This excellent article from The Register is an excellent reason not to use Winblows. Even though its a few years old, it is (unfortunately for MS users) still relevant. And not much has changed in three years on the MS front…

From CNET News.com:

…The Microsoft chairman told a group of reporters at a press conference in Lisbon that the tax agency needs special computers to handle his returns “because their normal computers can’t deal with the numbers,” according to a report by the Agence France-Presse news wire…

“Special computers”? What the hell does that mean? Looks like the IRS is running Winblow$…

Digging through Word’s help facility, I found this entry on password protecting a document (in Word 2000 Help, go to the Index, put ‘password-protection’ in the keywords, and click ‘About using passwords’ to see for yourself) :

When you create a password, write it down and keep it in a secure place. If you lose the password, you cannot open or gain access to the password-protected document.

And you wonder why virii run rampant and security is a joke with MS products. The Average Joe Computer User does this type of stuff anyways. Should this behavior really be encouraged? If Micro$oft is putting rubbish like this in their products, what does that tell you about their stance on security?

Look at this hilarious clip of Bill floundering when he can’t get his presentation to work. Normally, its somewhat painful to watch a person in this situation, unless its Bill. Conan O’Brien just adds to the humor. Its nice to see the Big Guys look like total klutzes in front of thousands, and then be able to watch it over and over for your own personal entertainment.

What should this tell you if Bill can’t get his own Micro$oft crap to work? Don’t expect your Micro$oft crap to work either.

Time to beat up on Micro$oft.

I wrote about my new laptop with XP loaded on it a couple months back. Well, for whatever reason, XP doesn’t shutdown about 50 percent of the time. It just hangs and I end up having to power off the machine manually. I have seen this problem on every release of Winblows since Winblows 95, no matter what hardware I’m on. One would think that Microsoft would be able to fix this type of problem in 9+ years.

What I wouldn’t give to just load Fedora or even Gentoo. Life would be good.