You should expect more from your ISP. Stream is stream, up and down, regardless of how it's provided or how it's used. Some MS user downloading "I Love Lucy", SirCam or adverts from MSNBC will use just as much or more bandwith than I will, too bad. I demand to use my connection as I please as well. Do as you will, but don't expect people to listen to your bend over advice.
Oh yeah, I will vote with my feet as do many others are. Haven't you notice the IT slowdown?
When people like me leave the net to people like you there will be nothing left but suck, but I don't think that will happen. There are ways around the last mile that will leave greedy loosers in well deserved debt.
huh, huh, perfectly useless without $900 of additional software. Someone reported spending ten minutes to turn off the "dumb down" stuff. Why bother? When you are finished you end up with W2K, NT, 98, ME, something like Win3.1. Same old, same old, it's not FUD to call it dull. If I were to use it, I'd expect the same quirky and inconsistent junk that everyone became familiar with and now considers "easy".
Code Red? Oh yeah, the XP call home features are much that. Expect MS.net to become very clogged and XP to be very slow or to quit working when you disconnect the internet.
Even my grandmother can get more than one screen with the average X virtual window manager. Most come set up with 4 screens, so you can have your different programs set up like that. My grandmother would not, however, really want multiple aliases on the same machine. If she knew that much, she would understand su and xinit -:1, heck she might even have multiple terminals.
Your example is way off base anyway. Brother is going to tell sister to take a hike, and sister is just not going to want brother reading her email. Too bad for sister, MSIE will continue to cache that mail where brother, or anyone local or remote for that matter, will be able to read it.
If they were really co-operative they would set up some scripts to su and call various applications, then put links on the desk top.
call bash
su sister
netscape -mail (or whatever)
Heh, I'm at an annoying NT machine at work or I'd paste a real script that worked. I think you can see how to do it from there.
If doctors thought that weed was useful, they would say so and beat the DEA up. I listen to my doctor and I hope you can find one that you trust as well. It might help your wife, but I suspect a nicer husband would do better.
This is not what residential ADSL is for. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about having access remotely (like when I'm at work). However, I don't publicize the fact that my machine is up and running and connected. That's what those of us in the industry call "stupid."
Well, I was told that some people in industry consider sharing stupid but you should speak for yourself! Some of us want to make content available for non-comercial purposes and that the web was designed for that. The web was not made to be dominated by a few giant comercial suck sites, it was made at CERN to share information.
I'm already paying out the nose for the privalidge of publishing and people like you burn me up. I want badwith from a common carrier, not edited BS from some kind of publisher, thank you. Express your opinions here, on your own site or anywhere else people might listen but don't tell me what to do. Give me my static IP or do without my $45/month.
I don't. No way in hell is the military going to depend on a civilian network for their operations.
Every trained user is a potnetial hub and the more hubs the harder it is to knock out. Think of the Radio Relay Leauge's field day . This kind of activity is just what the military desires. Central exchanges that can be knocked out or co opted work backwards.
What do you think those blue signs next to the interstate with corporate logos on them are? Normal countries have little symbols to indicate road related services, such as gasoline and hotel, at exits. Here we plaster all that ugly stuff up and let people erect huge billboards that blot out the sky. Thank you Bill Clinton, you sellout.
That's a great post, if you leave that stupid drug stuff out of it! There is a difference between liberty and liscence. Liscence is the enjoyment of your liberty without considering the consequences to others. Sex with minors, driving under the influence, excessive speeding are all acts of liscence. Marijuana, which serves no real purpose but recration, falls into the liscence catagory. People get upset when you blow it in their face, and defending it here detracts from very real concerns you have about your liberty.
I say, let the businesses have their internet, and watch it crash and burn. If they haven't learned yet, maybe this will teach them.
Yeah, I wish they would build a net. Instead they want to ruin this one, as you have noticed. If you want to imagine what they will do just turn on a TV. There it sits with some 60 broadcast channels largly empty thanks largly to Federal Laws backed by folks like GE, Westinghouse, other large advertisers and propaganists. Ever wonder why there were 60 broadcast channels, but only three or four broadcasters forever? It's all about control. If these folks finish, you will wish you had something as cool as AOL.
Look to the military and national interest to combat this mess. There are the military advantages of the internet as it exists and the case is not at all like TV. Distributed, dumb nets are nuke hard. Contoling mechanisms are weak. Philisophicaly, military folks should like the internet as it is too. Restrictions on publication and control of this new publishing media are simply UnAmerican. Weak OSes from MS have weakened things enough. I expect many of these efforts to be thwarted.
