Tuesday, July 3, 2012

(Partial) Apologia

While I had hoped to make this blog free from any particular programming ideology (only FOSS, or only GNU/Linux software, or only Apple, or only Satan's licensed software), I have rapidly realized that there is one platform which I will never write about, Windows. I haven't had a Windows machine in almost a decade. My personal machines have been OS X, and the machines at the institutions I've been at have generally, but not always, been Linux. This has led me to ask many a summer research student to do one of the following:
  1. Install a Linux distribution on their own machine;
  2. Use the department's Linux machines;
  3. Figure everything out in Windows on his own;
  4. Find a new summer research advisor.
I have felt somewhat guilty about this, but I'm just not knowledgeable enough to know how to set up different software libraries within a Windows programming environment, how to connect that machine to a remote server, or much else beyond web browsing and email.

Despite this, I recognize that Windows, as desktop environment, has come a long way in ten years, and it is no longer synonymous with the blue screen of death.

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