The idea is that disinterested third parties will capture events. This is why witnesses have credibility. Why would they lie? Witnesses with cameras are far more credible than those without. Lies have always been part of the equation and motives have to be discerned.
I'm not sure why there are so many negative comments here. It's like 50% of the posts say, "Slashdotters are paranoid weenies." Great, there's nothing like reading insults all day, except being so lifeless as to write them.
As a Christian celebrating Christmass, I had the day off and a video camera in my hand. What was I capturing? Mundane details of family life in New Orleans. I saw nothing terrible, thank goodness. No one got riled up either. It's amazing where you can go with a smile. Had I heard of something terrible at a time and place where I was, I'd take a closer look at my tape. Sure, it would not be as good as a Rodney King tape, any picture is better than none. There I was, sousvailance, without knowing it. Surely, others were doing the same thing.
I don't understand why any (non tech person) would still use a disk (as opposed to a disc).
I don't know why anyone would not use an ftp server connected to a cable box. proftp works for me, who needs media for anything but archives?
The kind of computer that lacks a network interface generally lacks a CDROM but has a floppy. Hate them as much as I do, I've still got a pile of floppies and several drives. Compared to the single CD writer, the floppy drives in my house are easier to write to when I have to run someplace unfamiliar.
It's amazing what a billion or two in advert budget can do. Word of mouth is powerful but slow and can be overwritten in a flash. It's hard to even begin to tell people about free software and why it exists with all this "Pirate" crap dominating the traditional media.
When I tell people about apt, they think I have some kind of software Napster. I learned this while demonstrating dselect to my wife's brother. He was unimpressed untill he learned that the authors of the software meant for me to have it, source and all for whatever purpose I saw fit. I was shocked as much by him thinking that I was "stealing" as I was by his acceptance of such theft. My sister's father in law thought much the same, though he was more dubious about copyright violations and expected me to be busted one day. The thought that I tried to impress was that there is no need for this "theft" as better free alternatives exist that will always be free and always be better. It's hard for them to see outside of the greed they are daily bombarded with.
The net result of the bombardment is that they think that they should not but that they must and will "steal". "Oh well, that's just normal business. Everybody would do it if they could." , is repeated over and over. They, however, feel as though there are no alternatives and that they must continue to do things they consider wrong untill M$ is kind to them and bundles what they want into their OS. Amazing isn't it? The greed is good folks are conditioning people to act immorally and accept immoral laws.
But shouldn't I have the right to say no to you copying my creations, regardless of the media?
I put you into my replicator, but all that came out was a troll. What's wrong with this picture?
Your hypothetical machine is an interesting and flawed side track. We might imagine that there will always be some kind of input to such a machine, like energy, and that you will have to please the folks that make those inputs or they won't want to do it anymore. Hmmm, sounds like trades are required to satisfty people and you have some kind of traditional economy, old laws and all, working. Or not, and the nice things break down. Worse things have happened when people don't respect their neighbors and try to screw them.
As for your intent, sorry, No Feasable Way, No Moral Way, and No Fucking Difference.
1. No Feasable Way. You can't keep people from making copies, but they don't affect the value of work. The original will always have some value to someone and coppies will always be recognized as such. Today, you can buy a print of the Mona Lisa, or you can pay someone to stand in the Louve and painstakingly make a copy by hand. The results are indistingushable from a distance. The differences only tell as you get closer. Coppies will be available, unless your restrict other people's freedom.
2. No Moral Way. You telling me that I can't do what I want with my brushes, or any other technology is an immoral artifact of the now obsolete publishing and recording industries. In the US, limited time fanchises were granted for publishers with the express intent to increase the public domain and enrich society. The evil is no longer needed as we now have nearly costless reproduction of intelectual work. The creator of the Mona Lisa made his living producing works of art, war and liesure. He would be just as valuable and sought after today as he was then. But what is ownership of his work? Does the Louve or any other institution have the right to keep me from imitating the Mona Lisa? I think this is an unnatural extention of your power over my behavior. As you would make the law your tool in violating rights, people would loose respect for the law. Knowledge hoarding of the kind you recomend is the surest road to social ruin.
