Bag's Rants

This may be legal but is it ethical.

I've just installed some software that I purchased quite legitimately from PC World. It failed to install. Ooops, some problems with DLLs. After a bit of investigation it was because I had not upgraded my Office software. I still run Office 97 although I have two licensed copies of Office 2000. One is free and the other installed on my sons computer. Don't ask. I don't have any requirement for any additional functionality so I didn't bother and he did because his school work was on Office 2000.

So now I have a software application I can only use on one system, my sons, which has a less powerful processor. What a bummer.

Anyway. Looking at this whole situation it became clear to me how many applications required upgrades which appear to give no added functionality for the user. Media player is a case in point. Microsoft decides to add Digital Rights Management to it's media player to stop piracy. This causes problems for some users but who cares. At least you can select what patches to apply. Then you discover that a critical software patch to stop one of the latest worms or something has the media player patch included. So if you install the critical patch you have also patched your totally unrelated media player with the DRM code.

And I think that the number of patches we have installed for XP has exceeded the size of the original OS itself. The original came on one CD and one patch alone was 250Mb.

Next thing is we will be forced into this trusted computer environment that has been talked about over the last few years. Read more here. But, it will be OK on MS and the US Government will have a backdoor. We can trust them.

Roll on a decent OS.

posted by Bag @ 1:43 am