It's been just under a week since my last ranting - truth be told, working full-time really has taken it out of me, and my beloved internet has found itself neglected of a would-be linkslutter. However, there's still been a few issues that have "arisen", so to speak.
I'll be the first to admit that a lot of people use XP illigitemately - but honestly, who gives a shit if we're screwing over a monopoly that's screwing over the consumer? Personally, I only use XP because it's the most popular platform that I know everything is made for. There's a Mac in my household, but yeah.. Mac.. no. I don't have the patience to learn all the intricases of Mac when Windows gladly fills my time with its endless problems.
But just the other day, I got a message, 6 months after I installed XP clean onto my system, that my copy of XP "may not be legitimate - you may be a victim of software fraud".
Gasp! You don't say, I'm a victim of getting something for free that I should be getting for free anyway? And what's that, you say? I'm inavertedly taking money away from Bill Gates, the richest man on the planet? I'm so ashamed of myself. Oh wait - I live below the poverty line (technically) - and I really don't feel like paying $150+ for a system with countless bugs.
However, this little notification stored itself in my taskbar and wouldn't go away. Like most unused icons in the taskbar, if you forget they exist for a few days, they'll be hidden. So I just figured that if I ignore it, it'll go away.
Not so. Apparently this little fucker stays there all the time until you buy a legal copy. Well I was having none of that BS cluttering up my neglected taskbar, so I partook in some investigation to get rid of it - but no matter what I searched, the only way to seemingly dispose of it (for now) is to actually spend money... so screw that. I tried living with it for a few days, but found that it was an aesthetic headache, and I went into my sluething.
But this brings me to my handy little solution. All I had to do was go into the taskbar options, select the icon, and put it to "hide always", and poof, it's gone, at least off my visibility.
Which leads me to my final point. It seems that Microsoft just assumes/relies on people's general computer illiteracy to get by. Most people wouldn't have a clue how to get rid of that, or make it "go away" by proxy. Microsoft tries to appear legitimate, but given their exploits of routinely screwing over both the competitor and the consumer and avoiding being broken down (except for that one case, but yeah, do you feel like there's competition in the market now) for the better half of two decades. . . it doesn't happen. I mean, how many of you actually READ what the security updates are doing, or do you just mindlessly click "yes" so the popup will go away? How many of you have EVER noticed a performance boost from any update, ever?
It's just a thought - when I disabled the updates to stop the notifier from pissing me off, it "warned" me that I'd stop receiving critical updates. . . critical what? What has Windows EVER done for ANYONE apart from suck but be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time (ie: The 80's, when everyone was high on coke and buying shit).
In my ideal utopic world, companies wouldn't be huge dicks. Oh, how I dream sometimes.
-Mark
1 comment:
Updates are bullshit. I personally think they're uploading software problems so you have to buy patches and be even more subservient to their gear. Sort of like my belief that Norton and McAfee hire people to create viruses in order to ensure people will buy their neat protection programs. It's sort of like paying for protection from the Mob.
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