3. No Fucking Difference. You can try, but you will fail.
I've seen the NT boxes sitting on shelves where I work, "New Technology". It was not exactly new even then, nor did it thread very well. It was better than their DOS junk, too bad they were so wrong headed as to consider it a "Unix killer". They were clueless then and they are clueless now.
Why should they have delayed the release over this bug? It's not like they are going to fix any of their other problems, even if they wanted to. I mean, would you expect a pimp to let his girl stay home because she got a cold?
What did Periclese compare Athen's newly glorified acropolis to? Jewels on a whore. History is instructive indeed, thank you Thucidities.
Remember, the men behind/. are kids fresh out of school, without any business tact (not that I've shown much, but I'm not being paid to be here...).
Let's see, I'm 35 and work for a US national sized company. They have not fired me yet, so I must have some tact.
I'm interested in all the windows worms and I'm glad that Slashdot documents them. Here disasters that cost companies that trust M$ millions of $ are treated rather cooly, exept by folks like me. You see, here I get to scream my head off about how stupid, irresponsible and incompetent the exchange group is. You don't think I'd actually tell anythig to the moron "standardized" on Exchange then got clobbered by all this? I mean, they tried very hard. They spent all the company money on all the band-aid virus checkers, comercial mail filters and what not. Heck, they are still trying very hard to recover all the contacts, email, calender events, daily journals and what not that contained the characters "hi" in them? Nah, they might get their feelings hurt if they learned how badly the company they trusted let us all down. Here I can scream it all out loud, share laments with others who suffer and more important, learn exactly why such things happen and why they will always happen when you do things the M$ way. Slashdot is teaching me with good and bad expamples of how to do things. Shame on M$ for the way they do things. Here I can gloat and bitchslap trolls like you in a way that would get me shitcanned at work. When I'm finished learning good conceptes and taking out my frustration on loosers like you, I can gently suggest things to my co-workers that might improve the place I work. I don't have to gloat about new viruses, the NAV packs and viruses themselves do that for me.
What's your point? M$ bought a Quick and Dirty Operting System and did little to improve it's security model? Don't be fooled, this was done for profit not user convenience.
People have been screaming all along that their approach was irresponsible and would swamp the rest of us in a tide of shit. Bill Gates decided it was time to take over the internet back in 95 or so. He did not ignore the internet in "The Road Ahead" because he was worried about what his half assed OS would do to other people. He ignored it because he had a limited imagination. There is nothing inherently conveinient in the stupid single user mode M$ chose to keep. While the free software community developed unix like file systems with permisions to run multi user OS on top of DOS, Bill Gates started tacking on inconvient and usless things like the loggon screen. As the free software community adopted the tried and true security models of Unix, Bill Gates was busy making a mail client that would auto execute atttachments. Each step of the way, responsible people cried out in alarm. Today we suffer, but none like those who pay to trust M$.
If the W2k virus is "Bassed on NT Technology", where NT stands for "New Technology", will the next patch recursivly contain the previous "uber" patch. The New Technology Technology Uber Uber patch?
such as the exellent Konqi, the only other browser besides IE I would ever dream of using
Anyone who usese IE is a fool. Oh wait, I'm at work and HAVE to use IE.
Let's think about how useful that makes web counters. I spend 10 hours a day at work, 8 hours sleeping, 2 hours getting too and from work. That leaves me with four hours each day to do things around the house, two of which are usually dedicated to eating and grooming. Two hours for everything else in the world. So what browswer is most likely to be used? M$IE by greater than ten to one.
Dreams of MSIE at my house are more like nightmares. That's not where I wanted to go yesterday!
When you consider that 125,000,000 people in the US alone have internet access, 50,000,000 so called unique users is not so big. I have to wonder if the tool they used to determine uniqueness is a MSIE only thing.
