>1. Newbies learn rpm's and never know how to compile >there own software >2. Never download a binary -- trojans abound !
I'm not sure that Linux (and the Open-Source/Free Software movement in general) is really about compiling your own software. I thought it was more about having the freedom to see and modify and redistribute the code if you want to. Sort of like the US' freedom of religion, in which you are free to pick from one of the already-existing religions, change your mind at any time, start your own religion, or even ignore religion altogether.
FWIW, I've installed things both with and without RPMs. I definitely find RPMs easier -- just type one command and everything happens within moments! It beats "make, make check, make setup, make install" and waiting a long time while stuff compiles. Also, some things have refused to compile properly against glibc.
On the other hand, the pre-installation documentation that comes with non-RPM installation sets is usually quite helpful, whereas with an RPM the only docs usually seem to be the man pages. Which are all right as far as they go, but you can't even look at them until after you've installed the whole package.
As for downloading binaries, RPMs are binaries. And they could contain Trojans. I've never encountered one that did, but it's possible.
>and its really getting retarded that some apps are >pro-rpm -- like GNOME ? Kinda funny that the only source >install-guide is called "Installing from source for a RedHat system"
Here, I totally agree with you. Especially if the only way to install it is to use an RPM -- what if someone doesn't have RPM installed on their system?
(Important note, BTW -- you can install RPM on non-Red-Hat systems. I believe you can d/l the thing from Red Hat's site for free and that it's open-source. But that doesn't mean that most non-Red-Hat machines have bothered to install RPM.)
This sort of thing will simply hinder the acceptance of one's software. If only (let's say) half the people can even install it, then you've just halved your potential user-space.
A similar thing happened to me when I got into drama -- I started reading stuff not just for basic comprehension and speed, but for tone, inflection, phrasing and general "how would I deliver these as lines in a play"-type stuff.
My reading speed dropped from somewhere near 1000 wpm down to about 350 or so. But I can cold-read nearly anything and make it sound professional and well-rehearsed the first time.
I'm not sure the trade-off is worth it, though, unless I go back into theater.
Good Analogy, Actually...
on
Linux on CNN
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· Score: 1
...because people understand it instantly. Hearing something like that will immediately get even a total non-techie to realize that the "free" in "people say Linux is free" has nothing to do with monetary cost.
Of course, the real cynical ones may disagree with the assertion, but by that point, they already understand the point of the analogy.
Besides, people do say that the U.S. is free. Whether they're right or not has little to do with the validity of the analogy.
>For the youngsters here that don't remember life before Star Wars, some >who wonder what the big deal is, let me take you back a bit.
Very well put -- that takes me back to when I was 9 and it first came out. I'd already absorbed a heavy diet of ST:tOS, but Star Wars hit me like a bomb, just as it did the rest of the culture.
I still remember fondly how I first heard of it: my parents showed me an issue of Time magazine, with a little strip up in the corner that said "Inside: The Year's Best Movie?" (Yes, with the question mark. Little did they know.) And Mom and Dad said "Do you think you'd like to see this?"
Inside was a magnificent spread telling of a farm boy and a pair of robots and a grand adventure, with glorious pictures of space battles and 'droids. I was hooked. I told my parents "You bet!"
Three years later, when Empire came out, the cover story on Time magazine was Empire -- the cover illo was George Lucas surrounded by movie characters; I forget the caption. And up in the corner, showing the change from three years before, was a little band that said something about a major news story -- maybe something to do with the election, or the hostage crisis in the Middle East.
What about HotMail? I know some people that use that, and that's trusting MS with your email. All kinds of confidential things could go in there...
(And no, these people have not had lobotomies, even partial ones. They're just not very technical-minded, and they travel around a lot and want to be able to get their email at various locations. And not pay any money for it.)
I agree with you that "everyone uses it, so it must be good" is fairly moronic. Heck, practically everyone uses Windows, does that make it better?
But "everyone is using it, so it must be an industry standard" makes nothing but sense -- it's practically the definition of "industry standard".
And yes, by that measure, both Windows and MS Office are industry standards -- practically everyone uses them, has an understanding of how they work, can handle documents in their formats, etc. That's part of doing business today.
You're obviously not from Germany. Over there, and in much of Europe, SuSE is very dominant.
There may "*BE*" only Red Hat wherever you are, but the rest of the world has choices, and there are whole countries where they aren't choosing Red Hat. Try to look beyond the US.
And everyone I know understands just plain "Slackware" or "Debian" just as easily as "Tampax" or "Red Hat".