Yep, the whole boiling water reactor all it's supporting equipment whent to the waste heap when the second unit of this power plant was not built. Thanks, Jimmy Carter (stupid pig, not nuclear engineer) for making the cost of building it three or four times greater than the cost of building unit I and only marginally safer! Anyone who wanted it was welcome to pay freight to cart it off. No one wanted it, and it was eventually hacked into pieces. Other large components such, as feed water pumps, suffered the same fate.
Unit I had longes first run of it's type and has been 1GW onto the grid for 15 years. Unit II scrap and large multi million dollar hole.
Instructions and tools for building the floppies are available on both the CD and at http://www.debian.org! The set consists of 15 or so floppies. They can be made with the DOS utility, rawrite.exe. It's tedious but it works. 8M of ram is a low ram install but it can be done. Good luck!
Even the resident linux fanatic (who knows alot more than anyone else, but not enough) admitted that windows suited our best interests.
Too bad they did not step up! That's the best way to learn. Get them to set up a non esential service an an obsolete cuz it don't run W2k box for practice. It will out do your supposedly cheaper solution.
Oh, by the way, if you use Debian patches are as easy as apt-get update; apt-get upgrade; in your chron. Set it up and earn your pay!
Are you sure the documents come from where they say they do? It would be easy for this worm to remember a few of the addresses it has had along the way and falsify the address. It uses its own SMTA. Sure, I'll bet SirCam is not that clever, but it could be.
It's good to want to warn people, but keep it short and simple. The links are nice. Admonishments about double clicking, trusted sources and "your business" can be percieved as smug and are inefective in anycase. Do you know this thing requires a double click? MS will give a scary warning for the links too... the user may be scared to look at your untrusted email links after that.
Imagine getting something like this from some clueless MS user who had been tricked. Replace Linux references in the above with MS BS and you can see how offensive it is. Also, imagine that the files they referenced were not yours.
The essential information you are sending is that you recieved mail purporting to be from them, their machine is infected (must be if SirCam remembers it? imagine if it had an address harvester!), and news links. A three liner should do.
For the average user, how may be tempted to buy books on Xcell or Outlook, Windoze cost plenty. First they have to buy non crippled versions of the software that came with their $1000 PC, if you don't count the cost of the "bundled" junk. Then something breaks and it's off to the store for the $250 oil change, err, I mean upgrade. Before they know it, their computer is "obsolete" and can't even be used as a word processor and they feel like buying another one. This cycle happens once or twice when some new multi media toy is introduced that suckers more people into buying another box. What a rape!
Sorry, it's much cheaper to buy $400 worth of parts, install Linux and keep the thing running for years. It's even cheaper to pick up a "obsolete" box and put Linux on it. After getting over the Nix knowledge hump, it's been much easier to maintian Linux boxes that don't break. As Bruce Perens pointed out above:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
will keep your Debian system patched (not that it needs much of that) and updated against security holes.
It bugs me that MSIE is used for all kinds of junk the OS or GUI should handle. Passing the info back and forth makes for instability, not to mention resource shortages. Loading up large parts of a large browser fills up your RAM. It's more objectionable still if you never use that browser because it is loaded with security holes, and lacks control of content. Ever try to surf with IE and no images to avoid adverts? I did, but some kind of default preference brought them back up every time I started the stupid thing. It's slow and bloaty for no reason other than to push adverts on you.
Get this, my 150MHz cyrix Media GX with 64MB of RAM gives me good control over what I surf with Mozilla, runs it's own email and ftp servers without problems. It runs about as fast as a 450 AMD K6/2 with nothing but a browser does. Starting to see it now?
Oh yeah, I to pay for and use this crap at work. Why of why does IT here mean MS?
Games, I forgot about that. It used to be a big driving force in hardware development. That's changed, hasn't it? Isn't the current IT downturn part due to gamer saturation?
Got Quake on Linux, haven't tried it out but I will. Windows box fails to boot these days, so I have not been playing many games lately. I imagine more people will start developing games for Linux as MS flunks itself out and continues to screw everyone it associated with them.
The largest cost is your time, intentionally wasted by MS.
