Subject: No Microsoft Used Or Wanted. From: Microsoft_Addict@ Sender: Microsoft_Addict@ I append http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/std/no_ms.txt See Also http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/std/no_ms_format.txt See Also http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/std/no_mail_formats.txt See Also http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/std/virus.txt Thanks for your mail, Why I avoid addiction to Microsoft compatible binary products. Written for job agents & others who burden me with unsolicited urgings to become a fellow Microsoft addict. I Agree - MS-DOS makes a useful program loader. - MS-Windows sells in a mass market of simple unskilled users. - The MS-* marketplace is vast, with astronomic profits, costs & risks. But - The PC mass market is dominated by large vendors with massive development & advertising budgets, dedicated to producing sufficient hyperbole & hot air, to aggressively sell high volumes of standard product into a market notable for its tight profit margins, cheap hardware prices (& consequent low quality/reliability), trend obsessed buyers, & semi-unskilled users, largely supplying a market requirement for glorified office typewriters & games boxes, & plagued with lack of security & viruses etc. That's Not My Market ! My Market Sector I do not supply MS-* end users. I am a computer systems engineering consultant. I supply a market that in part existed even before the PC was invented .... including what once was called the departmental mini-computer, plus what is now known as Server systems, & high value end user systems. These systems are high value per unit, low volume, customised systems, with sufficient budget per unit available to pay my Consultancy rates. My Clients - Many of my development projects are not destined for PC hardware, DOS & MS-Windows etc are irrelevant. - Clients are familiar with sophisticated operating systems, & not afraid of manuals. - My clients do not have the vast budgets necessary to develop MS-* based PC end user style software, targeted at a mass market of uneducated users. Their development budgets are not amortised across a mass market of thousands of buyers, they prefer avoiding the extra costs of developing complex systems on an untenable MS-* base, when a more cost effective Unix base is readily available. - They benefit from me working on a Unix system with public source code, well documented, easily copied & modified to their custom requirements, Wintel PC Architecture: - The MS-* OS BIOS is a can of worms, I've used it, & didn't enjoy it ! (wrote many C programs on top of it, & created stack frames to call it). - Some features available 10 to 20 years ago in real operating systems, are still not available in MS-*. Some MS features took 10 years of waiting, (eg long & lower case filenames), Unix didn't stand still since MS-DOS started maybe 15 years ago, Unix too continued to evolve, & is still ahead of MS-* in facilities, (& is also now available for i386 & upward PCs). - The PC's Intel 8086 inheritance (still present in i386 & i486 etc) compares unfavourably with orthogonal CPU designs such as the Z8000, M68000, NSC32532, PDP-11, VAX etc, all of which support Unix, not DOS). - PC Hardware is built for the cheap domestic & office electronics mass market, PCs are not reccomended in high reliability systems (military, hospital, industrial control etc), & not used to base high performance systems on, where better non PC products from SGI/HP/DEC etc dominate (running Unix). If you don't know what I'm talking about, ask a military designer if he'd prefer the mechanical reliability of a PC ISA/PCI bus, against a VME (or even Intel Multibus 2) Bus, then ask about other PC hardware reliability issues. - MS-* systems have no security, & are wide open to virus contamination. The base systems are minimal, extra software costs licence money & installation time, later extension & maintenance is problematic. (Compare this with an entire integrated Unix clone with X-Windows + 24,151 packages(@ 2013-02-13), all sourced & free to copy (Ref. http://www.berklix.org/freebsd.org). - Even if you want a glitzy graphical front end, you don't need MS binaries, go look at http://www.kde.org for a nice desktop environment probably attractive to new Unix users (& available with FreeBSD among other Unix OSs). Microsoft Inc: - It's risky delivering systems based on MS-*, when Microsoft can pull an anti-competitive trick, like tampering with the installed system (Ref. Microsoft Web Explorer, MS-Win, socksys.dll). - Remember when the President of [Phar Lap Inc?] found (about 1998/9) the list of all licensable software products MS