A Very Old (2005) Rant
– Written circa 2005 –
The war on slashdot
Now, where do I start? Lately, for some reason I’ve been reading slashdot, a lot 
. At first I was like, yeh group of Linux geeks who don’t have much else to do, but the more i read it the more angry i get, they’re *so* ignorant and obessive, about one thing, the GNU (fail)
Everytime a new peice of hardware is posted on there, you can bet that it will be seconds before somebody asks “does it run Lunix!!11/1!?!~1!”… …. :@….
STFU Fools! NOBODY cares, why do you think that ~90% of the worlds computers run a Microsoft OS? Because it *works*, and don’t give us some shit like “they were there first” or whatever, becuase that doesn’t matter, look at Firefox, that’s been around just under 2 years and its got a 6%? market share, MS have been around since 1978, It *is* possible to overtake them if what you have is good enough
Another example of a product taking a large proportion of the market from MS is Apache, the webserver, it powers over 60% of the worlds webservers, and a large proportion of those are going to be running windows. Apache took a large share of MSs market from them, when people realised that it was better than IIS.
But, don’t get me started on IIS…. LMAO!. *everyone* on Slashdot thinks that IIS is insecure. That, largely is a myth, stemming from the days of incomptetant server admins who failed to install patches, IIS is a very good server platform, when it’s configured right, and secured properly. When I *try* to explain this to some people they say, “why don’t yu use it?”, there are several reasons, 1. I don’t use windows on my server, that is kinda the main limitation 
, 2. I find apache suits my needs better, and I can easily add modules and stuff, 3. I dont need to have to install 1.5GB of OS on my server when I wont use half the stuff, so I use a 350MB OS.
Right, now for the big issue on slashdot; Linux.First I need to get some definitions straight with these people. Linux is a kernel, NOT an OS. People call windows bloated, but Linux is more bloated if you ask me, Fedora is 2CDs, Suse is upwards of a 4GB FTP install, Debian is 7CDs I think, Slack is 2. WHAT THE FUCK? :@ Windows is 1CD and doesn’t come with gigs of useless programs that noone will ever use, and doesn’t fuck up your partition table upon installation.
What’s that I hear, people telling me it’s my fault that my partition table is broken, or that my drive is dieing or something stupid like that? NO. It was working perfectly well before they touched it, it happened once and I wandered whether it was that distro or a dodgy ISO burn, but when it happened with more than one, I began to wonder…
From that moment on, if I do decide to install Linux on here to test it, I make all partitions first in partition magic, Linux is *never* going to touch my partition table again . Next of course is loading times, we’ve all heard the media hype that Linux is after etc etc. But *is* it? Windows on my desktop, takes about 25seconds to boot, that includes me entering my password.SuSE on the other hand took well over 5minutes to completely boot.
So, people telling me that “windoze” or “winblows” takes years to boot, on specs that would easily beat mine, what’s wrong? why does windows take so long to boot?, why does windows crash so much for you? I have *never* seen a BSoD on my main system ever. why does your system break that easily?. You need to take your computer to a technician and get it fixed, seriously, you probably have serious disk corruption issues (from using Linux, no doubt), memory failure and overheating problems, get a *real* computer and configure it right before you bitch.Sit down, and STFU
i’m gonna move onto FreeBSD now, as my wrists are killing me LOL. I use FreeBSD on my server because I like it, not because it isn’t Microsoft, which seems to be the reasoning with half the Linux machines on this planet :I. I used to use windows 2003 on my server, but I found having a GUI kinda useless, as after I’d installed everything I didn’t need it. If I wanted to edit files, I’d map the drive to my main machine, if i wanted to restart some services I’d use telnet. I then decided, being a *nix n00b, that I’d try some Linux. So I downloaded a version called SME or something, can’t remember now. It was fine for a while, stuff worked but, still being half of a standard 2k3 intsall, it still had shitloads of stuff running I never used.
So, I looked into other *nixes. I’d heard some very good things about FreeBSD and had been reading their site for a while, so I downloaded the 5.2.1 disks. It took me a while to figure it out, but realised after exausative VMware testing that it was very different from Linux, So I left it a few weeks.
After a while I got the urge to return to FreeBSD, but this time I was armed with some knowledge, and the handbook, which I read this time (I know (fail)). I got it running, and used the ports system to get everything I needed, it used about 2GB of space, but still being very n00bish, I left it like that. Slowly over time I learned useful tricks and stuff, how to compile things from the source. Now, about 5months on, and 3 servers later, I can say I know what I’m doing, or so to speak, more than I did. Now, I’m using a the STABLE branch of FreeBSD which is custom compiled for my hardware etc, and I compiled everything. It uses 350MB of my harddrive, and I know I can change stuff without it breaking, edit config files etc. This is a far cry from Linux’s “fix everything with pre-compiled RPMs” where n00bs fix stuff but don’t know how it was done.
This is one of *nixes problems, pre-compiled shit that fixes things but doesn’t tell you how it was or why it broke in the first place. on my system, if something stops working, I like to know why it has, not go “rpm -u <file name>”
And so, this brings to a close the “war on slashdot” even though, I have hardly mentioned them and whored my usage of computers, oh well, maybe they’ll learn something,… well they won’t but I might as well try. I’m guna go sleep now, as its nearly 1:30am, and my hands hurt