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Free Software As Nigerian Scam
djeaux writes "In the November 4 issue of Syllabus, Howard Strauss, manager of technology strategy and outreach at Princeton University, presents 'The FREE, 0% APR, Better Sex, No Effort Diet' in which he scattershoots at open source software. The Nigerian scam is part of his imagery, leading to a great quote: 'While you are installing your free open source software you may want to write Mrs. Ahmed a check. Her $8.5 million will help pay for the real cost of that free software.' Elsewhere, Strauss describes the open source community as 'a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure.'" Not everyone at Princeton agrees.
That sounds like a fair minded, well reasoned and educated comment entirely lacking in FUD...
fortune -o
Is there anyway I can moderate this entire story -1: Flamebait?
I see the plan, post four links to Princeton servers and watch them suffer. Make them pay for their insolence!
"instead of having highly paid programmers at... Blackboard build your critical university systems, you can have scores of software gurus scattered around the globe working completely independently build them for you FOR FREE."
Oh, you didn't. You mean free vending machines for life Blackboard?
Since Microsoft tries to hire them right out of school, "too young" must be young indeed! I'd rate that article as definitely either a Troll or Flamebait, certainly Overrated.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
That article really makes me think. It makes me wonder about the value of a FREE article.
Sounds like he's bitching about moving to Windows.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
May you live in interesting times...
Sd-
The Open Source Community
(Score: -2 AttemptedFlamebait)
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Is there a special prize for 1st post and karma whore in one?
That award goes to "[modifying the source code] was discredited decades ago". WTF? How, by whom, and most importantly why was "modifying source code" discredited? I mean, the whole article is full of completely unsubstantiated nonsense and mudslinging, but this little comment grabbed my attention.
You run across these guys from time to time... good old fashioned IT weenies, left over from the days when the PHB's actually accepted that they had to wait a year or more for the high priests in the big-air-conditioned-room to make a few paltry changes to their little RPG-III payroll application. He didn't get those round lips from eating square meals.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
"Propritary software relies on keeping things secret. Terrorist cells rely on keepin things secret. So really, when you buy a copy of Windows, you may as well make the cheque out to one O. b. Laden."
;) Loose, irrelavent analogies are fun!
How's that?
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Oh Jayzus not this guy again. I can't get away from him.
His brainstorms:
togamatons (wearable computers built into your watch, glasses or clothes)
automatons (built into your car)
refrigermatons (built into your refrigerator door)
bitemematons (Howard, get some fresh air)
"We've all seen this FUD before. It's old news, it's an old battle. They're bringing it up again. But this time isn't like the last time. It just FEELS like, this time, somethings different. Like they're losing... They're not losing their castle, but the little provinces on the edge of their kingdom. Open source is slowly encroaching on their land, and they know it."
:-)
"Isn't that worth *dying* for?"
Sorry, it just reminded me of a Matrix monologue...
The man's brain must be a FUDsponge.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Bob: You wanted to be Krusty's sidekick since you were five! What
about the buffoon lessons, the four years at clown college.
Cecil: I'll thank you not to refer to Princeton that way.
Freevo - Linux Multimedia Jukebox
And now we dance, or have a LAN party, or something. I don't know. When we destroy SCO how the hell will we celebrate?
I'll have sex in the champagne room. Yeah, you heard me.
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
...that this article is hosted on a server running Apache?
In case anyone was wondering what the hell Homestar Runner is: http://www.homestarrunner.com. I found the website and I'm still wondering what the hell it is.
First he was told Linux was free and now he's receiving letters from SCO.
No, you got that wrong. :)
Linux and MacOS X are based on 30-year old technology.
Windows XP -is- 30 year old technology with new paint and a bigger engine.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This is the alluring pitch of BSD software. We may have to give up project planning, quality control, coding standards, accountability, version control, and support, but it's BSD and we get the ability to modify the source code ourselves, something that is extremely dangerous to do, was discredited decades ago, and few people do anyway.
That was quite interesting, but your letter loses all its merit upon examining your home page where, amongst other things, you proudly display a picture of you posing with a Yoda doll.
You also seem overly pleased with the fact that your webpage is "strictly conforming" to XHTML 1.0.
Sorry, but I refuse to take advice from someone so hopelessly geeky and anal.
He never made it though.
... the audacity!!!).
... but those damned students are just there and you will have to make do, if you dont like it you shouldnt work at a university (and you obviously shouldnt!).
All it is is some whining about how it is getting harder for him to push through proprietary software purchases, and how student run/create infrastructure is too complex for poor old geriatric him to understand (at least he is honest) and how they are willing to do his and other's work for the price of some free lunch (and for that they cost him his lunch time every so often for meetings too
Im typing this on a student administrated campus LAN as we speak, and I tremble of the thought of letting his geriatric kind near it.
Yeah students are willing to take the bread out of the mouth of people like him for free, that is true and that is sad for those people. Ill agree with him on that much. They dont do a bad job of it though, time and time again people like him have only succeeded in proving they cant do it better but can only ask more money to do it worse.
To mr. Strauss : cry me a river you fucking dinosaur. Students are a resource for univeristy IT departments, I know you would love to do nothing more than just spend other people's money
I think he meant crackers.
No, I think he is crackers.
Well, laugh!
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Don't you know????
Real men patch live binaries
None of this source code bullshit for me... I eat, breathe and sleep raw machine code. If there's a security hole in IIS that Microsoft is refusing to fix, I can start up BASIC, do a couple hundred POKE statements, and all's well and good.
Source code is for WHUSSES! (You pansy source-coder.)
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
It's not the computers, it's the users that bog down the non-CS IT departments. You're overlooking the size and skill level of the user base.
CS students (who have gotten past the Freshman level weed-out courses) are likely to me MUCH more tech savvy than, say, a music or statistics major (who mainly want to just run one or two applications and then read email and surf).
Compare that small group of highly technical users, who probably have owned computers for years and years and are embarassed to have to ask for help with printing, etc. (RTFM!), with the hordes of "mundanes" who just have to write a freakin' paper and don't know what "PC Load Letter" means on the printer or why opening attachments is dangerous.
>CS and EE departments make punishing use of their computing resources.
By which you mean, power users run programs that use a lot of CPU resources. Ooo, scary! Non-CS students physically break computers because they don't know better or don't care:
I need more RAM, I think I'll steal it out of a lab computer.
Hey what's this attachment, hey it doesn't seem to be doing anything, hmm now this computer's slow, oh well who cares, I'll use the next one.
Oops, I spilled my coke in the keyboard. I better not tell anybody or I'll have to pay for a new keyboard, and I bet that's expensive.
How nice that they built a cup holder into the front of this computer. Oops, I spilled my coffee into the cup holder opening.
I'm late for class, this printer is slow, maybe if I yank on the paper as it comes out, it'll print faster. Oops, paper jam, I'm outta here.
I love Napster! I think I'll download a bunch more file sharing apps and run them all the time since all my bandwidth is free.
This 22MB MPEG is soooo funny. I think I'll email it to everybody I have an email address for.