Windows 7 RC

For #4, I'm suggesting that just because you use Word and I use Word does not guarantee that I will make changes and send you the document back in the same format. Or that even if the format is the same that when you open it on you machine the layout will look the same.

#6, I'm saying the average person can't do basic things. The average person can only do a basic thing in any OS once they have been trained or shown how to do a basic things - and we haven't defined what basic is either. Most people will say email and creating documents, but I know quite a few people that use a computer for nothing more that Mahjong and solitaire. Now once you change the interface to the OS (say from XP to Windows 7) even though all the "basics" of the OS are essentially the same, the average person is going to become frustrated at the new layout and need to be retrained.

peetaur said:
And BTW, I am not against pay software, and biased towards free stuff. I just really strongly believe that things should be driven towards quality, and should be as compatible with other software as possible, and follow open protocols and standards. The people that pay for it, and use it should drive the development, based on their needs. It should not be the people that sell it forcing the people that use it to lock themselves in and reduce the popularity of open software.

I'm not against paying for software, I've even bought a number of commercial softwares for FreeBSD, but sadly I think most development is driven by marketing and laziness. By laziness I mean that people want what I call "the one button app". You just click the one button and it magically does every thing you want - of course this view comes from a number of years of writing software for corporate users. Marketing well - again from my experience in the corporate world - drives almost all software and hardware decisions and if you are unfortunate enough to have decisions made on the golf course and not in technical meetings it can get really bad...ok, I'm going to stop being bitter now.
 
roddierod said:
#6, I'm saying the average person can't do basic things. The average person can only do a basic thing in any OS once they have been trained or shown how to do a basic things - and we haven't defined what basic is either. Most people will say email and creating documents, but I know quite a few people that use a computer for nothing more that Mahjong and solitaire. Now once you change the interface to the OS (say from XP to Windows 7) even though all the "basics" of the OS are essentially the same, the average person is going to become frustrated at the new layout and need to be retrained.
Well the 'average person' is now moving to tablets. Stuff like Windows vs Linux vs MacOS vs <My Fav OS> is becoming less and less to matter.


roddierod said:
I'm not against paying for software
FOSS fanatics will not agree with you :). Just curious, how many people here write software for a living either freelance or employed?

People see a software in the market and wonder why is it priced like that or why can't it even be free? People not from product development backgrounds may be surprised to know the products that actually make a public appearance is just a fraction (a successfully closed project) of what actually gets tried by product line management. Naturally there is tendency to recover cost.

roddierod said:
I've even bought a number of commercial softwares for FreeBSD, but sadly I think most development is driven by marketing and laziness. By laziness I mean that people want what I call "the one button app". You just click the one button and it magically does every thing you want - of course this view comes from a number of years of writing software for corporate users. Marketing well - again from my experience in the corporate world - drives almost all software and hardware decisions and if you are unfortunate enough to have decisions made on the golf course and not in technical meetings it can get really bad...ok, I'm going to stop being bitter now.
My experience is mixed. Enterprises are usually resistant to change and they don't like shiny new toys. "One button" magic is usually demanded by retail users. However, I'd concur with you in another situation...enterprise do demand "one button" magic toys if it is meant to be supplied by some hapless vendor.
 
Sorry for the late reply

drhowarddrfine said:
Do you have any comment on the long fight between Brendan Eich and ECMA trying to get Microsoft to show up on time for voting? And when, after the vote is done, Microsoft shows up to object to the vote?

Do you have any comment on Microsoft's Chris Wilson not showing up for HTML5 Working Group meetings, his lack of participation and not returning emails or phone calls even though he's the co-chair of the group?

Any comment on IE8 being 11 years behind all other browsers in web standards support?

I haven't followed the Microsoft/ECMA issues and couldn't comment knowledgably.

However, in the IE3 and IE4 timeframe, I worked with Chris Wilson and Scott Issacs on the accessibility aspects of standards support. I found both of them very professional and truly interested in doing the right thing for the end-user and customer.

