What is up with these punks? I just re-read the second link in the article. I remember this topic from a little while ago. However this quote from the article has just hit me:
the MPAA is working on new legislation to broaden the FCC's power
Huh? Since when did the MPAA become part of the legislative body? Where in the constitution does it grants rights to the MPAA to write legislation? Am I the only one who thinks this if freaking insane? How can our "representatives" just sit back and "pass the ball" to big corps to write their own laws? What the hell happened to the USA?
I think it is. It would stop all the scum-bag lawyers from bringing frivilous suit. A loser pays system would actually be only for the party bringing the suit to trial. If I sue you and lose, I pay your legal bills. If I sue you and win, you do not have to pay my legal bills.
Because big corps can intimidate people or smaller corps if it is not. How many people or small companies would be willing to risk legal costs against a big corp?
One thing I hate about the USA is how the legal systems works. A friend of mine is from Denmark and she has mentioned this many times to me. According to her, in Denmark the loser pays the court fees. If we had "loser pays" here in the USA, it would make a huge difference in the legal system. Most big companies would be very leary to sue if they knew they would have to pay legal fees. As it is now. Big corps can just intimidate smaller companies with legal costs.
Spell Checking under Linux and even MS windows creats a custom dic in the users ~ directory. So under Linux and MS Windows, you just have to add your wives name ONCE. Any application out there that doesn't suppor the platforms native spell-checking is just broken.
It is no different for Mac OS X. I can write a Mac OS X app that tries to do spell check on its own.
So Max OS X is not any more simple for spell checking than Linux. It is not any more simple than MS Windows for spell checking. Well, for MS Windows you do have to spend a few hundred bucks to get the MS Office suite to have it available system-wide for good spell checking. So I will agree with you that for spell checking, Mac OS X users have it _much_ better than MS Windows users that have to pay a few hundred bucks to have a system-wide framework for spell-checkign. However, Linux users have also had this for many years now.
Well, I agree with everything you say. I just said it on a more "user-friendly" level. However, I did not think about parody. IMO, parody is very important. However, parody does need to be "spelled-out" in law very clearly. For example, should I be able to take the nations top #1 song and just add a fart sound every 20 seconds and sell it and call it a "parody"?
So then you agree with the MPAA/RIAA in the prosecution of file sharers.
Nope, not at all. Where did you come up with that? Let us look at the 2 examples I gave.
1. The golden rule should be that you cannot profit off of a copyright with out the copyrights holders permission.
How does the average file-sharer financially profit off of sharing a copyrighted work?
2. Large-scale distribution should be illegal.
The average file-sharer is not involved in large-scale sharing. Now, if there is someone out there that is sharing 1,000 songs, movies or any other copyrighted material, then IMO, they should go down. If you have a bunch of copyrighted material and you let a few hundred users download it, then you should have to pay some fine. I don't agree with the @ss-hats at the **AA. They want you to go to JAIL while they don't have to go to jail for price-fixing. I think it is _very_ stupid for someone to have to go to jail for a civil financial issue. The **AA can just use civil law to get back any _real_ loss from the big-time file sharers. I think it is _really_ sad when the **AA sues some little kid or an old lady for sharing a few songs. There are a lot of bigger fish out there that are doing the real damage.
I personally won't care or feel for the **AA cause until they stop being @ss-holes and destroying young people financially.
The RI/MP/AA just lie, lie and lie about how they are suffering! However, it is funny how _good_ music and movies can make such a sh!t load of money. Star Wars III broke pretty much every box-office record you can think of, yet the MPAA is trying to claim how a few people sharing a piss-poor version of Star Wars III is "killing the magic".
I think you are confusing distribution with Fair Use. Fair Use allows you to share to some extent, but not to distribute.
