On my "see through" drive all I can see are "0"s and "1"s. Shouldn't there be other numbers? Like "2" through "9"? Not only that, but they're flying by so fast I can't read them when the drive is spinning. I think my drive has a flaw from the manufacturer.
Don't you guys realize? Dell and Microsoft are birds of a feather. Their tactic is "Two steps forward, one step back." That's how they think they are going to win. They won't.
Google gaining on Microsoft? Crap. Microsoft will never even see the faint glow of Google's taillights on a clear night. Gaining on Microsoft, in the bad way? Google is not running on the same track. Let's face it: Microsoft, the overfunded, undertalented monster-- the always 'wannabe' to whoever comes up with a really original idea (the kind of idea that never happens at One Redmond Way)-- is green with envy at Google's success, and it galls Bill Win-At-Any-Cost-Including-Your-Soul Gates. Microsoft will never come near Google: It's not in their genes, nor in their heart-- oh,fsck, I forgot, Microsoft doesn't have any heart. They only have rabid pit bulls that will tear out anybody else's heart, so they can get at their success.
My two most favorite beverages, both rolled into one! Well, I also like single malt scotch, straight out of the bottle, sans ice, sans water, but I could probably afford to drink more of the coffee-beer. Just wouldn't get quite as happily snockered.
A thin strand that reaches all the way up to a space station cannot be very visible from a few miles away. What happens when a 747 or even a fighter jet gets tangled up in it?
I noticed all the comments to the parent from the "Anonymous" Microsoft paid shills. Now my free comment to "What about Google?": What about Linux? What about Firefox? What about KDE? I don't like Gnome. It came from the people who want us to use Mono, which is just a copy of.NYET, and it promotes the use of C#, which will eventually cut off the testicles of any open source (Linux) programmer who uses it. Microsoft sucks. Bill Gates is a greedy megalomaniac. Steve Balmer is his henchman. OSS will rule the millenium! But only if it is under the GPL.
According to Netcraft: LexisNexus runs Windows IIS on Windows 2000. ChoicePoint runs Lotus Domino on Windows 2000. No surprises here. Seisint is mostly unknown, on two pages of "seisint" with the exception of the three first entries, which run Linux, Linux, and BSD. Somehow I believe these first three "seisint" sites were not the victims of the data theft. Hmmm?
There is only one logical reason why North was chosen to be "up" on a globe: 1. There is a lot more water in the Southern Hemisphere. 2. Everybody knows that water always runs downhill. 3. Ergo, North must be "up" and South must be "down".
[Mod this up to 5, please, so I can get my karma back.]
Gates also wrote in the firt edition of "The Road Ahead" that the CD was boing to be the future and the (then somewhat fledgling) internet would go nowhere. Shortly thereafter, he had "The Road Ahead" revised to edit those totally wrong predictions out of it-- after all, he had to save face. Keep in mind that Gates must win at any cost-- he will lie anytime it is necessary to do so to win.
Why, immediately after posting my reply to this, the very next screen presented to me by Slashdot showed my comment AUTOMATOCALLY modded down to -1? My comment follows:
Re:One Good Thing Atleast - Philanthropy? (Score:-1) by Erchie (103202) on 10:11 Wednesday 12 February 2003 (#5289039)
Pablo Escobar, who lived in Medellin, Colombia, was one of the richest drug lords in that country. He made all of his money shipping cocaine to the United States and Europe. He, or members of his organization, broke laws in every country they dealt with, including their own-- committing crimes which inluded distrubution of illegal substances, violation of customs laws, kidnapping, murder, assassination of Colombian politicians who stood in his way, hijacking, non payment of taxes on money earned doing business, theft, torture, sex crimes, money laundering, and others-- all in the name of promoting or protecting his business, or expanding into new markets. He had a large organization, spread all over the world, and amassed billions of US dollars. He was also a huge philanthropist to the poor people in his country. He built soccer fields and parks in poor neighborhoods, he built schools in rural villages, with free tuition for the poor children of those villages. He built clinics. He paid for immunizations and other medical attention for poor children. And he did this all in the name of charity-- "charity" with the motive of creating good will in Colombia for his organization, and making people love him. Because of his philanthropy, the people in his department (states are called "departments" in Colombia) shielded him from prosecution by the law, until pressure from other countries (the US, for one) demanded he be punished. So what happened to him? He was put into a "prison" which was constructed just for him, using his money, and furnished lavishly with all the luxuries he demanded, including everything he required to continue to run his international business from in prison. His "guards" provided him with liquor, women, servants, first class food, and satellite television. Now, consider the reasoning in your comment, viz:
Now given all this is it in anyway """"""""OK"""""""" then that they may be pulling more money than they should be out of people who can afford it when a lot of people are benifiting that would not if MS was not there?
