The outlook for Vista

I feel like these guys...
Image via WikipediaMicrosoft recently announced they are sunsetting XP as of 30 June. What is up with that? For quite some time now, people have been complaining about how bad Vista is. Anecdotally, I have to agree. The one machine we have purchased with it, we downgraded back to XP... just as others urged.

The list of things I don't like is long, but tops among them are its insistence on constantly asking me for permission to do mundane things. Oh, and its bloatedness, and unreliability (it managed to get itself reconfigured so we could not talk to the net at all, then eventually tore itself apart), which is not what we wanted in a machine that was for a non technical college student.

This OS isn't ready. It's not just me whining either. No amount of strong arming the manufacturers, threats to kill XP, or spin control can fix that.

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Getting off Hivemind

If you're on Hivemind (the site, not the Hivemind OS software) and you want to get off, all you have to do is publish your real name on your Wikipedia page... simple right?

Except my real name's been there all along. Very first edit to the page, in fact.

But I got added to Hivemind recently. No. I'm not giving you the link to Hivemind, it gets enough inbound links as it is. Trying to ask Brandt why gets zero reply.

Maybe it's more like you have to also not annoy Daniel Brandt by calling him a weenie (or worse, see this blog post). Or maybe you have to get behind whatever his latest hobby horse is... delete whatever he is hot about, sign whatever petition he is keen on, etc. Or maybe ??? Who knows?

Point is, if you want to be seen as acting on principle, as Brandt claims to be doing, you have to actually act on principle, and not act based on personal grudges.

That's what I try to stick to, and "acting on principle" is precisely what I was arguing in defending the redirect deletions... the principle of deleting them was correct even if Daniel Brandt himself was not a nice person.

Else, if you consistently don't act on principle, you're just a bully. As Moulton pointed out, Brandt's actions fit the description.

Kato justified Brandt's tactics here. I suspect that there is some validity to the claim that you have to fight unfairly if you have been treated unfairly. But on the other hand, is attacking those who most want to help the most reasonable way to effect change?

I don't think so. Do you?