Because Shiny Things Are Fun - The New New Windows v Linux Thread

[ode]fortune[/ode]

Fly Windows NT: All the passengers arry their seats out onto the tarma, plaing the hairs in the outline of a plane. They all sit down, flap their arms and make jet swooshing sounds as if they are flying.

Someone patented the letter c© we're all screwed with oks now, those unts!

How many computer owners know that their title is now system admin or they should be hiring one?

How many Linux users, more?

Yeah, it's more!

Buy a yada, throw it out, buy a yada throw it out,,, wait there's root, corporations::: it's a pandemic on OUR machinery!

With the prevalence of chromebooks lately. Maybe the vs will change.
Chromebooks and Chromeboxes have their own quirks.

I figure the outrage with the Windows 32 bit bios, inside a 64 bit laptop, put that kind of crap to rest.

Gonna be 80 degrees F this week. What a winter.

Off-T

Ha, we're sitting on over 20 inches of snowy fun here!
Longer between it falling and nothing like when I was a kid.

Hear a lot of scientist* hitting Antarctica and such places, been heavily over-packed these years?

Antarctica vs Texas - narrowing the gap?

Does Windows make people dumber? I spoke to our IT manager once, asked why Windows is using backslash in path, not slash as Unix world does. He said this is because MS patented backslash and Unix had to use something else. College education. And then this virus fear. They believe virus is something that comes and inevitably infects your computer. They don't understand there has to be a vulnerability to exploit or it won't happen. There are what, around 9-10 million of viruses out there? And all anti-virus software companies agree around 1/3 of threats go undetected. No wonder if your computing experience is limited to Windows you will think virus comes and gets you no matter what.

Hey windows and its lawyers might actually think they have a patent on that, I know amazon thinks it has patented the 1-click purchase?

Many money makers wouldn't dare patent their viruses... or update forever or change your battery and on and on...

Just working on our herd immunity, everybody has to be equally as dumb.

You missed the point, this IT manager did not know Unix started long before MS. For him computing started with MS and DOS, there was nothing before that.

Yeah I missed that layer.

Often with different tools (my first computer at 18, Linux in my early 20s and now nothing but) we learn different tricks.

Originally Posted by Emerson You missed the point, this IT manager did not know Unix started long before MS. For him computing started with MS and DOS, there was nothing before that.

Similar but less extreme, when I first got a Linux box I asked at a computer shop for a Linux-compatible modem (Winmodems were all the rage then). They didn't have any but said they were sure any modem would work as long as I could get DOS-based drivers for it. They probably weren't wrong (generally to work under DOS it would have to be a real modem, so Linux should be able to use it too) but I suspect they were right for the wrong reason.

Originally Posted by Emerson Does Windows make people dumber? I spoke to our IT manager once, asked why Windows is using backslash in path, not slash as Unix world does. He said this is because MS patented backslash and Unix had to use something else. College education. And then this virus fear. They believe virus is something that comes and inevitably infects your computer. They don't understand there has to be a vulnerability to exploit or it won't happen. There are what, around 9-10 million of viruses out there? And all anti-virus software companies agree around 1/3 of threats go undetected. No wonder if your computing experience is limited to Windows you will think virus comes and gets you no matter what.

ROTFL... this has got to be one of the funniest stories I've ever heard! Thank you for posting here Emerson!

How did you stop yourself from bursting out laughing?

(I believe you by the way, not trying to imply you're lying... sadly I can see a lot of Windows-only users being that naive)

Originally Posted by Emerson I spoke to our IT manager once, asked why Windows is using backslash in path, not slash as Unix world does. He said this is because MS patented backslash and Unix had to use something else.

I wonder how he explained web addresses. Do you think maybe he never looked at the address bar of his browser?

hazel,

human beings are blessed with a "feature". It sets: if you don't understand it, skip it.

(How often you have seen in these or other forums how someone asks for help, is given pro grade assistance and completely ignores it because logic in it is over his/her head?)

Edit: The same IT manager refused to allow me to connect a little Linux box to their LAN. My department had a big screen with ads, we replaced the content twice every week. So instead of uploading content over network I had to send a technician with ladder to replace the USB stick with ads.

Does Windows make people dumber?

No, that's the public education system that does that. Or at least it does not do anything to fix it.

Windows and Android exist so that those grajiates can use a computer at all. Try explaining the concept of a file tree to one of them, or a bootloader. I'm talking about those "click on a icon and something should happen" people.

How often you have seen in these or other forums how someone asks for help, is given pro grade assistance and completely ignores it because logic in it is over his/her head?

It's not just about computers, that's their whole way of interacting with the world. I was told by my teacher that gravity pulls sideways, so that's the way that it is.

I remember talking to people many years ago, probably 90s, who were on "computer studies" or "IT" courses and when they told me about the sort of things they were doing, it just seemed like "business admin" + MS Office to me...

It's a sad state of affairs when students are just taught to use Microsoft instead of how computers actually work. Unfortunately these courses are only aimed at raising the next generation of office drones - not in actually "educating".

The Windows registry's obnoxious nature, is why I also object to things like dconf in gnome. Anything in free software, which is designed around obfuscating and hiding things from the user and making easy user customisations difficult if not impossible - is corporate strategy akin to those employed by Apple, google or MS - to ensure their products are used exactly as intended and that the brand presence is preserved.

Hazel, you're overestimating people if you believe that any significant number - even Windows sysadmins - realise that a / in a URL actually denotes a directory. Many windows "power user" types only know aboul "folders" and those are yellow things you click-click on...

An ex colleague of mine, who was a Windows IT support "professional" could not even put together a typical window command line "c:\program name.exe /a /b c/ whatever" and got / and \ mixed up and I had to fix it all.

Originally Posted by cynwulf ... Hazel, you're overestimating people if you believe that any significant number - even Windows sysadmins - realise that a / in a URL actually denotes a directory. Many windows "power user" types only know aboul "folders" and those are yellow things you click-click on... ...

That reminds me of when most people where I lived growing up didn't even know what the internet even was, let alone had an internet connection themselves. I think at the time we were the only people in the whole town (I grew up in the country, not the city) that even had an internet connection. This was back in the dial-up internet days, and well before I even knew what Linux was (or UNIX for that matter), let alone was using it - had only used MS-DOS and later on Windows at that time. But anyway, I remember our ISP gave us some server space to upload your own little website to (you used their FTP server from memory to do it), and remember wondering what does the tilde mean? Then after a while when I first started using Linux back in the mid to late 2000's it clicked, and remembered wondering that and ten + years later or whatever it exactly was thinking "that was our "home" directory for our ISP account!". Therefore, our former ISP was running some Unix-based OS - I don't think it would have been Linux back then but could be wrong.

A trip down memory lane