Talk:Microsoft

"This led to Vista being installed on many new machines where the customer would have preferred WinXP."

From what I heard, they rather engaged in some licensing shifting that led to the customer getting XP (if wished), but it still counted as a Vista sale. I'll see if I still got sources for that (and some of the rest) in my RSS reader archives tomorrow. --Sid (talk) 01:51, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

yup, whatever can be sourced . I could not get XP on my laptop, they would only do Vista, so thats a personal experiance thing. Hamster (talk) 03:21, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

You couldn't buy XP, but you could get a downgrade license with Vista Ultimate and Business purchases. So companies basically exploited this to sell machines with XP installed, and it counted as a Vista sale, so MS could go all "ooh look how well Vista is doing in sales". See second paragraph here -- Nx / talk 10:19, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

“The world today has 6.8 billion people… that’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”

Has anybody else hear this quote from Bill Gates? He seems to be saying vaccines could LOWER population by 10-15%. But then goes on to say reproductive health services and health care (which would mean more people... from better... health... care) very confusing.

In today's developed countries, the fertility rate has dropped drastically throughout the last century or so. Bill Gates considers the better health care to be responsible: If it is very likely that a child makes it to adulthood, it's unnecessary to have many of them. In poor countries, on the other hand, many, if not even most, children die within years, forcing parents to have more children s.t. at least some of them (children) survive and care for them (parents) when they (parents) are old.

I've watched a youtube video from a former classmate of mine who seems to have developed an uncanny attraction towards conspiracy theories lately... in that video, clever cutting and commentary twist Gates's actual message (better health care -> less rabbit-like reproduction) into accusation of genocide (BG wants to kill 1 billion Africans!), while also strongly objecting to the use of reproductive health care (which they invariably equate with abortion).

In another video (or the same one... It's been some time) somebody accused Bill Gates of genocide against Indians after vaccinating millions of Indian children (against polio, I guess, but I'm not sure), several thousands of which becoming paralyzed or dying afterwards. I might get the numbers wrong, but the number of children who developed side effects was much smaller than the total number of vaccinated children, s.t. I assume the usual ratio of side effects rather than intentional genocide.

Since there are some anti Gates (Foundation) conspiracies, we should consider starting a standalone Bill Gates article. 87.145.133.170 (talk) 14:54, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

Mission

I don't see how this fits in with the RationalWiki mission at all. This off topic article sounds like it belongs at some sort of pro-linux computer site rather then here. --Sir Onion ^{Kneel before my vegetable might!} 01:00, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

RationalWiki has science-related articles, and technology is based on science. If an article on a huge computer software company doesn't belong here, then neither do the articles for YouTube (references to it could easily link to Wikipedia), the Internet (RationalWiki is on it, but isn't necessarily about it), or OS Wars (covers more companies and organizations than Microsoft, but otherwise has a similar subject). --GastonRabbit (talk) 23:21, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Funspace idea

Answers for when you get one of those calls claiming to mend your computer over the phone:

• My computer expert is at school - can you wait?
• Play them along and then say you use Linux/Apple Macs/any obscure computer program you know of.
• I think you've got a wrong number.
• Amuse yourself with assorted flavours of 'at a tangent'/Good Soldier Schweik-ism.
• Pretend they are long lost friends.
• Attempt to sell them something/weird services.

etc 82.44.143.26 (talk) 18:31, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

More on FUD

Microsoft has been known to engage in a lot of dishonest practices, like Scroogled and astroturfing.

They also lie/misinform about a lot of things publicly, like the true nature of Xbox 1 DRM practices, how they weren't gonna put Windows 8 on their flagship phone or that the use of FREE open source software actually incurs a higher TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), etc. etc. .

Their advertisement typically targets supposed weaknesses of their competitors like privacy issues and malware vulnerabilities that they themselves have in equal or worse measure. All of that is of course an extension to the notion that Microsoft is a pioneer of FUD and I would suggest to name the section "More on FUD".

There was also the debacle with the NSA, which they themselves admitted to, but that one seems rather too recent to add in. I'm not sure how far dishonesty and dodgy practices go along with 'the mission', but I could add to the article using that.

They are mostly committing the logical fallacy appeal to fear (argumentum ad metum), which we have yet to have an article on as well under 'Logic'. Nullahnung (talk) 02:25, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Cogswell's complaint

I finally wrote off Microsoft in the late eighties or early nineties, when I was trying to get an interface card running in a PC-AT to control some HP-IB (later IEEE-488) devices in my lab, spectrum analyzers, plotters, and so forth. The card was programmable in BASIC, which I did not want to do. The manufacturer kindly provided a table of all the hooks needed to talk to the card from C code, and I liked that idea. All it would take was a small assembly-language routine to point at the parameter table and jump to the PROM on the I/F card, at address 0C0000. Simple enough to write such a routine, but Microsoft's assembler refused to code the jump to a hard address. I got on the phone to Beaverton, and an "application engineer" told me it wasn't going to happen, and that I could expect even less control of the machine in future, for my own protection.

What the MS drone was telling me was that their assembler was defective by design. Fuck that noise, I thought. It took a couple of instruction bytes masquerading as data to do the deed, and I haven't looked back. Sprocket J Cogswell (talk) 18:09, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

I'm currently designing a set of scripts and a Haskell program to automate some installations and file conversions for some folks who aren't very tech-savvy and wouldn't necessarily be able to do so themselves (especially since it involves compiling a LaTeX document). On Linux (I only looked at a couple of the more popular distros), this program was simple. On Mac (or at least OSX), it was a bit more of a pain, but it worked. On Windows... Dear god, there is no conceivable way to make this set of scripts anything other than a huge pain in the ass... All by design, of course. - Grant (Talk) 18:12, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

*Shrugs, goes back C# Development* Call me the counterbalance to the anti-Microsoft then. Zero (talk) 18:21, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

The comical thing is that my gyrations with that IEEE-488 controller happened in a company that was (even more dysfunctionally than µsoft) bogged down in bureaucratic bloat, and knew it, and couldn't find a way out of that soggy paper bag. C. Northcote Parkinson probably had something to say about the futility of organizational growth, as did IBM's Fred Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month. Interesting times, both then and now. Sprocket J Cogswell (talk) 18:25, 13 February 2014 (UTC)