For example. You come over my house and I pull out a new DVD of Spider Man 2 that I just bought. Should I not put the DVD in and play it until you run out to the store and buy your own copy? No. Fair Use allows you to watch it with me. Now, if I set up a big projector on my property and sold tickets for $2 and had 100 people come and watch it, that would be a different story.
If you come over my house and look at some of the paintings I have, should I require a payment from you and send it to the copyright holder? What if I happen to be playing a music CD that I bought. Should I require you to put your fingers in your ears or charge you for every second that listen to the song?
The movie and music industries have been getting to draconian here in the USA. They have been able to just buy up any law they want. There use to be balance with copyright and Fair Use, however that has long since been bought away by the movie and music industries.
It really is not that difficult to find balance with copyright and fair use. 1. The golden rule should be that you cannot profit off of a copyright with out the copyrights holders permission. This would make it illegal for me to download a music CD and burn my own copies for people at $2 each. 2. Large-scale distribution should be illegal. That can be a little bit of a grey area, however it would not be hard to put in the laws that large-scale distribution is defined as thus "...". Maybe you cannot share a copyrighted work with more than 10 people or something. Or maybe you cannot share a copyrighted work with more than 5 people outside of your immediate family (for those with big families like my brother-in-law who has 15 people in his family, 2 parents, 13 children).
Is this article trolling or what? RTFM and see what the guy said:
And when further pressed about whether a mainstream computer user in search of immediate safety from security woes ought to buy Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh instead of a Wintel PC, he said, "If you want to fix it tomorrow, maybe you should buy something else."
Uh... where exactly did he "recommend" Apple? Where did he say, "yes, buy an Apple because they are better" or "yes, I recommend Apple"? Something different could be anything. Heck, his teenage daughter probably just needs IM, Web and Email. You can do that with any GNU/Linux or *BSD distro. Damn, you could even get Solaris x86 and do those basic things with it (and Solaris x86 sucks for a desktop).
I do find it amazing that he didn't say "no, no, no... WinTel is the _only_ way to go". However, I would hardly call what he said as being an recommendation for Apple, Linux, Solaris or any other non MS Windows product. He basically is saying, "hey, if you don't want to deal with spyware, adware and viruses, your going to have to look at something other than MS Windows". I don't think that is telling us anything new. The whole freakin world knows that, yet the majority of the masses stick with the MS Crap(tm). Maybe Jane and Joe Six-Pack like spyware, adware and viruses?
You can protect individual user directories in Windows XP if you set up permissions correctly, just the same as how you can protect individual user directories on Linux if you set up permissions correctly.
Yes, you can set up XP permissions correctly. Well, XP home kills your ability to do this easily. Read this article. XP Home is pretty much brain dead IMO. From the article about Home vs Pro:
The most obvious difference is security, which is vastly simplified in Home Edition. Each interactive user in XP Home is assumed to be a member of the Owners local group, which is the Windows XP equivalent of the Windows 2000 Administrator account
So the majority of all computer users using MS Windows XP are running as admin. They are open to far more problems than the typical Linux or Mac OS X user who are running as a non-admin user. Sure you can run as root/admin under the other OS'es, however it is not the norm.
I would argue that there are quite a few new Linux users who foolishly make liberal use of the root account to make certain tasks easier. While maybe a competent Linux user would not make such mistakes, theres no reason to expect that a competent user would make the same kinds of mistakes on a Windows machine.
And your argument would be wrong. All of the major Linux distro's have users create a non-root account at _install time_. When it comes time to do a task that requires root, a nice little GUI window pops up and asks for the root password (oh, this also happens from the console/command line).
it's not helpful when Linux extremists like you warp the truth to fit your agenda.
Linux extremists like me? So I say something negative about MS and now I am a "Linux extremists"? Stop being an MS appologist. I make my living by writting software on MS OSes. I just don't appoligize for all the stupid things MS do.
You should be ashamed.
Ashamed of what? Not making up excuses for every brain dead thing that MS has done. You should be the one that is ashamed for sweeping the problems of MS under the rug.
