I know most folks hate computers and just want to get whatever they're used to so they can get their work done with the minimum amount of thought. For those people shelling out the money to get legal with Microsoft is probably the best way to go.
But there are a lot of Windows users out there, let's call them "cheapskates," who can't see the sense in paying twice as much for software as they paid for their entire computer. I bet Microsoft's cracking down on piracy will drive a lot of users to Linux. Especially as they learn that Linux is so polished now that it's as easy to install and use as Windows. And it doesn't have to cost a dime. No piracy checks. No phoning home behind your back, no locking you into proprietary file formats. No spyware. No viruses. No other unacceptable bullshit.
There are many excellent Linux distributions, but I happen to use Ubuntu. It's free, it's fast, it's stable, it's secure. It's just better. XP is a bloated, creaking pig. How can it be worth anything when the superior alternative is free?
I found Bob Frankston's argument in Cringely's column interesting:
The problem, to Bob's way of thinking, isn't the Internet per se, but the direction powerful political and business forces are attempting to take it. Part of this can be seen in last week's column on Net Neutrality, but Bob takes it further - a LOT further - to a point where it becomes logically clear that making almost any regulation specifically to hinder OR HELP the Internet can only make things worse. And by making it worse I mean inhibit in a severe way the growth of human knowledge, culture, and economic development. It's just a choice between freedom and totalitarianism, simple as that. To Bob the issues surrounding Net Neutrality come down to billability and infrastructure. While saying they are doing us favors, ISPs are really offering us services they can bill for. Nothing is aimed at helping us, while everything is aimed at creating a billable event.
Vinge makes two opening assumptions: no grand physical disaster occurs, and today's computing and communications trends continue. He added a third trend: "The great conspiracy against human freedom." As novelist Doris Lessing has observed, barons on opposite sides of the river don't need to be in cahoots if their interests coincide. In our case, defence, homeland security, financial crime enforcement, police, tax collectors and intellectual property rights holders offer reasons to want to control the hardware we use.
My guess is that there are more Windows oriented viruses/worms circulating the Internet.
Undoubtedly there are. And Microsoft's PR flacks, who apparently decided which vulnerabilities are labeled as critical in TFA (very few), also argue that Windows is attacked more because it's more popular. By that reasoning Apache should have a much worse security record than IIS since it's at least twice as popular. But if anything it's the other way around. The simple truth is your basic cracker/delinquent types are going to go after the low hanging fruit first. They attack Windows so much because it's easier.
Replace the hard disk with a Compact Flash to IDE adapter, use passive cooler for the CPU and basically you're set. You don't need P4 to run a firewall. Something like VIA's C3 will do. Setup like that doesn't draw much power, so passive PSU cooling becomes an option.
Fine, but after spending your money on mods you'll have something very close to my Motorola wr850g that you can pick up on ebay for less than $30 and then flash with dd-wrt. Ipcop is great, I've been running it on my lan for years, but c'mon.
Of course it does. The 'blue' interface is for wireless.
I stand corrected. WAP support is included as of v.1.4. However you can get an entire linux-compatible router (see above) for about the same price as an access point, so why bother?
An argueably better and entirely free alternative to Smoothwall is IPCop. Definitely a product worth checking out as there are no "limited" versions and it supports a lot of interesting add ons such as SquidGuard, a midnight commander clone and a time based billing system.
This is very true, and in fact I'm running ipcop 1.4.x on my home network right now. It's been running great on my old pentium for a couple of years and is amazingly powerful and reliable. It does pretty much everything you could possibly want in a firewall. However:
It makes noise and uses more power than a dedicated router.
It doesn't do wireless.
My wife wants to move her computer to a location that will be very hard to get to with wired ethernet--brick walls, tile floor. So I finally bit the bullet and picked up a Motorola wr850g router from ebay. It has the same memory and chipset as the pre-v5 wrt54g (and is therefore dd-wrt and openwrt compatible) but can be had for less than $30.
According to the hardware compatibility guide at openwrt.org there are a lot of different routers that have the same chipset and memory as the v4 wrt54g. I found a new in the box Motorola wkt850 networking kit on ebay which also includes the wr850g router and a usb network adapter. If you don't care about the adapter you can find the router alone for as little as $25.
The deals are out there. You just have to know what you're looking for.