And the silly comparison to Microsoft, complete with dollar $ign, may be cute, but it doesn't really hold much water. I personally don't hate MS because they're the market standard; I hate them because they're arrogant, domineering bastards who produce shitty products and abuse monopoly power to get them accepted. Why hate them becuase of their market share and Bill's wealth (which looks an awful lot like sour grapes and envy) when there are so many good reasons to hate them?
By comparison, Red Hat doesn't have monopoly power (and so doesn't abuse it), produces decent if not good quality products, and funds programmers to write open-source software that the entire community can then benefit from. (RPM is a great example.)
If you get tired of smoking that stuff yourself and want to sell it for a profit, you should probably avoid the L.A. ghettoes -- the CIA might get annoyed at you for cutting in on their turf.
That quote didn't really strike me as scary, but more as very accurate and on-target. I've noticed for quite some time now that MS press releases and even their standard advertisements often sound like they were drafted at the Ministry of Truth -- I feel funny about making the 1984 comparison, just because it's so easy and clichéd, but there's a frequent inversion of reality that's very much the same in feel. Big Brother "raises" the chocolate ration from 30 grams to 20 grams, and Microsoft declares that Windows NT is scalable. In either case, the reality is the opposite of the claim.
I compare MS's "we are winning" bullshit with the bit at the end of the novel: The announcement comes through that "our forces on the Malabar front have just won a glorious victory", and you suddenly realize that, based on what else we've seen coming out of MiniTrue, the chances are extremely high that Oceania just got clobbered. And then you realize that there may not even be a Malabar front in the first place, and the world just implodes around you and you want to be sick.
So I see that quote and I'm actually a bit pleased to see that other folks are noticing what I'm seeing: that Microsoft's execs are living in a whole nother world, one where NT is scalable and 2 plus 2 does equal 5 if calc.exe says it does, one where Microsoft is good for innovation and DNS even stands for "Digital_Nervous_System".
And the more people that see MS' disconnect with the rest of reality, the more people will be equipped to properly understand their propaganda. No, that quote doesn't scare me at all.
Funny, I thought those who created things (software, art, clothing, whatever) had the right to decide what to do with their creations (burn them, sell them, give them away, give away derivative works such as binaries, etc.).
Graft and corruption involve actually stealing stuff and otherwise abusing other people. I don't see how the analogy applies.
Then you're going to establishments that know what they're doing. And good for them! I can't stand places that discriminate based on dress -- I generally wear a motorcycle jacket, black t-shirt, etc. (Then again, few places will discriminate against that in San Francisco; they'd lose half the City as customers!)
You might want to congratulate said establishments some time, just to let them know they're doing something right.
I don't think you can get all the button-down shirts, _shoes_ (don't forget shoes, many people frown on suits worn with sneakers), ties, maybe socks that you need for only $300.
I'm pretty sure you can, although I hadn't really been thinking of shoes. Like another poster mentions below, you can pick up decent-looking shoes pretty cheap.
I'll confess, I've only ever shopped for ties as gifts for others, but it always seems that the ones that aren't actually hideously ugly cost at least $50.
Many of my favorite ties have been bought from street vendors for under $10 -- generally more like $3 or 4! (Washington DC, where I used to live, does have a lot of tie-selling street vendors. I haven't seen that phenomenon here in San Francisco...) Even in stores, though, they can usually be found for between $10 and 20. And I'm talking about at-least-decent ones, not those angry-fruit-salad hideosities that some places stock.
As for the remaining socks and button-down shirts, neither of these needs to be very expensive. They also need not be conservative -- I used to wear my suit with brightly colored silk button-down shirts ($20 apiece at any of a gazillion shops in Georgetown) back in DC, and nobody batted an eye. For a similar price, you can get a standard, run-of-the-mill button-down shirt at K-Mart and again, nobody will care.
So, my analysis there is: $100 on shirts gets you one for each day of the week. Figure another $50 for decent shoes, and then you've got yet another $150 for ties and socks. I'm not certain on sock prices lately, but I suspect $50 on socks will get you more of them than you're likely to need, and $100 on ties should buy at least 5 to 10.
Then let's not forget dry cleaning costs (and the associated medical bills for the damage that dry cleaning fluid does to you). Also, let's not forget that these costs are not one-time things.
I was responding to a consideration of "converting to a suit-and-tie environment", so I can and do count only the one-time costs. Also, since this is just the conversion, the suit need not be dry-cleaned, since it's already clean.