Web surveys are not a good measure anyway. Linux users may have something better to do than surf comercial websites all day. Consider the number of Sun users reported. Linux is used by the physics community for workstations. I doubt any of those "desktops" got counted. They might not even have a browser (gasp!), or a GUI for that matter.
What we need to do is find the small percentage that is responding to this mail and whack them over the head, otherwise it will never end.
Whack my grandmother at your peril, it's never going to end.
The ultimate fools are those who buy your logic and pour money into advertising. This works just as well for the suckers who buy "harvester" software as it does for folks who buy billboards. All it buys the purchaser is customer anoyance. The more advertised something is, the less likely I am to buy it. Unfortunatly there's a sucker born every minute who thinks "brand recongition" can be earned in some way other than solid performance, positive reviews and customer satisfaction.
ACME Bolts are missing an important element compared to Simple Dolt. It hasn't got a coherent set of features based on a sober evaluation of the average user's needs. They have various fasteners that do this and that very well for specific solutions, but if you're going to make Simple Dolts you need careful design. This is a big task because everything must work with a flat head screwdriver or a penny. Users need consistancy, predictabilty and ACME just dosn't have it.
ACME bolt makers have no consideration for the average user! They worry about holding things together instead of making it easier to do things with a penny.
ACME needs to be constrained to these standarsd. Boycot hex heads, torx, phillips, and anything else that can not be opperated with a peenny. I just don't see whay anyone would use them. Everything should be a user friendly as a Simple Dolt.
People start conversations with me all the time by asking, "Can you handle this Windows issue..." I almost never hear "Can you help me with this Linux problem..." (possibly because, as the article points out, Linux users aren't as technically challenged as MS users.)
Has it occured to you that there are fewer problems? The software I have mostly does what I want it to, it's less confusing, easier to maintain and easier to learn.
My wife is leaning how to use Red Hat. It took her a while to unprogram years of M$ use, and that was the most difficult part. Other things like "man" for manpage, "mail" or "pine" for mail, "ls" for list, ssh user@computer -X, GNOME desktop manipulation and KDE stuff seemed to take much less effort than all the undocumented "left-click, sixth tab to the right, expert button, set refresh rate" M$ nonsense. She likes being able to use programs off different computers. She likes not getting Outlook attacks. She understands the rudiments of the file structure and has come to appreciate user accounts. All of this training took less than six months, but she was able to do most of what she wanted almost immediatly.
Can you say that about Windows? It took me much longer to get things done under M$, and the "learning" has never stoped due to needless "upgrading".
It's easier to offload Windows work to others because there are more people capable of doing basic tasks on Windows than can do it in Linux.
Windows offers better profit margins...It's easier for me to mark up $1000 software by 10% than it is for me to charge a $100 "price" for free software
If you are interested in helping your client do something, you might think differently. Why not set up a "class" of your own with free software as the coursware. $25/hr adds up quickly for you, but might be nicer on your client than the $1,100 snatch and run.
Secondly, $10/mo is fucking cheap. Really fucking cheap. The company I work for spends about $100k/year on CheckPoint licenses and subscriptions, $100k/year on Cisco support contracts, and god knows what on Sun, Microsoft and Dell contracts.
Let's say you have 100 people at your company. That gives you $12,000/year. For a thousand person company, well there you have it. I suppose it's better than the $30/desk-month that Red Hat wants.
About a month or two ago, National Geographic of all people, did a write up on Silicon Valey and the software business there. It was very funny to turn big fluffy full spread M$ adverts to pages filled with real people doing real things with real computers that were visably running anything but M$. Not one M$ cripled box in the bunch, though it was not mentioned explicitly. The real world, it seems, knows better. Even the jocks who studdied rocks!
It would be wiser to compare the support from an actual Linux company, such as Red Hat or IBM, to that of Microsoft.
