In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Roy Schestowitz
<newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote
on Sat, 25 Aug 2007 00:57:52 +0100
<5548555.8eLZCqdxML@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> ____/ Mark Kent on Friday 24 August 2007 18:21 : \____
>
>> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>> ____/ High Plains Thumper on Saturday 11 August 2007 20:09 : \____
>>>
>>>> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>>>> John Bailo on Saturday:
>>>>>> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> PC World Editor Resigns When Ordered Not to Criticize
>>>>>>> Advertisers
>>>>>>> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/03/1810239&from=rss
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Who reads paper news any more?
>>>>>
>>>>> Most people do. Those who use the Internet /regularly/ are
>>>>> still a a minority.
>>>>
>>>> What I find interesting in the slashdot article is the ad just
>>>> below it. It states, "State Government Says Linux Was Too Big a
>>>> Risk", another FUD ad by Microsoft.
>>>
>>> Yes, I saw this before and these government people were criticised for
>>> embracing and helping Big Lie tactics (
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie ).
>>>
>>
>> I don't think I've ever seen a company more overt in its manipulation of
>> government and the media than Microsoft. The cigarette companies did a
>> really good job pretending that they didn't know about the damage
>> smoking causes, at least, until somebody split the beans; and the oil
>> companies are right now doing a cracking job of hiding the impact of
>> global warming and pretending that it has nothing to do with
>> industrialisation - they're so successful that a large number of people,
>> even *here* have been fooled. The problem with this whole approach,
>> really, is that it works.
>
> Yes, I have almost lost a friend who has been brainwashed by the oil giants.
> How can anyone deny physics? Answer above (hint: Wikipedia).
>
There are certain individuals on sci.physics who would
happily deny a now-enormous amount of peer-reviewed
experimental conclusions showing the success of general
relativity. :-) (Some raw data is also available, though
I've not looked at it.)
There are a few individuals that would swear that they
have proof that the collapse of the World Trade Center
on that horrible day of 2001-09-11 was an inside job,
done by experts using timed explosives. (I am not sure
how to refute such stupidity, though I have seen a TDC
special that shows the meticulousness that Controlled
Demolition, Inc. does for a building site. This includes
partial demolition of critical support columns and poring
over specifications of the building, plus miles of bright
yellow and orange timing fuse wire that would be very hard
not to notice -- especially if one trips over it. And of
course they notify authorities well in advance to clear
the area so that no one gets hurt and damage is minimized.
Unfortunately CDI's website doesn't appear to go into as
much detail, so I can't simply give a link.)
To a lesser extent, there are some individuals in
sci.environment who would somehow try to deny the data that
the Earth is globally warming. I'll admit I do not know
how much of that is human-caused, although we are pouring
hundreds of millions if not billions of metric tonnes of
CO2 into the atmosphere; it's bound to have an effect, and
I doubt the effect will be positive, especially if water
gets into the act, creating carbonic acid. While drinking
said acid might be pleasurable in the right settings --
*burp* soda pop/carbonated beverages -- there are issues
with buildings, the most obvious one presumably being
some variant of limestone destruction. The melting of the
Arctic icecap is documented in a number of places; it takes
heat energy to do that, unless one wants to postulate LGMs
in flying saucers teleporting ice blocks to the Zanobian
empire, who live, of course, on Zanobia, a hot little
planet on the rim of the Andromeda Galaxy, or something....
And, of course, hard, scientific data is very hard to come
by here in COLA, assuming the problem of "Linux versus
Windows" is ever good enough to characterize thereby;
best I can do is copy files around and measure that, or
run POVRAY rendering time or Nexuiz frame rate benchmarks,
and that's only a small subpart of the entire problem,
since one can compare and contract Evolution versus
Outlook, OOCalc versus Excel, Impress versus Powerpoint,
Word versus abiword versus kwrite versus OOWriter, and
compare feature lists, general responsiveness, etc.
Hardware comparisons make it even tougher. How does one
properly compare an IBM z-series machine running Linux
and serving websites, to a Pentium IV sitting on a user's
desk and playing Unreal Tournament? Might as well compare
apples and penguins, especially since apples don't swim
and penguins don't grow on trees...
And how exactly does one ascertain that font A is more
beautiful, useful, etc. than font B? At best, one might
do a single-blind study (a double-blind would be difficult
unless the individuals were known not to know anything
about which font is which, and even then Verdana versus
Helvetica can easily be distinguished, although not as
easy to tell which is which unless one knows the fonts),
and have users tick off subjective experiences e.g., "Did
reading the paper on this display give you a headache?".
And then there's marketing moolah; Microsoft has tons
of money to throw around. (If one uses $100 bills, one
metric tonne thereof would be approximately $100M, as each
bill weighs 1 gram or 1 millionth of a metric tonne.)
The lack of marketing moolah killed the Amiga [*], for
example, at least as far as I can tell. (Of course it
killed Commodore as well.) So Microsoft has been trying
to push various ideas around -- how truthful they are is
hard to say -- such as "Microsoft TCO is cheaper".
Welcome to the flood of information in the New World Order.
And I use the term loosely... :-)
[*] at this late date, I have no idea what the status of
Amiga technology is.
--
#191, ewill3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Windows. Because it's not a question of if.
It's a question of when.
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
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