lifemaximum

10 Reasons to Switch to Linux

2007-01-23T10:03:00.000+08:00

Obtained from :
http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000117

1. It Doesn't Crash
Linux has been time-proven to be a reliable operating system. Although the desktop is not a new place for Linux, most Linux-based systems have been used as servers and embedded systems. High-visibility Web sites such as Google use Linux-based systems, but you also can find Linux inside the TiVo set-top box in many livingrooms.

Linux has proved to be so reliable and secure that it is commonly found in dedicated firewall and router systems used by high-profile companies to secure their networks. For more than ten years, it has not been uncommon for Linux systems to run for months or years without needing a single reboot.

2. Viruses Are Few and Far Between
Although it is possible to create a virus to target Linux systems, the design of the system itself makes it very difficult to become infected. A single user could cause local damage to his or her files by running a virus on his or her system; however, this would be an isolated instance rather than something could spread out of control.

In addition, virtually all Linux vendors offer free on-line security updates. The general philosophy of the Linux community has been to address possible security issues before they become a problem rather than hoping the susceptibility will go unnoticed.

3. Virtually Hardware-Independent
Linux was designed and written to be easily portable to different hardware. For the desktop user, this means that Linux has been and likely always will be the first operating system to take advantage of advances in hardware technology such as AMD's 64-bit processor chips.

4. Freedom of Choice
Linux offers freedom of choice as far as which manufacturer you purchase the software from as well as which application programs you wish to use. Being able to pick the manufacturer means you have a real choice as far as type of support you receive. Being open-source software, new manufacturers can enter the market to address customer needs.

Choice of application programs means that you can select the tools that best address your needs. For example, three popular word processors are available. All three are free and interoperate with Microsoft Word, but each offers unique advantages and disadvantages. The same is true of Web browsers.

5. Standards
Linux itself and many common applications follow open standards. This means an update on one system will not make other systems obsolete.

6. Applications, Applications, Applications
Each Linux distribution comes with hundreds and possibly thousands of application programs included. This alone can save you thousands of dollars for each desktop system you configure. Although this is a very small subset, consider that the OpenOffice.org office suite is included as well as the GIMP, a program similar to (and many people say more capable than Adobe Photoshop); Scribus, a document layout program similar to Quark Xpress; Evolution, an e-mail system equivalent to Microsoft's Outlook Express; and hundreds more.

For the more technically inclined, development tools, such as compilers for the C, C++, Ada, Fortran, Pascal and other languages, are included as well as Perl, PHP and Python interpreters. Editors and versioning tools also are included in this category.

Whether you are looking for Instant Messaging clients, backup tools or Web site development packages, they likely are all included within your base Linux distribution.

7. Interoperability
More and more computers are being connected to networks. No system would be complete if it did not include tools to allow it to interoperate with computers running other operating systems. Once again, Linux is very strong in this area.

Linux includes Samba, software that allows Linux to act as a client on a Microsoft Windows-based network. In fact, Samba includes server facilities such that you could run a Linux system as the server for a group of Linux and Windows-based client systems.

In addition, Linux includes software to network with Apple networks and Novell's Netware. NFS, the networking technology developed on UNIX systems also is included.

8. It's a Community Relationship, Not a Customer Relationship
Other operating systems are the products of single vendors. Linux, on the other hand, is openly developed, and this technology is shared among vendors. This means you become part of a community rather than a customer of a single manufacturer. Also, the supplier community easily can adjust to the needs of various user communities rather than spouting a "one size fits all" philosophy.

This means you can select a Linux vendor that appears to best address your needs and feel confident that you could switch vendors at a later time without losing your investment--both in terms of costs and learning.

9. It's Not How Big Your Processor Is...
Because of a combination of the internal design of Linux and development contributions from a diverse community, Linux tends to be more frugal in the use of computer resources. This may manifest itself in a single desktop system running faster with Linux than with another operating system, but the advantages go far beyond that. It is possible, for example, to configure a single Linux system to act as a terminal server and then use outdated hardware as what are called thin clients.

This server/thin client configuration makes it possible for older, less powerful hardware to share the resources of a single powerful system thus extending the life of older machines.

10. Linux Is Configurable
Linux is a true multi-user operating system. Each user can have his or her own individual configuration all on one computer. This includes the look of the desktop, what icons are displayed, what programs are started automatically when the user logs in and even what language the desktop is in.

New office slang

2006-11-28T00:42:00.000+08:00

404 - Someone who is clueless. From the Web error message, “404 Not Found,” which means the document requested couldn’t be located. “Don’t bother asking John. He’s 404.”

Adminisphere - The rarified organizational layers above the rank and file that makes decisions that are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant.

Alpha Geek - The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. “I dunno, ask Rick. He’s our alpha geek.”

Assmosis - The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

Batmobiling - putting up emotional shields. Refers to the retracting armor that covers the Batmobile as in “she started talking marriage and he started batmobiling”

Beepilepsy - The brief siezure people sometimes suffer when their beepers go off, especially in vibrator mode. Characterized by physical spasms, goofy facial expressions, and stopping speech in mid-sentence.

Betamaxed - When a technology is overtaken in the market by inferior but better marketed competition as in “Microsoft betamaxed Apple right out of the market”

Blamestorming - A group discussion of why a deadline was missed or a project failed and who was responsible.

Blowing Your Buffer - Losing one’s train of thought. Occurs when the person you are speaking with won’t let you get a word in edgewise or has just said something so astonishing that your train gets derailed. “Damn, I just blew my buffer!” (Synonym: “Head Crash”)

Body Nazis - Hard-core exercise and weight-lifting fanatics who look down on anyone who doesn’t work out obsessively.

Bookmark - To take note of a person for future reference. “After seeing his cool demo at Siggraph, I bookmarked him.”

Brain Fart - A byproduct of a bloated mind producing information effortlessly; a burst of useful information. “I know you’re busy on the Microsoft story, but can you give us a brain fart on the Mitnik bust?” Variation of old hacker slang that had more negative connotations.

CGI Joe - A hard-core CGI script programmer with all the social skills and charisma of a plastic action figure.

Chainsaw Consultant - An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee head count, leaving the top brass with clean hands.

Chip Jewelry - Old computers destined to be scrapped or turned into decoration. “I paid three grand for that Mac and now it’s nothing but chip jewelry.”

Chips and Salsa - Chips = hardware, salsa = software. “First we gotta figure out if the problem’s in your chips or your salsa.”

CLM (Career Limiting Move)- Used by microserfs to describe an ill-advised activity. “Trashing your boss while he or she is within earshot is a serious CLM.”

Cobweb - A WWW site that never changes.

Crapplet - A badly written or profoundly useless Java applet. “I just wasted 30 minutes downloading that crapplet!”

CROP DUSTING - Surreptitiously farting while passing thru a cube farm, then enjoying the sounds of dismay and disgust; leads to PRAIRIE DOGGING.....

Cube Farm - An office filled with cubicles.   
Dead Tree Edition - The paper version of a publication available in both paper and electronic forms.   
Dilberted - To be exploited and oppressed by your boss, as is Dilbert, the comic strip character. “Damn, I’ve been dilberted again! The old man revised the specs for the fourth time this week.”  
Dorito Syndrome - The feeling of emptiness and dissatisfaction triggered by addictive substances that lack nutritional content. “I just spent six hours surfing the Web, and now I’ve got a bad case of Dorito Syndrome.”  
Egosurfing - Scanning the Net, databases, etc., for one’s own name.  
Elvis Year - The peak year of popularity as in “1993 was Barney the dinosaur’s Elvis year”  
Flight Risk - Used to describe employees who are suspected of planning to leave a company or department soon.
Generica - Fast food joints, strip malls, sub-divisions as in “we were so lost in generica that I couldn’t remember what city it was”
 
Glazing - Corporate-speak for sleeping with your eyes open; a popular pastime at conferences and early-morning meetings. “Didn’t he notice that by the second session half the room was glazing?”  
Going Postal - Totally stressed out and losing it like postal employees who went on shooting rampages
GOOD job - A "Get-Out-Of-Debt" job. A well-paying job people take in order to pay off their debts, one that they will quit as soon as they are solvent again.  
Gray Matter - Older, experienced business people hired by young entrepreneurial firms trying to appear more professional and established.  
Graybar Land - The place you go while you’re staring at a computer that’s processing something very slowly (while you watch the gray bar creep across the screen). “That CAD rendering put me in graybar land for like an hour.”  
High Dome - Egghead, scientist, PhD  
Idea Hamsters - People whose idea generators are always running.   
Irritainment - Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying, but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The O.J. trials were a prime example.  
It’s a Feature - From the old adage, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” Used sarcastically to describe an unpleasant problem you wish to gloss over.  
Keyboard Plaque - The disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on some people’s computer keyboards.  
Link Rot - The process by which web page’s links become obsolete as the sites they’re connected to change or die.  
Meatspace - The physical world (as opposed to the virtual) also “carbon community” “facetime” “F2F” “RL” 
 Mouse Potato - The online generation’s answer to the couch potato.
Ohnosecond - That minuscule fraction of time during which you realize you’ve just made a terrible error. 
 Open-Collar Workers - People who work at home or telecommute. 
 Percussive Maintenance - The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again. 
 Perot - To quit unexpectedly. “My cellular phone just perot’ed.”  
 Plug-and-Play - A new hire who doesn’t require training. “That new guy is totally plug-and-play.” 
 Prairie Dogging - When something loud happens in a cube farm, causing heads to pop up over the walls trying to see what’s going on. 
 Ribs ‘N’ Dick - A budget with no fat as in “we’ve got ribs ‘n’ dick and we’re supposed to find 20K for memory upgrades” 
 Salmon Day - The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed in the end. “God, today was a total salmon day!” 
 Seagull Manager - A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits over everything and then leaves. 
 Siliwood - The coming convergence of movies, interactive TV and computers; also “Hollywired” 
 SITCOMs - What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids. “Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage” 
 Square-Headed Spouse - Computer 
 Squirt the Bird - To transmit a signal up to a satellite. “Crew and talent are ready...what time do we squirt the bird?” 
 Starter Marriage - A short-lived first marriage that ends in divorce with no kids, no property and no regrets. 
 Stress Puppy - A person who thrives on being stressed-out and whiny.  
Swiped Out - An ATM or credit card that has been used so much its magnetic strip is worn away. 
 Tourists - Those who take training classes just to take a vacation from their jobs. “There were only three serious students in the class; the rest were just tourists.” 
 Treeware - Hacker slang for documentation or other printed material.  
 Umfriend - One with whom one has a sexual relationship; as in, “this is Dale, my...um...friend.” 
 Under Mouse Arrest - Getting busted for violating an online service’s rule of conduct. “Sorry I couldn’t get back to you. AOL put me under mouse arrest.” 
 Uninstalled - Euphemism for being fired. Also: decruitment.
Vulcan Nerve Pinch - The taxing hand position required to reach all the appropriate keys for certain commands. For instance, the warm re-boot for a Mac II computer involves simultaneously pressing the Control key, the Command key, the Return key and the Power On key.

WOOFYS - Well Off Older Folks. 
 World Wide Wait - The real meaning of WWW.

Xerox Subsidy - Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace. 
 Yuppie Food Coupons - Twenty dollar bills from an ATM.

Opera

2006-11-22T12:47:00.000+08:00

Opera ( article from http://www.yourhtmlsource.com)
Opera Software’s browser is a really good piece of work. Billing itself as “The fastest browser on Earth!”, it is a free browser with excellent standards support.

The amount of ideas and helpful features that they’ve managed to cram into opera is really something else. Your desktop is kept tidy through its tabbed browsing features, which opens all webpages in dockable windows inside a single instance of the application. There are a range of tools to help you find information on the net easily, from integrated search-enabled toolbars to instantaneous looking-up of selected words.

Two very helpful features are the page-zoom feature, which allows you to zoom in the entire document, instead of just the text; and the developer shortcuts to turn off style sheets and images. In other browsers you have to go through multiple menus or use bookmarklets for this functionality.

The interface is clean and sleek, though a bit crowded. Whereas the interface in browsers like Firefox is strictly controlled, in that nothing gets added to it without it being absolutely necessary, Opera’s designers don’t seem to have been so discerning. As a consequence, the menus and toolbars can be overwhelmingly filled with options that you generally won’t need to change.

All in all, Opera is definitely worth a try in place of the more established browsers. It may not have a large following, but it is a very promising offering, and is pioneering features you will undoubtedly see appearing in other browsers down the line. I like it.

for more info and downoad visit www.opera.com

Instruction on editing videos recorded on Sony handycam mini-DVD models: by LIfeMaximum

2006-11-16T23:23:00.000+08:00

As I was reading through the forums I came across that people who use the Sony handycam mini dvd series cannot import their videos into the computer or they might need ,Extra piece of hardware (firewire box) to do it so. However I managed to do it for free without any additional hardware , with couple of softwares that you can find easily on the net for free.

Requirements:
- Handbrake 0.7.1 (2006022400) Developed by Eric petit (titer@m0k.org)
(you can obtain a copy of the software from http://handbrake.m0k.org/)

- MPEG Streamclip 1.7 Developed by Squared 5
(you can obtain a copy of the software from http://www.squared5.com/)

- USB cable that came with the camera itself

- Camera

- A mini DVD

- And of course some recorded material on your mini-DVD

1. Finalize the mini-DVD within the camera by pressing the Finalize button and following the instruction on the screen.

2. Avoid any vibration to your camera when it is finalizing and wait.

3. Select the review mode (where you view the videos that you have recorded)

4. Connect the USB cable to your camera and the other end of it to your USB port

5. You need to wait for a short while as your computer detects the mini-DVD within your camera. I used MacBook I wouldn’t know if same thing goes for PCs, but you could try.

6. After that you should be able to see the mini-DVD on your DESKTOP screen and clicking on it will open it up.

7. You should see lots of files. The files that contain your video are the ones with .vob extension.

8. Open up handbrake and start ripping it the format that you should choose must be:
Destination for encoding:

Format: MP4 File

Sounds: AVC/H.264 Video /ACC Audio

9. It should take a while, after your are done with ripping the DVD.

10. Open up the MPEG Stream clip, and open up the file that you ripped using the MPEG Stream clip

11. Than go to File menu and choose Export to DV and than later choose the setting that you want and choose DV NTSC.

12. After it is done exporting .The new file that you got you can be edited and cut in iMovie HD.

Alright enjoy and if you have any question you can contact me at lifemaximum@gmail.com

Why I hate windows ? got it from http://www.vanwensveen.nl/index.html

2006-11-09T14:44:00.000+08:00

Let's be honest: there's no such thing as bug-free software. Initial versions of programs may occasionally crash, fail to de-allocate memory, or encounter untested conditions. Developers may overlook security holes, users may do things nobody thought of, and not all systems are identical. Software developers are human, and they make mistakes now and then. It happens. But of all major software vendors Microsoft has the worst record by far when it comes to the quality of their products in general.
Outlining the battle field

Microsoft boasts a rather extensive product range, but in fact there's less here than meets the eye. Microsoft has forever been selling essentially the same software over and over again, in a variety of colorful new wrappers.

Microsoft products can be divided into three categories: applications, operating systems, and additional server products. The applications include the Microsoft Office suite, but also Internet Explorer, Media Player, Visio, Frontpage, etc. The operating systems involve desktop and server versions of Windows. On the desktop we find Windows 9x/ME, NT Workstation, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and at the server end we have Windows NT Server, Windows 2003 Server and Windows 2000 varieties such as Datacenter. The additional server products, e.g. Internet Information Server (IIS) and SQL Server, run on top of one of the Windows server products. They add services (e.g. webserver or database server functions) to the basic file, print and authentication services that the Windows server platform provides.
Two different Windows families

Windows on the desktop comes in two flavors: the Windows 9x/ME product line, and the Windows NT/2000/XP product line. The different versions within one product line are made to look a bit different, but the difference is in the details only; they are essentially the same. Windows '95, '98 and ME are descended from DOS and Windows 3.x, and contain significant portions of old 16-bit legacy code. These Windows versions are essentially DOS-based, with 32-bit extensions. Process and resource management, memory protection and security were added as an afterthought and are rudimentary at best. This Windows product line is totally unsuited for applications where security and reliability are an issue. It is completely insecure, e.g. it may ask for a password but it won't mind if you don't supply one. There is no way to prevent the user or the applications from accessing and possibly corrupting the entire system (including the file system), and each user can alter the system's configuration, either by mistake or deliberately. The Windows 9x/ME line primarily targets consumers (although Windows '95 marketing was aimed at corporate users as well).

The other Windows product line includes Windows NT, 2000 and XP, and the server products. This Windows family is better than the 9x/ME line; at least these versions use new (i.e. post-DOS) 32-bit code. Memory protection, resource management and security are a bit more serious than in Windows 9x/ME, and they even have some support for access restrictions and a secure filesystem. That doesn't mean that this Windows family is as reliable and secure as Redmond's marketeers claim, but compared to Windows 9x/ME its additional features at least have the advantage of being there at all. But even this Windows line contains a certain amount of 16-bit legacy code, and the entire 16-bit subsystem is a direct legacy from Microsoft's OS/2 days with IBM. In short, all 16-bit applications share one 16-bit subsystem (just as with OS/2). There's no internal memory protection, so one 16-bit application may crash all the others and the the entire 16-bit subsystem as well. This may create persistent locks from the crashed 16-bit code on 32-bit resources, and eventually bring Windows to a halt. Fortunately this isn't much of a problem anymore now that 16-bit applications have all but died out.