I've only "bought" three Windows packages directly. One XT with DOS 3.2 on it. One 486 with Win3.1 on it and bundled software. One laptop with a bare Win95. The last purchase was a waste as Debian works much better on it. That 486 was upgraded with someone else's software, and other machines were treated much the same. Three years ago, I bought a Watcom Fortran Compiler for Windows. All of it helped at the time, but now I regret all the time I spent learning MS BS.
Indirectly I've supported much greater costs. My schools and now my company pay out the nose for Windows junk. It's sad. Yes, you and me both are paying for all those windows boxes in all those labs on campus and sucking the life out of you at work.
Linux has cost me much less and provided much more with less efort in the end. My distros have come from books, CD shops and from the web. The book, Linux Unleashed (Red Hat 5.1), was a good place to start but newer are not as useful. CD shops, Cheap Bytes and Linux Central for example, carry up to date CDs for cheap. All can be gotten from web sites if you know what you are doing. Debian is the easiest to get that way and to learn about. Books on most specific subjects I'd have to have bought in the Windoze world anyway, so I won't count that as a cost.
The time saved has been amazing. Installs are much easier for Linux. Without all the propriatory BS of install floppies for each and every device and program, and much less baby sitting Linux installs go fast. Documentation is worlds better under Linux, so I waste much less time trying to figure out how to do something that should work but does not. G77 runs older FORTRAN code without modification and that saved me considerable time for CFD class. FTP, Telnet-ssl and X works much better than Window's quirky file and resource sharing, so there's more time I've saved. Another great time saver is not having to rebuild periodically. Stuff just works when you need it to and it's easy to upgrade when you want to.
As the last of my windows boxes die, I'm just letting them slip off. Now that I've great print support set up on a Red Hat 7.1 box, I have little need for those windows boxes and don't bother with them as their print service fails (parallel and USB!). I tried putting W2K on my wife's box but it failed to even format the hard drive. I put on the older 98 because the Voice of Command demanded it. That was three months ago, but already the printing on it died. Red Hat runs it good. 98 stays there until I can find a driver for the Cannon parallel scanner (doubtful) and a D-Link USB camera, or it quits booting or running those devices. 98 no longer boots on my last windows box, and it's been great to spend the time on cool stuff like IPChains, Exim, Chat, Gphoto, Gimp and gcc instead. Good bye broken, shitty, begging MS junk. I'm off the upgrade mill, cause you suck!
Last time I looked at a newspaper, about four months ago, the sections were clearly seperable though poorly written. Though software is nothing like printed work, the newspapers will get it. Heh, all you have to do is try to remove MSIE to understand that Billy G made the entire OS dependent on it. Poor Mr. Com - pooter won't work.
Oh yeah, last time I check the news stands the specialty mags for sports, weather and horoscopes were doing very well. None of them should be, dead trees is a dead medium.
The harm windoze does is measured directly at $250/per person in US. That's how much MS rakes in each year for it's crappy wares. The indirect cost, from lost work, user stress and sysadmin nervous breakdowns must be an order of magnitude greater. The judgement will be irrelevant by delivery time.
All they have to do is continue to use the word "bundeling" and rely on ignorance of what they did. "Bundle" completely hides the comingiling by implying that MSIE is a free gift and removable part of the OS. Who doesn't like ham sandwiches?
It seems to be falling apart, though. The NYT article did not get it, but they are closer to seeing. They used the term "mingeling" to describe the MSIE dependence of the OS. The CNN article, if it did use the term "comingiling" shows a greater understanding. Sooner or later a reporter at one of the larger news houses is going to understand that the MS way of passing all sorts of low level crap therough the GUI and browser funcion calls is an ineficient and destabilizing, technique with the sole purpose of exerting inapropriate control over developers and users. When he convinces his editor of this you will see the word comingle togeter with relavant examples of unrelated functions that should not be mixed. They might even catch on to means by wich MS exerts control over hardware makers so they don't release drivers for any but MS OS (larger threat, fight DCMA and UnAmerican reverse engineering restrictions!).
Of course, by then enough people may have realized they don't need MS BS to make their computers work that it won't be news. Who cares what happens to MS's soon to be bankrupt corpse?
Sure it's old. Pervasive computing? IBM might have had this in mind when it partnered with MS and it's (Q)DOS. After all, the Quick and Dirty Operating System and 8 bit computers were supposed to provide smarter terminals. Combine these smarter terminals with the then building DARPA net and you can see that someone must have had this in mind twenty years ago.
Since then MS has revealed far more oppresive vision for "grid" computing. Where did you want to go ten years ago?