I realize this reply is little under 3 years over due, I've been busy. <smile>
 
Responsible

peetaur said:
Advantages to Windows:

  1. It runs a particular mail client, which when mailed an attachment named winmail.dat that violates standard protocols, can actually view the encoded attachment files.

Just because the attachment isn't in an open format doesn't mean it violates standards.

Yes, Exchange 2000 would internally violate SMTP standards with regard to TNEF-encoded messages, but that was a bug that was fixed. When forced to send a TNEF-encoded message, Outlook will wrap it up in standards-compliant attachment.

Outlook 2002 and newer default to HTML as their message formats.

In other words, (nearly?) all advantages are purely based on its hostile takeover of the market, making the company responsible a monopoly, having nothing what-so-ever to do with quality. So if you use it because of the above advantages, you are reponsible for its position in the market.

Hostile takeover? Recognize that there has always been commercially available alternatives to Windows. Windows is successful because it did things OS/2, Mac OS, and dozens of other OS's could not do - run the programs that the purchaser wanted to run.

Nothing hostile about it.

I'll strongly disagree about quality. I'll put the quality of Windows up against any other commercially available software. Many of the quality issues end-user perceive are not the fault of Windows, but of third-parties.

Yes, I am responsible for it's position in the market. I'm 1/1,125,000,000 responsible.
 
Walled Gardens

SR_Ind said:
Well the 'average person' is now moving to tablets. Stuff like Windows vs Linux vs MacOS vs <My Fav OS> is becoming less and less to matter.

The problems will remain, and between iOS, Android, and Windows RT, the walled gardens are getting higher and harder to scale.
 
ChuckOp said:
Just because the attachment isn't in an open format doesn't mean it violates standards.

But does that make it okay? What you said is basically a true statement, since it simply doesn't follow the standard, rather than violating it. But it is still an unfriendly concept. If I'm not using Outlook, and I get a winmail.dat attachment, what am I supposed to do with it? It is ridiculous to assume that every email client will understand this closed standard. And in my experience, when someone is emailed a "winmail.dat" file (for example, in Thunderbird), instead of saying that Outlook is ridiculous, they say that Thunderbird is clearly broken and inferior, because Outlook can "properly" read the attachments. This is force, and indicates a hostile takeover.

ChuckOp said:
Nothing hostile about it.

See above. And similar monopoly tactics apply to Word, and IE. Remember back when Microsoft was found to be using undocumented functions in IE and over the years, the documented ones that Netscape used were getting slower and slower? And there are many more examples, which would be pointless to list here. You can easily find them elsewhere if you open your mind and do the research.

ChuckOp said:
will wrap it up in standards-compliant attachment.

No sir. It wraps it up in an unstandard attachment, in a standard way. If I mail you a .zip file, there is no need for there to be included in the email standards, but you know what it is, and the sender knows what you should see in the attachments list. The interoperability of the product arising from using the standards is intact. But when you send something cryptic and essentially useless, the usefulness of standards is broken. If every company pulled tricks like this, the whole system would fail. To make such a statement is to say "there is nothing wrong with it" to anyone reading it, which is false.

ChuckOp said:
I'll strongly disagree about quality. ...

I could argue with you about quality (since I prefer to a less dumbed down system to be quality), however, my original point was to do with their advantage in the market being purely to do with marketing tactics and monopoly enforcement.

And continually using the "blame 3rd party drivers" defense is also pointless. Repeating the same statement about 3rd party drivers crashing Windows is not going to make me switch or support such a choice. Every Linux system I run has 3rd party drivers in it (from the distro or elsewhere rather than from kernel.org), and they apparently run forever without crashing. One XFS system I have has crashed 2 times in 3 years in the same 2 weeks for no apparent reason (blame XFS), and the others actually never crashed. And FreeBSD with ZFS crashes or hangs lots, but I use it rather than Windows, for very good reasons.

