Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 18:24:12 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: brett@lariat.org (Brett Glass) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), adam@whizkidtech.net (G. Adam Stanislav), chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: M$ anti-trust case Message-ID: <200004261824.LAA06534@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20000425141125.00beb5e0@localhost> from "Brett Glass" at Apr 25, 2000 02:14:28 PM
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> Steve needs lower level access to the hardware than that. He needs to > be able to inspect the surface literally at the bit level and do > low-level reformatting. The hardware of modern IDE drives often does > not allow this; you can't do a low-level format at all. Worse still, > many drives insist upon hiding their caching so that you cannot be > sure when a write is committed to the surface of the disc. Kirk > complained about this last fall at FreeBSDCon, and he's right. I complain about it all the time. You can turn this off on SCSI drives via mode page 2. Many IDE drives are SCSI drives with IDE interfaces; that is, the drive engine itself is the same as the SCSI engine, as far as registers, and it is a matter of whether there is IDE or SCSI ASICs on the board. I realize that many IDE drives may not be directly accessible in this way, but at this point you are complaining about hardware limits, not Microsoft. The point of the level 3 lock, level 1 lock, VXD approach is to disengage the Windows drivers from the drive, so that if you are a programmer capable of writing code for accessing the hardware directly, you can do so from within protected mode, and without interference from the OS. At that point, it does not matter which OS you use: in other words, the claim that there is a Microsoft monopoly at work in preventing Steve from writing his software is specious. I agree that Microsoft has wielded monopoly power, and has violated both Act 1 and Act 2 of Sherman, and is probably in technical violation of the RICO anti-racketerring statutes, for which the Justice Department has not seen fit to take them to task. HOWEVER -- your example is flawed, and people seeing it might not recognize it as a strawman, and therefore might tar other, more valid examples, with the same brush. The subject of this thread is the anti-trust case; please keep it on track, if you are going to continue it. Thanks, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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