# fetchmail + procmail + mutt + spamassassin + msmtp: No-nonsense mail reading and sending.
Interesting! I have nearly the same setup, though I use postfix to alias user@localhost to my external email address and smtp-auth to my ISPs outbound mailserver. It is overkill, but I know postfix fairly well and it's pretty easy to set up. If I was starting from scratch though I'd definitely use something like msmtp.
# Firefox
* Adblock: Saves an astonishing amount of screen real estate.
Even better is to use the Adblock Filterset-G Updater in conjunction with Adblock. The filters update themselves automatically. I very rarely ever see an ad, and even better I never have to bother writing my own filters.
For those who use gnome, gnome-terminal has tabs! Ctrl-Shift-T and open as many as you want. For some reason it took me a year or two to discover this. I typically have a couple of tabs open, including a root window. It's great for quickly checking logs or for installing software or whathaveyou, and it's much neater than having multiple windows open all over the place.
Microsoft isn't trying to lock out competing technologies (free software) or lock us out of the hardware for the benefit of intellectual property "rightsholders." Oh no, those are accidents. They're just trying to protect us from viruses. You know, like for our own good and stuff.
Want to see Microsoft's vision of the PC? Take a look at the Xbox. Of course it will be possible to run Linux on newer TPM enabled systems, but then a lot of digital content won't work. And ordinary people won't have the energy or know-how to get unapproved software running.
It doesn't matter much that geeky features like WinFS or Monad are getting dumped. They were never the main point anyway.
WiFi is becoming universally available anyway because the vast majority of folks don't know how to secure their routers. Naturally I thought this was a very bad thing at first and when I configured networks for my non-techie friends I made sure to turn all the encryption on.
But lately I've been looking at WiFi as more of a commons. There are water fountains everywhere, why shouldn't there be WiFi? It's only going to get cheaper and more plentiful, and it's hard to imagine businesses putting a lot of money into authentication, metering, etc., when there are a half dozen open connections in the area to choose from.
But if we all offer it when we have it, it'll be there for everyone.
First of all, it's a waste of time to get all bug-eyed about politics. Most folks barely know how to turn their machines on and are suspicious of any kind of change.
The place I last worked I was responsible for the IT budget, such as it was, and like any rational person I used the money on hardware--actual stuff--as much as possible. Shiny, quiet computers with lots of ram, mirrored RAID drives on the server, a zoomy networked laser printer that cut the cost of consumables. Stuff like that.
Everyone got Thunderbird for mail. Everyone got OpenOffice except the owner, who did these baroque spreadsheets in Excel that wouldn't run in OO.o without a lot of screwing around.
The biggest hit was showing IE and Firefox w/Adblock running side by side. Again no mention of politics or anything. No ads or pop-ups either.
What software did I pay for? OEM Windows SBS 2003 ($450), a half dozen OEM copies of XP Pro ($140 per), Grisoft antivirus ($35 each for 2 years), one OEM Office XP ($70). About $1600 all in, a lot less than it could have been.
I couldn't really do linux on the server because the owner knew I was quitting and he felt like he'd have more of a chance with a familiar looking interface. In actual fact administering SBS probably isn't much easier than linux, but I didn't push it.
It's just not possible to shove your own software preferences down other people's throats. But now there are a few more happy users of OO.o, various Mozilla products, etc, and an owner that'll balk at shelling out big bucks for a $0.25 CD that'll only run on one machine.
Use free software where it makes sense. Gradually things will change.
Any sex offender seriously contemplating raping and killing a child will not hesitate to chop off the monitoring bracelet and go underground. Period.
This is a ridiculous law. But it gives a scared public the warm fuzzies, and some politicians get to look good on TV for a while.
It's like the Schaivo thing. Douchebag Tom DeLay and all those other political flaks were just looking to score brownie points with the public. Call me a cynic, but I doubt anyone in Washington looked at it any other way.
My work computer is an nt4 server box which serves as the office PDC and which I also use to do Quickbooks related stuff. The PDC stuff is no problem thanks to Samba, but some of the other people I work with only know Quickbooks and are otherwise totally computer illiterate. There is no possibility of switching to some alternate accounting package.
Also, Microsoft has killed support for nt server a couple of months ago to drive sales of new licenses. We're behind a firewall, I have every service turned off that I don't need, I never use IE or OE, but at some point I'm going to have to move off nt while still running Quickbooks. Normally that would mean a new version of windows, but by the time you factor in a license for w2k3 server plus client licenses and new hardware to run it on, it's expensive as hell.