Huh? Why don't you look for a real DOM ref? That one is not standards compliant. So if you only care about crappy IE, you are OK, otherwise, you will get a bunch of crap.
For example, click on the first link in your example. It takes you to "DHTML Collections". It lists "all" as a collection. "all" is not a DOM collection. It is MS specific crap that break compatibility between browsers and makes your web app only work in IE.
Here is a _real_ DOM reference. This one is standards compliant and will work with the major browsers out there.
Well, maybe because this issue _only_ affects MS Windows PC's?
The same virus could be written to run on any OS
Oh really, so why don't you write it or have someone else to write it? All those other OS'es out there are based on some type of Unix style permissions such as Linux, Mac OS X, *BSD, Solaris, etc. Those systems won't be affected in the same way.
If this virus got on Linux or Mac OS X, it would _only_ affect the current user. Meaning that if my wife did something stupid on my Linux or Mac OS X boxes, it would be _her_ stuff that is lost and not _mine_. As a programmer, I have a lot more important things on my computers than my wife. If she loses a few pictures or emails, "no harm done".
However, if I had an MS Win XP system at home setup as the factory default with every user an admin my wife's mistake would have lost all of my file!
So yes, this is in _every_ way a "Windows specific thing".
Are you suggesting that this type of commment should be modded "troll"? Why shouldn't these types of problems be added to the MS-PR-Machines' TCO? Why shouldn't MS add the cost of a _real_ firewall, virus protection and spyware/adware protection to the TCO of their OS for home and corporate users (especially home users)?
Just try to run an MS Windows XP Home computer that is connected to the internet without any _real_ firewall, virus scanner or adware/spyware prevention. That PC will be taken over in no time.
For all the MS appoligists and astroturfers,... *sigh*
True. However, how exactly is a service going to be able to tell you about some custom made track by a DJ? The only thing a service like this can do is tell you about main-stream published songs. And I will bet you that the service is limited to the mainstream crap for the last 10 years or so.
I would love to see one of these services pick out one of my old favorite Cure tracks or Stone Temple Pilots or Poor Righteous Teachers(I grew up in Trenton) or CCR or... There are tons of songs that these services just won't grab since the song is not part of the main-stream teeny-bopper crap that is floating around. Personally, I don't see the point unless all you car about is main-stream crap. If you like to dance to Brittany, then this just might be the service for you!
Oh Please... Don't try to be such an "AOL tease". You know you are really just some lanky (male) geek in his momma's basement wanting to feel popular by all the/. "friends" you get. ; )
Hmm. Most major online music "stores" out in the wild allow you to do a very cool thing called search. So if you knew even a small part of the lyrics, you should be OK. Also, most of the major online music stores are taking a hint from Amazon. They are looking at your past purchases and recommending content. IMO, Amazon, has been on-the-money. Every book that Amazon has recommended to me, has been somthing I have wanted and as such, have purchased.
I agree. How many people are going to be willing to pay $1.00 USD to find out just the name of a song? This looks like a "company" that just wants to spend some venture capital. I would like to know what venture firm invested in this crap. I have some great land opportunities in the Florida Everglades (Disclosure: I live in Orlando). The Everglades are becoming "the" place to live in Florida. If you have some venture capital to spend, please contact me at your@an.id10t.com for further details.
We use BigFix. It is a _very_ nice program. We dumped SUS for it because BigFix is so much better. BigFix handles MS Windows as well as other platforms. BigFix can download SRPM files for our Linux servers, compile the source RPM and then deploy it. It handles our Solaris servers as well.
If you are on a small budget, you can just go with simple scripting. Pick a Debian based distro or an RPM based one (SuSE or RedHat only) and you can script all you need. Enable SSH for every system you deploy, desktop and server. Then you just write a few simple scripts _once_ and you can push down any update you need.
