Sorry, but I'm really finding it hard to believe you're not deliberately misunderstanding. I have explicitly not talked about trends or statistics. I demonstrated that a stated proposition was at least wrong in my experience. You seem to wish to state that my position isn't a certain one and that I would need to back things up with statistics. You really need to start at the beginning of this thread and see what you're actually trying to argue against because it began with someone out and out stating that people didn't download instead of purchasing and I demonstrated through my direct experience that their position wasn't a certain one and that I would need to see it backed up with statistics to convince me. I then got troll and flamebait mods and a shower of replies (including yours) telling me that my "anecdotal evidence" showed nothing. Well it showed exactly what I originally stated that it showed - that the original position wasn't certain and that actual statistics would be required. For you to leap in and say I need statistics shows a fundamental lack of grasp of what you have been reading.
As to veiled insults and ad hominems, I make no great claims to mathematical genius, but I have studied it at degree level and maths is pretty irrelevant here. What we are discussing is reasoning.
but in the end we need to rely on logic and not opinion.
Good, I refer you to my first post in this thread where I criticised someone for putting their "piracy is good for the artist" opinion as fact and asked for some supporting evidence. I invite you to answer on their behalf as you state you are pro-logic, anti-opinion. Failing actual statistics, I can only make reasonable guesses based on my experience. I can either assume that my social group, which crosses three European countries plus the USA and spans an age range of 22 to 44 and a moderate span of affluence levels is somehow grossly atypical in having about 4/5 members preferring to download a desired song or movie instead of buy it, or that piracy does damage sales. Now the former seems a lot more probable to me so if you want to convince me that piracy has a net positive on sales of media (and I'm covering everything including friends in the small press RPG game book industry), then you'd better stop waving your opinion at me and give me some statistics.
And please, in future, skip the petty sleights about "studying maths beyond the high school level". At least I reply to what people have written instead of what I'd like them to have written.
I didn't see anyone cry for workers of paper mills, printing presses and typewriter factories when computers replaced paper.
Sorry - I have to award you dubious analogy of the week award for that. No-one has stopped wanting music. No-one has replaced it with something else. They've simply found a way to get it from the "factory" without paying for it.
Hmmm. A troll moderation for a well-reasoned and polite post. Putting the case that piracy actually harms media producers here on Slashdot is like arguing Evolution at a Creationist rally. You can be as measured and thorough as you like in putting your case, but some people just don't want to hear it and fight back by trying to silence you.
Sure, very good. But unless you think my knowing someone who downloads instead of buying is a lie, then my point stands very well, thank you very much.
How many DVD's do you own that are store-bought? If the number is greater than zero, your argument is invalid.
Probably around a hundred, not counting ones that I previously owned but later donated to my local charity shop. In what way does my having purchased DVD's contradict a friend having downloaded a movie rather than bought it?
The problem with anecdotal evidence, when it comes to piracy, is that everyone in the United States of America and Europe has anecdotal evidence of whether piracy works or not.
My anecdotal evidence is perfectly valid. It was put that people aren't pirating media instead of purchasing it and I know plenty of people who do exactly that. Bam! Statement disproved.
The first time I meet a "pirate" who doesn't have an extensive DVD/BluRay/HDDVD collection is when I'll do what I had to do in the early 90's: Buy nothing but pure bullshit from the entertainment at their illegally-fixed asking price.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but there's nothing illegal about the prices media is sold on. Price-fixing pertains to competitors selling the same product. But the latest Basement Jaxx album is not the same product as the latest Britney album. So unless you are proposing that everybody purchases music based on cost, rather than their taste in music, what you're saying doesn't make sense.
And no, I don't think any musician should have a free meal ticket for an entire year due to a weekend's work.
Firstly, you've just made up an arbitrary example to support your argument. If it takes me a year to make an album I'm happy to release, am I entitled to charge more? Without respect to whether people like the music or not, it's just about how quickly someone works? And if people are willing to pay for a weekend of the artists work, as they have been before, who are you to tell the artist they should charge less? What industry do you work in? Have you had to study to get a degree to perform your job? If you were a highly skilled sysadmin who specialised in security, could I say it was unfair of you to charge more for a weekends analysis of a corporation's infrastructure than for a shelf-stacker to charge for a weekend's work in a supermarket? Because you've just stated that talent and skill and learning aren't relevant to how much someone can charge. A weekend's work is worth a set amount according to you. But Paul McCartney said he wrote "Yesterday" in less than a morning, a song that has been covered more times than any other and is playing somewhere in the world near constantly at any given moment. How much would those couple of hours of Paul's be worth? According to you, the supreme arbiter of value, enough to keep him going for a few weeks. But you are not the supreme arbiter of value. People in general are and they determine how much they think something is worth by how much they are willing to pay for it.