Of course Windows has seen a lot of development over the years. But in fact very little has really improved. The new features in new versions of Windows all show the same half-baked, patchy approach. For each fixed problem, at least one new problem is introduced (and often more than one). Windows XP for example comes loaded with more applications and features than ever before. While this may seem convenient at first sight, the included features aren't as good as those provided by external software. For example, XP insists on supporting DSL ("wideband Internet") networking, scanners and other peripherals with the built-in Microsoft code instead of requiring third-party code. So you end up with things like DSL networking that uses incorrect settings (and no convenient way to change that), scanner support that won't let you use your scanner's photocopy feature, or a digital camera interface that will let you download images from the camera but you can't use its webcam function. WiFi network cards are even more of a problem: where manufacturers could include their own drivers and client manager software in previous versions of Windows, users are now forced to use XP's native WiFi support. Unfortunately XP's WiFi support is full of problems that cause wireless PCs to loose their connection to the wireless access point with frustrating regularity. Also XP's native WiFi support lacks extra functions (such as advanced multiple-profile management) that manufacturers used to include in their client software. And of course applications (such as Internet Explorer and Outlook) have been integrated in the operating system more tightly than ever before, and more formerly separate products have been bundled with the operating system.
Design flaws common to all Windows versions

All versions of Windows share a number of structural design flaws. Application installation procedures, user errors and runaway applications may easily corrupt the operating system beyond repair, networking support is poorly implemented, inefficient code leads to sub-standard performance, and both scalability and manageability leave a lot to be desired. (See also appendix A.) In fact, NT and its successors (or any version of Windows) are just not comparable to the functionality, robustness or performance that the UNIX community has been used to for decades. They may work well, or they may not. On one system Windows will run for weeks on end, on another it may crash quite frequently. I've attended trainings at a Microsoft Authorized Education Center, and I was told: "We are now going to install Windows on the servers. The installation will probably fail on one or two systems [They had ten identical systems in the classroom] but that always happens - we don't know why and neither does Microsoft." I repeat, this from a Microsoft Authorized Partner.

Be that as it may... Even without any installation problems or serious crashes (the kind that require restore operations or reinstallations) Windows doesn't do the job very well. Many users think it does, but they generally haven't experienced any alternatives. In fact Windows' unreliability has become commonplace and even proverbial; the dreaded blue screen has featured in cartoons, screen savers and on t-shirts, it has appeared at airports and on buildings, and there has even been a Star Trek episode in which a malfunctioning space ship had to be switched off and back on in order to get it going.

And even if Windows stays up it leaves a lot to be desired. On an older-but-still-good desktop PC (e.g. a 450MHz PII CPU with 256MB RAM, something we could only dream of a few years ago) four or five simultaneous tasks are enough to tax Windows' multitasking capabilities to their limits, even with plenty of core memory available. Task switches will start to take forever, applications will stop responding simply because they're waiting for system resources to be released by other applications (which may have crashed without releasing those resources), or kernel and library routines lock into some unknown wait condition. Soon the whole system locks up entirely or becomes all but unusable and has to be rebooted. In short, Windows' process management is as bad a joke as its memory protection and resource management are, and an operating system that may crash entirely when an application error occurs should not be sold as a serious multi-tasking environment. Granted, it does run several processes at once - but not very well. Recent versions of Windows (i.e. 2000 and XP) are a little better in this respect than their predecessors, but not much. Although they have been patched up to reduce the impact of some of the most serious problems, the basic flaws in the OS architecture remain; a crashing application (e.g. a video player) can still lock up the system or throw it into a sudden and spontaneous warm reboot.
Code separation, protection and sharing flaws

Windows is quite fragile, and the operating system can get corrupted quite easily. This happens most often during the installation of updates, service packs, drivers or application software, and the problem exists in all versions of Windows so far. The heart of the problem lies in the fact that Windows can't (or rather, is designed not to) separate application and operating system code and settings. Code gets mixed up when applications install portions of themselves between files that belong to the operating system (occasionally replacing them in the process). Settings are written to a central registry that also stores vital OS settings. The registry database is basically insecure, and settings that are vital to the OS or to other applications are easily corrupted.

Even more problems are caused by the limitations of Windows' DLL subsystem. A good multi-tasking and/or multi-user OS utilizes a principle called code sharing. Code sharing means that if an application is running n times at once, the code segment that contains the program code (which is called the static segment) is loaded into memory only once, to be used by n different processes which are therefore instances of the same application. Apparently Microsoft had heard about something called code sharing, but obviously didn't really understand the concept and the benefits, or they didn't bother with the whole idea. Whatever the reason, they went and used DLLs instead. DLL files contain Dynamic Link Libraries and are intended to contain libary functions only. Windows doesn't share the static (code) segment - if you run 10 instances of Word, the bulk of the code will be loaded into memory 10 times. Only a fraction of the code, e.g. library functions, has been moved to DLLs and may be shared.

The main problem with DLL support is that the OS keeps track of DLLs by name only. There is no adequate signature system to keep track of different DLL versions. In other words, Windows cannot see the difference between one WHATSIT.DLL and another DLL with the same name, although they may contain entirely different code. Once a DLL in the Windows directory has been overwritten by another one, there's no way back. Also, the order in which applications are started (and DLLs are loaded) determines which DLL will become active, and how the system will eventually crash. There is no distinction between different versions of the same DLL, or between DLLs that come with Windows and those that come with application software. An application may put its own DLLs in the same directory as the Windows DLLs during installation, and may overwrite DLLs by the same name if they exist.

What it boils down to is that the application may add portions of itself to the operating system. (This is one of the reasons why Windows needs to be rebooted after an application has been installed or changed.) That means that the installation procedure introduces third-party code (read: uncertified code) to the operating system and to other applications that load the affected DLLs. Furthermore, because there is no real distinction between system level code and user level code, the code in DLLs that has been provided by application programmers or the user may run at system level, i.e. unprotected. This corrupts the integrity of the operating system and other applications. A rather effective demonstration was provided by Bill Gates himself who, during a Comdex presentation of the Windows 98 USB Plug-and-Play features, connected a scanner to a PC and caused it to crash into a Blue Screen. "Moving right along," said Gates, "I guess this is why we're not shipping it yet." Nice try, Mr. Gates, but of course the release versions of Windows '98 and ME were just as unstable, and in Windows 2000 and XP new problems have been introduced. These versions of Windows use a firmware revision number to recognize devices, so an update of a peripheral's firmware may cause that device to be 'lost' to PnP.

Another, less harmful but most annoying, side-effect of code confusion is that different language versions of software may get mixed up. A foreign language version of an application may add to or partially overwrite Windows' list of dialog messages. This may cause a dialog window to prompt "Are you sure?" in English, followed by two buttons marked, say, "Da" and "Nyet".

Peripheral drivers also use a rather weak signature system and suffer from similar problems as DLL's, albeit to a lesser degree. For example, it's quite possible to replace a printer driver with a similar driver from another language version of Windows and mess up the page format as a result. Printer drivers from different language versions of Windows sometimes contain entirely different code that generates different printer output, but Windows is unaware of the difference. This problem has been addressed somewhat with the release of Windows 2000, but it's still far from perfect.
Mixing up OS and application code

Designing an OS to deliberately mix up system and application code fits Microsoft's strategy of product bundling and integration. (See below.) But the results are obvious: each file operation that involves executable code puts the entire OS and its applications at risk, and application errors often mean OS errors (and crashes) as well. This leads to ridiculous 'issues' such as Outlook Express that may crash Windows NT 4.0, if NT is a 'high encryption' version with the locale set to 'France'. Replying to a message may crash the entire system, a problem which has been traced to one of the DLLs that comes with Outlook. (Are you still with me?)

In a well-designed and robustly coded OS something like this could never happen. The first design criterion for any OS is that the system, the applications, and (in a multi-user environment) the users all be separated and protected from each other. Not only does no version of Windows do that by default, it actively prevents you from setting things up that way. The DLL fiasco is just the tip of the iceberg. You can't maintain or adequately restore OS integrity, you can't maintain version control, and you can't prevent applications and users from interfering with each other and the system, either by accident or on purpose.
Beyond repair

Then there's Windows' lack of an adequate repair or maintenance mode. If anything goes wrong and a minor error or corruption occurs in one of the (literally) thousands of files that make up Windows, often the only real solution is a large-scale restore operations or even to reinstall the OS. Yes, you heard me. If your OS suddenly stops working properly and the files which you need to restore are unknown or being locked by Windows, the standard approach to the problem (as recommended by Microsoft) is to do a complete reinstallation. There's no such thing as single user mode or maintenance mode to do repairs, nor is there a good way to find out which file has been corrupted in the first place, let alone to repair the damage. (The so-called 'safe mode' merely swaps configurations and does not offer sufficient control for serious system repairs.)

Windows has often been criticized for the many problems that occur while installing it on a random PC, which may be an A-brand or clone system in any possible configuration. This criticism is not entirely justified; after all it's not practically feasible to foresee all the possible hardware configurations that may occur at the user end. But that's not the point. The point is that these problems are often impossible to fix, because most of the Windows operating system is beyond the users' or administrators' control. This is of course less true for Windows 9x/ME. Because these are essentially DOS products, you can reboot the system using DOS and do manual repairs to a certain degree. With Windows NT this is of course completely impossible. Windows 2000 and XP come with an external repair console utility on the CD, that allows you to access the file system of a damaged Windows installation. But that's about it.

This leads to ridiculous situations. For example, I tried to install a bugfix from Microsoft for Windows NT, which included a DLL that replaced a previous version in the system directory. However, since Windows keeps this DLL open and locked, this cannot be done while the operating system is running. The README that came with the patch blithely suggested that I reboot my computer using DOS, and manually replace the DLL from the DOS prompt. Apart from the fact that NTFS system partitions cannot be accessed from DOS, which I will ignore for the moment, this inability to allow for its own maintenance is a good demonstration of Windows' immaturity.

The inability to make repairs has been addressed, to a certain degree, in Windows XP. XP comes with a 'System Restore' feature that tracks changes to the OS, so that administrators may 'roll back' the system to a previous state before the problem occurred. Also, the 'System File Check' feature attempts to make sure that some 1000 system files are the ones that were originally installed. If a "major" system file is replaced by another version (for example if a Windows XP DLL file is overwritten by a Windows '95 DLL with the same name) the original version will be restored. (Of course this also prevents you from removing things like Outlook Express or Progman.exe, since the specification of what is an important system file is rather sloppy.)

These workarounds are automated processes, and they are largely beyond the user's control. Disabling System File Check requires major surgery, and neither feature can be stopped from undoing modifications that it thinks are incorrect but that may be intentional. There's still no maintenance mode. Even so this may be an improvement over the previous situation: a certain amount of recovery is now possible. On the other hand, this illustrates Microsoft's kludgey approach to a very serious problem: instead of implementing changes in the architecture to prevent OS corruption, they perpetuate the basic design flaw and try to deal with the damage after the fact. They don't fix the hole in your roof, they sell you a bucket to put under it instead.
Wasted resources

The inefficiency of Microsoft's program code is of course disastrous to Windows' performance figures. (Where did you think the name 'Windoze' comes from?) Microsoft needs at least three or four times as much hardware to deliver the same performance that other operating systems (e.g. Unix) deliver on much less. And that's not the only problem. Another issue is that most of Windows' bells and whistles do not increase productivity (the bottom line when it comes to ICT investments paying off) at all. Today you need at least a 600 MHz Pentium III to do the same kind of typical office work job under Windows XP that you used to do on a 12 MHz 286 under DOS... in about the same amount of time. Productivity has only been fractionally increased at a hugely inflated Total Cost of Ownership. Can you say "Return On Investment"?

Only 32 kilobytes of RAM in the Apollo capsules' computers was enough to put men on the moon. The Voyager deep space probes have on-board computers based on a 4-bit CPU. An 80C85 CPU with 176 kilobytes of PROM and 576 kilobytes of RAM controlled the Sojourner rover that drove across the surface of Mars and sent us a wealth of scientific data and high-resolution images in full-color stereo. But when I have a 233MHz Pentium II with 128 Megabytes of RAM and 30 Gigabytes of disk space, and I try to type a letter to my grandmother using Windows XP and Office XP, the job will take me forever because my computer is underpowered!!

Server-based or network-based computing is no solution either, mainly because Windows doesn't have any real code sharing capability. If you were to shift the workload of ten 450MHz/512MB workstations to an application server (using Windows Terminal Server, Citrix Server or another ASP-like solutions) you would need a theoretical 4.5GHz CPU speed and 5GB of RAM at the server end to maintain the same performance, not counting the inevitable overhead which could easily run up to 10 or 20 percent.

And then there's the incredible amount of inefficient, or even completely unnecessary code in the Windows file set. Take the 3D Pinball game in Windows 2000 Professional and XP Professional, for example. This game (you'll find it under \Program Files\Windows NT\Pinball) is installed with Windows and takes up a few megabytes of disk space. But most users will never know that it's sitting there, wasting storage and doing nothing productive at all. It doesn't appear in the program menu or control panel, and no shortcuts point to it. The user isn't asked any questions about it during installation. In fact its only conceivable purpose would be to illustrate Microsoft's definition of 'professional'. No wonder Windows has needed more and more resources over the years. A few megabytes doesn't seem much, perhaps, but that's only because we've become used to the enormous footprints of Windows and Windows applications. Besides, if Microsoft installs an entire pinball game that most users neither need nor want, they obviously don't care about conserving resources (which are paid for by the user community). What does that tell you about the resource-efficiency of the rest of their code? Let me give you a hint: results published in PC Magazine in April 2002 show that the latest Samba software surpasses the performance of Windows 2000 by about 100 percent under benchmark tests. In terms of scalability, the results show that Unix and Samba can handle four times as many client systems as Windows 2000 before performance begins to drop off.

Another example is what happened when one of my own clients switched from Unix to Windows (the reason for this move being the necessity to run some webbased accounting package with BackOffice connectivity on the server). Their first server ran Unix, Apache, PHP and MySQL and did everything it had to do with the engine barely idling. On the same system they then installed Windows Server 2003, IIS, PHP and MySQL, after which even the simplest of PHP scripts (e.g. a basic 100-line form generator) would abort when the 30 second execution timeout was exceeded.

Paradoxically, though, the fact that Microsoft products need humongous piles of hardware in order to perform decently has contributed to their commercial success. Many integrators and resellers push Microsoft software because it enables them to prescribe the latest and heaviest hardware platforms in the market. Unix and Netware can deliver the same or better performance on much less. Windows 2000 and XP however need bigger and faster systems, and are often incompatible with older hardware and firmware versions (especially the BIOS). This, and the fact that hardware manufacturers discontinue support for older hardware and BIOSes, forces the user to purchase expensive hardware with no significant increase in return on investment. This boosts hardware sales, at the expense of the "dear, valued customer". Resellers make more money when they push Microsoft products. It's as simple as that.
Many small flaws make a big one

Apart from the above (and other) major flaws there's also a staggering amount of minor flaws. In fact there are so many minor flaws that their sheer number can be classified as a major flaw. In short, the general quality of Microsoft's entire set of program code is sub-standard. Unchecked buffers, unverified I/O operations, race conditions, incorrectly implemented protocols, failures to deallocate resources, failures to check environmental parameters, et cetera ad nauseam... You name it, it's in there. Microsoft products contain some extremely sloppy code and bad coding practices that would give an undergraduate some well-deserved bad marks. As a result of their lack of quality control, Microsoft products and especially Windows are riddled with literally thousands and thousands of bugs and glitches. Even most of the error messages are incorrect!

Some of these blunders can be classified as clumsy design rather than as mere sloppiness. A good example is Windows' long filename support. In an attempt to allow for long filenames, Microsoft deliberately broke the FAT file system. They stored the extension information into deliberately cross-linked directory entries, which is probably one of their dirtiest kludges ever. And if that wasn't enough, they made it legal for filenames to contain whitespace. Because this is incompatible with Windows' own command line parsing (it still assumes the old FAT notation) another kludge was needed, and whitespace had to be enclosed in quotation marks. This confuses (and breaks) many programs, including many of Microsoft's own that come with Windows.

Another good example is Windows' apparent case-sensitivity. Windows seems to make a distinction between upper and lower case when handling filenames, but the underlying software layers are in fact case-insensitive. So Windows only changes the case of the files and directories as they are presented to the user. The names of the actual files and directories may be stored in uppercase, lowercase or mixed case, while they are still presented as capitalized lower case files. Of course this discrepancy causes no problems in a Windows-only environment. Since the underlying code is essentially case-insensitive, case is not critical to Windows' operation. However as soon as you want to incorporate Unix-based services (e.g. a Unix-based webserver instead of IIS) you discover that Windows has messed up the case of filenames and directories.

But most of Windows' errors and glitches are just the result of sloppy work. Of course there is no such thing as bug-free software, but the amount of bugs found in Windows is, to put it mildly, disproportionate. For example, Service Pack 4 for Windows NT 4.0 attempted to fix some 1200 bugs (yes, one thousand two hundred). But there had already been three previous service packs at the time! Microsoft shamelessly admitted this, and even boasted about having "improved" NT on 1200 points. Then they had to release several more subsequent service packs in the months that followed, to fix remaining issues and of course the additional problems that had been introduced by the service packs themselves.

An internal memo among Microsoft developers mentioned 63,000 (yes: sixty-three thousand) known defects in the initial Windows 2000 release. Keith White, Windows Marketing Director, did not deny the existence of the document, but claimed that the statements therein were made in order to "motivate the Windows development team". He went on to state that "Windows 2000 is the most reliable Windows so far." Yes, that's what he said. A product with 63,000 known defects (mind you, that's only the known defects) and he admits it's the best they can do. Ye gods.

And the story continues: Windows XP Service Pack 2 was touted to address a large number of security issues and make computing safer. Instead it breaks many things (mostly products made by Microsoft's competitors, but of course that is merely coincidence) but does not really fix any real security flaws. The first major security hole in XP-SP2 was described by security experts as "not a hole but rather a crater" and allowed downloadable code to spoof firewall information. Only days after XP-SP2 was released the first Internet Explorer vulnerability of the SP2-era was discovered. Furthermore SP2 leaves many unnecessary networking components enabled, bungles permissions, leaves IE and OE open to malicious scripts, and installs a packet filter that lacks a capacity for egress filtering. It also makes it more difficult for third-party products (especially multimedia plugins) to access the ActiveX controls, which in turn prevents the installation of quite a bit of multimedia software made by Microsoft's competitors. XP-SP2's most noticable effect (apart from broken application compatibility are frequent popups that give the user a sense of security. Apart from this placebo effect the long-awaited and much-touted XP-SP2 doesn't really fix very much.

In the summer of 2005 Jim Allchin, then group VP in charge of Windows, finally went and admitted all this. In a rare display of corporate honesty, he told the Wall Street Journal that the first version of Longhorn had to be scrapped because the quality of the program code had deteriorated too far. The root of the problem, said Allchin, was Microsoft's historical approach to developing software (the so-called 'spaghetti code culture) where the company's thousands of programmers would each develop their own piece of code and it would then all be stitched together at the end. Allchin also said to have faced opposition to his call for a completely new development approach, firstly from Gates himself and then the company's engineers.
Unreliable servers

All these blunders have of course their effects on Windows' reliability and availability. Depending on application and system load, most Windows systems tend to need frequent rebooting, either to fix problems or on a regular basis to prevent performance degradation as a result of Windows' shaky resource management.