In addition to the high cost I just don't trust Windows' stability or security. I've used unix/linux for 15 years or so, so I can tweak it if something isn't working like I want. It's not perfect but I believe it's more stable and secure than windows.
Quickbooks is a huge app in the small business sector, and right now thousands of small businesses are trying to figure out how to deal with the end of support for nt. Now that it supports Quickbooks, Crossover Office will probably enable a lot of migrations off nt for shops with access to linux expertise. Not to mention generate sales for the folks at Codeweavers. A smart move if you ask me.
It's apt that matters, not whether the package format is.deb or.rpm. I've been using apt-rpm on redhat 9 for a couple of years now using four repositories, fedoralegacy for OS updates, and freshrpms, Dag, and atrpms for various goodies. I apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade just like on debian with no dependency problems whatsoever. If I need extra packages for something I'm installing, apt tells me about them and offers to download them for me. Works great.
Apt for rpm is about the best advertisement for debian-like systems there is. I'm getting off redhat after 7 or 8 years, and I like apt so much that I'm switching to Ubuntu.
While not perfect, the LPI cert is the best imho. It's vendor neutral, inexpensive, and doesn't arbitrarily expire for the purpose of making money on re-certs.
I actually have the LPIC-1 certification. The test itself was surprisingly hard for an entry level linux certification, but fair. I read somewhere that the failure rate is near 60%, so don't expect to just walk in and ace it.
I wouldn't bother with the Linux+ exam. While it might bamboozle some HR departments, I wonder if it's hard enough to demonstrate any real competence with linux. The only CompTIA certification I have is the A+ (paid for by a former employer) and it was a *total* joke. A monkey could pass it.
I have personal email going back 10 years or so. I'm also on a couple of high volume email lists and get ~500 emails/day.
I keep everything in mbox format. I archive high volume mboxes with archivemail, so everything older than 90 days gets gzipped. Procmail sorts all my mail, spammassassin strips out the garbage, etc.
I use mutt as my email client. It's as powerful as any other program I've used, and because it's text mode I can ssh into my home machine and check my mail from anywhere.
I suppose this is somewhat of a stoneage type setup, but I've been using it for years and I've never seen a reason to upgrade.
There are a lot of great stories on Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org site about the early days of the Mac, including many of the inevitable personality conflicts that arise when you have a lot of folks working under a deadline to get a huge project shipped. A fascinating site - I read it end to end when I came across it.
My sense is that while Jef had the original vision for the Mac it was Burrell Smith who did much of the actual implementation. If the Mac must have a father, Burrell might be the better choice.
There's really nothing on my computer worth stealing, but the thought of blowing away my entire setup and starting from scratch gives me hives. So I have an old pentium running a dedicated linux firewall with NAT to the internal network. Everything is blocked, with the exception of ssh which is forwarded to my linux box inside the network. There are no wireless connections.
I have an iptables firewall running on my personal linux machine, and I use the ssh AllowUsers directive to only allow remote logins from my username. Other than that there's nothing running that's visible from the outside. I also check for security updates every day. Naturally I also have a strong root password and never log in as root unless I'm doing something that requires it.
I could get a lot more paranoid than that, but I think having a strong dedicated firewall, not running services I don't need, etc. is enough to keep me protected from the vast majority of malware out there. That, and not running windows...;-).
So Redhat has this great plan to monetize its relationship with its users. It'll split its line into RHEL, which is being faithfully copied by the free alternatives CentOS and Whitebox, and Fedora, a time based distribution meant to be a testbed for future versions of RHEL. Fantastic. I guess I'm supposed to be a beta tester for some enterprise version of linux that I can't/won't pay for.
So the high end stuff is going to get copied about 8 minutes after its released. And completely free, stable, excellent linux distributions like ubuntu, gentoo, debian, et al, are available that are not meant to be some sort of farm team for the real distribution. How did it not occur to the powers that be at Redhat that their base would drift away to other distributions?
Take myself. I've used Redhat since v5.2, but I'm switching to ubuntu. It's so fast, so stable, it's free, there's a great upgrade path, etc. What do I need Redhat/Fedora for?
1) with their record of bad faith toward their own customers and their ongoing security lapses, most knowledgeable end users would not trust Microsoft to manage their personal information, and
2) with their record of bad faith toward their own business partners and their ongoing security lapses, online retailers wouldn't relish the extra burden of sending a monthly tithe to Microsoft.
