Believe it or not folks, I have a bit
of a readership of this page! Anyhow,
Robert S. Lewis wrote:
| I just saw this animated ad for Internet Explorer that
implies that
downloads are faster using the MS browser. I'm not a geek
but methinks that
browsers do not speed up downloads! [...] False advertising
from MS? I sure
hope not!
|
Well, actually, it may not be false advertisement, though
like any other
self promoting ad campaign Microsoft has run, it is misleading.
The new MSIE
may have faster downloads as compared to their previous version
if their
previous version had some sort of idiotic performance impeding
algorithms for
downloads. You are right to think that these things should
be limited by your
connection to the network, not the browser, but there
is really no end to
incompetence among Microsoft's engineering staff.
But just like Microsoft
Word, you can expect that by the 6th or 7th version
they'll finally get it
right (and then mess it up again with the very next
version that you are
forced to upgrade to.)
Remember, Microsoft has Operato compete with. Although
Opera doesn't
have nearly the market share, they certainly have certain
technological
advantages. Most notably, Opera is significantly faster than
either IE or
Netscape. So in keeping with their character, Microsoft may
be doing nothing
different from what they always do: they simply may be
copying the
functionality of another product.
JoAnne Schmitz writes:
| The saga of F3:
I once had a good friend. Its name was F3. I used
it all the time to search
through text. It's supposed to be a "find..find
next" kind of tool. It was
fairly consistent in the MS software I used,
and I got to depending on it. But
now when I press F3 it pulls up the "search
for files" box in Win95/98/NT.
And now there is no longer a simple way
to search back and forth, and actually
see what you're searching for.
You hit control-F and a dialog box pops up
asking for the search string.
The box is modal so it will not go away and you
can't move around in the
file or window while the box is there, all you can do
is search for the
next instance or kill the box.
So if you get a match and it's at the top or bottom
of the screen, and you
want to know what the second line is after your
search text, you have to kill
the box. Then look at your text. Then control
F and half the time or more
you have to type the same crap in over again.
What the fuck were they
thinking? Don't they ever do searches?
I called them up and told them about it because I was
losing my patience with
searching through the MSDN library and having to
play with their little box.
The help files even say that F3 is supposed
to work, and I can go in and in
the configuration option dialog I can see
that F3 is supposed to be
"find..find next" but it isn't. The phone answering
person at MS said, gee, I
never noticed that before, I guess it's a real
bug. No kidding.
Why don't they make it non-modal?
Argh.
|
There's not much I can add to that. You are absolutely write,
I've been bit by that recently myself (I've been forced to use MSVC++,
which has the same conniption with f3.)
Here's a comment from John King on USENET:
Subject: Re: Microsoft buying AMD?---a proposal
From: "John King"
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.sys.intel
Robato Yao wrote:
>
>
>Get a load of this Microsoft document used in the DOJ's case
>against Microsoft.
>
>http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/exhibits/365.pdf
>
I use to be a Microsoft defender. It is getting harder
and harder to do.
Have you folks read the
Halloween
Memos? If not, get it. It is an annotated (by an open software
advocate)
paper covering Microsoft's strategy against open software, like
Linux and
Apache.
Remember folks, they want to charge you a *yearly rental
fee* in a couple of
years. At least they are talking about that. Man do
we need Linux.
They want to "kill" Linux by extending open protocols
with Microsoft only
extensions, like their attack against Java.
|
Even Microsoft's one time allies are jumping ship.
For those of you who think that Microsoft's support might
be what
differentiates it from Linux think again. RedHat and other Linux
vendors are
experts at solving Linux problems and they make their money
off of it.
Microsoft on the other hand ... well here's some inside information:
(FROM) a former microsoft tech support guy
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Paul:
I figured here was some info you might find interesting.
I
used to work for microsoft as an outsourcer.
Here's the real meat of it.
Microsoft does not do ANY
of it's frontline tech support for ANY APPLICATION.
It's
split up like this.
Microsoft outsources its technical support to
contractors
who take the phone calls for microsoft.
It's a real fucked up situation,
because, ms forces
the outsourced companies to take a certain # of calls
an
hour, the calls a frequently verging on the impossible,
especially when
the person on the other end is completely
computer illiterate. Anyway,
like I was saying, Microsoft
does not do ANY of it's frontline tech support.
Here's the
breakdown.
Keane IT Consulating (Phoenix, AZ and Irving, TX) does
windows 98 support, ms office
support, and windowsupdate support.
Software Spectrum (Spokane and Garland, TX) handles
most of the backoffice product
support, to include windows nt, iis, exchange,
sql server,
and frontpage server. They also handle the most of the
win98
advanced support.
Stream International (Boston and Portland, OR) handles
win95
support, some backoffice support, internet
explorer, and 3.1 support.
This may give some guideline as to why ms support tends
to
be fairly weak.
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