On the desktop this is bad enough, but the same flaws exist in the Windows server products. Servers are much more likely to be used for mission-critical applications than workstations are, so Windows' limited availability and its impact on business become a major issue. The uptimes of typical Windows-based servers in serious applications (i.e. more than just file and print services for a few workstations) tend to be limited to a few weeks at most. One or two server crashes (read: interruptions of business and loss of data) every few months are not uncommon. As a server OS, Windows clearly lacks reliability.

Windows server products aren't even really server OSes. Their architecture is no different from the workstation versions. The server and workstation kernels in NT are identical, and changing two registry keys is enough to convince a workstation that it's a server. Networking capabilities are still largely based on the peer-to-peer method that was part of Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and that Microsoft copied, after it had been successfully pioneered by Apple and others in the mid-eighties. Of course some code in the server products has been extended or optimized for performance, and domain-based authentication has been added, but that doesn't make it a true server platform. Neither does the fact that NT Server costs almost three times as much as NT Workstation. In fact we're talking about little more than Windows for Workgroups on steroids.

In November 1999, Sm@rt Reseller's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols ran a test to compare the stability of Windows NT Server (presumably running Microsoft Internet Information Server) with that of the Open Source Linux operating system (running Samba and Apache). He wrote:
Conventional wisdom says Linux is incredibly stable. Always skeptical, we decided to put that claim to the test over a 10-month period. In our test, we ran Caldera Systems OpenLinux, Red Hat Linux, and Windows NT Server 4.0 with Service Pack 3 on duplicate 100MHz Pentium systems with 64MB of memory. Ever since we first booted up our test systems in January, network requests have been sent to each server in parallel for standard Internet, file and print services. The results were quite revealing. Our NT server crashed an average of once every six weeks. Each failure took roughly 30 minutes to fix. That's not so bad, until you consider that neither Linux server ever went down.

Interesting: a crash that takes 30 minutes to fix means that something critical has been damaged and needs to be repaired or restored. At least it takes more than just a reboot. This happens once every six weeks on a server, and that's considered "not so bad"... Think about it. Also note that most other Unix flavors such as Solaris, BSD or AIX are just as reliable as Linux.

But the gap between Windows and real uptime figures is even greater than Vaughan-Nichols describes above. Compare that half hour downtime per six weeks to that of Netware, in the following article from Techweb on 9 April 2001:
Server 54, Where Are You?
The University of North Carolina has finally found a network server that, although missing for four years, hasn't missed a packet in all that time. Try as they might, university administrators couldn't find the server. Working with Novell Inc. (stock: NOVL), IT workers tracked it down by meticulously following cable until they literally ran into a wall. The server had been mistakenly sealed behind drywall by maintenance workers.

Although there is some doubt as to the actual truth of this story, it's a known fact that Netware servers are capable of years of uninterrupted service. I recently brought down a Netware server at our head office. This is a Netware 5.0 server that also runs software to act as the corporate SMTP/POP3 server, fax server and virus protection for the network, next to regular file and print services for the whole company. It had been up and running without a single glitch for more than a year, and the only reason we shut it down was because it had to be physically moved to another building. Had the move not been necessary, it could have run on for years and years - after all there's no reason why its performance should be affected, as long as nobody pulls the plug or rashly loads untested software. The uptimes of our Linux and Solaris servers (which act as mission-critical web servers, database servers and mail servers, and also run basic file and print services) are measured in months as well. Uptimes in excess of a year are not uncommon for Netware and Unix platforms, and uptimes of more than two years are not unheard of either. Most OS updates short of a kernel replacement do not require a Unix server to reboot, as opposed to Windows that needs a complete server reboot whenever a DLL in some subsystem is replaced. But see for yourself: check the Netcraft Uptime statistics and compare the uptimes of Windows servers to those of Unix servers. The figures speak for themselves.

Microsoft promises 99.999% availability with Windows 2000. That's a little over 5 minutes of downtime per year. Frankly I can't believe this is a realistic target for Windows. Microsoft products have never even approached such uptime figures. Even though most of the increased availability of Windows 2000 must be provided through third-party clustering and redundancy solutions (something that the glossy ads neglect to mention) it's highly unlikely that less than five minutes of downtime per year for the entire Windows cluster is practically feasible.

Perhaps even more serious is the fact that, short of clustering, there is no adequate solution for the many software glitches that jeopardize the availability of a typical Windows server. A typical NT or 2000 server can spontaneously develop numerous transient problems. These may vary from network processes that seem healthy but ignore all network requests, to runaway server applications that lock up the entire operating system. Usually the only solution in these cases is to power cycle and restart the system. I remember having to do that three times a week on a production server. Believe me, it's no fun. Perhaps it's understandable that some network administrators feel that the best way to accelerate a Windows system is at 9.81 meters per second squared.
More worries, more cost, or both

Does all this make Windows an entirely unusable product that cannot run in a stable configuration anywhere? No, fortunately not. There are situations where Windows systems (both workstations and servers) may run for long periods without crashing. A vendor-installed version of Windows NT of 2000 on an HCL-compliant, A-brand system, with all the required service packs and only certified drivers, should give you relatively few problems (provided that you don't use it for much more than basic file and print services, of course). The rule of thumb here is to use only hardware that is on Microsoft's Hardware Compatibility List (HCL), to use only vendor-supplied, certified drivers and other software, and to use third-party clustering solutions for applications where availability is a critical issue.

Another rule of thumb is: one service, one server. Unix sysadmins would expect to run multiple services on one server and still have resources to spare. Good Windows sysadmins generally don't do that. If you need to run a file/print server, a web server and a mail server, all under Windows, use three servers. This will minimize the risk of software conflicts, and it will help prevent overload. On the other hand, you now have to maintain three servers instead of one, which in turn requires more IT staff to keep up with the work.

A diligent regime of upgrading and running only the latest versions of Microsoft products may help as well. Such a policy will cost a small fortune in license upgrades, but it may help to solve and even prevent some problems. To be honest, Windows 2000 and XP on the desktop, and Windows Server 2003 in the server room, are somewhat better (or rather, less bad) than NT4 was. These versions are at least more stable, and less prone to spontaneous crashes, than NT4 was. Some of NT's most awkward design blunders have been fixed. For example, the user home directories are no longer located under the WINNT directory. On most systems (especially on notebook computers) 2000 and XP are considerably less shaky, and hardware support is certainly better. Which goes to show that a few relatively trivial changes may go a long way, I suppose.

But still, given the general quality of Microsoft products and Windows in particular, there are absolutely no guarantees. And of course Microsoft introduced a whole new set of glitches and bugs in Windows XP, which largely undid many of the improvements in Windows 2000. So now Windows XP is less stable in some situations than Windows 2000 was. But that's innovation for you, I suppose.
Denial will see us through

One frightening aspect about all this is that Microsoft doesn't seem to realize how serious these problems are. Or rather, they probably realize it but they don't seem to care as long as sales hold up. While the core systems of large companies still run on either mainframes or midrange Linux systems in order to provide sufficient reliability and performance, Microsoft sales reps pretend that Windows is good enough to compete in that area.

Microsoft likes to pretend that Windows' huge shortcomings are only minor. Their documents on serious problems (which are always called 'Issues' in Microsoft-speak) are very clear on that point. Take the classic 'TCP/IP Denial Of Service Issue' for example: a serious problem that was discovered a few years ago. It caused NT servers to stop responding to network service requests, thus rendering mission-critical services unavailable. (This should not be confused with deliberate Denial Of Service attacks to which most operating systems are vulnerable; this was a Windows issue only.) At the time there was no real solution for this problem. Microsoft's only response at the time was to state that "This issue does not compromise sensitive data in any way. It merely forces a server to become unavailable for a short time, which is easily remedied by rebooting the server." NT sysadmins had to wait for the next service pack that was released several months later before this problem was addressed. In the meantime they were expected to accept downtime and the rebooting of mission-critical servers as a matter of course. After all no data was lost, so how bad could it be?

And Microsoft thinks that this stuff can compete with Unix and threaten the mainframe market for mission-critical applications?
Uh-huh. I don't think so.

In September 2001 Hewlett-Packard clustered 225 PCs running the Open Source Linux operating system. The resulting system (called I-cluster) benchmarked itself right into the global top-500 of supercomputers, using nothing but unmodified, out-of-the-box hardware. (A significant number of entries in that top-500, by the way, runs Linux, and more and more Unix clusters are being used for supercomputing applications.) Microsoft, with a product line that is descended solely from single-user desktop systems, can't even dream of such scalability - not now, not ever. Nevertheless Microsoft claimed on a partner website with Unisys that Windows will outperform Unix, because Unisys' server with Windows 2000 Datacenter could be scaled up to 32 CPU's. This performance claim is of course a blatant lie: the opposite is true and they know it. Still Microsoft would have us believe that the performance, reliability and scalability of the entire Windows product line is on par with that of Unix, and that clustered Windows servers are a viable replacement option for mainframes and Unix midrange systems. I'm not kidding, that's what they say. If you're at all familiar with the scalability of Unix midrange servers and the requirements of the applications that mainframes are being used for, you will realize how ludicrous this is.
Microsoft lacks confidence in own products

Dog food is sold to the owners who buy it, not to the dogs who have to eat it. "Eating your own dog food" is a metaphor for a programmer who uses the system he or she is working on. Is it yet functional enough for real work? Would you trust it not to crash and lose your data? Does it have rough edges that scour your hand every time you use a particular feature? Would you use it yourself by choice?

When Microsoft acquired the successful Hotmail free Email service, the system had roughly 10 million users, and the core systems that powered Hotmail all ran Unix. A few years later the number of Hotmail users exceeds 100 million, but in spite of Microsoft's claims about the power of Windows and their previous intentions to replace Hotmail's core systems with Windows servers, Hotmail's core systems still run Unix. This is discussed thoroughly in a leaked-out internal paper by Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks. He mentions the proverbial stability of the Unix kernel and the Apache web server, the system's transparency and combination of power and simplicity. Windows on the other hand is considered to be needlessly GUI-biased (Brooks writes: "Windows 2000 server products continue to be designed with the desktop in mind") and also complex, obscure and needlessly resource-hungry. (Brooks: "It's true that Windows requires a more powerful computer than Linux or FreeBSD [and treats] reboot as an expectation".)

Hotmail is not the only example of Microsoft's refusal to eat their own dog food. The "We have the way out" anti-Unix website that Microsoft (along with partner Unisys) put up in the first months of 2002, initially ran Unix and Apache. (It was ported to IIS on Windows 2000 only after the entire ICT community had had a good laugh). For years Microsoft's own email servers have been protected by third-party security software, which amounts to a recognition of the fact that Exchange on Windows needs such third party assistance to provide even a basic level of system security.
Microsoft's SQL Labs, the part of the company that works on Microsoft's SQL Server, purchaced NetScreen's 500-series security appliance to defend its network against Code Red, Nimda and other worm attacks. Apparently the labs' choice was made despite the fact that Microsoft then already sold its own security product touted as a defense against such worms. The Microsoft ISA [Internet Security and Acceleration] Server was introduced in early 2001 and was hailed by Microsoft as their first product aimed entirely at the security market. In fact, the most important reason businesses ought to switch to ISA Server, according to Microsoft, was that "ISA Server is an [...] enterprise firewall and secure application gateway designed to protect the enterprise network from hacker intrusion and malicious worms". Still Microsoft's SQL Labs prudently decided to rely on other products than their own to provide basic security.
And Microsoft's own accounting division used IBM's AS/400 midrange platform for critical applications such as the payroll system, until well in the late nineties.
Food for thought.
Network pollution

It should also be mentioned that Microsoft doesn't know the first thing about networking. A Windows system in a TCP/IP environment still uses a NetBIOS name. Microsoft networking is built around NetBEUI, which is an extended version of NetBIOS. This is a true Stone Age protocol which is totally unroutable. It uses lots of broadcasts, and on a network segment with Windows PCs broadcasts indeed make up a significant portion of the network traffic, even for point-to-point connections (e.g. between a Microsoft mailbox and a client PC). If it weren't for the fact that it is possible to encapsulate NetBIOS/NetBEUI traffic in a TCP/IP envelope, connecting Windows to the real world would be totally impossible. (Note that Microsoft calls the IP encapsulation of NetBEUI packets 'native IP'. Go figure.) The problem is being made worse by the ridiculous way in which Microsoft applications handle file I/O. Word can easily do over a hundred 'open' operations on one single file, and saving a document involves multiple write commands with only one single byte each. Thus Windows PCs tend to generate an inordinate amount of garbage and unnecessary traffic on the network.

Microsoft's design approach has never shown much understanding of of computer networking. I remember reading a document from Microsoft that stated that a typical PC network consists of ten or at most twenty peer-to-peer workstations on a single cable segment, all running Microsoft operating systems. And that explains it, I suppose. If you want anything more than that, on your own head be it.

Here's a simple test. Take a good, fast FTP server (i.e. one that runs on Unix). Upload and download a few large files (say, 50MB) from and to a Windows NT or 2000 workstation. (I used a 233MHz Pentium-II.) You will probably see a throughput in the order of 1 Mbit/s for uploads and 2 to 3 Mbit/s for downloads, or more on faster hardware.
Then boot Linux on the same workstation (a quick and easy way is to use a Linux distribution on a ready-to-run CD that requires no installation, such as Knoppix). Then repeat the upload and download test. You will now see your throughput limited only by the bandwidth or your network connection, the capacity of your FTP server, or by your hardware performance, whichever comes first. On 10 Mbit/s Ethernet, 5 Mbit/s upload and download throughput are the least you may expect. To further test this, you can repeat it with a really slow client (e.g. a 60 or 75MHz Pentium) running Linux. The throughput limit will still be network-bound and not system-bound. (Note: this is not limited to FTP but also affects other network protocols. It's a performance problem related to the code in Windows' IP stack and other parts of the architecture involved with data throughput.)

New Windows versions bring no relief here. Any network engineer who uses PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet) with ADSL will tell you that the MTU (a setting that limits packet size) should be set to 1492 or less. In XP it's set by default to 1500, which may lead to problems with the routers of many DSL ISPs. Microsoft is aware of the problem, but XP nevertheless persists in setting up PPPoE with an MTU of 1500. There is a registry hack for PPPoE users, but there is no patch, and XP has no GUI-based option which enables the user to change the MTU conveniently.

The above example is fairly typical of XP. Iit tries to do things itself and botches the job, rather than give you control over it to do it properly. But all versions of Windows share a number of clumsily designed and coded network features, starting with Windows file sharing. This service uses fixed ports, and can't be moved to other ports without using dynamite. This means that routing the essentially insecure Windows file sharing connections through a secure SSH tunnel is extremly cumbersome, and requires disabling (or, on XP, uninstalling) file sharing services on the local client, so that using both a tunneled and a non-tunneled file sharing connection at the same time is impossible, and switching back and forth between the two requires rebooting. Yes, you could conceivably solve this with a VPN configuration, but that's not the point. The point is that any self-respecting network client will let you configure the ports it uses but, apparently for reasons of user-friendliness, Microsoft hard-coded the file sharing ports into their software, thereby making it impossible to extend file sharing beyond insecure connections on a local LAN.

On top of all this, readers of this paper report that according to John Dvorak in PC Magazine, the Windows kernel maxes out at 483 Mbps. He remarks that as many businesses are upgrading to 1 Gigabit Ethernet, Windows (including XP) just can't keep up.
Now go read what Microsoft writes about Windows 2000 and XP being the ideal platform for Internet applications...
Denial of Service vulnerabilies

The sloppy nature of Windows' networking support code and protocol stacks also makes the system more vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks. A DoS attack is a form of computer vandalism or sabotage, with the intention to crash a system or otherwise render it unavailable. In a typical DoS attack a deliberately malformed network packet is sent to the target system, where it triggers a known flaw in the operating system to disrupt it. In the case of Windows, though, there are more ways to bring down a system. For example, the kernel routines in Windows 2000 and XP that process incoming IPsec (UDP port 500) packets are written so badly that sending a stream of regular IPsec packets to the server will cause it to bog down in a CPU overload. And of course Windows' IPsec filters cannot block a 500/udp packet stream.

Another way to render a system unavailable is a Distributed Denial of Service attack. A DDoS attack involves many networked systems that send network traffic to a single target system or network segment, which is then swamped with traffic and becomes unreachable. There's very little that can be done against DDoS attacks, and all platforms are equally vulnerable.

With all these DoS and DDoS vulnerabilities, it's a worrying development that Windows 2000 and XP provide new platforms to generate such attacks. The only real 'improvement' in Windows 2000's and XP's IP stacks is that for no good reason whatsoever, Microsoft has extended the control that an application has over the IP stack. This does not improve Windows' sub-standard networking performance, but it gives applications the option to build custom IP packets to generate incredibly malicious Internet traffic. This includes spoofed source IP addresses and SYN-flooding full scale Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. As if things weren't bad enough...
Cumulative problems on the server

So far we have concentrated on Windows. Most of the problems with Microsoft products originate here, since Windows is by far the most complex Microsoft product line, and there are more interactions between Windows and other products than anywhere else. But unfortunately most server and desktop applications are cut from the same cloth as Windows is. The general quality of their code and design is not much better.

The additional server products generally run on a Windows server. This means that all the disadvantages of an insecure, unstable platform also apply to the server products that run on those servers. For example, Microsoft SQL Server is a product that has relatively few problems. It's basically a straightforward implementation of a general SQL server, based on technology not developed by MS but purchased from Sybase. It's not very remarkable or innovative perhaps, and Service Pack 4 for MS SQL Server 2000 mostly fixed problems caused by Service Pack 3, in true Microsoft fashion. Still it's not a bad product as far as it goes, certainly not by Microsoft standards. But even so, no database service can be more stable than the platform it's running on. (This goes of course for any software product, not just for an SQL database server.) So all vulnerabilities that apply to the Windows server directly apply to the database service as well, even though the database service itself isn't a bad product.

Other additional server products come with their own additional problems. Microsoft's webserver product, Internet Information Server (IIS) is designed not just to serve up web pages written in the standard HTML language, but also to provide additional authentication and links to content databases, to add server and client side scripting to web pages, to generate Dynamic HTML and Active Server Pages, et cetera. And it does all these things, and more, but often not very well. IIS is outperformed by all other major webserver products (especially Apache). IIS' authentication is far from robust (the general lack of security in MS products is discussed below) and the integration of an IIS webserver with a content database server is far from seamless. Dynamic HTML, ASP and scripting require the webserver to execute code at the server end, and there Microsoft's bad process management comes into play: server load is often excessive. Running code at the server end in response to web requests creates a lot of security issues as well, and on top of all that the web pages that are generated do not conform to the global HTML standards, they are only viewed correctly in Microsoft's own web browser products.