Luckily Microsoft makes bazillions off Windows and Office and can throw a couple billion here and there on various schemes--gaming, set top boxes, what have you. They know as well as anyone that the commoditization of operating systems and productivity software is underway and they won't be able to maintain their margins forever. If they don't find a cash cow soon they'll be forced to (horrors!) make less money.
What corporations mean by "support" is one or two OSes that are standardized enough for the bottom-end support people to walk the users through simple scripts, i.e. "ensure that the computer is plugged in and turned on, click start, click setting, click network and dialup connections, etc..."
The last Verizon tech I talked to didn't know what dhcp was. There's no way these people could deal with something as varied *nix, and frankly you don't want them to. If the hardware works and the protocols are supported you're good to go. If you have a problem reboot the modem. You won't get much else in the way of useful information of the support staff anyway, even if you are running windows.
On a level playing field free software will inevitably wipe the floor with proprietary software. At some point linux or openoffice or whatever becomes good enough and Microsoft's proprietary stuff starts to look too expensive both in terms of money and lock-in. Once alternative file formats and protocols become commonplace Microsoft will have lost much of its power in the marketplace.
To combat this eventuality Microsoft and the entertainment industry push to build DRM into the hardware - CPUs, motherboards, sound systems, all of it. This is really what Longhorn is all about. There will be a thicket of patents walling off the technology, and of course the licenses will not be compatible with free software. Naturally it will be difficult to impossible to get this hardware to be fully operational without access to the specs.
Obviously, most people in the industry will understand what Microsoft is up to and many will not want to go along. So there'll be attempts to sponsor legislation mandating the use of these technologies. I'm sure you can imagine all the FUD from the {RI,MP}AA and their many front groups.
Will Microsoft get away with closing the PC hardware platform? I don't know. But this will be the final showdown between free and proprietary software.
For the record, I think this would be very bad for America.
It is obvious to me that linux has reached critical mass: there's massive developer interest, LAMP is huge on the server side, and it's getting easy enough to use that unsophisticated users can be productive with it.
Look at linux today, and compare it to say five years ago. Then imagine that rate of improvement projected five years into the future. There's no way Microsoft can be competitive long-term on a purely open hardware platform.
Ergo, Microsoft's only real chance of stopping the juggernaut is to own the hardware. You can be sure they're making the rounds to all the vendors right now. In my more optimistic moments I tell myself that it's already too late. But I'm worried. You should be too.
I don't know about you guys, but I have a closet full of working older machines that I just can't seem to bring myself to throw out. My home firewall is a 486/100 ram running the ipcop firewall distro, which I've found to be very stable and powerful. It's also very quiet, since there's no fan on the cpu. I imagine a Linksys would use less power, but the 486 was free and it would take a long time in power savings to make up for the difference in cost.
Obviously a 486 isn't going to cut it for something like a MythTV box, but there are a lot of good barebones mini-itx machines out there that can be put together for not much money.
I've used PC-based stuff and linux for a long time and see no reason to change. It's just a matter of matching the hardware and linux version to the task at hand.
Like a lot of the/. crowd, I do tech support for an extended group of family and friends. Most of these folks have no idea that leaving an unfirewalled unpatched win98 machine sitting on a broadband connection is a bad thing. All they know is it doesn't work anymore and can I fix it?
If they're on a broadband connection I get them a hardware firewall. I don't even ask, I just buy it and hand them the bill. I also enable automatic updates. I generally use free tools like ad-aware and spybot, tiny firewall, a free av scanner if they're too cheap, etc.
In what has to be the most painful bit for them, I give the Inevitable Security Lecture. Their attention span being what it is, I only hit the high points. I point to the Windows Update icon, explain what critical updates are, explain what spyware is (and how to use ad-aware & spybot), etc. It's probably a waste of time, but you never know.
There you have it. I've been through it over and over. Like I said, old hat.
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I know most folks hate computers and just want to get whatever they're used to so they can get their work done with the minimum amount of thought. For those people shelling out the money to get legal with Microsoft is probably the best way to go.
But there are a lot of Windows users out there, let's call them "cheapskates," who can't see the sense in paying twice as much for software as they paid for their entire computer. I bet Microsoft's cracking down on piracy will drive a lot of users to Linux. Especially as they learn that Linux is so polished now that it's as easy to install and use as Windows. And it doesn't have to cost a dime. No piracy checks. No phoning home behind your back, no locking you into proprietary file formats. No spyware. No viruses. No other unacceptable bullshit.
