On 2/13/06, Mike McCarty <mike.mccarty@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Temlakos wrote: > > Mike McCarty wrote: > > That's no different from what Coca-Cola and Pepsi do. I don't hear > > you screaming about them coercing people. No, do not compare apples to oranges. Pepsi and Coco-Cola have competition in the market place, Sams Colo, RC products, Dollar General Brand just to name a few. Microsoft has no competition in the desktop os market, they put them out of business or stop them from getting in business. Remember they have already been convicted of being a monopoly, now we just need to stop fining them chump change, 10 to 20 billion dollars in fines would certainly change their attitude. Somewhere else in this thread was mentioned windows success, windows is not successful, Microsoft's monopoly err, marketing is successful. As far as requiring registration of the product for it to run, they could have done that with md-dos, windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.11wfw, 95, 98, 98se, me, nt, 2000, they chose not to. They wanted people to spread the discs around, share the os and allow people to become hooked on windows inferiority. Now windows xp comes along, you have to license it or it will not run, change the underlying hardware and it will not run, vista is going to get worse. Microsoft offers the os source code in lieu of an api specification for communicating with networking stack, that's it get people to see the code and become tainted in the copyright infringement cases. Hardware drivers, that's a good one. Let's look at winmodems, I have a lucent/agere winmodem that has a linux driver in two parts, the proprietary part from lucent and the open source part from the linmodem driver project. Hardware manufactures could solve this problem and still maintain their proprietary parts. Place on every pci carcd, modem, network, sound, video and such an eeprom chip that contains the specifications necessary to make a driver communicate with said card. Adaptive drivers would query the cards internal hpi (hardware programming interface) and learn what is necessary and how to communicate with said card. Imagine a wifi card build in such a manner and when plugged in the os kernel running says "hey I found a wifi card, I will load my wifi driver component and that driver component will query the card learn how to speak to it, its configuration possibilities and start driving it." Microsoft has prevented that from happening, as in having the manufacuturer make a winmodem, give microsoft the api (and no one else), microsoft has the only driver, buy microsoft windows or you cannot use this hardware, computer manufacturer put a winmodem in every machine you make. Based on that microsoft sells windows, modem manufacturer sells x units at 7.00 a pop, computer manufacturer gets their share. I saw a post the other day concerning the micrsoft malicious software removal tool, it will remove portions of Nortorn products and a registry hack is required to get it back. It would not be the first time microsoft has sabotaged someone Else's product to make their own look better or sell better. Just my ranting. John -- Registered Linux User 263680, get counted at http://counter.li.org
