Re: Moderately improved map of Microsoft tying evidence

["Erick Andrews" <eandrews@star.net>]

  On Fri, 7 Nov 1997 12:19:17 -0500 (EST), Roberto Di Cosmo wrote:
  
  >I strongly support the idea of putting together
  >hard factual evidence of the global strategy
  >implemented by MS over the years.
  >
  >What is *very* difficult in this kind of task, though,
  >is that software *is* complex, and it takes a lot [...]
  
  <snip>
  
  >I am talking of the defragmentation utilities :-)
  >
  >I personally met lots of people which were very proud of
  >knowing how to use a defragmentation utility under dos/windows
  >and were very surprised to see that I had no such magic tool
  >on my portable running NextStep (that has a mach based bsd [...]
  
  <snip>
  
  >
  >
  >Also in the category "slowing down the technological evolution/fooling the customer",
  >we should put the braindead directory scheme used once in DOS and
  >modified now for FAT. I mean, unless you use a hammer on your disk,
  >you are supposed to never find a damaged directory structure on an
  >Unix system (this is guaranteed by the inode data structure + fsck
  >algorithm), while I personally have seen many disks completely ruined
  >by "ScanDisk" (the last one this summer: ScanDisk "repaired" the disk
  >and afterwards all the filenames were turned into gibberish and all
  >the data was lost).
  >
  >Anybody willing to try his hand at writing a little story accessible to everybody
  >on these easy to verify facts?
  >
  >--Roberto Di Cosmo
  >
  <snip>
  
  Roberto,
  
  I understand where you are going.  I don't know how easy this would
  be to articulate to a non-technical, time-limited audience.
  
  For instance, OS/2's HPFS (and HPFS386) file systems are installable
  file systems and exhibit several properties of which you speak about UNIX.
  It gets very technical, very quickly, when you start discussing superblocks,
  fnodes, and resistance to fragmenting...as inherent in the directory and file
  structure design...not to mention Extended Attributes and b-trieve algorithms.
  [reference back issues on this subject at  www.edm2.com].
  Clearly, neither FAT nor VFAT have this level of technology.
  
  Unless a definitive "high-level" approach can be taken to prevent flummoxing
  the audience, it could even backfire.  I'm not sure how to show technical state-
  of-the-art at a particular time in light of justifying how MS should have done it too.
  However, in terms of HPFS, my understanding that MS does have rights to 
  [some?] parts of it when they were co-developers with IBM in the late 1980's.
  Perhaps a case could be made that, at least, they certainly knew about these things,
  and also perhaps that they advertised C2 file system security before it was true.
  (I'm not so sure it is yet true even with the latest NT).
  
  Erick Andrews