Friday, February 9, 2007

Some people

I think everybody should just drop all other operating systems, and just get Vista. It's just the best. But apparently, not everybody has what it takes.

Here's one example:
I was given a beta CD of Vista. I finally got around to putting it on my Windows partition last month. The install went pretty smoothly - it had an option to upgrade the XP partition, preserving the applications and data already present.

I didn't really play with it long enough to form a firm opinion on Vista, but the experiment ended rather badly. Vista popped up a window telling me that the trial period had expired, and it was time to pay up. I had to go to work at that point, so I shut down the machine, brought it into the office, and booted it up again. Then, the "trial period expired" window and a browser window - supplied so that I could buy a license at the MS site - were the only functionality that Vista would enable.
I couldn't go to my desktop, Windows Explorer, a command prompt, or anything that would enable me to access my hard drive. Files that I had created under my paid-for XP were now inaccessible to me; no way was provided to copy them off before reinstalling XP. My hard disk was, in essence, being held hostage; paying for a Vista licence was the ransom.

I tried to reinstall XP from its CD while preserving the data on the partition, but I got some frightening error messages in the process and aborted before risking the whole partition.

OK, I see a million problems with this.
  • Why have Windows on a partition? That's wasting all of the other partitions!
  • She's running something called "Ubuntu" on the other partition. What's that?
  • A beta version of Vista? News flash! It's out! Buy it!
  • She uses some crazy language called "Python" instead of Visual Basic.
  • She uses Oracle instead of SQL Server.
If you want just a toy computer, go ahead and put all of that junk on it. If you want a real computer, go Vista.

She is kinda hot, though. Go check out her picture.

Update:
I did some research (MSN search is awesome!) on Ubuntu and Python. It turns out they're open source! Fricking Commies.

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