Microsoft and the Lawsuit

I know about the lawsuit.

I heard about it a while back when I was hunting down some answers for a very high tech question that I had about a certain very high tech technology.

It was a late night on a Sunday back right before 9/11. I had been working on a project non-stop for what felt like hours and I finally got to a point that I needed to to send the querystring contents from a posted http request from the instantiated session of the client back to the server but I needed to do a postback from the calling function at the same time in order to parse the string.

And it should have been no big deal.

I spent the next 5 minutes exhausting the Google looking for the answer to my question. I couldn’t find much from the usual sources regarding the typical solutions to problems with the HTTP and Microsoft.

Then I found it and it turned out that what I needed to do used to be possible. In fact, it used to be downright easy Yet now, because of the lawsuit, not only were my attempts doomed to fail because of the poison pill inherent in the latest service pack, but my attempts were in fact contrary to several laws, an international treaty, and no less than 4 (four) pending United Nations Resolutions. And China isn't going to use her veto this time, buddy. Don't even think about that one.

And I thought to myself, “Shit man, if the lawsuit was a snake, it would have slithered off into the grass and maybe went and ate some eggs or something.”

And if the lawsuit could do that and keep me from posting the calling function return value by reference, I could be missing out on some even larger pieces of information.

It turns out that I was missing just a little more than I had originally suspected, and by 'little', please consider that I use that more euphemistically than literally since we are talking about the lawsuit that is just going to be the final blow to a leviathan like Microsoft. And I do mean big and not little in case you were still wandering around about it.

What's this about? What's this about?

Good questions. Both of them.

Well, it started that this was about the lawsuit.  And it is about the lawsuit.  Don't get me wrong; this has always been about the lawsuit.

Then it became about something else too in addition to being about the lawsuit.

Llamas, man.

Big dumb smelly llamas.  It's like you can't get away from the damn things.  You try to compartmentalize yourself into this little compartmentalized compartment and then they follow you in there with no regard or concern at all for your solitude or anything else that us good right thinking people value and may even consider sacred or holy. 

I mean.

I mean, come on man.  It's about the lawsuit.  What else could this be about?