OT: Warning Regarding Microsoft

[M.Hockings]

Donald Correll wrote:

> Hey Wayde,
>  Too bad I have to eat. I work in a corporate environment where Linux 
> is a niche player. I love to experiment with Linux and Free BSD but 
> the bread and butter is still with Sore Bill and Micro$haft. Worse yet 
> when my son wants to play games it is XP home. Wouldn't it be lovely 
> if we could banish the bullies from Redmond but it is going to be a 
> long battle. So grin and just enjopy whatever OS you are forced to 
> work with (when you have no other choice).
> Donald Correll, who wishes he could get the money back he spent on MCP 
> 70-210 and reinvest in Linux Net Admin.

I think that if you investigate you will find that most games will run 
under Linux, some have native Linux installs others need Wine.  For one 
game (UT2003) I was unable to get it to install under Win98 but it 
installed fine in FC1 on the same machine.  I will admit that sometimes 
it takes a little reading to figure out how to install under Linux.  
However, unless you keeners work at it and ask the game companies for 
Linux versions they will continue to pump out Windows-only stuff.  If 
you don't ask for it you won't get it...

 From the other side of the coin, I work in software development and I 
am seeing more and more requests to have our products run 
multi-platform.  Also our IT dept. is starting to make Linux workstation 
installs available, not just the Win2K/WinXP stuff and I see some of the 
mid-range servers (IBM iSeries boxes) are doing their job using Redhat 
Linux.

Does all this mean that Windows should be "banished", I would hope not 
(please don't throw things!) as I would imagine that having choice in 
operating systems would make all of the choices stronger(i.e., more 
stable) and more reasonably priced.  And having competition would help 
the different Linuxi (Linuxes ?) arrive at a good common install 
mechanism (PRM seems to work fine for me).

Just my CAD$0.02 for choice

Mike