Eventually I decided that my motherboard must be at fault; it was of a slightly unusual make and model, and NT did not support as many different motherboards as Linux. I am always looking for excuses, no matter how feeble, to buy new hardware, so I bought a new motherboard that was Windows NT logo-compatible, meaning that the Windows NT logo was printed right on the box. I installed this into my computer and got Linux running right away, then attempted to install Windows NT again. Again, the installation died without any error message or explanation. By this time a couple of weeks had gone by and I thought that perhaps the search engine on the Microsoft Support website might be up and running. I gave that a try but it still didn't work.
So I created a new Microsoft support account, then logged on to submit the incident. I supplied my product ID number when asked, and then began to follow the instructions on a series of help screens. In other words, I was submitting a bug report just as with the Debian bug tracking system. It's just that the interface was slicker--I was typing my complaint into little text-editing boxes on Web forms, doing it all through the GUI, whereas with Debian you send in an e-mail telegram. I knew that when I was finished submitting the bug report, it would become proprietary Microsoft information, and other users wouldn't be able to see it. Many Linux users would refuse to participate in such a scheme on ethical grounds, but I was willing to give it a shot as an experiment. In the end, though I was never able to submit my bug report, because the series of linked web pages that I was filling out eventually led me to a completely blank page: a dead end.
So I went back and clicked on the buttons for "phone support" and eventually was given a Microsoft telephone number. When I dialed this number I got a series of piercing beeps and a recorded message from the phone company saying "We're sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed."
I tried the search page again--it was still completely nonfunctional. Then I tried PPI (Pay Per Incident) again. This led me through another series of Web pages until I dead-ended at one reading: "Notice-there is no Web page matching your request."
I tried it again, and eventually got to a Pay Per Incident screen reading: "OUT OF INCIDENTS. There are no unused incidents left in your account. If you would like to purchase a support incident, click OK-you will then be able to prepay for an incident...." The cost per incident was $95.
The experiment was beginning to seem rather expensive, so I gave up on the PPI approach and decided to have a go at the FAQs posted on Microsoft's website. None of the available FAQs had anything to do with my problem except for one entitled "I am having some problems installing NT" which appeared to have been written by flacks, not engineers.
So I gave up and still, to this day, have never gotten Windows NT installed on that particular machine. For me, the path of least resistance was simply to use Debian Linux.
In the world of open source software, bug reports are useful information. Making them public is a service to other users, and improves the OS. Making them public systematically is so important that highly intelligent people voluntarily put time and money into running bug databases. In the commercial OS world, however, reporting a bug is a privilege that you have to pay lots of money for. But if you pay for it, it follows that the bug report must be kept confidential--otherwise anyone could get the benefit of your ninety-five bucks! And yet nothing prevents NT users from setting up their own public bug database.
This is, in other words, another feature of the OS market that simply makes no sense unless you view it in the context of culture. What Microsoft is selling through Pay Per Incident isn't technical support so much as the continued illusion that its customers are engaging in some kind of rational business transaction. It is a sort of routine maintenance fee for the upkeep of the fantasy. If people really wanted a solid OS they would use Linux, and if they really wanted tech support they would find a way to get it; Microsoft's customers want something else.
As of this writing (Jan. 1999), something like 32,000 bugs have been reported to the Debian Linux bug database. Almost all of them have been fixed a long time ago. There are twelve "critical" bugs still outstanding, of which the oldest was posted 79 days ago. There are 20 outstanding "grave" bugs of which the oldest is 1166 days old. There are 48 "important" bugs and hundreds of "normal" and less important ones.
Likewise, BeOS (which I'll get to in a minute) has its own bug database (http://www.be.com/developers/bugs/index.html) with its own classification system, including such categories as "Not a Bug," "Acknowledged Feature," and "Will Not Fix." Some of the "bugs" here are nothing more than Be hackers blowing off steam, and are classified as "Input Acknowledged." For example, I found one that was posted on December 30th, 1998. It's in the middle of a long list of bugs, wedged between one entitled "Mouse working in very strange fashion" and another called "Change of BView frame does not affect, if BView not attached to a BWindow."
This one is entitled
R4: BeOS missing megalomaniacal figurehead to harness and focus developer rage
and it goes like this:
----------------------------
Be Status: Input Acknowledged BeOS Version: R3.2 Component: unknown
Full Description:
The BeOS needs a megalomaniacal egomaniac sitting on its throne to give it a human character which everyone loves to hate. Without this, the BeOS will languish in the impersonifiable realm of OSs that people can never quite get a handle on. You can judge the success of an OS not by the quality of its features, but by how infamous and disliked the leaders behind them are.
I believe this is a side-effect of developer comraderie under miserable conditions. After all, misery loves company. I believe that making the BeOS less conceptually accessible and far less reliable will require developers to band together, thus developing the kind of community where strangers talk to one- another, kind of like at a grocery store before a huge snowstorm.
Following this same program, it will likely be necessary to move the BeOS headquarters to a far-less-comfortable climate. General environmental discomfort will breed this attitude within and there truly is no greater recipe for success. I would suggest Seattle, but I think it's already taken. You might try Washington, DC, but definitely not somewhere like San Diego or Tucson.
----------------------------
Unfortunately, the Be bug reporting system strips off the names of the people who report the bugs (to protect them from retribution!?) and so I don't know who wrote this.
So it would appear that I'm in the middle of crowing about the technical and moral superiority of Debian Linux. But as almost always happens in the OS world, it's more complicated than that. I have Windows NT running on another machine, and the other day (Jan. 1999), when I had a problem with it, I decided to have another go at Microsoft Support. This time the search engine actually worked (though in order to reach it I had to identify myself as "advanced"). And instead of coughing up some useless FAQ, it located about two hundred documents (I was using very vague search criteria) that were obviously bug reports--though they were called something else. Microsoft, in other words, has got a system up and running that is functionally equivalent to Debian's bug database. It looks and feels different, of course, but it contains technical nitty-gritty and makes no bones about the existence of errors.
As I've explained, selling OSes for money is a basically untenable position, and the only way Apple and Microsoft can get away with it is by pursuing technological advancements as aggressively as they can, and by getting people to believe in, and to pay for, a particular image: in the case of Apple, that of the creative free thinker, and in the case of Microsoft, that of the respectable techno-bourgeois. Just like Disney, they're making money from selling an interface, a magic mirror. It has to be polished and seamless or else the whole illusion is ruined and the business plan vanishes like a mirage.