It was a good ride - will miss y'all!
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From: Bob Butler on 6 May 2010 10:36 "MM" <kylix_is(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message news:0oo4u5h0g1tfivhcgdgfkcpq5ascsgfi6h(a)4ax.com... <cut> > Thinking, as I occasionally still do, about Microsoft's handling of > classic Visual Basic, I would demand (were I American) of any future > presidential candidate a new law that made it mandatory for any > software company to provide support for 50 years once a certain number > of the product had been sold, e.g. one million. And I would further > make it the law that ALL the source code would have to be held in > escrow in case the company went out of business. And further yet, if > the company went bankrupt and no one came forward to buy the escrowed > source code, it would be turned into open source. > > Yeah, I'd vote for someone who did something like that. I wouldn't. I'd be completely opposed to anything remotely like what you suggest. I think MS made a huge mistake dropping VB and I'd love for them to recant or sell the rights to somebody else but it's their intellectual property and their right to abandon it. IMO it was a major business mistake to do so but I'd never want to try to force them to either continue it or release it except through market forces.
From: Mayayana on 6 May 2010 10:43 | | I tried to give them a clue a couple years back... | https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=389684&wa=wsignin1.0 | (requires sign-in) | Ironically, that page is a dummy created specifically to require script. A script function forwards to the real link, which is replaced immediately in my browser by big red letters that say javascript is required ...and it uses cookies...and probably requires a Live ID? ....And I supppose they probably threw in a gratuitous IFRAME somewhere. Maybe that's a way to reduce IE criticism. Anyone with all that enabled, using IE, has very little chance of ever getting to the MS comments site before they're grounded by a driveby download. :)
From: Karl E. Peterson on 6 May 2010 11:35 -mhd wrote: > Karl E. Peterson <karl(a)exmvps.org> wrote: > >> -mhd wrote: >>> It has been pointed out to me that MS also dropped NNTP support in Win7 >>> (Outlook Express). -mhd > >> They did, yes. Which prompted me to discover a far superior tool - >> what OE always should've been! Try MesNews, if you feel so inclined. >> :-) > > Well I would never use Outlook Express either (I use Agent), but the point is > maybe MS knew a long time ago the writing was on the wall for their > commitment to nntp based groups and this has been in the works for a quite a > while. It has. They've been trying to figure it out for over a decade now. They still don't really understand usenet at all. -- ..NET: It's About Trust! http://vfred.mvps.org
From: Helmut Meukel on 6 May 2010 12:07 "dpb" <none(a)non.net> schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:hruhme$qum$1(a)news.eternal-september.org... > MM wrote: > ... > >> Thinking, as I occasionally still do, about Microsoft's handling of >> classic Visual Basic, I would demand (were I American) of any future >> presidential candidate a new law that made it mandatory for any >> software company to provide support for 50 years once a certain number >> of the product had been sold, e.g. one million. And I would further >> make it the law that ALL the source code would have to be held in >> escrow in case the company went out of business. And further yet, if >> the company went bankrupt and no one came forward to buy the escrowed >> source code, it would be turned into open source. > ... > > Have you had any candidates on that side of the pond propose such a policy? > :) > > -- The Pirates Party, founded in some european countries before the last EU election. For free internet ... Helmut.
From: GS on 6 May 2010 12:36
Mayayana formulated on Thursday : > >> >> Sometimes people chuckle and look heavenwards when I admit to being a >> diehard Windows 98 user. ....I always say, if something ain't broke, >> don't fix it. I'd still like to know what, exactly, all the bells and >> whistles in XP/Vista/Windows 7 do for productivity. > > I just switched to XP, finally, after getting a new > monitor. I had to get a new graphics card to get > a good display option, and the card has no '98 > driver, of course. > > I'm fairly happy with the move, delighted that now > I can download and use just about anything without > worrying about supported versions. (That scenario > should last about 6 months. :) > > But I put a lot of work into making the move. I had > to write my own custom hacks just to do things that > worked easily in Win98: changing icons, making all > folders the same size, reassigned the Desktop > to C:\Windows\Desktop so that that commonly used > path is not 87 characters long, etc. > > I had to get deeply into > researching services and firewalls. (I'm still not happy > on the firewall front. I settled on Online Armor Free > as one of the top reviewed and least bloated, but it > makes unnecessary disk access every 5 seconds! So I'm > still doing research on firewalls.) Have you tried Avast? > > All in all, I see XP as a bloated mess that needs a > great deal of cleanup to be efficient, and a great deal of > education/fine tuning to be safe. I also get odd, funky > behavior that I didn't used to get. XP is more brittle > than '98. One day I experimented with replacing > comdlg32.dll, in an attempt to get a Desktop icon in > Save dialogues. (Who's the nut who came up with the > idea of removing that?!) When I rebooted, XP complained > about a possible corrupt file and refused to do anything > from there. I had to boot into '98 and put the old file back. > XP never asked if I wanted to run boot-time checksums. > And I can't find a way to turn it off. Likewise, I removed > RPCSS in Win98, but if I just shut off RPC in XP I won't be > able to reboot again. Yet I have no use for RPC. It's just > a useless security risk. ...The list goes on. XP just seems > much too easy to break. NT in general is meant to be set > up as a corporate workstation, controlled by admins, and > used by employees who write My Word docs all day and put > them in My Documents. > > On the good side, in addition to support for more > software and hardware, I find that XP is more efficient > "under the hood". Large VB projects are hard to load in > '98, for instance. And my own software seems to run > notably faster in XP, all things being equal, than in '98. > BUT...and it's a big but...that's only true when XP has > been cleaned up, with dozens of pointless services > turned off. And now you understand why Vista and UAC was introduced! I did all the custom configuring for all my XP machines (1 each SP1, SP2, SP3) pretty much same as you describe here. Once done, it proves (to me at least) to be fairly reliable and secure. The SP1 machine was running NT SP6 when I upgraded (loosely termed), which began as a Win98/NT4 dual boot machine. Garry |