$200

Week of November 23, 2004

Send him to jail.

Don't let Bill Gates pass Go. Don't give him your $200.

Send him to jail.

And put him in a cramped damp cell down a long dark corridor with Steve 'Fat Bastard' Ballmer to keep him company and take up his space - and see how long those two criminals can wait before they start clawing each other to bits.

Let's face it:

• If Microsoft were a petroleum company, your car would start knocking ten minutes out of the driveway. They'd have diluted your petrol with junk. And they'd still be telling you it was the highest quality petrol you could buy and that they knew more about petroleum than anyone else in the business.

• If Microsoft were a restaurant chain, you'd be sick with ptomaine poisoning by morning. And they'd still have ads in all the papers and banners at all the sites proclaiming how healthy and nutritional their food was and how they knew more about food and nutrition and health than anyone else in the industry.

• If Microsoft were a NASA contractor, man would never have made it to the moon - and countless astronauts would have died in the attempt. And they'd still be telling you how they always put security first - and know more about it than anyone else in the industry.

A United States battleship was rendered defenceless because the US Navy was dumb enough to equip their boat with MS Windows and the operating system crashed. Had the ship been in battle, every sailor on board would today be dead.

Bill doesn't care about you - he never did and he never will. All the online IT pundits - PC Mag, PC Week, ZD, and of course the redoubtable Microsoft mascot Paul Thurrott - would like you to believe Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 2 represents a change in corporate attitude. Don't believe it.

All this nonsense about 'trustworthy computing' is just a spin to get you to suck in the latest scheme, namely controlling your computer even more. There was no real apology, and SP2 only represents an attempt to stop all the bad PR - not to protect you. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer couldn't care less.

Bill Gates is evil - and so is Steve Ballmer.

But devils don't wear horns; they're identifiable instead by that cold glassy look in their eyes, by that smile that's never really convincing, and by actions that speak louder than words.

Bill Gates is a criminal, and he deserves to sit behind bars, and so does his henchman Steve Ballmer. And they should be sued by class actions all the way to the poorhouse.

Write to your US congressmen, members of parliament, EU representatives - write to everyone - and tell them you demand a change.

Talk to your local PC vendor. Tell them you'll not put up with this Microsoft nonsense any longer. Tell them they either stop their hard-sell spiel for Windows or you'll go to someone else with your business.

Or get a Mac. Apple computers are not more expensive than PCs - that was only more Microsoft spin. And they're more reliable than any other computer vendor in the world - even IBM.

The whole world is moving towards open source. Sun Microsystems will shortly release their Solaris as open source, and Sun are the biggest and heaviest Unix vendor on the planet.

The entire Internet runs on open source - and Unix; so what are you doing with a Windows PC anyway?

Even Apple are open source and Unix - and what do open source and Unix have over Bill Gates and Windows?

Everything. Open source means hundreds, thousands of dedicated programmers continually reviewing the code, honing it, tweaking it, taking out potential security risks, buffer overflows, possible exploits and the like. Open source means quality and stability the likes of which Bill Gates cannot achieve - and he knows it.

The core technologies of Apple's fantastic dazzling OS X are open source Unix; Linus Torvalds' Linux already made it to Mars; Sun will soon release their Solaris to the open source community; starting to get the picture?

Don't give Bill Gates any more of your money. He's got too much already. He doesn't deserve what he's got. And you can do a lot better than with his shite bag of crappy software. He doesn't care about you and never did and never will, so why should you care about him?

Don't let him pass Go. Don't let him collect $200. Send him to jail.