[humorix] New Bug-Infested Distro Eases Transition From Windows To Linux

[James Baughn <jbaughn@xxxxxxx>]

New Bug-Infested Distro Eases Transition From Windows To Linux

In what promoters are calling a "Linux distribution built
for managers by managers", a new company called
Pee-aitch-bee Enterprises has unveiled "Notdows", a distro
designed to "ease the transition from Windows to Linux in
every way possible."

A key component of Notdows is the killrandom daemon process,
which randomly kills running processes, faithfully
simulating the Windows experience.  Over time, however,
killrandom will operate less frequently, allowing the user
to smoothly transition to a stable operating system.

"Ordinary distros built by geeks are designed to be as
stable as possible," said a Pee-aitch-bee developer/manager.
"This does not work well for some naive ex-Windows users,
who become disoriented and lost in such a foreign
environment. While recent versions of Windows are more
stable than predecessors, the difference between Windows and
Linux can still be quite jarring. We hope to ween these
users away from Windows' flakiness without causing
unnecessary emotional duress."

The development process for Notdows is markedly different
from most open source projects.  "We want our system to have
an optimum number of bugs to closely match Windows.  Our
developers are rewarded for reaching a target of 1 bug per
1,000 lines of code.  In some cases bugs must be
intentionally added in order to achieve this objective.  Our
development platform, code-named Reverse Bugzilla, makes
this possible."

In some cases, however, Notdows has developed nasty bugs
that cancelled out other bugs.  "We discovered that
killrandom 1.2.23 had an ugly flaw that allowed the program
to kill itself, immediately causing the system to run at
maximum stability.  It took awhile to diagnose the problem,
but we knew something was fishy when one of our development
machines reached an uptime of 61 days -- the average for a
fresh Notdows installation is 3 days between reboots."

The Notdows developers do take security seriously, however.
"We like bugs, but not security holes," the developer said.
"The last thing we want is for crackers to trash somebody's
system, providing an opportunity for the user to wipe their
hard drive and decide to go back to Windows. However, for
peace of mind, we do include a dummy anti-virus program that
pretends to scan files but otherwise does nothing except
make grinding sounds on the hard drive."

In another nod to Windows, the standard Notdows system costs
an obscenely large amount of money.  "While we do make the
whole thing available for free from our FTP site, we really
don't want our target audience to know that.  They believe
that 'more expensive' is always synonymous with 'more
quality'.  What they don't know about anonymous FTP isn't
going to hurt them..."


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