And I don't need to compare them to other commercial businesses. (Nearly?) all successful
large businesses got there through tricks and lies. Here is a big list of Microsoft lawsuits I found somewhere, which is interesting enough to share. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1048246/microsoft-lawsuit-payouts-usd9-billion

Seeing WordPerfect in the list on that page reminds me of the fact that in some obscure version of Word where I had the "upgrade" CD rather than the normal install, it would ask you to insert the previous version's installer disk as proof that you own it. If you inserted a WordPerfect floppy disk instead, it would say that your proof is okay and it would continue to install Word.


ChuckOp said:
Yes, I am responsible for it's position in the market. I'm 1/1,125,000,000 responsible.

A bit more actually, but your estimate is close. Even this thread makes you more responsible. Unfortunately though, it is not a crime, and cannot be measured, so I can't accurately quantify the effect.


And ChuckOp, since otherwise this would just be an endless and pointless argument, much like a religious one, perhaps you could answer a question I have. I want to create portable external disks to ship data around the world. When doing so, we are forced to use NTFS, because no windows user knows how to use anything other than that and FAT32, and FAT32 has no support for large files. Luckily, NTFS was successfully reverse engineered, and works just fine in most OSses (lately causes kernel panics in OSX though), so it can still be used on other systems. I'm sure Microsoft isn't happy that everyone can use NTFS, or they would have released the specs. So what is Microsoft's officially endorsed solution to such a compatibility problem?
 
I would like to thank ChuckOp for his very informative posts. I would also commend him on the manner in which he acts, given some of the other posters in this thread. That he includes opinions is not a problem, as you are free to form your own opinions.

I do not think the aggressive, and confrontational nature of several posters in this thread is good for anybody. From pure semantics (that some people attacked SirDice with, reductio ad absurdum even), to a series of unsubstantiated claims expecting ChuckOp to explain the actions of company as a whole, and those of random employees. I know it is alarmingly common on the faceless, anonymous communication mediums, and I would not pretend otherwise.

However, there is no point in engaging in such behaviour in what is otherwise a helpful, and friendly forum. As somebody who believes in the quality of FOSS, and FreeBSD in particular, I would want somebody who ventures into these forums to see a considered, and reasoned argument. Your argument should befit the quality of the software you advocate. So, please, "Preview Post," and make sure that you are explaining why you disagree, or how the solution you suggest is better.
 
peetaur said:
But does that make it okay? What you said is basically a true statement, since it simply doesn't follow the standard, rather than violating it. But it is still an unfriendly concept. If I'm not using Outlook, and I get a winmail.dat attachment, what am I supposed to do with it?

I didn't say it was "okay". You stated that the sending of winmail.dat violated standards, and I countered that it did not violate standards.


It is ridiculous to assume that every email client will understand this closed standard. And in my experience, when someone is emailed a "winmail.dat" file (for example, in Thunderbird), instead of saying that Outlook is ridiculous, they say that Thunderbird is clearly broken and inferior, because Outlook can "properly" read the attachments. This is force, and indicates a hostile takeover.

Hopefully you realize that the TNEF format we're discussing existed PRIOR to HTML even existing. It's called WinMail because of the original Microsoft Mail clients including what was known as Microsoft Exchange in Windows 95. That was developed in 1993 and 1994, before HTML became a standard.

Since it's a closed format, there is no one saying "that Thunderbird is clearly broken and inferior", certainly no one from Microsoft.

I'll reiterate; TNEF (AKA winmail.dat attachments) are proprietary and filled a need in the early 1990's when all email clients and servers did everything proprietary. It wasn't until the late 1990's that HTML and MIME had the feature set that TNEF was providing.

Accordingly, it's been ten years since any Microsoft software shipped that defaulted to using it in favor of HTML and MIME. Yes, you can still occasionally wind up getting a winmail.dat attachment - because the original sender of the message did something, usually specify the legacy "RTF Format" under email options. However, you'll still get a plain text version of the message.

See above. And similar monopoly tactics apply to Word, and IE. Remember back when Microsoft was found to be using undocumented functions in IE and over the years, the documented ones that Netscape used were getting slower and slower?

