Today is the anniversary of the famous King speech. Five years ago, I wrote this parody. It is sadly still true today:
Twenty-some years ago, the PC was invented and our desktops would never be the same. And now we must face the tragic fact that our desktops are still not free. Twenty years later, our lives are still sadly crippled by the manacles of frequent crashes and by numerous security problems. Twenty years we have lived on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. We are still languishing in the corners of American society and find ourselves exiles in our own technological land.
So I have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition. Windows has to go from our desktops. It is time for the ‘nixes (Unix, Linux and Apple’s OS X) to play a more major role, and for Microsoft to get with the program and fix this broken buggy whip.
I say to you today, my readers, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of productivity. I have a dream, that all PCs will live up to their original marketing potential, and free their owners from the devils of DOS and frequent application crashes. I have a dream that one day our desktop PCs, sweltering with the heat of their overclocked CPUs, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and reliable operations.
I have a dream that one day all of my applications will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood and play nicely on my PC, no matter what version of drivers and odd video adapter is inside my computer.
I have a dream that your and my children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the version of operating system running on their desktop computer, but by the content of their work output on their hard disk.
I have a dream today.
This is my hope. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day from having to reboot our computers every day, from crashed applications and inexplicable blue screens and error messages.
How I wish most of us could free ourselves from the tyranny of Windows and have a desktop operating system that didn’t crash frequently, could support our legacy applications, were easy to install and wasn’t a security sinkhole. Dream on.
Hi David…I don’t think your dream will ever come true…. Windows is here to stay and the entire ecosystem. What’s going to happen more and more are Web apps – that’s the dream that will happen! đ
Ramon Ray, Editor @ Technology Evangelist, http://www.smallbiztechnology.com
Shame on you. You must have forgotten what things were like 20 years ago. A command line that was “friendly” to a small number of people and to take advantage of that command line I had to “pip A:*.txt B:”. come now. Memory failed on a regular basis and floppies were a horror of reliability. I had a sabbatical project on 5.25 with no less than five copies. There is so much more that many of us remember fondly but when we think about it we are glad that we were among the “anointed (mathematically and logically skilled)” and could take advantage of the tools. Although I must say that my fingers still sometimes twitch with a desire to use WordStar keystrokes. I have just hauled out my early PC bible Inside the IBM PC: access to advanced features and programming by Peter Norton. I don’t think my wife would survive long if she needed to use this book to get things done. By the way she does medical records transcription on-line and is constantly teaching her employers ways to more efficiently use there tools, including Word.
As we added the internet the geek level did not go down. It got worse remember command line ftp? vedit? When the nasties started showing up you had to load a bunch more stuff on your computer to protect yourself. Neither the early Mac or the Windows machines were a joy to use. (Now I have just made those with computer religion angry)
Today I am using Vista Home Premium. It just does not crash. Only one device that I used with my computer, does not like Vista. My old Handspring PDA will not sync under Vista. Imagine that! I use it to keep a list of the books that I have read. (I’m old and sometimes can’t remember which mystery or science fiction titles I have read before. Am running AVG free and Zone Alarm (I confess I still don’t trust windows security completely, although I suspect that they might face anti-trust action if they really did it right) If I did not want those, my ISP (Charter) provides a complete suite firewall, spyware, and antivirus. I have a 5GB connection to the internet with a Linksys wireless switch/router/NAT. Since I put in my first NAT a few years ago I have had only two “virus” issues that did not do any harm because they were caught upon entry before they could run. My anti-spyware’s only complaint has been tracking cookies and most of those I want to keep.
I’ll vote for today over yesterday. My grandkids megapixel pictures download in a second or two as opposed to, well my brain refuses to calculate the hours at dial up speeds. What more could an old retired geek want? — Dale Hobart, retired university IT manager
I must chime in that the freedom you speak of in this article is what will be lost if you truly want a safe PC. You wonât have the freedom to run any program you choose, edit, move or delete any file on your system. Most likely you wonât be able to even get to the true kernel and core OS files on your machine. I work for Gainesville State College and we have accomplished much of what you hope for here through hardware standardization and locking down the OS â thereby limiting our usersâ freedom. A crash, lock-up or blue screen is usually an indication that some hardware component in the machine is failing, not a trashed OS. In most cases our users are more than willing to trade complete freedom to do what they wish to a computer in order to gain stability and reliability. Unfortunately, I see a day when MS and other OS vendors will force âTrusted Computingâ and such initiatives on us that will remove our freedom to format our hard drives to install an alternate OS or dual-boot. May we never give up too much of our âfreedomâ to do what we wish with our computers. Be careful, you might get what you ask for and find that true freedom is what you traded to get it!
By the way, my primary family computer has been running for almost 5 years now with Windows XP. All users but myself are Power Users. I am an administrator and my account has a strong password. This machine is rock-solid stable as the day I brought it home. Based on this experience I completely believe that the majority of home computers running Windows XP would also be stable if they were simply configured to take advantage of the security built into the OS right out of the box. This also means that every app downloaded off the net does NOT end up getting installed on this computer unless it is from a reputable vendor or trusted source. — Brandon Haag, a current university IT manager
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