Microsoft – A Debacle for Humanity: How One Corporation Caused Untold Damage to the World Economy, Cost Society Untold $Billions, Severely Damaged Human Productivity, and Even Significantly Set Back Human Progress

Microsoft was and is still an abusive monopoly which ripped off society for billions of dollars, caused vast losses to the world economy, and even set back technological progress for all of mankind by a significant amount. You had to buy Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft Windows was always a piece of crap.

Think of how much this worthless to lousy to dysfunctional OS cost consumers, business, and society due to its crappy nature. You are always hearing that “the system is down” right, whenever you go anywhere? The ATM is down half the time you go there. Call random businesses and 10-2

Windows’ endless dysfunction and crashing caused a tremendous amount of damage to the US military who moronically decided to use Windows all through our country’s fighting forces for just about everything. Great. A computer-based military where the system always crashes. I’m sure they’re going to win every war they fight.

Basically, all of humanity was forced to use a glaringly obviously inferior product for all of its computing needs. This inferior product had constant problems which drove a spike through the heart of productivity at the individual, business, nonprofit, and government level. All of humanity was using inferior computer systems that barely worked and failed all the time.

All of this time, there were much superior systems out there which could have beaten Windows if they only had a chance. Amiga OS was always one of finest ever developed. BeOS was an outstanding OS, amazingly great. OS/2 was an out of the world OS. All of these OS’s were fantastic at multitasking and even multithreading. People routinely ran up to 80 applications at a time on OS/2 with little or no slowdown. BeOS was about that good and may have even been faster. But with a monopoly on the desktop where everyone was forced to use Windows, all of these other OS’s died a sad death.

Unix has long ruled at the university and corporate level, and much of the Net runs of Unix. Larger server systems have always run on Unix at the level of the large enterprise, be it government, corporate, or nonprofit. But Unix has never really broken in on the desktop where Windows still reigns. Windows is much better now than it was in the Windows 95 era (Remember how horrible that OS was?). I am currently running Windows 7, which is the best Windows I ever run, but it’s still crap. It suffers from unfixable file corruption and sometimes needs a hard reboot or goes down altogether.

Unix on the other hand is virtually uncrashable. It is very hard to take down a Unix system. They are nearly resistant to crashing. File corruption is virtually nonexistent on Unix because of Journaling File Systems and text files instead the idiotic and flawed Registry of Windows. The Registry is so flawed that it can probably never be fixed. As long as the Registry exists, Windows will continue to be slow, hog memory and hard drive, be awful at multitasking, crash your applications, suffer irreparable file corruption, and go down hard and need hard reboots.

Mac OS is an excellent OS now that it runs on a Unix core. Mac OS is almost uncrashable now, and it never or almost never needs to be reinstalled. Plug and Play is as easy as plugging in any electronic device in your house, whereas Windows plug and play has always been horrible, and it still is here at Windows 7. Windows also harmed the world economy by forcing us to shell out untold billions for OS’s, word processors, browsers, databases, spreadsheets, and presentation programs.

Microsoft of course leveraged its OS monopoly to create browser, database, spreadsheet, and presentation monopolies. All of these products were quite expensive. In the process, many excellent word processors (remember Wordperfect 5.1?), spreadsheets, databases, and presentation products were all destroyed. It didn’t matter how good they were. It didn’t matter if they were better or even vastly better than their Microsoft competitors (Access was always junk) because due to the OS monopoly, none of the competitors in this other software stood a chance.

The truth is that all of this stuff could have been had for free all along. Linux is free and open source, and that is one of the reasons why it is so great. Firefox and Opera are also free now, and Firefox is also open source and has been taken over by Sun. Free online email programs like Gmail have cut significantly into the market share of Outlook Express (always awful – Eudora was so much better) and Outlook.

Open Office, now taken over by Sun, is free and is starting to give Word, Access, Excel, and Powerpoint a run for their money. I use Word Writer all the time, and it’s just as good as Word by now. If the world moves to free browsers, OS’s, word processors, chat software (Skype), spreadsheets, databases, and presentation software, think of how much money can be saved at the individual, business, nonprofit, education, and government level! It will be a great step forward for humanity.

There is no way for Microsoft to compete with a free product of course, so we will hopefully begin to slowly destroy this diabolical corporation, one of the worst ones that ever existed.

