Posts by Roo 1687 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2010
I would have been happier with something a lot more 'old school'. ie: a special slot (eg: SD card, USB stick) which when populated will boot from it no matter what - overriding whatever the boot order is in the BIOS. You can secure that with a glue gun and be done with it without introducing a relatively *complex* patent encrusted layer that will most likely defy independent audit.
""....Eventually after spending who knows how much time and money, the IA64s outperformed a set of systems that had had no significant development funding for years....." Not true. Itanium2 absolutely walked all over even EV7 in every test we did."
I can believe that, but it also proves the man's point that the EV7 had suffered from a lack of development. EV7 taped out in 2001 (it was 2 years late under HPaq's tender loving care, the core was the same as the 1996 vintage EV6), HP shipped boxes in 2003 (fabbed at 180nm).
McKinley (Itanic 2.0) taped out in 2002 @ 180nm, so I would expect it stomp all over a 1999 design with less than half the cache.
Madison (Itanic 2.1) shipped in 2003 @ 130nm. If Intel can't beat a 1996 vintage core fabbed on a bulk process at this point they may as well have quit the business.
I think people forget just how heavily delayed EV6 and it's successors were (legal action, corporate take-overs). Given the difficulties and constraints faced by the Alpha's engineers I think that it is a miracle that they remained competitive for as long as they did.
"it seems to me that it just needs a few tiny nudges to better rationalize and integrate the pre-processor, provide support for Objects, bring functions up to first class objects, some refinement of syntax to allow nesting of functions"
Interestingly C++ started life as an C pre-processor, and one of the requirements was that it was backward compatible with C... It sounds like you may be treading the same path - with different set of constraints. You could try working from the other direction, ie: start with BCPL and work your way through to C+Hindsight. ;)
The thing that surprises me is that you seem to have missed a huge hole in C, explicit support for parallelism. Even doing the bare minimum like supporting a subset of OCCAM constructs like ALT, PAR, PROC & CHAN could help fix an awful lot of broken/unnecessarily complex threaded code.
"I think that a good re-think of the language could allow us to toss C++, C#, Java, Objective C, golang, etc. I have a hunch that done right it would actually decrease the size of the base language."
If you go the BCPL first route I think you have a good chance of achieving that aim, it is a *very* simple language that (allegedly) informed the development of C. If it was me undertaking such a project I think I would be starting at BCPL + CSP level and clone the missing bits of C that I feel I really need. The thing about C/C++ is that the standards committees and compiler writers have actually got the languages to the point where they are actually pretty well defined - and the error checking turned up to 11 tends to weed out the majority of bone head bugs.
We have come a long way from Microsoft's early C compilers that didn't do type checking (thus begetting Hungarian notation - yuck), and compilers that didn't check arguments (anyone else remember wrangling K&R style code ?) ... ;)
"Not when you allow for the TCO in most cases. A good example is Munich"
Ah yes, Munich, that would be the one where Microsoft commissioned a TCO study that concluded it would have been cheaper to stick with Microsoft stuff, provided you didn't pay any license fees. Their figures were based on Munich paying $0 in CALs etc.
Presumably you'd know that already because you've been told that already.
"If you want professional quality, you have to pay professional prices."
In my experience "Professional Quality" means that you get the same kinds of bugs and vulnerabilities, the main distinguishing feature is that your wallet is a lot lighter. Of course those "Professional Prices" include support, which is professional in that the personnel are paid to flannel you for 3-6 months while $vendor recruits a developer fresh out of University to fix it for you (presuming of course they can find the source code of the release you are running in the first place).
You are quite correct: Free can't compete with the wallet lightening properties of "Professional Quality" software...
"What this misses is that the inventor with the earth shattering idea may not be in the position to manufacture and market the advance."
True. However, if they are unwilling/unable to develop manufacturing & marketing 'in-house' they could sell their expertise to manufacturers rather than their idea. Sure it might not be as easy as chillaxing while waiting for a royalty cheque to land on the doormat - but I think it would be more productive for society at large.
Also keep in mind that inventors do get shafted despite holding valid patents, simply because they can't afford to defend them or they are unable to. The reg reported a case a while back concerning a submarine electrical connector being ripped off by a defence contractor - the case was thrown out of court on the grounds that the patent was somehow essential to the defence of the realm.
