I speak of course, of the troll wars pertaining to Linux vs Windows vs Mac. Now, unfortunately, Macs tend to get away pretty well in these arguments, because regardless of how much open source software they steal and how much they try to push forward the boundaries of Vendor Lock-In, they are still the under dog in comparison to Microsoft, so MOST people, tend to leave them alone. The troll wars that I am particularly interested in, are those that follow the blog posts of a certain Steven J Vaughan-Nichols (Or SJVN to most of us). You see this is a very seasoned journalist, who has got a LOT of experience in the world of I.T. and he has a tendency to make rather straight forward blog posts. Only this morning I read one on Windows 7 and how good it was, yet immediately after, I read another which claimed Ubuntu 9.10 was better and gave the reasons why he thought so, the post about Windows being good, had barely a bad word said in the comments, no Linux fans jumping in there saying how much Windows sucks or that it’s a crap OS, yet the other post, whoohoohoohoo out come the zealots, and then the defenders of the faith.

To me he’s in a pretty good position to make reasoned, educated postings about the ups, downs, benefits and disadvantages to various software and operating systems, he has experience from all sides, has been doing it all for some time now, and he gets paid to do it, for some reason however, not everyone seems to agree with me. These days, the second SJVN says a single word against an MS product, all hell breaks loose. Someone from the Windows camp will jump in and instead of simply refuting the claim against Windows, they will begin a whole toilet roll (Yes I said Toilet Roll!) of insults against Linux and why it sucks, why it’s a hobbyist OS, why no one should care about an OS (Then why are you bothering to post if you believe no one should care?) and of course a whole load of other crap about how Linux doesn’t upgrade properly, how the people who use Linux are all nasty 43 year old men who still live in their mothers basement etc.etc.etc.

Well you may be asking yourself the same question as most of us Linux users, I understand why Linux users are passionate, I understand why Unix advocates are passionate, BSD, Solaris, whatever flavour you like, their’s usually a reason to be passionate, the same goes for open source software in general, there’s a philosophy behind it, there’s even a moral high ground to be taken in some/many cases, but until now, I could not for the life of me think why, anyone would get passionate about Windows, certainly not passionate enough to defend it so much and so publicly. I think however, that I’ve finally cracked it, a lot of people get accused of defending Windows because they get paid to do it, well that may be true in some cases, however I would assume (Now this is never really a good thing to do, but we all do it) that MS would make sure, anyone they paid to make blog posts, counter posts, forum posts etc. relating to their products, would at the very least be able to spell, let alone articulate their point. Otherwise what would be the point in paying someone to do it? So I’ve come to the conclusion, that the people defending Windows, who cannot articulate their points, most of whom don’t even seem to know what their own point is, to articulate it, are simply people who have grown up using MS products, like many of us did, started to rip off Windows a few years ago, then got fed up with the whole “Genuine Advantage” thing and decided to try Linux, not because of it’s morals, or it’s background, or even for it’s stability or security, but instead, for the fact that it was free, and ended up having not a very good time. I personally did something similar several years ago, I got fed up with the BSOD, I got fed up with constantly having to re-validate my Windows XP machine because MS had invented yet another way of checking if your copy of Windows was genuine and yet again got it wrong. So I moved to Fedora Core (Can’t remember which version, 5 I think).

I hated it, with a passion. I hated Gnome (I still do), I hated the fact that my video card didn’t work (a problem that is now well in the past), my sound card didn’t work (Even though it said it did (this problem is also for the most part gone), I also hated that the look of the system in a graphical sense, just didn’t seem as polished, so I re-installed XP and made do for 6 months, before I tried Ubuntu, the hardware handling was much improved by this point, but the system still looked crap, so I started asking around and digging, to find a better desktop environment, what I eventually found, was KDE. I promptly installed Debian and ran that happily for 6 months, before long I was bored with how simple everything seemed to be, and had become curious about what challenges might be out there, I found Gentoo! 1 year and a WHOLE LOT OF BANDWIDTH later, I knew more about Linux than I had ever thought possible and I was completely hooked, my life changed however, and I no longer had time to wait for 2 days while KDE compiled on my AthlonXP processor, so back I went, this time to the KDE version of Ubuntu (Kubuntu).