Microsoft's mail server product, Exchange, has a few sharp edges as well. To begin with, its performance is definitely sub-standard. Where one Unix-based mail server will easily handle thousands of users, an Exhange server maxes out at about one hundred. So to replace large Unix-based email services with Exchange generally requires a server farm.
A much bigger problem is Exchange's lack of stability and reliability. To lose a few days worth of corporate E-mail in an Exchange crash is not uncommon. Most of these problems are caused by the hackish quality of the software. Exchange is designed to integrate primarily with other Microsoft products (especially the Outlook E-mail client) and it doesn't take the Internet's global RFC standards too seriously. This limits compatibility and may cause all kinds of problems. Outlook Express also has a strange way of talking IMAP to the Exchange server. It makes a bazillion IMAP connections; each connection logs in, performs one task, sets the connection to IDLE-- and then drops the connection. Since OE does not always close the mailbox properly before dropping the connection, the mailbox and Outlook do not necessarily sync up. This means that you may delete messages in OE that magically return to life in a few minutes because those deletions did not get disseminated to the mailbox before the connection terminated.

Just like other Microsoft applications, the additional server products are tightly integrated into Windows during installation. They replace DLLs belonging to the operating system, and they run services at the system level. This does not improve the stability of the system as a whole to begin with, and of course most of the code in the additional server products is of the same doubtful quality as the code that makes up Windows. The reliability and availability of any service can never be better than the server OS it runs on. However most of Microsoft's additional server products add their own complexity, bugs and glitches to the system, which only makes it worse. The resulting uptime and reliability figures are rather predictable. The inefficiency that exists in Windows is also present in the additional server products, so as a rule of thumb each additional service needs its own server platform. In other words: if you need a file and print server, a web server and a mail server, you need three separate systems whereas Unix or Netware could probably do the job on only one system.
Desktop: bigger but not better

Microsoft desktop applications (like Word and Excel) are largely more of the same. They're in the terminal stages of feature bloat: they're full of gadgets that don't really add anything useful to the product, but that ruin productivity because of their complexity, and that introduce more errors, increase resource demands, and require more code which in turn leads to increased risks. After years of patching and adding, the code base for these products has become very messy indeed. Security, if any, has been added as an afterthought here, too. For example, a password-protected Word document is not encrypted in any way. Inserting a 'protected' document into another non-protected document (e.g. an empty new document) is enough to get around the 'protection'. And if that fails, a simple hex editor is enough to change the 'Password To Modify' in a document. Microsoft is aware of this, but now claims that the 'Password To Modify' is only intended to "prevent accidental changes to a document" and not to offer protection from modifications by malicious third parties. Uh-huh.

Animated paper clips don't really make Word a better word processor. We'd be better off with other things, such as a consistent behavior of the auto-format features, the ability to view markup codes, or a more complete spell checking algorithm and dictionary. But in spite of all the "new" versions of Office and persistent feature requests from their users, Microsoft still hasn't gotten around to that. Instead we have multi-language support that tends to 'forget' its settings occasionally, and an 'auto-correct' feature that's limited to the point of being more annoying than useful. Word documents have become excessively large and unwieldy, and occasionally they are corrupted while being saved to disk so that Word will crash while trying to read them at a later time.

In fact it's hilarious that the latest version of Office, well into the 21st century, still can't handle multiple users reading and writing the same data. It's stuck in the eighties, when multiple users might have been able to read the same data, but all but the best systems couldn't properly handle writing to the same files, let alone database records. This problem, referred to as record locking, was fixed in modern software over a decade ago.

We can be brief about Excel: it has similar problems, and calculation errors in formula-based spreadsheets on top of that. Excel is full of frills and spiffy graphics and animations, but essentially it's still a spreadsheet that cannot count and that requires that many formulas and macros be rewritten for each new version of Excel.

The database component of Office, Microsoft Access, isn't exactly a stellar piece of work either. Access, apart from its quirky way of interfacing with backend databases, can still lock out an entire (possibly mission-critical) database, just because one user hasn't shut down the application used to write or modify data. Access is actually supposed to be able to handle this condition, but it doesn't.

Menu interfaces in all Microsoft applications, even in those that are bundled in MS Office, are inconsistent and non-intuitive. For example, the menu option to set application preferences, which may be titled 'Preferences' in some products but 'Options' in others, may be found under the 'File' menu, under the 'Edit' menu, under 'View' or somewhere else, depending on what product you're currently using. To create even more confusion, the same options in different applications do not work identically. For example the 'Unsorted list' button (to create a bullet list) handles indentation correctly in Word but ignores it completely in PowerPoint (PowerPoint adds bullets but messes up the left outline of the text). And the 'F3' key activates the 'search again' function for string searches in practically all Microsoft products, except in Internet Explorer and Excel where it brings up something totally different for no apparent reason.
Microsoft does the Internet

Microsoft's most important application outside MS Office is without doubt Internet Explorer. In its first incarnation IE was a very unremarkable web browser; e.g. version 2.0 as it was shipped with Windows NT 4 was so backward that it didn't even have frame capability. This soon changed as Microsoft began integrating the web browser with Windows as a part of their integration and bundling strategies (which are discussed in detail below).

In all honesty it must be said that recent versions of IE (starting with version 6) aren't really bad web browsers. They do most what they're supposed to do, barring a few annoying problems with strange defaults in style sheets and some random discrepancies in the redndering of tables, but on the whole they do the job pretty well. At least they display standards-compliant HTML as more or less correctly rendered web pages, at a speed that is by all means acceptable. Previous versions weren't this good and even contained deliberate deviations from the global HTML standards that were intended to discourage the use of standardized HTML in favor of Microsoft's own proprietary and restrictive ideas.

The main drawbacks of Internet Explorer lie in the fact that it tries to be more than just a web browser. It adds scripting support (with the ability to run Visual Basic or Jscripts that are embedded in web pages) and it hooks directly into the Windows kernel. I've seen web pages that would shut down the Windows system as soon as the page was viewed with Internet Explorer. Microsoft doesn't seem to have bothered very much with basic security considerations, to put it mildly. And of course the installation of a new version of Internet Explorer replaces (overwrites) significant portions of the Windows operating system, with all the drawbacks discussed above.

Similar problems are found in Outlook, Microsoft's E-mail client. Outlook is in fact a separate application, but it isn't shipped separately. There are two versions: one is bundled with Internet Explorer (this version is called Outlook Express) and the other is part of MS-Office (this version is named 'Outlook' and comes with groupware and scheduler capabilities). In itself Outlook is an acceptable, if unremarkable, E-mail client; it allows the user to read and write E-mail. It comes with a few nasty default settings, but at least these can be changed, although the average novice user of course never does that. (For example, messages are sent by default not as readable text but as HTML file attachments. When a user replies to an E-mail, the quoting feature sometimes uses weird formatting that won't go away without dynamite. And there's often a lot of junk that accompanies an outgoing E-mail message.) More serious is the fact that both Outlook and its server-end companion Exchange tend to strip fields from E-mail headers, a practice that is largely frowned upon. This also makes both network administration and troubleshooting more difficult.

The most worrying problem with Outlook is that it comes with a lot of hooks into Internet Explorer. IE code is being used to render HTML file attachments, including scripts that may be embedded into an HTML-formatted E-mail message. Again Microsoft seems to have been completely unaware of the need for any security here; code embedded in inbound E-mail is by default executed without any further checking or intervention from the user.
Basic insecurity of MS products

And that brings us to another major weakness of all Microsoft products: security, or rather the lack thereof. The notorious insecurity of Microsoft software is a problem in itself.

It all begins with Windows' rather weak security. The number of reports on security holes has become downright embarrassing, but it still keeps increasing regularly. On the other hand, Windows security holes have become so common that they hardly attract attention anymore. Microsoft usually downplays the latest security issues and releases another patch... after the fact. If Microsoft really wanted to resolve these software problems, they would take greater care to ensure such problems were fixed before its products went on sale-- and thus reverse the way it traditionally conducts business. Doing so would mean less resources wasted by its customers each year patching and re-patching their systems in an attempt to clean up after Microsoft's mistakes, but it would also decrease the customers' dependency on what Microsoft calls 'software maintenance'. In the meantime, hackers are having a ball with Microsoft's shaky security models and even weaker password encryption (such as simple XOR bitflip operations, the kind of 'encryption' that just about every student reinvents in school). Hackers, script kiddies and other wannabees get to take their pick from the wide choice of elementary security weaknesses to exploit. Some recent and highly virulent worms, for example, spread so rapidly because they could crack remote share passwords in about twenty seconds. (This did not stop Microsoft from running an advertising campaign in spring 2003 that centered on hackers becoming extinct along with the dodo and the dinosaur, all because of Microsoft's oh so secure software. Unsurprisingly, this violated a few regulations on truth in advertising, and the campaign had to be withdrawn.)

Another large part of the problem is Windows' lack of adequate separation between code running on various system and user levels. Windows always assumes that code runs with the highest privilege so that it can do almost anything, including malicious intent. This makes it impossible to prevent malicious code from invading the system. Users may (inadvertantly or deliberately) download and run code from the Internet, but it's impossible to prevent system level resources from damage by user level code.
Integrated vulnerabilities

The tight integration between the various Microsoft products does little to improve overall security. All software components are loaded with features, and all components can use each other's functions. Unfortunately this means that all security weaknesses are shared as well. For example, the Outlook E-mail client uses portions of Internet Explorer to render HTML that is embedded in E-mail messages, including script code. And of course IE and Outlook hook into the Windows kernel with enough privileges to run arbitrary malicious code that happens to be embedded in a received E-mail message or a viewed web page. Since Outlook uses portions of IE's code, it's vulnerable to IE's bugs as well. So a scripting vulnerability that exists in Outlook also opens up IE and vice versa, and if IE has a hook into certain Windows kernel functions, those functions can also be exploited through a weakness in Outlook. In other words, a minor security leak in one of the components immediately puts the entire system at risk. Read: a vulnerability in Internet Explorer means a vulnerability in Windows Server 2003! A simple Visual Basic script in an E-mail message has sufficient access rights to overwrite half the planet, as has been proven by Email virus outbreaks (e.g. Melissa, ILOVEYOU and similar worms) that have caused billions of dollars worth of damage.

A good example are Word viruses; these are essentially VBS (Visual Basic Script) routines that are embedded in Word documents as a macro. The creation of a relatively simple macro requires more programming skills than the average office employee can be expected to have, but at the same time a total lack of even basic security features makes Word users vulnerable to malicious code in Word documents. Because of the integrated nature of the software components, a Word macro is able to read Outlook's E-mail address book and then propagate itself through the system's E-mail and/or networking components. If Windows' security settings prevent this, the malicious virus code can easily circumvent this protective measure by the simple expedient of changing the security settings. How's that for security?

Similarly, VBS scripts embedded in web pages or E-mail messages may exploit weaknesses in IE or Outlook, so that viewing an infected web page or receiving an infected E-mail is enough to corrupt the system without any further action from the user (including manually downloading a file or opening an attachment). Through those weaknesses the malicious code may access data elsewhere on the system, modify the system's configuration or even start processes. In March 2000, a hacker wrote (of course anonymously) on ICQ:
21/03/2k: Found the 1st Weakness: In Windows 2000 [...] there is a Telnet daemon service, which is not started by default. It can be remotely started by embedding a COM object into HTML code that can be posted on a web page, or sent to an Outlook client. Following script will start the Telnet service:

We've tried it and it really works. Only a Problem... we've put it into a html page. When opening the page... our best friend "IE5" shows an alert msg saying that "you're going to run some commands that can be dangerous to your PC...Continue?" We must fix it! No problem using Outlook... [sic]

Note that after patching no fewer than seven different security holes in the Windows 2000 telnet code (yes, that's seven security leaks in telnet alone!) Microsoft released another patch in February 2002, to fix security issue number eight: another buffer overflow vulnerability. Somehow I don't think this patch will be the last. If you don't succeed at first, try seven more times, try, try (and try some more) again. Seen in this light, it's not surprising that J.S. Wurzler Underwriting Managers, one of the first companies to offer hacker insurance, have begun charging clients 5 to 15 percent more if they use Microsoft's Windows NT software in their Internet operations.

Microsoft knows exactly how bad their own product security is. Nevertheless they wax lyrical about new features rather than accept their responsibility for their actions. To quote Tom Lehrer:
"The rockets go up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department, says Werner von Braun."

Microsoft can't be unaware of the risks and damages they cause. After all they prudenly refuse to rely on their own products for security, but use third party protection instead. (See above.) And while they try to push their user community into upgrading to new product versions as soon as possible, Microsoft can hardly be called an early adopter. In the autumn of 2001 they still did not run Windows and Exchange 2000 on their own mail servers yet, long after these versions had been released to the market. On other internal systems (less visible but still there) a similar reluctance can be seen to upgrade to new versions of MS products. Only after many security patches and bug fixes have been released will Microsoft risk upgrading their own critical systems.
Sloppiness makes the problem worse

Many security problems are caused by the sloppy code found in many Microsoft products. The many buffer overrun vulnerabilities can be combined with scripting weaknesses. You don't need to open E-mail attachments or even read an incoming E-mail message to risk the introduction of malicious code on your system. Just receiving the data (e.g. downloading E-mail from a POP3 server or viewing a web page) is enough. Yes, stories like this have long been urban legend, but Outlook has made it reality. Microsoft explains: "The vulnerability results because a component used by both Outlook and Outlook Express contains an unchecked buffer in the module that interprets E-mail header fields when certain E-mail protocols are used to download mail from the mail server. This could allow a malicious user to send an E-mail that, when retrieved from the server using an affected product, could cause code of his choice to run on the recipient's computer." This vulnerability has been successfully exploited by Nimda and other malicious worm programs. Other worm programs (e.g. Code Red) combine vulnerabilities like this with creatively constructed URL's that trigger buffer overruns in IIS. Even without the Frontpage extensions installed it is relatively easy to obtain unencrypted administration passwords and non-public files and documents from an IIS webserver. Furthermore, this "E-commerce solution of the future" contains a prank (a hardcoded passphrase deriding Netscape developers as "weenies") in the code section concerned with the access verification mechanism for the whole system. And there are many more weaknesses like this. The list goes on and on and on.

IIS is supposed to power multi-million dollar E-commerce sites, and it has many backend features to accomplish this application. But each and every time we hear about a large online mailorder or E-commerce website that has spilled confidential user data (including credit card numbers) it turns out that that website runs IIS on Windows NT or 2000. (And that goes for adult mailorder houses too. I'm not quite sure what kind of toy a Tarzan II MultiSpeed Deluxe is, but I can probably tell you who bought one, and to which address it was shipped. Many E-commerce websites promise you security and discretion, but if they run IIS they can only promise you good intentions and nothing more. Caveat emptor!)

The Code Red and Nimda worms provided a nice and instructive demonstration of how easy it is to infect servers running IIS and other Microsoft products, and use them for malicious purposes (i.e. the spreading of malicious code and DDoS attacks on a global scale). Anyone who bothers to exploit one of the many documented vulnerabilities can do this. Some of the vulnerabilities exploited by Code Red and Nimda were months old, but many administrators just can't keep up with the ridiculous amount of patches required by IIS. Nor is patching always a solution: the patch that Microsoft released to counter Nimda contained bugs that left mission-critical IIS production servers non-operational.

On 20 June 2001, Gartner vice president and analyst John Pescatore wrote:
IIS security vulnerabilities are not even newsworthy anymore as they are discovered almost weekly. This latest bug echoes the very first reported Windows 2000 security vulnerability in the Indexing Service, an add-on component in Windows NT Server incorporated into the code base of Windows 2000. As Gartner warned in 1999, pulling complex application software into operating system software represents a substantial security risk. More lines of code mean more complexity, which means more security bugs. Worse yet, it often means that fixing one security bug will cause one or more new security bugs.
The fact that the beta version of Windows XP also contains this vulnerability raises serious concerns about whether XP will show any security improvement over Windows 2000.

On 19 September 2001, Pescatore continued:
Code Red also showed how easy it is to attack IIS Web servers [...] Thus, using Internet-exposed IIS Web servers securely has a high cost of ownership. Enterprises using Microsoft's IIS Web server software have to update every IIS server with every Microsoft security patch that comes out - almost weekly. However, Nimda (and to a lesser degree Code Blue) has again shown the high risk of using IIS and the effort involved in keeping up with Microsoft's frequent security patches.
Gartner recommends that enterprises hit by both Code Red and Nimda immediately investigate alternatives to IIS, including moving Web applications to Web server software from other vendors, such as iPlanet and Apache. Although these Web servers have required some security patches, they have much better security records than IIS and are not under active attack by the vast number of virus and worm writers. Gartner remains concerned that viruses and worms will continue to attack IIS until Microsoft has released a completely rewritten, thoroughly and publicly tested, new release of IIS. Sufficient operational testing should follow to ensure that the initial wave of security vulnerabilities every software product experiences has been uncovered and fixed. This move should include any Microsoft .NET Web services, which requires the use of IIS. Gartner believes that this rewriting will not occur before year-end 2002 (0.8 probability).
So how serious is this?

In all honesty it must be said that Microsoft has learned to react generally well to newly discovered security holes. Although the severity of many security problems is often downplayed and the underlying cause (flawed or absent security models) is glossed over, information and patches are generally released promptly and are available to the user community without cost. This is commendable. But then the procedure has become routine for Microsoft, since new leaks are discovered literally several times a week, and plugging leaks has become part of Microsoft's core business. The flood of patches has become so great that it's almost impossible to keep up with it. This is illustrated by the fact that most of today's security breaches successfully exploit leaks for which patches have already been released. In fact the sheer volume of patchwork eventually became sufficient to justify the automated distribution of patches. For recent versions of Windows there is an automatic service to notify the user of required "critical updates" (read: security patches) which may then be downloaded with a single mouseclick. This service (which does work fairly well) has become very popular. And for good reason: in the year 2000 alone MS released about 100 (yes, one hundred) security bulletins - that's an average of one newly discovered security-related issue every three to four days!. The number of holes in Microsoft products would put a Swiss cheese to shame.

