The art of ignorance

I came across this possibly old article by Microsoft where they compare Linux to Windows. The article is found at the following address Windows Linux Comparison.

Here is part of the article:

According to Microsoft, an updater tool isn’t good enough because it only “updates”. Of course Microsoft isn’t attacking Redhat personally, but rather the use of Linux as a workstation. 

If we are talking about software deployment, it seems Microsoft has decided to ignore Redhat Network and Novell’s ZENworks. If we are talking about ease of system administration and configuration, Yast2 is obviously a myth according to Microsoft. Even on Ubuntu, the home desktop oriented Linux distribution, you simply apt-get install one package and you have a mailserver. It is extremely easy to badly judge other people’s products when when we choose understand much about them. This allows Microsoft to bad mouth Linux in front of its customers.

Are forced automatic updates in software a good thing?

Yesterday, I went to my local internet provider to complain about an issue with my internet connection. I went in to see this guy making a cup of coffee. Then he sat down in front of his PC which was running windows XP. As I explained my issue, he opened internet explorer and below his address bar were three toolbars (Yahoo toolbar, MSN toolbar, and some other one). I directly thanked myself I was running Firefox on Linux. I finished explaining my issue and he picked up the phone to make a phone call. While he was on the phone, internet explorer froze so he minimized it and opened Firefox. Then he started mumbling that he has to use this other program most of the time because Internet Explorer keeps hanging. Then I noticed that it was the old Firefox 0.8 (the first Firefox release after it was rebranded). I thought to myself “Firefox 0.8?? This guy must be missing a huge amount of security updates.” Then he finished the phone call and told me that my issue will be resolved in less than 5 minutes. I thanked him and as I stepped out, I asked him: “Do you like Firefox?” He answered: “What’s that?”. Then I said: “Nevermind” and Ieft.

New Website

I just registered a new website at x10hosting.com. It’s free and everyone likes free stuff but you have to add ads to the website which shouldn’t be a problem because most people surfing the internet use some ad blocking software or another. I haven’t yet decided what to do with the website. I did have a previous experience with that host which didn’t end well. But hopefully this time, things will go better. I might move my repository of svn/cvs archlinux packages to that website. In any case, I will update this post with any new changes.