Red Hat has their own update stuff and you can pay them extra and run your own update server on your local network. However, where I work we have found Red Hat to be _way_, _way_ overpriced (I work for a multi-billion fortune 500). We are starting to look toward Novell SuSE for our Linux needs. Novell SuSE is _way_ better priced. If you look at a Red Hat Linux solution and an MS Windows Solution, MS will usually be less expensive! I personally don't know what Red Hat is thinking. However, if you go with Novell SuSE, you will see that Novell SuSE is far less expensive than MS. Also, Novell SuSE has some very nice tech that they got from Ximian. As you pointed out, Ximian, now Novell, Red Carpet, is a very nice corporate update client. That is the whole design of the product. You have one local update server and put the client on all your deployed systems and Novell Redcarpet handles the rest.
With Linux you have tons of options. If you have a really bare-bones budget, I would personally recommend a nice Debian solution. I have been using Ubuntu on my desktops at work and at home and have been very pleased with how easy it is to upgrade with out dependency problems. I originally used Fedora Core, however I would run into repository conflicts often because every Fedora repository out there tried to be "The" repository for Fedora. So you would have 3 or 4 versions of every package and they would all conflict. You won't run into that with a Debian based distro.
If you have a bigger budget, look into Novell SuSE (which is still very cheep) and their Red Carpet client/server to handle updates. If your budget is even bigger, you can look into BigFix. However, I think BigFix is priced more as a bigger corporate product, though for our budget, BigFix was still priced nicely per/client.
As I said, you have _tons_ of options with a GNU/Linux deployment. Build yourself a seperate subnet and spend a few days testing to see what level of support you want. Obviously, the less support you or your staff want to do, the more you will pay for your solution. You could spend 10's of thousands if not 100's of thousands (or millions like us) for a complete MS software "assurance" package or you can go very lowlevel and build your own GNU/Linux system like Linux From Scratch (which was very fun for a personal project but _way_ too much work for a professional solution for more than 5 systems).
I persoanlly think your best bet is a hybrid system of Linux and MS Windows. As I said, get a test lab/network. Then use the right tool for the right job. Try to build a lab that is all or almost all Linux servers with mostly MS Windows XP desktops. On your MS Windows desktops try to use OSS software. For example, deploy Firefox and OOo.org. Maybe for some more tech users you could even get some Linux desktops in that mix. For your development needs, use OSS tech such as Tomcat or PHP.
Honestly, I would personally love to be in your position. It sounds like you have the ability to use the "right tool for the right job" without all the PHB crap or extreme OS bias. Where I work we have 140,000 employees and changing technology is like the changing of the North pole ; )
Open Office started out as a proprietary product, not an open one. Its was later made open source.
And what does that have to do with anything? OOo.org is now _supposedly_ Open/Free software. There is no reason for it to continue to require a bunch of "import sun.*;" proprietary crap. If OOo.org is truly Open/Free software, it would not require anyone to agree to some Sun license to use all of the features. Java is _not_ Open/Free software. Sure I can look at the Java code, but I cannot take that Java code and make my own version of Java. Open/Free software has nothing to do with being able to just _look_ at the source code. Looking at source code does nothing for Free software. Heck, even MS let the Chinese look at their source, and I certainly wouldn't call MS code "open".
Some AC already made most of the points here, however I will parrot my opinion. As the AC said, the language means nothing today. It is all about the class libraries. Sun has not release all of their class libraries, why do you think RMS complained about all those import sun.* stuff? The same goes for MS and.Net. Sure, C# the language is a standard. But C# by itself is not very useful. There is no point in using C# over C or C++ if you leave out all of the.Net framework. That framework that MS made is _not_ part of the "standard" that MS made "open". There are no open docs on Windows.Forms or many other MS.Net framework class libraries. So basically if you are a normal developer that uses MS Visual Studio and C#, you will _not_ be writing applications with any cross-platform abilities. You will be writing an MS-Only application that relies on a proprietary MS.Net framework.