And the pace has increased rather than slowed down. For example, once you install a "recommended update" (such as Media Player) through the Windows Update service, you discover immediately afterward that you must repeat the whole exercise in order to install a "critical update" to patch the new security leaks that were introduced with the first download! It's hardly reasonable to expect users to keep up with such a rat race, and not surprising that most users can't. As a result, many E-mail viruses and worms exploit security holes that are months or years old. The MSBlaster worm that spread in the summer of 2003 managed to infect Windows Server 2003 using a vulnerability that was already present in NT4!

In an age where smokers sue the tobacco industry for millions of dollars over health issues, all Microsoft products had better come with a warning on the package, stating that "This product is insecure and will cause expensive damage to your ICT infrastructure unless you update frequently and allocate time on a daily basis to locate, download, test and install the patch-du-jour". Unfortunately they don't, and Windows-based macro and script viruses emerge at a rate of several hundreds a month, while the average time for an unpatched Windows server with a direct internet connection to be compromised is only a few minutes.
Patch release as a substitute for quality

An interesting side effect of the ridiculous rate with which patches have to be released is that some users now get the impression that Microsoft takes software maintenance very seriously and that they are constantly working to improve their products. This is of course rather naive. If they'd bought a car that needed serious maintenance or repairs every two weeks or so, they probably wouldn't feel that way about their car dealer.
Redmond has exploited this misconception more than once. In recent comparisons of Windows vs. Linux they quoted patch response times, in an attempt to show that Windows is more secure than Linux. They had of course to reclassify critical vulnerabilities as non-critical, misinterpret a lot of figures, and totally ignore the fact that Windows develops many times the number of vulnerabilities than any other product.

Even so, if Microsoft's patching policy was effective we'd have run out of security holes in most MS products about now, staring with IE. Obviously no amount of patching can possibly remedy the structural design flaws in (or absence of) Microsoft products' security. A patch is like a band-aid: it will help to heal a simple cut or abrasion, but it won't prevent getting hurt again, in the same way or otherwise, and for a broken leg or a genetic deficiency it's totally useless, even if you apply a few thousand of them. The obvious weak point in the system is of course the integration of application software into the OS. Microsoft likes to call Windows "feature-rich" but when they have to release an advisory on a serious vulnerability in Windows Server 2003 that involves MIDI files, it becomes obvious that the set of "features" integrated in Windows has long since passed the limits of usefulness.
Microsoft's solution: security through obscurity

Lately Microsoft lobbyists are trying to promote the idea that free communication about newly discovered security leaks is not in the interest of the user community, since public knowledge of the many weaknesses in their products would enable and even encourage malicious hackers to exploit those leaks. Microsoft's Security Response Center spokesman Scott Culp blamed security experts for the outbreak of worms like Code Red and Nimda, and in an article on Microsoft's website in October 2001 he proposed to restrict circulation of security-related information to "select circles". And it's all for our own good, of course. After all, censorship is such a nasty word.

In August 2002, during a court hearing discussing a settlement between Microsoft and the DoJ, Windows OS chief Jim Allchin testified how cover-ups are Microsoft's preferred (and recommended) course of action:
"There is a protocol dealing with software functionality in Windows called message queueing, and there is a mistake in that protocol. And that mistake, if we disclosed it, would in my opinion compromise a company who is using that particular protocol."

In the meantime things are only getting worse with the lack of security in Microsoft products. The latest incarnation of Office (Office XP) provides full VBA support for Outlook, while CryptoAPI provides encryption for messages and documents, including VBS attaches and macro's. In other words, anti-virus software will no longer be able to detect and intercept viruses that come with E-mail and Word documents, rendering companies completely defenseless against virus attacks.

Clearly this is a recipe for disaster. It's like a car manufacturer who floods the market with cars without brakes, and then tries to suppress all consumer warnings in order to protect his sales figures.
Count the bugs: 1 + 1 = 3

Another worrying development is that leaky code from products such as IIS or other products is often installed with other software (and even with Windows XP) without the system administrators being aware of it. For example: SQL Server 2000 introduced 'super sockets' support for data access via the Dnetlib DLL. It provides multi-protocol connectivity, encryption, and authentication; in other words a roll-up of the different implementations of these technologies in past versions of the product. A system would only have this DLL if SQL Server 2000, the client administration tools, MSDE, or a vendor-specific solution was installed on the box. However, with XP this DLL is part of the default installation-- even on the home edition. One has to wonder how a component goes from "installed only in specialized machines on a particular platform" to "installed by default on all flavors of the OS." What other components and vulnerabilities are now automatically installed that we don't know about?

And the Windows fileset is getting extremely cluttered as it is. Looking through the WINNT directory on a Windows 2000 or XP system, you'll find lots of legacy executables that are obsolete and never used: Media Player 5, 16-bit legacy code from previous Windows versions as far back as version 3.10 (in fact the bulk of the original Windows 3.10 executable code is there), files that belong to features that are never used in most cases (e.g. RAS support) or accessibility options that most users fortunately don't need (such as the Narrator and Onscreen Keyboard features). Dormant code means possible dormant security issues. The needless installation of such a roundup reflects the laziness of Microsoft's developers: if you just install everything but the kitchen sink, you can just assume it's there at a later time and not bother with the proper verifications. Of course this practice doesn't improve quality control at all, it merely adds to the bloat that has plagued Windows from day one.
Expect no real improvement

The future promises only more of the same. Since Microsoft is already working on the next versions of Windows, it seems a safe assumption that we're stuck with the current flawed Windows architecture and that no structural improvements are to be expected. So far Microsoft has never seemed interested in cleaning up their architectures. Instead they concentrate on finding workarounds.

A good example is Microsoft's recommendation that PCs "designed for Windows XP" no longer accept expansion cards but only work with USB peripherals. This clearly indicates that XP still suffers from the architecture-related driver problems that have caused so many Windows crashes in the past. In an attempt to get rid of the problem, Microsoft tried to persuade PC manufacturers to abandon the PCI expansion bus. The fact that this recommendation was immediately scrapped by the hardware industry is irrelevant; the point is that Microsoft tried to get rid of expansion bus support rather than improve XP's architecture to make it robust.
This doesn't bode well for the future.

A good look at Windows and Windows applications shows that it's virtually impossible for Microsoft to remedy the basic problems with their software. They would have to redevelop their entire product range from scratch. Since robust design and Windows compatibility are mutually exclusive in the foreseeable future, this would mean to give up the limitations that bind the end user to the Microsoft platform. This is commercially unacceptable for Microsoft. In order to maintain revenues, they must hang on to their current software architecture, flaws and all. Lately Microsoft has been making a lot of noise about how they're now going to take security very seriously, but the bad overall quality of their product code makes it impossible to live up to that promise. Their Baseline Security Analyzer (which they released as part of their attempts to improve their image) is a good indication: it doesn't scan for vulnerabilities but merely for missing patches, and it does a sloppy job at that with a lot of false positives as a result.

Another largely empty promise is the so-called ".Net Framework". This is the development environment for the upcoming new .Net product lines. Its most touted 'innovation' is "Zero Impact Install" which proposes to do away with the tight integration between application and operating system. Instead of the current mess of DLL's being inserted into the OS and settings spread throughout an insecure registry database, applications will live in their own subdirectories and be self-contained. Code will be delivered in a cross-platform format and be JIT-compiled (Just In Time) for the platform it runs on. While these things mean a dramatic improvement over the current situation, their innovation factor is of course close to zero: the need for an adequate separation between OS and application code makes sophisticated ICT professionals long for Unix, mainframe environments or even DOS, and JIT-compilation is nothing new either (it wasn't even a new idea when Sun Microsystems proposed Java in the mid-90's). But more importantly: it remains entirely unclear how Microsoft will realize all this. In order to come up with a really good and robust platform, they'd have to replace Windows (and therefore their whole product range) with something that has an essentially different architecture. But .Net is not going to be a ground-up rewrite of Microsoft's OS product line. Such a rewrite would detach Microsoft from their installed base, so compatibility with (and therefore perpetuation of the shortcomings of) existing Windows versions seems unavoidable.
Trustworthy computing? Not from Microsoft

Let's face it: Microsoft's promises about dramatic quality improvement are unrealistic at best, not to say misleading. They're impossible to fulfill in the foreseeable future, and everyone at Microsoft knows it. To illustrate, in January 2002 Bill Gates wrote in his "Trustworthy computing" memo to all Microsoft employees:
"Today, in the developed world, we do not worry about electricity and water services being available. With telephony, we rely both on its availability and its security for conducting highly confidential business transactions without worrying that information about who we call or what we say will be compromised. Computing falls well short of this, ranging from the individual user who isn't willing to add a new application because it might destabilize their system, to a corporation that moves slowly to embrace e-business because today's platforms don't make the grade."

Now, for "today's platforms" read "a decade of Windows, in most cases" and keep in mind that Microsoft won't use their own security products but relies on third party products instead. Add to that the presence of spyware features in Windows Media Player, the fact that Windows XP Home Edition connects to a server called wustat.windows.com, hooks for the Alexa spyware in IE's 'Tools/Show Related Links' feature, and the fact that XP's Search Assistant calls sa.windows.com as soon as you search for information... and the picture is complete. Maybe Big Brother isn't watching you and nothing is being done with the knowledge about what you search for and which websites you visit... but don't count on it. And for those who still don't get it: in November 2002 Microsoft made customer details, along with numerous confidential internal documents, freely available from a very insecure FTP server. This FTP server sported many known vulnerabilities, which made gaining access a trivial exercise. Clearly, Microsoft's recent privacy-concerned and quality-concerned noises sound rather hollow at best. They don't even have any respect for their customers' privacy and security themselves.

As if to make a point, a few weeks after Gates' memo on Trustworthy Computing, Microsoft managed to send the Nimda worm to their own Korean developers, along with the Korean language version of Visual Studio .Net, thus spreading an infection that had originated with the third-party Korean translators. How 'trustworthy' can we expect a company to be, if they aren't even capable of basic precautions such as adequate virus protection in their own organisation?

And of course since Gates wrote the above memo nothing has changed. Security holes and vulnerabilities in all MS products, many of which allow blackhat hackers to execute arbitrary code on any PC connected to the Internet, continue to be discovered and exploited with a depressing regularity. Microsoft claims to have put 11,000 engineers through security training to solve the problem, but all users of Microsoft products continue to be plagued by security flaws. It's obvious that real improvement won't come around anytime soon. Windows Server 2003 is marketed as "secure by design" but apart from a couple of improved default settings and the Software Restriction Policies not much has changed. Shortly after Windows Server 2003 was released, the first security patch (to plug a vulnerability that existed through Internet Explorer 6) had to be applied, to nobody's surprise.
Lip service will do

Following Gates's memo on Trustworthy Computing, Microsoft has made a lot of noise about taking security very seriously. However, Stuart Okin, MS Security Officer for the UK, described security as "a recent issue". During an interview at Microsoft's Tech Ed event in 2002, Okin explained that recent press coverage on viruses and related issues had put security high on Microsoft's agenda. Read: it was never much of an issue, but now it's time to pay lip service to security concerns in order to save public relations.

And indeed Microsoft's only real 'improvement' so far has been an advertising campaign that touts Windows XP as the secure platform that protects the corporate user from virus attacks. No, really - that's what they said. They also made a lot of noise about having received "Government-based security certification". In fact this only means that Windows 2000 SP3 met the CCITSE Common Criteria, so that it can be part of government systems without buyers having to get special waivers from the National Security Agency or perform additional testing every time. CC-compliance does not not mean the software is now secure, but merely means the testing has confirmed the code is working as per specifications. That's all -- the discovery of new security holes at least once a week has nothing to do with it. But even so, Windows 2000 SP3 was the first Microsoft product ever that worked well enough to be CC-certified. Go figure.

Gates' initial launch of the Trustworthy Computing idea was much like the mating of elephants. There was a lot of trumpeting and stamping around the bush, eventually there was a brief moment of activity in high places, and then nothing happened for almost two years. Eventually Steve Balmer made the stunning announcement that the big security initiative will consist of... a lot of minor product fixes (yes, again), training users, and rolling up several minor patches into bigger ones. Microsoft's press release actually used the words, quote, "improving the patch experience", unquote. So far this "improvement" has mainly consisted of monthly patch packages, which had to be re-released and re-installed several times a month in a 'revised' monthly version. Right...

Another sad aspect of Microsoft's actual stance on security is neatly summed up by internet.com editor Rebecca Lieb, who investigated Microsoft's commitment on fighting the epidemic flood of spam. She concludes:
"[Microsoft] executives are certainly committed to saying they are [committed to helping end the spam epidemic]. These days, Bill Gates is front and center: testifying before the Senate; penning a Wall Street Journal editorial; putting millions up in bounty for spammer arrests; building a Web page for consumers; and forming an Anti-Spam Technology & Strategy Group, "fighting spam from all angles-- technology, enforcement, education, legislation and industry self-regulation."
When I meet members of that group, I always ask the same question. Every version of the Windows OS that shipped prior to XP's release last year is configured --by default-- as an open relay. Millions have been upgraded to broadband. Ergo, most PCs on planet Earth emit a siren call to spammers: "Use me! Abuse me!" Why won't Microsoft tell its millions of registered customers how to close the open relay?"

True enough, in 2004 over 75% of all spam is distributed via Windows PCs (on DSL and cable internet connections) that have been compromised by email worms and Trojan Horse infections. But rather than fix the vulnerabilities in their products, Microsoft so far has concentrated on high-profile actions such as a collaboration with the New York State Attorney General and a highly publicized crusade against internet advertising companies. Bill Gates' reckless prediction that in the year 2006 the spam problem would be solved has only served to demonstrate the value of Microsoft's promises on quality and security.

Neither is Microsoft's own implementation of Sender Policy Framework even remotely effective. Microsoft touted their use of SPF as a significant step in spam reduction, and introduced it with so much fanfare that you'd think they'd developed it themselves. However, Security appliance firm CipherTrust soon found that spammers adopted the new standard for email authentication much faster than legitimate emailers, and shortly after its introduction more spam than legitimate email was sent using Sender Policy Framework. While this is going on, implementors are balking at MS's licencing policy for the Sender ID system, which amounts to creating great dependency on Microsoft's permission to (continue to) use Sender ID.

Meanwhile Microsoft is branching into new markets and so far runs true to form. They have already shipped their first cellphone products. Orange, the first cellnet operator to run Microsoft Smartphone software on their SPV phones, has already had to investigate several security leaks. On top of that the phones are reported to crash and require three subsequent power-ups to get going again, call random numbers from the address book and have flakey power management. I shudder to think what will happen when their plans on the automotive software market begin to materialize.
Bottom line: things are bad

In spite of what Microsoft's sales droids would have us believe, the facts speak for themselves: developments at Microsoft are solely driven by business targets and not by quality targets. As long as they manage to keep up their $30 billion plus yearly turnover, nobody's posterior is on the line no matter how bad their software is.

Microsoft products are immature and of inferior quality. They waste resources, do not offer proper options for administration and maintenance, and are fragile and easily damaged. Worse, new versions of these products provide no structural remedy, but are in fact point releases with bugfixes, minor updates and little else but cosmetic improvement. Recent versions of Microsoft products are only marginally more secure than those that were released years ago. In fact, if it weren't for additional security products such as hardware-based or Unix-based filters and firewalls, it would be impossible to run an even remotely secure environment with Windows.

MS products are bloated with an almost baroque excess of features, but that's not the point. The point is that they are to be considered harmful, lacking robustness and security as a direct result of basic design flaws that are in many cases over a decade old. They promise to do a lot, but in practice they don't do any of it very well. If you need something robust, designed for mission-critical applications, you might want to look elsewhere. Microsoft's need for compatibility with previous mistakes makes structural improvements impossible. The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck, they'll be making vacuum-cleaners.

Besides, 63,000 known defects in Windows should be enough for anyone.

For more go to http://www.vanwensveen.nl/index.html

Bug

2006-11-04T00:16:00.000+08:00

GOOGLE Girl

2006-11-04T00:14:00.000+08:00

Mitch Hedberg Jokes...

2006-10-23T15:17:00.000+08:00

I drank some boiling water because I wanted to whistle.

I tried to have a cookie, and this girl said, "I'm mailing those cookies to my friend." So I couldn't have one. You shouldn't make cookies untouchable.

A lollipop is a cross between hard candy and garbage.

Has anyone seen me on Letterman? Two million people watch that show and I don't know where they are. You might have seen this next comedian on the Late Show, but I think more people have seen me at the store. That should be my introduction. "You might have seen this next comedian at the store," and people would say "Hell yes I have!"

It's hard to fight when you're in a gazebo.

I don't like grouper fish. Well, they're okay. They hang around star fish. Because they're grouper fish.

I have some speakers up here, thank God, because last night I didn't have them and I was telling jokes and I had no idea which joke I was telling. So I told jokes twice. I even told that one twice.

I've got a wallet, it's orange. In case I wanna buy a deer. That doesn't make any sense at all.

I miss the $2 bill, 'cause I can break a two. $20, no. $10, no. $5, maybe, $2? Oh yeah. What do you need, a one and another one?

I called the hotel operator and she said, "How can I direct your call?" I said, "Well, you could say 'Action!', and I'll begin to dial. And when I say 'Goodbye', then you can yell 'Cut!'"

A dog came to my door, so I gave him a bone, the dog took the bone into the back yard and buried it. I'm going to go plant a tree there, with bones on it, then the dog will come back and say, "Shoot! It worked! I must distribute these bones equally for I have a green paw!"

Cavities are made by sugar. So if you need to dig a hole, then lay down some candy bars!

I like cottage cheese. That's why I want to try other dwelling cheeses, too. How about studio apartment cheese? Tent cheese? Mobile home cheese? Do not eat mobile home cheese in a tornado.

I'm an ice sculptor. Last night I made a cube.

I went to the airport, I put my bag in the x-ray machine, I found out my bag has cancer. It only has six more months to hold stuff.

That would be cool if the earth's crust was made out of graham cracker. It would disappear just like the ozone layer, but for completely different reasons.

I want to get non-aerosol mace, you just rub it in. "Dude who is attacking me - come a little closer!"

Magicians disappear all the time, but as soon as a regular person does it, everyone is all scared. "Tom's gone!" "Is he a magician?" "No." "Then let's print up some flyers!"

I tried to throw a yo-yo away. It was impossible.

A sleeping bag is a tortilla for a human.

I rented a car. I didn't really need one, I just wanted to make one less available. I wanted one businessman on the bus with no car.

