Tristan at Shelley The Republican has uncovered my secret – and with that, laid bare my European socialist tendencies and pro-terrorist sympathies.
click to enlarge, “luser”…
That’s right. Everything you see on SDA is created on a operating system I didn’t pay for, with free software developed by anonymous hackers. There are no anti-virus programs on my computer. None at all.
Bill Gates has never seen a penny from me.
If that doesn’t creep out you capitalist pigs, nothing will.
That comments section is a wonder! How gullible are Linux users? I deal with the Linux evangelists regularly and a more humourless, self-absorbed group I have never met! Listen to Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie – Every OS Sucks and you’ll hear the best line on Linux ever: An OS “for elitist, nerdy schmucks”.
Before you flame me, read what I wrote. I haven’t slagged Linux, a very useful, powerful, and productive OS. I’ve just pooped on the smelly, basement dwelling nerds that live with their Moms and define their lives by the OS they use.
Debian? Get with the Ubuntu program!
Happy holidays Kate.
But, but… How do you play World of Warcraft? I mean sure, there’s WINE, but it’s a collossal pain in the ass to keep it running.
+1 Ubuntu
I have Ubuntu on my laptop. Haven’t used it enough to know the difference, though. Actually, when it comes to doing artwork, I wish I still had my old Suse 6.0 OS. Faster, for one thing. I’m not sure I care for the newer version of the GIMP that came with Debian, either.
Hmmmm…. the scary thing is these lock step corporatist Gestapo think they are conservatives. Fair use and competition are foreign concepts….check under their left arm pit for an MS licencing/product ID number 🙂
Isn’t Microsoft the CWB of the software world?
Seriously, this isn’t the first time that a product becomes the industry standard even if it isn’t the best of the market but the biggest. Remember betamax? I use what ever works for me or what I use at work (to keep current and familiar). In spite of me being a MSDST, my next PC at home will be a Linux platform. Just because you drive a chevy doesn’t mean you can’t test drive a Toyota (or Saab in this case).
We use Linux at work after switching over from Unix a few years ago. One reason is the ease of programming code, but another is because we handle oodles of sensitive information owned by our clients. If we were to switch to a MS platform, one of our decisions would be whether or not to phone the Chinese consulate and ask if they would like said confidential data on an easily accessed FTP site or if they could just go ahead and steal it on their own.
I didn’t read too much into Shelly’s commentary because it was so ludicrous but I do know that I access my blogger account from my Linux box at work.
There actually are people who think Linux is a communist plot, and that using it hurts the economy.
My attitude, shared by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is that people should be free to release their source code onto the world, or keep it proprietary, as they see fit. That maximizes individual freedom.
The more extreme elements of the free software movement, such as Richard Stallman, hold that all proprietary software is evil. These two sides of the free software movement are duking it out these days.
What do you mean, that link wasn’t parody?
Who invented the first digital computer?? Not the yanks.
http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v42/n18/eniac.html
Funny IBM is now owned by China
Damian, that’s the way I read it too. No way the writer could be that out to lunch to believe that.
Cheers,
lance
You guys are way ahead of me. I still use lynx for a browser and linux on most of my platforms. The only windows boxes I have still use windows 98 and they work fine. No need to upgrade to XP.
I user Linux too, but I do have a Windows partition tucked away for those times when I loose faith in the Wikipedia and need to open up Encyclopaedia Britannica (which I can’t get to run on Linux, even though it works on OS/X, which is Unix based too)
I use Linux mostly because it is far more secure than Windows, and It is far easier to install. It takes me about one and a half hours to install Linux (currently OpenSUSE 10.2) with all of its applications and set it up on my laptop; to install Windows, Office and all of the patches on my Kids’ laptops takes over 5 hours.
As an aside, I was horified when I was watching NASA TV earlier in the week, and up came the animated view of the ISS with the Windows Start Button at the bottom corner-now that would be a bad place to have a Blue Screen of Death!
Have a Merry Christmas!!