Is your assertion that IE used some sort of secret way of doing something but that Netscape was using non-secret ways, and over time got slower and slower? The implication that Microsoft was giving Internet Explorer some sort of speed advantage, while purposely slowing down Netscape Navigator? �e

You think there was something like "if process=Netscape.exe then sleep(100)" inside of HeapAlloc() or something like that?

Are you freaking kidding me? Don't you think that would have come out at the DOJ trial?

Having worked as a Program Manager in the Internet Explorer team in the 1990's for versions 3, 4, 4.01, and early development of IE5, I followed the DOJ allegations pretty closely and had my email file submitted as evidence.

The issue of undocumented functions giving IE some sort of advantage was not part of the so-called "Findings of Fact" (later overturned). It was often alleged, but never found to be accurate.

Microsoft hardly needed to artificially slow down Navigator - it was bloat-ware starting with version 4.0 and people started turning away from it when it became "Netscape Communicator" and had Netcaster radio and AIM clients built in.

And there are many more examples, which would be pointless to list here. You can easily find them elsewhere if you open your mind and do the research.

Yes, I can find many rants and ravings from conspiracy nuts, but I cannot find any fact-based examples of any Microsoft application gaining any advantage from an undocumented function or method that wasn't also used by non-Microsoft products. If you can find any, I'd love to discuss it.

I could argue with you about quality (since I prefer to a less dumbed down system to be quality), however, my original point was to do with their advantage in the market being purely to do with marketing tactics and monopoly enforcement.

By that standard, Apple would be considered much worse, right?

I always laugh out loud when someone says that Microsoft's "marketing tactics" are the reason for the success of it's products. Many people within Microsoft think the marketing has been awful; how many names has the search engine had? Explain the branding behind the email clients: Microsoft Mail, Microsoft Exchange (the client), Windows Exchange, Internet Mail and News, Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Mail.

Compare Microsoft, Apple and Google ads and say to yourself - which one was more likely to sway my purchasing decision?

Fancy marketing did not make Microsoft successful.

And continually using the "blame 3rd party drivers" defense is also pointless. Repeating the same statement about 3rd party drivers crashing Windows is not going to make me switch or support such a choice.

I only said it once, so I could not be repeating it. Beyond that, it's absolutely factually accurate.

Every Linux system I run has 3rd party drivers in it (from the distro or elsewhere rather than from kernel.org), and they apparently run forever without crashing. One XFS system I have has crashed 2 times in 3 years in the same 2 weeks for no apparent reason (blame XFS), and the others actually never crashed. And FreeBSD with ZFS crashes or hangs lots, but I use it rather than Windows, for very good reasons.

Thank you for proving my point. That drivers cause system crashes. Of course the drivers are likely more stable in Linux and OSS systems for two reasons: Firstly, the drivers are doing a lot less work, particularly display drivers. Nvidia and ATI drivers frequently crashed on FreeBSD machines I ran, and never supported the same capabilities of the hardware that the Windows drivers did. Secondly, there is a motivated community that can work to improve open source drivers.

And I don't need to compare them to other commercial businesses. (Nearly?) all successful
large businesses got there through tricks and lies. Here is a big list of Microsoft lawsuits I found somewhere, which is interesting enough to share. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1048246/microsoft-lawsuit-payouts-usd9-billion

Speaking as a longtime (but now former) Microsoft employee, I can tell you that myself and everyone I worked with operated ethically and lawfully and were never asked directly or indirectly to do anything otherwise.

Microsoft was and is a huge business that has over $60B in cash reserves. It should surprise no one that it is a magnet for lawsuits. Many things are alleged, very little is proven. Settlements don't equate to guilt.

Seeing WordPerfect in the list on that page reminds me of the fact that in some obscure version of Word where I had the "upgrade" CD rather than the normal install, it would ask you to insert the previous version's installer disk as proof that you own it. If you inserted a WordPerfect floppy disk instead, it would say that your proof is okay and it would continue to install Word.

Yes, 15 years ago, Word 97 allowed WordPefect to be a qualifying upgrade product.

Why is that a problem? Many commercial products, software and otherwise, give discounts for moving from a competitor product. That's not a trick, that's solid business practice.

