Hey - that's a cracking avatar you have there...

 A very cool avatar indeed.  Welcome back.

Love your avatar. What pisses me off about it though is that an atheist allowed his company to put out crap to the point your avatar was inspired. Windows has more holes in it than the Bible. I don't know how Bill Gates can show his face in public.

You were probably well before my time here, but welcome back!

Maybe because he's a brilliant businessman and philanthropist who has, all told, put more into education, humanitarian efforts, and technological innovation than anybody in history?  The man's a bloody saint.  Of course it can be argued that he can *afford* to be.

Bill revolutionized the idea of an independent operating system which would allow different computers to work on the same terms- which in itself revolutionized competition in the field of hardware by giving people real choice (something mac has still yet to do).

Yes, it is inefficient in many ways, and a vast majority of the applications are relative crap (like the buggy add-ware MSN messenger is), but it isn't easy to build an operating system that works across so many hardware platforms, particularly as the back end becomes so large that nobody can fully learn and understand the whole thing at once.

Computing is quickly reaching the limits of immediate human comprehension, and we're finding quite a trend of ghosts in the machines- emerging from the chaos that is unexpected interactions.  At the end of the day, you just have to put out as many bugs as you can and release to make the deadline.  It's an unfortunate truth of the software industry.

Having programmed myself, and being in software, I can say I've gained a healthy respect for bugs, and the sheer amount of work it takes to really stamp them out.

Of course, Bill is also more distanced from Microsoft of late, and focuses more on his foundation and charitable work.  Among other things, revolutions in nuclear power- for which he earns ample respect from me, regardless of any imperfections in commercial products he may have been behind in the past.

The only thing that can equate to the horrors in the Bible is Vista. Vista makes the Bible look like Blue's Clues. I'd rather be a Christian than a Microsoft programmer. The only c: prompt command worth anything is "format C:"

Just now in another post I said that no matter how much we hate someone else's claims we don't have to hate the person, just the claims. I take that back.

Vista is lower than toilet paper and less useful. You are my mortal enemy and I have just put a curse on you and your entire family!

If I had been one of the 9/11 Hijackers my target would have been Microsoft Headquarters. FUCK CHRISTIANITY, MICROSOFT IS FAR WORSE! The Bible has less holes than Vista.

That is my silly and dark way of asking......."WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU SMOKING?"

Stable? If by crashing every five minutes, you define as "stable" then yea.

I never had a problem wuth stability of Vista, altho I think Brian did, possibly because of driver problems on the machine he was sold.

My face-palming reaction has been the organization and interface "design", which was bad even by Microsoft 'standards'.

You see I use XP, occasional Linux, and Mac OSX side-by-side, and develop software on Windows and Mac. That may give me a different perspective, and more opportunity for regular comparisons.

It is disappointing to see Apple adopting some of the sillier UI conventions that MS use, like making some active interface elements, like buttons and links not apparent until you wave the mouse over them. What I have seen of the Windows Mobile 7 i/f looks like MS are taking this approach to a ridiculous extreme. I should have done the world a favor and bombed '1 Microsoft Way' in Redmond when I wandered onto the 'campus' just for curiosity, while sight-seeing the North-West of the US. J/K, of course, but the best one could say about M$ is that they have been a very mixed 'blessing' to the world of personal computing.