Opinion: A penguin for your thoughts

After all, Microsoft wants everyone to rush out and buy Windows Vista, particularly now it’s got a nice shine service pack of its own, rather than having everyone rush out and apply SP3 to their venerable XP desktops. Finding out what is actually inside WinXP SP3 is proving almost as difficult as finding out that it was even released in the first place.

According to Microsoft’s marketroids, SP3 is just “all the security updates and hot fixes it has released for the OS since XP's launch in 2001.” So, we don’t need it? Well it does apparently have “support for high-definition audio.” Been hanging out for that? Didn’t think so. But wait, there’s also “Network Access Protection (NAP), the security technology that's also built into Vista and Server 2008”. Hold me back! We can all look forward to never being able to login to the network again!

If the only way to make Windows secure is to stop it logging in to the network why not just disable support for Ethernet and WiFi? Well, yeah, there’s that Internet thing we all love to play with. How about this then – Microsoft embeds its virtual server technology in XP and Vista (it’s already in Server 2008) and lets us launch a Linux client for access to the Internet? Yes! This will work! No more security holes in Internet Explorer to worry about. No more stupid annoying firewall messages. All the scary stuff gets done by Linux!

Microsoft could pay the Open Source people a few cents per copy and they’d soon have so much money they’d stop bleating about all software being free. This would simultaneously free the world of all the bleating analysts who endlessly drone on about Open Source being the answer to all the world’s problems, which of course, they achieve using Microsoft’s proprietary word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software. Right, are you for us or against us? Penguinistas make your stand!