And ChuckOp, since otherwise this would just be an endless and pointless argument, much like a religious one, perhaps you could answer a question I have. I want to create portable external disks to ship data around the world. When doing so, we are forced to use NTFS, because no windows user knows how to use anything other than that and FAT32, and FAT32 has no support for large files. Luckily, NTFS was successfully reverse engineered, and works just fine in most OSses (lately causes kernel panics in OSX though), so it can still be used on other systems. I'm sure Microsoft isn't happy that everyone can use NTFS, or they would have released the specs. So what is Microsoft's officially endorsed solution to such a compatibility problem?

I would argue that NTFS has not been successfully reversed engineered. I never trust any non-Windows OS to write to NTFS reliably, because of past experiences with OSX and sadly, FreeBSD 5/6 corrupting portions of the NTFS directory tree.

I cannot speak for Microsoft, but since Windows NT, the concept of Installable File Systems has been part of Windows. Your device can specify IFS drivers that are loaded when the device is connected and can read any file system you have a driver for. There are open source IFS drivers for ext3.

While that requires additional development work, it does keep you in control of all aspects of the reading and writing, without dependence on reverse engineering.

Other possible techniques:

1) Use FAT32 and provide high-level scheme that splits files greater than 4GB into smaller chunks. Provide a join program for the user to rejoin the data on-site.

2) Use NTFS, but use a Windows-platform to perform the writing. For example, have a Windows machine share out the removable media and write your data out through SMB file shares. Slower, but more reliable.
 
I would argue that NTFS has not been successfully reversed engineered. I never trust any non-Windows OS to write to NTFS reliably, because of past experiences with OSX and sadly, FreeBSD 5/6 corrupting portions of the NTFS directory tree.

I've used ntfs-3g frequently at my previous job to fix broken NTFS filesystems (usually due to disk damage). This worked quite well. I've also resized many ntfs filesystems with ntfs-3g.
Never experienced serious corruption problems. FreeBSD 5/6 was quite some time ago, and a lot of progress has been made.
 
Carpetsmoker said:
I've used ntfs-3g frequently at my previous job to fix broken NTFS filesystems (usually due to disk damage). This worked quite well. I've also resized many ntfs filesystems with ntfs-3g.
Never experienced serious corruption problems. FreeBSD 5/6 was quite some time ago, and a lot of progress has been made.

I checked and I was in error, my experience was with FreeBSD 7.1, not 5 and 6. I've also had issues with Mac OS X in 2010 writing to NTFS.

The problem I had was moving files from a FreeBSD partition to a NTFS volume. There were a number of illegal characters in the file names. It was extremely frustrating and ultimately I was left with a directory tree of files I could not remove. I eventually had to backup and reformat the NTFS volume.

This was just anecdotal experience, not mission critical and not varied. Didn't affect my love of FreeBSD, just my distrust of using a closed file system outside of its comfort zone.

Thanks for the message.
 
ChuckOp said:
I checked and I was in error, my experience was with FreeBSD 7.1, not 5 and 6. I've also had issues with Mac OS X in 2010 writing to NTFS.

The problem I had was moving files from a FreeBSD partition to a NTFS volume. There were a number of illegal characters in the file names. It was extremely frustrating and ultimately I was left with a directory tree of files I could not remove. I eventually had to backup and reformat the NTFS volume.

This was just anecdotal experience, not mission critical and not varied. Didn't affect my love of FreeBSD, just my distrust of using a closed file system outside of its comfort zone.

Thanks for the message.

Which goes to prove the point that Microsoft uses propietary formats/filesystems AS A MEANS to make it as hard, risky and unreliable as possible to switch away from their products. Essentially once you are in, you can't get out. Also did you notice that MS made a new filesystem (refs). I am 100% sure they wrote it because they knew that with ntfs-3g, NTFS was no longer useful for it's intended purpose (LOCK-IN) since it wasn't secret enough anymore. So they came up with a new filesystem to recover their ability to make users data unreadable to non-MS OS's.

ChuckOp said:
I didn't say it was "okay". You stated that the sending of winmail.dat violated standards, and I countered that it did not violate standards.




