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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!

MS IE

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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