Another Microsoft Rant

Why do I even bother?  Mostly to vent of steam, but also to remind you of the terrible OS under which you toil.  Windows 7 is nothing more than an upgraded prison.

Even though there is not a single computer in my home that runs Microsoft software on a regular basis, I encountered two Microsoft-created demons in the same day.

The first popped up when I had to reboot into Windows to watch CBS online.  Of course I used Firefox; I know better than to trust Internet Explorer, that slutty browser who's more permissive than Jenna Jameson.

In the middle of my show, Firefox popped up a warning that it had deactivated a plugin for me.  A Microsoft plugin.  A little research unveiled for me a tale of secrecy and betrayal, in which a Windows system updated silently installed a Firefox plugin on my computer.  Firefox always asks you if you want a plugin installed, but Microsoft bypassed that process because that's the kind of shit Microsoft pulls.  And, of course, the plugin opened a host of vulnerabilities in Firefox.  So much so that the makers of Firefox rewrote the software to automatically reject Microsoft plugins.

Wow.

But wait, there's more.  The very same day, Yelena's MacBook complained that it didn't have enough hard drive space to do an upgrade.  After a traipse through a destroyed wasteland that looked more like Mogadishu than a system log directory, I discovered that Microsoft Office had literally filled up the hard drive with error messages. 

(Why weren't the old error messages being deleted?  Well that's Apple's fault.  But it's still Microsoft's fault for releasing software that literally spews dozens of errors per second, and not fixing it for months.)

Now I've removed the 70 gigabytes of error messages, and updated Mac OS X and Microsoft Office.  Since the update, Microsoft is complaining about the serial code and, of course, I can't find the installation CD.  I'll have Yelena use OpenOffice until M$ Office gets fixed.

If I can't find the serial code, I'll have to come up with some messy violent fix, like only allowing Yelena to run Office inside a virtual machine, or creating a chron job to clear out error logs like it was Zombietown.

I don't even use MS products!  Why can't they leave me alone?

J<