I know many others do philanthropy but Bill is probably the single largest individual to do so, and in ways others are not capable or have not try to.
Pablo Escobar was ultimately shot by a group from the Colombian government, backed by the United States. But by your reasoning, he should not have been punished at all because he was a philanthropist.
Consider this: Bill Gates gives away his money, because there is no way he or his descendents will ever be able to spend it all, not for generations to come. But the act of giving it away creates goodwill for Microsoft, and this-- you imply-- means that Microsoft should not be punished for its deliberate antitrust violations, which break the law.
Except for the difference in the nature of the crimes committed by Pablo Escobar's organization and Bill Gates's Microsoft, they are both guilty of making huge fortunes using proven illegal methods, and they both use/used their money to create public goodwill for their organizations through philanthropy, which they use/used to shield their illegal operations from censure by the people.
Can you not see something egregiously wrong with this kind of thinking? Do you think that having an obscenely large amount of money should absolve an organization from committing crimes or illegal acts? Should it mitigate any punishment against them to correct the evil results of their illegal behavior?
Pablo Escobar, who lived in Medellin, Colombia, was one of the richest drug lords in that country. He made all of his money shipping cocaine to the United States and Europe. He, or members of his organization, broke laws in every country they dealt with, including their own-- committing crimes which inluded distrubution of illegal substances, violation of customs laws, kidnapping, murder, assassination of Colombian politicians who stood in his way, hijacking, non payment of taxes on money earned doing business, theft, torture, sex crimes, money laundering, and others-- all in the name of promoting or protecting his business, or expanding into new markets. He had a large organization, spread all over the world, and amassed billions of US dollars. He was also a huge philanthropist to the poor people in his country. He built soccer fields and parks in poor neighborhoods, he built schools in rural villages, with free tuition for the poor children of those villages. He built clinics. He paid for immunizations and other medical attention for poor children. And he did this all in the name of charity-- "charity" with the motive of creating good will in Colombia for his organization, and making people love him. Because of his philanthropy, the people in his department (states are called "departments" in Colombia) shielded him from prosecution by the law, until pressure from other countries (the US, for one) demanded he be punished. So what happened to him? He was put into a "prison" which was constructed just for him, using his money, and furnished lavishly with all the luxuries he demanded, including everything he required to continue to run his international business from in prison. His "guards" provided him with liquor, women, servants, first class food, and satellite television. Now, consider the reasoning in your comment, viz:
Now given all this is it in anyway """"""""OK"""""""" then that they may be pulling more money than they should be out of people who can afford it when a lot of people are benifiting that would not if MS was not there?
I know many others do philanthropy but Bill is probably the single largest individual to do so, and in ways others are not capable or have not try to.
Pablo Escobar was ultimately shot by a group from the Colombian government, backed by the United States. But by your reasoning, he should not have been punished at all because he was a philanthropist.
Consider this: Bill Gates gives away his money, because there is no way he or his descendents will ever be able to spend it all, not for generations to come. But the act of giving it away creates goodwill for Microsoft, and this-- you imply-- means that Microsoft should not be punished for its deliberate antitrust violations, which break the law.
Except for the difference in the nature of the crimes committed by Pablo Escobar's organization and Bill Gates's Microsoft, they are both guilty of making huge fortunes using proven illegal methods, and they both use/used their money to create public goodwill for their organizations through philanthropy, which they use/used to shield their illegal operations from censure by the people.
Can you not see something egregiously wrong with this kind of thinking? Do you think that having an obscenely large amount of money should absolve an organization from committing crimes or illegal acts? Should it mitigate any punishment against them to correct the evil results of their illegal behavior?
When you are recovering in any market, it is sound business practice the cut prices in an effort to grow sales against your perceived competition. Of course this will be an uncertain time for them. A recovery is a very dangerous time for companies who have survived the shakeout. MS CFO probably well knows this. Who really knows at this point how sales will break for them? This was a public warning they expect some trouble on the horizon.
