We Kill Our Vista PCs 

Google Labels the Entire Internet as Badware

We killed our Vista-equipped machines last week. Shot ‘em between the eyes, so to speak. Of course, in the computer world that means we formatted their little hard drives and erased all the information on them, humming “Daisy, Daisy…” the entire time, remembering that was what Hal the computer sang as Dave wiped his memory in the movie 2001: A Space Oddesy.

While Dave was dealing harshly with Hal in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie because of Hal’s actions that had led to the death of his crewmates, our murderous rampage was occasioned because we were sick and tired of all the problems Vista had caused around our office.

The final straw was reached when a program crashed in the middle of doing one of our more important day jobs, supporting Hewlett-Packard’s webinar group, but the complaints had been building over time. We had two machines among all the computers in our shop running Vista while all the others run XP Pro, Service Pack Two (stay away from Service Pack Three). All our XP machines could “see” each other on the network, and could share printers and other devices. The Vista machines, on the other hand, were unwilling to share our network printers, causing needless problems. At one point I nearly succumbed and bought them their own printer, but I resisted.

The machines are back to XP now, and while we can’t access some of the ridiculous amount of RAM we put in the machines – the only reason we put on Vista in the first place – I’m glad to see the end of Vista in our shop.

While we’re on the subject of Windows operating system software, I can assure you we won’t be rushing to put any version of the newest Windows OS, called just Windows 7, on our computers. Reports from beta testers I’ve read are that it’s still a resource hog, meaning it won’t run on your older, slower computer and it is just too gigantic to run the new and very popular netbooks.

Google declares the entire Internet to be spam. In a human-driven accident that will be talked about for some time, for about an hour on the last Saturday in January any search you did at Google yielded a result that indicated Google thought the websites your search returned were all badware websites.

The incident, caused by what we’ll call a typo, caused Google to say about any website anywhere “This site may harm your computer” on the results of any search page. You could search for the most innocent term, and Google for about an hour would assure you that all the websites its search returned and listed for you were probably all badware websites.

While the warning from Google is a good thing, the problem that Saturday demonstrates the dangers behind letting any single monoculture dominate our lives. By way of demonstration, we wouldn’t be talking about this if it had been a similar problem at Ask.com but Google is so pervasive that in addition to becoming a verb, the company is something many folks are totally reliant upon.

Microsoft’s Windows operating system franchise is another monoculture. One shudders at the effects of all Windows equipped computers crashing for an hour on the same Saturday morning. The Internet will be all a-twitter (all puns, please rise) with discussions of the dangers of depending on any one supplier for so much of our infrastructure. Some are already comparing the monoculture problem to pure-bred dogs that, unlike a mutt, come with numerous health problems. The argument goes that we need to diversify our applications and providers whenever it’s possible, if only to keep the big vendors such as Microsoft honest.

To that extent, you can help by using something other than Internet “Exploder” for your web surfing today. If you haven’t used Firefox, try it. It’s a Friday Freebie and you can download it at Mozilla.com. The folks at Mozilla also bring us SeaMonkey, the follow-on to the all-in-one Internet application suite (browser, email and web page building) popularized by Netscape some years ago. You can download SeaMonkey at Mozilla.org, and it’s another Friday Freebie.

I’ve used Firefox and Mozilla’s email program, Thunderbird (yet another Friday Freebie), for years now, and only venture into Microsoft’s Outlook-land and Internet “Exploder-land” when I need to, meaning if those two programs suddenly collapsed under the weight of something I can’t imagine it wouldn’t matter to me.

MacHeads will want to note that Mozilla has a Friday Freebie for them too, a web browser called Camino. If you’re looking for a calendar to incorporate into your Thunderbird experience, Mozilla has the answer for you as well with Lightning, also available for the Windows and Linux (i686) platforms.

Random thought to leave you with: what if there were no hypothetical situations?