BL> Hi all,
BL> the philosophy of Bill Gates really annoys me!

BL> On one hand he now admits that there's a backdoor into Windows that
BL> makes it totally vulnerable to viruses on the internet, blaming it on
BL> his users for not having an effective firewall when M$ can't even
BL> write one that works (the only firewall is Linux)... while on the
BL> other hand he makes it basically impossible to do anything a little
BL> different.

BL> I have a nice little program that wipes my temporary drive. With
BL> gigabyte drives, you can never find anything, so all my backups and
BL> worki in progressgo to me 32Mb TMP FAT-formatted drive, and if horror
BL> of horrorsWindows or Word rolsl over (fairly common, btw) then the
BL> last little bit is somewhere there on the 32Mb and I can use Norton
BL> diskedit to dig it out and restore it.

BL> Every so often, I wipe it, FAT, files, everything... usign a direct
BL> disk write and Int 26 which is really fast. It takes 5 seconds... all
BL> gone. So far, when I want to wipe the drive, I just drop back to Win31
BL> and DOS6, but this mornign I got the urge to adapt it for universal
BL> use. It works nicely under Win31 but Win98 has the new Gates'
BL> philosophy: "Thou shalt not do things that M$ deems unnecessary."

BL> I know about lock and unlock which *allegedly* allows direct disk
BL> writes, and I've just finished rewriting my nice little utility to do
BL> that when I'm in Win98... nope.

BL> Even having locked the bastard (for some reason, M$ uses "lock" when
BL> they mean unlock, and "unlock" to lock it again), Windows
produces an
BL> error telling me I'm using an old utility that might stuff the drive.
BL> For god's sake... that's what it's for! I *want* to stuff the drive,
BL> but bloody Win98 won't let me!

BL> I *know* I can write it in Win98 using Delphi and a Win API call to
BL> write direct, but then it won't work in Win31 or DOS.

BL> I'm stuffed. I can't think of a way to get past Win98.

 Hi all,
         I haven't gone mad, answering myself... I've just had an
insight into the way M$ thinks!

 I've finally cracked this lock/unlock bizzo. For some reason beyond
me, M$ has decided it has to be written in assembler to work, but
the whole concept of "LOCK" is faulty!

  Win98 is genuinely multitasking, which means more than one program
may be writing to memory, disk and screen at once, and to prevent
the fuckups, LOCK is the answer. If your program has to do it *NOW*
then you have to lock the device to stop others pushing in. The old
Win31 used a message queue, but Win98 steals a lot from Unix.

 I couldn't make LOCK (the DOS command) work for me because the
command has to be "owned" by the program, and I was using a child. All
I have to do is write the INT 21400Dh/4Ah assembler ahead of my INT26h
call and I own the drive (I hope... haven't tried it yet).

 But the interesting part is the insight into the way M$ thinks.
Instead of just trusting software writers to either get it right
or fuck it up (no safety net) M$ has to take control for themselves in
an effort to prevent fuckups... and of course being M$, they fuck up.
Bill Gates has taken the "nanny" approach, but if software sucks, it
sucks. If an incompetent writer can't get this right, he'll stuff
something else.

 It's really fascinating to see inside the mind of M$. They honestly
believe that it's possible to write an O/S that will let faulty
software run perfectly! They think that their users can't be trusted,
so they try to bring the whole thing down to an LCD... but *they're*
the LCD, and they always fuck up.

 Not that Linux is much better. I had a look at emacs this afternoon,
and the rnthusiastic dickhead who wrote the manual says: "emacs is the
greatest program ever written!"

 Jesus! It's WordStar, revisited. Utter crap! I cannot believe an
editor could be made so clumsy to use! Whoever wrote it (whichever
committee, no one man could be this stupid) has no idea of intuitive
comands! Do you believe you have to type TWO commands to exit? And
when it asks are you sure yes/no? you have to actually type Y-E-S. And
some of the commands are in capitals!  It's like they took WordStar,
and sat down to work out ways to make it even more clumsy (WorStar won
an Olympic Gold, for clumsy).

 Bloody hell! LOCK convinced me that Win98 is a dead loss, but Linux
is even worse!

 I mean, if I wanted to insert a virus backdoor into Windows, you
would have to go a long way to beat LOCK. It's only a dozen bytes, and
then you OWN the drive. You can write anything you like on the hard
disc, it's yours exclusively for as long as it takes, and no one need
ever know what you wrote!    

Regards,
Bob

--- BQWK Alpha 0.5