To BeOS or not to BeOS
A Short Shakespearean Technopoem by Tuxedo Jack

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KING: O heavy burden! Mine Quadra 950...
POLONIUS: His protocol's connecting. Let's leave the channel, my sysop.

(Exeunt KING and POLONIUS.)
(Enter HAMLET.)

HAM.: To boot, or not to boot - that is the question:
Whether 'tis more critical in the boot list to process
The drivers or the system registry of a crash-prone OS
Or to boot to a command prompt,
And by not loading, prevent it? To shut down - or enter sleep mode -
No more; and by shutting down to say we end
The crashing, and the thousand unnatural faults 
Our programming is heir to. 'Tis a scheduled task
Devoutly to be wish'd. To shut down - to sleep.
To sleep - perchance to process tasks: ay, there's the conflict!
For in the shutdown state of oblivion what tasks might be queued
When we have turn'd off our systems
Must give us a second's pause. There's the priviliges
That makes the stability of staying in Windows folly.
For who would bear the clicks and chats of oppressive end-users,
Th' end-user's folly, the proud systems brought low by crackers,
The pangs of fail'd remote connections, the security breach'd,
The hindrance of user permissions, and the spurns
That rapid merit of the unworthy system,
When the end-user might his power assert
With a bare command of fdisk? Who would these end-users bear,
To load and run under a buggy operating system,
But that the dread of something scheduled after shutdown - 
The uninstalled software, from whose code
No system rolls back - crashes the FPU,
And makes us rather process the malware we have
Than download others we have not listed in our queues?
Thus does system security make crashards of us all,
And thus the native pixel depth of resolution
Is reduced four times o'er with the pale cast of magnetism,
And e-businesses of great coding and security
With this packet their systems lock our accounts
And lose the legal access to their networks. - Blur thy pixels!
The 32-bit Ophelia! - GeForce4, in thy speed and power
Shall all my History and Cache be rendered.

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Author's Notes

God help me.

College is screwy. The IT department hates me because I'm running
contraband anime/JPop servers off their library systems, because
I'm playing games all over the networks (Quake 3 LAN parties...),
and because I've gained illicit access to their servers.

Cogito, ergo codito.

MSMT3K Episode 205 will be up by Thanksgiving, God willing, and
Episode 206 will be at Christmas.

Ja matta!

Tuxedo Jack

Postscript: Oh, and the Quadra 950 really is a heavy burden. It
weighs in - _without a monitor_ - at 36 pounds.