Why Apple is a better company than Microsoft

[Fve Crathva]

Originally posted by Q Cubed
Also: security through obscurity is NOT something you want to base your security on.

But it's a great extra layer, for certain applications.

SP

[Mr. Harley]

For Asher and the DL. Note, I just stopped at NT because this refutes the claim conclusively that Microsoft does not do this. Now of course you will claim that they are not doing it anymore, then yada yada yada. Again, this makes good business sense as it puts the competition at a disadvantage. It is very bad for innovation and pricing, very good at creating a monopoly and whatever standard Microsoft imposes. FYI, the search took all of two minutes.

Software Publishers Association Agrees
The Software & Information Industry Association (formerly SPA, the Software Publishers Association) agrees with my conclusions. Pages 12 to 15 of the document Competition in the Network Market: The Microsoft Challenge, dated June 19, 1998, contain a section titled Hidden APIs. Here are two quotes that I find especially illustrative. The first quote illustrates the speed advantage that a programmer can derive from hidden API functions:

For example when Microsoft released Internet Information Server (IIS), it significantly outperformed Netscape Server on the NT Platform. Microsoft insisted that its developers had not had any additional acceess to information than had Netscape developers. Yet after careful review, Netscape developers were able to utilize previously undisclosed information about NT in their own products. Future releases of Netscape Server were competitive with IIS in subsequent testing.
If you write programs using a documented API, the programs run slower. The second quote illustrates that Microsoft uses the hidden APIs to make their applications the best in any particular market:
Microsoft can write application code that can run optimally on an operating system, has advance knowledge about future releases, knows which programming method to choose over another, and can tweak the OS code prior to final relase to advantage3 its own applications.
If you perform the costly task of reverse-engineering the hidden APIs in order to compete with Microsoft, they change those hidden APIs to favor their products.

The SPA document illustrates precisely the Hard Decision described above.

Secret API reverse-engineered and partially documented
Need more confirmation? Notorious Windows book publishers IDG put out a slim (335 pages) volume that "documents" a lot of NT internals, including the native API. Conservatively, 6 man-years of effort went into reverse-engineering all this material. This confirms the massive effort required to at least partially document NT's secret API.


Undocumented Windows NT
Prasad Dabak, Milind Borate and Sandeep Phadke
IDG Books, 1999
ISBN 0-7645-4569-8

Although Microsoft Windows NT is one of the most popular operating systems in the corporate world, no book has documented what actually goes on under the hood - until now. Undocumented Windows NT dissects the Win32 interface, deconstructs the underlying APIs, and deciphers the Memory Management architecture to help you understand operations, fix flaws, and enhance performance.
In this groundbreaking guide, three experts share what they've dug up on NT through years of hands-on research and programming experience. The authors' in-depth investigation uncovers both the strengths and the weaknesses - and reveals how you can make any Windows NT system more stable and secure.



I had a look at this book in a local bookstore on January 26, 2000. It possesses a lot of the flaws of a typical "Windows technical book": pitiful indexing, obvious lack of editing, and very little exposition on anything other than the syntax of the programming question at hand. The authors devote an entire appendix to prototyping and describing the NT native API functions' syntax. Material in that appendix apparently didn't make it into the book's index, nor are the function prototypes listed in alphabetical order. If you buy it, you will doubtless encounter a lot of frustration along with the information.

That said, the book contains a truckload of documentation on functionality only hinted at elsewhere.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another book covering the NT "native" API just came out:
Windows NT/2000 Native API Reference
Gary Nebbett
New Riders Publishing, February 2000
ISBN 1578701996

I had a quick thumb-through of a copy of this book. It looked pretty good, given that it listed the native API functions in alphabetical order, and covered the non-Win32 uses of some of the functions.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Several issues hide in that: whether programmers and designers best describe OS services in terms of C functions (or any function-like interface at all), or some elaborate assembly-language specification (like VMS) that allows almost any programming language to use the OS services.

[2] Inside Windows NT, 2nd Edition, by David A. Solomon, Microsoft Press, 1998, ISBN 1-57231-667-2.

[3] Verbing weirds language. "To advantage" reads poorly.

[4] According to a paper describing Linux on a Mach microkernel,

Early efforts to layer OS personality servers on top of the microkernel have had disappointing performance due to the extra message-based communication between the system components. Often, as much as a 40% performance cost has been reported.
[5] Inside Windows NT System Data by Sven B. Schreiber, Dr Dobb's Journal, Nov 1999, pp 40 - 49, for an account of how Schreiber reverse engineered the NtQuerySystemInformation() native system call.

