Oops... AVG accidentally kills Windows

"AVG", a popular anti-virus software programme from Czech software vendor "Grisoft" kills the Microsoft Windows XP operating system after you install a recent update according to this article on "APCMag.com". According to the article, this "only" happens on the French, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish editions.

Hmmm...according to Wikipedia there are about 322 million Spanish speakers, 177 million Portuguese speakers, 64 million French speakers, 61 million Italian speakers and 20 million Dutch speakers. Presumably some of these folks use computers.

Although the article expresses relief that the problem doesn't affect English language users, there are more speakers of these other languages than there are English speakers. So it sounds like a pretty big problem to me.

Users of Microsoft operating systems have grown "used" to the fact that viruses and assorted malware are a "normal" part of computing. They've grown used to running resource hogging security applications that require ever more powerful computers...and that's before you can actually do any work on your computer.

And, a programme that's supposed to protect your Windows operating system from "bad stuff" actually does something very bad to your computer (aside from "normal stuff" like hogging system resources).

While no computer operating system is perfect, users of non-Microsoft operating systems generally don't have these kinds of problems. They don't have to run these intrusive resource hogging security software programmes. Viruses and malware are the exception to the rule...not the rule.

Isn't it about time to end this abusive relationship with Microsoft software?

There are dozens of "free as in freedom", "free as in free beer" GNU/Linux based computer operating systems available today. Isn't it about time to take a look at the alternative?

Microsoft ... Loves'm and leaves'm

The head honchos at the British Library must feel like they've been ship wrecked on love beach.

About three years ago, the British Library and Microsoft partnered up and announced plans to digitize 100,000 old out of copyright books. Wasn't Microsoft a wonderful corporate citizen?

The British Library acted as a so-called "independent" ally of Microsoft in their heavy-handed bid to get ISO (International Standards Organization) approval for their brand spanking new 6,000 page "Office Open XML" file formats.

(An even more broken version of this broken file format is used in Microsoft Office 2007).

Microsoft's committee stacking and general political interference in the ISO process worked and they got their broken file formats approved in February, helping them to perpetuate their Microsoft Office monopoly for a few more years.

The ISO's credibility in the tech community is now very close to zero.

Move the calendar forward to this month.

Microsoft has just announced that they are abandoning their digitization project at the British Library.

Microsoft just wants to be friends.

See:
Goodbye, British Library
Microsoft "Live Search" Blog
Alex Brown, the British Library and OOXML