Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 20:27:26 11/01/98
Go up one level in this thread
On November 01, 1998 at 19:10:49, Amir Ban wrote:
>On November 01, 1998 at 11:51:01, Christophe Theron wrote:
>
>
>>
>>I was very sad when I learned that OS/2 was dead. I am pleased to see that Linux
>>grows.
>>
>>I don't use Internet Explorer. I use Netscape Communicator.
>>
>>Because we need to support several software companies. We need all of them, not
>>just one "big brother".
>>
>
>How much did you pay for Linux and Netscape Communicator, Christophe ?
More money than you have paid for your Internet Explorer. Even if you don't use
it, you certainly have it on your computer, or at least on your W95 CD. If you
have installed W98, you installed IE at the same time.
Frankly, you have to be very careful if you want to avoid having IE lurking
somewhere on your computer. Even the Visual C++ compiler installation tries to
corrupt your hard disk with IE. If you don't install it, you cannot view the
online help. When IE is installed, it tries hard to get rid of Netscape products
by settling itself as the default HTML and mail program.
The best description of this: Internet Explorer is the biggest known computer
virus. The technique is the well known "troyan horse".
Next step: you install W00 (oops... W2000) and discover that it has installed
for you the whole Office00 suite (1Gb). Word00 is installed as your default
readme.txt file viewer. Excel00 is your default taskbar program (the one that
shows the "Start" button). To change the default Windows colors you have to
start Publisher00.
Sorry. I am a little bitter when I see what has happened to the computer market.
This is not directed at you.
>>You can buy ChessBase products, but don't forget to buy other chess programs
>>too.
>>
>>You know what is my worse nightmare? That Microsoft releases a serious chess
>>program. And you know how they will do it: they will take the best programs,
>>disassemble them, and steal the algorithms to build their own program. Of course
>>you know that they have already done this with the Stacker Disk Compression
>>Utility. Don't you remember? The result is the "Microsoft" Dos and Windows disk
>>compression utility. They could do the same with chess programs.
>>
>
>This is not what happened.
>
>Microsoft's DoubleSpace compression originates from "DoubleDisk", a product of
>Mitan, a small Israeli company run by Micky and Eitan Feldbau, and published by
>Vertisoft, its US distributor. The brothers Feldbau were old friends of mine,
>and I was in close contact with both Mitan and Stac when this episode happened.
I was a DoubleDisk user in 1991 (IIRC). A nice product at that time. Was very
useful for my 286 notebook (I had a 20Mb hard disk).
>Mitan, in '90 or so, were the first to come up with "transparent" drive
>compression based on the Lempel-Ziv algorithms. Stac, a company from Carlsbad,
>CA that did compression hardware came up with Stacker based on a similar concept
>soon later, and led the market. Then Microsoft became interested. They
>negotiated with both Mitan and Stac and decided on buying the DoubleDisk source
>code, which the developed into DoubleSpace.
>
>Stac then sued Microsoft for patent violation. It seems Stac had patent rights
>for the algorithm called LZ77 (I never understood this part, since Lempel & Ziv,
>two Israelis, published this in the public domain in 1977. I know that my friend
>Micky, who saw very little money out of all this, was very bitter about this.
>The words he had for Stac were worse than what Thorsten Czub has for Chessbase).
>Stac won in court, and the court awarded them $40 million. Microsoft payed only
>$26 million, I think, because Microsoft also won a patent counter-suit. A
>byproduct of this was that Mitan & Vertisoft went out of business. Stac, by the
>way, also left the compression business after that and are doing other things
>now.
It is very interesting to learn these details. On my side, I have read in a
(trustable) paper that Microsoft had simply copied byte-by-byte some portions of
Stacker assembly code.
There was also the fact that - correct me if I am wrong - Microsoft DoubleSpace
could read Stacker compressed disks. As you told us, Microsoft bought DoubleDisk
source code, not Stacker's. Did they negociate the ability to read Stacker
volumes? If not, it is maybe one of the reasons they were sentenced?
Anyway, Microsoft has lost in court. I am not going to believe that Stac was the
bad guy in this story.
>>The result would of course be a good program. Would you call this a "wonderful
>>development for consumers" ?
>>
>>For the community of chess programmers, this would be the *last* development.
>>
>
>I think if Microsoft decide to enter this market, the people who should be
>concerned are at Mindscape. I don't understand why this affects chess
>programmers, except that one or more of us will be working for Microsoft.
Maybe you could ask former companies that were selling operating systems, word
processors or spreadsheet to explain to you what the problem with Microsoft is.
Well, you may have difficulties to locate these companies, because they don't
exist anymore. Ask Netscape, they are still alive. I think they have an Internet
address. :)
Again, this is not directed at you. In case Microsoft enters the computer chess
market, you would be a victim. Exactly as I would be. I hope we would keep on
developping our programs and make them fight against each other, but we would
not earn a single dime with them anymore.
The good side of this is that we would not have the "amateur/professional"
discussion anymore. :)
Christophe
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