There are many excellent Linux distributions, but I happen to use Ubuntu. It's free, it's fast, it's stable, it's secure. It's just better. XP is a bloated, creaking pig. How can it be worth anything when the superior alternative is free?
It makes noise and uses more power than a dedicated router.
It doesn't do wireless.
My wife wants to move her computer to a location that will be very hard to get to with wired ethernet--brick walls, tile floor. So I finally bit the bullet and picked up a Motorola wr850g router from ebay. It has the same memory and chipset as the pre-v5 wrt54g (and is therefore dd-wrt and openwrt compatible) but can be had for less than $30.
The deals are out there. You just have to know what you're looking for.
I'll add a couple of my own:
Vim! Because it's VI, only better!
For those who use gnome, gnome-terminal has tabs! Ctrl-Shift-T and open as many as you want. For some reason it took me a year or two to discover this. I typically have a couple of tabs open, including a root window. It's great for quickly checking logs or for installing software or whathaveyou, and it's much neater than having multiple windows open all over the place.
Microsoft isn't trying to lock out competing technologies (free software) or lock us out of the hardware for the benefit of intellectual property "rightsholders." Oh no, those are accidents. They're just trying to protect us from viruses. You know, like for our own good and stuff.
Want to see Microsoft's vision of the PC? Take a look at the Xbox. Of course it will be possible to run Linux on newer TPM enabled systems, but then a lot of digital content won't work. And ordinary people won't have the energy or know-how to get unapproved software running.
It doesn't matter much that geeky features like WinFS or Monad are getting dumped. They were never the main point anyway.
WiFi is becoming universally available anyway because the vast majority of folks don't know how to secure their routers. Naturally I thought this was a very bad thing at first and when I configured networks for my non-techie friends I made sure to turn all the encryption on.
But lately I've been looking at WiFi as more of a commons. There are water fountains everywhere, why shouldn't there be WiFi? It's only going to get cheaper and more plentiful, and it's hard to imagine businesses putting a lot of money into authentication, metering, etc., when there are a half dozen open connections in the area to choose from.
But if we all offer it when we have it, it'll be there for everyone.
First of all, it's a waste of time to get all bug-eyed about politics. Most folks barely know how to turn their machines on and are suspicious of any kind of change.
The place I last worked I was responsible for the IT budget, such as it was, and like any rational person I used the money on hardware--actual stuff--as much as possible. Shiny, quiet computers with lots of ram, mirrored RAID drives on the server, a zoomy networked laser printer that cut the cost of consumables. Stuff like that.
Everyone got Thunderbird for mail. Everyone got OpenOffice except the owner, who did these baroque spreadsheets in Excel that wouldn't run in OO.o without a lot of screwing around.
The biggest hit was showing IE and Firefox w/Adblock running side by side. Again no mention of politics or anything. No ads or pop-ups either.
What software did I pay for? OEM Windows SBS 2003 ($450), a half dozen OEM copies of XP Pro ($140 per), Grisoft antivirus ($35 each for 2 years), one OEM Office XP ($70). About $1600 all in, a lot less than it could have been.
I couldn't really do linux on the server because the owner knew I was quitting and he felt like he'd have more of a chance with a familiar looking interface. In actual fact administering SBS probably isn't much easier than linux, but I didn't push it.
It's just not possible to shove your own software preferences down other people's throats. But now there are a few more happy users of OO.o, various Mozilla products, etc, and an owner that'll balk at shelling out big bucks for a $0.25 CD that'll only run on one machine.
Use free software where it makes sense. Gradually things will change.
Any sex offender seriously contemplating raping and killing a child will not hesitate to chop off the monitoring bracelet and go underground. Period.
This is a ridiculous law. But it gives a scared public the warm fuzzies, and some politicians get to look good on TV for a while.
It's like the Schaivo thing. Douchebag Tom DeLay and all those other political flaks were just looking to score brownie points with the public. Call me a cynic, but I doubt anyone in Washington looked at it any other way.
My work computer is an nt4 server box which serves as the office PDC and which I also use to do Quickbooks related stuff. The PDC stuff is no problem thanks to Samba, but some of the other people I work with only know Quickbooks and are otherwise totally computer illiterate. There is no possibility of switching to some alternate accounting package.
