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...)