They are swindlers, liars, and dumbasses
I have friends who work very hard to publish small fiction who would take exception to that. They are hit quite hard by piracy of their work and would be much better rewarded if people didn't do it.
You are confused. Anecdotal evidence is not usually much good for statistics, but it's fine for demonstrating falsehood. Proposal: Piracy doesn't hurt sales. Evidence: I know lots of people who download instead of buying something. See - I have demonstrated to myself that the proposal is false.
That's one of the most arbitrary made up statistics I've ever heard. Care to back up your claim? Aside from the logical consequence of it being true would be not seeing all the latest movies on torrent sites busy being downloaded. Unless of course you are suggesting that people have destroyed and repurchased three copies of Iron Man since it was released, etc.
Well I sympathise with your Blu-Ray experience. I also run Linux and it took me very nearly two days (about ten hours) to get Blu-Ray and HD-DVD playing on Linux. Even now I run into problems. However:
Well... I see your anecdotal evidence and I'll up you one....
The point of my anecdotal evidence is that when someone says "X does not happen" then one person with direct experience of X happening is sufficient to prove that statement wrong.
You'd need to back your opinion up with some serious, verified statistics to convince me. Everyone I know who pirates (which with the exception of old people, is almost everyone I know except myself - even a musician I know pirates other people's work), they pirate because they don't want to pay. Yes, they download music they wouldn't have bought otherwise (the "no lost sales argument" so popular with piracy apologists), but they also download all the movies and music they would have bought otherwise. It even hits cinemas, as I try to get mates to go to see a movie that might interest them and get the reply "downloaded it and seen it already."
The argument that piracy doesn't hurt sales and cost the companies and artists money, is false. My experience directly contradicts it.
I've got a better one. Tell your child to stop playing the game. If a parent can see what their child is doing in order to press a red button, then they can just as easily tell their child what not to do.
Relying on physical means to control your child's behaviour only sends the message that physical means are the only means to control their behaviour and if they can avoid or counter the physical means, they can behave as they wish. Are the people who proposed this bill afraid of their own children? Is physical control what they rely on?
If it goes well for them, word of mouth will become your friend. "Hey, Dr. SoAndSo did this really interesting thing with..." "I wonder what Prof. ThisNthat is doing that has her students so engaged and excited?" Your early adopters become advocates for the cause.
I cannot emphasise enough how important this is in an academic environment. Parent has hit it on the head exactly.
Okay. First off, good luck with this. It's a good initiative and all the negative comments you've recieved in this story aside, moving to Open Source is can be a very cost-effective and forward looking strategy.
Your position as a faculty member on the appropriate committee actually sounds quite positive. From the original Slashdot submission I had visions of you being a newly promoted manager in IT services or something. (And likely due a nasty shock imminently if you had been). Tactically, I would lay ground work by informing your colleagues more about the Open Source movement if they're not familiar with it. When initially confronted by someone trying to give them something for free, a lot of people are cautious to downright averse. But that's people-skills which no-one can advise you on without being there.