I have heard from many MS guys that try to convince others that.Net is "open". It is not. MS made C# and the CLR open. While both of those are nice, they are not the important part of a program. Without the.Net framework class libraries being opened, MS keeps a lock on.Net/C# just as Sun keeps a lock on Java and the standard JRE/JDK.
It's almost impossible to encumber open source software by using proprietary tools.
Maybe for tools, but certainly not for proprietary frameworks. Frameworks are all that Java and.Net are about. They both try to present a _huge_ code library of pre-written, pre-debuged code to save developers time. However, if those frameworks lock a develoer into a proprietary framewrok, such as MS.Net and Sun Java, you are only left with a bare-bones language when it comes to Free/Open software.
Ford's Escape Hybrid uses the same technology as the Prius.
I will go slow for you. Yes, maybe Ford did buy the hybrid tech for their escape. Do you think that all of the software for the Ford is the same? Hmmm. Come on now, I know you are a smart boy and can think this one out. Maybe, just maybe, Toyota just sold the physics/hardware of the system without specific software? Afterall, the hardest part of a hybrid is certainly _not_ software.
Big picture, y'know?:)
It sure is! I know I went a little too fast for you, but hey, maybe next year you could understand that the tech that one company sells to another just _may_ not be all the tech that company has to offer.
And whom should one vote for? Politician A who took in 1.2 million in campaign bribes or politician B who "only" took in 1 million in campaign bribes? All politicians are accepting campaign bribes and their vote is being influenced by that. So as a voter I have no ability to curb the corruption since all the congress critters/senators are accepting bribes.
I'm beginning to find the voters to be more despicable than the politicians
Well, I think it is wrong to blame the voters, however I do agree with you to some extent. The American voters are becoming more and more lazy and tend to only want to get off their @ss and vote if it is an issue that affects them directly.
Campaign bribes should not be allowed. It is not free speech. If giving someone money is free speech, then I should be allowed to give $10,000 to a judge and $10,000 to every member of the jury right before they start deliberation.
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One thing I hate about the USA is how the legal systems works. A friend of mine is from Denmark and she has mentioned this many times to me. According to her, in Denmark the loser pays the court fees. If we had "loser pays" here in the USA, it would make a huge difference in the legal system. Most big companies would be very leary to sue if they knew they would have to pay legal fees. As it is now. Big corps can just intimidate smaller companies with legal costs.
It is no different for Mac OS X. I can write a Mac OS X app that tries to do spell check on its own.
So Max OS X is not any more simple for spell checking than Linux. It is not any more simple than MS Windows for spell checking. Well, for MS Windows you do have to spend a few hundred bucks to get the MS Office suite to have it available system-wide for good spell checking. So I will agree with you that for spell checking, Mac OS X users have it _much_ better than MS Windows users that have to pay a few hundred bucks to have a system-wide framework for spell-checkign. However, Linux users have also had this for many years now.
Who gets to describe what a parody is or is not?
I personally won't care or feel for the **AA cause until they stop being @ss-holes and destroying young people financially.
The RI/MP/AA just lie, lie and lie about how they are suffering! However, it is funny how _good_ music and movies can make such a sh!t load of money. Star Wars III broke pretty much every box-office record you can think of, yet the MPAA is trying to claim how a few people sharing a piss-poor version of Star Wars III is "killing the magic".
For example. You come over my house and I pull out a new DVD of Spider Man 2 that I just bought. Should I not put the DVD in and play it until you run out to the store and buy your own copy? No. Fair Use allows you to watch it with me. Now, if I set up a big projector on my property and sold tickets for $2 and had 100 people come and watch it, that would be a different story.
If you come over my house and look at some of the paintings I have, should I require a payment from you and send it to the copyright holder? What if I happen to be playing a music CD that I bought. Should I require you to put your fingers in your ears or charge you for every second that listen to the song?
