IT Conservative: WTF?

You know, there are moonbats in the IT field too. Besides the obvious, such as Steve Ballmer, Paul Thurrott, and John Dvorak, there is also IT Conservative.

To be fair, he shares my disdain for Richard Stallman’s antics. That’s great. I’ll buy him a beer on account of that. Unfortunately, he goes from being pragmatic to just plain bizarre in claiming:

• Open Source software is the work of Communists hell-bent on destroying capitalism.
• The OpenMoko phone is somehow related to the threat of global terrorism and September 11th.
• DRM-free music is somehow a bad thing

Besides these bizarre claims, this guy’s blog is riddled with glaring factual errors. For example, he claims that Linus Torvalds named Linux after himself. (Anyone who knows anything about the history of Linux knows that it was a friend of Torvalds who provided the name Linux by creating a /linux/ directory on his FTP server to upload the Linux source code- Torvalds had intended to call the project Freax.)

His site is a great read if you are looking for some tongue in cheek humor or the occasional honest and fair criticism of certain aspects of Linux/Free Software. On the other hand, this gentleman is a Redmond fanboy who hates more programming languages than he likes, believes Open Source software is a Communist conspiracy, and believes Microsoft is here to save us.

Fundamentalism is scary and bad and should be fought. We’re in war in Iraq and Afghanistan right now to hunt down fundamentalists. We should do the same in our own country. Because, as I said many times before, the real threatening fundamentalists are the ones that are killing the very foundation our country is built on: capitalism. Giving into the freetard fundamentalists is going back to communism. Is that what we want?

I hope he has been declared mentally incompetent and thus ineligible to own a firearm.

Rebuilding with Windows 98

I spent two days last week rebuilding several machines down at the high school with Windows 98 and installing Office 2000 on them afterwards. This project has so far led me to several observations:

•  Windows 98, when stripped down to the bare essentials, can run extremely fast. How fast? I can cold boot one of the rebuilt machines in 15 seconds or less. That is without even messing with the configuration files.
• Despite all the extravagant features of newer office suites, they suck. Office 2000 loads in three seconds or less on 64 MB of RAM.
• FAT32 sucks. Large disk support meant something different in 1999 than it does today.
• A 550 Mhz Pentium III is a terrible thing to waste on Windows 98…
• These machines would be ideal Windows Eiger candidates