On the specific technical issues, I can help with some, not with others. For moving from EndNote to Zotero, it looks fairly straightforward in principle. I've not used either however, so my advice is purely strategic. Presuming your IT department offers user support for EndNote, I would contact the manager in charge in the capacity of your committee membership and have a friendly but decent chat about the implications. Find out how many man-hours they spend supporting it. Have that number to hand when you present to the committee. Ask them for the licence fees charged. Formally ask that individual for a preliminary evaluation of Zotero. Make up a number and call it the expected impact on support resource for the change over - both in user support and in migrating university data. Okay, don't make the number up, try to work out with someone something that seems reasonable to you, but leave a margin of error and include that margin in your report. Basically, what I'm saying is that you're about to ask for a substantial change, so involve everyone who will be involved from the start for the sake of good-feeling and for ensuring your facts are right, and then make a well-researched case to your committee. Hopefully this will be your initial success story that shows them you know what you're talking about. They're academics so if you don't have everything covered they'll spend hours talking useless waffle at each other. Uh, no offence.;)
On the subject of Open Office, I would perhaps not push for an institution-wide change. It would be a high-risk of suddenly getting everyone's backs up. For the majority of users, Open Office is as good as MS Office. But it's not better except in a few areas such as support of older formats and, obviously, cost. Your University will need MS Office for some users (probably) so you first want to talk to your IT Purchasing dept. and find out how the licencing works. Do you get an discounted educational licence for the entire site? Do you get charged by volume of installations? What? The temporary cost of user-support for a change to OO.org might be substantially larger than the money you save in anything but the substantial long-term. What you should do is lay the ground work for Open Office in the future. Mandate that all departments should be able to accept ODF format. That's a minor(ish) bit of training and IT tweaking on installs and it wont be of any real value in itself, but it has the value of making cross-platform support an issue that departments must formally recognise. Also, have a look at all the departments / faculties / teams, whether academic or adminstrative, and see if you can identify one you consider both very professional and positive, and ideally, smallish. See if you can start a trial there with them so that they move to OO.org en masse. It will let you (a) work out the bugs in moving to it, (b) show that it can be a success (or not;), (c) create a small pool of evangelists if you handle it right - the team will be proud of leading the way in saving the University coffers and being the flagship for new ways. Possibly - depends on you and them which is why I said identify the
Again I agree and disagree with you.:) You see for me, your second point about not just being able to switch the stuff out is a problem and it's tied directly to the way this extra functionality has been bolted in. Suppose at a later date the academic departments want to move to a different Virtual Learning Environment. That's hard enough as it is. It's just compounded if the University's site security, dining hall identification and goodness knows what else is tied into it. A system like that could teach Microsoft a thing or two about Embrace and Extend.;)
I don't think we're arguing, are we? You're saying Moodle isn't an equivalent to Blackboard and I'm saying 'good.' It's a replacement for the parts I care about. I would have written it differently if it were me, but it serves its function and the pace of improvement seems to be picking up substantially over the last year or two. I don't know Blackboard well enough to judge where its going, though I've heard enough horror stories about it second hand to be wary of its cost and its support issues. I am open to counter-stories, though.
We moved from Blackboard to Moodle at our institution. I am responsible for it and we have a very much larger installation than yours, even. But the GP is right - the instigation for the move came from a department that engaged and dealt with the academic departments. The drive did not come from the University's IT services and nor would it. IT in a university is a supporter, seldom a driver.
I agree and disagree with you. Moodle doesn't form the basis of a site security system. You could, if you wish, integrate it with an external system (I have done a very extensive system for doing just this). For me, I would not want site security being run from a system that managed student course materials. But if both systems depend on a common external data set, I have no problem with both systems drawing from it. It seems to me that linking such disparate areas of functionality so tightly is a weakness. If there is a relationship, let it be loosely coupled. My opinion, but it works well for me in practice.
Being selective is good advice. An interesting alternative to Blackboard is Moodle which our institution uses (and we migrated from Blackboard to do so). Any migration can be painful, so pick the likeliest show-case ones first where you can demonstrate both an improvement and a cost-saving. Slow and steady wins the race.;)
If they're smart, they'll call bluffs selectively. Assess those likely to fail in a highly public manner if they all shift across to MS's competitors and use them for publicity. Academia is pretty word of mouth and the odd disastrous migration is worth more to Microsoft than the odd lack of licence fees. It's a risk, but it's probably what I would do on select cases. A good salesman should be able to suss out likely disasters. And lets face it, even if the software you are moving to is better (however you define that), you're going to see big problems in demand for support, data migration, etc. just by virtue of the move.
I part-manage some of a University's software installations (amongst other things) and our institution uses a mix of free and proprietary software. We choose according to what is the best solution in each case and sometimes support overlapping programs - for example multiple email clients and operating systems. Your University may save money by going open source and all other things being equal, this is what you should go for. I'm a strong Open Source proponent myself. However, the real costs are not usually in the licencing, but in the staff costs to maintain and support an application or platform. Do NOT blindly charge in, trying to substitute OS for proprietary based purely on cost. You risk creating an unfairly bad impression of OS software. You don't say what your position actually is. If you are going to be tasked with supporting all this change, then consider carefully the strain any migration puts on your resource.
