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Several years ago, I was browsing at a local computer store when the owner cautioned me about a serious virus that was starting to circulate.
It eats up your hard drive,
he warned, and it
will make your machine act in unpredictable ways. It will
hang your computer for mysterious reasons, so that the only
way out is a hardware reset. You'll run out of memory even
when you're doing really simple stuff, and some of your
peripherals won't work right.
This sounded like a real threat, so I pressed for
details. Does this have a name?
I asked.
I call it the Gates Virus,
he said, but most
people call it Windows 98.
Alas, I was unable to heed his warnings. This pathogen spread through the computers of the world, including some of my own, and it did fill up hard drives and cause my machines to freeze and hang for incomprehensible reasons.
The company behind this assault, an outfit named Microsoft, was prosecuted by the federal government and was even found guilty in the years since it inflicted Windows 98 on us.
While its lawyers were in court, the company was running
ads that encouraged us buy Windows 2000 because it was
13 times more reliable than Windows 98.
It would seem to me that if Microsoft knew how to make a reliable operating system, the company should have offered us one in the first place. Instead, Microsoft first tells us Windows 98 is a great improvement, and then as soon as we have it, the company tells us that it's shoddy merchandise and we should buy an even more expensive product.
So I was more than skeptical when I read that this continuing criminal enterprise known as Microsoft would be releasing a new product on Oct. 25: Windows XP.
And my distrust was exacerbated when I learned that
there's a product activation
procedure so that each
copy of XP works on one and only one computer.
It's not that I practice or encourage software piracy. I've got a legitimate copy of Windows 98 for every machine that runs it. But trouble-shooting is simplified when every machine is running the exact same copy of Windows 98, so that I don't have to figure out whether a given machine is running the non-SE version or whatever when we see the famous Microsoft Blue Screen of Death.
But it's time to look on the bright side.
Consider that the American economy was already starting to slide before the Sept. 11 attack. And since then, people have cut back on their travels. Airlines have been hurt hard, but so also have motels and restaurants.
It's gotten so bad that our leaders have told us that it is an act of patriotism to spend money, so that our economy will start moving again.
And now here's Microsoft, stepping up in a patriotic way to make sure we do spend money. Cheapskate home users who had been accustomed to buying just one copy of Windows for two or three machines will now have to buy separate copies.
And that's just the start of the spending spree that will rescue the tech sector and, by extension, the rest of the economy.
Suppose your old laser printer succumbs. You'll have an increasingly difficult time finding one that knows how to form its own characters -- many of the newer ones rely on Windows for that. And it will also be harder to find one that connects via the traditional parallel port -- Microsoft is pushing for all peripherals to work off the Universal Serial Bus.
In other words, it won't be easy to find a printer than can just replace your old one without a lot of aggravation. The new printer will want you to be using Windows XP, whether you want to or not.
The same holds for other pieces of your system. Need a
new modem that can work with a reliable and affordable
operating system, like Linux? Good luck, in a market choked
with winmodems
that function only with Windows. In
a couple of years, will you be able to find a keyboard,
monitor, or mouse that isn't USB? Will you be able to find
a SCSI scanner or CD burner in a USB world, or will you be
replacing a lot of hardware?
You'll be happily plugging along on a 233-mhz Pentium with a 2-gb hard drive and 64 mb of RAM. You'll need to replace something like a printer. And the new printer will work only with Windows XP, and Windows XP won't work with anything less than a 300-mhz machine with 256 mb of RAM and an 8 gb hard disk.
You'll be spending money like the Dow was pushing 12,000. With all those enforced sales, the tech sector will soar again, leading the way to general prosperity.
I don't know how we'll express our gratitude to Microsoft for this great patriotic act, but I'm sure that someone will find a way. I just hope it doesn't involve criminal penalties for running Linux on old hardware.
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