Well that would be apples to apples, but the best answers to common questions invariably come from the hobby site that wrote the application, or someone else that just decided to document it. No joke, the google search seems to find those pages instead of a Red Hat or even Debian page. It is fair to point out that such support is much less common for M$ junk and that this is a problem for someone that has better uses for $200. There is still no substitute for a real person who knows the answer and can walk you through, but it would be unfair to judge the whole free software movement based on the failings of a few comercial interests.
The school in question was Carlo. There may be others like it, but I'm reasured by posters from places like RPI (the more I hear, the more I respect that place). You gotta wonder about the places that don't get it.
I don't how see how learning C++ or Unix is any less "Brand Training" than learning VB and NT. In fact it's the exact same thing, except harder (and that the "AT&T" brand is long dead in the computing world).
Well, C has pointers for one. How's that for a fundamental CS concept? We can move up the chain to virtual functions, PID and UID, all of which M$ fails to impliment. But hey, I'm just a bone headed mechanical engineer so what do I know?
There is nothing inherently wrong with all Linux desktop GUIs looking the same, is there?
Well, hell yes there is! More is better. Don't like to think too much about things, just pick one you like and use it. If you don't want to confuse your poor delicate users, pick one for them. I like window maker. Is he telling me that I to use Enlightenment, configured just so by Red Hat?
As is probably the theme at the majority of third-level educational establishments, student's exposure to OS technology at the Institute of Technology, Carlow is Microsoft-focused and desktop-based....
"nearly everyone who used Linux last year went on to fail their project". It came out that a number of individuals were missing from the final year due to failing the project element in year three. When I probed for the root cause of the project-failing problem, I got my second shock: "Linux is too hard to install". I was shocked not because these two statements were necessarily false but because these 31 students had pretty much convinced themselves that success was tied to Microsoft and failure to Linux.
Sounds like Carlo is cramming stuff down on their students. Even the author has his own load to cram, as cited above, despite his own awareness. I can imagine those students who failed did so because their project was not Wine, or could not write to NTFS, or make appointments on an Exchange server. It's hard to believe that students going to extra effort would all fail if the teachers had useful projects that taught real computer science concepts rather than procuct familiarization.
I didn't realize an embedded system NEEDED plug 'n play support.
That statement leaves us with two options:
1) M$ is lying about something that does not matter. This is typical of pathalogical lying and is designed to create a maximum of confusion.
2) M$ is lying about something that does matter and you are unable or unwilling to grasp the significance from too much of #1.
standard M$ FUD in reverse, ha ha ha.
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
·
· Score: 2
No sympathy has been earned.
It's pure FUD, but the problem is reassuring easily frightened and confused non-techies that it isn't true. How do you disprove the existence of allegedly hidden code?
How about peer review of source code and check sums for compiled code? How else do you prove the intergrity of a thing, by a billion dollar advert budget? Yeah.
For years the softies have put out FUD about not being able to trust free software due to a lack of central control. True? Of course not. Yet it scares lots of people into a closed source surender of their rights and money. It's part of the reason they have all the piles of money they do from pushing some of the worst built, least secured software ever. They deserve to get this shoved right back at them.
The track record justifies a lack of trust, but they can blame terrorists if they want.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, at least they were quiet as they ate the crumbs off your desk. Big fan in box on floor? It's a vacuum cleaner! Wheeeeeeeeee, all day long!
I'm not sure why there are so many negative comments here. It's like 50% of the posts say, "Slashdotters are paranoid weenies." Great, there's nothing like reading insults all day, except being so lifeless as to write them.
As a Christian celebrating Christmass, I had the day off and a video camera in my hand. What was I capturing? Mundane details of family life in New Orleans. I saw nothing terrible, thank goodness. No one got riled up either. It's amazing where you can go with a smile. Had I heard of something terrible at a time and place where I was, I'd take a closer look at my tape. Sure, it would not be as good as a Rodney King tape, any picture is better than none. There I was, sousvailance, without knowing it. Surely, others were doing the same thing.
