Day: April 8, 2004

Since we’re on a roll talking about Microsoft, I should mention this: IKEA founder ‘richer than Gates’.

The interesting things to me is that this news came out the day after I went to IKEA. I like to think I had something to do with it… I like to think that because it amuses me.

The other interesting part is that I noticed IKEA uses neoware machines running Windows NT 4. Yes, NT4! Now, I could say that IKEA’s founder would not be richer than Gates if they had upgraded all of those machines to Windows 2000, because that would be funny… or I could say that IKEA’s founder would be even more richer than Gates (more richer?) if IKEA had been using Linux all along, because that would be political…

We all know you can’t be funny and political at the same time…

Besides, we also know that Windows is cheaper that Linux anyway… We know this because Microsoft tells us so.

I said recently that Windows Hates Me, and it must be true. I think Windows hates me because it knows I usually prefer non-Microsoft technologies. See, even when I use Windows, I end up using something like Perl. So when I said that Microsoft SQL doesn’t like to store a lot of text, what I should have said is that the non-Microsoft tools I used didn’t like to work with SQL to store/retrieve a lot of text. So I’ll give Microsoft SQL a point there. It stores lots of text, I just can’t easily do it with the tools I’m using. That damn Win32::ODBC module is partly to blame, as it has it’s limitations…

Of course if I was using some other RDBMS like MySQL and Perl’s DBI module, I’d have no problems. Microsoft SQL hates me too you see…. and if I was using MySQL and Perl, I’d try my hardest not to do it on Windows…

I won’t even get into the scheduler and how I need to bug an admin go in via VNC to add a scheduled job instead of just using crontab…

Windows, Microsoft SQL… Why do you hate me so?