“However well your opponent plays, you just knock all the pieces over, crap on the board, and then say you won.”

It doesn’t matter what rules of engagement you use with the Cult of Microsoft or how you interact with them. They are the lowest common denominator of any discussion regarding the freedom of software choice and FLOSS.

I must be doing something right, you’re the second person to declare victory for me in recent times.

However well your opponent plays, you just knock all the pieces over, crap on the board, and then say you won.

“You are welcome to voice your complaint to the chief editor of ComputerWorld.”

Not his error, it’s your lie. That “External Audit” never existed and you created a phony link.

That’s the real story TEG. Yes, everyone needs a good laugh and right now I’m laughing at you. You can’t even win a debate with phony links, outright lies and a mouth full of BS.

See you later when you reincarnate.

‘You created that phony link.’

You are welcome to voice your complaint to the chief editor of ComputerWorld. As I always say, everyone needs a good laugh every now and again.

You created that phony link. Then you just make stuff up and throw it at Robert. What’s this “can’t get it to work”? Go ahead, throw that crap at me.

‘FLOSS works well in both.’

I can also say that Windows works well in both as well. The problem that you, as the stand-in technician, can’t get it to work is in every way irrelevant to the operating system itself.

You are the one mixing exploits in old buildings with exploits in new buildings. FLOSS works well in both.

‘Easterville was a brand new school with a capital budget for IT and cable-trays built in for a network.’

Again, you are not recociling that story with your previous statement on “no plan for acquiring new machines, no budget to do so and not even enough electrical outlets for more”. Remember – you are the one here using your past exploits with schools’ ICT facilities to justify your choice of software, not me, and I have no obligation to unravel your convoluted reasoning for you.

‘MTBF is a measure of the average of statistical events.’

I am sorry, but as someone who don’t even know how to apply the maths correctly, you don’t get to lecture me about MTBF. Take what the article says and just shut up about it already.

‘I studied nuclear physics and know how it works.’

You studied nuclear physics, so stick to nuclear physics. You aren’t qualified as an expert of IT and will never be considered as such with your current background in the industry.

Learn your place.

Easterville is a real place, not imaginary:

Easterville was a brand new school with a capital budget for IT and cable-trays built in for a network. The typical school where I worked predated twisted-pair LANs being popular in schools and in some cases Lose ’95. I have worked in classrooms with 2 to 4 electrical outlets in rooms because all they imagined was the odd television or projector in use and those on carts to be shared amongst classrooms. The idea of a cluster of PCs in each classroom is fairly recent. The cost of rewiring schools is prohibitive. They tend to wait until the building is falling down before doing that. In Easterville the student population overflowed to other communities so they eventually built a new school. They did have conduits in the design but cable-trays had to be added and storage rooms converted to racks before we could move in. Each classroom had multiple Cat-6 cable connections but we had only a few gigabit/s ports on switches. That kind of infrastructure is extremely rare in education. The high schools I attended are still standing and being used. The oldest is my age…

MTBF is a measure of the average of statistical events. To the extent that there are a large number of variables the lifetime can be approximated by a normal distribution and the way to combine the standard deviations of multiple normal distributions is to add the standard deviations in quadrature. I studied nuclear physics and know how it works. If you model a PC as a cluster of radioactive atoms the probability that an explosion will take out any atom in the system is the sum of the probabilities that any atom in the cluster will explode. The standard deviation of the resulting distribution of events will be the square root of the sum of the squares of the individual standard deviations. As the MTBF is related to the standard deviation linearly this works for MTBF’s too only as reciprocals because the probability we want has units of per unit time. So, it’s the laws of combining probabilities and the idea of rates, not rocket science. A system of parts is less reliable than any of its parts unless there is redundancy something COTS does not endorse currently. There are effects of infant mortality and defects of manufacture which take out systems much sooner but the systems under consideration are old and well-tested.

How are you going to “FOSS and Linux based appliances (e.g. OpenFiler, Clonezilla) along with windows freeware (e.g. sparklexp, Powershell, amiword) to give a technically minded teacher a lab that they could not only maintain but could get help on from the widest number of sources after I left and if something breaks.”

I left them Clonezilla and used it to keep XP running but I was having to re-image two or three XPs per week and none with GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is just the right way to do IT in schools. XP was picking up malware even with the latest and greatest anti-malware running on each client. No teacher has the time to do that with no budget.