1. Introduction
Thanks to
the good graces of some people who know me and like my
website
I have been
given the use of Windows XP on a Hewlett Packard computer.
Altogether,
the first impressions are fairly good. In fact, Windows XP seems to deliver most
of what Windows 95 promised, and the most striking thing about it is that so
far I haven’t seen it crash. Also, for the first time I have used Windows (of
which I know the 95 and 98 versions quite well) there is a more or less decent
introduction to the OS, even though it contains a lot of propaganda for Microsoft
and for Windows.
In this
text I will document some of my first impressions with Windows XP
- followed by some second impressions.
2. Why Windows XP?
Having
noted my distaste for earlier versions of Windows why am I using XP? There are
three main reasons.
First, I
need a system that requires little fuss and problems to work, since I have a
rare disease (M.E.) that leaves me little energy. Second, it turned out I could
not buy a dual boot system with a working Linux on it, since – as MyCom computers told me, where the system I use was bought –
“this is forbidden”. Third, over the past three years I have installed quite a
few versions of Linux but never succeeded in installing a version that worked
with internet, printers and sound, and to do so apparently required months of
delving into obscure hardware specifications and forbidding Unix-prose, for
which I have little taste, and less energy.
In part,
these reasons are personal and explained elsewhere on this website, but the
second reason is of some general interest, since it shows that Microsoft has a
considerable monopolistic hold on the resellers of computers, even though this
is illegal.
3. The fundamental problem with Windows XP
The
fundamental problem with Windows XP that I presently see is the new Microsoft
licensing policy, which seems to imply that everyone who runs Windows XP has to
open his system to Microsoft, so that Microsoft can control you are behaving
like a decent customer, and can upload newer versions behind your back for
which you will be billed, and close down earlier versions, because you did not
pay or do not conform to Microsoft’s ideas about decency.
The officially
given reason by Microsoft is that Microsoft wants to stop illegal copying. With
this I have some abstract sympathy, for it seems to me that people should pay
for software they do use and that is sold to others. But this does not mean
that I am willing to grant a corporation I don’t trust the right to delve into my
private computer, and there seem to me to be better ways to protect software
than Microsoft’s way.
Also, the
real reason seems to be that Microsoft wants to control whatever it can
control, including you and me.
4. How to work around Windows XP?
The problem
is then how one works around Windows XP and avoids Microsoft taking over
control over one’s private computer. There are the following ways.
User and consumer-groups: I cannot believe most users,
especially those who are not naive about computers, to be or remain content
with Microsoft’s XP and Net plans, and I suppose this is the best chance
private persons have against Microsoft. Also, I do not believe that in states
with decent legal systems Microsoft will succeed in its plans – but it will
probably be a considerable struggle for consumer organizations to keep
Microsoft working within the law.
Registration of Windows: When I went first on the Internet
in 1996 I already had 10 years of extensive experience with PCs, and had acquired
some strong beliefs about privacy that turned out to be true. Briefly, I
regarded and regard the Internet as a virtual public place, where I do not want
to exist as I am, in part to avoid discrimination for my opinions, and in part
to prevent being persecuted by commercial firms. This is part of the reason I
am on line as “Maarten Maartensz”,
which is my real first name and the alias under which
I published on paper.
So I will
register Windows also under this alias. This makes it impossible for me to pay
on line and buy on line, but this I do not want to do in any case. Also, I do
not mind buying software – indeed, I owe a legal copy of FrontPage 2000, also
registered on “Maarten Maartensz”
and bought on a CD in a shop, which is the way I prefer, for I want to deal
with real people in my own environment when I do business, and not with whoever
hides behind an internet-URL.
Alternatives to Microsoft: By and large I don’t like the
software Microsoft makes. Most of it is simply bad, and nearly all of it is targeted
at very average users with little real knowledge of computers – those who love
Microsoft’s talking paperclip and believe in “Intellisense”
– which I am not.
