Redeemer.Blog

Taki PM'd me recently with a very cool potential avatar (shown left) that she thought I might be interested in and that got me to thinking: For years I've been using Penguin avatars on Neoseeker, and my current one seems to imply vengeance against Microsoft.

Ironically, and in spite of me using the Penguin avatars I'm actually a strong supporter of Windows (I do all my Neoseeker development work on Win XP). So in a way, Windows is directly involved in the creation and ongoing improvement of Neoseeker.

I like XP for its simplicity and basic elegance, I like the general UI concepts it uses like the very slim taskbar and useful start menu, and I like it thanks to several software that simply doesn't exist in other platforms and that I consider critical to my work.

So why do I use the avatars?

1. I think penguins are cool (they look cute too).
2. I have a thing for animals with webbed feet :P (the duck billed platypus for instance, is awesome!)
3. Windows can improve ALOT if it was willing to adopt some Unix principles and features, and my hope is that the decision makers at Microsoft will eventually embrace the reality that instead of fearing Unix and/or shunning some of its features, they should embrace the strengths of all their competitors and adapt those strengths into Windows.

Can you imagine what would happen if the most widely used consumer desktop OS in the world had the flexibility and power of some of the things found in Linux, BSD, and OSX? Assuming such an OS would be able to run a decent amount of legacy Windows software, it would immediately stop the bleeding of their userbase and probably allow them to gain back some market share.