What is FUD?

[Paddy]

Interesting article!

http://www.cavcomp.demon.co.uk/halloween/fuddef.html

[Xairbusdriver]

If slightly dated...and its never seen a spell/grammar checker much less a code validator. Like most prognosticators, his crystal ball was a little foggy. It must really be fun to read on every Windows machine I've ever seen where every app has a screen-width window.

However, the history of FUD is an interesting read.

[Paddy]

Er, Jim...I don't know about the spelling - I'm not about to plow through it again looking for errors, but are you sure you're looking at the same page I am? It is a fluid layout - not fixed and no container limiting its width, but that's better than pages that FORCE you to go full width and take over your entire monitor, which is really obnoxious) and it validates perfectly at w3C.org. Can't help it if PC browsers are badly designed....

I posted it for the historical perspective.

[kimmer]

Interesting history, and don't we still see FUD in use today?

[Paddy]

QUOTE

...don't we still see FUD in use today?

Oh no, never! Nope, not a bit. Not ever.

[krissel]

Tha AAMSTRAD/fan issue was funny.


But if you really want to read up on the DR DOS situation, here's a link to a several page article from the days of the MS anti-trust case back in the late 90's.  I saved the links from back then and am surprised to see that they still work.  

http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/sp...ort_microsofts/

Be sure to read through all the pages til you come to this:

QUOTE

The best product endorsement that Digital Research ever obtained for DR-DOS was from Microsoft, it turns out, and we know this thanks to a disclosure by Judge Benson in his 4-0 decision this week for Caldera. Phil Barrett, who was managing Windows 3.1 in 1990, received an email from a subordinate about DR-DOS 5.0, which said: "You asked me for a user's view of DR DOS 5.0... I used DR DOS 5.0 with a huge number of apps. I found it incredibly superior to MS DOS 3.31 and IBM DOS 4.01. ... The most important reason to use any version of DOS is to run DOS apps. DR DOS 5.0 runs every DOS app I know. DR DOS 5.0 works successfully with Windows (2.11, Win 386 2.11 and Windows 3.0 and 3.0a). ... Conclusion: DR DOS is vastly superior to MS dos 5.0." ®

Yes, MS was, and is, the best... at FUD.  

[Xairbusdriver]

Oh, yes indeed, the page is "fluid," there was NO assigned width. If one had a wide enough monitor, the whole site could be viewed as ten lines. Not exactly user-friendly when 65-75 characters is known to be a suitable line length. But I'm not sure how it validated with none of the <p> having the approved closing tag "</p>" I think it's either laziness or simple ignorance to allow such a page continue to be used (since 1998, no less). Of course, it could be the fact that it  It is about as simple as html can get. All the other tags had proper closing tags. Of course, edited by a 1997 app! Or "generated" by Mozilla/4.5b2, aka Netscape (remember that browser?).

And, while "max-width:" and min-width:" are fairly old properties (CSS2), I don't think Netscape ever understood them since IE didn't until version 7 or 8, well after the creation date of the page.

I doubt that anything he used to prepare the page even included any kind of code/text checking. But I think it is standard practice to insert a "space" behind any punctuation mark, especially a 'period.'

QUOTE

FUD sands for Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.It is a marketing technique

And that's the very first sentence! "sands"? "Doubt.It"? At first glance I thought he was making a joke! There are two more instances in the rest of that paragraph. My problem is, I never learned how to scan, I tend to look at every word and the punctuation (which gets messed up by not having spaces used. So, it's mainly my problem...