No, it's not an AFJ. It's simply being held on the anniversary of the previous one, which in turn was held "the day after the source code release", which in its own turn was set for March 31, I think by corporate fiat.
The fact that it's on April 1 is essentially an unfortunate coincidence. They should, however, place such a notice on the invite or in the FAQ (as they did last year).
Two thousand bucks? Where is that money all going?
The last time I went and bought a suit, I got myself a very nice Nino Cerruti -- a beautiful Italian number that, depending on what other accoutrements I put with it, can make me look like anything from a Mafia capo to a hip record company exec to a SoMa Internet consultant. It cost something like $350 or $400.
The suit before that was a much cheaper black one that I picked up in a hurry for a wedding or something, and ran about $100, IIRC. Maybe $150.
So let's say you get one nice suit at $400, two of lesser quality at a total of $300, and then with another $300, you can get as many button-down shirts and neckties as you need. Total: $1000.
And that's taking the high-side estimates on those prices. What do you need for a suit and tie environment that costs a total of $2000?
Though I'll admit that even only $1000 taken out of the computer equipment budget is pretty noticeable. $1000 can buy a decent amount of toys and stuff.
Of course, any Linux user who has ANY trust in ms for ANYTHING needs to have their head examined.
Hey, man, I trust Microsoft on a number of things...
I trust Microsoft to put out buggy software.
I trust Microsoft to put out software that's bloated, oversized and slow. (Bad in addition to buggy.)
I trust Microsoft to put out software that involves a lot of proprietary new techniques, protocols and standards, which MS will call "revolutionary", "necessary" or some combination thereof. (Annoying and closed in addition to bad and buggy.)
I trust Microsoft to distort the truth in anything they say or print. Oftentimes, they're suspiciously like the Ministry of Truth in the particular style with which they distort, but not always. But no matter what, I trust that if the Microsoft press release matches the official news, then I know the official news isn't telling me the whole story, either!
Indeed, it sometimes feels like there's something almost algorithmic about MS's spin department. Often, they'll simply invert the truth -- they say Win98 (re)boots faster than 95; I've found the exact opposite. They say NT is scalable; we all know better.
I want to figure out their algorithm and reverse it to get a Microsoftian-to-truth converter.:-)
I have seen this a couple of times but can't figure out what it means.
So what does Micros~1 mean??
It's a reference to 95/98/NT's bogus attempt at "long filenames". If you look at a long-named file under MS-DOS, you get the first 6 characters of the name, then a tilde and then a digit. If your directory listing in Win95 would look like, say:
Microsoft Alpha
Microsoft Beta Microsoft Gamma This is really lame!.doc
then the same group of files in DOS come out as:
MICROS~1
MICROS~2 MICROS~3 THISIS~1.DOC
It's a Win95/NT/98-aware way of joking about the fact that you can't even fit Microsoft's name into the 8.3 format it enforced for so long (and still retains backward compatibility with).
In the both cases, you spend money for hardware and the labor to set it up and install clients on PCs.
In the Linux case that's all you spend.
And actually, in the Linux case you can spend a little less on the hardware, since Linux will handle quite a bit more mail traffic per unit time than NT will. This is one of the problems that keeps bedeviling Hotmail -- Microsoft keeps hassling them to make it work on NT (instead of, I think, Solaris, which was in place before they got bought by MS). Every time they try NT again, Hotmail performance drops through the floor again.
I'm on a mailing list for Qmail (a sendmail replacement/competitor/alternative), and every so often we get a bunch of questions about "is there something wrong with my mail queue? There are lots of messages stacked up and undeliverable." Then it turns out they're all destined for Hotmail.
OH yes, this is certainly true. I just love when the same says different things in the same article! "I like linux, linux is good." "Don't use it." Huh?
I see him saying more of "I like Linux, Linux is good, but if you want to cover your ass, think really hard and carefully before deploying it at your workplace (or being the one to recommend deploying it there)."
Which, much as we may dislike it, actually makes sense. If you work for a boring corporate monolith or a pointy-haired individual, making a recommendation for a change is putting your ass on the line. If anything goes wrong with it, or the higher-ups just aren't satisfied with it, you could be in trouble.
Most people really like to avoid trouble.
And yes, it's really easy to say, "these folks should get better jobs", but that isn't always an option for them. For someone who wants to try to get Linux in place at their workplace but is worried about financial security, Berst's comments are relevant.
Say, you know what someone should do? Get some of this glass and use it as the windows for their restaurant or café. Then mention that fact to members of the intelligence community.
