The Open Source Advocate

In my last post , several people accused me of being anti-Microsoft. This is not true at all! I believe that Microsoft makes good products. Do you think they could attain a 95% market share without making a good product? That is not the way a market economy works. What I am opposed to are arbitrary restrictions being placed on the software I use. Can you imagine a case where my Linux operating system locks me out for no good reason? Perhaps a message that says "We're sorry, but the Penguin Kingdom has decided that you have not given them enough herring. Access denied." This chain of events has got me thinking about Windows and Linux. Specifically, would you use Windows if it was licensed by the GPL ? Windows would just be another open source operating system to choose from. Would you choose it? It has great hardware and application support, and most of your users already know how to operate it. You could choose to run only open source applications on it, or yo...

I have been happily using Ubuntu for quite a while now, and I don't really use the Windows partition on my hard drive. The only thing I have ever needed was my Groupwise archive that contained some old emails. Recently, I heard about a new tool called VMware Converter . This free tool can be used to create a VMware image from a real installation of Windows. I thought it would be a good idea to convert my Windows partition into a virtual machine so that I could simply fire up Windows while I am running Ubuntu. I booted into Windows, downloaded the VMware Converter, and followed the wizard. After a few hours of processing, I had a VMware image of my Windows installation. Everything appeared to be working, so I booted into Ubuntu and fired up VMware Player and started the new virtual machine I had just created. Everything looked good as Windows started to boot inside the virtual machine. However, I quickly ran into a brick-wall. Licensing. Yuck! Windows told me that I didn...

I came up with this exercise while on a long car trip to Lake Powell with some friends. This is a great way to kill some time, and you can learn a lot about people by the way they respond to this scenario. Scenario For some supernatural reason, all other humans have suddenly disappeared from this planet. There was no warning, it was as if they were all teleported away at the same time. You are left alone on the planet and must now decide what to do with your life. Here are some topics to consider: The world is your oyster Congratulations, everything in the world is now yours! Of course you won't be able to use it all, and things that are normally considered valuable, such as gold or money, will now be worthless. Declining infrastructure Without anyone else running the place, things will start to deteriorate. The speed at which this happens depends on many variables. I expect that many cities will be destroyed by fire in the first week. Electricity will only last for so lon...