And well they should expect trouble on the horizon. With this present administration in office, I do not expect an economic recovery for several more years in the United States. In fact, if Bush gets everything he wants, I do not expect a recovery for the next ten or twenty years. We will be lucky if we can avoid a depression as bad as the one that struck the world in 1929, or worse. If he gets everything he wants this term, and does not even get re-elected, which I think is going to be the outcome of the next election, we will still have a fiscal mess on our hands that will take eight more years (after Bush is kick out of office) of a hard working Democratic administration to clean up. Bush is a loose cannon, whose instincts are counter to the well being of the United States of America and the continuation of freedom for its people. If we are not very careful, the whole world is likely to be cast into a decade of horrendous holocaust because of the paranoia and parochial attitude of the dangerously effete elitist presently in office.
Microsoft has shown over and over again that they don't do this, but instead can change course on a dime (unlike most large companies). Let's pretend that tomorrow 99% of the world adopted Linux -- The next week Microsoft would be the #1 software vendor on the Linux platform.
They can change on a dime because they sell a product which has no substance-- it is ethereal, it is purely mental, it has nothing to offer in a physical sense, except a plastic disk with an intrinsic worth of ten cents and a small handbook worth fifty cents-- all of which is sold to the public for $289US under a license which stipulates that the contents of the disk may not be used except as Microsoft declares, and with no warrranty whatsoever, and the code it contains may not be modified at all.
It is precisely for this reason that the GPL OSS model is the only one that makes sense in comparison with MS secretware.
If Bill Gates had been around and invited to the party when geometry and algebra were "invented" he would have seized control of them and restricted their use to only those who paid his newly formed company MicroTrometry an absurd license fee for each access to the "secret code" of algebra and the laws of trigonometry, which they would have been able to use only under a draconian Non-Disclosure Agreement that forced all of your descendants into eternal slavery if its terms were breached. If you needed to measure the height of a pyramid, you would have had to pay Bill al Gillates a license fee for the momentary use of the Pythagorean theorem, which by the way he had stolen from Pythagoras with a slick "partner" agreement which stipulated that Pythagoras would do all of the development of the theorem, and al Gillates would get all of the profits from its licensing the the public and ultimate total ownership of the formula would be his. MicroTrometry would have patented such concepts as the Law of Sines and the qualities of similitude and homothecy of triangles, and they would have killed all original work and new discovery by others in the field of mathematics by their stranglehold on algebra, geometry, number theory, and integral calculus.
Re:A lesson the Linux worlds needs to learn
on
Why VHS Was Better
·
· Score: -1
...it is as unreasonable to expect ordinary users who do not find computing technology interesting in its own right to be motivated to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to undertake the same kind of analyis and action you imply we'd see from most Linux users.
That's why the choice of various GUIs have evolved that run on top of Linux. If a user has the ability, he can access the lowest levels of the Linux code-- even down to modifying the cource code and recompiling it. But that skill is not necessary for a user who is a total-newbie-computer-illiterate to have in order to run Linux.
My five year old has been using Linux with KDE since he was three, to play the games that come bundled with SuSE. He can boot Linux and log in (previously from a terminal CLI, but now he does it from the graphical login screen-- although he has known how to type his name and a simple password on a CLI since he turned four), and he can correctly shut down Linux when he is done (previously, by tapping the up or down arrow keys to recycle to the shutdown command string, which he recognized, even though he could not actually read, and tap enter-- again, all of that is now done from the graphical login screen).
It is a vicious Urban Myth Started By Microsoft that Linux HAS TO BE too impossibly difficult for the less capable computer user.
My whole family, including my wife and all six kids-- besides the five year old there are kids of seven, nine, seventeen, nineteen and twenty) uses Linux and ONLY Linux (specifically SuSE 8.1) to do everything we want to do for our daily tasks of internet browsing, email, instant messaging, and shopping, and the kids do their research and write papers for their homework using various of the wordprocessors, including Kwrite, StarOffice 6.0, and AbiWord and my wife uses our computers connected by a small LAN to two HP printers, one an OfficeJet d145 and the other an older LaserJet 4 with Postscript, for her small home business (she is an interpreter for the local hospitals and court). We burn CDs for backing up files, and my wife and kids are addicts for the games that come with Linux.
