Differences between version 7 and predecessor to the previous major change of MicrosoftDirtyTricks.
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| Newer page: | version 7 | Last edited on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 12:45:40 pm | by DavidTaylor | Revert |
| Older page: | version 5 | Last edited on Friday, February 6, 2004 2:24:54 pm | by JohnMcPherson | Revert |
@@ -24,9 +24,9 @@
Update - (early 2004). They seemed to have changed their mind about this... the microsoft websites now seem to work with non-Microsoft browsers (other than windowsupdate.microsoft.com, of course).
!!Read-only Changes to Windows Registry
-The HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE part of the registry is not writable by users without "admin" rights on Windows 2000 (and presumably XP). This breaks lots of software that stored program settings in here, meaning they either won't install, or won't run. Netscape 4.7 has (had?) this problem. To be fair, this might not have been done for the purpose of breaking software.
+The HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE part of the registry is not writable by users without "admin" rights on Windows 2000 (and presumably XP). This breaks lots of software that stored program settings in here, meaning they either won't install, or won't run. Netscape 4.7 has (had?) this problem. To be fair, this might not have been done for the purpose of breaking software, but as a security measure. In Windows NT based OS's, this registry key is for machine configuration settings, the browser customizations are user specific and should be saved in HKEY_CURRENT_USER. In fact, all user configuration should be placed in user registry hives. In retrospect it looks like sloppy programming by the software manufacturer; if you come across this problem, you should let the manufacturer know
.
!!Email Formatting
Outlook and Outlook Express do lots of little things that make messages look funny on non-Outlook email clients.
@@ -73,7 +73,8 @@
----
!!Microsoft Business Practices
Windows 3.1 gave a warning message if it was being run on DRDOS rather than MSDOS, even though it worked just as well on either. Presumably this was to scare people into only using MSDOS.
+see [AARD Code|http://members.ozemail.com.au/~geoffch/editorial/aard/index.html]
In the early nineties, a company named "Stac" had as its flagship product a program named "Stacker", that transparently compressed and then de-compressed files on-the-fly. This product had versions for MS-DOS version 5, [IBM]'s OS/2, and [Apple]'s [Macintosh] operating systems. Microsoft
were interested in incorporating this functionality in their next version, MS-DOS 6, and approached Stac about licensing. During discussions, Microsoft gained information about technical details of the software. When MS-DOS 6 came out, it included !DoubleSpace, which eventually a jury found infringed on Stac's patents, and Stac was awarded US$120 million damages. But by then it didn't matter, as their product was effectively marginalised. (Incidentally, Microsoft counter-claimed that Stac had illegally reversed engineered MS-DOS because they were using undocumented DOS functions). Also, MSDOS 6.0 included changes that broke Stacker, although the company quickly produced an updated version that worked with 6.0.
