• absolute dominion: Microsoft has become the giant in computers, what IBM once was. As an unchallengeable hegemon (an autocratic ruler) it has wreaked destruction on many inventive companies.
• three families: there exist three families of Windows, each with their own properties and unreliabilities, but among one another highly compatible.
• dangerous bedfellows: Microsoft is but one of the hegemons that rule the USA. The Government, CIA, FBI, NSA and the Pentagon see great advantage in being able to snoop into anybody's computer to uplift sensitive data in their zest for surveillance, so they have lucrative agreements.
• bloatware: Windows software is spiralling out of control, requiring ever faster hardware, bigger memories and larger disks.
• unreliability: Windows software has been notoriously unreliable but NT is reliable. Why? What about Linux?
• incompatibility: Microsoft office proprietary document standards have widely been accepted as de-facto industry standards, but are they?
• digital rights management: the powerful hegemons of the movie and music industry have persuaded Microsoft to build copy protection into its operating systems. But is this accepatable to its users?
• no system backup: Microsoft has never provided good backup facilities, a most essential need for businesses and professionals.
• limits to complexity: Microsoft may well have reached the limit of the amount of complexity it can manage.
• back to the contents page: read more about moving from Windows to Linux.

Ruthless in its business practices, Microsoft took on every company that doubted or threatened its hegemony, not by making the better widget or better software but by suing it to death, untill no other way out existed than to co-operate fully and to subdue to the biggest bully in the field. Microsoft also sought uniqueness by disregarding existing standards and thus taking refuge in proprietary software, the very mistake that also killed the big computer industries.

"Neither the 1994 consent decree nor the 1998 antitrust conviction have caused any change in Microsoft's behavior. The big OEMs do what Microsoft tells them to, and will continue to do so as long as it holds a monopoly. This is another chicken-and-egg problem; only a vendor who can survive without selling any Microsoft products can afford to displease Microsoft."

Microsoft has been accused of uncompetitive behaviour, and has been sued in court, but to no effect. Today, Microsoft is so large that nobody can stop it. Or will it die by its own hubris, like Rome did? Will there be an uprising, a revolt? Or could it die by its own mistakes?

"Microsoft doesn't get called the Evil Empire for nothing; they know every monopolistic trick for suppressing the competition there is, they are utterly ruthless about using them, and it has already been shown that they can successfully evade anti-trust consequences."

The big improvement came with the Pentium chip (i586) which outperformed its predecessors by such a large margin that it made Windows95 possible, soon replaced by Windows98 and 98SE and WindowsME (millennium Edition). We were now experiencing hyperinflation in software code that required memories of over 256 MB and disk space over 2GB!!! Remember that DOS ran in a mere 1MB with disk space first only on floppies but later up to 10MB (Winchester disks).

The Win9x family was notorious for its unreliability, so that quite independent from the Win9x family of operating systems, the NT (New Technology) was developed. This branch of Windows has a proper operating system and a better file system as well (NTFS, NT File System) rather than the FAT (File Allocation Table) file system of DOS. But NTFS comes at a price.

Later an in-between was born, the Windows 2000 (Win2K) family. Now the NT is being phased out for 2K.

WindowsXP is a bit of an odd ball, since it has a small NT kernel which emulates a DOS machine on which Windows runs. As a result it can be intolerably slow, requiring the fastest of chips and large memory to hide its shortcomings.

Can Linux become a door for spies? Not likely, say the Linux developers, because Linux is 'open' software and a spy-door would soon be discovered, besides, there are many distros and you would need to make orifices in each. But what if you purchase your distro (Linux distribution) from an American company? Who can check that it is spy-proof? Obviously we will see a shift away from American providers. For the moment Linux is safe because it still has so few users, is open software and has several distros.

The microcomputer did not win because it was better but because it was cheaper and this philosophy filtered down to every part of the operating system and all software, until it became a liability. For instance, in printers alone there could well have been over 10,000 different printers. First these talked over the parallel printer port according to a standardised protocol (Centronix) and character set, but soon variants crept in. When word processing demanded output of grey scales, variable pitch characters and lined boxes, the protocol was no longer sufficient. Each printer now required its own factory-built driver. As printers became less and less intelligent, their processing was taken over by their drivers inside the computer, and these drivers became more and more specific. To make matters worse, the differences between the various editions of Windows were sufficient to require separate drivers for each windows version and each type of printer. The legacy of the lack of printing standards became a huge burden and this also applies to all other hardware.

