From the “Holy crap” files, I give you someone calling him/herself “Tristan”, at a site called “Shelley the Republican“:
Like most things that are worth owning, Computers are an American invention. Look at any modern computer and you will see that the whole thing is the product of American brilliance.
For example, this rugged IBM laptop I am using was designed and built by an American company. It runs software built by Microsoft, one of America’s most productive organizations. My computer does everything I could possibly want: I can do my work, submit my taxes and even search the Bible.
Like all the greatest American engineering, it’s an example of innovation that makes a growing group of European and Chinese hackers jealous. They hate our lead in computing technology and will stop at nothing until they have control of all of our computers.
I’m talking about a project called ‘Linux’, something you may not have encountered, but might do some day. It’s a computer program that was initially developed in Finland as a means of circumventing valuable copyrights and patents owned by an American company called SCO Group.
Unlike Windows, which is a mature commercial product which is normally included with every new computer, Linux is given away. Now it may not sound like much of a problem, after all there is very little profit in merely giving a product away.
This would be certainly true were in not for the Linux project’s seductive Marxist ideology and the effect that it has on ‘Blue-State’ liberals. Indeed, Linux is so pervasive amongst the blue states and many liberal universities that a leading computer expert Steve Balmer (from Microsoft) described Linux as cancer.
The comments are even richer. The first is from the hostess herself:
The name alone (LINUX) sounds kind of queer to me!
It’s just some primitive European substitute for a real operation system like the mighty Windows XP.
Also I would like to mention that Apple’s ‘Mac Os X’ is a real threat, too. This damn extrem [sic] leftwing company is giving millions to the democ-rats!!!
Also I suspect that this Mac OS is sending personal information to Apple and other communist companies and organizations!
Kindest of regards,
Shelley
And further:
Thanks for posting my article Shelley; I submitted this to the mainstream IT press, but none of them wanted to know. It’s shocking to learn that the same liberal bias that infects mainstream news-sources also affects the technical press.
Yes, Linux is a primative [sic] European clone; It is much less capable than Windows. In fact it omits features that were standard in Windows back in 1998; For example Linux has no built-in anti-virus or anti-spyware software.
You cannot even buy popular utilities like Norton Security to compensate for this fact. There are no tools for common tasks like defragging a hard disk. God knows what you would use to send a fax or make a website. You cannot even get Front Page for Linux.
Linux is that bad; The only explaination [sic] I can think for people using it is that it by-passes the protection given by American companies and the Dept of Homeland Security. It should be considered a terrorist program.
It’s also woth noting here that Linux is based on UNIX, which is a wholly American invention that’s now nearly fifty years old.
No active version of Windows that I know of in 1998 had any anti-spyware or anti-virus integrated with it. And the reason you need it at all is that so many viruses and spy-ware programs target Windows specifically, to the exclusion of Mac and Linux. As these users increase over time, more of them will need such a solution, and they’re already starting to pop up. Sophos is a virus-scanner that runs on Mac OSX, and there are versions of F-Prot and AVG for Linux.
As for “making a Web site”, there’s a program called NVU which totally duplicates the functionality of FrontPage. And, as anyone with more than ten functioning brain cells on the Internet knows, all you really need to “make a Web site” is a freaking text editor and an FTP client. That’s all I use. Therefore, I have concluded that this person “Tristan” is not only not tech-savvy, but is a complete moron to boot. Either that, or this is a put-on, and a damned good one at that.
I know of two conservative Kansans who use Linux — me (I guess I’m conservative, anyway, who the hell knows) and another from my blogroll who’s been away awhile. I consider it sort of like an open barter system — the ultimate libertarian, government-free economy. The makers of a Linux distro are trading you the operating system for any time and effort you want to put into improving it. Nothing prevents you from releasing or even selling your work; you’re just required to release it under the same terms: your work must be open to modification itself.
The rest of these idiot ramblings (assuming, again, that is what they are) are crushed ruthlessly in the comments. Read it all for a laugh.
UPDATE: I read a few more posts from the site. This entire site has to be a put-on.
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