Time Warp – The Good Old Days and Today at Robert Pogson

In the good old days of monopoly, M$ was spreading FUD with SCOG and it stuck:

“After an extensive evaluation in which RadioShack compared Windows® and Linux, the company selected Microsoft® Windows Server System™ and Windows XP Embedded because the platform offered lower long-term costs, less risk, better alignment with long-term technical strategy, stronger vendor support, and better use of existing development and IT operations skills. The company’s move to Windows will reduce the number of servers in its stores by 50 percent and save millions of dollars”

That was in 2006 when RadioShack had a server with M$’s burden and a POS stack with a UNIX operating system. Of course it was cheaper to eliminate the UNIX server but it would have been cheaper still to have eliminated the server lugging under that other OS and going with GNU/Linux alone…

Flash forward to 2012. Rather than worrying about “risks” of selling/using GNU/Linux RadioShack is selling PCs with GNU/Linux.

see "RadioShack Saves Millions of Dollars by Choosing Windows over Linux" (2006).

see More information on the Ubuntu laptop sold at Radioshack (and Computer Shop) (2012)

see it sold in Egypt… (today)

I fondly remember shopping at RadioShack in the old days, buying the odd battery or part. I even bought stuff from RadioShack while in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. Ahhh the good old days… Today is a better day, though, if you like freedom with your software. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux but Ubuntu GNU/Linux will do, I suppose.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.

1 Response to “Time Warp – The Good Old Days and Today”

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1 Clarence Moon Aug 11th, 2012 at 6:54 am

Quite a stretch of your imagination, Mr. Pogson! It seems like you are saying that Radio Shack is revisiting their decision to use Microsoft server and client software internally based on some blogger seeing a Dell machine with Ubuntu in an affiliated store in Egypt. Is it too much to ask for you to admit to that being rather tenuous?

If you read the blog and comments, there is the suggestion that this Dell model is from a batch that Dell cooked up for sale in India, a happening previously reported here by you. With these machines showing up discounted in Egypt, might it not be that they are not selling well in India and so Dell is trying to dump them in other parts of the world? That would worry me if I were you.