Posted on 06/05/2016 8:31:16 AM PDT by Utilizer
When you're stuck in the middle of the Central African Republic (CAR) trying to protect the wildlife from armed poachers and the Lord's Resistance Army, then life's pretty tough. And now Microsoft has made it tougher with Windows 10 upgrades.
The Chinko Project manages roughly 17,600 square kilometres (6,795 square miles) of rainforest and savannah in the east of the CAR, near the border with South Sudan. Money is tight, and so is internet bandwidth. So the staff was more than a little displeased when one of the donated laptops the team uses began upgrading to Windows 10 automatically, pulling in gigabytes of data over a radio link.
And it's not just bandwidth bills they have to worry about.
"If a forced upgrade happened and crashed our PCs while in the middle of coordinating rangers under fire from armed militarized poachers, blood could literally be on Microsoft's hands," said one member of the team.
"I just came here recently to act as their pilot but have IT skills as well. The guy who set these PCs up didn't know how to prevent it, or set a metered connection. I am completely livid."
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.co.uk ...
I finally broke my use of windows at home. Next time my work PC gets upgraded, I am switching to Ubuntu.
Try downloading a Linux Mint bootable disc and select the Gnome desktop environment version to download. I have found over the years that Mac users really prefer that one (Gnome) over the other DEs.
Boot from it and try it out -the disc will not touch your computer and you can play with it and see how you like it. Just remember that since it will be running from your optical drive it will be somewhat sluggish while you do so. It runs much faster after install.
Ubuntu is indeed quite popular, but Mint is the one most people seem to prefer. Try Mint with the Cinnamon desktop and see what you think.
Have fun!
Win10 is one big fat NSA letter to the American public.
I forgot to address that part of your question. I do not work with those particular programming languages so I can not say if they have Linux versions available. I think ShadowAce and unixfox might have better info.
Damn Windows 10 downloaded itself when i got called away from my computer. I tried to go back to windows 7 and now i have the black screen of death. I’ve watched several videos on how to fix it but nothing has worked.
Windows 10 is the computer world equivalent of date rape. You go to sleep, and wake up to find out something happened without your permission.
I love that statement. I’m stealing it!
And my next pc will be Linux.
Didn’t Bill Clinton push Ubuntu?
No, I’m afraid you will simply have to reinstall win7. This time, make a backup of your configured machine in case it happens again.
Have a look at System Rescue CD -it’s what I use. :)
No, that was Rwanda. *grin*
Really, we run plenty of mission critical applications on MS OS, involving safely moving 10s of millions of people every year. The better solution is have competent people set up said MS OS so you can do simple things like... you know... turn OFF the auto upgrade to win 10.
Thx for the tip.
Uh huh. Microsoft is the only OS that performs secret updates. It is also the only OS that isn’t fully documented in the public domain. I also have little trouble with XP, because I have turned every updater off and disabled many programs that should not have been there in the first place. You can learn to defend yourself from Microsoft; however, that takes lots of bad experiences just to identify its risks.
I suppose the question might be, "Why not use the Linux equivalents and just abandon the font of all evil?".
He always claims "but we won't have drivers for everything we need on Linux."
And I keep pointing out that we have lots of drivers that don't work properly on Winblows, causing a $300 tech support visit to customer sites to fix every time it occurs.
So they are upset over their DONATED computer?
Don’t care
You can’t work with them, and they won’t let you kill them. Same old story.
Note that you won't be able to run libs that are mainly wrappers around Win API's.
If it runs on the server, you can almost certainly run it on an Unbuntu desktop. If you look for the equivalent packages on another distro, you can almost certainly run it there, too.
SQL: You have more or less every other SQL database available, except MS-SQL.
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