When Vista misbehaves
I am the “elected” tech-supporter of my family. Sometimes I can help,
and sometimes I’m puzzled by the Vista operating system. My
wife’s computer suddently had a problem connecting to our wireless
router, and I just could not figure out why Vista kept disconnecting
from the network after 15 min. One thing I never want to see again is
the stupid “wirless troubleshooting” help thing. After some time I got
annoyed and rebooted the computer. Booom! Wireless works! That’s just
great I thougth, everything works. Only thing is that she needs to
reboot every 15 min as long as she wants to browse the net (at this
point I should point out that I’m over dramatizing a bit, it was
after only 4 reboots that the issue was resolved). But as a GNU/Linux
user I found this dance kind of strange. I’m used to being told that
Linux is to hard and arcane for most people, but this was just
ridiculous. And the “help-guide/throubleshooting” didn’t help at all,
even after reading it several times. I really don’t want to be mocked
for using GNU/Linux any more. Not after the trouble and magic involved
in fixing a Vista problem. My choice of operating system is both free as
in freedom and working. RTFM all the way as opposed to Vista.
"Windows is free"
That incredible stupid, misinformed and ignorant statement came during an class I was attending yesterday. It was a uttered as a response to a question asking if there was an alternative mac-compatible program to a Microsoft-program we have to run during that class. “Windows is free, why don’t you run that” a fellow student said. The Mac-guy was a bit annoyed by that. Myself, as a free software supporter, I was fucking furious.
I’m not sure what kind of direction this guy came from to arrive at that conclusion. He may have bought a computer, or several computers over a longer period of time, with some copy of the Microsoft Windows operating system, and got into his head that the operating system itself don’t cost any money. He might have gotten the OS from someone in his family, I’m not sure if that is legal or not and I don’t care because I run gNewSense. He might have found it on the Internet, and believed that stuff found on the Internet is free. One other thing I found out was that the school I attend have some kind of agreement with Microsoft that enables the school to give away licenses to students, because the school is paying such an outrageous amount of money anyway. He may even have been referring to this deal, but still Windows is not free. Someone have paid for the license, in this case the Norwegian people through taxes.
So there you have it, there are ignorant and/or misinformed people all around us. Even on a higher engineering education that educate IT-professional. Guess I have a lot of “free software”-education to do during this and other classes.