2001-09-06 - 12:52 p.m.

a rant about the evils of micro$oft

so i'm going to take a page out of the book of my new pen pal, and discuss a topic. as a matter of fact, i'm going to get up on a soap-box and do a little ranting. buckle up kids, it's going to be a geeky ride.

i'm sure anyone who is acquainted with a computer geek like me is used to hearing about the evils of Micro$oft. for a long, long time i've been an indifferent micro$oft basher, trying to walk the fence. i always figured that they were anti-competitive and unscrupulous, but it's kind of what i've come to expect from large corporations. just par for the course in a way. it's often a smaller step than you might think from being honestly driven and competitive to being unscrupulous.

i am no longer giving old Bill the benefit of the doubt. any doubt.

that goes double for Dubya.

so why am i all up in arms? it's a combination of things i've read on-line recently. first of all it's a

column on micro$oft's bootloader license agreement. here's the gist of it: if any hardware manufacturer wants to ever pre-install windows on any of their machines, ever (which is pretty much a requirement to be in business for them), they have to promise that windows and only windows will go on those machines. this means no dual-boot machines. ever. this means that OSes like linux and BeOS can be sold on machines where there is no windows, but not on the same machine as windows. this means that the vast majority of people out there, who wouldn't tackle installing an new OS if their life depended on it, and wouldn't know fdisk if it bit them on the ass, will never see any OS but windows. ever.

this is by far more blatantly and effectively anti-competitive than the whole embedded browser thing. by many orders of magnitude. yet this issue was almost completely ignored in the trial in preference for hitting the browser bundling issue.

okay, that was a mistake on the part of the government, but they were still trying to make micro$oft play fair.

until today.

today old Dubya told the justice department to forget about trying to break up micro$oft and to drop the browser bundling part of the case. so after spending all that time and effort and taxpayer money to prove the weakest part of their case, they now give it up. leaving them with exactly what to hold over Bill's head? i don't even know. i don't pretend to know all the ins and outs of this case, but it looks like me that the best that the gov't can do now is a slap on the wrist.

micro$oft is getting away with it. again. they're doing everything in their power to make sure that they and only they control what people do on their computers. and it may not seem like a big deal to non-geeks, but it just burns me up.

i'm not really sure what i can do about this, except to make sure that micro$oft never gets another penny of my money. i think i'm going to go buy a Mac.