1. Editing a textfile/etc/apt/sources.list
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get upgrade
and free software is retrieved from any of hundreds of mirror sites around the world, closed source distribution will continue to be second or third rate.
A pay for each copy in a box approach to distribution just sucks rocks.
A subscription to closed source junk is almost as bad. It can't be updated as quickly and well, it costs money. Do I really want to pay for my telnet client every month? If you buy microsoft OS, you have bought the same telnet client two or three times in the last four years. Same old bugs, same old look, same limits, yawn.
MS has got a record of inconvenient and extortionate distribution. Their dedication to the pay per each copy on each machine model and "aggresive" competitive measures to break other people's software has left them with nasty co mingled code that sysadmins are rightly hesitant to patch, ever. They have consistently denied any failings by blaming user and sysadmin ignorance and lazyness. People, not just crackers, have noticed that MS stuff won't work and every piece comes at a price. In the end despite all you wrongly say, the proof is in the kaputting. As yet another virus blows over them and anoys everyone, the inferiority shines through.
Hush! Let this thing blow up and get as bad as it will. I'll suffer a few days of slow net service so that the world might learn how irresponsible MS is and how bad their wares are. Of course, even if this is fought tooth and nail, it will still show up how inferior a closed source, NDA distribution model really is. Leave MS to worn their people.
Relax, all you MS sysadmins. Nothing Really Bad is going to happen. Just sit tight and all this will blow over, like Mellisa did. Educate your users and continue upgrading to W2K. Sleep, now.
How I hate to ruin a good discussion about cool stuff from Sun talking about MS legacy junk.
It was hard for me to run a reasonably configured Win95, release 1, on 66Mhz 486 with 500MB hard disk and 16MB ram. Another 500MB hard disk helped. Later MS ware, while having needed fixes like the ability to see much larger hard disks, use MSIE which wants a 500MB hard disk foot print. I would not think of running any of their newer bloaty code on a 486.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah, I will vote with my feet as do many others are. Haven't you notice the IT slowdown? When people like me leave the net to people like you there will be nothing left but suck, but I don't think that will happen. There are ways around the last mile that will leave greedy loosers in well deserved debt.
huh, huh, perfectly useless without $900 of additional software. Someone reported spending ten minutes to turn off the "dumb down" stuff. Why bother? When you are finished you end up with W2K, NT, 98, ME, something like Win3.1. Same old, same old, it's not FUD to call it dull. If I were to use it, I'd expect the same quirky and inconsistent junk that everyone became familiar with and now considers "easy".
Code Red? Oh yeah, the XP call home features are much that. Expect MS.net to become very clogged and XP to be very slow or to quit working when you disconnect the internet.
Your example is way off base anyway. Brother is going to tell sister to take a hike, and sister is just not going to want brother reading her email. Too bad for sister, MSIE will continue to cache that mail where brother, or anyone local or remote for that matter, will be able to read it.
If they were really co-operative they would set up some scripts to su and call various applications, then put links on the desk top.
call bash
su sister
netscape -mail (or whatever)
Heh, I'm at an annoying NT machine at work or I'd paste a real script that worked. I think you can see how to do it from there.
If doctors thought that weed was useful, they would say so and beat the DEA up. I listen to my doctor and I hope you can find one that you trust as well. It might help your wife, but I suspect a nicer husband would do better.
Well, I was told that some people in industry consider sharing stupid but you should speak for yourself! Some of us want to make content available for non-comercial purposes and that the web was designed for that. The web was not made to be dominated by a few giant comercial suck sites, it was made at CERN to share information.
I'm already paying out the nose for the privalidge of publishing and people like you burn me up. I want badwith from a common carrier, not edited BS from some kind of publisher, thank you. Express your opinions here, on your own site or anywhere else people might listen but don't tell me what to do. Give me my static IP or do without my $45/month.
Every trained user is a potnetial hub and the more hubs the harder it is to knock out. Think of the Radio Relay Leauge's field day . This kind of activity is just what the military desires. Central exchanges that can be knocked out or co opted work backwards.
Does that mean that the infamous BeUser, who's trolling I have not seen in a while, may be unemployed soon? Say it ain't so!
What do you think those blue signs next to the interstate with corporate logos on them are? Normal countries have little symbols to indicate road related services, such as gasoline and hotel, at exits. Here we plaster all that ugly stuff up and let people erect huge billboards that blot out the sky. Thank you Bill Clinton, you sellout.