The movie and music industries have been getting to draconian here in the USA. They have been able to just buy up any law they want. There use to be balance with copyright and Fair Use, however that has long since been bought away by the movie and music industries.
It really is not that difficult to find balance with copyright and fair use. 1. The golden rule should be that you cannot profit off of a copyright with out the copyrights holders permission. This would make it illegal for me to download a music CD and burn my own copies for people at $2 each. 2. Large-scale distribution should be illegal. That can be a little bit of a grey area, however it would not be hard to put in the laws that large-scale distribution is defined as thus "...". Maybe you cannot share a copyrighted work with more than 10 people or something. Or maybe you cannot share a copyrighted work with more than 5 people outside of your immediate family (for those with big families like my brother-in-law who has 15 people in his family, 2 parents, 13 children).
I do find it amazing that he didn't say "no, no, no... WinTel is the _only_ way to go". However, I would hardly call what he said as being an recommendation for Apple, Linux, Solaris or any other non MS Windows product. He basically is saying, "hey, if you don't want to deal with spyware, adware and viruses, your going to have to look at something other than MS Windows". I don't think that is telling us anything new. The whole freakin world knows that, yet the majority of the masses stick with the MS Crap(tm). Maybe Jane and Joe Six-Pack like spyware, adware and viruses?
calc.exe
notepad.exe
mspaint.exe
sol.exe
Need I go on? Or were you looking for real examples? If so, sorry, I can't help ya ; )
For example, click on the first link in your example. It takes you to "DHTML Collections". It lists "all" as a collection. "all" is not a DOM collection. It is MS specific crap that break compatibility between browsers and makes your web app only work in IE.
Here is a _real_ DOM reference. This one is standards compliant and will work with the major browsers out there.
If this virus got on Linux or Mac OS X, it would _only_ affect the current user. Meaning that if my wife did something stupid on my Linux or Mac OS X boxes, it would be _her_ stuff that is lost and not _mine_. As a programmer, I have a lot more important things on my computers than my wife. If she loses a few pictures or emails, "no harm done".
However, if I had an MS Win XP system at home setup as the factory default with every user an admin my wife's mistake would have lost all of my file!
So yes, this is in _every_ way a "Windows specific thing".
Just try to run an MS Windows XP Home computer that is connected to the internet without any _real_ firewall, virus scanner or adware/spyware prevention. That PC will be taken over in no time.
For all the MS appoligists and astroturfers,... *sigh*
I would love to see one of these services pick out one of my old favorite Cure tracks or Stone Temple Pilots or Poor Righteous Teachers(I grew up in Trenton) or CCR or ... There are tons of songs that these services just won't grab since the song is not part of the main-stream teeny-bopper crap that is floating around. Personally, I don't see the point unless all you car about is main-stream crap. If you like to dance to Brittany, then this just might be the service for you!
Oh Please... Don't try to be such an "AOL tease". You know you are really just some lanky (male) geek in his momma's basement wanting to feel popular by all the /. "friends" you get. ; )
Hmm. Most major online music "stores" out in the wild allow you to do a very cool thing called search. So if you knew even a small part of the lyrics, you should be OK. Also, most of the major online music stores are taking a hint from Amazon. They are looking at your past purchases and recommending content. IMO, Amazon, has been on-the-money. Every book that Amazon has recommended to me, has been somthing I have wanted and as such, have purchased.
I agree. How many people are going to be willing to pay $1.00 USD to find out just the name of a song? This looks like a "company" that just wants to spend some venture capital. I would like to know what venture firm invested in this crap. I have some great land opportunities in the Florida Everglades (Disclosure: I live in Orlando). The Everglades are becoming "the" place to live in Florida. If you have some venture capital to spend, please contact me at your@an.id10t.com for further details.
Firfox gives users a choice to open in tabs or *gasp* new windows. So, if like me you like tabs, then use tabs. If not, use windows and have a ball.
