Flutterby™! : Microsoft sucks! Really! 2005-08-09 01:15:33.60877+00

Microsoft sucks! Really!

2005-08-09 01:15:33.60877+00 by Dan Lyke 7 comments

Hey Scoble: You want to convince me that Microsoft isn't the suckiest suck that ever freakin' sucked? Then fix your damned validation servers. I've been trying to get a blasted update for this piece of crap for a while now, I've paid my hundreds of dollars for a damned XP license, and every time I try to get some freakin' support for this shit I get:

Why did it not validate?

It appears that our activation servers are not functioning properly. Please return to complete the validation process at a later time.

We hope that you'll return later to retry the validation process so that you may enjoy the full benefits of genuine Microsoft software.

While that's just fucking great that you assholes can't run a goddam IT center to save your own freakin' customers, that leaves me trying to get some software running on this lousy ass excuse for an "operating system" while being left out in the cold.

Despite, yes, paying you schmucks waaaay too damned much money for buggy crap! And it's not even being a good games platform right now.

Damn, having a Mac and a Linux machine as my primaries for a month or two have made me see the light. Windows sucks. Microsoft sucks. And every apologist who isn't screaming that Redmond needs to be nuked back to flat obsidian in order to save us from more of this annoying unnecessary and frankly freakin' incompetent horror sucks.

That is all.

Bahahahaha! So I tried it with a browser other than the suckage that is IE

, and they gave me a little executable to download. I run it, and got:

Augh! So then Windows Media Player decides to go tits up and non-responsive. Grrrr...

#Comment Re: made: 2005-08-09 05:33:03.382369+00 by: meuon [edit history]

Not sure who the original voice of that really is, but I appreciate it more by playing with obscure abandoned hardware like my Zaurus.

People ask me: "Why Linux/FreeBSD/..." - My answer is "because Microsoft is so bad that people all over the world contribute insane amounts of time and resources to develop a free alternative that works better.."

What is scary is that as disjointed as "FOSS" development is, how well it works in comparison.

It is interesting to note how Dan's tone towards Micrsoft has changed now that he's become a regular Mac user. It's also interesting to note how his vocabulary has changed! Dan was the first person, other than my grandmother, who I heard use "fudge" as a curse word. I guess using the Mac has made him feel comfortable with the more "pedestrian" verbage.

"Back in the day" I developed 2D and 3D games in DOS using Watcom C and the Metagraphics library (with the assembly source tweaked). I used BRIEF to edit code because the Watcom IDE was unusuable.

Oh yeah, a couple years ago I need to write a simple DOS-based program to do some graphics. Instead of brushing the dust off Watcom and Metagraphics, I decided to see what DJGPP was like. I was completely blown away. Not only did GPP produce excellent binaries from C/C++ code, but the IDE was about the best text-mode IDE I'd ever used, and the free graphics library made Metagraphics look downright sad. All this from GPL'd, free software.

This points to a trend I've seen in the computer industry since the dawn of the command prompt. Too much of our industry operates normally on the "bleeding edge". Everyone thinks they have to run in the top 1%. Sure, in a year or so, that 1% looks more like 50%. But in three years, that 50% becomes 100% and the tools are much more stable. When I was making games, I was pushing the envelope of DOS development: 32-bit protected mode, direct addressing of video RAM, tweaking the graphics libary code, writing my own file formats and compression schemes. All this to get a decent simulated 3D enviroment in software that allowed for a 100Mhz Pentium (without MMX) with 16MB of RAM to show all the players of both teams in a football game on screen at once without noticeable lag. Now, I could do the same using free tools and not have to put the effort into tweaking the bleeding edge tools. Of course, now the hardware can throw around the video like it's nobody's business - doing texture-mapped wireframes at really high refresh rates.