After all this switching, you might think I’d stay with just one distro, but you’d be wrong, I’ve switched back and forth between Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS for years, trying a few others along the way but not as a serious desktop option. Over the last 12 months I’ve been pretty solidly Kubuntu, without even considering any other distro or any other OS, I’ve tested Win7 both on hardware and virtualised, and yes, I must say it’s pretty good, but I still can’t bring down my terminal with an F key (Yakuake), I can’t simply turn on wobbly Windows or transparency or the desktop cube, I can’t rely on it being stable or drop to a command line if the system freezes up, I can’t just reload the X-Server if that freezes, I can’t install new programs, upgrades or drivers without rebooting, I can’t leave it running for 3 weeks and then go back to it and have it be responsive, the list of things I can’t do on Windows of any flavour is huge, the list of things I can’t do but want to on Linux, is limited to one thing and one thing only these days, and that’s run Adobe CS4!

My partner and I have been working on this for a long time now, along with Nicholas Tee over at Zane Publishing, we’ve spent the last few years converting all of the “Zane Publishing” Educational Video titles to digital format, converting the quizzes to digital format and building the website and membership system to deliver them, on-demand to the masses for low, affordable subscription costs.

The involvement and intensity of this site has been simply immense, an entirely, built from scratch, database driven website, which had to be easy to use, easy to navigate, yet look beautiful and function perfectly, delivering over 1000 videos and quizzes on-demand has been a challenge, but I think we’ve managed to come damn close with our 30 day release and when the 30 days is up you can expect to see much more in the way of navigational features, teacher resources and helpful how-to documents around the site. The site was literally a “ground-up” operation, unfortunately as much as I’m an open source advocate, nothing out their open or closed source was going to fit the bill for this project, so it was decided we would build this thing from scratch, from it’s first php tag to it’s last bash script.

Originally intended for home-schoolers, because of Zane Publishings original market, the site has become more of a vision for opportunity, we suddenly realised just after beginning the build, that teachers may want to use these videos, quizzes and resources as well. Let’s face it, we’re well and truly into the digital age now and I’ve been working in a school during the day for the last 8 months and discovered that teachers really do love to use a data projector, with visual aids and any other teacher resources they can find to help them in their role as “educators”, so why not open the site up to them as well? That’s exactly what we’re going to do, teachers will have the ability to search the sites extensive video collection for something that suits a topic they want to teach and buy an individual Video or Topic/Collection of Videos for less than $10 and use them for a month. Not to mention, we’re also building a schools based membership system for Educational Institutions to get special pricing and access to all of the sites resources for a yearly subscription fee, the ability to create teacher and student accounts in order to take full advantage of the site.

With free lesson plans and curriculum courses coming soon, teachers will hopefully love this site to bits, I’ve had some great feedback from some of the teachers I work with and I hope that trend will continue as more and more teachers discover the site. Home Schoolers will soon be able to earn money through the site’s affiliate program too. Any member of the site can also volunteer as a sudo-salesperson and earn themselves some money by recommending the site to their friends, other home schoolers and schools, the affiliate system should be available just shortly after the full launch of the site in 28 days time.

The “Christian Guide for Learning” is now in it’s final stages of conversion, from hardback to e-book format and will hopefully be released with the finished site in 28 days time, free sections of the book will be and are now available to all registered members, with 2 “pay for” sections available at around $25 USD each, or the whole book for around $40 USD, all to be released soon.

Music to Study By is a feature that’s already available to members who register now, a collection of music from the Baroque era, proven in recent studies to improve your concentration and learning abilities if you listen to it while studying.

World resources are offered in the form of “The CIA Factbook” and “World Leaders” directories, right there on the website, updated regularly the information can be invaluable to anyone trying to teach social studies or current affairs topics to children.

So pop on over to Zane Education and take a look for yourself, let us know here, or using the websites built in contact form what you think of it, suggestions you may have for more features etc, it’s all appreciated and after all the site was built with you in mind and it will continue to be that way, so suggestions are more imperative than just welcomed.

Although the site has not been up long and therefore various things are still not in place, eventually the site will have a donate button for visitors to use if they find the site helpful. This is not a company, but simply a few programmers using the site as a way to share their thoughts, code and advice on Linux, Open Source, the GPL, Programming and more.

If you find the site useful or helpful please let us know by using the comment boxes provided beneath the posts, that way we have some idea that people are using the site, finding it helpful, if there’s anything new we should be doing to help more or things that should simply be left off if no one finds them any use.

Keep checking back to this space in the near future, things are changing.