I once lived next door to a guy who's patent *applications* fell into the national interest category. The last I heard was that the patents applications were locked up in a safe somewhere with no hope of them being granted and no hope of being able to monetize them (the defence contractors who could benefit from them wouldn't have to pay him a cent to see the applications and use them in any case).
Patents are a nice idea, but the fact is they are intended to eliminate competition, and the burden of operating a Patent system increases geometrically year by year due to it's very nature of cataloguing everything that has been patented and having to cross check everything you do against it in order to avoid infringing.
Patents are unsustainable by design regardless of where you stand in the IP debate, and in my view they offer little to no measurable benefit to society as a whole.
"Once you've caught up there's no incentive to do your own R&D"
Firstly : The goal posts are moving all the time, once you've "caught up" you still need to expend effort to maintain your relative position.
Secondly : If Patents exist you can hold up innovation by simply refusing to license your IP to other people, then you don't need to do any R&D at all. Great for you, sucks for everyone else because prices are maintained at an artificially high level and puts a brake on productivity improvements as well.
Thirdly : Ultimately the market will pay what it can bear, and that figure doesn't change just because some numb nuts has cornered the market. If you happen to be the first to market the chances are you will be profit more highly from it, so the trick is to innovate and bring products to market ASAP.
"The Chinese are strengthening their own intellectual property laws in case you haven't noticed."
If you believe the press at large they are using them to protect their local vendors. I don't see this as a good thing, I see it as a method of obstructing free trade and holding up innovation.
"The only thing that happens without a patent system is that commercially valuable innovations are kept secret."
Trade secrets (aka 'valuable innovations') are still kept despite the patent system existing. If the patent system didn't exist, reverse engineering has proven to be a useful counterbalance to monopolies. Compaq ripping off IBM's PC BIOS is a classic example.
The nice thing about reverse engineering as the counterbalance is that the effort required to reverse engineer something tends to be proportional to the effort required to develop it. By contrast the effort to defend/attack a patent bears little relation to the effort involved in developing the IP it is more dependent on how knows who and how deep their pockets are.
At present we have a scenario where engineers are fighting lawyers in the field of law - a scenario where they will almost always lose and end up a lot poorer. If patents were binned we would have engineers out-innovating engineers in a 'free' market which strikes me as a win-win for IP developers AND consumers.
"Firstly they are swiftly changing markets, do you care if last seasons designs are copied?"
Quite clearly the vendors do care because they go to significant lengths see that people producing and selling counterfeits are prosecuted (with varying degrees of success).
"Secondly the cost of entry is low. You don't need a team of designers working for years to invent a new frock."
A lot of people flog widgets copied verbatim from component vendor app notes, they don't need teams of designers working for years either.
"There's plenty of historical precedent as to what happens without a patents system. The US got their start into the industrial revolution by wholesale stealing of European patents, but they still saw fit to create their own patent system"
The lesson we could take away from that example is that ignoring/not having patents promotes extremely rapid growth and massive trade surplus. China's recent history appears to support that hypothesis as well.
"That's nonsensical."
"If I use a website regularly, or follow links from a trusted website to another site, then suddenly I can't get at it because of the filter, *of course* I know the site exists and will need to ask it to be unblocked."
In this example you have a-priori knowledge that the site exists and what kind of content it has, so you have enough knowledge and experience to file a complaint/request to unblock the site in question.
Now consider the case where you are trying to get to a brand new site you've never heard of before and the site has been black-hole routed by the BOFH implementing the filters. For all you know the site is down/offline, and in those cases I suspect the majority of Joe Public out there will shrug their shoulders and move on to something else that isn't on the wrong end of a black hole route.
"Incidentally I have much experience of such things having a filtered connection at work, and legitimate reasons for occasionally requesting an unblock. So the original question is a good one, and I'd like to know the answer."
Same here on both of those points.
"You've missed the point."
No, I don't think I did because I am quite well aware of the issues you raise and I don't feel the need to dip my oar in on those points already well made by the article. My facetious post was pointing out that quite often users (and indeed sites) could be completely unaware that filtering was going on in the first place.
"If you tell them a site needs to be unblocked is there any process that compels them to unblock?"
There's no point in any such process if the punters access via filtered connections exclusively (quite likely if they are on by default), because they will never be able to see the filtered sites to know that they exist *and* they are wrongly blacklisted in the first place...
For those people that *do* have access to unfiltered connections my guess is that most people would simply access them via their unfiltered connection rather than waste time fighting bureaucrats...