[6] Analysis of the Security of Windows NT
by Hans Hedbom, Stefan Lindskog, Stefan Axelsson, and Erland Jonsson
From Section 8.2, "UNIX versus NT", page 65:

Even though Microsoft Inc. would like to have us believe otherwise, NT does not in fact contain many ideas that UNIX has not either pioneered or picked up during the seventies or early eighties. Both systems have from a research perspective a distinctive seventies feel to them. Especially from a security perspective one is struck by the similarities between the respective systems. There are in fact many more similarities than differences.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by shawnmmcc
FYI, the search took all of two minutes.

You should demand some kind of compensation -- you will never regain those two minutes of your life ever again.

[Asher]

Originally posted by MrFun


You should demand some kind of compensation -- you will never regain those two minutes of your life ever again.

And it was hopeless, it was rhetoric and filled with retardedly stupid quotes that show how hapless the author is (just what the hell is "Linux on the Mach Microkernel"...that's like saying "Ford on the GMC" == WTF?)

I've looked into this myself before and I've never been able to find anything aside from rhetoric from MS' competitors (like Netscape) that were trying their hardest to get MS broken up into bits. As I recall, none of this was proven (or could've been proven) in court cases.

Netscape claims that they somehow discovered MS' "hidden" API and used it to improve their performance. The reality of the situation was Netscape Server was the biggest heap of crap (I used it back in 98-99 on SidGames.com anyway) that didn't differenciate between threads and processes in the original Windows NT versions. In Windows NT/2K/XP, if the threads/processes are related they ought to have one master process with lots of child threads.

Netscape Server (and Apache prior to 2.0) used a design that worked well on Linux/Unixes and poorly on Windows. When Netscape finally figured out the stupidity of their design, they switched it to improve performance and match IIS' multi-threading capabilities.

Your two-minute Google search was superficial and dug up nothing but rhetoric.

It is true there are undocumented (and unsupported) functions in Windows -- just like virtually every other software ever made. The problem is the allegation that MS has some kind of super-functions hidden that only they can use is so mind-numbingly stupid that it really does frustrate me. No one has ever actually pointed out anything remotely like this, yet the Slashdot and anti-MS crowd continue to circulate this bull**** as if it were fact. Then you have articles online that casually mention it, then people who don't know what they're talking about citing those articles on forums as proof...

[Mr. Harley]

Asher - the article also provides two books that were written documenting those. I assume then that you feel that the publishers (note - these were technical books, not something by Karl Rove or Michael Moore) were also equally clueless. Asher knows more than experts in the field.

...The problem is the allegation that MS has some kind of super-functions hidden that only they can use is so mind-numbingly stupid that it really does frustrate me. No one has ever actually pointed out anything remotely like this, yet the Slashdot and anti-MS crowd continue to circulate this bull**** as if it were fact....

DOJ Antitrust Document reference Microsoft - at DOJ itself.

Independent software vendors and competing platform developers will get little relief from Microsoft's continual practice of hiding and manipulating interfaces. Microsoft has the unreviewable ability under the proposed settlement to define Windows itself. It therefore controls whether and how independent software developers will be able to write programs that run on top of the operating system. The definitions of software products and functionalities and the decisions about how to configure applications programming interfaces (APIs) are left in the hands of Microsoft to an extreme extent. As a consequence, the company will be encouraged to embed critical technical specifications deeply into the operating system and thereby prevent independent software developers from seeing them. To the extent that Microsoft would actually be required to reveal anything, it would be so late in the product development cycle that independent software developers would never be able to catch up to Microsoft's favored developers...

...Microsoft's prevented Intel from developing software by using its key leverage over computer manufacturers. In an oft-repeated pattern, Microsoft "pressured the major OEMs to not install NSP software on their PCs until the software ceased to expose APIs."[Footnote 40: Fact, at 101] ...

...Microsoft launched a year long campaign in which it "tried to persuade Apple to stop producing a Windows 95 version of its multimedia playback software, which presented developers of multimedia content with an alternative to Microsoft's multimedia APIs."[Footnote 54: Fact, at 105.]

Microsoft backed its effort to drive Apple out of developing applications for the Windows environment with threats that it "would enter the authoring business to ensure that those writing multimedia content for Windows 95 concentrated on Microsoft's APIs instead of Apple's."[Footnote 55: Fact, at 106.]