There is something magical and unexpected about standardisation and limiting one's choices with care, the result of which is more choice rather than less. Think of Lego or Meccano. With care these toys limited the dimensions and pitch (modulus) of their sockets such that it made any combination possible through modularity. The problem is that standardisation has not kept up with the flight of technology, and Microsoft carries a lot of the blame.

The golden promise of computing was that if the basic modules had been chosen with care, a layer of other modules could be constructed above it, using these modules, and above that the application software and above that meta-software (like GUIs). The software heap would look a bit like a pyramid, becoming ever more capable and intelligent as the pyramid grew wider and taller. A small increase in the pyramid's size would equate to a leap in capability and intelligence. But this did not happen, as in the DOS period, every software house made its own modules with its own oddities and bugs.
Windows brought a fresh approach by providing many standard functions, accessible by documented API calls (Application Program Interface). Tragically, this also locked software and hardware vendors into the MS hegemony. Even so, much duplication occurred, to the extent that it would be fair to say that about 98% in your computer is duplicated. In Linux systems this fares considerably better.

We are using bigger media now. A photo from your camera is some 10-30MB but can be compacted to 3-7MB without much harm. A 2 hour video, highly compressed, requires 4.5GB. Uncompressed in the cutting room, a whopping 50-150GB! So you can see where the memory and disk space go, but why would an operating system like WinXP devour so much memory? My own story must be recited here.
 

Another important factor causing bloatware is that society has become more complex. It begins with your computer box. Whereas early computers had a couple of serial ports and a parallel printer port, your box is teeming with USB ports, a mouse port, special sound processors and a whopping display driver, and many more features you'll never know are there. For each a supporting driver is needed, even though you may never use any. Your box may in fact contain three to four processors.

Another complexity comes from our cultural differences. For instance, early computers were happy with 64 characters of text, but this soon expanded to 127, as the standard ASCII set (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). To accommodate all 'latin' languages with strange doodakies like éîûÑ, 255 letters were just sufficient. But now we need to accommodate Chinese Kanji with over 20,000 tokens and languages that are read back to front, up and down and so on. It would be plain stupid to let these complexities trickle down to the deeper layers of the operating system where speed is paramount. To have screens display Kanji is already a major juggling act.

But all this does not explain the XP operating system's need for over 300MB of RAM. This is needed to optimise slow dog WinXP. To achieve marginally faster disk access, it reads the disk's directory and FAT (File Allocation Table) into memory, and if you have 6 partitions, that amounts to a lot of space. It also keeps the very bloated system registry, Window's nightmare, in memory. The problem is that this memory space is non-negotiable.
By comparison, Linux uses the technique of disk-cacheing, using all unused memory. Cacheing is taking the actually used disk sectors in memory so that the computer runs faster and faster as it is being used. When memory is needed for applications, it is freed up until no more free memory is available.
Windows downfall is that it also has a virtual memory allocation scheme where memory is swapped to and from the swap file on disk. But this software still has the same bugs as in DOS, and makes the computer slower and slower as the day progresses, and may cause serious crashes.
 

Some of its early vulnerability occurred because it allowed earlier versions of system software to overwrite later versions as new applications were installed. Now all new software must first be 'certified', a cost that small developers find hard to bear.

Let me recount another nightmare.
 

How does all this compare to Linux? Linux is a properly designed operating system created in co-operation as opposed to competition. From the ground up it is based on good open standards, and it is extremely well documented. The heap of software resembles more that of a pyramid, with little duplication. All applications try to use the existing module libraries as much as possible so that they are tested in all possible ways, ultimately leading to high reliability. A Linux sytem for instance, needs a reboot very rarely and can be left running for years on end without any trouble. Only in the period that new applications are installed, is some instability experienced, mainly because of 'dependency' problems where a new application depends on a later version of a module library, which was not yet installed.

An entirely different kind of unreliability comes from viruses and worms infecting the operating system. This is possible because of Windows' inherent security flaws and designated back-doors and because of Internet Explorer, and because so many Windows hackers exist. Remember that Microsoft employed thousands of programmers, so internal vulnerabilities are widely known. An immediate remedy is to get rid of Internet Explorer, although it is not advisable to uninstall it. Use Mozilla instead.
The nature of viruses is that they spread over the Internet, and if there are enough interlinking e-mail addresses, the virus is able to cause a pandemic, much the same as a real virus in an overpopulation. As far as Linux is concerned, the chance of viral infection is very much smaller than in Windows. This also goes for adware and spyware.

