Dec 15 2007
Bread and circuses
I was talking to someone the other day about infected Windows machines, and I mentioned the fact that it takes just minutes for an unprotected machine to succumb to something on the big wide web. Three separate studies produced different numbers, but in none of them was the average infection time more than 35 minutes. It was only four minutes in one trial.
It seems these numbers are not so well known as they should be, though they have been around long enough (and have been argued back and forth by enough people). Does this kind of information find itself into the hands of the computer-buying public? Obviously not.
I’ve tried convincing people to use something more usable (or at least, something less outright dangerous) than Windows. That’s not easy when people use some non-portable software. But Windows Vista has been such a break, for software compatibility and hardware, that a lot of people seem to be eyeing up alternatives.
In my optimistic moments I feel as if this might be the beginning of the end for Windows. Vista has been so thoroughly disparaged and ridiculed.
And in my more pessimistic moods, I think that Windows is like a software prolefeed. It keeps people happy now so they don’t think about how miserable they are at the same time: viruses, spyware, the need to even think about these things.
There’s a rich history of user-centric interface design in computing research; whole fields devoted to strengthening machines against attack; and several inter-operable but varied systems in use around the world. The road we’ve travelled is littered with the abandoned remains of glorious and terrible machines… and yet here we are, rumbling along in the slipstream of some hulking smoke-belching juggernaut.
Sometimes it feels like looking back at the history of an alien culture: a civilisation so advanced it sped off to stars, leaving behind its detritus for us to marvel at. And then we find out that all this was made by us. All these seemingly advanced machines were once in daily use by real people.
I don’t have any particular problems with Windows. The trouble with Vista is that it fixed almost all of the technical issues which techy people had been complaining about, and put a shiny new coat on it. But XP, at the moment, isn’t broken enough to warrant people upgrading.
Techy people continue to complain since a lot of them just hate Microsoft (for increasingly few reasons), and other people just aren’t techy enough to see the benefit of Vista. I feel kinda sorry for Microsoft more than anything else. From a technical perspective, at least, they’ve actually tried to improve, and gotten nothing but chastisement for their achievements.
I don’t think that many of the competitors to Windows are actually a whole lot better. I use Ubuntu because I like it, but if I got a new machine I imagine I’d see little reason to change from the Vista that came with it (especially since I’d want to play games, and DX support on Wine is still kinda shaky).