For most of
the things I do with computers I know better alternatives than are supplied by
Microsoft and I intend to use these. An example is StarOffice
5.1, which is an old and terminated version that used to be free and which I
still have on CD and like much better than MS Office. (The new version is StarOffice 6.0 and costs $ 80. I haven’t seen it yet, but
it also is very probably better than MS Office, and certainly much cheaper.)
Alternatives to Windows:
There are two serious alternatives
to Windows, and many less serious ones. The two serious ones are Apple
Computers and a Linux OS. I will not discuss Apple here, but I will try to get
a properly working Linux on the Hewlett Packard I am using now. My main demand
here is that I get a version that installs without problems and includes Internet,
sound and printing without my having to delve into technicalities I think
boring and useless. This ought to be possible in the coming years.
For those
who like programming and open source software there is an interesting
programming language and environment called Squeak. This I work with myself,
and I can recommend it to anyone who is serious about programming. It provides
working if sometimes somewhat simple versions of things computers can do, and
enables one to do most things one can do with a computer with Squeak (and to
program everything else, if one has the time and the knowledge). For people
naive to computers
or programming
it will probably be too difficult.
5. New features in the present set-up
The set-up
of the HP plus Windows XP has a number of new features that please me.
Monitor:
The monitor is better than the one I had, and
is capable of higher screen resolutions, which is very pleasant and looks
nicer.
Windows XP: This looks better than earlier Windows, in
part no doubt because of the better hardware I use. The fundamental difference between
this and the earlier versions of Windows I used, which crashed daily on me, is
that so far Windows XP has not crashed at all. This is a great benefit, for I
have lost a lot of data because of this.
Standby: Unfortunately, the Hewlett Packard has a noisy
cooling fan, like all the computers I have had since 1986. (It isn’t worse than
the earlier ones, but it
also
is not better.) Fortunately, there now is a standby
mode under Windows, which switches off most things including the screen and the
fan. This also is a very pleasant feature, since it removes a lot of useless
bothersome noise and saves energy.
Old Windows programs:
The old Windows programs I used and
like installed and work painlessly. These tend to be freeware, such as Powerdesk 4 and WS-FTP LE, but I was pleased to find these still work under Windows XP, since I like them much
better than what Microsoft has to offer in their stead.
The
above first impressions are - as often - far too
favorable. As far as I can see there are two things that have been
improved in Windows XP: The stability of the OS is far better than it
used to be in all other Windows, and the general menus look a little
bit better. But the first feature is probably stolen from Linux (since
Microsoft could not get its act together from 1995 till 2002, and the
Linux code is open source, and very probably written by far better
programmers than are willing to work for Microsoft), and the second
feature is merely cosmetical, and not big change or improvement anyway.
1. The very many crashes of Word
I said above Windows XP doesn't crash
anymore, and this is true. The programming code was very probably
stolen from Linux, since Microsoft couldn't
design a non-crashing OS for seven
years, and the people behind Linux designed a stable system ever since
they started to write their alternative to Windows,
while the code is
open source, which is a Good Thing - which
also allows Microsoft
to "borrow"
(steal, copy without thanks or mentioning it) the code.
Instead, the flagship of Microsoft, the
texteditor Word, has crashed a few hundreds of times on me the past
month (when writing html in it, which should be possible, but is not).
It crashes in all manner of circumstances, apparently for all manner
of reasons - and Microsoft has invented a very cheap and dirty trick:
Before it crashes you are informed "politely" that it will crash, and
that Microsoft is sorry, and that you can send the report to Microsoft
- which if I had done so, and reported all the crashes that happened
over the last month, would have cost me a good part of what Word costs
in the shop in telephone ticks. And I don't mention my own loss of
time or money.
2. The many crashes of FrontPage 2002
The website this text is on was mostly
written with FrontPage 2000, which is not a good program
at all, but which I
use because I bought it and it does a decent job in maintaining a
database of hyperlinks. Since this site has some 45.000 internal
hyperlinks, I need an automatically maintained database.