My manager said, "Don't use liquor as a crutch!" I can't use liquor as a crutch, because a crutch helps me walk.

I went to a restaurant, and I saw a guy wearing a leather jacket, eating a hamburger, drinking a glass of milk. I said, "Dude, you are a cow. The metamorphosis is complete. Don't fall asleep or I will tip you over!"

My girlfriend works at Hooters. In the kitchen.

I've never been to a hotel with a rotating restaurant on top, but one time I took my girlfriend to a merry-go-round, and I gave her a burrito.

I want to get a vending machine, with fun sized candy bars, and the glass in front is a magnifying glass. You'll be mad, but it will be too late.

I think a rotisserie is a really morbid Ferris wheel for chickens. We will take a chicken, impale it, and then rotate it. Spinning chicken carcasses make my mouth water. I like dizzy chickens!

Some comics get drunk before a show. I don't. When I get drunk, I don't want to stand in front of a bunch of people that I don't know. That does not sound comfortable. Why have all these people gathered? And why am I elevated and not facing the same way as everyone else? And what is this electric stick in my hand? I want a chair too!

This one guy said, "Look at that girl. She's got a nice butt." I said, "Yeah, I bet she can sit down excellently!"

I would imagine the inside of a bottle of cleaning fluid is really clean. I would imagine a vodka bottle is really drunk.

I want to ride in a cold air balloon. "This isn't going anywhere!"

Tony the Tiger usually thinks that stuff is great.

I can whistle with my fingers, especially if I have a whistle.

This one commercial said, "Forget everything you know about slipcovers." So I did, and it was a load off of my mind. Then the commercial tried to sell slipcovers, but I didn't know what they were!

I'm into carpooling, because sometimes my car gets hot and needs to refresh itself.

Imagine if you were a drummer, and you accidentally picked up two magic wands instead of sticks. There you are, keeping the beat, the next thing you know, your bass player turns into a can of soup.

I'm a hard act to follow, because when I'm done, I take the microphone with me.

Why is Cloud 9 so amazing? What is wrong with Cloud 8? That joke came off the top of my head, and the top of my head ain't funny!

I wear a necklace now because I like to know when I'm upside down.

I read that MTV's Real World got 40,000 applications. That's amazing, such an even number. You would have thought it would be 40,008.

I bought a scratch off lottery ticket, but then I accidentally spilled calamine lotion on it, so it did not need to be scratched. Shoot! I will not know if I have won!

I ate one anchovy, and that is why I did not eat two anchovies.

As a comedian, you have to start the show strong and you have to end the show strong. Those are the two key elements. You can't be like pancakes. You're all happy at first, but then by the end, you're sick of 'em.

I saw a billboard for the lottery. It said, "Estimated lottery jackpot 55 million dollars." I did not know that was estimated. That would suck if you won and they said, "Oh, we were off by two zeroes. We estimate that you are angry."

I wish they made fajita cologne, because that stuff smells good. What's that you're wearing? That's sizzlin'!

I have an idea for sweatshops: air conditioning! That's simple. 14 year old boys working twelve hour days? "Yeah, but they're comfortable!"

I spilled some vodka on the carpet, and I vacuumed it up, and the vacuum got drunk. I had to take the Hoover to detox.

If you can't sleep, count sheep. Don't count endangered animals. You will run out.

A fly was very close to being called a land, because that's what it does half the time.

I want to rob a bank with a BB gun. "Give me all your money or I will give you a dimple! I will be rich, you will be cute. We both win."

I had a chicken finger that was so big, it was a chicken hand.

I got binoculars 'cause I don't want to go that close.

I can read minds, but I'm illiterate.

If Spiderman was real, and I was a criminal, and he shot me with his web, I would say, "Dude, thanks for the hammock."

I got a belt on that's holding up my pants, and the pants have belt loops that hold up the belt. What's going on here? Who is the real hero?

I had the cab driver drive me here backwards, and the dude owed me $27.50.

Kittens play with yarn, they bat it around. What they're really doing is saying, "I can't knit, get this away from me!"

I met this girl, she was an actress, and she gave me her number. It started with 555.

If you don't know a light bulb is a three-way light bulb, it messes with your head. You reach to turn it off, and it just gets brighter! That's the exact opposite of what I wanted you to do! So you turn the switch again, and it gets brighter once more! I will break you, light bulb!

I went to a restaurant with my friend, and he said, "Pass the salt." I said, "Screw you! Sit closer to the salt."

Imagine if the headless horseman had a headless horse. That would be chaos. I would think that if you were the headless horseman's horse, you would be very confused. "I don't think this dude can see."

You know when you see an advertisement for a casino, and they have a picture of a guy winning money? That's false advertising, because that happens the least. That's like if you're advertising a hamburger, they could show a guy choking. "This is what happened once."

I was on a bus once, it was in the middle of the night, and I had a box of crackers and a can of Easy Cheese. It was dark, and it was a surprise how much cheese I had applied on each cracker. That's why they should have a glow-in-the-dark version of Easy Cheese. It's not like the product has any integrity to begin with. If you buy a room-temperature cheese that you squeeze out of a can, you probably won't get mad because it glows in the dark too.

I have a Sharpie. I love Sharpies. You know what they say on them? Not for letter writing. That sucks. Now I have to communicate with my dad using numbers.

Comedy clubs have brick walls behind the performer. Bricks make you funny. When I'm in front of a fireplace, I'm hilarious.

I got two stools, in case I want to sit down and sit down again on something else.

If a drink was ice cold, it would be impossible to drink. Because it would be solid. Here's a drink, Mitch - it's ice cold. I guess I could lick it.

Knock on wood is a saying for good luck. I think that started when someone went to someone's door to see if someone was home. "I hope Joe's home, knock on wood!"

I wanted to get a tape recorder, but I got a parrot instead. I think I did that joke backwards.

I don't get the regular AIDS test anymore. I get the roundabout AIDS test. I ask my friend Brian, "Do you know anybody who has AIDS?". He says, "No". I say, "Cool, because you know me."

I put fruit on top of my waffles, because I want something to brush off.

People ask me for my autograph after a show. I'm not famous, I think they're messing with me. I think they're trying to make me late for something.

I saw a lady on TV, she was born without arms. That's sad, but then they said, "Lola does not know the meaning of the word 'can't'." That, to me, is even worse in a way. Not only is she missing arms, but she doesn't understand simple contractions. It's easy, Lola - you just take two words, put them together, take out the middle letters, put in a comma, and you raise it up!

If I'm out to dinner with a group of friends, and somebody offers to pay for the check, I immediately reach for my wallet. Inside is a note that says, "Say thanks!"

I did a radio interview; the DJ's first question was "Who are you?" I had to think. Is this guy really deep, or did I drive to the wrong station?

I like when they say a movie is inspired by a true story. That's kind of silly. "Hey, Mitch, did you hear that story about that lady who drove her car into the lake with her kids and they all drowned?" "Yeah, I did, and you know what - that inspires me to write a movie about a gorilla!"

I like it when you buy something and pay with a credit card, they put your credit card on the receipt, but only the last four numbers. Aha! I'm really good at guessing twelve numbers. I can't guess 16 numbers, so thanks for the assistance!

XM radio doesn't have commercials, so after about thirty minutes of listening to it, I'm like, "What should I buy?"

If you have to release bad news to the public, it would help if you are not ugly.

I saw a seagull hanging out by a lake, but I said, "Don't worry, Dude. I won't say anything."

Fettuccini Alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults.

I tried to freshen up a room, so I held a Certs in front of a fan.

Snake eyes is a gambling term, and an animal term, too.

I like those blow-up beds. "This becomes a full size bed in three minutes!" Well, a mattress kicks your ass. Zero seconds. "Yeah, but you can store this thing." You can store a bed, too - in the bedroom.

I make myself a bowl of instant oatmeal, and then I don't do anything for an hour. Why do I need the instant oatmeal? I could get the regular oatmeal and feel productive.

My girlfriend is named Lynn. She spells her name "Lynn". My old girlfriend's name is Lyn, too, but she spells it "Lyn". Every now and then I screw up, I call my new girlfriend by my old girlfriend's name, and she can tell because I don't say "n" as long.

When you're doing a show on stage, and they show you a red light, that means you have 5 minutes left. At some clubs, they hold a candle up in the back. That's the worst method. You're up here, and then you see a floating candle. "Oh, no! This place is haunted!" I can't be funny when I'm frightened.

I was at a concert in LA, and the band was having an off night, and some people in the audience started throwing tomatoes at the band. Now who would throw tomatoes at the band? That's bad. But who would bring a tomato to a show? That's worse. Don't throw tomatoes at the band. What if they really like tomatoes? They'll think you're enjoying the show. "You guys are great - here's a tomato!" The tomato is the universal sign for not enjoying a performance. Plus I like it on sandwiches! I had the guy at Subway put tomatoes on my sandwich because I didn't like the way he was making it. I don't know what that meant there. That was ad-libbed.

I saw soda pop for $1.20 a six pack. That price messes with your head. You start thinking you're gonna sell soda pop. Suddenly I've got packs of pop with me. "Looking to buy some pop? 50 cents a can. It's not refrigerated because this is a half-assed commitment!"

A friend said to me, "I think the weather is trippy." I said, "No, man, it's not the weather that's trippy, perhaps it's the way we perceive it." And then I realized I just should have said, "Yeah."

I like Kinko's, because they're open 24 hours. If it's 5 am and I decide I need two of something, I'm covered! Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, and then I think, "Oh, yeah. Kinko's. No problem. That will not remain singular."

A friend gave me a drug for attention deficit disorder, because he's afflicted, but I'm not. So what happened to me is I suddenly had an extra-long attention span. People would tell me a story, and it would end, and I'd get all mad. "Come on, man, there has to be more to that story."

I have a friend who is a juggler. If I'm at his house, I don't like to take food from him, if it's in threes. He has three apples left, I guess I can't have one. I wouldn't want to screw up his practice routine.

I'm a mumbler. If I'm walking with a friend, and I say something, he says, "What?" So I say it again, and he says, "What?" Really, it's just some insignificant stuff I'm saying, but now I'm yelling, "That tree is far away!"

I was booked into the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas with three other comedians. We all were using the Riviera in-house shampoo, so we all had equal shine and bounce.

I was walking down the street with a friend, and he said, "I hear music." As if there was any other way you can take it in. That's how I receive it too. You're not special.

I made $3,000 opening for the Neville Brothers, and they paid me in cash. That was a bad situation, because I bought ridiculous stuff. I bought a snake bite emergency kit. Then I said to my friends, "Don't even worry about snakes anymore". My friend stepped on a worm, and I said, "Lay down!"

I sometimes close my eyes during a show because I have drawn a picture of an audience enjoying the show more on the back of my eyelids.

I have a roommate, and I signed a year lease. I screwed up! That's like I wrote a joke that didn't work, but now I have to tell it for a year.

A guy came up to me in the airport, saying, "Dude, I saw you on TV last night!" But he did not say whether or not he thought I was good. He just confirmed I was on television. So I turned away for a minute, and then I turned back toward him and said, "I saw you at the airport about a minute ago. And you were good!"

You should never tell someone they have a nice dimple, because maybe they were shot in the face with a BB gun.

I had my palm read. I wrote something on it first to see if she would read that too.

I have a few cavities. I don't like to call them cavities. I like to call them "places to put stuff." Do you know where I can store a pea? Yes, I have some locations available.

I can't eat spaghetti. There's too many of them.

I heard a guy tell me he liked cherries. I waited to hear if he was going to say "tomatoes", then I realized he like cherries just. That joke is ridiculous.

I've always wanted to have a suitcase handcuffed to my wrist. That's not a full joke there! It's filler.

Swiss cheese is the only cheese you can draw and people can identify. You can draw American cheese, but someone will think it's cheddar. It's the only cheese you can bite and miss. "Hey Mitch - does that sandwich have cheese on it?" "Every now and then!"

I went to a tent store. "What kind of tent do you need?" "Circus."

I thought my teeth were white until I washed my face with Noxzema. My teeth are off-white. I'm not even white. I'm off-white. It's a new race; we will prevail!

I got a hotel room at New York New York in Las Vegas and I was very happy. They've got that rollercoaster encircling the entire premises, just like Manhattan.

When it comes to racism, you hear people say, "I don't care if people are white, black, purple or green." Hold on, now, purple or green? Come on now, you gotta draw the line somewhere.

Sometimes I get really lonely. Especially when I'm throwing a Frisbee.

I was going to stay overnight at my friend's house - he said, "you'll have to sleep on the floor." Damn gravity! You don't know how bad I wanted to sleep on the wall.

Dogs are forever in the push-up position.

I was in a convenience store, reading a magazine. The clerk told me, "this is not a library!" "OK! I will talk louder, then!"

I am wearing a vest. If I had no arms, it would be a jacket.

Advil has a candy coating. It's delicious. Then it says on the bottle, do not have more than two. Then why do they have a candy coating? I cannot help myself. Let me have ten Advil, I have a sweet tooth.

I was at a restaurant, and I ordered a chicken sandwich, but I don't think the waitress understood me. She asked me, "How would you like your eggs?" I thought I would answer her anyway and said, "Incubated! And then raised, plucked, beheaded, cut up, put onto a grill, and then put onto a bun. Damn! I don't have that much time! Scrambled!"

I travel with a boom box. When I get on a plane, I stuff the power cord for the boom box into the battery compartment. From an outsider's point of view, it looks like I've got it all wrong.

I lived in an apartment, and I had a neighbor. I knew that whenever he knocked on the wall, he wanted me to turn my music down. I'd mess with his head. I'd say, "Go around. I cannot open the wall!"

Last time I called shotgun we had rented a limo, so I messed up!

I'm always on the road, and I drive rental cars. Sometimes I don't know what's going on with the car, and I'll drive for ten miles with the emergency brake on. That doesn't say a lot for me, but it doesn't say a lot for the emergency brake. What kind of emergency is this? I need to not stop now. It's not really an emergency brake, it's an emergency make-the-car-smell-funny lever.

People associate long hair with drug use. I wish people associated long hair with something other than drug use, like an extreme longing for cake. And then strangers would see a long haired guy and say, "That guy eats cake!" "He is on bundt cake!" Mothers saying to their daughters, "Don't bring the cake eater over here anymore. He smells like flour. Did you see how excited he got when he found out your birthday was fast approaching?"

You know you can't please all the people all the time, and last night, all of those people were at my show.

If I was a mechanic and someone called me and said their car would not start, I would say, "Hey - maybe a killer is after you!"

I had to take a physical to do this show. They had a lot of weird questions like, "Have you ever tried sugar or PCP?"

When you open the elevator on the top floor of a building and the other guy doesn't get out, something is seriously wrong.

When you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things. All right, you're a stand-up comedian, can you write us a script? That's not fair. That's like if I worked hard to become a cook, and I'm a really good cook, they'd say, "OK, you're a cook. Can you farm?"

I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just gonna ask where they're going and hook up with them later.

I wanted to buy a candle holder, but the store didn't have one. So I bought a cake.

I can't wait to get off the stage, because I've got some LifeSavers in my pocket and pineapple is next!

I went to a heavy metal concert. The singer yelled out, "How many of you people feel like human beings tonight?" And then he said, "How many of you feel like animals?" The thing is, everyone cheered after the animals part, but I cheered after the human beings part because I did not know there was a second part to the question.

I would like it if four people did a cartwheel all at once... so I can make a cart.

I like baked potatoes. I don't have a microwave oven, and it takes forever to bake a potato in a conventional oven. Sometimes I'll just throw one in there, even if I don't want one, because by the time it's done, who knows?

I bought myself a parrot, but it did not say "I'm hungry", and so it died.

I had a box of Ritz crackers, and on the back of the box, they had all these suggestions for what to put on top of the Ritz. Try it with cheese. Try it with peanut butter. Come on, man, they're crackers, that's why I got them. I like crackers! I didn't buy them because they're little edible plates!

I don't have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that.

I thought I'd go to a craft fair, and there would be a jar of jellybeans there - "Guess how many jellybeans are in this jar, and win a prize". Aw, come on, man, let just me have some. I'll tell you what, guess how many jellybeans I want! If you guessed a handful, you are right.

One time I stayed at a haunted motel. When I checked into my room, there was a sheet on the floor, and I thought it was a ghost that had passed out, so I kicked it.

My sister Wendy has a husband and two children, and they have a family photo on top of the VCR, where they're all looking slightly to the left. As though something is going on over there! I guess something happened over to the left that made everybody happy! Except my sister is cross-eyed, so she can't quite pull it off. One eye is right-on.

When I get a cold sore, I put Carmex on it, because Carmex is supposed to alleviate cold sores. I don't know if it does help, but it will make them more shiny and noticeable. It's like cold-sore-highlighter. Maybe they could come up with an arrow that heals cold sores.

I hate turkeys. If you go to the grocery store, you start to get mad at turkeys. You see turkey ham, turkey bologna, turkey pastrami. Somebody just needs to tell the turkeys, "Man, just be yourselves!" I already like you, little fella. I used to draw you. If you had a couple of fingers missing, you would draw a really messed-up turkey. That turkey was in an accident!

I hate arrows. They try to tell me which direction to go. It's like "I ain't going that way, line with two thirds of a triangle on the end!"

When you go to a bar that has a black light, everybody looks cool. Except for me, because I was under the impression that the mustard stain came out.

Imagine if an bow and arrow killed you. That would suck. An arrow killed you? They would never solve the crime. "Look at that dead guy. Let's go that way."

Pizza Hut will accept other pizzeria's coupons. That makes me wish I had my own pizza place. Mitch's Pizza - this weeks' coupon: free unlimited pizza! Special note: coupon not valid at any of Mitch's Pizza locations. "Free pizza oven with purchase of a small coke."

I type a 101 words a minute. But it's in my own language.

Whenever I walk somewhere, and someone hands me a flyer, it's like they're telling me, "Here, you go throw this away."

I like to hold the microphone cord like this, I pinch it together and then I let it go, then you hear a whole bunch of jokes all at once.

I can't floss my teeth. People tell me how hard it is to stop smoking; I think it's about as hard as it is to start flossing.

A severed foot is the ultimate stocking stuffer.

I played in a death-metal band. People either loved us or hated us. Or they thought we were OK.

I tried to walk into Target, but I missed. I think the entrance to Target should have people splattered all around.

A lot of bands have intense names, like "Rigor Mortis" or "Mortuary". We weren't that intense, we called ourselves "Injured". Later on we changed it to "Acapella" when we were walking out of the pawn shop.

