Bill Gates Will Burn In Hell

Sorry for so few posts, it has been a busy and productive week. In addition, the recent drop to seasonal temperatures has made our bed extra cozy and I've been pretty slow out of the blocks every morning this week.

As I said, a busy but productive week and I was pretty glad to see Friday come around. But not so glad to home to a family PC that's been having problems. At some point last week one of the kids had downloaded a perfectly innocent looking screensaver program, D3 Christmas. I must say, the graphics were pretty cool. But 'lo, the pop-up ads soon began to appear and MS Anti-Spyware was throwing up an alert about the startup program izoo.exe every time anyone logged in. MS Anti Spyware continued to identify Adware-Webnexus as an offending bit of software running on the system. But cleaning efforts were all in vain. Every time we restarted izoo.exe and Webnexus were respawned from the depths of the registry. Ordinarily, I might have let this go a while. However, iTunes would not launch. And I've promised to make a couple of Christmas CD mixes for some folks for their holiday parties next week.

Three or four hours of digging around in the registry and online would not fix the problem and about 10 PM last night I finally resigned myself to backing up the system and completely reinstalling the OS. As the home PC is a custom-built hot-rod, this is not as simple as inserting the restore disks. I finally got things up and running sufficiently with the core OS, all the security patches, Firefox, Thunderbird and MS Office at about 3:30 AM

All this is unnecessary. It is possible to make an operating system that is very secure. Linux and Mac OS X are very secure systems. Yes, they do have the odd flaw but very few and even fewer are of the sort that end-users really need to worry about; ones that would allow an attacker to access the system at an administrative level and execute code. Microsoft had many opportunities to do as Apple did in 2000. Apple then said, "We know you love the Apple OS, but the code base is ten years old, it is not secure, it is not a modern operating system. We owe it to our company, our customers and to the larger computing community to start from scratch and build a modern and secure OS. We will continue to support the old OS for a number of years, but the new OS will not completely run the old software. When you switch your are really going to have to switch."

Apple took those steps at a time of weakness, when the company's entire future was at stake. Microsoft had several opportunities to do this from a position of strength, nay market dominance both in 1998 when they were working on Windows 2000 and again in 2002 when XP was in development. Instead, they have continued to rely on the core structures introduced in 1994, which were an unstable kludge then and continue to be now.

If anyone could ever succinctly and eloquently explain to the American public and especially the American corporate class, exactly how much of their lives and treasure have been needlessly squandered by the short-sighted and visionless leadership of Microsoft, there would be no place on Earth safe for Bill Gates to hide. It would be torches and pitchforks in Redmond. I'm really grateful to Microsoft for providing me with damn fine living for the past eight years or so. But I'd trade it all in New York minute to have back all the days, hell weeks of my life spent fucking with computers that have been terminally hosed because Gates and his company never had the courage and vision to do the right thing.