My daughter is taking a course in high school which trains her on Wintel systems for graphics and web page design-- she also works on the staff of the school yearbook, which uses the school's Wintel lab to do its graphics work-- and she complains that their entire Wintel system is frequently down for a week or two at a time, and cannot understand why they do not have a Linux equipped lab. She tells her Microsoft-centric teacher that Linux is far better than the XP and Win2000 system they have, because Linux is always available without fail, and it is much easier to perform the same tasks on her Linux system at home than it is on the Wintel system at school. Her teacher refuses to acknowledge that there could possibly be anything better than WinTel, but he can't keep their Wintel system on line for longer than a month or so at a time, and when they go down they stay down, far longer than they should. Yet he continues to robotically tout Microsoft to his students as being the standard and he cavalierly refuses to make apologies when their crashed system prevents the yearbook staff from completing their tasks to meet their deadlines, stating to the kids that "computers do crash, and that's a fact of life." My daughtergot in trouble with him when she told him that it may be a fact of life in the world of Microsoft but it certainly is not a fact of life in her SuSE 8.1 world at home, and she had never known a computer to crash until she started working with Wintel.
Slashdot Mirror
On my "see through" drive all I can see are "0"s and "1"s. Shouldn't there be other numbers? Like "2" through "9"? Not only that, but they're flying by so fast I can't read them when the drive is spinning. I think my drive has a flaw from the manufacturer.
Don't you guys realize? Dell and Microsoft are birds of a feather. Their tactic is "Two steps forward, one step back." That's how they think they are going to win. They won't.
So you buy Microsoft stuff... hmmm. Does that mean your morals are put aside for the moment?
Google gaining on Microsoft? Crap. Microsoft will never even see the faint glow of Google's taillights on a clear night. Gaining on Microsoft, in the bad way? Google is not running on the same track. Let's face it: Microsoft, the overfunded, undertalented monster-- the always 'wannabe' to whoever comes up with a really original idea (the kind of idea that never happens at One Redmond Way)-- is green with envy at Google's success, and it galls Bill Win-At-Any-Cost-Including-Your-Soul Gates. Microsoft will never come near Google: It's not in their genes, nor in their heart-- oh,fsck, I forgot, Microsoft doesn't have any heart. They only have rabid pit bulls that will tear out anybody else's heart, so they can get at their success.
Nitpicker. Can't you find something else to niggle to death?
Every body knows that Christians confess their sins to Pat Robertson-- I've seen it on TV.
My two most favorite beverages, both rolled into one! Well, I also like single malt scotch, straight out of the bottle, sans ice, sans water, but I could probably afford to drink more of the coffee-beer. Just wouldn't get quite as happily snockered.
A thin strand that reaches all the way up to a space station cannot be very visible from a few miles away. What happens when a 747 or even a fighter jet gets tangled up in it?
Where is Rob Enderle now? I guess he is trying to burrow under a rock, with his tail tucked between his legs as he dribbles pee into his shoes.
The United States is being flushed down the toilet. I will never buy HP again. Idiots!
Be patient. The largest avalanche starts with the first pebble.
You've obviously never seen a flying doughnut.
Sucker!!!
I noticed all the comments to the parent from the "Anonymous" Microsoft paid shills. Now my free comment to "What about Google?": .NYET, and it promotes the use of C#, which will eventually cut off the testicles of any open source (Linux) programmer who uses it. Microsoft sucks. Bill Gates is a greedy megalomaniac. Steve Balmer is his henchman. OSS will rule the millenium! But only if it is under the GPL.
What about Linux?
What about Firefox?
What about KDE?
I don't like Gnome. It came from the people who want us to use Mono, which is just a copy of
Will they call it the Itanic?
According to Netcraft:
LexisNexus runs Windows IIS on Windows 2000.
ChoicePoint runs Lotus Domino on Windows 2000.
No surprises here. Seisint is mostly unknown, on two pages of "seisint" with the exception of the three first entries, which run Linux, Linux, and BSD. Somehow I believe these first three "seisint" sites were not the victims of the data theft. Hmmm?
There is only one logical reason why North was chosen to be "up" on a globe:
1. There is a lot more water in the Southern Hemisphere.
2. Everybody knows that water always runs downhill.
3. Ergo, North must be "up" and South must be "down".
[Mod this up to 5, please, so I can get my karma back.]
I thought the RIAA were gangsters and organized crime.
Send Bush, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rove, Wolfowitz, Rice, DeLay, and Powell. And then hope it never comes back.
Gates also wrote in the firt edition of "The Road Ahead" that the CD was boing to be the future and the (then somewhat fledgling) internet would go nowhere. Shortly thereafter, he had "The Road Ahead" revised to edit those totally wrong predictions out of it-- after all, he had to save face. Keep in mind that Gates must win at any cost-- he will lie anytime it is necessary to do so to win.
