Swimming in the Pensieve

There just hasn’t been much time to check-in here, because life has that nasty tendency to just march along, demanding 100% of your attention.

The phone lines are still giving me fits, but those are reasonable minimum due to a work-around that I have in place; so it’s a back-burner thing right now.

In shoving everything over to the left side of my desk–so to speak–I have noticed a few things of the interim that demand some sort of comment from me. The fact is that there are so many of them that it’s time to filter some of them out and go for the one on the top of the pile.

Here we go…

windoze vista
It’s no secret that microsoft has been taking it on the security jaw of late. The fact is that, since the ’90’s they’ve been regularly taking it on every jaw they have–security included–the difference being that the ‘Joe-Schmoe’ of computer users is starting to listen, and listen closely.

Why?

Probably because it is no longer the odd-isolated incident wherein somebody gets hosed by a virus, trojan, or other digital malady. This is an everyday occurance, and people are losing their personal, academic, SOHO, and business data–often to catastrophic repurcussions. Forget the war stories. You’ve already heard them yourself, or have some of your own to tell–unless you’ve been living in a sterile bubble–so rehashing what we already know all too well is pointless, if you ask me.

The rhetoric surrounding the upcoming release of windoze vista isn’t even a departure from microsoft’s past practice of disinformation and forward-looking promises–which usually go significantly unfulfilled on a number of counts. The ‘rah-rah’ ad copy regarding vista is designed to make you expect the perfect windoze experience, and delay a move to something else that works better on the AMD/Intel platform. It largely works quite well on people who aren’t used to things like freedom and exercising one’s freedom to select what is most apropriate for the individual from a range of possible choices; but, this time, things are just a bit different.

In general, windoze users’ instant objection to moving away from the microsoft play pen has been one of not being able to parse the many choices of Linux distributions available to them, selecting that flavor which best serves their own needs. (Interestingly enough, I observed a similar pattern of behavior in response to new-found freedoms in inmigrants from the former Soviet-Bloc nations to the United States. Too many choices, and nobody to tell them what is ‘best’ for them.)

windoze vista is now being heralded as the newest answer to all the problems of windoze users (how many times has this been now…about a hundred?), and it now comes in something on the order of six versions, according to BBCNews. Take a look:

windoze vista Versions
• Vista Ultimate
• Vista Enterprise
• Vista Business
• Vista Home Premium
• Vista Home Basic
• Vista Starter

So…which one is right for you? Guess what? The biggest complaint about all of the wonderful, forward-looking announcements regarding the panacea called vista is that there are simply too many choices for current windoze users.

HUH??????
It isn’t like there are some-three hundred versions to choose from, people! There are–so far–only 6, count ‘em [one, two, three, four, five, six], choices; and it’s likely that none of them offer you exactly what you want. You will, of course, have to wait to find out just how much of your hard-earned cash microsoft is going to cheat you out of for what promises to be six different flavors of the same-old, worthless garbage. With NO WARRANTY (as always).

That’s right, folks. microsoft has (and has had for a very long time) a warranty statement that basically says that you have no rights, no guarantees, no warranty, no legal recourse against them if their software is junk. Don’t believe me? Read microsoft’s plethora of EULAs sometime, and run the verbage by a lawyer. Why, then, do they decry the fact that, logically, FLOSS offers you no warranty on what you can download and install on your computer for free?