re: Farewell to an old friend !
Monday, February 16, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by gewg_
(3932 messages posted)
MartinM wrote:
[...]But a disk once more full,
And a screen growing dull,
Meant the day of XP came to pass.
Here in the 21st Century, my choice is to never give money for software that
1) requires Product Activation (clueless vendors grow the number daily)
or
2) requires a dongle (e.g. many closed-source CAD programs)
or
3) surreptitiously (and/or clumsily) writes to my boot sector
(e.g. Intuit's junk; Sony music CDs)
or
4) constantly tries to "phone home"
or
5) includes any other DRM measures.
Now its all bedded in and OK,
The old beast has been taken away,
It was easy to use,
And it rarely confused . . .
This old codger who's 60 today.
Happy birthday, you old fart.
I shan't be rushing to Vista,
See "Product Activation", "phone home", and "DRM" (above)
and "Windows Genuine Advantage"(below).
Or to Linux (which I've heard is swifter),
It's called Free Software and the *free* part means Freedom[1].
To wit:
No attempted lock-in via proprietary file formats.
No not-backwards-compatible continuous forced upgrade cycle.
No Windows Genuine "Advantage"
by which MSFT can cripple your OS via remote control
--even though it's an error of *their* crappy "verification" mechanism
(whether that error rate is 42%
http://www.google.com/search?
q=42%.of.the.people.reporting.problems.were.actually.running.Genuine.software
or "merely" 22%.)
http://www.google.com/search?q=intitle:One.in.Five+WGA+22.Per.Cent
With Micros~1's unwillingness
to actually remove the infection vectors in their defective-by-design software,
it's also gotten to the point that running a M$ OS outside a virtual environment
just makes no sense.
Debian Linux v5 was just released
and their (verified exploit-free) software repositories
now contain over 23,000 completely FREE applications
any of which can be downloaded & installed with a single command line instruction.
If by some slim chance you can't find a FREE replacement for a Windoze-only app,
there are ways to run that app without exposing your computer to infections:
When running (more-secure-by-design) Linux as the host OS, you can
open a virtual session using VirtualBox[2] or VMware[2],
invoke the MSFT OS to get your closed-source payware Windoze-only app to run,
and close the virtual session.
At that point, all the Windoze-only infections and M$-specific nonsense
go poof with the virtual machine.[3]
...of course, this assumes that the Windoze-compatible app you need to run
**won't** work under WINE (a possibility that grows more slim each day)
with WINE (a replacement for M$ code libraries) in turn being called under Linux
--and none of this requires paying the Microsoft Tax(tm).
...and I haven't yet mentioned Free Software's freedom to select
a (still-supported) OS configuration which allows you to use your old hardware.
There was no need to dispose of your old hardware;
there are a number of Linux variants that could make it useful as
e.g. a file server or print server or firewall or as a desktop computer.
Change for its own sake,
Simply fattens the cake,
Of the makers of disks and transistors !
In this life (if he's lucky), every man gets to pick his own poison.
In my case, I've decided not to be in league with any further plans of The Borg
--plans which will restrict my freedom to use my computer as I wish.
I especially won't give money to be abused.
[1] It also almost always means "gratis" aka zero-cost.
[2] Both are gratis; VirtualBox is also libre (GPL'd).
[3] There are also fewer device driver issues
because all the devices which (virtualized) Windoze uses
are **virtual** devices, with the actual hardware being accessed via Linux
--which has the best out-of-the-box hardware support of ANY OS.
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