Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 11:52:50 -0700 From: "Charles Burns" <burnscharlesn@hotmail.com> To: syborg@stny.rr.com Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Advocacy help for CS professor Message-ID: <F179bRtoZhv0RK5LUsn0002179f@hotmail.com>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
>Oh boy, I fought with this type all the way through engineering school. >Yet another CS professor who sees the glitzy surface and the commercial >success yet ignores the sloppy underpinnings (He's probably a DCOM expert, >right?) and the havoc M$ is wreaking on this planet right now. > >I've found it worthless to try to reason with these people on technical >grounds - if they were interested in technical acumen, they wouldn't be >arguing with you anyway. That's one of the oddities. The guy specializes in such languages as Java, C++, and assembly. Most of his C coding is for the Windows console! Normally I ignore people that are all out Windows. Nothing necessarily wrong with being so, it's just in this particular person's case he is a typical Unix user at heart in what he does and how he does it. > >There are only 3 arguments that can help you at this point: > >* M$ is a convicted monpolist who has broken the law several times and has > been convicted of same. They should be treated accordingly. He agrees that MS should be called on anything illegal that they do. >* Ask this "professor" what happens in the wild when one species has > gained utter and complete control of a biota and is then summarily wiped > out by some sort of disease? The only safe network is a heterogenous > network. The fact that one opsys controls the desktop of 95% of the > world's, businesses' and governments' desktops gives me the willies and > is just plain wrong. Agreed, but he is looking at it from a purely practical standpoint. >* Ask him why exactly he would support a defacto, corprate-installed > standard rather than a widely-agreed upon public standard that all > opsys's could communicate with. I did in a manner of speaking, and the fact that it is the de facto standard was pretty much the reason, coupled with the arguments that nothing could possibly beat Microsoft due to their resources of various types. >I'm a unix enthusiast, but an open-standards zealot. The problem is, >you've dropped this question in a newsgroup to a bunch of people who >probably couldn't care if some sequestered academic thinks M$ has better >products just because they were able to buy the market ;-) I don't particularly care if the person tries out Solaris, BSD, Linux, or whatnot. Being a programmer, though, I figured open source would be a strong advantage. Thanks for your comments! _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?F179bRtoZhv0RK5LUsn0002179f>