On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 2:34 PM, Henry Hertz Hobbit
<hhhob...@securemecca.com> wrote:
> If you people
> love Darl McBride who single-handedly did more to try to trash
> the ability of anybody to use Linux and dislike Richard Stallman
> whose work makes it possible for you to have Linux I am more than
> baffled. I am DUMBFOUNDED!
What makes you think anyone here loves Darl McBride? At most, I
imagine some people here respect him as a person who has made some
poor decisions regarding lawsuits. I imagine a lot of people dislike
him almost as much as you seem to.
Why does it offend you so much that I dislike what Richard Stallman
has been doing lately? I don't dislike him as a person, though I
wouldn't go out of my way to meet him. I just wish he'd taken a
different path. I'm sorry my opinions offend you so much, but I'm not
going to change them on your behalf.
> I needed people with Linux expertise to help leverage people off
> of Windows onto Linux for security reasons. Specifically, I see
> the following two areas as ripe for the picking:
>
> 1. People at home. Many have very little technical knowledge
> and will need assistance from time to time. A good LUG is the
> place to get this. In fairness, some of your members are
> providing that, but if somebody is so entranced and enchanted
> by McBride to accuse me of not having social skills they are
> NOT the kind of person I need to help hand-hold these people
> into using Linux. Specifically, people could help them start
> to make the transition to Linux by starting with installing
> Firefox, Chrome, or Opera as their primary browser on Windows.
> Then install OpenOffice in place of Office. Anything that reduces
> the culture shock in going from Windows to Linux will help
> them when they make the transition. BUT THESE PEOPLE ARE GOING
> TO NEED A LOT OF HELP! And all they are going to care about is
> that they got rid of a problem - Windows malware. They don't
> adore Linux and probably never will except for this one reason,
> THEY GOT RID OF THE MALWARE! But they also need to get what
> ever it is they do done (and that is THEIR business).
What does someone's opinion of Darl McBride, Richard Stallman, or your
social skills have to do with installing Firefox? I would be more
than happy to help anyone who showed up to a meeting to install
Firefox, some Linux distribution, or whatever. I think most members
would feel the same. Of course, I'd also be happy to help them
install a fresh copy of Windows, but that's beside the point.
> 2. Small business owners do not have the protection that you or
> I as individuals have. They are spear-phished and the hackers
> once they get the needed info siphon off their bank account and
> then sabotage their machine so it won't boot. But what do they
> have to go to? Deseret Industries replaced their Windows 2003
> POS (Point Of Sale) Server system with a Windows 2009 POS
> system. Why didn't they consider Linux? BECAUSE THERE IS NO
> LINIX POS! About their only alternative is perhaps IBM'S AIX
> POS system and it is actually far more expensive rather than
> less expensive than what Microsoft provides. You would have to
> create it manually. No small business has the resources or
> technical staff to do that. Why didn't somebody already seize
> on this business opportunity? BECAUSE THERE IS A LAW-SUIT FROM
> SCO STARTED BY DARL MCBRIDE THAT STILL WON'T DIE AND GO AWAY!
> They are promising to continue it forever. I would NOT write
> ONE LINE of code in that situation and I don't know one other
> business manager that wouldn't do exactly the same thing
> unless it may be Novell.
>
> So what can we do to help them? SANS, Brian Krebs formerly of
> the Washington Post and others have already come up with the
> answer. Give them either a dedicated machine to do their banking
> with or a bootable Linux CD that they can boot to Linux to do
> their banking from. These CDs could be provided at meetings and
> PLUG people could help small business owners in using it.
> My friend Greg warned me about you people and he was right. He
> also gave up on PLUG. But he is using Ubuntu Linux just to
> get rid of the Windows malware situation. So you are going to
> have to make a decision of where you want to go. You are going
> to have to come up with a charter that details the direction of
> where you are headed and what you consider important. If it is
> any of the following I am definitely not interested:
>
> [a] Promote Darl McBride who is the pivot point of somebody who
> tried to destroy Linux. Microsoft at the start was so happy
> with what he was doing you can't believe it. From that you
> should not misinterpret me as being anti-Microsoft. I am
> not. I am pro-security and wanting people to have something
> that gets the job done. If that is Windows and they are
> happy, so am I. It is just that I know from a security
> stand-point that Linux is much better.
