You should be skeptical about these so-called “leap seconds“. These scientists are giving away free seconds and something seems fishy about it. Our clocks can’t handle these extra seconds; are they out to sabotage us? And what if they come back to us at a later date to claim these seconds that they’ve given away? What will you do then?
Time is money, and people don’t give away free money just because. If I were you, I’d stay well away from this sketchy leap second business.
I was reading something about the revenue of a certain mint (producer of coins), and I thought to myself, “How does one make money minting coins?” Then I realized that it was a silly question to ask.
I’m a little late, but I just found out that the UK and Dutch governments paid Microsoft a large sum of money (to give an understatement) to extend support for Windows XP. They are “very grateful”, they said.
I’m quite shocked. How desperate are you that you’ll pay £5.5 million (almost US$9.3 million) to extend the support of a buggy 12-year-old operating system for a year when there are perfectly good free and open-source substitutes out there? They’re worried about how much money it will take to retrain everyone if they switched over to open-source software; I don’t see how paying Microsoft £5.5 million to extend support for a year is better. Not only are you paying to keep support, you’re also paying to keep your antivirus licenses. Does anyone not realize that you don’t need an antivirus on Linux? If you want to pay for support, go get Red Hat Enterprise, SUSE Linux Enterprise, or some other enterprise Linux. Your cost in training users will be insignificant compared to your deal with Microsoft and its associated costs.
Also, to Microsoft, this is bribery: you’ll give support to users if they paid you a ridiculously large sum of money. Either stand firm by your decision to stop giving support or give support to everyone. They had seven years to prepare for the end of support, which is more than enough time to assess alternatives and plan a transition.
I’m very disappointed in both of you.
Ever wonder what your teachers do during the summer?
Perhaps this FoxTrot comic can give us an insight:
FoxTrot comic 2004-05-28
`The Penguin' says... 