Two months ago a lot of online magazines and “tip” web sites reported that WindowsXP reserves 20% of your network bandwidth so in case of a crash, debug information can be sent to Microsoft. InfoWorld says that this is not the case exactly and that there is a good reason behind the limitation.
Windows XP Network Bandwidth Limitation a Myth?
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Eugenia Loli
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I guess they want to put PCAnywhere out of business now as well!
There seems to be so much missinformation about anything that microsoft does, be it their products or strategies. I am not saying everything bad about them is a lie, nor that everything good is untruthful, I am saying that the sources are more than often wrong. They don’t have the neccessary knowledge to really claim one thing or another.
That is why these articles are good, they try to clear things up, but I would still like Microsoft to somehow clear them up as well. They wrote the software and must know it well after all (any developer who don’t know what (s)he did they should consider firing after all). There is a huge amount of APIs and things you can make XP/.NET do, few know about them. It would also be nice if the bad stuff is reported truthfully and with facts backing them up instead of this stupid netscape case there is now.
I get the sensation that M$ is trying to limit what they are responsible for here. They can control their remote services, but can they control others? What happens if the other ones screw everything up? Who gets the blame? It might not be any reason other than that. Don’t be so quick to assume what Microsoft intends.
What M$ does is good for the buyers of their software, they don’t need to buy more and more add on software (unless they warez it, and don’t give me that that is better), it’s already included in the big shiney box they bought (unless they got the rip off preinstall). This is great for the general public who can’t shelf out unlimited amounts of money. This is what the linux distros are trying to do (that is bundle as much as they can) and what Apple wished they could do (they have the video/camera software bundled as standard, who would ever be able to make a piece of software like that and sell? They have the same problem M$ once had, so they are forced to write their own software).
As someone in the article says “I use this to administrate 280 computers”. That person must be at a corporation, which has a completely different budget for software. They can afford the add on software. If they want to offer different packaged windows:es this is the only place it makes sense for the buyers. Make companies choose between “we bundle it all” and “NT 3.51” and see what they choose… well, it doesn’t make sense to give them a stripped down one, they can still get the add on software.
This only leaves us to one thing. Stop Microsoft from legally forbid others software to run on Windows and possibly make them open up their APIs a bit more so people can make software.
To all of you out there, if you are planning a product, make something that you won’t think M$ won’t do for a while, make it big, make much money on stocks and sell the whole shebang to M$. Then retire and write whatever software you like and give away for free. See the irony?;)
(I rant too much)
To all of you out there, if you are planning a product, make something that you won’t think M$ won’t do for a while, make it big, make much money on stocks and sell the whole shebang to M$.
Gee, that works except that MS is more likely just to put you out of business leaving you with jack crap.
What M$ does is good for the buyers of their software, they don’t need to buy more and more add on software (unless they warez it, and don’t give me that that is better), it’s already included in the big shiney box they bought (unless they got the rip off preinstall). This is great for the general public who can’t shelf out unlimited amounts of money
Actually this is terrible for the general public. I am sure a lot of people will just use the default windows media player; it’s free and the don’t have to buy something else. To bad it is more and more limiting on anything besides MS proprietary stuff like windows media files. If I remember right XP has cd burner software; which means that the general public will never know how much better Nero is for burning CDs.
What ticks me off is the bit toward the end on licensing. I use Remotely AnyWhere (RA – http://www.remotelyanywhere.com/) to manage our web servers. According to the story, if I want to use RA view the screen of a machine running XP, I need an XP license for my machine, even if I’m actually running Win2000 Pro.
Don’t know about being a myth, but it certainly looks like a made up word to me 🙂
btw that liscensing agreement is shit (but lets face it who would actually be anal enough about compliance to shell out the cash for that?).