What is your actual position at the University and what substituted software do you have in mind. I (and others) may be able to offer useful advice if you give us specifics. Otherwise we're stuck with generalities. For example, I could provide very convincing support material for moving from Blackboard to the Open Source Moodle. I would charge for actual consultation work on it though.
Maybe, just maybe, you haven't turned on that computer in a year.
Nope. I was using it yesterday and it was fine. Windows XP has been fine for me. Never had a crash or similar. However, I seem to have been modded troll and flamebait for simply calling someone out for stating "Windows sucks is a well-known fact." Obviously can't disagree with the herd, here.
Saying RIAA lied is like saying the is sky blue or windows sucks. It's a well known fact.
*Checks out of window - sees nothing but dark grey. Tries to recall last time Windows XP installation went wrong, realises it hasn't since installation a year ago*
Slashdot Mirror
How about "Life is negative entropy" ?
*Throws rock at BikeHelmet.* ;)
There! Now doesn't that tell you something.
Sorry, but I'm really finding it hard to believe you're not deliberately misunderstanding. I have explicitly not talked about trends or statistics. I demonstrated that a stated proposition was at least wrong in my experience. You seem to wish to state that my position isn't a certain one and that I would need to back things up with statistics. You really need to start at the beginning of this thread and see what you're actually trying to argue against because it began with someone out and out stating that people didn't download instead of purchasing and I demonstrated through my direct experience that their position wasn't a certain one and that I would need to see it backed up with statistics to convince me. I then got troll and flamebait mods and a shower of replies (including yours) telling me that my "anecdotal evidence" showed nothing. Well it showed exactly what I originally stated that it showed - that the original position wasn't certain and that actual statistics would be required. For you to leap in and say I need statistics shows a fundamental lack of grasp of what you have been reading.
As to veiled insults and ad hominems, I make no great claims to mathematical genius, but I have studied it at degree level and maths is pretty irrelevant here. What we are discussing is reasoning.
Good, I refer you to my first post in this thread where I criticised someone for putting their "piracy is good for the artist" opinion as fact and asked for some supporting evidence. I invite you to answer on their behalf as you state you are pro-logic, anti-opinion. Failing actual statistics, I can only make reasonable guesses based on my experience. I can either assume that my social group, which crosses three European countries plus the USA and spans an age range of 22 to 44 and a moderate span of affluence levels is somehow grossly atypical in having about 4/5 members preferring to download a desired song or movie instead of buy it, or that piracy does damage sales. Now the former seems a lot more probable to me so if you want to convince me that piracy has a net positive on sales of media (and I'm covering everything including friends in the small press RPG game book industry), then you'd better stop waving your opinion at me and give me some statistics.
And please, in future, skip the petty sleights about "studying maths beyond the high school level". At least I reply to what people have written instead of what I'd like them to have written.
Regards,
Harmony.
Sorry - I have to award you dubious analogy of the week award for that. No-one has stopped wanting music. No-one has replaced it with something else. They've simply found a way to get it from the "factory" without paying for it.
Hmmm. A troll moderation for a well-reasoned and polite post. Putting the case that piracy actually harms media producers here on Slashdot is like arguing Evolution at a Creationist rally. You can be as measured and thorough as you like in putting your case, but some people just don't want to hear it and fight back by trying to silence you.
Sure, very good. But unless you think my knowing someone who downloads instead of buying is a lie, then my point stands very well, thank you very much.
Probably around a hundred, not counting ones that I previously owned but later donated to my local charity shop. In what way does my having purchased DVD's contradict a friend having downloaded a movie rather than bought it?
My anecdotal evidence is perfectly valid. It was put that people aren't pirating media instead of purchasing it and I know plenty of people who do exactly that. Bam! Statement disproved.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but there's nothing illegal about the prices media is sold on. Price-fixing pertains to competitors selling the same product. But the latest Basement Jaxx album is not the same product as the latest Britney album. So unless you are proposing that everybody purchases music based on cost, rather than their taste in music, what you're saying doesn't make sense.
