Should Microsoft give up on producing operating systems,

and focus on what it does best: the mass production of patches every two weeks?

but it is going to be attacked by the sick bastards that write computer killing code due to its popularity. I will no doubt have another OS soon, as I detest MS industry tactics and governmental brown-nosing, but have actually been pleased with the stability of xp. Go figure.

I like Windows XP, and I'm also a die-hard Linux guy. It's a pretty stable, easy to use OS. I don't even mind paying the Microsoft tax. After all, they have invested a lot of research and development into this product. Besides, if you go with Mac you're going to be paying more (except this time its' going into tight hardware controls to insure that Mac OS X works seamlessly) and if you go with Linux, the money you save on the OS is going to easily go into an equivalent amount of man-hours getting everything to work as well as it does in Windows (though here the problem is that OEMs won't open up their drivers or even properly document their equipment so the open source community can write Linux drivers).

What bothers me about Microsoft though is the boneheaded lack of security and all the DRM crap that assumes every user is a thief. Did I mention Microsoft's thuggery, er, I mean business tactics. Oh yeah, and assuming every user is an idiot.

Edit: Because I can't type. :-P

Let's go back to the good old days when a working knowledge of DOS was required to get anything done on the old 8086, and the only thing we used the phone line for was calling mom. Bullshit. I for one am deeply greatful to Bill Gates, though a tax system that let's him keep all that money is a scandal. Let Microsoft be Microsoft!

Let's stay calm. Put down the gun. Put down the gun.

I was just gonna turn the bulldog loose.

I do think that MS should be split, though. OS should be a like a utility company. Their application software can stand on it's own. I think they have an unfair advantage in their applications by having control of a universal operating platform.

But I think MS deserves credit for making the PC/Windows a ubiquitous part of our culture. Although serrendipity had a lot to do with it (DR-DOS).

M$ is a marketing company, a marketing company that delivers its marketing research via its marketing data collection product called "Windows". Most of the things that are being called "bugs" are, in fact, put in there specifically for their "Special Marketing Partners", a high-ticket bunch of companies who are allowed access to the APIs for these marketing data collection functions. They also have built in layers of redundancy on these functions, so when one gets exploited or discovered, they can issue a patch, close it, and let the SMPs know where the fallback position might be. Of course, clever people know they are in there, play reverse-engineering games and then write exploits.

M$ philosophy is that your HDD acreage belongs to them, under terms of their EULA, and therefore, they can mine it for anything they goddamned well please, your personal privacy be damned.

Vignette: I was doing an update the other day on an XP machine with Kerio Personal Firewall installed and running. During the update's installation phase, it connected, multiple times, to Hotmail servers. M$ owns Hotmail. Why? Why,during an update, must that happen? Because M$ just doesn't care about your privacy. It collects marketing data and sells it. That is their cash stream. The OS is ancillary.

The best security and virus protection program is two step:

1. At a command prompt, type "fdisk"

2. Stick a Linux or BSD install disk in your CDROM and reboot.

It's cheaper, too.

operating systems that is friendly to software writers instead of trying to monopolize the whole pc world. They need to be more open about the OS's code. I think a bunch of the anti MS hacking is done by frustrated software developers.