This is Bill Gates in the Simpsons. This episode features the billionaire software mogul as the evil mastermind that shuts down Homer Simpsons`s Internet company. This shows the reality of life in the corporate world, where you may not want to buy someone out, but you can shut them down in other ways. Microsoft are always wanting to shut down their competitors and force people to use the Microsoft software as the only solution. Even though Linux distributions have many useful features that Windows does not. Namely; freedom to choose the desktop environment you wish and not requiring anti-virus and anti-spyware software to keep you safe from the nasties on the Internet. You can choose from many different Linux distributions and they all have varying levels of complexity. although Linux is hard and complex as you make it. You can do just about everything with the command-line or you can use the GUI tools like Yast2 to perform system administration. Poor Homer Simpson only wanted to run an ISP and provide a service to his customers. And I do not see Microsoft becoming an ISP anytime soon. But this story could be about other companies too. There was the Xerox Star computer system in 1981 that had a desktop with icons and a mouse/keyboard interface long before Microsoft released the Windows 3.0 operating system.
Windows 3.0 was not that bad, not too many differences between it and Windows 3.1, but then Windows 3.11 came out and this supported workgroups hence the name. But the Windows 8 interface does remind me a bit of Windows 3.11. I remember NT 3.5 had the Windows 3.1 interface as well. That was released in 1994. But nowadays we would not use such an outdated and obsolete operating system. Not even Windows NT 4.0 would be used these days. The older Simpsons episodes such as the 3D episode are classics these days, they certainly do not make them like they used to. Series 24 is not too bad, but they are tackling current affairs as a way to keep the series running. At least they will not kill the series like Stargate Universe. That series was very entertaining, the prospect of being stuck on the ancients spaceship whilst you are fighting aliens and each other whilst also visiting strange planets is one hell of a concept for a SciFi series. Better than Stargate Atlantis. And where is the Atlantis anyway? Is it on another planet or Earth? Anyway, the giant ship in the series was the best looking spaceship I have seen in a Science Fiction series. Nearly as good as the giant Guild Heighliners in the 1984 David Lynch film “Dune”. That film was drastically different from the book, but it has some good action scenes between the Fremen and the Saduarkar soldiers of the Emperor. But why were they wearing hazmat suits in the desert?
That is what happens when you let someone like David Lynch make a movie. The Simpsons should make a Facebook episode like the very funny South Park episode “You have 0 friends” that was a very funny depiction of Social Networking. The Simpsons did this in the episode S23E11 “The D’oh-cial Network”. Lisa creates a social networking website and this causes much chaos in Springfield. There was also the episode that showed Steve Jobs appearing on the wall of an Apple store like Big Brother in 1984. This shows him as a megalomaniac that is controlling the PC market and pushing his hardware above all others to the masses. This is the reality of the PC market though, every manufacturer and operating system vendor wants consumers to use their operating system above others, that is the reality. That makes sense of course. If I was making an operating system I would want everyone to use it as well, but I would not use anything like UEFI and I would cooperate better with GRUB bootloaders and dual booting operating systems. That is something that Windows needs to improve on.