No one here is interested in promoting Darl McBride.
> [b] Discuss the esoterica of things that really don't help
> normal people get their job done. Once they get rid of the
> Windows malware and get things doing what they need to get
> done they are happy campers. That is fine with me! That is
> one more satisfied customer that when I write to a company
> and say: I have a pipeline problem. Your Linux code for
> your PCI parallel board won't compile I will no longer get a
> support staff person that says "we have umpteen mergers
> and that is an unsupported product." If we have 10,000 new
> Linux users in place of each one we have now they wouldn't
> even dream of saying that! They would literally put their
> Linux staff programmer on the job and try to figure out why
> it no longer compiles on both Ubuntu 10.04 and OpenSuse 11.2.
> Hey, both the gender bender USB ---> Parallel cable and
> this PCI Parallel board work on Windows. Why not on Linux?
> IT IS THE PIPELINE that is the main source of the problem.
> But I am still baffled why Fedora 3 could recognize my
> monitor and Fedoras 10, 11, and 12 couldn't. ALL MICROSOFT
> WINDOWS USERS WOULD HAVE THE SAME PUZZLING THOUGHT! Why
> did it have it then but not now? Ditto for one printer
> filter that worked replace by 12 that well they may work
> or they may not work.
We are interested in talking about things that we, the members of this
group, want to accomplish or are otherwise interested in. This group
is for us, not for the world at large. We're not a social movement,
we're a users group. As in, WE are the users who are meeting to
discuss things related to OUR usage of Linux. If someone wants to
install Linux and become a user, then we welcome them and will be
happy to answer their questions and, if they suggest things they'd
like to hear about, we can try to accommodate those topics. It's
silly to try to guess what some hypothetical new person might be
interested in, though, when there are already a group of us with
interests that we know about.
> [c] Continue with the idea that distros should diverge more and
> more rather than converge to something ordinary people can
> handle. I am sorry but Ubuntu shifting the maximize,
> minimize, and close buttons from upper right side to the
> upper left side is hard to understand. For the same reason
> I continue to use a QWERTY keyboard instead of shifting to
> DVORAK - sooner or later I hit the other way of doing it.
> Standardization of ontrols of automobiles were done years
> ago. The same thing needs to happen here with Linux. Having
> fifteen different ways for mounting my FAT32 partition of
> which thirteen are wrong is hard to understand.
Some of us have other uses for Linux besides trying to get Windows
users to adopt it as a desktop OS. I use it primarily for embedded
systems and related development. Others use it as a server platform.
Trying to fit the myriad uses of Linux into a single interface is
silly. I agree that a single desktop platform on Linux would be nice,
but the very principles espoused by your friend Richard Stallman
ensure that such a thing will never exist, because it would require
some sort of centralized, top-down dictate to make it happen.
> So you people hammer it out what is you want to do and I will
> go another way. But I will be damned if I will ever understand
> why somebody would lovee Darl McBride and hate Richard Stallman
> to the point that they would say I lack social skills. Perhaps
> they work for Omniture and are peeved that my PAC filter strips
> almost all (all?) of their scripts out so you don't even see the
> 2o7.net host called? C'est la vie.
Is there a single person here that 1) loves Darl McBride, 2) hates
Richard Stallman, and 3) has said you lack social skills? No. There
may be some people who don't hate Darl McBride enough for your tastes,
others who don't like Richard Stallman sufficiently, and maybe one of
the above said you lacked social skills, or it might have been someone
else entirely. How you managed to combine the three traits into your
imagined 'essence of PLUG' is beyond me.
--Levi
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