Business Standard / New Delhi Oct 26, 2009, 00:53 IST
This refers to the interview with the Microsoft’s Managing Director Rajan Anandan (‘This is the highest-quality OS in the history of Windows’, October 23) — it looked more like a paid advertisement which gave details of the new features of Windows 7. As anyone with a basic knowledge of computers would tell you, this is a reworked Windows shell which uses enhanced pre-fetching and hence stresses out the RAM faster than the previous version of Windows. The so-called improvements are in the visual appeal of user interface which don’t enhance the utility of a product.
To put things in perspective, one could set up KDE 4.3 and customise it to nth degree till your eyeballs pop out. The basic factor of security is still not addressed and anyone can access the administrator privileges by default. This doesn’t inspire confidence in the product. Neither does it come pre-installed with office applications, nor does it support any software repository unlike Debian with its own thousands of applications which leave you spoilt for choice.
Each of the so called “new feature in Windows” has been implemented in free open source software since the early 1980’s. No one speaks about the licensing issues because technically you only lease out the product from Microsoft.
It is only a matter of time before hackers target viruses and trojans of all hues at the lousy operating system that increasingly needs more hardware to make it functional. I have been using an Intel Celeron chip on my laptop as well as Ubuntu desktop for the past three years without feeling the need to upgrade. Ubuntu is six days away for a brand new 9.10 version for free.
I hope you will carry a write up on the increasing use of open source software in India and how it can seriously challenge the dominance of Microsoft.
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