Robert Pogson

I have long viewed M$ as the Great Satan and tolerated Apple because Apple at least makes interesting products. They are also small enough that they are not an elephant in the living room. My opinion just changed. They are two heads of the same evil.

Being in business and doing well does not poke a hole in common sense and fairness, principles that all can live by. Businesses and their leaders must be held accountable for their actions. Apple just triggered a raid by police on the home of the editor of Gizmodo, a respectable source of information about lots of new gadgets, just like Apple sells. Where is the common sense in that? Why would any company attack an outfit bent on spreading news about their products, giving free advertising? Where is the respect for the constitutional right to be free from arbitrary search and seizure?

Apple has done some FLOSS-like things by opening some code and using a UNIX OS underneath and they use ARM but their ethics stink.

GIZMODO! GIZMODO! GIZMODO! GIZMODO! GIZMODO! GIZMODO!

Take that, Apple. Die, Steve Jobs!

Now that I have ventilated I can comment on some things that I really hated about Apple even before this final straw. Trying to extend copyright protection in their OS (which is a product many like) via the EULA to require running on their hardware is a huge non-free aspect of their operation. A business that produces a good OS should be happy that customers run it on any hardware. Apple uses this leverage to bless their hardware and to make the job of providing drivers for hardware easier for them. They can also charge an unnaturally higher price for less capable hardware just because it it “blessed by Jobs”. I like competition in software and hardware. Apple stifles competition. If IBM had blessed Apple with a monopoly in the old days, they would be just as bad as M$. They are now in the scale of evil but smaller in economic impact.

We should not ignore Apple any longer as the enemy of our enemy. Apple is not our friend. Three years ago, I enlightened my brother about the merits of GNU/Linux as compared to MacOS. For schools, there is not much comparison. Apple’s products cost much more than free software and hardware. They do not really work any better either. Schools do not need software whose supplier has made a deal with the devil to be allowed to run on Apple’s hardware.

Update Carla Schroder digs deeper and gives her opinion about the incident between Apple and Gizmodo.

Update 2 ABC News gets it right.

M$ reports that 7/1000 of PCs scanned show evidence of malware. Let’s see. 7/1000 X 1300 million is 9 million infected PCs globally. Weren’t there more than that compromised in a single quarter last year? Yes, there were. Some report 2.5 to 13% of PCs compromised in various countries. Panda Security claims 23% of PCs with updated anti-virus software are infected. M$ is out to lunch or has a much different view of infection than others. Perhaps they view a lot of malware as normal.

When I came to my present employment I found by scanning that about half the sick PCs were infected. We restored to factory as best we could, updated and backed-up machines to cure as much as we could. Even with a really difficult anti-virus/firewall regime we still get a few infections. Less than 23% for sure, but then I can only detect what our scanners can detect. I have never detected anything but a test virus on a GNU/Linux PC.

Whether we have infections or not we spend a lot of time and money preventing them. The best way to prevent them is to run GNU/Linux since a tiny fraction of viruses are aimed at that OS. There are a lot of reasons to use GNU/Linux but this one alone is sufficient.

An example: Last night I was about to leave the building when a teacher who was working late on reports flagged me down to look at an XP PC that would not print. It ran terribly slowly. I had to kill many processes just in order to run diagnostics like task-manager. The print queue was plugged but everything seemed normal. I could browse to the network printer. I started a scan for malware and found nothing. The resident anti-malware software was installed, updated and working normally, too. I booted SystemRescueCD and it failed mid-way. I could not boot at all from a USB device. I then examined the BIOS setting and found nothing out of the ordinary. I did a factory-reset of the BIOS and found I could now boot from USB devices and the CD. Memtest86 showed nothing. I backed up the user’s files. When I booted into the OS on the hard drive, the system immediately started printing to the network printer. I have no idea what the corruption of the BIOS was that was not detected by the checksum. This was possibly not malware but I wasted hours trying to detect malware. On a system running GNU/Linux I likely would not have scanned for malware except as a last resort, and I would have had no trouble with lock-in applications so a restoration would have worked very well if needed. How many hours do you waste every year fighting malware? I don’t want to waste a second of my life doing that. I run GNU/Linux to minimize that task.

I have only worked here a few months but I have struggled a lot with malware. Patching that other OS, fire-walling, scanning, etc. all seem futile. The best solution I have is paving the OS with GNU/Linux. Restoring to a snapshot of the drive from an earlier time is second best.

I was shocked to read about the audit of Chinook SD by the BSA. Money is tight and should not be wasted on suppliers who are so costly. If Chinook SD looked at its guiding principals:

• Student Centered – Our decisions are focused on strengthening student learning and meeting the needs of children and youth.
• Collaborative Relationships –
  Our relationships are positive and cooperative to increase system effectiveness.
• Visionary – Our actions are positive and strategically proactive for a culture of growth.
• Accountable – Our commitment to systematic monitoring and accountability ensures prudent use of human and financial resources.