I don't know why anyone would not use an ftp server connected to a cable box. proftp works for me, who needs media for anything but archives?
The kind of computer that lacks a network interface generally lacks a CDROM but has a floppy. Hate them as much as I do, I've still got a pile of floppies and several drives. Compared to the single CD writer, the floppy drives in my house are easier to write to when I have to run someplace unfamiliar.
When I tell people about apt, they think I have some kind of software Napster. I learned this while demonstrating dselect to my wife's brother. He was unimpressed untill he learned that the authors of the software meant for me to have it, source and all for whatever purpose I saw fit. I was shocked as much by him thinking that I was "stealing" as I was by his acceptance of such theft. My sister's father in law thought much the same, though he was more dubious about copyright violations and expected me to be busted one day. The thought that I tried to impress was that there is no need for this "theft" as better free alternatives exist that will always be free and always be better. It's hard for them to see outside of the greed they are daily bombarded with.
The net result of the bombardment is that they think that they should not but that they must and will "steal". "Oh well, that's just normal business. Everybody would do it if they could." , is repeated over and over. They, however, feel as though there are no alternatives and that they must continue to do things they consider wrong untill M$ is kind to them and bundles what they want into their OS. Amazing isn't it? The greed is good folks are conditioning people to act immorally and accept immoral laws.
I put you into my replicator, but all that came out was a troll. What's wrong with this picture?
Your hypothetical machine is an interesting and flawed side track. We might imagine that there will always be some kind of input to such a machine, like energy, and that you will have to please the folks that make those inputs or they won't want to do it anymore. Hmmm, sounds like trades are required to satisfty people and you have some kind of traditional economy, old laws and all, working. Or not, and the nice things break down. Worse things have happened when people don't respect their neighbors and try to screw them.
As for your intent, sorry, No Feasable Way, No Moral Way, and No Fucking Difference.
1. No Feasable Way. You can't keep people from making copies, but they don't affect the value of work. The original will always have some value to someone and coppies will always be recognized as such. Today, you can buy a print of the Mona Lisa, or you can pay someone to stand in the Louve and painstakingly make a copy by hand. The results are indistingushable from a distance. The differences only tell as you get closer. Coppies will be available, unless your restrict other people's freedom.
2. No Moral Way. You telling me that I can't do what I want with my brushes, or any other technology is an immoral artifact of the now obsolete publishing and recording industries. In the US, limited time fanchises were granted for publishers with the express intent to increase the public domain and enrich society. The evil is no longer needed as we now have nearly costless reproduction of intelectual work. The creator of the Mona Lisa made his living producing works of art, war and liesure. He would be just as valuable and sought after today as he was then. But what is ownership of his work? Does the Louve or any other institution have the right to keep me from imitating the Mona Lisa? I think this is an unnatural extention of your power over my behavior. As you would make the law your tool in violating rights, people would loose respect for the law. Knowledge hoarding of the kind you recomend is the surest road to social ruin.
3. No Fucking Difference. You can try, but you will fail.
I've seen the NT boxes sitting on shelves where I work, "New Technology". It was not exactly new even then, nor did it thread very well. It was better than their DOS junk, too bad they were so wrong headed as to consider it a "Unix killer". They were clueless then and they are clueless now.
Are my Window Managers infringing? Oh no! I'm so confused. Will Lindows blow like M$? Say it ain't so.
What did Periclese compare Athen's newly glorified acropolis to? Jewels on a whore. History is instructive indeed, thank you Thucidities.
Let's see, I'm 35 and work for a US national sized company. They have not fired me yet, so I must have some tact.