They'll all want to eat and meet there. It would make using a laser mike impossible.:-)
Around Washington, DC or some other city with a lot of spook activity, such a thing might fly, financially.
And business desktops!! for Linux? [etc.] I am a Dell skeptic, so let's see if the actions match the words.
Why not Linux business desktops, especially from Dell's point of view? The hardware's no different from the Windoze systems their assembly lines are already set up to churn out (except that they don't really need as much horsepower, since they won't be running MS bloatware). The software to pre-load is significantly cheaper than the stuff they'd license from MS -- they can probably put command-line Linux, any of various GUIs and Corel Office Suite or StarOffice onto the machine for the price of MS Windows or MS Office alone. (If not less.)
Outsourcing the tech support means they really don't have to do much at all to make this work. Most of their overhead for adding the Linux line of Dells is in marketing, inventorying the new SKUs, creating new packaging, and so forth.
Heck, they can even make a little extra by marketing the neato-keen cachet of a Linux business system. If I were a Dell exec, I'd be all over this idea. There's really very little to lose, and a helluva lot to gain.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that Linux (and the Open-Source/Free Software movement in general) is really about compiling your own software. I thought it was more about having the freedom to see and modify and redistribute the code if you want to. Sort of like the US' freedom of religion, in which you are free to pick from one of the already-existing religions, change your mind at any time, start your own religion, or even ignore religion altogether.
FWIW, I've installed things both with and without RPMs. I definitely find RPMs easier -- just type one command and everything happens within moments! It beats "make, make check, make setup, make install" and waiting a long time while stuff compiles. Also, some things have refused to compile properly against glibc.
On the other hand, the pre-installation documentation that comes with non-RPM installation sets is usually quite helpful, whereas with an RPM the only docs usually seem to be the man pages. Which are all right as far as they go, but you can't even look at them until after you've installed the whole package.
As for downloading binaries, RPMs are binaries. And they could contain Trojans. I've never encountered one that did, but it's possible.
Here, I totally agree with you. Especially if the only way to install it is to use an RPM -- what if someone doesn't have RPM installed on their system?
(Important note, BTW -- you can install RPM on non-Red-Hat systems. I believe you can d/l the thing from Red Hat's site for free and that it's open-source. But that doesn't mean that most non-Red-Hat machines have bothered to install RPM.)
This sort of thing will simply hinder the acceptance of one's software. If only (let's say) half the people can even install it, then you've just halved your potential user-space.
A similar thing happened to me when I got into drama -- I started reading stuff not just for basic comprehension and speed, but for tone, inflection, phrasing and general "how would I deliver these as lines in a play"-type stuff.
My reading speed dropped from somewhere near 1000 wpm down to about 350 or so. But I can cold-read nearly anything and make it sound professional and well-rehearsed the first time.
I'm not sure the trade-off is worth it, though, unless I go back into theater.
...because people understand it instantly. Hearing something like that will immediately get even a total non-techie to realize that the "free" in "people say Linux is free" has nothing to do with monetary cost.
Of course, the real cynical ones may disagree with the assertion, but by that point, they already understand the point of the analogy.
Besides, people do say that the U.S. is free. Whether they're right or not has little to do with the validity of the analogy.
I think your basic ten-dollar scientific calculator can emulate ENIAC. Except it goes faster, takes up less space, uses less power, etc.
>who wonder what the big deal is, let me take you back a bit.
Very well put -- that takes me back to when I was 9 and it first came out. I'd already absorbed a heavy diet of ST:tOS, but Star Wars hit me like a bomb, just as it did the rest of the culture.
I still remember fondly how I first heard of it: my parents showed me an issue of Time magazine, with a little strip up in the corner that said "Inside: The Year's Best Movie?" (Yes, with the question mark. Little did they know.) And Mom and Dad said "Do you think you'd like to see this?"
Inside was a magnificent spread telling of a farm boy and a pair of robots and a grand adventure, with glorious pictures of space battles and 'droids. I was hooked. I told my parents "You bet!"
Three years later, when Empire came out, the cover story on Time magazine was Empire -- the cover illo was George Lucas surrounded by movie characters; I forget the caption. And up in the corner, showing the change from three years before, was a little band that said something about a major news story -- maybe something to do with the election, or the hostage crisis in the Middle East.
They'd learned. :)
What about HotMail? I know some people that use that, and that's trusting MS with your email. All kinds of confidential things could go in there...
(And no, these people have not had lobotomies, even partial ones. They're just not very technical-minded, and they travel around a lot and want to be able to get their email at various locations. And not pay any money for it.)