Microsoft went on to suggest that incompatibilities would occur since "the technologies provided in those tools might very well be inconsistent with those provided by Apple's tools."[Footnote 56: Fact, at 106.]

The threat was backed up with the cross-subsidies available when the "Microsoft executives warned, Microsoft would invest whatever resources were necessary to ensure that developer used its tools; its investment would not be constrained by the fact that authoring software generated only modest revenue."[Footnote 57: Fact, at 107.]...

THE ANTICOMPETITIVE BUSINESS MODEL
Using the operating system as the core of its market power, Microsoft erects barriers to entry. It freezes out competitors with incompatibilities,[Footnote 63: The practice was deeply embedded in the business strategy, although it was refined over time. Wallace and Erickson offer the following example from 1982-83 (p. 233). Still, for a very brief time in early 1983, Multiplan did enjoy an advantage over 1-2-3. Microsoft released its upgrade for he IBM PC/XT, causing problems for 1-2-3 on the updated operating system. According to one Microsoft programmer, the problems encountered by Lotus were not unexpected. A few of the key people working on DOS 2.0, he claimed, had a saying at the time, DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." They managed to code a few hidden bugs into DOS 2.0 that caused Lotus to break down when it loaded. "There were as few as three or four people who knew what was being done," he said. He felt the highly competitive Gates was the ringleader. The art had apparently been refined by the early 1990s (Wallace, p. 38-39). "He denied there was a Chinese Wall at Microsoft," Schmidt wrote in his notebook, "and clearly stated that the software groups throughout all of Microsoft's Corporation talked to all others. He claimed that the use of hidden APIs was an error by the team" The hidden APIs referred to by Schmidt are applications programming interfaces, or "calls," programming codes integrated into an operating system such as Windows to allow it to respond to commands from an application program. If competitors don't know about these hidden or undocumented calls, their applications will not work as well as Microsoft's Microsoft had long denied that it deliberately designed hidden calls into its operating systems, but in the summer of 1992, Andrew Schulman, a programming expert living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, published a book Undocumented Windows, which confirmed that Microsoft had lied. Microsoft later acknowledged that Excel and Word used at least 16 APIs that had been hidden in Windows. (boldface added by me)

pwnd - and unless you can provide similiar evidence, from the legal system or from academic presses, you will remain that way. I am going to save that little quote for every time you claim how Microsoft is not the rat bastard company it is. Note, I am not passing judgement on the quality of their products, Asher. In fact you'll note I gave Che the thumbs up - and he was not paticularly nice to anybody.

Stop being so silly when you make ridiculous claims, like how you researched it and could find nothing - I am either forced to believe you are a) stupid, and actually couldn't enter the search string - "court cases" microsoft API undocumented - on Google, or b) you are being disingenuous in your claim that "I've looked into this myself...". Asher, if I posted a poll on Apolyton, and they had the choice between those choices as the reason you make an unsupportable claim about Microsoft, how big a percent do you think will choose disenenuous (or fanatical, but I'm trying to avoid that thread all together. )

Asher, I posted a link clearly showing what has been claimed, going into details. You refutation also contradicts itself - the Netscape Server worked well on other platforms, not Windows - and I linked to the article where by using the undocumented Windows API's Netscape Server worked faster on MS products. I am trying hard not to be insulting, but doesn't the logic of that bother you even for a second? You are doing exactly what I predicted. Now I have the DOJ cite, and I will bet you that you have some specious argument about that - but you won't provide an actual single cite about the flaws in the DOJ Document except maybe from Microsoft. You do know that the DOJ hires these people called expert witnesses, and that unless you want to lose, it is a good idea to hire competent ones. Which the DOJ did (read the entire link before starting to nitpick), and they did their research, and now hopefully this is finally settled.

Unless you insist I cite God - but then you will have a problem, because some of our posters would have us believe that, well, God isn't on your side. (just couldn't resist it after the way you almost never actually use cites to refute, just your pronouncements)

[Urban Ranger]

dp

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Fve Crathva
Because they were being used? Because they worked when used by people who knew precisely how to use them, but were too dangerous when used publicly?

Um, isn't that what documentation is for? Telling others how to use them precisely, and give warnings for dread things that could happen if they aren't used in exactly the right way?

Originally posted by Fve Crathva
Because they were a temporary kludge, necessary for some OS operation, but slated to be removed when a proper implementation was written (or when it was no longer necessary)?