I had a stick of Carefree gum, but it didn't work. I felt pretty good while I was blowing that bubble, but as soon as the gum lost its flavor, I was back to pondering my mortality.

I went to a cigar store, the man behind the counter asked me, "What kind of cigars do you like?" I answered, "It's a Boys."

I hate dreaming. Because when you sleep, you wanna sleep. Dreaming is work, you know - there I am in a comfortable bed, the next thing you know I have to build a go-kart with my ex-landlord. I want a dream of me watching myself sleep.

I was at a bar, and this guy bumped into me, and he did not apologize, and he said, "Move!" I thought that was rude, so I said, "Go to hell!" Then I started to run. He caught up to me. He had a mustache, a goatee, a pair of earrings, sunglasses, a ponytail and he was wearing a hat. He said, "Hey, you got a lot of nerve!" I said, "Hey, you got a lot of... cranium accessories!"

I want to be a race car passenger: just a guy who bugs the driver. "Say man, can I turn on the radio? You should slow down. Why do we gotta keep going in circles? Can I put my feet out the window? Boy, you really like Tide."

When I was on acid, I would see things like beams of light. And I would hear things that sounded an awful lot like car horns.

I went to the Home Depot, which was unnecessary. I need to go to the Apartment Depot. Which is just a big warehouse with a whole lot of people standing around saying "We don't have to fix anything."

When we were on acid, we would go into the woods, because there was less chance that you would run into an authority figure. But we ran into a bear. My friend Duane was there, raising his right hand, swearing to help prevent forest fires. He told me, "Mitchell, Smokey is way more intense in person!"

I got in an argument with a girlfriend inside of a tent. That's a bad place for an argument, because when I tried to walk out, I had to slam the flap. How are you supposed to express your anger in this situation? Zip it up real quick?

Is a hippopotamus just a really cool opotamus?

I went to England to tell jokes, and I wanted to tell my Smokey the Bear joke, but I had to ask the English people if they knew who Smokey the Bear is. But they don't. In England, Smokey the Bear is not the forest-fire-prevention representative. They have Smackie the Frog. It's a lot like a bear, but it's a frog. And that's a better system, I think we should adopt it. Because bears can be mean, but frogs are always cool. Never has there been a frog hopping toward me and I thought, "Man, I better play dead!"

The only way I could get my old CD into stores is if I took one in and leave it. "Sir, you forgot this." "No, I did not. That is for sale. Please alphabetize it."

I wear V-neck shirts. I can't wear a regular neck shirt, it hurts. And I especially hate turtlenecks. Wearing a turtleneck is like being strangled by a really weak guy. All day! If you wear a backpack and a turtleneck, it's like a weak midget trying to bring you down.

I think Bigfoot is blurry, that's the problem. It's not the photographer's fault. Bigfoot is blurry. And that's extra scary to me, because there's a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside. Run. He's fuzzy. Get outta here!

You know when you go into a restaurant, and it gets busy and they start a waiting list, and they start calling out names, "DuFresnes, party of two." They say again, "DuFresnes, party of two." But then if no one answers, they'll just go to the next name, "Bush, party of three." Yeah, but what happened to the DuFresnes? No one seems to care. Who can eat at a time like this? People are missing! And they're hungry! That's a double whammy! "Bush, search party of three!" You can eat once you find the DuFresnes!

I cannot tell you what hotel I'm staying at, but there are two trees involved.

I wrote a script, and I gave it to a guy who reads scripts, and he really likes it, but he thinks I need to rewrite it. I said, "Screw that, I'll just make a copy!"

My sister wanted to be an actress, but she never made it. She does live in a trailer; she made it half-way. She's an actress, she just never gets called to the set.

I have a "Do Not Disturb" sign on my hotel door. It's time to go to "Don't Disturb". It's been "Do Not" for too long. We should embrace the contraction.

I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.

I like to wear a "Do Not Disturb" sign around my neck so that little kids can't tell me knock-knock jokes. "Hey, how ya doin'? Knock-knock." "Read the sign, punk!"

If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be screwed up.

I met the girl who works at the Doubletree front desk, she gave me her number. It's ZERO. I tried to call from here, some other woman answered. "You sound older!"

I like vending machines, because snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar in a store, sometimes I will drop it so it will reach its maximum flavor potential.

If 13 is unlucky, then 12 and 14 are guilty by association.

2-in-1 is a stupid term, because 1 is not big enough to hold 2. That's why 2 was created.

They say the recipe for Sprite is lemon and lime. I tried to make it at home. There's more to it than that.

I know a lot about cars. I can look at a car's headlights and tell you exactly which way it's coming.

I like refried beans. That's why I wanna try fried beans. Maybe they're just as good, and we're not wasting time.

A lot of people don't know it, but onions make me sad!

This shirt is dry clean only. Which means it's dirty.

I hate sandwiches at New York delis. Too much meat on the sandwich. It's like a cow with a cracker on either side. "Would you like anything else with the pastrami sandwich?" "Yeah, a loaf of bread and some other people!"

At my hotel room, my friend came over and asked to use the phone. I said "Certainly." He said "Do I need to dial 9?" I say "Yeah. Especially if it's in the number. You can try 4 and 5 back to back real quick."

I ordered a club sandwich, but I'm not even a member. "I like my sandwiches with three pieces of bread." "Well, so do I!" "Then let's form a club." "OK, but we need some more stipulations. Instead of cutting the sandwich once, let's cut it again. Yes, four triangles, arranged in a circle, and in the middle we will dump chips." "How do you feel about frilly toothpicks?" "I'm for 'em!" "Well, this club is formed."

My lucky number is four billion. That doesn't come in real handy when you're gambling. "Come on, four billion! Darn! Seven. Not even close. I need more dice."

I went to a pizzeria. The guy gave me the smallest slice possible. If the pizza was a pie chart with what would you do if you found a million dollars, he gave me the "Donate it to charity" slice. "I'd like to exchange this for the 'Keep it!'"

I love blackjack. But I'm not addicted to gambling. I'm addicted to sitting in a semi circle.

I saw this wino, he was eating grapes. I said, "Dude, you have to wait."

I don't own a cell phone or a pager. I just hang around everyone I know, all the time.

I used to drink wine. This girl asked me, "Doesn't wine give you a headache?" "Yeah, eventually, but the first and the middle part are amazing!"

I think foosball is a combination of soccer and shish kabobs. Foosball screwed up my perception of soccer. I thought you had to kick the ball and then spin round and round. I can't do a back flip, much less several, simultaneously with two other guys who look just like me.

I went to the store and bought eight apples; the clerk said, "Do you want these in a bag?" I said, "Oh, no, man, I juggle."

I used to do drugs. I still do drugs. But I used to, too.

I saw a guy juggling chain saws, it was cool, unless something needed to be sawed down, then it's annoying.

The thing about tennis is: no matter how much I play, I'll never be as good as a wall. I played a wall once. They're relentless.

I was going to get my teeth whitened, but I said, "I'll just get a tan instead."

I think Pringles initial intention was to make tennis balls. But on the day that the rubber was supposed to show up, a big truckload of potatoes arrived. But Pringles is a laid back company. They said, "Screw it. Cut 'em up!"

I got some tartar control toothpaste. I still have tartar, but that stuff's under control. I got so much tartar, I don't have to dip my fish sticks in anything. That's actually kind of gross. After that joke, I have to clarify that I'm just joking.

An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You would never see an "Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order" sign, just "Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience."

I would like to go fishing and catch a fish stick. That would be convenient. I could easily get a job at Mrs. Paul's.

Because of acid, I now know that butter is way better than margarine.

You know when they have a fishing show on TV? They catch the fish and then let it go. They don't want to eat the fish, but they do want to make it late for something. "Where were you?" "I got caught!" "I don't believe you, let me see the inside of your lip."

So, I sit at the hotel at night and I think of something that's funny. Or, if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny.

You know crazy straws - they go all over the place? These straws are sane. They never lost their mind. They say, "we're going straight to the mouth. That guy who takes a while to get there? He's crazy."

You know that Pepperidge Farm bread, that stuff is fancy. That stuff is wrapped twice. You open it, and then still ain't open. That's why I don't buy it, I don't need another step between me and toast.

I like it when you reach into a vending machine to grab your candy bar, and that flap goes up to block you from reaching up? That's a good invention. Before that, it was hard times for the vending machine owners. "Yeah, what candy bar are you getting?" "That one, and every one on the bottom row!"

This product that was on TV was available for four easy payments of $19.95. I would like a product that was available for three easy payments and one complicated payment. We can't tell you which payment it is, but one of these payments is going to be hard. The mailman will get shot, the envelope will not seal, the stamp will be in the wrong denomination. The final payment must be made in wampum.

I want to make a vending machine that sells vending machines. It'd have to be real big.

I would imagine if you could understand Morse Code, a tap dancer would drive you crazy.

I was going to get a candy bar, the button I was supposed to push is HH. So I pressed the H button twice. Potato chips came out! Turns out there was an HH button. You gotta let me know. I'm not familiar with the concept of HH. I did not learn my AA BB CCs.

I don't wear a watch because I want my arms to weigh the same.

I get the Reese's candy bar. You look at that, there's an apostrophe-s there. That means the candy bar is his. I didn't know that. Next time you're eating a Reese's candy bar, and a guy named Reese comes by and says, "Gimme that", you better hand it over.

I went to the park and saw this kid flying a kite. The kid was really excited. I don't know why, that's what they're supposed to do. Now if he had had a chair on the other end of that string, I would have been impressed.

The Kit Kat candy bar has the name Kit Kat imprinted into the chocolate. That robs you of chocolate! That's a clever chocolate-saving technique.

I played golf. I did not get a hole in one, but I did hit a guy. That's way more satisfying. You're supposed to yell, "Fore!" I was too busy yelling, "There ain't no way that's gonna hit him!"

If you want to talk to me after the show, I'd be surprised.

I saw a human pyramid once. It was very unnecessary.

If you find yourself lost in the woods, build a house. "Well, I was lost, but now I live here!"

I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long.

I bought a house, it's a two bedroom house, but I think it's up to me to decide how many bedrooms there are. This bedroom has an oven in it. This bedroom has a lot of people sitting around watching TV. This bedroom is over in that other guy's house.

I bought a doughnut and they gave me a receipt for the doughnut. I don't need a receipt for the doughnut. I give you money and you give me the doughnut, end of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this. I can't imagine a scenario that I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut. To some skeptical friend, "Don't even act like I didn't buy a doughnut, I've got the documentation right here. Oh, wait. It's in my file at home, under 'D'".

I have a king sized bed. I don't know any kings, but if one came over, I guess he'd be comfortable. "Oh, you're a king, you say? Well, you won't believe what I have in store for you."

A snake bite emergency kit is a body bag.

When I was a boy, I laid in my twin size bed, wondering where my brother was.

My roommate says, "I'm going to take a shower and shave, does anyone need to use the bathroom?" It's like some weird quiz where he reveals the answer first.

I don't have a microwave oven, but I do have a clock that occasionally cooks stuff.

I wrote my friend a letter with a highlighting pen, but he could not read it, he thought I was trying to show him certain parts of a piece of paper.

I want to get a job naming kitchen appliances. That seems easy; refrigerator, toaster, blender. You just say what the thing does and add "er".

I use the word totally too much. I need to change it up and use a word that is different but has the same meaning. Mitch do you like submarine sandwiches? All-encompassingly!

I think pickles are cucumbers that sold out. They sold their soul to the devil, and the devil is dill.

At the end of a letter I like to write "P.S. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated.

I got my hair highlighted, because I felt some strands were more important than others.

I don't have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that.

My friend asked me if I wanted a frozen banana, I said "No, but I want a regular banana later, so, Yeah."

Mr. Pibb is a poor imitation of Dr. Pepper. Dude didn't even get his degree.

Sometimes I wake up and I think I should start wearing a beret, but I don't do it though. One day I'm gonna though. You bet, I will have a beret on. That's ridiculous, but it's true. I always fight with wearing a beret.

The commercial for Diet Dr. Pepper says it tastes just like regular Dr. Pepper. Well, then they screwed up!

A mini-bar is a machine that makes everything expensive. When I take something out of the mini-bar, I always fathom that I'll go and replace it before they check it off and charge me, but they make that stuff impossible to replace. I go to the store and ask, "Do you have coke in a glass harmonica? Do you have individually wrapped cashews?"

I went to a doctor, and all he did is suck blood from my neck. Don't go see Dr. Acula.

I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.

I wanna hang a map of the world at my house. Then I wanna stick pins in the locations that I've traveled to. But first I have to travel to the top two corners of the map so it won't fall down.

It's hard to dance if you just your lost wallet. "Whoa! Where's my wallet? But, hey this song is funky."

People think I'm into sports because I'm a man. But I'm not into sports. I like Gatorade, but that's about as far as it goes. By the way, you don't have to be sweaty and play basketball to enjoy Gatorade. You can just be a thirsty dude. Gatorade forgets about this demographic!

I like rice. Rice is great when you're hungry and you want 2,000 of something.

It's very dangerous to wave to people you don't know because what if they don't have a hand? They'll think you're cocky. Look what I have. This thing is useful. I'm gonna go pick something up.

You know when a company wants to use letters in their phone number, but often they'll use too many letters? "Call 1-800-I-Really-Enjoy-Brand-New-Carpeting." Too many letters, man, must I dial them all? "Hello? Hold on, man, I'm only on 'Enjoy.' How did you know I was calling? You're good, I can see why they hired you!"

Yeah, I'm not into sports. If someone told me I had athlete's foot, I'd say that's not my foot!

Someone handed me a picture and said, "This is a picture of me when I was younger." Every picture of you is when you were younger. "Here's a picture of me when I'm older." How you'd pull that off? What's that camera look like?

I would not want to be a mobile home repo man. Those would be hard to sneak away - "Knock knock - Hi, would you go cut your grass and look that way for a half an hour?"

I don't want to have my face on the cover of a Wheaties box. I wanna have my face on the cover of a Rice Krispies box. "Snap, Krackle, Mitch and Pop"!

If I was a locksmith, I'd be pimping that out man. I'll trade you a free key duplication for. That joke made me laugh before I could finish it, which is good, because it had no ending.

I saw on HBO they were advertising a boxing match "It's a fight to the finish". That's a good place to end.

I wrote a letter to my Dad - I wrote, "I really enjoy being here," but I accidentally wrote rarely instead of really. But I still wanted to use it, so I wrote, "I rarely drive steamboats, Dad - there's a lot of stuff you don't know about me. Quit trying to act like I'm a steamboat operator." This letter took a harsh turn right away.

Every McDonald's commercial ends the same way: Prices and participation may vary. I wanna open a McDonald's and not participate in anything. I wanna be a stubborn McDonald's owner. "Cheeseburgers?" "Nope! We got spaghetti, and blankets."

One time I was forced to go to the doctors because of a sports accident. Herpes.

I don't own a cell phone or a pager. I just hang around everyone I know, all the time. If someone needs to get a hold of me they just say, "Mitch," and I say, "what" and turn my head slightly.

I like to smoke a pipe, because it's the punch line indicator. Whenever I take a hit of the pipe, you should be laughing.

Alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only one you can get yelled at for having. Goddamn it Otto, you are an alcoholic! Goddamn it Otto, you have Lupus! One of those two doesn't sound right.

You know when they show someone washing their hair under a waterfall? That's crazy. That would knock you on your butt.

I was at this casino minding my own business, and this guy came up to me and said, "You're gonna have to move, you're blocking a fire exit." As though if there was a fire, I wasn't gonna run. If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.

There's a guy in the audience with a distinctive laugh. I hope that guy is miked. The only problem with having a distinctive laugh is I know exactly when that guy isn't laughing. "Oh, distinctive laugh doesn't think that joke was funny!"

I like cinnamon rolls, but I don't always have time to make a pan. That's why I wish they would sell cinnamon roll incense. Sometimes I'd rather light a stick and have my roommate wake up with false hopes.

I think we should only get 3 honks a month on the car horn. Then, someone cuts you off, you press the horn, and nothing happens. You're like, "Crap! I wish I hadn't seen Ricky on the sidewalk!"

People teach their dogs to sit, it's a trick. I've been sitting my whole life, and a dog has never looked at me as though he thought I was tricky.

I got a business card because I wanna win some lunches. That's what my business card says: Mitch Hedberg, Potential Lunch Winner. Gimme a call, maybe we'll have lunch. If I'm lucky!

My friend said to me, "You know what I like? Mashed potatoes." I was like, "Dude, you have to give me time to guess - if you're going to quiz me you have to insert a pause."

I had a paper route when I was a kid. I was supposed to go to 2,000 houses. Or two dumpsters.

I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.

They could take sesame seeds off the market and I wouldn't even care. I can't imagine 5 years from now saying, "Remember sesame seeds? What happened? All the buns are blank!"

An escalator can never break. It can only become stairs. You would never see an "Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order" sign, just "Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience."

How does a sesame seed stick to a bun? That's magical. There must be some sesame seed glue out there. Either that or they're adhesive on one side. Peel off the backing, place it on the bun.

I used to be a hot-tar roofer. Yeah, I remember that day.

I like the Fed-Ex driver, 'cause he's a drug dealer and he doesn't even know it.

A severed foot is the ultimate stocking stuffer.

I remixed a remix, it was back to normal.

I think foosball is a combination of soccer and shish kabobs.

There was a product on late night TV that you could attach to your garden hose - "You can water your hard-to-reach plants with this." Who would make their plants hard to reach? That seems so very mean. I know you need water, but I'm going to make you hard to reach. "Think like a cactus!"

That would be cool if you could eat a good food with a bad food and the good food would cover for the bad food when it got to your stomach. Like you could eat a carrot with an onion ring and they would travel down to your stomach, then they would get there, and the carrot would say, "It's cool, he's with me."

If you had a friend who was a tightrope walker, and you were walking down a sidewalk, and he fell, that would be completely unacceptable.

My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them.

I know a lot about cars. I can look at a car's headlights and tell you exactly which way it's coming.

I think animal crackers make people think that all animals taste the same.

I have a cheese-shredder at home, which is its positive name. They don't call it by its negative name, which is sponge-ruiner. Because I wanted to clean it, but now I have little bits of sponge that would melt easily over tortilla chips.

