One of the more prolific trolls on Channel9, under the pseudonym ‘Shooby’, posted some flamebait today. The post was so inarticulate and poorly thought-out that I felt I had to respond.

His initial Post, sans irrelevant cannabis-induced meanderings:
Top 10 things Windows is better at than Linux
10 making you feel like you are a slave to the machine with constant updates, upgrates, reloads, and all that crap
9 sucking money out of your wallet
8 deleting your hardrive because you just got an email from .ru
7 sending all your credit card numbers to that fellow in .ru
6 disabling your favorite applications when you update
5 stealing every other software makers ideas and calling it innovation
4 bundling a bunch of useless applications like Paint
3 updating the icons and the backgrounds and calling it Vista
2 bolting on security that asks your granny whether port 21 is ok to allow HKERBOT12.exe to use
1 making a bunch of not too bright suck ups post cat pictures

No way could I let that fly. So I responded:

Why O Why do I feed the trolls? We get that you don’t like Windows. Go back to the commune and converse with the people who agree with you. We don’t sit in your VW Bus and ruin your circle - Stop ruining ours.

1. Games
2. Support
3. Compatibility
4. Getting new big-name software first (Except DeCSS. You can have it)
5. Multi-Monitor support (Still sucks, but better than yours)
6. Multitasking
7. Finding hardware drivers. For new stuff.
8. Despite the fact that there are actual capitalists over here, we’re less condescending than you. Don’t you have homework to do?
9. There is no one person in the world whose death will inevitably result in the Kernel source code being lost.
10. Having an actual company behind the product can result in great things, like innovation. If it comes in the form of buying 100 companies in five years, so be it; innovation can be bought. What Linux zealots call innovation is more like an acid flashback.

Having said that, I’ll do you the unjustified favor of responding to yours:
10. Those are all up to the User, just like in Linux. Have you never updated some hippie freeware app when a new version came out?
9. Excuse us if we put more trust in people whose livelihoods depend on producing a quality product.
8. User’s fault, shouldn’t have been running as admin anyway
7. User’s fault, shouldn’t have credit card info on there anyway
6. Cite your source. Regardless, User’s fault. Should have read the update page before installing all of them.
5. If it’s not pattented, it’s fair game. Come to think of it, where did Linux get the idea for a GUI?
4. How many hundreds of packages do most distro’s come with by default? And don’t some of them want updates? Can you not afford an extra four gigs? Get a job, Cheech.
3. Do you even watch the videos here?
2. User’s fault for having a copy of HKERBOT12.exe in the first place.
1. How about making a bunch of Lenin’s descendants post penguin pictures?

I see you wrote shooby.org in something called Joomla. By “wrote”, of course, I mean “Had Joomla write for you”. Are there any actual developers in your little circle?

I felt the last burn at the end was unusually appropriate, as Linux users stereotypically pride themselves on being Über super fancy high-tech coders, and this douche decided to have a piece of software write his site for him. I make $35 an hour doing this - I wonder how much McDonald’s is paying Shooby?

Maximum Verbosity was created, by me, in C#, ASP.NET 2.0, and AJAX. I also use technologies such as Transact-SQL, ADO.NET, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Shooby used a 3rd-party wizard. Who do you think made the right choices here?

Edit: Thread got locked fast, looks like Shooby got banned over this one. I guess we’ll see the next incarnation of the infamous Beer28 tomorrow.