You mean the OS was held together by duct tape, but they released it to the public?

Originally posted by Fve Crathva
It's easy to to be an armchair engineer and say that Microsoft should release their products only when they're completely finished, but that's idiotic and naive.

There is no reason to not believe a finished product, e.g. something MS deemed ready to be sold to the public, is not finished to a very large degree, i.e. no kludges, no hidden surprises, etc? Maybe your own expections lowered over the years by using Microsoft software, but not mine.

I have never seen a motherboard that came with jump wires. I have never seen a car that was only 70% built or a chair with one fewer legs than it is necessary for it to stand on its own. Why should software be different?

Originally posted by Fve Crathva
I'm sure as a Linux fanboy, you'll agree that Microsoft's programmers aren't perfect.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Q Cubed

Yet again another doofus fell for this. There are platforms with lesser marketshares with more viruses.

*cough*Firefox*cough*

Lesser marketshare with vulnerabilities, and yet Firefox isn't targeted as often as IE.

God knows why.

You keep saying this but you have no real evidence. Nobody really knows why OS X has zero viruses. I know that you don't know. So stop talking out of your ass.

[Fve Crathva]

Um, isn't that what documentation is for? Telling others how to use them precisely, and give warnings for dread things that could happen if they aren't used in exactly the right way?

No, the documentation is for telling others how to use the functions precisely, and giving warnings for unexpected things that could happen if they're not used in exactly the right way. There are certain things that are inherently dangerous--like fork() on UNIX--but that also provide essential functionality, and those sorts of things have to be exposed, regardless of what power they give the programmer. But if the only power your operating system gains by exposing a part of the API is the ability for the public to crash the OS (or whatever)--which, by the way, is also blamed on Microsoft--what possible excuse could they have for documenting it? Consider that documenting it freezes it into the API permanently.

You mean the OS was held together by duct tape, but they released it to the public?

While reeking of hyperbole and ignorance, this is essentially correct. The point I was making is that there is no such thing as a finished product (except TeX, when Knuth dies). Have you ever played a game with bugs? How could they possibly release their game when there are bugs still in it!?!?! Programmers have to work under deadline, just like most people who live in the Real World, and sometimes the only way to solve a problem in the time frame given you is to fudge it until the next release. You can rail all you like about how that shouldn't be the case, but it is, so suck it up.

There is no reason to not believe a finished product, e.g. something MS deemed ready to be sold to the public, is not finished to a very large degree, i.e. no kludges, no hidden surprises, etc? Maybe your own expections lowered over the years by using Microsoft software, but not mine.

No, my expectations are lowered by being a real person living in the real world. A person who understands that despite how you see them, programmers aren't the god-like incarnations of Industry itself, able to solve every single problem on their lists before release. In software engineering, it's called triage:

Microsoft Programmer: Dude, they want us to have this out next month? I still haven't come up with a way to make APIFunctionA() safe!
Microsoft Boss: Dude, Product1 still crashes every time it loads up on an Intel processor, just don't document APIFunctionA, and get on with fixing Product1!
MP: Duuuuuuuude!!!
MB: Duuuude.

I have never seen a motherboard that came with jump wires. I have never seen a car that was only 70% built or a chair with one fewer legs than it is necessary for it to stand on its own. Why should software be different?

Congratulations on comparing software to hardware! You're a genius! I can't believe I'm about to lecture a so-called computer person on this subject.

OK, seriously. Hardware engineers have several huge advantages over software engineers. Firstly, they can rely on the incontrovertible laws of Physics, which will indicate immediately to your chair engineer that his chair won't stand up. Software engineers have no fundamental laws that are so robust.

Secondly, most of the creation of hardware is done hundreds, thousands, if not millions of times. We'll ignore your indication that 30% of the work on an operating system's functionality is put into creating hidden API functions. A piece of software is created once (which is a benefit in terms of cost), and every single instance of it can't be tested. Even if the analogy was valid, if I can take dramatic license to try to match up to your 30% figure, you're arguing the Windows API equivalent of the engineers at Ford leaving the floor out of their car, so that the driver can use his shoes as brakes.

Thirdly, hardware goes through two processes: creation, and manufacturing. Software only goes through creation. Your motherboard engineer can create his motherboard with connections out the wazoo, but when the design goes to the manufacturer, it's translated into the product we all know and love, using appropriate materials. Software engineers have no such luxury, they have to create their product exactly how it is distributed. Furthermore, the wires on your special motherboard have a functional equivalent in the real world (that is to say, what is actually used). What I've said many times is that many of these hidden API calls don't have proper functional equivalents--if they did, the equivalent would be documented in the API.