Adobe has just recently submitted its PDF format for acceptance as an international document standard. But will it accept proposals for change? Will it commit others to adhere to standards in which Adobe has a clear lead over others? Will it accept that other software can produce PDF documents without licence penalties? The standard already looks like bloatware.

Most users of Word are not aware that 99% of their requirements are covered by the well-documented Rich Text Format (.RTF) which is also very much more compact, and better suited to sending over e-mail. What's wrong with using typewriter format (.TXT) a bit more? This is after all, the most compact and standard of all. Likewise, the standard and well documented Hyper Text Markup Language (.HTML) is particularly compact where images are included, and is also most suitable for e-mailing.

Incompatibility in another sense is particularly now a hot issue, as earlier Microsoft Office versions will no longer run on Vista. The document format has also changed and is no longer compatible. What does that teach you? Isn't it time to move to Open Office software that respects 'open document' standards that will still be readable in the next millenium?

Let me be very clear about this. An operating system is just a blind slave, whose task it is to do what it possibly can in the most efficient way. To let Morality, Religion, Beliefs and Law enter its code is sheer lunacy and an invitation to let the (Police) State into the sanctity of your home.

I have mentioned before how the bullies, the hegemons of the USA have been coercing software houses and equipment suppliers to serve their narrow interests of  money and power. Anyone now who is powerful and wealthy enough, can influence the behaviour of millions of computers. The door now stands wide open not only for spying but also for propaganda, selective filtering of Internet access (anything you read), and any evil you can imagine, to be part of the system you buy.

So how is this in Linux? You will see in further chapters that here too, the bullying goes on, even though the Linux community is proud of its independence and freedom. Some distros already inhibit you from viewing Content-Scrambled (CSS) movies, the ones you buy or hire from the video shop. Imagine not being able to view a movie on your computer, simply because of this kind of bullying.

The problem with any operating system is that a backup program must run with the operating system active, which means that it cannot access files that have been locked. That means that a backup of the C: drive can be done only from DOS on a floppy disk or so. But the operating system is the only agent capable of unlocking and freezing system files for the purpose of backup. Therefore system backup MUST be an integral part of the operating system, unless copying of locked files is permitted. My prediction is that Microsoft will never provide one, as it has more its own interest at heart than that of its customers.

I'm not talking about backing up other drives, which is more straight-forward. The lesson learnt here is that it is important for every Windows user to keep own documents on other drives. Do not use the 'My Documents' folder - ever!

But there is some good news. A Balkan state company, Paragon, has produced a reliable backup progam (Paragon Drive Backup) that makes backups of entire partitions while "hot-processing", thus by-passing the file locking mechanisms. The result is burnt onto a DVD which is also a bootable disc with a restoration manager on it. I've been using this program since it first arrived and it has saved me on many occasions. It also reliably backs up and restores Linux partitions, even though it is a WindowsXP program. A 7GB partition compresses onto a 4.5GB disc, which is burnt in less than 15 minutes. Note that the PDB restoration utility on bootable DVD can move the NTSF MFT Master File Table, and enables you to resize the partition as well.
Cost: less than $100 includes a DVD burner = well worth it.
 
 

With a complexity inherited as far back as DOS, it is my opinion that Microsoft has reached its limit of complexity some years ago. The four year delay in the arrival of Windows Vista, does not bode well, even though Vista offers little more than XP. I foresee that Vista has the same bugs as previous versions, but perhaps plastered over a bit more. The registry was to be abandoned and placed in a full-blown relational database, at a low level in the operating system (it never happened). This must make Vista even slower than XP and more memory-hungry as well.

I fear (glee?) that Vista may well be Microsoft's last version of Windows, since the company will not be capable of making the next jump, which is now aimed at 64-bit-wide chips. It could well be that Microsoft's future operating systems will also be based on Linux.

But Vista will be sold to people who buy their first hardware, and what standard can they compare it with? In the meantime businesses, professionals and enterprises will cast a wary eye, not keen to do the experiment soon. It could well be that the jump from XP to Vista is more daunting than the jump from Windows to Linux. We'll see.