Also, Microsoft has killed support for nt server a couple of months ago to drive sales of new licenses. We're behind a firewall, I have every service turned off that I don't need, I never use IE or OE, but at some point I'm going to have to move off nt while still running Quickbooks. Normally that would mean a new version of windows, but by the time you factor in a license for w2k3 server plus client licenses and new hardware to run it on, it's expensive as hell.
In addition to the high cost I just don't trust Windows' stability or security. I've used unix/linux for 15 years or so, so I can tweak it if something isn't working like I want. It's not perfect but I believe it's more stable and secure than windows.
Quickbooks is a huge app in the small business sector, and right now thousands of small businesses are trying to figure out how to deal with the end of support for nt. Now that it supports Quickbooks, Crossover Office will probably enable a lot of migrations off nt for shops with access to linux expertise. Not to mention generate sales for the folks at Codeweavers. A smart move if you ask me.
It's apt that matters, not whether the package format is .deb or .rpm. I've been using apt-rpm on redhat 9 for a couple of years now using four repositories, fedoralegacy for OS updates, and freshrpms, Dag, and atrpms for various goodies. I apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade just like on debian with no dependency problems whatsoever. If I need extra packages for something I'm installing, apt tells me about them and offers to download them for me. Works great.
Apt for rpm is about the best advertisement for debian-like systems there is. I'm getting off redhat after 7 or 8 years, and I like apt so much that I'm switching to Ubuntu.
While not perfect, the LPI cert is the best imho. It's vendor neutral, inexpensive, and doesn't arbitrarily expire for the purpose of making money on re-certs.
I actually have the LPIC-1 certification. The test itself was surprisingly hard for an entry level linux certification, but fair. I read somewhere that the failure rate is near 60%, so don't expect to just walk in and ace it.
I wouldn't bother with the Linux+ exam. While it might bamboozle some HR departments, I wonder if it's hard enough to demonstrate any real competence with linux. The only CompTIA certification I have is the A+ (paid for by a former employer) and it was a *total* joke. A monkey could pass it.
I have personal email going back 10 years or so. I'm also on a couple of high volume email lists and get ~500 emails/day.
I keep everything in mbox format. I archive high volume mboxes with archivemail, so everything older than 90 days gets gzipped. Procmail sorts all my mail, spammassassin strips out the garbage, etc.
I use mutt as my email client. It's as powerful as any other program I've used, and because it's text mode I can ssh into my home machine and check my mail from anywhere.
I suppose this is somewhat of a stoneage type setup, but I've been using it for years and I've never seen a reason to upgrade.
There are a lot of great stories on Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org site about the early days of the Mac, including many of the inevitable personality conflicts that arise when you have a lot of folks working under a deadline to get a huge project shipped. A fascinating site - I read it end to end when I came across it.
My sense is that while Jef had the original vision for the Mac it was Burrell Smith who did much of the actual implementation. If the Mac must have a father, Burrell might be the better choice.
Here's the funniest take on the whole thing.
There's really nothing on my computer worth stealing, but the thought of blowing away my entire setup and starting from scratch gives me hives. So I have an old pentium running a dedicated linux firewall with NAT to the internal network. Everything is blocked, with the exception of ssh which is forwarded to my linux box inside the network. There are no wireless connections.
;-).
I have an iptables firewall running on my personal linux machine, and I use the ssh AllowUsers directive to only allow remote logins from my username. Other than that there's nothing running that's visible from the outside. I also check for security updates every day. Naturally I also have a strong root password and never log in as root unless I'm doing something that requires it.
I could get a lot more paranoid than that, but I think having a strong dedicated firewall, not running services I don't need, etc. is enough to keep me protected from the vast majority of malware out there. That, and not running windows...
So Redhat has this great plan to monetize its relationship with its users. It'll split its line into RHEL, which is being faithfully copied by the free alternatives CentOS and Whitebox, and Fedora, a time based distribution meant to be a testbed for future versions of RHEL. Fantastic. I guess I'm supposed to be a beta tester for some enterprise version of linux that I can't/won't pay for.
So the high end stuff is going to get copied about 8 minutes after its released. And completely free, stable, excellent linux distributions like ubuntu, gentoo, debian, et al, are available that are not meant to be some sort of farm team for the real distribution. How did it not occur to the powers that be at Redhat that their base would drift away to other distributions?
Take myself. I've used Redhat since v5.2, but I'm switching to ubuntu. It's so fast, so stable, it's free, there's a great upgrade path, etc. What do I need Redhat/Fedora for?