Contrary to Tristan’s concerns about Linux, it is this very software that in part contributes to companies like Microsoft, Intel, AMD making their products better, and more affordable.
The evolution from DOS to Vista has resulted in some very great advances in computer and microchip development; funded by you and I buying these devices which have continually declined in price and increased in performance just to handle the overhead of Bill’s Windows…
Linux in my mind is basically keeping the industry honest and affordable. Can you imagine what a PC today would cost if Microsoft really had a monopoly on this. We would not have the power on our laps and tables today as Linux is still a great performer on Pentium I or earlier boxes.
Use whatever you want, and whatever works for you…but, if you do go the Bill Gates route then BUY IT! DON’T STEAL IT!
You are part of a socialist plot to undermine the entire capitalist system. Microsoft employs the genuine innovators (http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2004/11/19/2301.aspx) of such valuable patents (http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220040230959%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20040230959&RS=DN/20040230959) and you undermine the viability of such innovations with your patent-violating cursed open software.
I hope you can live with yourself.
And if you must use open software, real men run a good all-American FreeBSD rather than that socialist Euro-trash Linux, and their Marxist Manifesto-like Social Contract (http://www.debian.org/social_contract).
Bill Gates doesn’t need more money. Nor do many of his workers for that matter.
Use PuppyLinux- No installation hassles-fits on a CD and you don’t even need a harddrive-comes with all the utilities most will ever need -all in less than 90 mb. For free!
Check out the comments at Shelley The Rupublican. There are some real nutzoids there!
Let’s see, that would be … every mid-sized to large company in the world, including Microsoft.
Brilliant satire or Stupidest. Article. Ever.
You decide.
As a Conservative computer system support specialist, I have only one thing to say… WHAT A NUTBAR!!! LOL!!!
I help run a Windows shop, but we’re always open to new ideas, and we run 3 Linux firewalls, at the moment. Why? Microsoft charges too much for their licenses… so we’ll keep looking at alternative options.
It has nothing to do with the Europeans or the terrorists… it has everything to do with the capitalists who want too much of our money!
Debian eh? I’m a Redhat man myself. I operate somewhere on the order of 60 Windows 2003 servers and we have over 1000 XP workstations where I work. Over the years I’ve managed to save big bucks for my company by infiltrating the network with Linux boxes. They are great web-servers, fileservers, firewalls, DHCP, DNS etc. I have managed to get 40 Redhat (ES 3.0, ES 4.0, FC2, FC3, FC4) servers tucked away. None of the users are even aware of using Linux. It’s still a M$ world, unfortunately.
That article WOULD be amusing…if it were a little more clear that it’s a parody. Me, I had to re-read it about 3 times until I figured out that the guy is trying to be funny. Sarcasm just doesn’t carry very well online.
Anyway, Kate, I’m impressed. I don’t know very many people who run a *nix variant in general, let alone female conservatives from Alberta running Debian. My respect for you just went up another notch.
FAA does not allow Microsoft Windows in any aircraft control software. What does that tell you? It just ain’t reliable enough.
It was Bill Gates who talked about Windows being “good enough” software. That was Windows 95 with 16,000 known bugs, but “good enough” to capture the market at the time. Well, good enough apparently now means it may have problems but its good enough if they can guilt-trip you into buying it for patriotic reasons.
Windows and other Microsoft products in general are overpriced and have far too many features that you just don’t need for most uses. It’s great to be patriotic etc etc but ut’s not reasonable to support a less-than-adequate product just because the alternative comes from overseas. That’s a half-wit attitude.
Dude. Saskatchewan.
Well I have a rant but it’s not against or for one operating system versus another, it’s more on the order of the whole darn confusion of it all.
What I mean is that when there are so many darn choices of OS’s and you have this kind of software and this kind of hardware and then there is the big problem that all end users run into is this.
This don’t work with that and that don’t work with this and hell were all screwed up.
I smelled the satire pretty much right away. Admittedly, it is cleverly disguised. Try reading Shelley the Republican aloud in the voice of South Park’s Mr. Garrison.