I'm interested in all the windows worms and I'm glad that Slashdot documents them. Here disasters that cost companies that trust M$ millions of $ are treated rather cooly, exept by folks like me. You see, here I get to scream my head off about how stupid, irresponsible and incompetent the exchange group is. You don't think I'd actually tell anythig to the moron "standardized" on Exchange then got clobbered by all this? I mean, they tried very hard. They spent all the company money on all the band-aid virus checkers, comercial mail filters and what not. Heck, they are still trying very hard to recover all the contacts, email, calender events, daily journals and what not that contained the characters "hi" in them? Nah, they might get their feelings hurt if they learned how badly the company they trusted let us all down. Here I can scream it all out loud, share laments with others who suffer and more important, learn exactly why such things happen and why they will always happen when you do things the M$ way. Slashdot is teaching me with good and bad expamples of how to do things. Shame on M$ for the way they do things. Here I can gloat and bitchslap trolls like you in a way that would get me shitcanned at work. When I'm finished learning good conceptes and taking out my frustration on loosers like you, I can gently suggest things to my co-workers that might improve the place I work. I don't have to gloat about new viruses, the NAV packs and viruses themselves do that for me.
People have been screaming all along that their approach was irresponsible and would swamp the rest of us in a tide of shit. Bill Gates decided it was time to take over the internet back in 95 or so. He did not ignore the internet in "The Road Ahead" because he was worried about what his half assed OS would do to other people. He ignored it because he had a limited imagination. There is nothing inherently conveinient in the stupid single user mode M$ chose to keep. While the free software community developed unix like file systems with permisions to run multi user OS on top of DOS, Bill Gates started tacking on inconvient and usless things like the loggon screen. As the free software community adopted the tried and true security models of Unix, Bill Gates was busy making a mail client that would auto execute atttachments. Each step of the way, responsible people cried out in alarm. Today we suffer, but none like those who pay to trust M$.
If the W2k virus is "Bassed on NT Technology", where NT stands for "New Technology", will the next patch recursivly contain the previous "uber" patch. The New Technology Technology Uber Uber patch?
Anyone who usese IE is a fool. Oh wait, I'm at work and HAVE to use IE.
Let's think about how useful that makes web counters. I spend 10 hours a day at work, 8 hours sleeping, 2 hours getting too and from work. That leaves me with four hours each day to do things around the house, two of which are usually dedicated to eating and grooming. Two hours for everything else in the world. So what browswer is most likely to be used? M$IE by greater than ten to one.
Dreams of MSIE at my house are more like nightmares. That's not where I wanted to go yesterday!
Web surveys are not a good measure anyway. Linux users may have something better to do than surf comercial websites all day. Consider the number of Sun users reported. Linux is used by the physics community for workstations. I doubt any of those "desktops" got counted. They might not even have a browser (gasp!), or a GUI for that matter.
Whack my grandmother at your peril, it's never going to end.
The ultimate fools are those who buy your logic and pour money into advertising. This works just as well for the suckers who buy "harvester" software as it does for folks who buy billboards. All it buys the purchaser is customer anoyance. The more advertised something is, the less likely I am to buy it. Unfortunatly there's a sucker born every minute who thinks "brand recongition" can be earned in some way other than solid performance, positive reviews and customer satisfaction.
Never trust someone who connives.
ACME bolt makers have no consideration for the average user! They worry about holding things together instead of making it easier to do things with a penny.
ACME needs to be constrained to these standarsd. Boycot hex heads, torx, phillips, and anything else that can not be opperated with a peenny. I just don't see whay anyone would use them. Everything should be a user friendly as a Simple Dolt.
Has it occured to you that there are fewer problems? The software I have mostly does what I want it to, it's less confusing, easier to maintain and easier to learn.
My wife is leaning how to use Red Hat. It took her a while to unprogram years of M$ use, and that was the most difficult part. Other things like "man" for manpage, "mail" or "pine" for mail, "ls" for list, ssh user@computer -X, GNOME desktop manipulation and KDE stuff seemed to take much less effort than all the undocumented "left-click, sixth tab to the right, expert button, set refresh rate" M$ nonsense. She likes being able to use programs off different computers. She likes not getting Outlook attacks. She understands the rudiments of the file structure and has come to appreciate user accounts. All of this training took less than six months, but she was able to do most of what she wanted almost immediatly.