SP

[Q Classic]

Originally posted by Agathon
God knows why.

You keep saying this but you have no real evidence. Nobody really knows why OS X has zero viruses. I know that you don't know. So stop talking out of your ass.

You're confronted with evidence that suggests (but does not prove) that platforms with lesser marketshare are not attacked as often.

What do you do? Dismiss it out of hand. Is this what philosophy teaches you? That's not what those classes taught me.

Jeebus, you're sounding like a Creationist here, automagically discounting any evidence that may suggest that you're not quite right.

Take your hot air and fly away in a balloon, why don'tcha, and come back when you're willing to actually discuss things?

[Fve Crathva]

Also I'm not Asher's AE, but he's usually right, and I'm usually right, so we can't help it if we end up on the same side in this sort of argument.

SP

[Asher]

Originally posted by shawnmmcc
pwnd - and unless you can provide similiar evidence, from the legal system or from academic presses, you will remain that way. I am going to save that little quote for every time you claim how Microsoft is not the rat bastard company it is. Note, I am not passing judgement on the quality of their products, Asher.

Again -- why don't you look into what those APIs are. They are not super-functions that let MS do what other people can't. As I recall one of them, for instance, was access to a different save/load dialog box which was basically a "beta" version of one later released systemwide in Windows. If you use Office 2000/XP, you'll still see that old dialog box, but it was a bad idea to use it. It doesn't integrate with the Windows settings fully (in the new dialog box, you can customize the "buttons" in the left pane...they don't affect the old Office boxes).

Before you keep jumping on the "pwn3d" statement and quoting stuff that actually doesn't dispute what I said, you should remember what the real argument is. I've already said MS has unreleased APIs in Windows that they don't want the public to use, and sure they may use some of these before others can, but that's not exactly a competitive advantage if you look into what exactly the APIs did...

In fact you'll note I gave Che the thumbs up - and he was not paticularly nice to anybody.

Never mind the fact that he was wrong on some things in his post.

Asher, I posted a link clearly showing what has been claimed, going into details. You refutation also contradicts itself - the Netscape Server worked well on other platforms, not Windows - and I linked to the article where by using the undocumented Windows API's Netscape Server worked faster on MS products. I am trying hard not to be insulting, but doesn't the logic of that bother you even for a second?

Look into this more -- it wasn't an undocumented API that sped up Netscape Server, it was a redesign of their thread model. Their old thread model (and Apache 1.0-1.3's thread model) worked faster on Linux/Unixes and slower on Windows, the new Apache 2.0 and the later versions of Netscape Server used a thread model that worked better on Windows. The API for this was documented, it was a design decision that Netscape made poorly in their first versions of the application (or perhaps it's because the software was ported from Unixes).

You're using claims from Netscape and the DOJ -- both of which were out to break MS up -- with vacuous claims of mysterious "hidden APIs" that aren't elaborated on. Then you consider that some kind of proof that MS can make better products on Windows than other people because of this.

"I'm not trying to be insulting," but it's clear that you're not much of a scientist.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Agathon
God knows why.

You keep saying this but you have no real evidence. Nobody really knows why OS X has zero viruses. I know that you don't know. So stop talking out of your ass.

You're such a fanboy that it's not funny. Testamonies from security experts, psychologists, and general common sense dictate that the larger the userbase a software product has, the bigger the target is for it. Add to that the common resentment of MS in the geek community, and it's not at all surprising to hear that MS is targeted far more than MacOS is.

MacOS has had many, many vulnerabilities, many of which were just as bad as the ones that allowed "CodeRed" and other worms to spread. But no one wrote the virus on it.

One thing is for certain -- MacOS X is not immune to viruses. It's had many security vulnerabilities. It just lacks the active virus writers that Windows has, and the reasoning for that should be blatantly obvious to anyone who doesn't have their penis rubbing Jobs' prostate.

[Asher]

Speak of the devil...

http://news.com.com/Apple+plugs+critical+holes+in+OS+X/2100-1002_3-5879187.html?tag=nefd.top

Apple plugs 'critical' holes in OS X
Published: September 23, 2005, 1:48 PM PDT
By Alorie Gilbert
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Apple Computer released 10 security fixes to address Mac OS X flaws that security experts described as "critical."

