Thou shalt keep windows on thy machines (was Re: [ILUG] Naive..etc.)

[Jimmy Tang]

Hi All,

On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 03:07:55PM +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> On Fri 22 Jun 2007, paul at clubi.ie wrote:
> 
> > I'm saying there are quite a few options. You're picking on the least
> > accessible example - try the "FreeDOS bootdisk" one instead.. ;)
> 
> Personally, when updating the BIOS on a machine,
> I do exactly what the manufacturer recommends,
> as I have had very unpleasant experiences in the past
> trying to be clever.
> 
> If Lenovo/IBM tell me to shut my eyes and count to 10
> when updating their BIOS that is exactly what I will do.
> 
> 

I've been remotely following this entire thread, and its pretty
interesting how this thread has turned into a discussion on why not to
just have a spare partition for windows for updates, service engineers
etc... to do things that linux cant do simply because
manufacturers/isps/companies do not provide linux alternatives.

and people are all debating about the merits of both having linux only,
windows only and having both. and deciding with your wallet on who to
support for hardware that supports linux and writing your own solutions
to the problem etc...

so the question remains, how many linux users here who claim that
opensource is great and strongly disagree with using windows because its a
tax that manufacturers impose on users also use things like binary blobs
(un)knownlingly in their kernels to get hardware that the linux user has
bought. a good example of this is nvidia or ati cards does the average
linux user really care that they dont know how secure the binary blob is
for video card as much as the next macosx or windows user? probably not.

face it, most linux "zealots" and users who claim linux is better than
windows, and i'd agree with that, are probably right if they are clever
enough to use it with enough manpage reading etc...

but when you start throwing crappology in about "the manufacturer/company
doesnt support linux" just because their user base is stupid and use
windows. i think the linux user is just broken, because more than likely this
linux user will be using some binary blob on their system, contradicting
their beliefs of opensource and how software should work (and all that
stuff with gpl, open standards, interoperability and any other buzz word
that opensource advocates use).

note, some if not most people will see what i have bothered to type in
the above to be a flame/troll or whatever. but the fact of the matter is, i
myself like opensource, and im quite happy to use opensource
(gpl/bsd/mit or whatever license) and if it doesnt work, i'm probably
gonna try getting binary blobs to work which kinda goes back on my idea
on liking and supporting opensource. but hey, i want the graphics card that
i paid 350euro for to work with full acceleration so i can play quake3
arena and any other games that publishers have bothered to publish for
linux. if it doesnt work, i'll boot into windows. and i'm probably not
clever enough to write a driver to fix the problem even if i did have
the specs, are you? mind you there are people out there with time and
are clever enough to do so, so a pat on the back to them, and i'll buy
them a beer if i ever meet these people.



Jimmy.

-- 
Jimmy Tang
Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing,
Lloyd Building, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland.
http://www.tchpc.tcd.ie/ | http://www.tchpc.tcd.ie/~jtang