were searching customers computers for, then embedding in their Word docs, ready for emailing, unknown to their customers; a `feature' that when exposed MS claimed to be a mistake, & issued a new non privacy invading version ? - One can rely on near monopoly suppliers, such as Microsoft, to modify its software interfaces often enough to keep people locked in (look at the extended calls in the newer windows variants, that make portability to `Wine' Windows emulators problematic. Compare this with the attempted open easy portability worked towards, by IEEE/Posix, & the free source projects: (FSF, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Mach). My Background I'm a computer systems design engineer, with a university honours degree in Computers & Cybernetics, & ~40 years systems design experience, first in electronics & system design, then later more software oriented, my market sector is _Not_ Microsoft based personal computer end users. The nearest I get to MS-* usually is the Unix server system connected to some MS-Windows (or Unix + X-Windows) terminal systems. - In my business a PC to me is either: (A) a cheap Unix + X-Windows development workstation, (B) a TCP/IP client to my server, (C) a dumb terminal, (D) an electronic engineering test instrument (that might boot via DOS). My Future: - It's hard enough to keep up to date with the mass of new tools developing in the Unix market, without distracting to MS-*. - No benefit to joining a PC market awash with cheap semi skilled labour, & neglecting Unix & computer systems engineering skills. - I'm generally friendly & helpful, but busy, & reject spurious advice from agents etc, suggesting I de-skill myself & do MS-* based work, to the detriment of Unix work, I don't aim to be a `Jack Of All Trades, Master Of None'. - I've done joint Unix-MS projects before, & will again, as well as 100% Unix projects, projects with real time OSs, & no OS at all, etc, but I minimise my MS-* exposure & maximise my Unix exposure. Advertisement: My Resume is on the Web in English & German, Postscript & Ascii. http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/ I'm happy to discuss potential work assignments ( even if with interfaces to MS, but the less the better ;-) I happily speak German for business, I've been in Muenchen since '85 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For another less than appreciative view of IBM-PCs, Intel, & MS-*, listen to the sound track of Julian Culman, broadcast by BBC World Service, Wed Mar 5 23:10-23:15 GMT 199[7?], "Science View" (He's an Acorn StrongARM-CPU fan) (Sorry no URL or recording available from me, try BBC sound archives ). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MÜNCHEN (COMPUTER-WOCHE) Oct 1999 Die Europäische Kommission hat Microsoft den Fehdehandschuh hingeworfen: Der neue Kommissar für Unternehmen und Informationsgesellschaft, Erkki Liikanen, erklärte im Rahmen der Konferenz Information Security Solutions Europe in Berlin, öffentliche IT-Projekte würden künftig vermehrt auf alternative Betriebssysteme zurückgreifen, solange die Gates-Company nicht den Quellcode von Windows offenlege. Anbieter von Sicherheitslösungen müßten Nachteile in Kauf nehmen, solange sie keinen Zugang zu dem Code hätten, auf dem ihre Anwendungen aufsetzen. In bezug auf die Krypto-Industrie erklärte Liikanen: "Es gibt ein entscheidendes Hindernis für weiteres Wachstum in dieser Branche: Der Desktop-Markt wird von einigen wenigen Anbietern dominiert. Das wäre nicht weiter schlimm, wenn dies nicht proprietäre Systeme wären." Hier könne die EU durchaus ihren Beitrag zur Lösung des Problems leisten, so der Kommissar - öffentliche Ausschreibungen für Computerausstattung müßten nicht länger bestimmte (Betriebs-)Systeme vorschreiben. Der Brancheninformationsdienst Computerwire führt darüber hinaus noch weitere EU-Quellen (davon eine aus dem Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie = BMWi) an, die allesamt den verstärkten Einsatz von Open-Source-Software innerhalb der EU fordern, um die Internet-Sicherheit zu erhöhen. http://legalnews.findlaw.com/legalnews/lit/microsoft/ms-conclusions.html for the April 2000 decision "... ORDERED, ADJUDGED, and DECLARED, that Microsoft has violated §§ 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1, 2 ..." Microsoft tax pyramid: http://www.billparish.com/presslist.html http://www.berklix.com Computer Consultancy http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/cv/ My Resume - English & German http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/contact/ Contact - German for business also OK. http://www.berklix.com/free/ Free Software http://www.berklix.org Free Organisations & Clubs