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The Open Source Word, Linux, Operating Systems, Government,
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Spockie-Tech
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Joined: 31 May 2004
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Location: Melbourne, Australia


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Thats an interesting website and its good that people are keeping an eye on the Military Spending.. with the size of their budgets, you would hope that someone would, and I suspect that sites very existence supports the suspicion that a lot of military money *does* go in directions that it shouldnt

I dont quite see too much on the site that conclusively *disproves* my admittedly unsupported-by-hard-evidence assertion though..

Under Procurement, there is a section about seller influence - where choice of seller is based upon factors that are considered irrelevant to the "model answer". I note the US scores just 2 out of 5 for that one, and Australia only scores 3 out 5.

Its human nature after all.. if you have the choice of spending money with your local friends vs sending it to some "others" who might be on the other side in a scuffle, the instinct is to support your locals.. and by doing so you keep the balance of trade on the good side, provided that the local product is not demonstrably significantly inferior to the competition of course.

The Samsung vs Apple thing was just me showing the disparity between US judges that supported Apple vs Judges elsewhere around the world.

The availability of realistic alternatives to MS and Apples products has only been around for 10 or so years, it takes most beauracracies, especially military ones, longer than that to decide to even think about the issue, so the lack of military open source users at this point isnt particularly suprising to me.

Interestingly however, the US agency that does focus significantly on computer power - the NSA - has taken the trouble to release a tweaked version of Linux - "SE Linux" (Security Enhanced) based on kernel and module modifications - made possible by open source software - to create an OS that demonstrates the requirements they supposedly want to see in a secure OS, (hmm)..

whilst on the other hand there seems to be a reasonable amount of evidence around that all versions of Windows have had keys in them that allow NSAKEY (google it for researcher evidence) signed cryptographic routines to be easily inserted into the low level windows drivers without the end users awareness.

This is the sort of antics that cause the inherent distrust between users of OS's and Suppliers of same, and why other countries will likely be doing their best to move towards more demonstrably open os's as soon as they can do so.

If I had hard evidence to support my suspicions, then I would likely be being called as a witness in a corruption case. I admit my suspicions are just that. Suspicions based on my knowledge of human nature.. not bashing of any particular country.
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Post Thu Mar 28, 2013 10:13 pm 
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Valen
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Joined: 07 Jul 2004
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mccaffe are running ubuntu, I saw one after flash crashed ;->
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Post Fri Mar 29, 2013 6:30 pm 
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Knightrous
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Joined: 15 Jun 2004
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After nearly 8 years of Ubuntu, I think it's time to move on.
Having read a few articles and reviews of the latest version of Mint, I think I'm going to give it a shot. Was impressed straight away when I was able to find an Official User Guide (http://www.linuxmint.com/documentation/user-guide/Cinnamon/english_17.0.pdf) on the download page, something Ubuntu has never had.

Cinnamon/MATE desktops look like they will suit my needs compared to the flux that Unity is currently in.
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Post Fri Jun 27, 2014 1:15 pm 
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Valen
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I'm thinking the same.
Though mint is based on ubuntu so you can just install the mate desktops over ubuntu.

Mint also doesn't support upgrades from version to version as i recall which is a bit off putting.
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Post Fri Jun 27, 2014 1:27 pm 
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Knightrous
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quote:
Originally posted by Valen:
Though mint is based on ubuntu so you can just install the mate desktops over ubuntu.


I test MATE a few years back by installing it onto Ubuntu and the resulting setup was certainly different to the Mint+MATE I tested afterwards in a VM. I think the amount of cruft you get from multiple desktops ends up causing a lot of grief.

If Mint doesn't support upgrades doesn't really worry me as I generally do clean installs with Ubuntu anyway and just have a list of programs in a .txt file that I kick off once the install is done. (Having my Root and Home drives installed on separated partition makes this easy to do without losing configurations and files).
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Post Fri Jun 27, 2014 1:45 pm 
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Valen
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To be fair I've been having problems after migrating mythbuntu 12.04 to 14.04
So yeah upgrades may not be the best anyway.
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Post Fri Jun 27, 2014 1:57 pm 
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Knightrous
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I think the only OS I've ever had a "perfect" upgrade with was OSX.
I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion to Mountain Lion to Mavericks without any issues*.




* I had one issue with Mavericks, it was about a week after my upgrade and my MBP froze up, then the SSD suddenly stopped showing the Mavericks partition and failed to boot. I believe Stevo has the same issue. However after a fresh install of Mavericks onto the same SSD, I've yet to have a spot of bother. I assumed it was some kind of bug created from the upgrade which affected SSD drives (Didn't affect Cait's MBP with a HDD)
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Post Fri Jun 27, 2014 3:01 pm 
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