I agree with you that "everyone uses it, so it must be good" is fairly moronic. Heck, practically everyone uses Windows, does that make it better?
But "everyone is using it, so it must be an industry standard" makes nothing but sense -- it's practically the definition of "industry standard".
And yes, by that measure, both Windows and MS Office are industry standards -- practically everyone uses them, has an understanding of how they work, can handle documents in their formats, etc. That's part of doing business today.
You're obviously not from Germany. Over there, and in much of Europe, SuSE is very dominant.
There may "*BE*" only Red Hat wherever you are, but the rest of the world has choices, and there are whole countries where they aren't choosing Red Hat. Try to look beyond the US.
And everyone I know understands just plain "Slackware" or "Debian" just as easily as "Tampax" or "Red Hat".
And the silly comparison to Microsoft, complete with dollar $ign, may be cute, but it doesn't really hold much water. I personally don't hate MS because they're the market standard; I hate them because they're arrogant, domineering bastards who produce shitty products and abuse monopoly power to get them accepted. Why hate them becuase of their market share and Bill's wealth (which looks an awful lot like sour grapes and envy) when there are so many good reasons to hate them?
By comparison, Red Hat doesn't have monopoly power (and so doesn't abuse it), produces decent if not good quality products, and funds programmers to write open-source software that the entire community can then benefit from. (RPM is a great example.)
So why the "Red $oft" moniker?
Hey, d00d--
If you get tired of smoking that stuff yourself and want to sell it for a profit, you should probably avoid the L.A. ghettoes -- the CIA might get annoyed at you for cutting in on their turf.
I compare MS's "we are winning" bullshit with the bit at the end of the novel: The announcement comes through that "our forces on the Malabar front have just won a glorious victory", and you suddenly realize that, based on what else we've seen coming out of MiniTrue, the chances are extremely high that Oceania just got clobbered. And then you realize that there may not even be a Malabar front in the first place, and the world just implodes around you and you want to be sick.
So I see that quote and I'm actually a bit pleased to see that other folks are noticing what I'm seeing: that Microsoft's execs are living in a whole nother world, one where NT is scalable and 2 plus 2 does equal 5 if calc.exe says it does, one where Microsoft is good for innovation and DNS even stands for "Digital_Nervous_System".
And the more people that see MS' disconnect with the rest of reality, the more people will be equipped to properly understand their propaganda. No, that quote doesn't scare me at all.
Funny, I thought those who created things (software, art, clothing, whatever) had the right to decide what to do with their creations (burn them, sell them, give them away, give away derivative works such as binaries, etc.).
Graft and corruption involve actually stealing stuff and otherwise abusing other people. I don't see how the analogy applies.
Intriguing theory... now, do you have any evidence for it, or are you just blowing hot air?
:)
(Or perhaps you meant to put a "maybe" or "what if..." on the front of that statement?
You might want to congratulate said establishments some time, just to let them know they're doing something right.
I'm pretty sure you can, although I hadn't really been thinking of shoes. Like another poster mentions below, you can pick up decent-looking shoes pretty cheap.
Many of my favorite ties have been bought from street vendors for under $10 -- generally more like $3 or 4! (Washington DC, where I used to live, does have a lot of tie-selling street vendors. I haven't seen that phenomenon here in San Francisco...) Even in stores, though, they can usually be found for between $10 and 20. And I'm talking about at-least-decent ones, not those angry-fruit-salad hideosities that some places stock.
As for the remaining socks and button-down shirts, neither of these needs to be very expensive. They also need not be conservative -- I used to wear my suit with brightly colored silk button-down shirts ($20 apiece at any of a gazillion shops in Georgetown) back in DC, and nobody batted an eye. For a similar price, you can get a standard, run-of-the-mill button-down shirt at K-Mart and again, nobody will care.
So, my analysis there is: $100 on shirts gets you one for each day of the week. Figure another $50 for decent shoes, and then you've got yet another $150 for ties and socks. I'm not certain on sock prices lately, but I suspect $50 on socks will get you more of them than you're likely to need, and $100 on ties should buy at least 5 to 10.
I was responding to a consideration of "converting to a suit-and-tie environment", so I can and do count only the one-time costs. Also, since this is just the conversion, the suit need not be dry-cleaned, since it's already clean.
Sorry to be nit-picky. :)
No, it's not an AFJ. It's simply being held on the anniversary of the previous one, which in turn was held "the day after the source code release", which in its own turn was set for March 31, I think by corporate fiat.