Hopefully you realize that the TNEF format we're discussing existed PRIOR to HTML even existing. It's called WinMail because of the original Microsoft Mail clients including what was known as Microsoft Exchange in Windows 95. That was developed in 1993 and 1994, before HTML became a standard.

Since it's a closed format, there is no one saying "that Thunderbird is clearly broken and inferior", certainly no one from Microsoft.

I'll reiterate; TNEF (AKA winmail.dat attachments) are proprietary and filled a need in the early 1990's when all email clients and servers did everything proprietary. It wasn't until the late 1990's that HTML and MIME had the feature set that TNEF was providing.

Accordingly, it's been ten years since any Microsoft software shipped that defaulted to using it in favor of HTML and MIME. Yes, you can still occasionally wind up getting a winmail.dat attachment - because the original sender of the message did something, usually specify the legacy "RTF Format" under email options. However, you'll still get a plain text version of the message.



Is your assertion that IE used some sort of secret way of doing something but that Netscape was using non-secret ways, and over time got slower and slower? The implication that Microsoft was giving Internet Explorer some sort of speed advantage, while purposely slowing down Netscape Navigator? �e

You think there was something like "if process=Netscape.exe then sleep(100)" inside of HeapAlloc() or something like that?

Are you freaking kidding me? Don't you think that would have come out at the DOJ trial?

Having worked as a Program Manager in the Internet Explorer team in the 1990's for versions 3, 4, 4.01, and early development of IE5, I followed the DOJ allegations pretty closely and had my email file submitted as evidence.

The issue of undocumented functions giving IE some sort of advantage was not part of the so-called "Findings of Fact" (later overturned). It was often alleged, but never found to be accurate.

Microsoft hardly needed to artificially slow down Navigator - it was bloat-ware starting with version 4.0 and people started turning away from it when it became "Netscape Communicator" and had Netcaster radio and AIM clients built in.



Yes, I can find many rants and ravings from conspiracy nuts, but I cannot find any fact-based examples of any Microsoft application gaining any advantage from an undocumented function or method that wasn't also used by non-Microsoft products. If you can find any, I'd love to discuss it.



By that standard, Apple would be considered much worse, right?

I always laugh out loud when someone says that Microsoft's "marketing tactics" are the reason for the success of it's products. Many people within Microsoft think the marketing has been awful; how many names has the search engine had? Explain the branding behind the email clients: Microsoft Mail, Microsoft Exchange (the client), Windows Exchange, Internet Mail and News, Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Mail.

Compare Microsoft, Apple and Google ads and say to yourself - which one was more likely to sway my purchasing decision?

Fancy marketing did not make Microsoft successful.



I only said it once, so I could not be repeating it. Beyond that, it's absolutely factually accurate.



Thank you for proving my point. That drivers cause system crashes. Of course the drivers are likely more stable in Linux and OSS systems for two reasons: Firstly, the drivers are doing a lot less work, particularly display drivers. Nvidia and ATI drivers frequently crashed on FreeBSD machines I ran, and never supported the same capabilities of the hardware that the Windows drivers did. Secondly, there is a motivated community that can work to improve open source drivers.



Speaking as a longtime (but now former) Microsoft employee, I can tell you that myself and everyone I worked with operated ethically and lawfully and were never asked directly or indirectly to do anything otherwise.

Microsoft was and is a huge business that has over $60B in cash reserves. It should surprise no one that it is a magnet for lawsuits. Many things are alleged, very little is proven. Settlements don't equate to guilt.



Yes, 15 years ago, Word 97 allowed WordPefect to be a qualifying upgrade product.

Why is that a problem? Many commercial products, software and otherwise, give discounts for moving from a competitor product. That's not a trick, that's solid business practice.



I would argue that NTFS has not been successfully reversed engineered. I never trust any non-Windows OS to write to NTFS reliably, because of past experiences with OSX and sadly, FreeBSD 5/6 corrupting portions of the NTFS directory tree.

