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Graduation Day

And here's to you Mr Microsoft
Jesus loves you more than you will know
Wo wo wo

It's Graduation Day.

Who's graduating? The World Wide Web of course.

Invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXTcube, the web finally came of age with the emergence of JavaBeans and the NCSA Mosaic browser. Mosaic Communications Corporation became Netscape, Microsoft released Chicago aka Windows 95 about a year late, and the rest is history.

Sort of.

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It was called the 'home computer revolution' and suddenly everybody and their grandmother had to get on the Internet. A development of ARPANET, a project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense, the Internet had been around for a long time, but never before had it attracted the layman.

Bill Gates changed all that.

Promoting what is easily the worst software in history, Microsoft took what essentially was little more than a 'hardware interface' and a far cry from an 'operating system', put an incredibly inept graphical interface on it, and called it Windows.

By 1995, as Microsoft struggled to get a stable 32-bit system out the door, the world was ready for the Internet, and Bill Gates was more or less ready for the world.

But karma has a way of catching up with even the most elusive crooks.

Neither Bill Gates nor Microsoft ever showed any sign of business ethics or morals, and what's worse, they never demonstrated any pride in their craft. They only want to be top dog, and more: they want to be the only dog allowed to urinate on the fire hydrant.

Things are finally catching up with them.

Look around and all you see are sympathetic eyes
Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home
Coo coo cachoo Mr Microsoft

2004 has been declared the year of the Linux desktop, as more and more major corporations embrace open source, as more and more governments on all levels world-wide cut the umbilical cord with Redmond, and as more and more of the Linux 'distros' finally come of age and wake up to the fact that their products must be easy to install and run.

Today, Linux is no longer a struggle: it's far easier to install and run than Microsoft Windows.

It's Graduation Day.

Simultaneously, amidst some of the worst security scandals ever, and facing a total inability to deal with the situation, Microsoft are now admitting perhaps the biggest vulnerability ever found in Windows - and according to some, the biggest vulnerability ever found anywhere.

Next week Bill Gates is to be speaker at a major security conference. It will be interesting to see what his spin will be, what the doctors come up with this time, and how well he weathers the storm.

More and more people in the know are starting to count his days.

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