My Thoughts After Feeling the Digg Effect

My last post caused quite a stir yesterday. I am not used to causing such an upheaval, it was fun. I have to admit that I secretly hoped that would happen, on a smaller scale, for the sake of discussion.
The post was originally intended for people who had heard about Linux as being the better OS (which I personally think it is), and are not necessarily as computer literate as most of the people that read the post are. As a network (Windows) administrator myself, I like to think as the least common denominator. It might offend some people, but you'd be surprised at how many people do not know how to "copy and paste". I've seen it happen several times where individuals were told by Linux fans how great Linux was, installed a distro (usually Ubuntu) on their computer, and found that either some of their hardware stopped working, they expected a beryl/compiz desktop that wasn't there, or were not aware that their windows software would not work in Linux, even with wine, because they hadn't been told. Yes, I know that there is great support for Linux on the Internet, but you'd be surprised at how many people do not know how to look for it. Also, a lot of people are used to taking their computers to get repaired/fixed when there is a problem and lo and behold, a lot of computer repair shops do not know anything about Linux.

One thing I noticed and no one pointed out is that I had "BSD" mistyped as "BDS" (I was horrified and fixed the typo). Where are the BSD fans out there?

Another point, and this I kind of did it on purpose, is I purposefully used "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux" (the correct name for the operating system) to see what would happen. I was surprised that no one from the Free Software Foundation pointed that out.

I was pleased to see that there were very little if any "Fuck you Windows is the best"/'Well fuck you more, Windows sucks" comment threads. Most comments were very constructive.

I might stir shit up some more posting on the advantages of Windows over Linux...

Warning about Pidgin

So I just found out that my beloved "Pidgin" (formerly "Gaim") instant messenger client was saving my user names and passwords as plain text in an XML file!! I went to the developers' site to see if the team was doing anything to fix this issue, but their official response (click here to see) is that they are not going to fix it any time soon. Their reasoning behind this is that IM programs are by default unsafe, so why bother....
This team just lost a lot of points in my book.
If you use gaim/pidgin and you want to see this with your own eyes, just go to the .purple directory (if you use linux, it's in your /home/$USER directory, if you use windows, its in C:\Documents and Settings\Application Data folder), and look for accounts.XML... you will find your passwords there.
Now, since it seems that the team is not going to change this any time soon, and since I like my "false sense of security" (I'm quoting the "Pidgin" team) I went ahead and switched IM clients. I'd heard a lot of good things about Kopete, and even though I am not a big fan of KDE (you've probably realized by now that I am a GNU/Linux person) I am willing to give this application a shot. I just installed and it seems to run smoothly in GNOME. I just started using it yesterday, and I haven't really done much with it, but so far so good, even though it is very "KDEee".