[geeks] Odd uptick in spam...

[Micah R Ledbetter]

On 9/7/2007, "Anthony Ortenzi" <geeks at litfire.com> wrote:

>Der Mouse blathered:
>> Is it Microsoft's crapware that's endangering your national security,
>> or is it the chowderheads who choose to run it despite its being the
>> least secure, in practice, operating system on the planet?
>
>Shouldn't you be spouting this on /.?

Well, I think he has a point. Consider only the lusers running a
never-updated copy of Windows XP Home, thepiratebay.org edition. I think
that the current thought RE: botnets is: a large number of them exist
today if only people patched their systems when patches were available.

What this leads us to is this: lusers are too stupid to run computers AT
ALL. Whether Windows, Macintosh, Solaris, or otherwise, they'll manage
to fuck it up bad :). There's tremendous room for vendor improvement,
here, and it should happen. However, vendor improvement can never solve
brain damage, or being a luser - which is the same thing.

And finally, I don't think that was an insult aimed at NON-chowderheads.
At least, I didn't take it that way, and I use Windows sometimes (like
at work).

>I use Windows for a desktop platform because I like to get things done,
>while you're dealing with package management, Mozilla memory leaks, and
>whether or not your hardware is supported.

Have you even used a Unix system designed for PCs since the 90s? (Well, I
guess the Mozilla point is well taken, but then that makes me ask: Have
you even used Mozilla on Windows?)

Besides, I think package management is a really great thing, and even
some Windows people[0] feel the same way. I install a package management
system on any system I use frequently - one of: fink, MacPorts, SFU and
cygwin, pkgsrc (which has really cool multiplatform support). Or maybe
you're talking about RPMs on RedHat 5?

>Yes, when I finally allow Adobe Reader to update, I go through a series of
>reboots an hour long, but the other 100 hours a week when I'm looking at an
>Explorer.exe interface, if I'm not getting things done, it's because of my
>own attention span.

I don't even know how to respond to this. You like Explorer?

 - Micah

[0] http://wpkg.org/ ... I've never actually used it, since its kind of
a hack. A *real* package management system would distribute .zip files
and unpack them itself, rather than run the vendor-provided .exe. The
problem is that for some reason programmers provide home-cooked shitty
installers that are impossible to script, rather than something like a
msi.