31 Aug
2008
31 Aug
'08
5:40 p.m.
You know, you either have SERIOUS reading comprehension issues, or you're
trolling.
Either way, I am not interested, so THIS is my last reponse to you.
This is absolutely ridiculous...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Arachelian" <ray at arachelian.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 31, 2008 7:44 PM
Subject: Re: Free Linux and OpenOffice - even if your email address doesn't
That is absolutely shocking
In closing, let me give you some advice:
Unplug, and interact with humans a bit more...
You're not even able to properly read and comprehend the simple sentences
I'm typing.
Whether it's misunderstanding, or trolling, I don't know, but it's a serious
waste of the list's time.
If you want to clear up where our misunderstandings are, by all means, send
me an email, but stop wasting the
list's time with crazy responses, that aren't even coherent in regards to my
statements. I can just imagine people
scratching their heads reading your responses to my statements, like
"enlightening" me on the Linux version of
the EEE PC that *I* mentioned, or where on EARTH you gathered that I hadn't
touched Linux since 1998, and...
Oh, never mind.
Tony
tonym wrote:
Dang right - I have ENOUGH trying to support them on Windows.
Besides, As I've said, you CANNOT play current games on Linux.
<sigh>
The whole debate started, when I simply notified
the list, that anyone
who ran Windows, and was in school,
or knew someone in school, and had an .edu email address, could get an
academic copy of Office 2007 Ultimate
for $60.
After that, all the Linux/Open-Source bigots came out decrying it.
OpenOffice was menetioned as being the be-all end-all
and being free, and I promptly downloaded it, installed it, and it
wouldn't even open 1/3 of the work my wife did last semester.
Actually, the fun began after someone took exception to being told that
there are free operating systems, and free office suites out there and
kept bringing up all sorts of unrelated stuff such as how his company is
a multi-billion dollar company and so forth, moving away from the topic
of educational use, then going forth into how he wouldn't provide it for
his wife and kids and how unless someone else was willing to provide him
support for free...
To clarify a few things here, I'm far from being an OS bigot, back in
the day, I had my MCSE, and even went as far as getting an MCT - that's
right a trainer certificate. If you really want to, I can scan'em in
and post'em somewhere. And mind you, this was before the MCSE certs
were worth less than toilet paper.... The days that guys who were
flipping burgers started taking the classes and saying "So I hear this
windows stuff can make me $80K a year" but couldn't figure out how to
type is the day I dropped teaching those courses.
Don't get me wrong, in the beginning, I too was impressed and lured by
MSFT. I loved learning NT and w2k, as it was so much better than
Netware - (yeah, had a CNE too) there were enjoyable things about them,
hell, I even ran them on Alpha AXP hardware, which was the coolest thing
since sliced bread. But as enjoyable as eating a T-Bone steak is, when
the vendor insists on putting Ketchup on it when you'd rather have A1,
then later switches from Ketchup to shit, you give up on it quickly.
(The analogy is to bugs and limitations for those that don't get it.)
Why do you constantly feel the need to throw out a resume? Who cares?
I had my CNE back in 1990/91 - 1994 - worked on 2.x - 4.x - and WHO cares?
I worked on PC-MOS multiuser DOS - and WHO CARES?
Get real...I have no interest in you resume, or your experience.
At every step, as a sysadmin, I can testify that it is much easier to do
things in any Unix than it is in windows.
That's all fine, but going back to the ORIGINAL topic, my wife and kids are
not SYSADMINS.
You and I are, and we can use whatever we want. But I travel, I work late at
the office, sometimes
I just plain don't FEEL like working on systems at home.
Guess what? I haven't had to do nary a thing on her Vista laptop.
Fine.
That doesn't mean Linux is not usable for home users - it's just that *I*
don't need that extra headache.
Personal choice - grin and bear it.
At least for someone that
knows both OS's well. Yes, I can completely understand that a guy with
just an MCSE is gonna be lost in the woods on a Unix machine if they've
never seen it before, and the same is true of a Unix admin. However,
give the same guys the same years of experience in both environments on
equivalent areas, and they'll invariably gravitate to Unix every time.
As the line goes "Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to
reinvent it, poorly."
Beyond that, the rest is crap, and it's been getting worse, not better.
Who the hell needs all that Activation BS?
You know, you've been gritting me on going back and forth, and you're doing
the same thing.
There is NO activation in corporate environments - Home, yes. Corporate, no.
Who needs to reboot every
other month? Who the hell needs layers and layers and layers of DRM?
(see http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/ ) With almost every other
OS out there, I can take the hard drive out, stick it in a similar
machine and have it immediately just work when the hardware dies and not
have to wait for a replacement to come back from IBM or whomever.
With almost any other OS out there, I can boot off a live cd (no, not
just Linux, but FreeBSD and Solaris have live CD's) and fix my problem
and continue. You just can't do that with windows -- well, you could
but you have to build an unsanctioned, and therefore license breaking
Windows PE CD.
Acronis Snap Deploy - but that's neither here nor there.
Hell, even the Solaris install CD is bootable - I can
do
boot -s cdrom and be at a shell, mount my hard drive, run fsck or
whatever I need to do and boot back up. Can't do that with windows.
Yeah, there's that "Recovery console" thing when it works. Good luck
when it doesn't though.
But you know what else is really really cool, I can boot off a Live
Linux CD, mount the windows disk and fix whatever is wrong with it. And
yes, it recognizes NTFS drives just fine. That's right, I can use Linux
to fix Windows. Can you use Windows to fix Linux? Never mind why would
you want to, but can you? But, can you?
