Nathan's Occasional Blog

Anti-MS Group Aims to Block Vista:

A public interest lawyer who is also intending to run as a Republican in the 2006 Illinois gubernatorial race is taking his fight to Microsoft in hopes of preventing the company from releasing what he calls “bad code.” Andy Martin of The Committee to Fight Microsoft on Tuesday announced his intentions to block Microsoft from releasing its Windows Vista operating system. Martin intends to ask Microsoft for an unconditional warranty that the operating system is free of bugs that could result in security vulnerabilities.

“Bill Gates sells the public defective products, and then expects us to spend years being his guinea pigs, while he corrects the myriad of defects and vulnerabilities in his defective code. This is mass consumer fraud.” Martin argued. “It is unacceptable corporate behavior. Over four years after Windows XP was released I still receive regular ‘updates’ and ‘bug fixes,’ which reflect a product that was originally scandalously defective.”

I don’t think this asshole realizes that we’re talking about software here. I mean let’s think about releasing an OS in comparison with something Mr. Martin uses every day – a car. I’m just guessing here admittedly, but your average car proabably has … oh I don’t know, we’ll go with 10,000 parts (if you count all the bolts and screws). EVERY car manufacturer has a recall of some kind every year … and those are just the defects that the government is worried enough about to mandate a fix. There are TONS of maintenance bulletins, etc. released as well.

Sounds just like patching to me … except an OS has millions of lines of code and a defect won’t KILL you! That’s right boys and girls, your computer won’t flip over at high speed and kill you (Explorer). Nor will a slight physical impact to the case cause the hard drive to explode in a ball of firey death (Pinto). So why isn’t Mr. Martin flaming the car industry? Or airlines who lose luggage, cancel flights without notice, and generally do everything in their power to piss off their customers? [Oh, they occasionally kill their customers too.]

Let’s get back to the computer industry … why doesn’t Mr. Martin yell at Apple? Or Oracle? Or Novell? Or Symantec? [Hell, I yell at Symantec all the time.] Or Adobe? Or ANY other company that’s ever written a line of code and put it out for use by someone else?

Shut the hell up. Seriously.

Update: It seems I’ve got company in the “this guy is a complete idiot” department. Thanks Brandon @ Longhornblogs.com!