When I read this article I wasn’t sure if it was a badly written satire or an attempt to write the stupidest software article ever. Didn’t get too far in the comments as his web page caused Mozilla to freeze up.
I’m a very reluctant M$ user (unfortunately most medical billing software runs on windoze) who would much rather be using Linux. I have linux boxes that I play with but unfortunately I no longer have the time build my systems from scratch and have to buy computers which invariably come with XP installed. It usually takes about 2-3 hours to disable all of the assine features that M$ believes users want. Macs are much nicer and I also run an OS X box and this system is a joy to play with. Maybe I’ll go to Macs next now that one can run windoze as a process on 80×86 hardware.
Most of the software I use is either open source or stuff I’ve written myself. Open Office works find for word processing and is just as annoying as Word when it first installs. I’ve got Word files that are 20 years old and no new version of M$ word can open them which is why I have to run a Macintosh emulator (Basilisk II is great) and run my 1987 copy of word on it to look at stuff I wrote 18 years ago).
I forsee more and more people migrating to Linux if M$ continues its policy of screwing users. Making document files deliberately incompatible with old versions of a word processor is the height of idiocy. Even Visual Basic, a development environment that I have been using for years, is being discontinued. Given the choice of going to VB.NET (which means rewriting all of my code) or learning Java and starting to program in that language, the choice is obvious.
As a long time free software developer (Gnumeric, GNOME, and now OOo) it’s gratifying to see a happy user. I’ve recently had a few meetings with MS re: their new ‘Office Open XML’ file format for Office12. Once the technical work was finished conversation shifted to other areas, including politics. We had a good laugh when people discovered that the MS developers were politically liberals, while the open source crowd were the conservative group.
Best wishes, and thanks for the excellent blog.
If you run into any linux problems drop me a note.
“FAA does not allow Microsoft Windows in any aircraft control software. What does that tell you? It just ain’t reliable enough.”
The FAA certification is DO-178B Level A, required for any software whose failure could cause or contribute to a failure resulting in the catastrophic loss of an aircraft. There is NO home-user operating system (Microsoft, Linux or otherwise) that has been certified to that level. The COTS software that IS certified for DO-178B Level A (LynxOS) is UNIX-based and recently made Linux-compatible, but it is a long, long way from ordinary opensource Linux distributions.
“FAA does not allow Microsoft Windows in any aircraft control software. What does that tell you? It just ain’t reliable enough.”
The ‘Blue Screen of Death’ is the last thing I’d want to see at 40,000 feet!!!
The BSOD is the last thing I want to see at 1 foot. Unfortunately I have expensive hardware which has not been ported to Linux, so I have to run a grunge pit mix of Xpee and 98…
“That’s right. Everything you see on SDA is created on a operating system I didn’t pay for…”
I imagine you’re not the first Saskatchewan resident to enjoy a free ride on the backs of other hardworking people.
*heeheehee*
No one economic system is the be all end all to everything. All countries exsist in a mix of capitalism and socialism (even the far right ones) and the trend seems to be to add more economic systems into the mix (open source, “reputation”, etc.) as time goes on.
This was a GREAT parody! And, don’t forget to READ THE COMMENTS if you can. Some of you can’t because the IM (Instant Messaging) window gets intercepted by your anti-virus components as being a “blaster” virus. WOW – I didn’t realize the “new” Telus ADSL Wireless Router (from 2Wire) even had this feature (kudos to Telus!) Guess if I was running Windows I’d be bothered, but I’m not, so I’m not.
Linux originated in the mind of Linus Torvalds (sp) from scandinavia, Finland I think.
anyway, he based it on Unix which was designed and built RIGHT FROM THE START for multitasking.
winddoze on the other hand comes fgrom a long line of patches, redesigns, rethinking, workarounds (remember LIM?/ extended memory, expanded memory etc et bloody cetera?). then the great leap forward to (drum roll) true 32 bit operating cystem !!! and all the after sale guinea pig (sucker) testing aka windoze 95.
now some great monolith called aztec or something looming.