Re:One Good Thing Atleast - Philanthropy? (Score:-1)
by Erchie (103202) on 10:11 Wednesday 12 February 2003 (#5289039)
Pablo Escobar, who lived in Medellin, Colombia, was one of the richest drug lords in that country. He made all of his money shipping cocaine to the United States and Europe. He, or members of his organization, broke laws in every country they dealt with, including their own-- committing crimes which inluded distrubution of illegal substances, violation of customs laws, kidnapping, murder, assassination of Colombian politicians who stood in his way, hijacking, non payment of taxes on money earned doing business, theft, torture, sex crimes, money laundering, and others-- all in the name of promoting or protecting his business, or expanding into new markets. He had a large organization, spread all over the world, and amassed billions of US dollars. He was also a huge philanthropist to the poor people in his country. He built soccer fields and parks in poor neighborhoods, he built schools in rural villages, with free tuition for the poor children of those villages. He built clinics. He paid for immunizations and other medical attention for poor children. And he did this all in the name of charity-- "charity" with the motive of creating good will in Colombia for his organization, and making people love him. Because of his philanthropy, the people in his department (states are called "departments" in Colombia) shielded him from prosecution by the law, until pressure from other countries (the US, for one) demanded he be punished. So what happened to him? He was put into a "prison" which was constructed just for him, using his money, and furnished lavishly with all the luxuries he demanded, including everything he required to continue to run his international business from in prison. His "guards" provided him with liquor, women, servants, first class food, and satellite television. Now, consider the reasoning in your comment, viz:
Now given all this is it in anyway """"""""OK"""""""" then that they may be pulling more money than they should be out of people who can afford it when a lot of people are benifiting that would not if MS was not there?
I know many others do philanthropy but Bill is probably the single largest individual to do so, and in ways others are not capable or have not try to.
Pablo Escobar was ultimately shot by a group from the Colombian government, backed by the United States. But by your reasoning, he should not have been punished at all because he was a philanthropist.
Consider this: Bill Gates gives away his money, because there is no way he or his descendents will ever be able to spend it all, not for generations to come. But the act of giving it away creates goodwill for Microsoft, and this-- you imply-- means that Microsoft should not be punished for its deliberate antitrust violations, which break the law.
Except for the difference in the nature of the crimes committed by Pablo Escobar's organization and Bill Gates's Microsoft, they are both guilty of making huge fortunes using proven illegal methods, and they both use/used their money to create public goodwill for their organizations through philanthropy, which they use/used to shield their illegal operations from censure by the people.
Can you not see something egregiously wrong with this kind of thinking? Do you think that having an obscenely large amount of money should absolve an organization from committing crimes or illegal acts? Should it mitigate any punishment against them to correct the evil results of their illegal behavior?
Now given all this is it in anyway """"""""OK"""""""" then that they may be pulling more money than they should be out of people who can afford it when a lot of people are benifiting that would not if MS was not there?
I know many others do philanthropy but Bill is probably the single largest individual to do so, and in ways others are not capable or have not try to.
Pablo Escobar was ultimately shot by a group from the Colombian government, backed by the United States. But by your reasoning, he should not have been punished at all because he was a philanthropist.
Consider this: Bill Gates gives away his money, because there is no way he or his descendents will ever be able to spend it all, not for generations to come. But the act of giving it away creates goodwill for Microsoft, and this-- you imply-- means that Microsoft should not be punished for its deliberate antitrust violations, which break the law.
Except for the difference in the nature of the crimes committed by Pablo Escobar's organization and Bill Gates's Microsoft, they are both guilty of making huge fortunes using proven illegal methods, and they both use/used their money to create public goodwill for their organizations through philanthropy, which they use/used to shield their illegal operations from censure by the people.
Can you not see something egregiously wrong with this kind of thinking? Do you think that having an obscenely large amount of money should absolve an organization from committing crimes or illegal acts? Should it mitigate any punishment against them to correct the evil results of their illegal behavior?
This was a public warning they expect some trouble on the horizon.
And well they should expect trouble on the horizon. With this present administration in office, I do not expect an economic recovery for several more years in the United States. In fact, if Bush gets everything he wants, I do not expect a recovery for the next ten or twenty years. We will be lucky if we can avoid a depression as bad as the one that struck the world in 1929, or worse. If he gets everything he wants this term, and does not even get re-elected, which I think is going to be the outcome of the next election, we will still have a fiscal mess on our hands that will take eight more years (after Bush is kick out of office) of a hard working Democratic administration to clean up. Bush is a loose cannon, whose instincts are counter to the well being of the United States of America and the continuation of freedom for its people. If we are not very careful, the whole world is likely to be cast into a decade of horrendous holocaust because of the paranoia and parochial attitude of the dangerously effete elitist presently in office.
