You have to rewire your house as well.
by schwim on Sep.16, 2009, under Miscellaneous
I swear to God, this guy drives me batshit. As much as I try to consider myself a linux defender, I realize that I just can’t allow myself to be viewed as an ally to this asshatedry.
Mr. Vaughn-Nichols writes a lot of articles that chap my ass. I get it. Microsoft is Evil and we must stamp out the fire of proprietary restrictions. Okay, okay. You don’t get a virus. Got it. You don’t have to pay for an OS upgrade, roger that. This latest attempt to bring to light the evil that resides in Redmond is by letting us know how much it will cost to turn an XP computer to a computer running 7. His estimated cost? $42,961. Not including retraining the world to use the new Start button.
There’s much more to it than that though. He is both shocked and appalled that you can’t upgrade from XP to Windows 7. He can’t begin to imagine the time it would take to transfer all of your data to a new operating system. This is the same person that tells everyone they need to make the move to linux. I guess transferring your data is only time consuming when moving between versions of Windows. There’s some kind of rip in the time-space continuum when transferring out of a Windows OS to something else.
Then he goes to great lengths to make us aware that his computer can’t possibly run 7 with it’s unrealistic hardware expectations of a 1.6 Ghz processor and 2 gigs of ram.
I got a kick out of this. I have two computers in the corner of my office. They’re perfectly good computers with great specs(one was my gaming machine until recently) but I can’t run linux on them. They both run the same mainboard (MSI Neo series) and despite tons of posts across the internet in attempts to get it to work, I’ve never gotten linux to work on them and I’m not the only one. I found hundreds of people with the same mainboard and the same problem. Nobody could figure out how to get linux to boot off of that mainboard. While Mr. Vaughn-Nichols complains about the cost of a gig of ram to come up to Win 7 specs, I’m left with a couple grand worth of machines that linux doesn’t like.
I won’t be running 7 in the foreseeable future and I’m as happy as a clam with linux as my work OS. That being said, I understand that linux is neither polished enough nor user friendly enough for everyone. I and thousands of other people across the world manually mount and unmount our network drives because it seems that linux developers still haven’t figured out how to postpone shutting down network connections until the networked drives have been disconnected, causing a one minute delay in shutting down. I have a support thread spanning multiple pages where I needed help binding monitor shutdown to a hotkey combo because in all my years of using linux, I’ve never had a distro in which the screensaver and monitor shutdown worked reliably.
I love linux but I would be out of my mind if I thought it could replace Windows. Windows exists for a reason. Until linux users realize that, we’re all going to be categorized with the likes of Mr. Vaughn-Nichols.
September 16th, 2009 on 5:39 pm
Having a bad day? Sorry.
As I read it the $42,961 is for 100 boxes in a biz environment so it’s probably a very reasonable estimate, possibly too small. We’d want to get that number big enough to justify just buying 100 new boxes with Win7 preloads and everyone is happy. Everybody in the gravy train makes out beautifully, the employees get new toys, and Africa gets 100 additional toxic waste items. What could be more fun? Certainly not a Linux system – that’s dull and boring.
Vaughn-Nichols is not a regular read of mine so I don’t have an opinion of him except to say that if a few mainstream guys get a bit over-the-top it’s a drop in the bucket against the gargantuan wave. of MSBS.
As to your two Linux-dead boxes. Sorry.
But you’re right: Windows does exist for a purpose, sort of like malaria or cancer or H1N1. Darwin works in mysterious ways…..
September 16th, 2009 on 6:17 pm
I just meant to imply that it’s much cheaper to upgrade Windows than it is to move to linux. Say I have 100 boxes. Now I have to buy a mainboard for each of those boxes. Then I have to teach my employees to use a button that doesn’t say start…. The costs seem to stack up much more quickly with linux. Think it’s a little over the top of me to suggest buying a mainboard for all 100 computers? Well, not really any more of a stretch than pulling a gig of ram out of my ass to use to push the numbers up on a Win upgrade.
You’re right, Windows isn’t good for anything. I’m gonna go play Fallout 3 on Ubuntu.
Hey, wait a minute…..
My point isn’t that Windows is the best OS out there, or that it isn’t expensive to upgrade… or that they shouldn’t have supported an upgrade from XP to 7. Maybe my sarcasm and indignation was too thick to let it come through. My point is merely that the same linux supporters that bash Microsoft for underhanded sales tactics, FUD and lies are the ones that will choose 100 computers, sticks of ram and retarded employees that can’t figure out an OS to inflate their figures when pulling an estimated cost of upgrade out of their ass. It’s cheap and low end. The people that can see through it think less of linux when they see something like this and the people that can’t see through his bullshit are the people that you don’t want using linux because they’ll give us all a bad name.