That's a great post, if you leave that stupid drug stuff out of it! There is a difference between liberty and liscence. Liscence is the enjoyment of your liberty without considering the consequences to others. Sex with minors, driving under the influence, excessive speeding are all acts of liscence. Marijuana, which serves no real purpose but recration, falls into the liscence catagory. People get upset when you blow it in their face, and defending it here detracts from very real concerns you have about your liberty.
Yeah, I wish they would build a net. Instead they want to ruin this one, as you have noticed. If you want to imagine what they will do just turn on a TV. There it sits with some 60 broadcast channels largly empty thanks largly to Federal Laws backed by folks like GE, Westinghouse, other large advertisers and propaganists. Ever wonder why there were 60 broadcast channels, but only three or four broadcasters forever? It's all about control. If these folks finish, you will wish you had something as cool as AOL.
Look to the military and national interest to combat this mess. There are the military advantages of the internet as it exists and the case is not at all like TV. Distributed, dumb nets are nuke hard. Contoling mechanisms are weak. Philisophicaly, military folks should like the internet as it is too. Restrictions on publication and control of this new publishing media are simply UnAmerican. Weak OSes from MS have weakened things enough. I expect many of these efforts to be thwarted.
More wires, damn it!
Unit I had longes first run of it's type and has been 1GW onto the grid for 15 years. Unit II scrap and large multi million dollar hole.
just my 2 cents per kilo watt hour.
Instructions and tools for building the floppies are available on both the CD and at http://www.debian.org! The set consists of 15 or so floppies. They can be made with the DOS utility, rawrite.exe. It's tedious but it works. 8M of ram is a low ram install but it can be done. Good luck!
Too bad they did not step up! That's the best way to learn. Get them to set up a non esential service an an obsolete cuz it don't run W2k box for practice. It will out do your supposedly cheaper solution.
Oh, by the way, if you use Debian patches are as easy as apt-get update; apt-get upgrade; in your chron. Set it up and earn your pay!
It's good to want to warn people, but keep it short and simple. The links are nice. Admonishments about double clicking, trusted sources and "your business" can be percieved as smug and are inefective in anycase. Do you know this thing requires a double click? MS will give a scary warning for the links too... the user may be scared to look at your untrusted email links after that.
Imagine getting something like this from some clueless MS user who had been tricked. Replace Linux references in the above with MS BS and you can see how offensive it is. Also, imagine that the files they referenced were not yours.
The essential information you are sending is that you recieved mail purporting to be from them, their machine is infected (must be if SirCam remembers it? imagine if it had an address harvester!), and news links. A three liner should do.
Sorry, it's much cheaper to buy $400 worth of parts, install Linux and keep the thing running for years. It's even cheaper to pick up a "obsolete" box and put Linux on it. After getting over the Nix knowledge hump, it's been much easier to maintian Linux boxes that don't break. As Bruce Perens pointed out above:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
will keep your Debian system patched (not that it needs much of that) and updated against security holes.
Get this, my 150MHz cyrix Media GX with 64MB of RAM gives me good control over what I surf with Mozilla, runs it's own email and ftp servers without problems. It runs about as fast as a 450 AMD K6/2 with nothing but a browser does. Starting to see it now?
Oh yeah, I to pay for and use this crap at work. Why of why does IT here mean MS?
Got Quake on Linux, haven't tried it out but I will. Windows box fails to boot these days, so I have not been playing many games lately. I imagine more people will start developing games for Linux as MS flunks itself out and continues to screw everyone it associated with them.
I've only "bought" three Windows packages directly. One XT with DOS 3.2 on it. One 486 with Win3.1 on it and bundled software. One laptop with a bare Win95. The last purchase was a waste as Debian works much better on it. That 486 was upgraded with someone else's software, and other machines were treated much the same. Three years ago, I bought a Watcom Fortran Compiler for Windows. All of it helped at the time, but now I regret all the time I spent learning MS BS.
Indirectly I've supported much greater costs. My schools and now my company pay out the nose for Windows junk. It's sad. Yes, you and me both are paying for all those windows boxes in all those labs on campus and sucking the life out of you at work.
Linux has cost me much less and provided much more with less efort in the end. My distros have come from books, CD shops and from the web. The book, Linux Unleashed (Red Hat 5.1), was a good place to start but newer are not as useful. CD shops, Cheap Bytes and Linux Central for example, carry up to date CDs for cheap. All can be gotten from web sites if you know what you are doing. Debian is the easiest to get that way and to learn about. Books on most specific subjects I'd have to have bought in the Windoze world anyway, so I won't count that as a cost.