Firstly, you've just made up an arbitrary example to support your argument. If it takes me a year to make an album I'm happy to release, am I entitled to charge more? Without respect to whether people like the music or not, it's just about how quickly someone works? And if people are willing to pay for a weekend of the artists work, as they have been before, who are you to tell the artist they should charge less? What industry do you work in? Have you had to study to get a degree to perform your job? If you were a highly skilled sysadmin who specialised in security, could I say it was unfair of you to charge more for a weekends analysis of a corporation's infrastructure than for a shelf-stacker to charge for a weekend's work in a supermarket? Because you've just stated that talent and skill and learning aren't relevant to how much someone can charge. A weekend's work is worth a set amount according to you. But Paul McCartney said he wrote "Yesterday" in less than a morning, a song that has been covered more times than any other and is playing somewhere in the world near constantly at any given moment. How much would those couple of hours of Paul's be worth? According to you, the supreme arbiter of value, enough to keep him going for a few weeks. But you are not the supreme arbiter of value. People in general are and they determine how much they think something is worth by how much they are willing to pay for it.
I have friends who work very hard to publish small fiction who would take exception to that. They are hit quite hard by piracy of their work and would be much better rewarded if people didn't do it.
You are confused. Anecdotal evidence is not usually much good for statistics, but it's fine for demonstrating falsehood. Proposal: Piracy doesn't hurt sales. Evidence: I know lots of people who download instead of buying something. See - I have demonstrated to myself that the proposal is false.
That's one of the most arbitrary made up statistics I've ever heard. Care to back up your claim? Aside from the logical consequence of it being true would be not seeing all the latest movies on torrent sites busy being downloaded. Unless of course you are suggesting that people have destroyed and repurchased three copies of Iron Man since it was released, etc.
Well I sympathise with your Blu-Ray experience. I also run Linux and it took me very nearly two days (about ten hours) to get Blu-Ray and HD-DVD playing on Linux. Even now I run into problems. However:
The point of my anecdotal evidence is that when someone says "X does not happen" then one person with direct experience of X happening is sufficient to prove that statement wrong.
You'd need to back your opinion up with some serious, verified statistics to convince me. Everyone I know who pirates (which with the exception of old people, is almost everyone I know except myself - even a musician I know pirates other people's work), they pirate because they don't want to pay. Yes, they download music they wouldn't have bought otherwise (the "no lost sales argument" so popular with piracy apologists), but they also download all the movies and music they would have bought otherwise. It even hits cinemas, as I try to get mates to go to see a movie that might interest them and get the reply "downloaded it and seen it already."
The argument that piracy doesn't hurt sales and cost the companies and artists money, is false. My experience directly contradicts it.
I feel that this poster further up gave a good answer.
I've got a better one. Tell your child to stop playing the game. If a parent can see what their child is doing in order to press a red button, then they can just as easily tell their child what not to do.
Relying on physical means to control your child's behaviour only sends the message that physical means are the only means to control their behaviour and if they can avoid or counter the physical means, they can behave as they wish. Are the people who proposed this bill afraid of their own children? Is physical control what they rely on?
I cannot emphasise enough how important this is in an academic environment. Parent has hit it on the head exactly.
Da! In Soviet Russia, Nietzsche quotes YOU.
Okay. First off, good luck with this. It's a good initiative and all the negative comments you've recieved in this story aside, moving to Open Source is can be a very cost-effective and forward looking strategy.
Your position as a faculty member on the appropriate committee actually sounds quite positive. From the original Slashdot submission I had visions of you being a newly promoted manager in IT services or something. (And likely due a nasty shock imminently if you had been). Tactically, I would lay ground work by informing your colleagues more about the Open Source movement if they're not familiar with it. When initially confronted by someone trying to give them something for free, a lot of people are cautious to downright averse. But that's people-skills which no-one can advise you on without being there.
On the specific technical issues, I can help with some, not with others. For moving from EndNote to Zotero, it looks fairly straightforward in principle. I've not used either however, so my advice is purely strategic. Presuming your IT department offers user support for EndNote, I would contact the manager in charge in the capacity of your committee membership and have a friendly but decent chat about the implications. Find out how many man-hours they spend supporting it. Have that number to hand when you present to the committee. Ask them for the licence fees charged. Formally ask that individual for a preliminary evaluation of Zotero. Make up a number and call it the expected impact on support resource for the change over - both in user support and in migrating university data. Okay, don't make the number up, try to work out with someone something that seems reasonable to you, but leave a margin of error and include that margin in your report. Basically, what I'm saying is that you're about to ask for a substantial change, so involve everyone who will be involved from the start for the sake of good-feeling and for ensuring your facts are right, and then make a well-researched case to your committee. Hopefully this will be your initial success story that shows them you know what you're talking about. They're academics so if you don't have everything covered they'll spend hours talking useless waffle at each other. Uh, no offence.
