Free Linux and OpenOffice - even if your email address doesn't

[Tony Mori]

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


> tonym wrote:
>
>> 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...

Dang right - I have ENOUGH trying to support them on Windows.
Besides, As I've said, you CANNOT play current games on Linux.
<sigh>

>
> 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
>
>
>
>> 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.
>

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.

>
>
> 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.
>
>
>> 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.
>

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.

>
> 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. :-)

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