[LINK] The White House IT -- a joke!

[fcassia]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:14 PM, Marghanita da Cruz
<marghanita at ramin.com.au> wrote:

> The point about Linux is that you don't spend your life installing security patches.

I upgraded from Fedora Core 6 to Fedora 10, right after the first
install, the system updater started downloading like crazy and then
informed me that there were 43 new patches (upgrades of kernel and
assorted utils) to install. I let it do things automagically, and
every week it informs me of between four to a dozen packages that need
updates.

Clearly the age of version numbers and alpha-beta-GA software cycles
is over, and we´re all beta-testers now. Plus, with all computers
permanently or semi-permanently connected to a world-wide network,
there is little choice but to jump on this train, to remain "secure".
(I think security, whether physical in the real-world and also in the
IT world is a myth, there´s different degrees on insecurity, but I
digress...)

I feel you´re missing the best selling points of Linux:

#1 Avoiding vendor lock-in and proprietary file formats
#2 You don´t have to pay through the nose for OS upgrades like happens with
#3 You can move between distros and enjoy the same choice of applications.
#4 You don´t have to get in the "planned obsolescence" game by
hardware manufacturers. In fact a piece of hardware (happened to me
with a USB-SCSI adapter) whose commercial drivers were last updated in
Y2K might not have drivers for Vista, perhaps not even XP, but if it´s
supported by Free (libre) drivers, it´ll be likely supported forever
going forward.

Just my $0.02
FC