> I cringe every time I see or hear a progressive -- who would never
> dream of eating factory-farmed meat, miss a WTO protest, or back away
> from supporting the liberation of women, people of color, and so on --
> blithely using Microsoft products, which has seemed to me a major
> no-no since well before Judge Jackson's ruling.
>
> Microsoft is *easier* (for some values of easy, anyway) to use than
> almost everything else (owing almost entirely to its ubiquity on new
> machines), but, geez, being a vegan, antiglobalization, antiracist,
> antisexist protester is *way* harder than learning to use Linux (or
> one of the BSDs). Those of us who've done both can attest to
> that. (And it's getting easier to use all the time; the latest Gnome
> desktop for Linux is rapidly approaching
> peopel--who-only-email-and-surf stage very rapidly.)
>
> It's simply one of the nastiest companies around -- growing positively
> Orwellian of late, from a heavy reliance on prison labor to the very
> recent, totally evil 'turn in people who request a quote for new
> computers delivered without an MS operating system' gambit -- and the
> degree to which progressive activists are reliant on its shitty
> software is bewildering and sad.
>
> Best,
> Kendall Clark
>
> PS-for-Chuck -- There's a new Linux distribution that's using the
> BSD-style port tree for system configuration and management; just
> another feather in the cap of the BSD crowd, the core of which seems
> to have a perpetual chip on its shoulder at what it takes to be the
> undeserving (relative) popularity of Linux -- which it has always
> considered, often in open, brittle hostility, to be as technically
> inferior to, say, FreeBSD as Windows is to Linux.
What's even cooler is that the Anarchist FAQ comes with some BSD distributions.
My website runs on a server powered by BSD. It's very robust and is almost never down.
<< Chuck0 >>
Infoshop.org -> http://www.infoshop.org/ Alternative Press Review -> http://www.altpr.org/ Practical Anarchy Online -> http://www.practicalanarchy.org/ Homepage -> http://flag.blackened.net/chuck0/home/
INTERNATIONALISM IN PRACTICE
An American soldier in a hospital explained how he was wounded: He said, "I was told that the way to tell a hostile Vietnamese from a friendly Vietnamese was to shout ‘To hell with Ho Chi Minh!’ If he shoots, he’s unfriendly. So I saw this dude and yelled ‘To hell with Ho Chi Minh!’ and he yelled back, ‘To hell with President Johnson!’ We were shaking hands when a truck hit us."
(from 1,001 Ways to Beat the Draft, by Tuli Kupferburg).