I walked by a dry cleaner at 3 am, and there was a sign: "Sorry, we're closed" You don't have to be sorry, it's 3 am, and you're a dry cleaner! It would be ridiculous for me to expect you to be open! I'm not gonna walk in at 10 am and say "I walked by here at 3 and you were closed - somebody owes me an apology!"

I bought a seven dollar pen because I always lose pens and I got sick of not caring.

Look at the limes in this drink, how they float. That's good news. Next time I'm on a boat, and it capsizes, I will reach for a lime. I'm saved by the buoyancy of citrus.

My sister wanted to be an actress, but she never made it. She does live in a trailer. She got half way. She's an actress, she just never gets called to the set.

Every book is a children's book if the kid can read.

Every time I go and shave, I assume there is somebody else on the planet shaving as well, so I say, "I'm gonna go shave too."

I have an oscillating fan at my house. It goes back and forth. It looks like the fan is saying "no." So I like to ask it questions that a fan would say "no" to! Do you keep my hair in place? Do you keep my documents in order? Do you have 3 settings? LIAR! My fan lied to me. Now I will pull the pin up. Now you're not saying ANYTHING!

I got an ant farm. Them fellas didn't grow anything. Hey, how about some celery? Plus, if I tore your legs off, you would look like snowmen.

I didn't go to college, but if I did, I would have taken all my tests at a restaurant. Because the customer is always right.

Last week I helped my friend stay put. It's a lot easier than helping someone move. I went over to his house and made sure that he did not start to load stuff into a truck.

I don't have a baby, but if I did, I would either buy a baby-name book or invite somebody over who had a cast on.

I got my hair highlighted, because I felt some strands were more important than others.

I saw a commercial for an above-ground pool, it was 30 seconds long. Because that's the maximum amount of time you can picture yourself having fun in an above-ground pool. If it was 31 seconds, the actor would say "The water is only up to here? What do I do now? Throw the ball back to Jimmy? Or put some goggles on and look at his feet?"

Why are there no "during" pictures?

I like the public hot-tub at the hotels. I like when a guy is already in there, I say, "Hey, do you mind if I join you?" Then I go turn the heat up, and I add some carrots and onions.

I have an underwater camera just in case I crash my car into a river, and at the last minute I see a photo opportunity of a fish that I have never seen.

As an adult, I'm not supposed to go down slides. So if I'm at the top of a slide, I have to pretend that I got there accidentally. "How the hell did I get up here? I guess I have to slide down. Whee!" That's what you say when you're having fun. You refer to yourself and some other people.

I had a Velcro wallet in a casino. That sound annoyed the hell out of me. Whenever I lost money, and I opened the wallet, it was like the sound of my addiction.

I'd like to see a forklift lift a crate of forks. It would be so literal!

If you're a fish, and you want to be a fish stick, you must have very good posture.

Sometimes I fall asleep at night with my clothes on. I'm going to have all my clothes made out of blankets.

I don't know how to fix a car. If the car breaks down, and the gas tank does not say "E", I'm screwed. But if the gas tank says "E", I get all cocky - "I've got this one, don't worry." So I get out the toolbox AKA wallet.

I type a 101 words a minute. But it's in my own language.

My apartment is infested with koala bears. It's the cutest infestation ever. Way better than cockroaches. When I turn on the light, a bunch of koala bears scatter, and I don't want them to! "Hey - hold on fellas! Let me hold one of you, and feed you a leaf." Koala bears are so cute, why do they have to be so far away from me? We need to ship a few over, so I can hold one, and pat it on its head.

I had a job interview with an insurance company, and the lady said, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" I said, "Celebrating the fifth year anniversary of you asking me that question."

I wish I could play little league now. I'd be way better than before.

Every time I walk by a spy shop, I think that I need to put some surveillance on somebody. Rick's been acting fishy! I need to buy a safe that looks like a Spray 'N Wash can. "Hey, Mitch, can I use the Spray 'N Wash?" "Yeah, if you want to spray your shirt with documents!"

I never joined the army because at ease was never that easy to me. Seemed rather uptight still. I don't relax by parting my legs slightly and putting my hands behind my back. That does not equal ease. At ease was not being in the military. I am at ease, bro, because I am not in the military.

I've never stayed at a bed and breakfast. If I did, I figure you would start to get hungry! "Is that all you got around here? Well, maybe you can direct me to a chair lunch dinner."

I had a bag of Fritos, they were Texas grilled Fritos. These Fritos had grill marks on them. They remind me of summer, when we used to fire up the barbeque and throw down some Fritos. I can still see my dad with the apron on. Better flip that Frito, dad, you know how I like it.

We're gonna have to sweeten some of these jokes for the CD. You know what sweeten means, right? Sweeten is a show-biz term for "add sugar to".

I opened-up a yogurt, underneath the lid it said, "Please try again." because they were having a contest that I was unaware of. I thought maybe I opened the yogurt wrong. Or maybe Yoplait was trying to inspire me. "Come on Mitchell, don't give up!" An inspirational message from your friends at Yoplait. Fruit on the bottom, hope on top.

I was in downtown Boise Idaho and I saw a duck. I knew the duck was lost, because ducks aren't supposed to be downtown. There's nothing for 'em there. So I went to a Subway sandwich shop. I said, "Let me have a bun." She wouldn't sell me just the bun, she said it had to have something on it. She said it's against Subway regulations to sell just the bun. I guess the two halves aren't supposed to touch. So, I said, "All right, put some lettuce on it." "That'll be $1.75!" I said, "It's for a duck!" "Oh, then it's free." I did not know that. Ducks eat for free at Subway! Had I known that, I would have ordered a much larger sandwich. "Let me have the steak fajita sub, and don't bother ringing it up - it's for a duck! There are six ducks out there, and they all want Sun Chips!"

I hate flossing, I wish I just had one long curvy tooth. They didn't have to make separations for me.

I find that a duck's opinion of me is influenced by whether or not I have bread. A duck loves bread, but he does not have the capability to buy a loaf. That's the biggest joke on the duck ever. If I worked at a convenience store, and a duck came in and stole a loaf of bread, I would let him go. I'd say, "Come back tomorrow, bring your friends!" When I think of a duck's friends, I think of other ducks. But he could have, say, a beaver in tow.

The next time I move I hope I get a real easy phone number, something like 2222222. People will ask, "Mitch, how do I get a hold of you?" I'll say, "Just press two for a while, when I answer, you'll know that you've pressed two enough."

If you're an animal, you want to have a beaver as a friend, because they have some kick-ass houses. Lake side, my butt! Lake ON!

A waffle is like a pancake with a syrup trap.

I got a smoke alarm at home, but really it's more like a 9-volt-battery-slowly-drainer.

You know they call corn-on-the-cob, "corn-on-the-cob", but that's how it comes out of the ground. They should just call it corn, and every other type of corn, corn-off-the-cob. It's not like if someone cut off my arm they would call it "Mitch", but then re-attached it, and call it "Mitch-all-together".

I have no problem not listening to the Temptations.

I like buying snacks from a vending machine because food is better when it falls. Sometimes at the grocery, I'll drop a candy bar so that it will achieve its maximum flavor potential.

When you put Listerine in your mouth, it hurts. Germs do not go quietly.

If you're watching a parade, don't follow it. It never changes. If the parade is boring, run in the opposite direction. You will fast-forward the parade.

On a traffic light yellow means yield, and green means go. On a banana, it's just the opposite, yellow means go ahead, green means stop, and red means, where'd you get that banana?

Xylophone is spelled with an X. That's wrong. It should be a Z up front. Next time you spell Xylophone, use a Z. If someone says, "That's wrong!", you say, "No, it ain't." If you think that's wrong, then you need to have your head Z-rayed.

RELIGION

2006-10-21T01:46:00.000+08:00

When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!

But I want you to know something, this is sincere, I want you to know, when it comes to believing in God, I really tried. I really, really tried. I tried to believe that there is a God, who created each of us in His own image and likeness, loves us very much, and keeps a close eye on things. I really tried to believe that, but I gotta tell you, the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize, something is fucked up.

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the résumé of a Supreme Being. This is the kind of shit you'd expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. And just between you and me, in any decently-run universe, this guy would've been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago. And by the way, I say "this guy", because I firmly believe, looking at these results, that if there is a God, it has to be a man.

No woman could or would ever fuck things up like this. So, if there is a God, I think most reasonable people might agree that he's at least incompetent, and maybe, just maybe, doesn't give a shit. Doesn't give a shit, which I admire in a person, and which would explain a lot of these bad results.

So rather than be just another mindless religious robot, mindlessly and aimlessly and blindly believing that all of this is in the hands of some spooky incompetent father figure who doesn't give a shit, I decided to look around for something else to worship. Something I could really count on.

And immediately, I thought of the sun. Happened like that. Overnight I became a sun-worshipper. Well, not overnight, you can't see the sun at night. But first thing the next morning, I became a sun-worshipper. Several reasons. First of all, I can see the sun, okay? Unlike some other gods I could mention, I can actually see the sun. I'm big on that. If I can see something, I don't know, it kind of helps the credibility along, you know? So everyday I can see the sun, as it gives me everything I need; heat, light, food, flowers in the park, reflections on the lake, an occasional skin cancer, but hey. At least there are no crucifixions, and we're not setting people on fire simply because they don't agree with us.

Sun worship is fairly simple. There's no mystery, no miracles, no pageantry, no one asks for money, there are no songs to learn, and we don't have a special building where we all gather once a week to compare clothing. And the best thing about the sun, it never tells me I'm unworthy. Doesn't tell me I'm a bad person who needs to be saved. Hasn't said an unkind word. Treats me fine. So, I worship the sun. But, I don't pray to the sun. Know why? I wouldn't presume on our friendship. It's not polite.

I've often thought people treat God rather rudely, don't you? Asking trillions and trillions of prayers every day. Asking and pleading and begging for favors. Do this, gimme that, I need a new car, I want a better job. And most of this praying takes place on Sunday His day off. It's not nice. And it's no way to treat a friend.

But people do pray, and they pray for a lot of different things, you know, your sister needs an operation on her crotch, your brother was arrested for defecating in a mall. But most of all, you'd really like to fuck that hot little redhead down at the convenience store. You know, the one with the eyepatch and the clubfoot? Can you pray for that? I think you'd have to. And I say, fine. Pray for anything you want. Pray for anything, but what about the Divine Plan?

Remember that? The Divine Plan. Long time ago, God made a Divine Plan. Gave it a lot of thought, decided it was a good plan, put it into practice. And for billions and billions of years, the Divine Plan has been doing just fine. Now, you come along, and pray for something. Well suppose the thing you want isn't in God's Divine Plan? What do you want Him to do? Change His plan? Just for you? Doesn't it seem a little arrogant? It's a Divine Plan. What's the use of being God if every run-down shmuck with a two-dollar prayerbook can come along and fuck up Your Plan?

And here's something else, another problem you might have: Suppose your prayers aren't answered. What do you say? "Well, it's God's will." "Thy Will Be Done." Fine, but if it's God's will, and He's going to do what He wants to anyway, why the fuck bother praying in the first place? Seems like a big waste of time to me! Couldn't you just skip the praying part and go right to His Will? It's all very confusing.

So to get around a lot of this, I decided to worship the sun. But, as I said, I don't pray to the sun. You know who I pray to? Joe Pesci. Two reasons: First of all, I think he's a good actor, okay? To me, that counts. Second, he looks like a guy who can get things done. Joe Pesci doesn't fuck around. In fact, Joe Pesci came through on a couple of things that God was having trouble with.

For years I asked God to do something about my noisy neighbor with the barking dog, Joe Pesci straightened that cocksucker out with one visit. It's amazing what you can accomplish with a simple baseball bat.

So I've been praying to Joe for about a year now. And I noticed something. I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same 50% rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don't. Same as God, 50-50. Same as the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe, the wishing well and the rabbit's foot, same as the Mojo Man, same as the Voodoo Lady who tells you your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles, it's all the same: 50-50. So just pick your superstition, sit back, make a wish, and enjoy yourself.

And for those of you who look to The Bible for moral lessons and literary qualities, I might suggest a couple of other stories for you. You might want to look at the Three Little Pigs, that's a good one. Has a nice happy ending, I'm sure you'll like that. Then there's Little Red Riding Hood, although it does have that X-rated part where the Big Bad Wolf actually eats the grandmother. Which I didn't care for, by the way. And finally, I've always drawn a great deal of moral comfort from Humpty Dumpty. The part I like the best? "All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again." That's because there is no Humpty Dumpty, and there is no God. None, not one, no God, never was.

In fact, I'm gonna put it this way. If there is a God, may he strike this audience dead! See? Nothing happened. Nothing happened? Everybody's okay? All right, tell you what, I'll raise the stakes a little bit. If there is a God, may he strike me dead. See? Nothing happened, oh, wait, I've got a little cramp in my leg. And my balls hurt. Plus, I'm blind. I'm blind, oh, now I'm okay again, must have been Joe Pesci, huh? God Bless Joe Pesci. Thank you all very much. Joe Bless You!

GEORGE CARLIN ON THE 10 COMMANDMENTS

2006-10-21T01:43:00.000+08:00

GEORGE CARLIN ON THE 10 COMMANDMENTS
from "Complaints and Grievances" (HBO special)

Here is my problem with the ten commandments- why exactly are there 10?

You simply do not need ten. The list of ten commandments was artificially and deliberately inflated to get it up to ten. Here's what happened:

About 5,000 years ago a bunch of religious and political hustlers got together to try to figure out how to control people and keep them in line. They knew people were basically stupid and would believe anything they were told, so they announced that God had given them some commandments, up on a mountain, when no one was around.

Well let me ask you this- when they were making this shit up, why did they pick 10? Why not 9 or 11? I'll tell you why- because 10 sound official. Ten sounds important! Ten is the basis for the decimal system, it's a decade, it's a psychologically satisfying number (the top ten, the ten most wanted, the ten best dressed). So having ten commandments was really a marketing decision! It is clearly a bullshit list. It's a political document artificially inflated to sell better. I will now show you how you can reduce the number of commandments and come up with a list that's a little more workable and logical. I am going to use the Roman Catholic version because those were the ones I was taught as a little boy.

Let's start with the first three:

I AM THE LORD THY GOD THOU SHALT NOT HAVE STRANGE GODS BEFORE ME

THOU SHALT NOT TAKE THE NAME OF THE LORD THY GOD IN VAIN

THOU SHALT KEEP HOLY THE SABBATH

Right off the bat the first three are pure bullshit. Sabbath day? Lord's name? strange gods? Spooky language! Designed to scare and control primitive people. In no way does superstitious nonsense like this apply to the lives of intelligent civilized humans in the 21st century. So now we're down to 7. Next:

HONOR THY FATHER AND MOTHER

Obedience, respect for authority. Just another name for controlling people. The truth is that obedience and respect shouldn't be automatic. They should be earned and based on the parent's performance. Some parents deserve respect, but most of them don't, period. You're down to six.

Now in the interest of logic, something religion is very uncomfortable with, we're going to jump around the list a little bit.

THOU SHALT NOT STEAL

THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS

Stealing and lying. Well actually, these two both prohibit the same kind of behavior- dishonesty. So you don't really need two you combine them and call the commandment "thou shalt not be dishonest". And suddenly you're down to 5.

And as long as we're combining I have two others that belong together:

THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTRY

THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOR'S WIFE

Once again, these two prohibit the same type of behavior. In this case it is marital infidelity. The difference is- coveting takes place in the mind. But I don't think you should outlaw fantasizing about someone else's wife because what is a guy gonna think about when he's waxing his carrot? But, marital infidelity is a good idea so we're gonna keep this one and call it "thou shalt not be unfaithful". And suddenly we're down to four.

But when you think about it, honesty and infidelity are really part of the same overall value so, in truth, you could combine the two honesty commandments with the two fidelity commandments and give them simpler language, positive language instead of negative language and call the whole thing "thou shalt always be honest and faithful" and we're down to 3.

THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOR"S GOODS

This one is just plain fuckin' stupid. Coveting your neighbor's goods is what keeps the economy going! Your neighbor gets a vibrator that plays "o come o ye faithful", and you want one too! Coveting creates jobs, so leave it alone. You throw out coveting and you're down to 2 now- the big honesty and fidelity commandment and the one we haven't talked about yet:

THOU SHALT NOT KILL

Murder. But when you think about it, religion has never really had a big problem with murder. More people have been killed in the name of god than for any other reason. All you have to do is look at Northern Ireland, Cashmire, the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the World Trade Center to see how seriously the religious folks take thou shalt not kill. The more devout they are, the more they see murder as being negotiable. It depends on who's doin the killin' and who's gettin' killed. So, with all of this in mind, I give you my revised list of the two commandments:

Thou shalt always be honest and faithful to the provider of thy nookie.

&

Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless of course they pray to a different invisible man than you.

Two is all you need; Moses could have carried them down the hill in his fuckin' pocket. I wouldn't mind those folks in Alabama posting them on the courthouse wall, as long as they provided one additional commandment:

Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself.

thanks to Doug Rowlands

10 Things No Guy Will Ever Say!!!

2006-10-13T00:03:00.001+08:00

1. I'd like to take you out on a date but your
tits
are just too big for me.

2. Here honey, you use the remote for awhile.

3. While I'm up, can I get you anything?

4. Sex isn't important, sometimes, I just want
to
be held.

5. We never talk anymore.

6. Hey, let me hold your purse while you try
that
on.

7. I'm sick of blow-jobs. How about if I just try
to
satisfy you for an hour?

8. Ooh, Antonio Banderas AND Brad Pitt? That's
one movie I gotta see!

9. I'd much rather watch Days of Our Lives than
Bay Watch.

10. You are right and I was wrong.

10 things Women won't say ever!!

2006-10-12T23:59:00.000+08:00

10. You know, I've been complaining a lot
lately. I
don't blame you for ignoring me.

9. The new girl in my office is a stripper. I
invited
her over for dinner on Friday.

8. While you were in the bathroom, they went
for it
on fourth down and missed. If they can hold
them
to a field goal they'll still cover.

7. Bar food again?? Kick ass!!

6. I liked that wedding even more than ours.
Your
ex-girlfriend has class.

5. I love hearing stories about your old
girlfriends.
Tell me more.

4. Let's just leave the toilet seat up all the
time;
then you won't have to mess with it anymore.

3. It's only the third quarter, you should order
a
couple more pitchers.

2. I'm so happy with my new hairstyle, I don't
think
I'll ever change it again.

1. I love when my pillow smells like your cigars
and scotch. You passed out before brushing
your
teeth again, ya big silly!