Windows

One of the things that bugs me most about games such as Neverwinter Nights 2 Gold
and the Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir Expansion isn't that, like so many other applications and games, that it asks me to register.

What bugs me is the way that it always chooses Internet Explorer to register with. The default browser on my systems is Google Chrome; it used to be Seamonkey but the separate processes in separate tabs makes Google Chrome my browser of choice. So when I go to register or visit any site from an application, the application should launch the my default browser - not Microsoft's default browser.

Whether intended or not, and whether damaging or not, it is a matter of control. I modify my computer systems to suit me, not some corporate interest. Don't launch a browser that another corporation wants you to launch, launch the browser that your customer wants to launch.

Ever since the 80s, at least some machines I have owned have run some Microsoft product - it was a matter of necessity in the 1980s for desktop publishing if you didn't have the required startup capital for a Mac, and - perhaps sadly - it had been the most cost effective solution prior to the advent of Linux.

As a sidenote, while everyone waxes poetic about Apples - and they are great machines - they have been and continue to be horribly overpriced for the larger market. In my book - not an Apple Book - Apple's greatest mistake has been in not finding the middle ground between their price/performance and that of the PC market. When I see an Apple machine, I'm torn between thinking of a person or company that is willing to spend money on a good product and thinking of a person or company that has more money that brains. Stick that in your iPod's receptacle.

And I like Linux - mainly because of it's no nonsense approach to computing as compared to Microsoft's approach. But since I was still trying to make a living with Information Technology, I had to stay familiar with Microsoft. It's just too large of a market to ignore, and frankly - Microsoft is good for IT people. When Microsoft screws up, IT people get paid - and IT people have been getting paid a lot over the last 20 years. Too much, maybe, and that bubble is popping if it hasn't already: I cannot substantiate it, but I believe that there are more power users in the world than there are people who work in fast food. And it's a matter of time before the pay reflects that.

So now, as I'm semi-retired from IT, the last crash of a hard drive - ANOTHER Seagate Barracuda 7200 (I'm unlikely to buy any other Seagate products for a while) - I don't need to stay in touch with the hokey-pokey proprietary folks in Washington, collectively known as Microsoft.