Oh and gee, what if someone malicious locks out their Administrator
account, whatever will you do then? Or worse if it's on a Domain?
You're kidding, right? That's reaching a bit.
Anyone who is using only 1 admin account, or has only 1 admin, needs to be
taken out behind the woodshed.
You could restore from backup - well if you had admin
rights, darn,
you'll
just have to reinstall... oh wait, you don't have to. Boot up this:
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/ live Linux CD, mount the drive
and replace the administrator's password in C:\Windows\system32\SAM
Um, seriously, have you put the Linux and XP versions of the EEE PC next to
each other, and seen them both?
I mean the REAL thing, not surfing - looks like you don;t get out much... I
mean the REAL hardware LIVE.
I will STAND by what I said - the Linux version looks like a toy.
Does that mean Linux sucks, as you seem to get from that.
Um, no.
Lemme write it in crayon for you...
The linux distribution, and gui, on the EEE PC which comes with linux, is
not a very graphically "nice" implementation.
That better? Apparently you like to twist all my words around, when really,
noone else has had any problem comprehending the
above sentence.
Just you.
Only you.
Now, does that mean it sucks? No. Did I say it
sucked? No. But the
Zealots took it as such, and kept going from there.
Not technically, but the following line of text sure comes close:
Put the Asus EEE PC with Linux next to version
with XP / Vista, and
there is NO comparison - it even LOOKS like a cartoony toy.
You would have gotten a hell of a lot less flames had you not said that,
and provided all the high falutin whiny "multi-billion dollar company"
and "REAL business world" condescension. What, you think no one else
works for a multi-billion dollar company here, or that their companies
can't afford to pay for support or pay to train their own guys to
provide internal support? You think that people who run Linux and other
Unix OS's all do it for shits & grins? That's why you got flamed.
Ray, you REALLY have no concept of reading, do you.
Where, pray tell, do you read in my above paragraph, that I had a bad
experience with Linux.
I even went as far as to say that linux:
"was about the ONLY operating system, that out-of-the-box, would properly
run with those RayCom 2MBit wireless cards."
I even SPECIFICALLY say that Windows did *NOT* support those cards properly
at the time.
Seriously - I strongly think, that half of our "discussion" has been either
your misunderstanding, or trolling.
Heck, I think I still have quite a few of the
older media around, back
when Linux was the "In thing" and was being sold retail in
Best Buy / Circuit City / etc.. I CLEARLY remember, before affordable
WiFi days, the copy of Corel Linux I bought retail, was about the ONLY
operating
system, that out-of-the-box, would properly run with those RayCom 2MBit
wireless cards. Not Windows, and not other Linux distros - I'm talking
OOB, here.
And I remember loading that on an HP OmniBook of some sort, Pentium 200
or so, as I recall...
Many things have changed since then. Most current hardware in the range
of the last 5 years "just works" on Linux. Yes, if you dig hard enough,
you'll find the oddball unsupported piece of hardware - but if anything,
those will have poor support for Windows. Your bad experiences of the
past shouldn't cloud your judgment of it today.
The fallacy that Linux isn't ready for the desktop expired years ago.
The only thing that should prevent anyone from switching to Linux is
that they absolutely must run a very specific piece of software which
only runs on Windows. But we have fixes for that too. WINE, CrossOver
Office, VMWare, VirtualBox, and many others. Stop drinking Microsoft's
Kool-Aid and look around you.
Your words would be far more believable were you upto date on your
FreeBSD/Linux knowledge. Go give it another look. Calling us zealots
and bigots without knowing how much we actually happen to know about
windows is not going to win you any friends either. Hey, if you're
gonna be hanging out a forum where geeks hang out, learn the proper geek
social skills.
Um, again, you're haveing reading comprehension issues.
When did I say I haven't touched it since then?
I PLAINLY said MULTIPLE times, that we run RHEL at the office. We're getting
support plans for it.
I mean, seriously, what is it that you are having trouble comprehending?
I started using Linux about 1995, and haven't stopped since.
Would I put it on my wife or kids machine?
HELL no - I know better.
First, my kids would be ticked, because they couldn't run steam, or GWAR, or
any number of other games.
Linux wasn't just the "in thing" years ago, it's still the "in
thing"
today. In fact, Unix has been the "in thing" for the last 30 years and
runs on everything from small embedded tiny devices such as cell phones
all the way to large super computers.
Again - you're having a little bit of trouble comprehending...
Take it IN context with what I said - Late 90's, retail computer/electronics
store had retail linux distros on the shelf.
They do not now.
Doesn't mean much, I was just pointing out that I bought quite a few
different distros back then.
CD's are useless, as distros change virtually overnight.
If you look around, other than Windows, most large OS companies all sell
some form of Unix or other. Yes, there's eCommStation (aka OS/2), but
since it's no longer IBM's product, it's no longer provided by a large
company. Yes, I know, there are still OpenVMS strongholds and I do
respect it (I do have the hobbyist license for it for my Alpha Station
200.) But now that both Novell and Apple have gone to Unix, MSFT is the
only one left behind.
Well, if they did that, they would be admitting Windows faults, which they
will never do.
ps - forgive
the formatting, as this is through my Webmail because my
work XP laptop is, surprise, running malware / trojan cleaning apps.
I'll resist the urge to add anything to the above line, no matter how
hard it is. :-)