Somehow Microsoft failed to consider that
1) with their record of bad faith toward their own customers and their ongoing security lapses, most knowledgeable end users would not trust Microsoft to manage their personal information, and
2) with their record of bad faith toward their own business partners and their ongoing security lapses, online retailers wouldn't relish the extra burden of sending a monthly tithe to Microsoft.
Luckily Microsoft makes bazillions off Windows and Office and can throw a couple billion here and there on various schemes--gaming, set top boxes, what have you. They know as well as anyone that the commoditization of operating systems and productivity software is underway and they won't be able to maintain their margins forever. If they don't find a cash cow soon they'll be forced to (horrors!) make less money.
What corporations mean by "support" is one or two OSes that are standardized enough for the bottom-end support people to walk the users through simple scripts, i.e. "ensure that the computer is plugged in and turned on, click start, click setting, click network and dialup connections, etc..."
The last Verizon tech I talked to didn't know what dhcp was. There's no way these people could deal with something as varied *nix, and frankly you don't want them to. If the hardware works and the protocols are supported you're good to go. If you have a problem reboot the modem. You won't get much else in the way of useful information of the support staff anyway, even if you are running windows.
On a level playing field free software will inevitably wipe the floor with proprietary software. At some point linux or openoffice or whatever becomes good enough and Microsoft's proprietary stuff starts to look too expensive both in terms of money and lock-in. Once alternative file formats and protocols become commonplace Microsoft will have lost much of its power in the marketplace.
To combat this eventuality Microsoft and the entertainment industry push to build DRM into the hardware - CPUs, motherboards, sound systems, all of it. This is really what Longhorn is all about. There will be a thicket of patents walling off the technology, and of course the licenses will not be compatible with free software. Naturally it will be difficult to impossible to get this hardware to be fully operational without access to the specs.
Obviously, most people in the industry will understand what Microsoft is up to and many will not want to go along. So there'll be attempts to sponsor legislation mandating the use of these technologies. I'm sure you can imagine all the FUD from the {RI,MP}AA and their many front groups.
Will Microsoft get away with closing the PC hardware platform? I don't know. But this will be the final showdown between free and proprietary software.
For the record, I think this would be very bad for America.
It is obvious to me that linux has reached critical mass: there's massive developer interest, LAMP is huge on the server side, and it's getting easy enough to use that unsophisticated users can be productive with it.
Look at linux today, and compare it to say five years ago. Then imagine that rate of improvement projected five years into the future. There's no way Microsoft can be competitive long-term on a purely open hardware platform.
Ergo, Microsoft's only real chance of stopping the juggernaut is to own the hardware. You can be sure they're making the rounds to all the vendors right now. In my more optimistic moments I tell myself that it's already too late. But I'm worried. You should be too.
I don't know about you guys, but I have a closet full of working older machines that I just can't seem to bring myself to throw out. My home firewall is a 486/100 ram running the ipcop firewall distro, which I've found to be very stable and powerful. It's also very quiet, since there's no fan on the cpu. I imagine a Linksys would use less power, but the 486 was free and it would take a long time in power savings to make up for the difference in cost.
Obviously a 486 isn't going to cut it for something like a MythTV box, but there are a lot of good barebones mini-itx machines out there that can be put together for not much money.
I've used PC-based stuff and linux for a long time and see no reason to change. It's just a matter of matching the hardware and linux version to the task at hand.
Like a lot of the /. crowd, I do tech support for an extended group of family and friends. Most of these folks have no idea that leaving an unfirewalled unpatched win98 machine sitting on a broadband connection is a bad thing. All they know is it doesn't work anymore and can I fix it?
If they're on a broadband connection I get them a hardware firewall. I don't even ask, I just buy it and hand them the bill. I also enable automatic updates. I generally use free tools like ad-aware and spybot, tiny firewall, a free av scanner if they're too cheap, etc.
In what has to be the most painful bit for them, I give the Inevitable Security Lecture. Their attention span being what it is, I only hit the high points. I point to the Windows Update icon, explain what critical updates are, explain what spyware is (and how to use ad-aware & spybot), etc. It's probably a waste of time, but you never know.
There you have it. I've been through it over and over. Like I said, old hat.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win - Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948.
OO.o has officially made it to stage 3. Congratulations to all OpenOffice.org developers who have made such fantastic progress in such a short time.