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Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200© Copyright Darrell Anderson. During my investigation I took a side trip and fiddled around learning how to strip Windows 2000 (W2K) of various obnoxious components like Internet Explorer, Outlook, NetMeeting, etc. I got pretty far into the project before scrapping and moving on, but I was able to strip the bugger to its essentials. I would have been an excellent witness at the stupid and meaningless anti-trust trial. I had originally thought I’d keep a W2K partition on my hard drive simply for reference purposes. I eventually abandoned that idea, not because of my desire to migrate to Linux, but because of the well-familiar Microsoft “resistance is futile” attitude. W2K is designed to automatically convert the original NT4 file system to NT5. W2K will do this even when an NT4 partition is tagged as hidden and has no relationship to the W2K partition. No questions asked, no warnings, just boom. This is obnoxiousness and belligerence as yet unknown. Technically I know of no way to avoid the issue other than maintaining NT4 partitions on a physically isolated drive. I even tried various boot loader programs that can “hide” partitions upon booting, but W2K nonetheless changed my NT4 partitions — all without my permission. Without a contractual meeting of the minds, such an action is called trespass. This attitude that my computer is not my property is why I want little to do with M$. I did my experimenting with W2K on a spare drive, and my original configuration never was in any danger. So you see Bill, resistance is not futile and I will not be assimilated. Please notice Bill that I am being polite about what you can do with your philosophy. Pay attention to the graffiti, Bill, the next time you are in a public rest room, and you will better understand my thoughts about your attitude with respect to my property. An individual I know bought a new computer; having never owned one before. No matter where he shopped he seemed to always get stuck with the M$ tax and so he bought a system with XP installed. I am unfamiliar with XP although I had read a little about some of the “phone home” shenanigans. A lot of that nonsense can be disabled, but not intuitively. That individual was lost and terrified of connecting on-line as long as all of the Micros~1 spy-ware was enabled. So I spent a lot of my time surfing and learning ways to help him. I wish I knew more about Linux so I could have encouraged him to simply avoid M$ brainwashing, but my own Linux expertise would have left him frustrated. I’d love to see him learn computers from the Linux side so he would not have to unlearn M$ habits; but the timing is wrong and he is learning how to deal with XP. On the good note, however, we spent about a week dissecting XP in order to stop all the phone home nonsense. A third-party two-way firewall helped monitor the system and some subsequent rules prohibited any phone home nonsense. Did you know that simply invoking the File Explorer Find feature triggered a phone home attempt? Not only would W2K never again see the light of day on my computer, but neither would XP or any other subsequent M$ operating system or software. This issue is all about control and who gets to do the controlling. What the M$ groupies don’t seem to grasp is the simple fundamental point that this computer is mine. Most Windows users simply shrugged when confronted with the NT4-to-NT5 file conversion. I did not. Furthermore, I am tired of the proprietary software attitude that forces consumers to pay for solutions that never should have appeared in the first place. Bugs are fixed and then sold as new “features”! The open source attitude does not suffer from that psychological malady and because source code can be reviewed, probably never will. In fact, some of the big open source projects, browsers for example, are often patched and fixed within hours after a bug report is posted. But the patch is posted as a bug fix, not as a new feature. Try that in the stuffed-shirt statist-protected corporate world. Yet, these proprietary software vendors seem to think they can install whatever they want on my property, and I am supposed to sit idly by and even smile! Bill, go read some more graffiti. Finis. |
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