You have to admire Bill Gates. Who else can convince 100 million people to pay 150 dollars and up to be beta testers for buggy software? As one Duke PhD Candidate in Electrical Engineering (customer of mine) said: "What we call 'bugs' in our software in India, Microsoft calls 'features' and charges extra for them."
MS releases the most insecure, hack prone stuff you can imagine, so that websites running activeX insert all kinds of goodies on your internet explorer (IE) machine, unknown to you. Someone in bangkok could be logging your keystrokes, browsing your files, or as happened to one guy I knew, remotely storing porn on your hard drive as a server for his X rated peep shows (now THAT is active X for ya!). Here at the office, we update anti virus, anti popup, anti adware, and anti spyware daily. Tired of this crap, people are starting to show interest an alternative popular overseas for some time, LINUX . Even if you want to stay with Windows, Mozilla Firefox (my favorite internet browser) has had over 4.5 million downloads in the last 3 weeks. Secure, fast, reliable, and RESISTANT TO ACTIVEX, I would highly recommend it.
The Vaderites over at MS have waked up to the fact that even some non geeks are bailing on them. IE is actually losing market share and MS has promised to address some of their security gaps..., something they had earlier refused to do till the release of "Longhorn" in 2006. This is largely due to Firefox (get it and use it!)
Further, they have sent out Steve Ballmer (the same guy tasked with burying IBMs OS/2, which was superior to Windows in every way) to spread FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) about the nature of Linux, the free operating system mentioned above. I don't have the brainpower, time or space here to address the intricacies of "open source" software, except to say that it is free, and anybody can look at it, twiddle with it, improve it, and re-release it. Geeks make money servicing it, not writing it. It is not "compiled" or hidden from view so that you only know what it DOES and not what it IS. Microsoft is terrified of it, and has been buying up "patents" on many of the processes that are ostensibly "open source." Ballmer showed up at a geekfest last week, clearly tasked with scaring anyone thinking of using Linux or developing apps with visions of a MS lawyer knocking on the door with a patent infringement suit. I think it is too late for them this time. The tech bust knocked the wind out of alot of the open source software guys, but they are coming back, and I really think MS's days of complete desktop dominance are numbered. Can't come soon enough for me.
I happen to like a local (here in Durham, NC) flavor of the open source world Red Hat . Download it and try it.
UPDATE
Techweb has a story today about a retail version of Firefox and OpenOffice, an open source office suite that runs under Linux and Windows.
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