Oh Dear - Scots police ditch Open Source

[DimPrawn]

And go back to Windows, Office etc. tee hee

Sensible chaps. Linux Sminux.

[AtW]

I suppose if someone told me to use shell to launch programs all day long rather than GUI I'd tell that person to feck off too.

In truth consumer grade Windows is a terrific value, however as soon as you start looking at server versions of Microsoft software you see that prices are way too high. Plus servers should not need nice GUI and awesome backwards compatibility with pre-historic x86 software.

[xoggoth]

I wonder what software would have been like had the Nazis taken over. Doubt Windows XP would be around, all those rounded bits look very decadent and non Aryan to me.

[Lucifer Box]

I wonder what software would have been like had the Nazis taken over. Doubt Windows XP would be around, all those rounded bits look very decadent and non Aryan to me.

In best SS-GB style I'm guessing Micro$oft would not exist and IBM would have gone on to dominate the PC O/S market. Maybe then we would all be looking at start screens like this perhaps?



It's IBM, so naturally their consultants couldn't even get the swastika right.

[AlfredJPruffock]

The Leith Police doth dismiss us ...

[AlfredJPruffock]

How the Devil are you LB ? Couldnt depart from this thread without bringing to your attention allegations of IBM's alleged cooperation with the Nazis in compiling lists of Jews and their addresses...


I was haunted by a question whose answer has long eluded historians. The Germans always had the lists of Jewish names. Suddenly, a squadron of grim-faced SS would burst into a city square and post a notice demanding those listed assemble the next day at the train station for deportation to the East.


But how did the Nazis get the lists?

For decades, no one has known. Few have asked.

The answer: IBM Germany's census operations and similar advanced people counting and registration technologies.


IBM was founded in 1898 by German inventor Herman Hollerith as a census tabulating company. Census was its business. But when IBM Germany formed its philosophical and technologic alliance with Nazi Germany, census and registration took on a new mission. IBM Germany invented the racial census-listing not just religious affiliation, but bloodline going back generations. This was the Nazi data lust. Not just to count the Jews - but to identify them.

People and asset registration was only one of the many uses Nazi Germany found for high-speed data sorters. Food allocation was organized around databases, allowing Germany to starve the Jews. Slave labor was identified, tracked, and managed largely through punch cards. Punch cards even made the trains run on time and cataloged their human cargo. German Railway, the Reichsbahn, Dehomag's biggest customer, dealt directly with senior management in Berlin. Dehomag maintained punch card installations at train depots across Germany, and eventually across all Europe.

How much did IBM know? Some of it IBM knew on a daily basis throughout the 12-year Reich. The worst of it IBM preferred not to know-"don't ask, don't tell" was the order of the day. Yet IBM NY officials, and frequently Watson's personal representatives, Harrison Chauncey and Werner Lier, were almost constantly in Berlin or Geneva, monitoring activities, ensuring that the parent company in New York was not cut out of any of the profits or business opportunities Nazism presented. When U.S. law made such direct contact illegal, IBM's Swiss office became the nexus, providing the New York office continuous information and credible deniability.

Certainly, the dynamics and context of IBM's alliance with Nazi Germany changed throughout the twelve-year Reich. I want the full story understood in context. Skipping around in the book will only lead to flawed and erroneous conclusions. So if you intend to skim, or rely on selected sections, please do not read the book at all. Make no mistake. The Holocaust would still have occurred without IBM. To think otherwise is more than wrong. The Holocaust would have proceeded-and often did proceed-with simple bullets, death marches, and massacres based on pen and paper persecution. But there is reason to examine the fantastical numbers Hitler achieved in murdering so many millions so swiftly, and identify the crucial role of automation and technology. Accountability is needed.

What made me demand answers to the unasked questions about IBM and the Holocaust? I confronted the reality of IBM's involvement one day in 1993 in Washington at the United States Holocaust Museum.


There, in the very first exhibit, an IBM Hollerith D-11 card sorting machine-riddled with circuits, slots, and wires-was prominently displayed. Clearly affixed to the machine's front panel glistened an IBM nameplate. It has since been replaced with a smaller IBM machine because so many people congregated around it, creating a bottleneck.


The exhibit explained little more than that IBM was responsible for organizing the census of 1933 that first identified the Jews. IBM had been tight- lipped about its involvement with Nazi Germany. So although 15 million people, including most major Holocaust experts, have seen the display, and in spite of the best efforts of leading Museum historians, little more was understood about this provocative display other than the brief curator's description at the exhibit and a few pages of supportive research.

I still remember the moment, staring at the machine for an hour. I turned to my mother and father who accompanied me to the museum that day and promised I would discover more.

My parents are Holocaust survivors, uprooted from their homes in Poland. My mother escaped from a boxcar en route to Treblinka, was shot, and then buried in a shallow mass grave. My father had already run away from a guarded line of Jews and discovered her leg protruding from the snow. By moonlight and by courage, these two escapees survived against the cold, the hunger, and the Reich. Standing next to me five decades later, their image within the reflection of the exhibit glass, shrapnel and bullet fragments permanently embedded in their bodies, my parents could only express confusion.

But I had other questions. The Nazis had my parents' names. How?

What was the connection of this gleaming black, beige and silver machine, squatting silently in this dimly lit museum, to the millions of Jews and other Europeans who were murdered-and murdered not just in a chaotic split-second as a casualty of war, but in a grotesque and protracted twelve- year campaign of highly organized humiliation, dehumanization, and then ultimately extermination.

For years after that chance discovery, I was shadowed by the realization that IBM was somehow involved in the Holocaust in technologic ways that had not yet been pieced together. Dots were everywhere. The dots needed to be connected.

Knowing that International Business Machines has always billed itself as a "solutions" company, I understood that IBM does not merely wait for governmental customers to call. IBM has amassed its fortune and reputation precisely because it generally anticipates governmental and corporate needs even before they develop, and then offers, designs, and delivers customized solutions-even if it must execute those technologic solutions with its own staff and equipment. IBM has done so for countless government agencies, corporate giants, and industrial associations.

For years I promised myself I would one day answer the question: how many solutions did IBM provide to Nazi Germany? I knew about the initial solution: the census. Just how far did the solutions go?

[zeitghost]

It ain't just IBM.

Those nice trucks were supplied by an offshoot of GM...

[zeitghost]

A bit like "Ein Reich, ein volk, ein windoze"... LB?

[Churchill]

A bit like "Ein Reich, ein volk, ein windoze"... LB?

Don't forget Krupps, they're still around!

[zeitghost]

I wonder if they've still got those funny factory chimneys with the internal rifling like they had between the wars...