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[Neil Bradshaw]

I don't *hate* M$, I just don't approve of their business model and
software. The only thing M$ did right was Office. Win2K is stable, but it
hogs resources. WinNT is a pain to deal with, and people are generally
sloppy about getting service packs and patches. A good number of NT
systems are still vunerable to msadcl and iishack, which is sad. This is
how the NY Times got cracked into earlier this week.

Win98 relies on an old cruddy 16-bit codebase that crashes all the
time. Same goes for WinME and Win95. Granted, with registry tweaks you can
stabilize it somewhat, but is this what a home user is capable of
doing? People with that level of expertise typically run NT or Win2K.

>From a security standpoint, if I can't see the code, it's not
secure. After learning of the Win95 easter egg and the Excel flight
simulator, that pretty much showed that you can't trust M$ to keep the
code lean, mean, stable, and secure. If they spent more time working on
stability rather than a stupid flight simulator in spreadsheet software,
maybe everyone wouldn't be so irritated at them.

>From a programming standpoint, it's nice that I can get stuff like Glade,
the GNU C compiler, etc. without having to pay $500 for a programming
suite just to write software on the OS I bought. It's also nice that I can
see the code for the compiler if I'm so compelled to look.

That is why I dislike M$.

Regards,
Neil Bradshaw
bradshaw at missouri.edu

"Assumption is the mother of all f**kups."