Thanks for the excellent post, Cornmaster!
Almost all your points, however, show us why MS should be eradicated as an entity. All the bugs, errors, crashes of prior OSs you mention are DEFECTS, and in any other consumer product, would warrant criminaly and civil prosecution for fraud. If a car, for instance, quit working, stalled, broke down all the time, etc.... it would be recalled and fixed. Ditto for any other American product. But software, and in particular, M$, seems immune not just from the
sword of justice, but the psychological mind-fu*k (as it is called in academia) has most people convinced that they should happily pay more money for yet another attempt to fix problems and deliver on prior promises.
If M$ had advertised win98 as the OS of the future, and it only crashed 25 times per day for the average user, would it have sold? Probably not.
So I don't view it as a "privilige" to pay those greedy bastards yet again to fix something that should have worked in 1993, when they put the likes of OS/2 and DR DOS out of business.
And it is the ulitimate rape of people in the world to connect the OS to the internet, or limit, or track, in any way, shape, or form my own hardware usage or changes.
I'm a pretty peaceful guy, but absolutely nothing gets me madder, faster, than the disgusting rapes by MS of users and competing developers. Look at what MS did to the browser world. Almost no choice anymore. I can't even view this very BBS without errors now (I use NETSCAPE). TF says "85%" of the people use MSIE, and so the rest of us are not worth the effort to have properly displayed pages. It is not TF's fault... it is the deliberate
sabotage by MS of the competitors, and then the "just swtich to MS and let them rape you" mentality. path of least resistance, and they know it. So destroy the company, and all the responsible people. The world does not need it!
After all, MS has single-handedly slowed the progress of the PC and technology for over 10 years now.... I thouroughly understand the technology, pending legal cases, US patent and copyright laws, etc... so it's not an offhand comment. MS should be destroyed... the empire is build on illegal business practices, and principle must reign supreme. We cannot say "but what would we do without them", and let the "end justify the means". They are rich and powerful in the software industry because they have broken US laws, back to 1983. Legally, they are liable for the entire value of the company and all its stock. It is time for the debt to be settled, and the money returned to those it was swindled from... the individual users, corporations, and the US government.
The ill-gotten gains of Gates, et. al., should simply be returned to the US treasury, and all MS intellectual property released, without copyright restriction, to the pubic domain.
A certain number of employees would be funded to transition users and corporations from the MS OS. The name windows, and all MS trademarks, would be permanently released into the public domain, with no owner.
BTW, the entire software industry would also be held accountable. Bug-ridden software would be required to be fixed, and the full purchase refunded until the fix, if users chose. Subsequent releases would be illegal unless free (or free of bugs, incompatabilities, glitches).
As I thoroughly understand the entire development and business cycle of software, I say this is not only possible, but must be done to protect the unwitting buyers and users. Rape is still rape, even if the vicitm does not fully understand they have been raped!
OK, I could go on. And on. But that's enough. I want open, fair, fully functional software products, and full prosecution for past deeds. And I want the standard to be that which we use in other civilian products!
Hey, the nice thing is that anyone who may not agree is of course totally free to shell out the $$$ for anything they want. LOL, and maybe they enjoy the promised single mouseclick that does the dishes, too.
But that wouldn't factor into your reasons.)
Perhaps Linux will rule the virtual world some day...