On the subject of Open Office, I would perhaps not push for an institution-wide change. It would be a high-risk of suddenly getting everyone's backs up. For the majority of users, Open Office is as good as MS Office. But it's not better except in a few areas such as support of older formats and, obviously, cost. Your University will need MS Office for some users (probably) so you first want to talk to your IT Purchasing dept. and find out how the licencing works. Do you get an discounted educational licence for the entire site? Do you get charged by volume of installations? What? The temporary cost of user-support for a change to OO.org might be substantially larger than the money you save in anything but the substantial long-term. What you should do is lay the ground work for Open Office in the future. Mandate that all departments should be able to accept ODF format. That's a minor(ish) bit of training and IT tweaking on installs and it wont be of any real value in itself, but it has the value of making cross-platform support an issue that departments must formally recognise. Also, have a look at all the departments / faculties / teams, whether academic or adminstrative, and see if you can identify one you consider both very professional and positive, and ideally, smallish. See if you can start a trial there with them so that they move to OO.org en masse. It will let you (a) work out the bugs in moving to it, (b) show that it can be a success (or not
Again I agree and disagree with you.
I don't think we're arguing, are we? You're saying Moodle isn't an equivalent to Blackboard and I'm saying 'good.' It's a replacement for the parts I care about. I would have written it differently if it were me, but it serves its function and the pace of improvement seems to be picking up substantially over the last year or two. I don't know Blackboard well enough to judge where its going, though I've heard enough horror stories about it second hand to be wary of its cost and its support issues. I am open to counter-stories, though.
We moved from Blackboard to Moodle at our institution. I am responsible for it and we have a very much larger installation than yours, even. But the GP is right - the instigation for the move came from a department that engaged and dealt with the academic departments. The drive did not come from the University's IT services and nor would it. IT in a university is a supporter, seldom a driver.
Tis true - we all become that which we fight against.
I agree and disagree with you. Moodle doesn't form the basis of a site security system. You could, if you wish, integrate it with an external system (I have done a very extensive system for doing just this). For me, I would not want site security being run from a system that managed student course materials. But if both systems depend on a common external data set, I have no problem with both systems drawing from it. It seems to me that linking such disparate areas of functionality so tightly is a weakness. If there is a relationship, let it be loosely coupled. My opinion, but it works well for me in practice.
Being selective is good advice. An interesting alternative to Blackboard is Moodle which our institution uses (and we migrated from Blackboard to do so). Any migration can be painful, so pick the likeliest show-case ones first where you can demonstrate both an improvement and a cost-saving. Slow and steady wins the race.
If they're smart, they'll call bluffs selectively. Assess those likely to fail in a highly public manner if they all shift across to MS's competitors and use them for publicity. Academia is pretty word of mouth and the odd disastrous migration is worth more to Microsoft than the odd lack of licence fees. It's a risk, but it's probably what I would do on select cases. A good salesman should be able to suss out likely disasters. And lets face it, even if the software you are moving to is better (however you define that), you're going to see big problems in demand for support, data migration, etc. just by virtue of the move.
I part-manage some of a University's software installations (amongst other things) and our institution uses a mix of free and proprietary software. We choose according to what is the best solution in each case and sometimes support overlapping programs - for example multiple email clients and operating systems. Your University may save money by going open source and all other things being equal, this is what you should go for. I'm a strong Open Source proponent myself. However, the real costs are not usually in the licencing, but in the staff costs to maintain and support an application or platform. Do NOT blindly charge in, trying to substitute OS for proprietary based purely on cost. You risk creating an unfairly bad impression of OS software. You don't say what your position actually is. If you are going to be tasked with supporting all this change, then consider carefully the strain any migration puts on your resource.
What is your actual position at the University and what substituted software do you have in mind. I (and others) may be able to offer useful advice if you give us specifics. Otherwise we're stuck with generalities. For example, I could provide very convincing support material for moving from Blackboard to the Open Source Moodle. I would charge for actual consultation work on it though.
Nope. I was using it yesterday and it was fine. Windows XP has been fine for me. Never had a crash or similar. However, I seem to have been modded troll and flamebait for simply calling someone out for stating "Windows sucks is a well-known fact." Obviously can't disagree with the herd, here.
*Checks out of window - sees nothing but dark grey. Tries to recall last time Windows XP installation went wrong, realises it hasn't since installation a year ago*
Maybe, just maybe, you're talking shit.