Rantings

My favorite thing to rant and rave about is anything related to Micro$loth. These are the people that create buggy software that occasionally does something useful.

Rant #1. Is there anyone out there using Micro$oft Windoze (in any configuration) that has not experienced the "blue screen of death"? I have decided that this is a Windoze "feature" to force you to reboot and run scandisk periodically.

Sound familiar? I thought so.

Rant #2. Have you been to the Windoze update site? Did you try to go there with any other browser besides Micro$sloth Internet Explorer? It's not possible. Why is it every web page on the internet (with the exception of a few designed by idiots) can be viewed and used with ANY browser, and yet Micro$loth has the arrogance to force you to use THEIR product to get updates to anything ELSE they make?

Which brings me to:

Rant #3. Virus alerts. The majority (if not all) of the virus alerts the media (and the 10,000 emails you get from "well-intentioned" friends) are not "Internet" or "Computer" or "Word Processor" or even "email" viruses at all. Read up on ANY of them, and you'll find that they all exploit some "feature" of Micro$loth products. If you don't use MS Word, the word processor virus won't affect you. If you don't use Outlook Express, the email virus won't affect you as long as you don't go totally neanderthal and run an executable attachment without virus scanning it (about as smart as parking on a set of railroad tracks with the barricades down and a train coming at 70+ miles an hour). Virus writers just LOVE Micro$loth, because they have given them all of these neat little ways to operate your computer from afar (like ActiveX and Visual Basic). To those people that cry about all the virus alerts, GET A CLUE. Go download Netscape or Eudora (or any of over a dozen more Email programs) and STOP using Outlook Express.

Rant #4. Getting forwarded email with 300 lines of email addresses to scroll through with a chain letter at the bottom (or an internet "hug", "tag", whatever). Also getting an email (multiple addresses on it again) warning me about a new virus when the person sending it could have verified the thing at any of HUNDREDS of web pages and found out it was not real (look here and here for virus updates).

I'll shut up for now. More to come later.

well, maybe not ...

Rant #5. Backups. Don't come to me for sympathy when Micro$loth's wonderful Windoze program takes a dump on you and you lose all of your files to a reformat. Copy the important ones to floppies. If there's too much to put on a floppy, get Winzip and span several floppies with it. Better yet, why not spring for a zip disk (100mb) or even a cd-writer (650mb). With several cd's, you could backup your entire computer!