Robert Pogson

Over at LinuxToday.com, Carla Schroder hits the nail on the head with her blog entry, ”
I Give Up. Windows Is Proof That People Are Too Stupid To Use Computers.

And too stupid or dishonest to report Microsoft Windows as the defective disaster that it is. If it were any other type of product it would have banned from every country in the world long ago. ”

She goes on to recount situations where people are in denial that the OS they use is garbage.

I have witnesses these things many times:

• acceptance of virus scanning as normal even when it sucks the life out of the machine
• thinking that other OS is “free”
• thinking re-re-rebooting is normal
• accepting phoning home, DRM, BSODs, network glitches
• accepting that PCs slow down with use
• accepting that the user has done something wrong to cause a crash
• mistaking pretty graphics for a pretty OS
• accepting the EULA

It all reminds me of an interesting day about 15 years ago. A backyard mechanic had overhauled his differential and took the car out for a spin. He turned a couple of corners and a wheel and axle fell off! He had forgotten or not installed properly the retaining clip. Oops. I don’t think he ever made that mistake again, but M$ and its customers keep making the same mistake over again. That is stupid.

If one bought a new car and the wheels kept falling off, you would immediately realize it was poorly built or designed to fail. Why cannot stupid people realize that other OS is badly designed??? Why do stupid people keep paying whatever M$ asks even as the price of hardware falls and the price of the licence for that other OS as a proportion of the price of a PC keeps rising.

M$ thought they had a problem when PCs were selling around $1000. Many OEMs helped them out by throwing stuff into PCs to keep the price about there for years. Now you can buy a quad-core, multi-gigabyte, terabyte machine for a few hundred dollars and people by the hundreds of millions keep paying for that other OS, with all its flaws.

Stupidity does not end with the end-users. The developers, analysts, bloggers, apologists, and trolls who keep writing for that other OS, and the OEMs who push it, and the retailers are all part of the circle of stupidity.

Fortunately, FLOSS is a breath of fresh air, a beam of light, real enlightenment in the world of IT. I have not bought a PC with that other OS for many years because I make my own but no one needs to now that a number of OEMs are starting to see the light. M$ is not their friend. It is not smart to rely on M$. Do not accept candy from that stranger.