The specs look similar to the ones I bought for our kids a couple of years ago (kids were ~2 and 3.5 at the time) so they could watch films on a long drive. I chose tablets because the in-car DVD option was actually going to cost more... The tablets have survived and the kids still enjoy taking photos, playing Angry birds, watching films on them and surfing the CBeebies website.
We have found that those cheap (and quite sucky) Droid tablets have outperformed everything else the kids have by a very large margin in terms of happy hours/£. Big win for us, but don't let that stop you from lending your iPad to your toddlers. ;)
"A true patriot ignores everything except that which makes the current power elite look good."
Depends on how you define patriotism. Some folks think that patriotism requires unquestioning obedience to the government of the day, although I think most people think of it as "doing right" by the country (and it's citizens). Personally I'm not sure Patriotism serves much of a purpose beyond waging war, I would rather people focussed on treating the people around them well.
I was going to say "treat others as you would like to be treated" - but there are some seriously twisted people out there. For example from the way the British Cabinet decided the fate of the Iraqis I am guessing that they would like to be lied to, be ignored, have all their assets stolen (including family heirlooms), locked up without charge and beaten to death with an option of being shot or blown up at random.
"Want privacy drop off the grid, it can be done, but then you have to ask, why are you being so secretive?"
It doesn't have to be anything secretive. It could be a justifiable fear of suffering the abuse of a comprehensive surveillance apparatus that has no public oversight, and has been shown to repeatedly operate beyond it's publically stated remit.
Besides, it seems to me that the Spooks are the ones doing the vast majority of the hiding, so presumably they are doing a lot of stuff that needs to be hidden from the public (by the very line of reason you appear to be championing) that means they should be subject to suspicion with actionable consequences.
Expanding the scope of surveillance through repeated acts of wilful infringement of privacy regulation isn't confined to the NSA, it seems to be something that nearly every organisation is guilty of at least once. Also abuse of data that has been collected seems to be something that happens within every organisation too. On the basis of those two observations it looks like it's a near certainty that everyone reading this message will get burned as a result of those unwelcome trends at least once... If we want to take this democracy thing seriously we really should be ensuring that it is possible for an individual to go 'off grid' data wise, it's the only way that a citizen can lawfully defend themselves from a malignant bureaucrat.
"I don't look at peoples buying habits and then immediately try to extort money out of them or blackmail them."
Sure you don't, if only we could guarantee that was true of everyone else with access to that kind of data... Quite often otherwise "nice" people do bad things when they think they can get away with it, you can see this phenomenon every day on any stretch of road with a speed camera. The vast majority of drivers slow down to the speed limit when approaching a speed camera and then accelerate away afterwards.
"NSA has in the neighborhood of 35,000 employees. It is not credible that each of them (managers to secretaries and machine repairpersons) tracks an average of 200,000 people in any sense that even remotely approaches meaningful. Not by at least two orders of magnitude."
Yet Amazon, Facebook and Google all manage to do plenty of meaningful tracking.
"If you look closely, you will see that the US tried very hard to stay out of WWI and WWII and only started poking it's nose into everyone's business after it was the lone superpower and found it had the power to prevent WWIII."
That can only be true if you ignore stuff like supplying arms to the UK & donating huge sums of cash to the Nazi party.
"So, the fact that IBM shifted the lines it sold most units in to Lenovo, and other Chinese companies started making kit at prices much lower than IBM's, that had no bearing on the sales slump what so ever? I beg to differ."
That definitely happened and would have accounted for a fair chunk of lost business, the lawsuit seems to be talking specifically about lost business that happened more recently. That said it's a fair point, IBM dropped a lot of business in Lenovo's lap.
"The NSA line is just a convenient excuse for IBM's failings in the Chinese market"
Could well be, but in practice the NSA being caught with both hands in the cookie jar is a lovely piece of ammunition for competitors to use against American vendors. History suggests Don Jefe is right when he says that business will continue over the long term - albeit with lower margins I'm not so sure myself.
I think most people guessed that the NSA et al were happily intercepting anything they wanted to, I'm fairly sure the Chinese would have expected it given their domestic capabilities. Despite that I think the majority of people expected that their activity would be lost in the noise or simply out of scope for the NSA et al. Snowden's leaks have shown that the scope of the NSA's activity is comprehensive and their traffic is not lot in the noise thanks to the advances in "big data" tooling...
With that in mind I think anyone making a large commercially or politically sensitive procurement would give serious consideration to adopting an "anything but American" stance right now.