The fact that it's on April 1 is essentially an unfortunate coincidence. They should, however, place such a notice on the invite or in the FAQ (as they did last year).
Two thousand bucks? Where is that money all going?
The last time I went and bought a suit, I got myself a very nice Nino Cerruti -- a beautiful Italian number that, depending on what other accoutrements I put with it, can make me look like anything from a Mafia capo to a hip record company exec to a SoMa Internet consultant. It cost something like $350 or $400.
The suit before that was a much cheaper black one that I picked up in a hurry for a wedding or something, and ran about $100, IIRC. Maybe $150.
So let's say you get one nice suit at $400, two of lesser quality at a total of $300, and then with another $300, you can get as many button-down shirts and neckties as you need. Total: $1000.
And that's taking the high-side estimates on those prices. What do you need for a suit and tie environment that costs a total of $2000?
Though I'll admit that even only $1000 taken out of the computer equipment budget is pretty noticeable. $1000 can buy a decent amount of toys and stuff.
Has anyone else had trouble getting through to www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk? Either they've been /.ed already, or there's something wrong with my connection.
Plus there sould be an option for "I haven't seen it yet due to the Slashdot Effect/Red Hat's shitty bandwidth".
Hey, man, I trust Microsoft on a number of things...
Indeed, it sometimes feels like there's something almost algorithmic about MS's spin department. Often, they'll simply invert the truth -- they say Win98 (re)boots faster than 95; I've found the exact opposite. They say NT is scalable; we all know better.
I want to figure out their algorithm and reverse it to get a Microsoftian-to-truth converter. :-)
URL? What's that, man? Is that, like, some geeky name for a websight address?
Sorry, I just had to do that. Normally, "Web Sight" makes me scream...
It's a reference to 95/98/NT's bogus attempt at "long filenames". If you look at a long-named file under MS-DOS, you get the first 6 characters of the name, then a tilde and then a digit. If your directory listing in Win95 would look like, say:
then the same group of files in DOS come out as:
It's a Win95/NT/98-aware way of joking about the fact that you can't even fit Microsoft's name into the 8.3 format it enforced for so long (and still retains backward compatibility with).
And actually, in the Linux case you can spend a little less on the hardware, since Linux will handle quite a bit more mail traffic per unit time than NT will. This is one of the problems that keeps bedeviling Hotmail -- Microsoft keeps hassling them to make it work on NT (instead of, I think, Solaris, which was in place before they got bought by MS). Every time they try NT again, Hotmail performance drops through the floor again.
I'm on a mailing list for Qmail (a sendmail replacement/competitor/alternative), and every so often we get a bunch of questions about "is there something wrong with my mail queue? There are lots of messages stacked up and undeliverable." Then it turns out they're all destined for Hotmail.
I see him saying more of "I like Linux, Linux is good, but if you want to cover your ass, think really hard and carefully before deploying it at your workplace (or being the one to recommend deploying it there)."
Which, much as we may dislike it, actually makes sense. If you work for a boring corporate monolith or a pointy-haired individual, making a recommendation for a change is putting your ass on the line. If anything goes wrong with it, or the higher-ups just aren't satisfied with it, you could be in trouble.
Most people really like to avoid trouble.
And yes, it's really easy to say, "these folks should get better jobs", but that isn't always an option for them. For someone who wants to try to get Linux in place at their workplace but is worried about financial security, Berst's comments are relevant.
Say, you know what someone should do? Get some of this glass and use it as the windows for their restaurant or café. Then mention that fact to members of the intelligence community.
They'll all want to eat and meet there. It would make using a laser mike impossible. :-)
Around Washington, DC or some other city with a lot of spook activity, such a thing might fly, financially.
Why not Linux business desktops, especially from Dell's point of view? The hardware's no different from the Windoze systems their assembly lines are already set up to churn out (except that they don't really need as much horsepower, since they won't be running MS bloatware). The software to pre-load is significantly cheaper than the stuff they'd license from MS -- they can probably put command-line Linux, any of various GUIs and Corel Office Suite or StarOffice onto the machine for the price of MS Windows or MS Office alone. (If not less.)
Outsourcing the tech support means they really don't have to do much at all to make this work. Most of their overhead for adding the Linux line of Dells is in marketing, inventorying the new SKUs, creating new packaging, and so forth.
Heck, they can even make a little extra by marketing the neato-keen cachet of a Linux business system. If I were a Dell exec, I'd be all over this idea. There's really very little to lose, and a helluva lot to gain.