Apple issued the patches, available through its Web site, Thursday. The flaws affect versions 10.3.9 and 10.4.2 of the Mac OS X operating system, as well as related server software.

Symantec and the French Security Incident Response Team both said the vulnerabilities are serious and that the need to patch them is urgent. However, no exploits for them have been reported, Symantec noted in an alert sent to members of its DeepSight service Friday.
Big plans for the small screen

The flaws expose affected machines to remote attack using arbitrary commands and e-mail interception, according to Apple's bulletin. Certain vulnerabilities could also be exploited for a denial-of-service attack, FrSirt said in an online advisory.

Apple declined to comment on the security patches Friday.

The company has previously released patches for these Mac OS X versions. In one of its bigger security updates, the company last month unloaded fixes for 44 flaws. Last May, it released an update for 20 vulnerabilities, and in March, it distributed an update for a dozen security bugs.

Another month, another whole whack of vulnerabilities that allow remote code execution and denial of service...

But we don't know why authors aren't wasting their time writing viruses to delete all of the softcode porn on highschool emo-kids computers...

[Mr. Harley]

Again -- why don't you look into what those APIs are. They are not super-functions that let MS do what other people can't.

Doesn’t wash. You’ve changed my wording to win your argument. I never held that they were super-API’s. I said that they were undocumented API’s used by Microsoft programmers (application) that were not available to the competition. Period. That both refutes the argument -

… Because they were a temporary kludge, necessary for some OS operation, but slated to be removed when a proper implementation was written (or when it was no longer necessary)?

Because Microsoft used them 16 times for MS Office products, in this case Excel and Word. Please note that Microsoft admitted to their use, and they were not available to the competitors.

You need to have a context why this is critical. Microsoft at the time of Windows 95, and to a lesser degree Windows 98, was attempting to leverage it’s OS system dominance into dominance of the Office Market. They were able to get their integrated products to market first, and more significantly, their products worked better with Windows 95/98 then their competition. The competition’s products had problems with stability and the “blue screen of death”. Now, you at least read my post from the Department of Justice (we yankees call it DOJ)?

Microsoft released its upgrade for he IBM PC/XT, causing problems for 1-2-3 on the updated operating system. According to one Microsoft programmer, the problems encountered by Lotus were not unexpected. A few of the key people working on DOS 2.0, he claimed, had a saying at the time, DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." They managed to code a few hidden bugs into DOS 2.0 that caused Lotus to break down when it loaded. "There were as few as three or four people who knew what was being done," he said. He felt the highly competitive Gates was the ringleader.

So this was standard operating procedure at Microsoft, and the use of the 16 API’s for Excel and Word are consistant with prior practices at Microsoft. Now, reference the unimportance of those calls.

If competitors don't know about these hidden or undocumented calls, their applications will not work as well as Microsoft's Microsoft had long denied that it deliberately designed hidden calls into its operating systems, but in the summer of 1992, Andrew Schulman, a programming expert living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, published a book Undocumented Windows, which confirmed that Microsoft had lied.

Lied reference there being no significant API’s in the Windows OS that are available to MS Applications programmers and not to the competition.

So let’s recap. Microsoft Appications Programmers used to 16 API’s hidden in Windows. They used them for Excel and Word. The competition did not have access to them. ALL OF THE COMPETITION ENCOUNTERED STABILITY AND SPEED PROBLEMS NOT ENCOUNTERED BY THE COMPETING MS PRODUCTS. And Microsoft has a documented history of deliberating making their OS less compatible with the competition so their own products have an advantage.

Asher, as I said, you are going to want me to cite God. The evidence was enough for two courts. The only problem the Appeals Court had was with the sanctions agains Microsoft, NOT the findings of fact.

FYI – the version I found on the web stated that when Netscapes server product was recompiled using access to an undocumented API it worked as well as Microsoft’s competing product. Now, if that happened once, it is a coincidence and I would grant your point. Twice, it becomes suspicious. Three times, there is a pattern, and that is what the courts found. By your premise, Asher, all of Microsoft’s competition has had problems because they are incompetent programmers. Netscape, Lotus, Wordperfect, Borland, Dr. Dos, Norton (until they signed their agreement with Microsoft, prior to that every new release of Microsoft caused Norton problems but not the Microsoft prodcuts), and that is only from my knowledge as a “code monkey”. DOJ I’m quite sure had a larger list, including more back-end products, as in for servers and commerical data-bases.