"It is good to see IBM and other major US companies taking a multi-billion dollar hammering, as money sadly is only thing that seems to make politicians act these days."
The problem with IBM (or any corp) taking a hammering is that they are just corporations, it is people make the decisions and it is (little) people who take the consequences of the bad decisions.The execs behind these decisions won't actually get any meaningful punishment (they may get to feel a bit uncomfortable in court while on paid gardening leave), but ultimately any punishment they receive will be minimal to zero so there will be no incentive to change their behaviour or lessen for them to learn. Soon enough they will be given a job by their friends/family/school mates and they'll carry on as though nothing happened. The folks who will get hit in the wallet are the grunts (who will lose their jobs to make an exec look better), the hostage-type customers who will pay more for the same old guff to help shore up the profit margins, and of course the Taxman who will get less income tax. The taxman will pass that cost onto the rest of the taxpayers over the long run so no skin off their nose.
Until execs are actually held responsible for their decisions in a meaningful way business will continue to operate this way. Also, given that the judges, lawyers, politicians & execs are drawn from the same pool of people I very much doubt that you will see the politicians passing laws that hold their friends & family fully accountable for their screw ups.
"US big business is well aware of" the damage already done and has no real idea how to deal with it."
Open source and flexible & efficient manufacturing + sensible pay structures (current ones are so distorted that competent technicians hit a pay ceiling within a couple of years of joining a company) + wasting less money on private jets, junkets, whores and hotels for the execs & salesmen would be a start. I do understand that goes directly against current western business culture - but ultimately it's the only way they're going to be able to go toe to toe with the rest of the world in the future.
"The information they didn't reveal was the drop in china sales. They didn't have to go into why, but they are on the hook for being able for reasonably foresee it."
One of the quotes from the article suggest the plaintiffs are asserting that the lost sales occurred as a side effect of Snowden's leaks - which I personally don't think IBM could be reasonably be expected to foresee.
Shareholders have a right to an explanation as to why sales are lost (the SEC require reasons in their filings), IBM would be breaking the law if they were to publish the real reason and they would be guilty of filing false reports with the SEC if they didn't tell the whole truth. I am not in the business of making excuses for IBM, but I think it's fair to say that they have been put in an impossible situation by the NSA. :)
"2) (per the article) "IBM lobbied the government in favour of a bill that would allow it to share customers' data with the NSA,""
Not wishing to stick up for IBM here... But consider this, they have *no* choice but to co-operate with the NSA whether they like it or not, however this forced co-operation (as you assert) can be "hostile towards their customers", which could well lead to legal action by those same customers - and the horrible irony is that they can't defend themselves by saying the NSA made us do it. With that in mind it seems logical that IBM would lobby for legislation that removes any ambiguity from the situation.
I'm not condoning IBM's actions, but in fairness to them it looks like the NSA & Shrub's War on Everything legislation have put them and every other American vendors over a barrel (and not just IT related guys).
America may well have screwed the pooch with respect to selling gear that is made in China back to China...
"From reading the article it appears that they are not being sued for cooperating with the NSA but for failing to reveal relevant information in a timely manner. I.e. that their business in China was or had, taken a big hit."
My point is that I don't think they *could* reveal the information in a timely manner without breaking US law. Suing someone for not breaking the law seems to be something that only the Lawyers can benefit from. We'll see how it pans out eventually. It's an interesting case. :)
"The Louisiana Sheriffs' Pensions and Relief Fund has filed the suit in New York, claiming that Big Blue "misrepresented and concealed" that its association with the NSA"
No doubt the next suit filed will be by the pension holding Sheriffs claiming that the pension fund has pissed their savings up the wall fighting IBM... I really can't see how that suit could succeed given that corporations are not allowed to reveal that they even have dealings with the NSA in the first place.
It is tempting to give NESTA the benefit of the doubt and ascribe their bungling to incompetence - but I really don't think the pattern of their behaviour supports that. On the one hand you have a guy with some IP and who wants to build a tangible product that could generate income. On the other hand you have artists - the vast majority of whom make a net loss on their output, and in some cases it isn't even possible to monetize their output. Yet NESTA supported the high-risk-zero return activities without hesitation, they subsidized their mates' hobbies and no intention of supporting money making activity/innovation.
It's a pity that Fentem didn't hedge his bets, that said I am not sure I would have done any better in his position at that age.
