I am NOT anti-Microsoft

No, really, I'm not!

Now while I agree this may initially sound like some Microsoft-bashing, it isn't really. No, honest! I do not hate Microsoft - I hate idiocy and, more to the point, the concept of marketing idiocy as being able to lower the Total Cost of Ownership of a given system.

Just to prove that I am justified in not hating The Beast of Redmond, let me extoll a couple of the virtues of their most recent desktop OS, Windows XP. For starters, its reasonably quick (although corners have been cut to achieve this) and the level of integration of the UI is truely impressive. Presumably due to the tight integration between the presentation layer and the OS, the UI tends to whiz around the place at deeply impressive speeds. The way Plug 'n' Play is handled generally tends to work extremely well and so on, so it's not all bad.

It's not all nice, though...

So what do you do? In vain you unplug and re-plug the camera a couple of times to see if that helps at all. Still nothing. By this time you're getting annoyed, so you decide to reinstall the drivers for the camera, only you can't seeing as it's a standard mass-storage device and the drivers are built in.

Wonderful.

You need this digital camera working, so desperation starts to kick in. You spend a half-hour digging around for the CD that contained the latest service pack and try to install it, but it it won't seeing as you've run Online Update. So you try online update, which is more than a little painful seeing as you have all of a single channel ISDN connection to the 'Net.

Arrg!!

Feeling slightly more calm having eaten something and watched a bit of TV, you come back to your PeeCee to find that Online Update has indeed used a shotgun method - and blown holes in your XP installation! It patched something to do with TCP/IP that knocked out the internet connection firewall, and then forcably restarted your machine. You poor little PeeCee dutifully rebooted and reconnected to the internet but, seeing as the internet connection firewall was disabled, your machine is now 0wn3d by a nine-year-old in Romania.

This wonderfull little chap has, in the past ten minutes, dutifully ripped off your outlook contact database, mailed obscenities to your boss, subscribed you to every hard-core porn mailing list he can find and turned your machine into HaX0R central, connecting to IRC through your internet account and initiated a Denial of Service attack against some large blue-chip corporation.

After tearing the ISDN cable out and spending the next two hours clensing your machine, you are overjoyed when you plug in your USB camera and it's seen! Perhaps it was worth all the hassle after all!

The photos are processed, imported to your Incredibly Important Document and saved to disk. You smile happily as you insert a blank CD-R into your writer, and then feel it fade as you suddenly realise you can no longer see the drive in 'My Computer'...

I don't hate Microsoft. I hate idiocy.

Oh, and just to add fuel to the fire, name another OS that has this kind of information on their corporate homepage...