“I had been ignoring the reports, linked from most everywhere
last week, that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had announced
that it would forbid the use of the Windows 2000 operating system
on government-owned computer, and require the installation of Linux
instead.”
“I was successful in keeping out of this controversy until a
friend forwarded me the text of the report, and I finally deigned
to read it. What I read only served to confirm my preconceived
opinion that the story was bogus — so I poked around the Net,
hoping to find better information.”
“But all of the stories I found seemed to cite just one
source: a news story from a Chinese newspaper that was not
hyperlinked to any of the reports that I saw initially, nor
easily found in search engines. The stories were all short, and all
had the same details — probably because they all traced back to
the same original newspaper story. The stories all cited unnamed
sources.”