I gave up on the desktop computer biznizz when I took a course to get MCSE and the outfit that subcontracted from the community college and then farmed out the microsoft designed exam ….. after 3 f’ing months STILL didnt have a record of me taking the course and qualifying for a waiver of the $100 exam fee.
finally they did.
a week before I got a letter from microslop advising me the waiver program was being ended.
oh joy oh bliss.
if microslop hit the market today it would be laughed out of existence. as it is a lot of their profits go into the pockets of clever lawyers who do things like tie up the ORIGINAL OWNERS of the brand name ‘Internet Explorer’ in court until they succumb and the name then conveniently becomes ‘available’.
on the other hand, I always recommend to acquaintances they partition the hard drive on their spankin new computer to allow a choice of operating ssytems but they havent a clue what Im talking about and the clucking bobbing heads at the computer store dont either.
and at this point I cant be bothered explaining the advantage.
just as an aside Kate, where did you get your digital savvy ?
She wants to see theft and hacking. Does she has no idea that her Windows OS is a clunky ripoff of Apple’s Macintosh operating system, she has no idea.
texas c:
so true. the only blue you want at that level is the blue sky. not the freakin computer.
I once had ahold of a funny writeup comparing operating systems to aircraft.
windoze was the one that took off at great speed fully loaded and… consistently blew up in the air for unknown reasons.
corydon is absolutely correct in that assesment, I got interested in windoze after win386 came out.
legalities en’sued’ regarding the ‘look and feel’ of the interface; a ripoff of the original apple macintosh or lisa computer, Im fuzzy on the details there, thats going back about 20 friggin years now.
and another thing mr microslop, STOP ‘deciding for me’ what the arrangement and settings will be on my system.
if I change something, LEAVE IT THERE.
feel free to list the ramifications but otherwise LEAVE IT ALONE.
and if your precious registry file is so important, WHY NOT A BUILT-IN BACKUP UTILITY SENDING IT TO A CDROM WITH ALL THE FIXIN’S ?????
no, gotta wait for a 3rd party utility and pay 70 bucks more a year for it and all the other stop gap measures instead of having it all IN THE OPERATING SYSTEM RIGHT FROM THE START.
there. man I been waiting a long time to get that off my chest.
I really think that it is different for different people, I once had 4 operating systems running on one PC but that got too tiresome, I have now for the past 6 or little more years been running Windows Millennium.
Oh sure all kinds of people kept saying to me, oh don’t use that version of Windows, no they kept saying use Windows 98 until they come out with Windows XP was what they kept saying.
They were all telling me about the problems I would have with that version. Huh, not a one.
I have never had to reinstall not had a problem of lockups or your proverbial blue screen of death but then again, I am not trying to run 2 dozen programs simultaneously either.
I really think that it is different for different people, I once had 4 operating systems running on one PC but that got too tiresome, I have now for the past 6 or little more years been running Windows Millennium.
Oh sure all kinds of people kept saying to me, oh don’t use that version of Windows, no they kept saying use Windows 98 until they come out with Windows XP was what they kept saying.
They were all telling me about the problems I would have with that version. Huh, not a one.
I have never had to reinstall not had a problem of lockups or your proverbial blue screen of death but then again, I am not trying to run 2 dozen programs simultaneously either.
The Linux-based network appliance my team designed over the last year is selling quite well – if I’d selected XPe for the OS, there’s be about $200 per unit bundled in software licenses, and we would still have had to write the specialized software ourselves.
Does that mean MS is bad? No. It means that, if you are willing to do some of the work yourself, and accept some of the risk, you can directly profit from your own efforts. This corporate capitalist greedhead is well-pleased by the results.
That link has to be parody, but it’s not a very good one. It would have been much funnier had the writer focused on Digital Rights Management.
Thanks for the link Kate. That was a brilliant piece of satire.
BTW, debian? Not a nice Cdn. dist like Xandros? (deb based)
No matter. *nix or OSX. And it runs on older hardware! No need to renew your processor subscription!