I was only Googling for info about whether people were
still getting Win2k preinstalled on new PC's when I
came across this thread and the bogus answers the
original poster was getting to his query. Reciting
Microsoft's laughable, lying-ass reasons for keeping
with its latest form of insecure bloatware is NOT
being helpful in any way. Where is the economic
incentive for Microsoft to improve anything if people
simply do whatever the company says to do? With
their monopolistic position in the marketplace, the
average consumer has few recourses except to not
buy into whatever they are selling, especially if you
want to see genuine improvement in PC software.
Microsoft is notorious for not improving any of its
products without there being some sort of real
competition (or threat) real or imagined. Internet
Explorer, which has always been only just a direct
rip off of NSCA Mosaic/Netscape, has been in
developmental limbo for years until Firefox finally
started catching on and people simply stopped
using IE altogether whenever they could. The same
applies to the OS. How many of you techies
reading this have lost an afternoon or evening
helping a friend or a relative purging every trace
of worm and spyware off a "family" PC? There's no
good excuse for this, none. Xp is slower than 2k
and 98se so why bother? Want/need iTunes?
Then get 2k. As it is, there are a number of sites,
most notably music sites that require 2k/Xp as is
for downloading and there is not a single legitimate
technical reason for this -- it's all Microsoft
deliberately forcing, directly or indirectly,
developers, to use its proprietary DRM crapware,
which uses all sorts of dubious programming
hooks not available in older Windows versions.
ScaLAPACK? Isn't that an old Fortran program?
If Microsoft had any use for it, they would rewrite
it in Visual Studio, add a few "extensions," rename
it MScaLapack, and then make their version just
incompatible enough with the original for people
not to bother with the original.
-BC
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