"I hear people say things like this, usually not about MS however, but I rarely actually come across software that actually can't run as non-admin, just lazy installers or software so bad you wouldn't use it anyway."
By that definition for many years MSOffice could have qualified as "software so bad you wouldn't use it anyway." ;)
""Cutler's legacy has become an OS that processes TIFF files at ring 0", Roo
Windows NT 4.0 was so sluggish they had to put GDI into ring0, in the process making it unstable and insecure. Cutler had nothing to do with it. ref"
I was careful not to suggest that Cutler was involved in such daftness. Also in this case it looks like El Reg misrepresented the nature of the vuln in any case - which invalidates my snipe.
As for GDI being the way it is - MS could have licensed/copied a UNIX way of doing this stuff safely & quickly (SGI et al had a handle on this before MS came up with 95) if it wasn't for their legendary "Not Invented Here" syndrome. With that said, some of the design errors MS have made were most likely due to pig ignorance rather than NIH.
"BTW: where's Linux graphic code today?"
Fair point, and god only knows with the new fangled X replacements....
In the case of X windows the user code does not explicitly* make system calls to render stuff, and it runs in a separate process from the Xserver... Instead the user code talks to the Xserver via a socket (* this uses system calls), although these days the bulk of data transfer happens via shared memory - which neatly sidesteps a lot of the potential system call overhead. I suspect a lot of people don't even realise you can run an Xclient remotely these days. ;)
Xservers certainly have been pwned in days gone by, but the nice thing is you can lock down access to an Xserver quite easily using permissions or simply remove it entirely from the system. Unfortunately Windows doesn't seem to offer the same option.
""The first of the critical flaws lies within the handling of TIFF image files"
Oh crap, I was using this as a way to make my steganographic messages self destruct. Now I'll have to rely on the DMCA to keep the NSA from reading my letters to mom."
Cutler's legacy has become an OS that processes TIFF files at ring 0, I bet he never saw that coming when he was slating UNIX in the 80s and 90s.
"http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open-source/3421844/microsoft-refuses-to-release-study-challenging-munich-linux-success/"
They didn't include licensing fees in the "Total Cost of Ownership" for the Windows software... Classic weasel words.
Looks like MS thinks Licensing fees are N/A to running a Windows box, we'd all better ask for some refunds. ;)
"
That doesn't change the fact that ~ 99% of the FTSE 500 run Windows as their primary end user OS...."
Nor does it change the fact that sales of Windows desktop PCs have been falling for a few years now. This is probably because email & web browsing are the main tasks performed by those boxes, and just about anything from a low-end phone to a Mac can do the same job now.
With all due respect to FTSE 500 companies maintaining a vast Windows Desktop estate, in my experience they often piss money up the wall because they don't know any better or in some cases they simply don't feel the need to do better.
"But NOT on the desktop....And Windows Server still has a 75% market share of x86/x64 servers...."
Well I can't address your suspiciously round number of 75% or even attribute it to you because you are posting as anonymous and you won't reveal your source so that sentence is not worth the cost of sending the bits to the Register in the first place.
For the record I use a windows desktop at my place of work, and all I use it for is keeping my feet warm, reading emails (Outlook is so crap compared to Thunderbird), writing code using Eclipse and sometimes building it with Maven. Sadly I can't actually run the entire system on my dev box because the compute intensive bit is compiled down to a Linux binary which runs on a grid of Linux boxes. This is actually one of the smallest grids I've worked with (~30), the other systems I've worked on tended to have several hundred linux boxes doing the compute.
It would actually be easier if the devs could have Linux on their desktop, but there is a lot of resistance from the folks running the desktops who funnily enough have invested most of their career in MS products and don't want to see change happening - even if it would save a couple of man-months per desktop of developer time every year.
"Good luck with that. Munich council have been trying for ten years, have spent tens of millions and still haven't finished. Hence why near zero companies are going down that path..."
I'm curious, why do you peddle this stale FUD/bullshit over and over again ? If you believe in what you are saying why are you hiding behind Anonymous ?
I ask because as customer I value competition in the market place. Folks promoting FUD like yourself are working towards removing competition from the market place. If you are successful then everyone (including you) will end up with less choice, higher costs and zero incentive for the dominant player to improve their products.
Meanwhile here in the real world folks like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, oil companies and the top tier Banks have been running vast farms of Linux boxes for a long time now. Those guys in your "near zero" category account for a vast proportion of world trade, so thankfully we still have some choice in the marketplace.