Can you say that about Windows? It took me much longer to get things done under M$, and the "learning" has never stoped due to needless "upgrading".
It's easier to offload Windows work to others because there are more people capable of doing basic tasks on Windows than can do it in Linux.
Windows offers better profit margins...It's easier for me to mark up $1000 software by 10% than it is for me to charge a $100 "price" for free software
If you are interested in helping your client do something, you might think differently. Why not set up a "class" of your own with free software as the coursware. $25/hr adds up quickly for you, but might be nicer on your client than the $1,100 snatch and run.
Let's say you have 100 people at your company. That gives you $12,000/year. For a thousand person company, well there you have it. I suppose it's better than the $30/desk-month that Red Hat wants.
About a month or two ago, National Geographic of all people, did a write up on Silicon Valey and the software business there. It was very funny to turn big fluffy full spread M$ adverts to pages filled with real people doing real things with real computers that were visably running anything but M$. Not one M$ cripled box in the bunch, though it was not mentioned explicitly. The real world, it seems, knows better. Even the jocks who studdied rocks!
Well that would be apples to apples, but the best answers to common questions invariably come from the hobby site that wrote the application, or someone else that just decided to document it. No joke, the google search seems to find those pages instead of a Red Hat or even Debian page. It is fair to point out that such support is much less common for M$ junk and that this is a problem for someone that has better uses for $200. There is still no substitute for a real person who knows the answer and can walk you through, but it would be unfair to judge the whole free software movement based on the failings of a few comercial interests.
The school in question was Carlo. There may be others like it, but I'm reasured by posters from places like RPI (the more I hear, the more I respect that place). You gotta wonder about the places that don't get it.
Well, C has pointers for one. How's that for a fundamental CS concept? We can move up the chain to virtual functions, PID and UID, all of which M$ fails to impliment. But hey, I'm just a bone headed mechanical engineer so what do I know?
There is nothing inherently wrong with all Linux desktop GUIs looking the same, is there?
Well, hell yes there is! More is better. Don't like to think too much about things, just pick one you like and use it. If you don't want to confuse your poor delicate users, pick one for them. I like window maker. Is he telling me that I to use Enlightenment, configured just so by Red Hat?
As is probably the theme at the majority of third-level educational establishments, student's exposure to OS technology at the Institute of Technology, Carlow is Microsoft-focused and desktop-based. ...
"nearly everyone who used Linux last year went on to fail their project". It came out that a number of individuals were missing from the final year due to failing the project element in year three. When I probed for the root cause of the project-failing problem, I got my second shock: "Linux is too hard to install". I was shocked not because these two statements were necessarily false but because these 31 students had pretty much convinced themselves that success was tied to Microsoft and failure to Linux.
Sounds like Carlo is cramming stuff down on their students. Even the author has his own load to cram, as cited above, despite his own awareness. I can imagine those students who failed did so because their project was not Wine, or could not write to NTFS, or make appointments on an Exchange server. It's hard to believe that students going to extra effort would all fail if the teachers had useful projects that taught real computer science concepts rather than procuct familiarization.
That statement leaves us with two options:
1) M$ is lying about something that does not matter. This is typical of pathalogical lying and is designed to create a maximum of confusion.
2) M$ is lying about something that does matter and you are unable or unwilling to grasp the significance from too much of #1.
It's pure FUD, but the problem is reassuring easily frightened and confused non-techies that it isn't true. How do you disprove the existence of allegedly hidden code?
How about peer review of source code and check sums for compiled code? How else do you prove the intergrity of a thing, by a billion dollar advert budget? Yeah.
For years the softies have put out FUD about not being able to trust free software due to a lack of central control. True? Of course not. Yet it scares lots of people into a closed source surender of their rights and money. It's part of the reason they have all the piles of money they do from pushing some of the worst built, least secured software ever. They deserve to get this shoved right back at them.
The track record justifies a lack of trust, but they can blame terrorists if they want.