Here are some Firefox hints.
- Hold down the shift key and click a link and it will open in a new window.
- Middle click to open a link in a new tab.
- Right click a link and pick between opening in a new tab or new window.
- Right click in a frame and pick view this frame in a new tab or new window.
The feature set goes on and on. Now throw in 100+ extensions and power of Firefox blows away IE.If you are on a small budget, you can just go with simple scripting. Pick a Debian based distro or an RPM based one (SuSE or RedHat only) and you can script all you need. Enable SSH for every system you deploy, desktop and server. Then you just write a few simple scripts _once_ and you can push down any update you need.
Red Hat has their own update stuff and you can pay them extra and run your own update server on your local network. However, where I work we have found Red Hat to be _way_, _way_ overpriced (I work for a multi-billion fortune 500). We are starting to look toward Novell SuSE for our Linux needs. Novell SuSE is _way_ better priced. If you look at a Red Hat Linux solution and an MS Windows Solution, MS will usually be less expensive! I personally don't know what Red Hat is thinking. However, if you go with Novell SuSE, you will see that Novell SuSE is far less expensive than MS. Also, Novell SuSE has some very nice tech that they got from Ximian. As you pointed out, Ximian, now Novell, Red Carpet, is a very nice corporate update client. That is the whole design of the product. You have one local update server and put the client on all your deployed systems and Novell Redcarpet handles the rest.
With Linux you have tons of options. If you have a really bare-bones budget, I would personally recommend a nice Debian solution. I have been using Ubuntu on my desktops at work and at home and have been very pleased with how easy it is to upgrade with out dependency problems. I originally used Fedora Core, however I would run into repository conflicts often because every Fedora repository out there tried to be "The" repository for Fedora. So you would have 3 or 4 versions of every package and they would all conflict. You won't run into that with a Debian based distro.
If you have a bigger budget, look into Novell SuSE (which is still very cheep) and their Red Carpet client/server to handle updates. If your budget is even bigger, you can look into BigFix. However, I think BigFix is priced more as a bigger corporate product, though for our budget, BigFix was still priced nicely per/client.
As I said, you have _tons_ of options with a GNU/Linux deployment. Build yourself a seperate subnet and spend a few days testing to see what level of support you want. Obviously, the less support you or your staff want to do, the more you will pay for your solution. You could spend 10's of thousands if not 100's of thousands (or millions like us) for a complete MS software "assurance" package or you can go very lowlevel and build your own GNU/Linux system like Linux From Scratch (which was very fun for a personal project but _way_ too much work for a professional solution for more than 5 systems).
I persoanlly think your best bet is a hybrid system of Linux and MS Windows. As I said, get a test lab/network. Then use the right tool for the right job. Try to build a lab that is all or almost all Linux servers with mostly MS Windows XP desktops. On your MS Windows desktops try to use OSS software. For example, deploy Firefox and OOo.org. Maybe for some more tech users you could even get some Linux desktops in that mix. For your development needs, use OSS tech such as Tomcat or PHP.
Honestly, I would personally love to be in your position. It sounds like you have the ability to use the "right tool for the right job" without all the PHB crap or extreme OS bias. Where I work we have 140,000 employees and changing technology is like the changing of the North pole ; )
I have heard from many MS guys that try to convince others that .Net is "open". It is not. MS made C# and the CLR open. While both of those are nice, they are not the important part of a program. Without the .Net framework class libraries being opened, MS keeps a lock on .Net/C# just as Sun keeps a lock on Java and the standard JRE/JDK.
Maybe for tools, but certainly not for proprietary frameworks. Frameworks are all that Java andAnd what does that have to do with the Toyota Prius software crashing? Was this article about a Ford car having hardware problems?
Campaign bribes should not be allowed. It is not free speech. If giving someone money is free speech, then I should be allowed to give $10,000 to a judge and $10,000 to every member of the jury right before they start deliberation.