I’m not a big fan of Microsoft. They make products with great interfaces, but flaky guts. On top of that, their business practices are monopolistic. Everybody knows that, right? Of course they do. So when my university struck a deal with the devil to offer free Microsoft products to students (read as “indoctrinate young programmers into M$ dogma”), I wasn’t thilled.

I changed my tune, however, when I yoinked free coppies of Win98, WinXP, OfficeXP, and Visual Studio. I still didn’t like M$, but who can turn down free software, especially enterprise level? I certainly can’t.

Anyhow, all was groovy until I wanted a better Java development environment than Forte. I soon discovered that Visual J++ 6.0 is woefully out of date and Visual Studio .NET doesn’t support Java (don’t get me started on the bastardizations of Java, C# and J#). So now I need to drop a load of cash to get a decent IDE, since my school only supports M$. I am not a happy camper.

Excuse me. I’m feeling all faclempt. Discuss amongst yourselves: Bill Gates bears the mark of the Beast or Bill Gates IS the Beast…