Microsoft creating a computer class system (Score 1)

Thanks to Microsoft and their medialess sales, all people are going to get now is a console. Everything else will eventually be controlled by the big hardware vendors, which gives the power of innovation and understanding to elite professionals and corporations (those running server professional) and effectively blocks middle ground or inexperienced users who may want to break into their machines for do-it-yourself projects from being able to learn and become informed consumers.

If you're never allowed to see the inside of your machine (for fear of screwing up a preset function or confusing a driver), or mess around with the dll and ini files of your operating system to learn how a program works (again, for fear of screwing up the os), then you can't very well find the problems to complain about, can you? Let the fridge call the repair boys, you needn't be involved... and if you happened to need some file our weak operating system did not properly protect? well, sorry... no one was supposed to know how to break in, I mean, we've kept all the disks.

Well, windows 2000 is a horrible hairball of an operating system. I think NT4 is about the only thing I'm even slightly willing to use of theirs for a long time.

What's really sad is that this has effectivly condemned lower class people to no alternative other than AOL and complete and total exploitation by incompetent hardware vendors who will probably not have the solutions to the problems this will cause. Those not already in the technical elite will have an almost impossible time being allowed into the computer revolution, except as ignorant, passive arcade rats plucking away at their consoles, and the inequality between those who have the knowledge and those who don't is only going to continue to get worse.

Want to customize your compaq or your dell? You'll do what you're told, buddy, or prepair to be at the mercy of our woefully inadiquate customer service division. Leave the technical stuff to us. We want you to view crashing your os as a sign of your own inadiquacy as a computer owner, so you'll never know if it was the os or not. This has got to be some kind of deal with A0L/p