A Rather Subjective Analysis of European Minority Languages

One way to see how well European minority languages is if you run a popular website that gets a lot of hits from all over Europe. I run one here on my old site, which is in the top 1200 blogs on the Internet (This blog is also in the top 1200). If you have a good weblog (a weblog allows a webmaster to monitor all of the visitors from your site), and I do, you can see what languages people are using on their browsers. When browsers come to the site, they are marked with language tracking. I am not sure if that is a language preference for webpages or if it is the language that the browser itself is written in. Minority lanugages are languages that are not the main spoken language of the country or languages that only have a small speaker base. In this piece, we will be dealing with Irish, Welsh, Catalan, Basque, Galician and Luxemburgish. Those I am quite sure are offered as language versions of the major browsers. Luxemburgish: Luxemburgish is the official language of Luxemburg, however, there are worries about it due to the small speaker base of only around 500,000. Further, there is a problem in that not enough new and technological words are coming into the language. Most browsers from Luxemburg are using the Luxemburgish language, so the language seems to be in pretty good shape. Catalan: Catalan is the most popular of the remaining five. However, considering how many readers I get from the Catalan region, very few Catalans are using Catalan browsers. Most are using Spanish language browsers. So the situation of Catalan does not look so good. Irish: I am amazed that there are any Irish browsers at all, but now and then, we do get one from Ireland. Needless to say, nearly all browsers from Ireland are using English. Still, everyone knows that Irish is in bad shape. Considering there are Irish browsers at all, I think Irish is in better shape than we think it is. Galician: I was quite shocked to find a few Galician browsers out there coming out of Galicia in the far northwest of Spain. This language is probably in better shape than people think it is. Most Galician browsers use Spanish. Welsh: Considering that most reports indicate that Welsh is doing pretty well, I was surprised that one almost never sees a Welsh browser. Almost all browsers coming out of Wales use English. I wonder if Welsh is in as good a shape as people say it is considering the dearth of Welsh browsers. Basque: I have yet to see a Basque browser! If browsers are indeed offered in Basque (uncertain) this is very bad news. I get quite a bit of traffic out of the Basque country, and 10 I can’t speak of other small languages in Europe because in general, browsers are not offered in those languages. This was an interesting little experiment though.

Firefox 3.5 Review

I usually do not review software, but I am a computer buff, so I may as well. Firefox is the free browser made by the Mozilla Foundation based on the old Netscape browser.

It is now starting to seriously rival Microsoft’s Internet Exploder, especially in Northern and Eastern Europe. Finland and the Baltic states have gone over in a big way. Internet Exploiter is still huge in China and Korea, with over 9

I upgraded from 3.0.1x a while back, and the early 3.5 was really terrible, so I’ve been avoiding it ever since. Nevertheless, someone put it on the other computer I use, and I noticed the other day that it was quite nice. So I finally got up the nerve to put it on this one.

What a surprise! It’s not often that a browser upgrade really slaps you across the face with its sudden and dramatic improvement.

One annoyance about earlier Firefox was the extremely bad use of resources such that the browser quickly pigs out and is sucking a good GB or so of RAM and on this box, I’m then into virtual memory territory, which on Windows just sucks. Also many webpages, especially this WordPress, are slow as mud in the Colorado River. I always figured it was the sucky WordPress platform, but whatever’s causing it, the new 3.5 makes WordPress positively snappy.

The browser loads very quickly, even with 2 windows and 17 tabs open as I am wont to do. It’s still pretty piggy, but the browser seems to retain snappiness and stability even as it gorges on your RAM, which is nice. I’m waiting to see how it acts in VM territory, but nothing on Windows is stable in VM, so I’m not optimistic.

The earlier stability problems are completely gone now.

If you have not done so already, upgrade to 3.5 right now!

Firefox 3.5

The long-awaited Firefox 3.5 was released a few days ago, on June 30, 2009. I just “upgraded” yesterday. Big mistake. Many of my extensions didn’t work, and Firefox was seriously hogging the CPU on a regular basis. It was so bad, frankly, FF 3.5 was simply unusable. My specs: Windows 2000 1 GB memory 1.66 MHZ AMD CPU Fast graphics card with 128 MB memory The system works quite well, and frankly, Windows 2000 uses resources much better than that Godawful system pig called Windows XP. Firefox also works much better on Windows 2000 than on XP. On XP, FF rapidly eats up the entire 1 GB of available memory. On Windows 2000, it takes a number of days to do that, possibly over a week. Also I have found that Windows 2000 is more stable than XP. It is nearly impossible to bring this Win 2K box down. I think I have hard-rebooted it maybe once. Every rare while, you might want to reboot for system performance. You need to reboot XP quite a bit more often. Actually, most of my Win 2K reboots are done just to check for new applications, since a lot of apps only check for new stuff on a reboot. True, Win 2K does not have System Restore, but I so horribly mangled my XP box with System Restore a while back, that I wonder what good it even is. On Firefox, I reverted back to Firefox 3.0.10 within a day. You can get old FF versions here and here. I could not find Firefox 3.0.13 available anywhere. But those two sites only go up to 3.0.11. How to revert to an older version of Firefox? Just go and get the old version manually and install it on top of the new one. You might have a problem with bookmarks though.

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