In what country is it illegal to sell a computer without an operating
system?
That’s what I thought. You’re still a moron.
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of
xxxxx@hotmail.com
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 4:32 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE:[ntdev] Mixing C and C++ files in a driver project.
So is the BIOS on your pre-built machine also a “tax”?
Actually, this is pretty spacious argument - although it may sound
convincing, in actuality, it is not.
There is a difference between the embedded and installable software. The
former is tightly bound to the hardware that needs firmware in order to be
functional, so that it gets installed by the hardware manufacturer - it is
impossible to make any use of the target hardware without it, because this
is the only “entity” that has in-depth knowledge of underlying hardware. The
latter is just an add-on feature that gets installed by the user. BIOS
belongs to the former class of software, and OS and application software
belong to the latter one…
1394 ports? I don’t need 'em (at home).
Again, the same story, but already at the level of hardware controllers -
they can come either on board (i.e. are just motherboard feature) or as
add-on PCI cards (i.e. installable by user). Have you ever seen a OEM PC
with 1394, USB, network, etc controller that comes as an add-on PCI card???
If it weren’t Microsoft we were talking about, no one would make this kind
of statement.
Wrong!!! This statement can be made in respect of everything that is meant
to be add-on feature but somehow gets presented as embedded one, be it
hardware or software, especially if an interested party makes a deal with
this or that government that legally obliges OEMs to provide add-on feature
in question on all machines that they produce. Somehow it just happened that
up to this point no one, apart from MSFT, tried to present add-on features
as embedded ones, let alone requesting legal assistance in doing so…
Companies sell PCs with the OS (in this case Windows) preinstalled because
that’s what the *vast* >majority of their customers want.
If this was the case, there would be just no point in legally forcing them
to do so, don’t you think???
Anton Bassov
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars
To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer