I have come to the conclusion that the best and most advanced windows programmers are the virus writers. Let’s think about this. Microsoft and other windows software companies consider making programs “easier to use” an upgrade to their software. While they don’t make their interface or the procedure in which the software is used intuitive for the user to control. They do however take the decision making out of your hands and just do it (ala’ autoupdate “windows update” or “phoning home” for updates or changing registry settings or installing extra “needed” software).

So based on this we can deduce that taking control and thinking for you is an example of a good program. This is exactly what the virus writers do and they do it more efficiently and effectively. These programmers take control of your computer without your knowledge and without original source code to windows to know the flaws of the system. They have to reverse engineer the system and find the flaws themselves.

Another basis for good programming is lack of bulk, or code efficiency. This is not seen by today’s Internet Explorer or for you not so technically inclined the “blue E” on your desktop. It hovers somewhere around 26 MB. For what? To decipher the limited abount of standards it supports!? This code efficiency is no longer seen in the commercial world of software (rarely anyways) as it is not an economically sound decision to rework the code for features for size speed when you could hack together something quick and dirty and push it out the door and count on the hard drives and processor upgrades to make up the performance gap.

Today’s virus writers are very efficient and deliver their program in a size so small that it is not even noticeable by most people and the resources they take from the computer are minimal so as not to be noticed. This is in conjunction with taking over the computer without the owners knowledge further verifying the virus writer’s ability to create a good program.

A good programmer is not judged by only the code he can produce, but the amount of time it takes to produce it and patch and errors, bugs, or software holes. Microsoft is always touting how quickly it patches security flaws and program flaws in it’s own software (cough, bullshit, cough).

The virus writers are constantly having to change or modify their programs to counter the patches made by the software vendor. They do so fairly quickly, so quick in fact that they manage to slip by Microsoft’s extremely quick security patch team with a few hundred thousand or so infected PC’s. Constantly modifying and patching their software to keep up with the technology trends of tomorrow. These guys never stop — what a great work ethic!

Why is it that every time that I meet an MCSE it seems like they’re brainwashed by the propaganda M$ spits out. I know they’re dependant on the fact the most Microsoft products are faulty for their paycheck, but they don’t have to buy into the propaganda themselves.

Great example of this was the client’s windows network admin that my company had to work with the other day. –
A little background.
We have a web based app that consists mostly of ASP pages for presentation layer and MSSQL for the business logic. We are moving away from ASP towards PHP for multiple reasons which I will not go into in this post. Suffice to say we don’t have any interest in migrating to .NET.

This windows admin asks us why we’re not using .NET. We give him the legitimate answer in short we feel that it will not be able to support where we want to go with our software and development process. Then we proceeded to tell him that we are moving to php with each new module in the software. This was completely unacceptable to him. Suddenly we were using “old” technology and he began to berate about PHP and then Open Source.
I have never seen someone with such a hatred for open source software like this. Most people like free stuff regardless of the business model or development practices. He proceeded to tell us how he would never use open source software in any aspect of his business. He started to insult us about our choice of programming language and told us that there weren’t any enterprise solutions based on php.

This very un-informed man also decided to lash out at open source stating that no business with a open source model could make any real money and that no one out there is making money off open source. Sun, Redhat, IBM, Apple, Novell apparently were unknowns to him. He must have been really erked and uneasy when he noticed one of our developers used a Apple powerbook to develop on.

Even when we were using M$ supplied software (SQL Server 2000) this was still not good enough for him. We should be devoloping on their beta software Yukon (MSSQL 2005). Ummmm… No. We will be moving to a more enterprise class solution such as DB2 and Oracle in the future we told him. He went on about how he was using it and it tested fine with him. In the back of my mind I know he was only administering Access driven apps and was not a software programmer and was thinking, what kind of “rigorous” testing could this schmuck put Yukon through?

This is the power of M$ propaganda. Not only does this person use their products but he would fight for them and sling rude comments toward people that he had just met minutes before in a business situation. This is ridiculous. The majority of his job maintaining windows boxes for clients is based on patching, securing, and putting out fires with his “superior software”, yet he still fails to notice these faults.

I’m going to stop before I get on a rant with crappy M$ software and OS. I’ll save that for another time. The point here is how rude they usually are with anyone who uses an alternative piece of software. This is not a religious belief or politics, there isn’t any reason to get so uptight about someone using different types of tools than you do. Really it’s like talking to someone about the new car they bought. As soon as they find out you bought a BMW they start to tell you how it’s crap and that not many people use them and that you should have got a Chevy cavalier like he has.

Anyways I’m sure this problem will never go away because of the many weak minded individuals out there just waiting for some company with great marketing skills to control their thinking. All I can do is keep writing in this blog to piss them off.