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Windows Refund Day (1999)

marc.merlins.org

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Re: Windows Refund Day (1999)

#121

Post by asveikau »

anthony_r wrote: post #107
filmgirlcw wrote: post #24

I’m going to get downvoted into oblivion for this, but as a teenager who remembers when this happened, this always struck me as the absolute dumbest idea and the most useless of performative actions. First, it was sponsored by a VC-backed company (that had hired a documentary crew to capture their success, the ill-fated VA Linux Systems (which eventually became known as Geeknet) and the pretty poor propaganda documen…

VA Linux is one of those prime examples of stock market mania. Close behind in terms of scale and similar in terms of philosophy/narrative (of the good small man sticking it to the evil big machine) to what we saw recently with GameStop. It is even a featured example in recent editions of The Intelligent Investor. The more things change the more they stay the same.

As an outsider, it definitely wasn't obvious at the time. Red Hat is still around.

If you look at their wikipedia article and see the photo of the rack mount servers they sold[1], that doesn't seem that ludicrous even today.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geeknet#/media/File%3AServer...

Re: Windows Refund Day (1999)

#122

Post by gambiting »

tinus_hn wrote: post #120
gambiting wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you can't return it, but at least in EU you are 100% allowed to take that licence and sell it on, no matter what the EULA says.

> Retailers in EU(and EEA and UK) have to take the product back if you don't agree with the licence > No, you can't return it, but at least in EU you are 100% allowed to take that licence and sell it on You’re contradicting yourself. PS license is spelled with an s

>>PS license is spelled with an s

Are you honestly unaware that UK spelling is licence, or are you trying to make some kind of point?

>>You’re contradicting yourself.

No, I'm not, but I will explain again. "Retailers in EU(and EEA and UK) have to take the product back if you don't agree with the licence" - the product. As in, the whole laptop/personal computer/tablet/whatever. If you don't agree with the licence bundled with the device, the retailer has to offer you a refund for the whole product. You can't return just the windows licence alone. I thought I made it quite clear in the earlier comment, but I guess not.

Re: Windows Refund Day (1999)

#123

Post by depressedpanda »

srazzaque wrote: post #94
npteljes wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A second Linux installation would do the same for you. The insurance is less Windows, and more having redundancy. Especially true if the situation is time critical - a default Linux installation won't stall you with a mandatory update.

For some things yes, but not for all things. I can think of 2: For a remote interview that I had a while back over Cisco WebEx, when things didn't work on my Fedora machine immediately, I'm glad I had my wife's XPS13 with Windows as stand by. Zero time wasted, worked immediately. If that didnt work, it would have been a phone call. I really wouldn't have wanted to muck around with some other distro at that point in t…

> For those situations where someone emails me an Excel or Word file that they would like my edits in, and I'm simply not in the position to extoll the virtues of open formats or coach them in Markdown or LaTeX, I have a Windows VM and office.

My solution to this is that if someone sends me something that can only be opened in Word or Excel, they don't want me to look at it.

Re: Windows Refund Day (1999)

#124

Post by bostonsre »

ogre_codes wrote: post #55
bostonsre wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, would have to say there's a lot more options now. It kind of seems like an elephant in the room, so want to call it out.... Is windows better or worse than macs/osx with Linux hostility? To me, it seems like Microsoft is less bad than Apple in this regard.

> Is windows better or worse than macs/osx with Linux hostility? To me, it seems like Microsoft is less bad than Apple in this regard. I'm not sure what you mean. Personally I like the Mac because it lets me run Unix stuff in a no BS way from the command line. It also runs Docker fine (haven't tried it on the M1). It doesn't have something like WSL, but it doesn't really need it because you can compile most things fo…

I mean that you can't buy a computer with mac hardware and linux os. Microsoft isn't forcing hardware vendors to only use windows.

Osx unix is still vastly different from most production environments. I really like wsl because I can use whatever linux os that I'm comfortable with and have access to a wide range of supported apps on windows. It seems really elegant to me and its not just running a linux vm on windows like most assume. The integration between wsl and windows is pretty neat. e.g. this is in my .bashrc in wsl, it copies output to my windows clipboard (and note that its a windows exe that im invoking from wsl).

function cb () { powershell.exe -command "\$input | set-clipboard" }

Re: Windows Refund Day (1999)

#125

Post by zeruch »

rbanffy wrote: post #101
zeruch wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't get downvoted, but you make a few factually questionable statements (disclosure: I worked at VA from 1998 to 2002): 1. VA didn't sponsor the event, but a chunk of the staff of the company's Sunnyvale HQ attended (and most of us were in the LUGs). VA didn't have any need at that stage to boost the IPO, as the fever was already brewing for companies like VA and Red Hat (both IPO'd that year, RH in August and…

> VA didn't hire a camera crew either, but a friend of one of the executive staff (Jon Hall) wanted to do a story about Open Source Jon "Maddog" Hall is an awesome guy, BTW. He used to be a constant presence at the Brazilian Free Software Forum (FISL). He's now the board chair of the LPI.