"In essence, it is a question how you grant enough incentives to the inventor."
That's the point of the "Margin" bit, as I pointed out FRAND is not necessarily "cheap".
It would be interesting to see how it panned out if you took FRAND to it's logical market driven conclusion, namely licenses are freely traded in an efficient open market, I suspect it would favour people who made stuff which I think would be a good thing. Virtual stuff is all well and good but it doesn't put food on the table.
"That is eventually one solution for one market (most likely telecommunications). But you have to realise that patents are also being used in other markets (think pharma, chemistry et al.) and there, you want to grant the monopoly to the inventor so that the inventor can refinance its R&D"
FRAND appears to be a very flexible term, "reasonable" doesn't not equate to "cheap" or "free" !
I think the toughest problem is accurately determining how much the R&D actually cost (not always easy to do if it is the result of an offshoot of a larger piece of work). I would also like to see the duration of the patent tied to the total amount of money that has been claimed in licensing revenue - so the total revenue earned by the patent over it's lifetime would be R&D+Fixed Margin.
The aim behind this is to prevent Patents from being unusable because the holder refuses to hand out licenses - and in some cases that can go on for decades - effectively blocking any forward progress for mankind as a whole.
Personally I'd rather we were able to share ideas freely without having to worry if we have independently replicated some IP from first principles that happens to be held by a shyster in Texas.
"When asked what the souce was they replied 'assembler' and I replied 'byeeee""
I think you might have missed an opportunity there... Rock solid spec (ie: the code), writing code in the language of your choice... I think your fear might have let you down badly there. ;)
I have found reading assembler written for "big" machines (eg: VAX, S/360 etc) by old school programmers (you know, the guys who inclued verbose comments describing the pseudo code for the program) to be a lot easier than reverse engineering a system written in a mixture of VB6, VBA, SQL, C#, C++ and Java for example...
"The lives saved would be immense"
How is removing a source of income from the local population going to save lives exactly ? I really don't see how a gang of thugs are going to suddenly reform themselves as a result of removing a source of income from the area. It'll just increase the competition for scarcer resources - which in turn will mean even more little people snuffing it.
For the hard of understanding: The folks doing the shooting, raping and maiming can do it with or without gold/diamonds/ore/slaves, and they can get away with it because there is nothing to protect the little people.
"Ditto here: I run Exchange at home to keep my hand in (ok it's hardly a multi-site farm but it's useful!), and also CentOS Postfix MTAs to increase my knowledge, which all helps with the day job. Only this morning I was setting up greylisting on them to try and reduce the incoming spam. Not that I get that much but I take any as a personal insult ;)"
I've been running Postfix + Greylisting for a few years, it's been working very well for a few years. Next step is to see what I can do with CARP. :)
"Why do you need to run an email server anyway?"
I can't speak for the author, but minimising the number of third parties harvesting private email for fun+profit was enough motivation for me. Spending hours reading EULAs and re-reading them every time they changed was wasting a lot of time. Also a third party service can be terminated/changed/dropped so you have to be prepared to shift everything over to another one - quite often at very short notice (that has happened twice - both times with zero notice, zero mitigation and no refund).
At least when you are running the server yourself you have some control about what changes and when.
"And some people may have missed the news. but you can use IMAP on hotmail now. It was introduced a couple of months ago."
I can't recommend Hotmail on the basis of POP3 or IMAP access over the long term. I found that Microsoft had a habit of breaking it for weeks and months at a time (no prior notice, explanations, apologies etc) - usually whenever they revamped their service (ie: at least once every 2 years). On the first occasion they dropped POP3 support they didn't bother telling anyone - when queried they said I'd have to pay for it on the basis that it wasn't an official feature. I paid, they dropped POP3 for a long time a few months later. Their customer support was non-existent and by that I really do mean literally no customer service at all.
Maybe they have improved (they couldn't get any worse) now, but I don't think it's worth the trouble finding out.
"Sure - try www.microsoft.com"
-1 for trolling, -1 for failing to put *your money* where your mouth is. Microsoft's servers are non-applicable for this one - unless of course you are on the MS payroll. ;) It wouldn't be the first bit of astroturfing and FUDing that MS has engaged in.
To do a fair test you need a Windows box that you value connected directly to the service provider - no filtering inbound or outbound, and while you are comparing to LAMP stacks add the all that AMP bit too so you are comparing like with like.
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