I cannot speak for Microsoft, but since Windows NT, the concept of Installable File Systems has been part of Windows. Your device can specify IFS drivers that are loaded when the device is connected and can read any file system you have a driver for. There are open source IFS drivers for ext3.

While that requires additional development work, it does keep you in control of all aspects of the reading and writing, without dependence on reverse engineering.

Other possible techniques:

1) Use FAT32 and provide high-level scheme that splits files greater than 4GB into smaller chunks. Provide a join program for the user to rejoin the data on-site.

2) Use NTFS, but use a Windows-platform to perform the writing. For example, have a Windows machine share out the removable media and write your data out through SMB file shares. Slower, but more reliable.

I agree with you that marketing didn't get MS to where they are. Plain old ITALIAN MAFIA "Bussiness 101 (How to MURDER, BLACKMAIL, STEAL, SCAM, VANDALIZE, BRIBE and EXTORT your way to being the ONLY company in the market)" is what got MS there (I mean, a company run by this and this guys).

I'm sure that with those guys running Microsoft, it's obvious that the company and it's employees operate ethically. As ethically as my cousin's company (plain ol' money laundering).

I'm sure MS doesn't play foul (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/23/13219/110, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Anti-trust, http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/, http://semiaccurate.com/2012/06/21/...ack-to-monopoly-forced-bundling/#.UPJUUJFX7z4, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock-in, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish, http://biz.yahoo.com/msft/p18.html, http://forums.aria.co.uk/showthread...EMs-To-Lock-Devices-Into-Windows-8-Using-UEFI, http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/22/microsoft-publishes-maximum-windows-7-netbooks-specs/, http://www.itexaminer.com/microsoft-adds-to-atoms-restrictions.aspx), they just boss the oem's around.

And the questions I wanted to ask you. Why MS Windows (even in Windows 8/Server 2012) STILL won't recognize ext2/3/4 filesystems (which every other non-Linux OS recognizes nativelly for read and write) and STILL won't automatically add already installed Linux and BSD OS's to it's boot manager (every other OS out there can do that automatically, except Windows), and finally What is the obsession MS have with the black color as the background in boot screens and boot managers (They locked the win7 boot sscreen PRECISELLY to keep people from changing the background color to something less "PROFFESSIONAL" and more colorful), the deliberate dullness of the UI (I mean Steve Ballmer THREW Longhorn out of the window and started from scratch BECAUSE the build he got at Winhec 2003 had WOBBLY WINDOWS AND VISUAL EFFECTS. For the sake of removing a F*CKING visual effect he RUINED the entire OS and gave us A HALF-BAKED, CRAPPY AND UNTESTED OS.), and the deliberate uncustomizability?
 
The employees at the base levels are not always informed or aware of what upper management does. He does have the right to defend his job position.

Cygwin seems to be the answer to the ext2/3/4 question.
 
And the questions I wanted to ask you. Why MS Windows (even in Windows 8/Server 2012) STILL won't recognize ext2/3/4 filesystems (which every other non-Linux OS recognizes nativelly for read and write) and STILL won't automatically add already installed Linux and BSD OS's to it's boot manager (every other OS out there can do that automatically, except Windows)

Nothing forces them to do so. The Linux filesystems are not considered to be industry standards yet and their quality is easily questionable. I don't expect any of them to become industry standards unless the Linux developers start to aim for feature stability instead of trying to impress the unwashed by coming up with "new and shiney" every month.
 
Well FreeBSD doesn't support ext4 either, and I guess most users don't even care about that.
Why should extfs be more important to be implemented than Apple's HFS (which used considerably more often) to begin with?

AFAIK ext4 is not even properly specified, which means the only way to "port it" means reverse engineering an application that breaks API and of cause ABI every every week (linux). The fact the sourcecode of the ext4 modules is available wouldn't help Microsoft either, because that source code is GPL.
 
Beastie said:
Hahaha, Windows never ceases to amuse me.
Code:
System failure: unable to detect the keyboard.
Please, press F1 for help.

Reminds me of the Windows has stopped responding do you want to end it now? It is something like that lol.
 
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