Oops, wrong one. John Hall (often used the faux middle name "Tiberius" for reasons no one understood) was a young exec from Stanford who now is an exec...somewhere else? (It's been a while since I even had to recall the guy), not Maddog. Maddog was and is a Prince of a fellow.

Re: Windows Refund Day (1999)

#126

Post by schoen »

zeruch wrote: post #125
rbanffy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VA didn't hire a camera crew either, but a friend of one of the executive staff (Jon Hall) wanted to do a story about Open Source Jon "Maddog" Hall is an awesome guy, BTW. He used to be a constant presence at the Brazilian Free Software Forum (FISL). He's now the board chair of the LPI.

Oops, wrong one. John Hall (often used the faux middle name "Tiberius" for reasons no one understood) was a young exec from Stanford who now is an exec...somewhere else? (It's been a while since I even had to recall the guy), not Maddog. Maddog was and is a Prince of a fellow.

Huh! This reminded me that I once knew that there were two different people called Jon/John Hall, and then forgot.

I've met Maddog a number of times, most often in Brazil. It's amazing how much of a celebrity he is for Brazilians; there would sometimes literally be a long line of people waiting to be photographed with him.

Re: Windows Refund Day (1999)

#127

Post by schoen »

stordoff wrote: post #80
_yoqn wrote: post #54

I'm surprised that after all these years and even with a request to point out typos in the end, this misspelling has survived: "...manufacturers would truely refund people..."

And "reporters, from several magasines".

By the way, Marc Merlin is a native speaker of French so I suspect these are non-native English typos (e.g. French "magasin").

Re: Windows Refund Day (1999)

#128

Post by mleonhard »

Macha wrote: post #100
mleonhard wrote: post #77

I read this and remembered how much I used to^W^W hate Microsoft. Microsoft intentionally did not fix the virus vectors in their software. They could have easily stopped 99% of viruses with these steps: 1. Make Windows ignore autorun.ini on writable media. -- When a user double-clicks on a drive that has a hidden autorun.ini file, Windows executes the binary referenced in the file. This is how most Windows viruses sp…

> 1. Make Windows ignore autorun.ini on writable media Wasn't this fixed in XP SP1? You got a OS prompt asking which action you wanted to take when you inserted removable media.

Yes, they did close it after 16 years [0], after releasing three new OS versions with the virus vector: Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows XP.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorun.inf#Abuse

Re: Windows Refund Day (1999)

#129

Post by npteljes »

srazzaque wrote: post #94
npteljes wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A second Linux installation would do the same for you. The insurance is less Windows, and more having redundancy. Especially true if the situation is time critical - a default Linux installation won't stall you with a mandatory update.

For some things yes, but not for all things. I can think of 2: For a remote interview that I had a while back over Cisco WebEx, when things didn't work on my Fedora machine immediately, I'm glad I had my wife's XPS13 with Windows as stand by. Zero time wasted, worked immediately. If that didnt work, it would have been a phone call. I really wouldn't have wanted to muck around with some other distro at that point in t…

I also dual-boot because some of the games I like run on Windows better. But this is not what OP was about, OP's Linux worked well otherwise, that's why I suggested that if they had two of them, they'd have the same "insurance". So that it's not a matter of the operating system itself, but the redundancy.

Re: Windows Refund Day (1999)

#130

Post by npteljes »

trynton wrote: post #105
srazzaque wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some things yes, but not for all things. I can think of 2: For a remote interview that I had a while back over Cisco WebEx, when things didn't work on my Fedora machine immediately, I'm glad I had my wife's XPS13 with Windows as stand by. Zero time wasted, worked immediately. If that didnt work, it would have been a phone call. I really wouldn't have wanted to muck around with some other distro at that point in t…

@srazzaque: "For those situations where someone emails me an Excel or Word file that they would like my edits in, and I'm simply not in the position to extoll the virtues of open formats or coach them in Markdown or LaTeX, I have a Windows VM and office." Why not get them to install LibreOffice and sent you the spreadsheet in the native format? https://www.libreoffice.org/

Because this creates friction, and from the other party's point of view, it's you who introduces it.

But I think MS Office Online, and to some extent ONLYOFFICE solves this problem mostly, no need for Windows or a VM.

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