[plug] Interesting - has anyone tried?

[Gavin Chester]

On Wed, 2008-05-21 at 15:57 +0800, Coral and Ben wrote:
> SO, so true! years ago I rang Microsoft for tech support with win98
> and 
> after being told they were charging me $25/hour for the support the 
> "answer" was, it is a hardware related problem. Guess what the
> hardware 
> manufacturer said?

I remember ... (roll out the rocking chairs and the "no-doze")

I was using M$ products back in the early days of M$ Australia Ltd, soon
after they began operations out of garage in Sydney (reportedly). I bet
many of you remember that, too ;-)

Then, you could actually get service. For example: Problem with Excel
(win3.1) not printing graphs correctly? Ring a 1800 number - yes, sir,
try this sir, try that sir. Still not working? We've flagged this as a
known bug. A patch will be posted to you on floppy this afternoon.
_That's_ why I was drawn into paying for software that actually came
with service. Was soon after this that Redmond decreed I had to pay for
the software _and_ pay for the support on an annual basis. It was about
this time I dabbled in FOSS for the first time. Greedy bean counters got
in on the act, you see :-(

My $0.05 ;-)

Gavin