So I updated to FrontPage 2002. This crashes like Word
2002, though not as often. Also, it contains
precisely
the
same sort of bugs that FrontPage 2000 had. For example, as I am typing
this my text is automatically spellchecked. I have
told FrontPage
2002 ten times - all
according to "Microsoft Help" - that I am writing
this page in English; I have saved the page and started again;
FrontPage 2002 agrees this page is supposed to be English ..... but
nearly every word I write is marked as a mistake, and FrontPage 2002
keeps treating my text as
if
it is Dutch. (Also, FrontPage's spellchecker
doesn't distinguish between Dutch and English: For supposedly
misspelled words in this text that has been marked and accepted as
English 10 times, I get a list of Dutch alternatives for English words
... plus some English words.)
It is the same with tables: There is
supposed to be a feature that lets you make your tables with a "default
for new tables". Well: Forget it - however many times you set it, in
FrontPage 2002 your new table according to your own "default for new
tables" will in fact be Microsoft's
default of
2 rows and 2 columns, whatever you do.
And so on, and so on, and so on. In
short: Do NOT get FrontPage 2002. There are two much better
alternatives: Macromedia's Dreamweaver (fairly expensive) and Naimo,
which looks like Dreamweaver to some extent, but is
by Korean programmers,
I believe,
and is far cheaper
than Dreamweaver and than FrontPage.
3. The utterly insane "Microsoft Help"
It may happen you want help with a
Microsoft program, and you press F1 or Help. Well .... your 1.4 Mhz
machine starts trundling for 10 tot 30 seconds, then shifts away the
program your working in first
one time by making the window smaller, then
does the same
again for the second time, and then - after a looooooong wait - "Microsoft Help"
appears. It is written in a dialect of Microsoft's legal staff that
pretends to be English, and has no answer for nearly all questions you
pose, and if it answers, often these answers are false (as outlined in
the previous section). Contextual help, that
was already present 15 years ago on DOS (in good programs not written
by Microsoft) has disappeared or doesn't work. Much of the information
that can be understood is plainly false, for it doesn't work. Most of
the text is solidly unreadable. And the most evident things are not
explained at all and are nowhere to found in the whole "Help" system.
For example, I have yet to find out
(after 6 weeks of trying, with 16 years of computing
experience)
how
to add a drive to Windows XP. Apparently Bill finds it easier to check
your computer behind your back if everything is on the C:\-drive, and
so the "Microsoft Help" does not contain the word "drive" or even a
hint about where to find information about adding one, as was very
easy in all previous versions of Windows, and in MS DOS.
A good instance of Microsoft's help was
the one I got in Windows 95, when I tried to get on line: "To get on
line you first have to built a postoffice." And "postoffice" was not
to be found in the helpsystem. I believe this explanation has
disappeared in XP, but what remains is like it.
4. The programming ability of Microsoft
I am at least a decent programmer in several languages. Programming is
not something I would like to do as a job, but I have a head for
mathematics, and since programming is a kind of applied mathematical
logic, the main problem with learning a programming language is
memorizing the many names and parameters in the system,
and getting a feel for the programming language, which takes time,
since any decent programming language requires knowing at least
hundreds of instructions before you can write really useful programs
in it.
I have now nearly
17 years of experience
with Microsoft products, and I don't recall ANY Microsoft program that
was much good. All crashed on me; all were full of bugs and
infelicities; in all cases any available help was written in
unreadable legalese instead of English or Dutch; and apparently
Microsoft does not debug its code: Its second to hundredth rate
programming slaves write it, then hand it over to their master-lawyers
who write EULA's for it that force you to sign away all your rights to
use the program, and after that you have to face the mess. You don't
believe this? Read the next section.
5. The morals of Microsoft
Here
is part of an enforced "user agreement" of Microsoft, as reported in
PCPlus #194, nominally of October 2002
(but for sale in August).