They can change on a dime because they sell a product which has no substance-- it is ethereal, it is purely mental, it has nothing to offer in a physical sense, except a plastic disk with an intrinsic worth of ten cents and a small handbook worth fifty cents-- all of which is sold to the public for $289US under a license which stipulates that the contents of the disk may not be used except as Microsoft declares, and with no warrranty whatsoever, and the code it contains may not be modified at all.
It is precisely for this reason that the GPL OSS model is the only one that makes sense in comparison with MS secretware.
If Bill Gates had been around and invited to the party when geometry and algebra were "invented" he would have seized control of them and restricted their use to only those who paid his newly formed company MicroTrometry an absurd license fee for each access to the "secret code" of algebra and the laws of trigonometry, which they would have been able to use only under a draconian Non-Disclosure Agreement that forced all of your descendants into eternal slavery if its terms were breached. If you needed to measure the height of a pyramid, you would have had to pay Bill al Gillates a license fee for the momentary use of the Pythagorean theorem, which by the way he had stolen from Pythagoras with a slick "partner" agreement which stipulated that Pythagoras would do all of the development of the theorem, and al Gillates would get all of the profits from its licensing the the public and ultimate total ownership of the formula would be his. MicroTrometry would have patented such concepts as the Law of Sines and the qualities of similitude and homothecy of triangles, and they would have killed all original work and new discovery by others in the field of mathematics by their stranglehold on algebra, geometry, number theory, and integral calculus.
That's why the choice of various GUIs have evolved that run on top of Linux. If a user has the ability, he can access the lowest levels of the Linux code-- even down to modifying the cource code and recompiling it. But that skill is not necessary for a user who is a total-newbie-computer-illiterate to have in order to run Linux.
My five year old has been using Linux with KDE since he was three, to play the games that come bundled with SuSE. He can boot Linux and log in (previously from a terminal CLI, but now he does it from the graphical login screen-- although he has known how to type his name and a simple password on a CLI since he turned four), and he can correctly shut down Linux when he is done (previously, by tapping the up or down arrow keys to recycle to the shutdown command string, which he recognized, even though he could not actually read, and tap enter-- again, all of that is now done from the graphical login screen).
It is a vicious Urban Myth Started By Microsoft that Linux HAS TO BE too impossibly difficult for the less capable computer user.
My whole family, including my wife and all six kids-- besides the five year old there are kids of seven, nine, seventeen, nineteen and twenty) uses Linux and ONLY Linux (specifically SuSE 8.1) to do everything we want to do for our daily tasks of internet browsing, email, instant messaging, and shopping, and the kids do their research and write papers for their homework using various of the wordprocessors, including Kwrite, StarOffice 6.0, and AbiWord and my wife uses our computers connected by a small LAN to two HP printers, one an OfficeJet d145 and the other an older LaserJet 4 with Postscript, for her small home business (she is an interpreter for the local hospitals and court). We burn CDs for backing up files, and my wife and kids are addicts for the games that come with Linux.
My daughter is taking a course in high school which trains her on Wintel systems for graphics and web page design-- she also works on the staff of the school yearbook, which uses the school's Wintel lab to do its graphics work-- and she complains that their entire Wintel system is frequently down for a week or two at a time, and cannot understand why they do not have a Linux equipped lab. She tells her Microsoft-centric teacher that Linux is far better than the XP and Win2000 system they have, because Linux is always available without fail, and it is much easier to perform the same tasks on her Linux system at home than it is on the Wintel system at school. Her teacher refuses to acknowledge that there could possibly be anything better than WinTel, but he can't keep their Wintel system on line for longer than a month or so at a time, and when they go down they stay down, far longer than they should. Yet he continues to robotically tout Microsoft to his students as being the standard and he cavalierly refuses to make apologies when their crashed system prevents the yearbook staff from completing their tasks to meet their deadlines, stating to the kids that "computers do crash, and that's a fact of life." My daughtergot in trouble with him when she told him that it may be a fact of life in the world of Microsoft but it certainly is not a fact of life in her SuSE 8.1 world at home, and she had never known a computer to crash until she started working with Wintel.
Bless her heart-- she is her father's daughter!)