HIGH TECH CORNER: MICROSOFT: THE CHRISTMAS E-MAIL GRINCH

Well, Microsoft is the Christmas Grinch if you sent Christmas cards by EMAIL and did not use a Microsoft Christmas card.

Blue Mountain Arts (BOLD)www.bluemountain.com(UNBOLD)UNBOLD, a producer of electronic greeting cards over the Internet, claims to have had their cards diverted to junk mail trash after Microsoft started competing on the Internet with a greeting card site of its own. At first it was though that only Outlook express was doing the junk mail deed of trashing EMAIL that you never saw.

Then it was discovered that thousands of WEB TV customers were also never getting their email greeting cards from Blue Mountain ARTS. WebTV currently has about 500,000 subscribers and is wholly-owned by Microsoft.

Was Microsoft really trying to kill competition at Christmas time? I really feel a junk mail filter is a good thing and would actually like even more options like letting me throw away EMAIL that has huge graphic attachments that take forever to download. If you have ever gotten those get-rich-quick emails with $$$ signs in them and you don't want to see them then use the spam filter.

In Microsoft's defense, it simply created greeting cards that did not have any characters that the filter would grab. If Blue Mountain Arts would play more by the Email etiquette rules of the Internet then I feel its cards would have arrived correctly. It is always so easy to blame the big guy.

The judge, on this one of many cases against Microsoft, ordered Microsoft to assist Blue Mountain Arts in updating its greeting cards to pass the filter test correctly.

On the JAVA lawsuit front, Microsoft released its latest Java Virtual Machine for the Microsoft operating systems as well as the Internet Explorer. No luck for MAC or Unix users, however, as Microsoft simply dropped JAVA support completely for these Operating Systems. Why did Microsoft change all that code at its own expense? Well, it was either do that or stop selling Windows due to a compliance order from the recent ruling in the San Jose Federal District Court.

The spin doctors in Washington should take tips from the pros at Microsoft. Microsoft said the reason it did this large code change was to create the fastest execution environment for Java.

It did set a new record on the Caffeinemark benchmark for Java passing the original creator SUN. Since SUN is a key player in the DOJ lawsuit against Microsoft, I am sure it wishes it had not stirred things up for Microsoft forcing Microsoft into SUN standard of JAVA compliance. SUN was better off when Microsoft's JAVA ran slower than its own original version.

I make a personal plea to FALCON, TCI, and Southwestern Bell. Please give us the fast Internet access speed that many cities our size have, with a far smaller growth factor than Cape. To the Phone Company, bring us digital subscriber line services (DSL). This is now considered the far better approach than the expensive ISDN services available here in Cape.

ISDN is not really available here in Cape unless you add $45 a month to the $86.59 monthly charge, to hook you up to St. Louis. To the cable companies, cable modems would be good as well. The city backed down on having TCI install fiber as promised in its original contract, saying that digital compression is just as good. Believe me, that statement is a crock.

Bandwidth is everything when dealing with the Internet and compression means less of it. But even cable modems over copper would be far better than a conventional 56k modem. Call your cable company and ask it when you can get cable modem service and see what it says. Cape is a wonderful town that deserves high-speed Internet access by either the phone or cable company.

With the U.S. consisting of 250 million people, telephone penetration is 94 percent and 65 percent of residences subscribe to cable television services. Wake up, Ma Bell. There is gold in them Internet hills.

As always feel free to contact me at (BOLD) DIGITAL@LDD.NET & WWW.DIGITALLABS.COM (UNBOLD).

Rich Comeau is an electronics scientist and owner of Digital Labs of Cape Girardeau.