MICKEYSOFT IS COMING TO TOWN (C)1998 Alan M. Schwartz The beautiful thing about Mickeysoft Windoze in all of its lurid incarnations - 3.xx, CE, 95, 98, NT - is not its bloated hairball morbid obesity, its torpid slowness, its intractable stupidity, its intrinsic instability, its gluttony to no apparent purpose of all system resources, its internal operational chaos, its utter resistance to installation debugging, its personally insulting iconography, its incessant patching and service pack updating... The one truly brilliant facet of Mickeysoft Windoze is an utter absence of system security provisions capable of stopping a 14- year old from trashing an entire corporate intranet at will. If that 14-year old is ambitious, the same effort within a standard deviation takes down all Terra. It's not a bug, it's a feature. On 04 March 1998 CNN was repository to computer stories even its reporters could understand. Hundreds of thousands of computers in universities and government running Windoze NT were brought to their silicon knees and crashed (the infamous Windoze Blue Screen of Death) by a naughty snippet of Java code: "The prank exploits a glitch in the Windoze NT program by instructing the computer to devote excessive memory resources to solve a problem that can't be solved." How does that differ from a plain vanilla Windoze boot? Problems were reported at the MIT, Northwestern University, the University of Minnesota and University of California campuses in Berkeley, Irvine, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Unclassified Navy computers connected to the Internet also crashed on Point Loma and in Charleston, South Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia... "It happened so fast," said Craig Huckabee, a research associate in the Computer Systems Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin. "In our department, I would have to say about 90 percent of the machines were affected." Security manager Ed Muth said Mickeysoft is working on a software patch to fix vulnerable Windoze NT programing. Maybe they will rewrite all ten million lines of Windoze source code and do it right this time. Maybe Ed will buy a Power PC. Apple software runs just like Windoze except for crashes, and nobody bothers to hack rogue code for a trivially small installed user base. Mickeysoft is accused of changing DOS and Windoze to put enemies like Lotus 1-2-3 behind the curve. Add maybe 160 million users of Mickeysoft's gangrenous operating systems worldwide and you have some idea of the real problem. Connect Bill Gates' genitalia to a 29 volt phone line and pipe in the help desk harvest for any hour of the day or night. Bill will sing a different tune after that, soprano. Should Mickeysoft OS developers be allowed to share inside information with the company's applications programmers, permitting them to leapfrog the competition? Right; nobody is sharing information with the folks down the hall. President Clinton did not inhale, Monica Lewinsky did not swallow, and Hillary Ramrod Clinton does not share Eleanor Roosevelt's taste in lovers. If I wanted to sabotage a programmer, I would tell him all the Windoze secrets and let him die a thousand deaths. Should a dominant industry player be allowed to intimidate smaller companies into giving up their good ideas? Mickeysoft threatens to withhold the Windoze OS license from hardware vendors who don't play by Bill's rules. Traffic Court and the IRS sing the same song, but that is OK - or would you like to walk to work and have your paycheck garnished for back taxes? Is it fair to use unrealistic inducements to lure small companies into partnering deals? Mickeysoft originally promised MSN content providers access to 30 million customers within 18 months, then left dozens of small firms stranded when it moved MSN to the Web. When Washington pulls that stunt it is called "Social Security." The SS plug gets pulled when the Baby Boomers retire and discover more than $3.5 trillion of their confiscated money has been loaned to the Feds as T-Bills. T-Bills are secured by the Social Security fund. The money is gone. Should Mickeysoft be allowed to require its business partners to not tell customers when they have a choice? Gee, it sounds like a Health Maintenance Organization and its medical doctor slaves. Mickeysoft was forced to stop requiring ISP partners not to volunteer information about non-Mickeysoft browsers, following an investigation by the European Commission. Washington calls that "sedition" or, if you program strong encryption, "munitions." What conclusion do we draw? Mickeysoft programs Washington and the courts. Prepare for Windoze America 2001! (Where was that naughty snippet of Java code...)