Microsoft (hardware) Rules!

trackball.jpgHaving difficulty with my arms and wrists led me to one of Microsoft’s split keyboard and trackball. (When I was younger, I was an early adopter. But back then I had fewer bills…) You never realize how much a regular keyboard and mouse do a number on your hands and arms until you make a switch. I’ve been very happy with both.

Which leads me to a pet peeve: Linux evangelists who use Windows. Now I realize this isn’t everyone, but there is as much FUD on the Linux side as there is on the Windows side. I spend the vast majority of my time in a Windows (W2K) environment, and while it does have difficulties with uptime, and other issues, I don’t think I’ve ever needed to do a hard reset. On the other hand, I’ve had Linux installations go bad. No doubt, the latter is my own fault, a lack of adequate backing up and changing things I shouldn’t have changed. But it’s not as clean as “Windows sux and Linux rulez.” And I think most people who are heavy users of Linux would agree that there are some things for which Windows is more convenient.

What really gets my goat is those who have very little idea of what Linux is, and who use Windows daily, who then claim to be open source advocates. Advocating means not requiring your students to hand in materials in MS Word format or demo SPSS/Windows in front of a class (when many of our “smart classrooms” sport a Solaris machine as well).

That was my rant for the evening. Now I will CTRL-ALT-DEL and kill off some processes that terminated badly and caused various memory leaks, all on my spiffy Gates-endorsed I/O.

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One Comment

  1. Posted 9/15/2003 at 9:05 pm | Permalink

    What really gets my goat is those who have very little idea of what Linux is, and who use Windows daily, who then claim to be open source advocates.

    Do you run into many of those? You must be in a more diverse environment, computing-wise, than I am. There are only a couple of us around here who advocate open source, but we all (both?) are active users of it. Of course, just about everybody complains about Microsoft, but very few, at least around here, migrate away from it. (Some use Macs, but not for statistics, and not because OSX runs on BSD. It’s awfully hard to get away from the Windows-based PC labs around here.)

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