[brlug-general] Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik Responds... 11/21/04

[Christian Tortorich]

Any department at LSU can get a MSDNAA license for $700/year which
includes XP for the labs, all server editions, basically everything but
office (which is free b/c of a university agreement with MSFT). For that
$700 you can also provide the students of any class (not majors) in your
dept with access to whatever you want from MSDN for free. And they don't
have to stop using the software once the class is over. 

MS is heavily entrenched in academia in order to breed the next
generation of MS coders and admins. 

Say what you want about MS, but they provide the software to academia
basically for nothing. 

Chris 

-----Original Message-----
From: General-bounces at brlug.net [mailto:General-bounces at brlug.net] On
Behalf Of Will Hill
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 7:43 AM
To: General at brlug.net
Subject: Re: [brlug-general] Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik Responds...
11/21/04

On Monday 14 February 2005 10:26 am, Andrew Baudouin wrote:
> keep your flamethrower in the closet

There's no need for invective when you have something to share.  The
primary 
problem, device drivers, is one that's going away and adoption,
especially at 
LSU, is up.

> Szulik:  For the average person that
> needs to be able to plug in their digital camera without going into
> the terminal  window, we think that the user's experience with any 
> brand of Linux will be sub-par.

He should run Fedora more often.  Great plugin camera support has been
working  
since core one.  I can contrast that and other excellent USB performance

under debian with buggy and useless performance under Windoze 2000,
where 
taking cameras off could cause a system freeze and Palm users got pushed

around by ineffective corporate "security" measures.  Syncing my visor
with 
KDE and getting pictures with digikam are point and click operations
that 
work out of the box with most modern Linux distros.  

>[Awful educational FUD about W2K costing a University less than a year
of RH 
support.]

What can you do with W2K server by itself that justifies the increased 
workload due to viruses and all that?  It's my impression that cost of 
additional software and runaround are an order of magnitude more
expensive 
than the initial purchase.  

LSU's terminals in the Rec Center and Union have gone over to some kind
of 
terminal running Firefox on a locked down KDE desktop.  I've never seen
any 
of them have a problem.  Several computer labs have what looks like
Fedora 
running, which makes it easy to pull up a Konq session and move around
files 
by sftp.  

Students and staff are getting tired of Microsoft's problems.  Last
weekend, I 
helped a fellow grad student put Fedora on a machine that had a copy of
Win98 
blow up.  His room mate's fancy laptop had a copy of XP Pro that was all

hosed and he was pissed.  My rad. therapy professor does all of his 
presentations from powerpoint from a laptop that's as buggy as all get
up.  
It takes for freaking ever to get up the presentations because power 
management is not working for him, and his wifi is looking for the
mother 
ship.  Then the presentation freezes at random and occasionally the
whole 
thing crashes.  You can say it works, but my 233 MHz PII laptop does all
of 
those things faster, without having to boot and without network
weirdness.  
Once these people go free, they won't be going back.


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