The time saved has been amazing. Installs are much easier for Linux. Without all the propriatory BS of install floppies for each and every device and program, and much less baby sitting Linux installs go fast. Documentation is worlds better under Linux, so I waste much less time trying to figure out how to do something that should work but does not. G77 runs older FORTRAN code without modification and that saved me considerable time for CFD class. FTP, Telnet-ssl and X works much better than Window's quirky file and resource sharing, so there's more time I've saved. Another great time saver is not having to rebuild periodically. Stuff just works when you need it to and it's easy to upgrade when you want to.
As the last of my windows boxes die, I'm just letting them slip off. Now that I've great print support set up on a Red Hat 7.1 box, I have little need for those windows boxes and don't bother with them as their print service fails (parallel and USB!). I tried putting W2K on my wife's box but it failed to even format the hard drive. I put on the older 98 because the Voice of Command demanded it. That was three months ago, but already the printing on it died. Red Hat runs it good. 98 stays there until I can find a driver for the Cannon parallel scanner (doubtful) and a D-Link USB camera, or it quits booting or running those devices. 98 no longer boots on my last windows box, and it's been great to spend the time on cool stuff like IPChains, Exim, Chat, Gphoto, Gimp and gcc instead. Good bye broken, shitty, begging MS junk. I'm off the upgrade mill, cause you suck!
Oh yeah, last time I check the news stands the specialty mags for sports, weather and horoscopes were doing very well. None of them should be, dead trees is a dead medium.
The harm windoze does is measured directly at $250/per person in US. That's how much MS rakes in each year for it's crappy wares. The indirect cost, from lost work, user stress and sysadmin nervous breakdowns must be an order of magnitude greater. The judgement will be irrelevant by delivery time.
It seems to be falling apart, though. The NYT article did not get it, but they are closer to seeing. They used the term "mingeling" to describe the MSIE dependence of the OS. The CNN article, if it did use the term "comingiling" shows a greater understanding. Sooner or later a reporter at one of the larger news houses is going to understand that the MS way of passing all sorts of low level crap therough the GUI and browser funcion calls is an ineficient and destabilizing, technique with the sole purpose of exerting inapropriate control over developers and users. When he convinces his editor of this you will see the word comingle togeter with relavant examples of unrelated functions that should not be mixed. They might even catch on to means by wich MS exerts control over hardware makers so they don't release drivers for any but MS OS (larger threat, fight DCMA and UnAmerican reverse engineering restrictions!).
Of course, by then enough people may have realized they don't need MS BS to make their computers work that it won't be news. Who cares what happens to MS's soon to be bankrupt corpse?
Shhhh, don't tell anyone! I've been using my wormed version of the SETI screen saver for particle transport calculations for years.
Since then MS has revealed far more oppresive vision for "grid" computing. Where did you want to go ten years ago?
1. Editing a textfile /etc/apt/sources.list
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get upgrade
and free software is retrieved from any of hundreds of mirror sites around the world, closed source distribution will continue to be second or third rate.
A pay for each copy in a box approach to distribution just sucks rocks.
A subscription to closed source junk is almost as bad. It can't be updated as quickly and well, it costs money. Do I really want to pay for my telnet client every month? If you buy microsoft OS, you have bought the same telnet client two or three times in the last four years. Same old bugs, same old look, same limits, yawn.
MS has got a record of inconvenient and extortionate distribution. Their dedication to the pay per each copy on each machine model and "aggresive" competitive measures to break other people's software has left them with nasty co mingled code that sysadmins are rightly hesitant to patch, ever. They have consistently denied any failings by blaming user and sysadmin ignorance and lazyness. People, not just crackers, have noticed that MS stuff won't work and every piece comes at a price. In the end despite all you wrongly say, the proof is in the kaputting. As yet another virus blows over them and anoys everyone, the inferiority shines through.
Relax, all you MS sysadmins. Nothing Really Bad is going to happen. Just sit tight and all this will blow over, like Mellisa did. Educate your users and continue upgrading to W2K. Sleep, now.
It was hard for me to run a reasonably configured Win95, release 1, on 66Mhz 486 with 500MB hard disk and 16MB ram. Another 500MB hard disk helped. Later MS ware, while having needed fixes like the ability to see much larger hard disks, use MSIE which wants a 500MB hard disk foot print. I would not think of running any of their newer bloaty code on a 486.