"This
time around, the most obvious was the subtle rewriting of the Media
Player EULA -
'You
agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and
software protected by digital rights management ('Secure Content'),
Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be
automatically downloaded
onto your computer. These security related updates
may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and
use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update,
we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the
updates.'
It is
difficult to know how to respond to such a change, effectively
giving
Microsoft carte blanche to install whatever
it likes onto your system with
the express aim of preventing you from running either software or
media,
especially when disowning the necessity to even tell you this
up-front (..)"
The
stresses and highlighting are added by me. My own response is
to try to install Linux Mandrake on this computer as soon as I can, in the hope it runs on this recent HP computer. Also,
this Windows XP policy is of course in itself an excellent argument FOR open source
- for what Microsoft wants is clearly illegal, immoral, indecent,
improper and by my own moral norms criminal and in conflict with my
understanding of my rights according to existing Dutch and
international law. It's like the droit de
seigneur: If Bill Gate wants to rape you, he feels he is entitled to -
and didn't you agree to it by clicking "Yes" when you installed the
program, and did have neither the legal expertise, nor the linguistic
ability, nor two weeks holiday, in which to puzzle through a Microsoft
EULA?
But
then Microsoft has a larger yearly turnover and profit than most
nations in the world, including the Netherlands, and therefore Bill
and his legal minions hope to get away with
raping their customers, stealing their privacy, installing code behind
their backs that switch off programs and destroy their customers data
... and expect praise and thanks of their users.
If
you missed the point: What Big Brother Bill "agreed" to do when he
ruins your system for you, including
your data and your programs "with your permission", and steals your
private information "with your permission", is that there is
somewhere in the world, say on Cayman Islands,
some website that may "explain" this,
in Microsoft's unreadable legalese: "
If we provide such a security update"
- which:
"may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use
other software on your computer"
-
"we will use reasonable efforts to post
notices on a web site explaining the updates.
"
(Note that if there is no anonymous web site somewhere in the universe
that explains the updates, all that is necessary, according to this
EULA, is that Bill once has tried to upload it to a non-existing
website.)
6. Big Brother Bill
Hence my own impression is that Bill
Gates and his top executives are getting insane,
or already are insane,
probably due to
having too much power, too much money, too much personal greed, and
too little effective control - the same recipe that made Nero, Stalin
and Mao.
There are many reasons to believe this
("All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All
great men are bad." Lord Acton, summing up human history.) and one
also mirrors the outcomes of fascism and socialism: Spectacularly ugly
"art", apparently addressed at morons.
An example is Microsoft Works,
that was installed on this system when I got it. This is so
extraordinarily ugly
that it can only have been designed by a bunch of manic depressive
anal retentives. I mean: The ugliness it achieves is so spectacular
that it is in a class of its own, like socialist realist art, or
fascist architecture. Also, those who made it must believe this is
Good for you, for you can't change anything about it (as would have
been very easy).
7. Is Linux the answer?
I very much hope it is, but I have
little reason to be optimistic. First, see Linux
on this site, that
tells the tale of my experiences with quite a
few
Linux distributions
on the previous computer I
used.
Next, frightened by Big Brother Bill's
plans for me and the net, I bought Linux Mandrake 8.2, in the hope it
installs without problems on this HP machine, and I can take leave from
Windows and Microsoft for nearly all purposes
forever.
But no: Linux Mandrake 8.2 (price: $ 70) so far does NOT install at
all on this system. The "bootable" CD does not boot, and I am
supposed to make a 3.5 floppy disk instead, which refuses to
accept
all
the bits that are needed.
There may be a workaround, and I will
certainly ask Mandrake, but I am not optimistic - I suppose that the
probability is high that Big Brother Bill has fixed Windows XP so that
it is impossible to have a dual boot system on it, together with Linux
(as is necessary, unless you buy a second computer, if you want to
migrate your data on a Windows machine to Linux).