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Microsoft's Bulk Deal With New Zealand Collapses
vik writes "The latest 3-year, pan-government deal that Microsoft has been establishing with the New Zealand government since 2000 has collapsed, opening the doors to the wider use of open source software in government. The NZ State Services Commission (already a prize-winning user of open source) says in a statement that it '...became apparent during discussions that a formal agreement with Microsoft is no longer appropriate.' Having lost their discount, individual government departments will now have to put their IT requirements out to tender individually."
I pity your troll status (alas I have no mod points). It's a fair point though - anyone using nLite and/or vLite to create an unattended installation disk can't say that windows is difficult to install. It's generally a good idea to use it anyway, otherwise the faffing around with service packs + updates is annoying (which appears to be what people are moaning about 99% of the time).
Sure, its laziness, but we're all lazy. Sometimes we want a computer to act like a device that just works, without hassle, at all.
Now, I know that's a pipe dream of a utopian future we'll probably never have. But, when things go wrong, consider the difference between Windows and Linux - with Windows you type a search in google and get some results that nearly always apply to you, do what they say and you're done. With Linux, type a search into google and you get a load of results, too many results, some fixing your problem... but for a different distro, some requiring you to have a lot more knowledge and skill that an ordinary user should have to use a modern computer, and some just obscure and wrong.
That's the difference, that's why you have to go extra to help people out with Linux instead of treating them like n00bs. Until we get support sites for distros that really are helpful to the common user (hmm.. perhaps an Ubuntu wiki of common issues, solutions, and so on) then we'll have to take up the slack and help people out.
Mind you, I have to help out my Windows-using friends as well :(