You too can use the preferred OS of the maxi-zoom-dweebie

There are certainly ideal groups of people who are capable of moving towards a 100 percent Open Source or Linux environment in both their professional and personal lives. I’m not really interested in discussing the political and ideological aspects or why someone would want to make that choice.

The greater and more important question is, who CAN switch to Linux?

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Stallracasaurus Rex

While RMS’s hatred of all things proprietary has fueled the FSF’s and GNU’s mission to create Free software alternatives for what seems like eons, the overwhelming desire for interoperability between open and proprietary systems makes his narrow-minded Cretaceous world view ripe for extinction.

As I have said in previous columns, I live as a citizen of two distinct worlds with diametrically opposing software development ideologies — the world of Microsoft, Windows and 3rd-party vendor developed proprietary software and systems, and that of Open Source and Free Software.

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Best Buy: Dress all the sales reps up like Dumbledore!

My colleagues Mary Jo Foley and Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wrote today about the plans that Microsoft has in place to train retail sales staff at Best Buy how to position PCs with Windows 7 for prospective systems buyers against Apple’s Macintosh systems and of all things, Linux.

This sort of grassroots negative campaigning against the Mac and Linux is really not the way Microsoft should address buyers in the upcoming year and holiday season. Just like negative political campaign advertising and grassroots door to door stomping, it often leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth and comes off as completely without class. Worst case, it has even been known to even backfire as a campaign technique. From the perspective of effective sales and marketing tactics, at best I would classify this as bottom feeding.

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Snow Leopard Coulda Been a Contenda

I have said on numerous occasions that Apple has missed the boat when it comes to enterprise adoption. This is sad, really, when you consider how good an operating system Mac OS X really is, in that it is the only UNIX-based OS that really could have had any chance in displacing the status quo of Windows and Microsoft hegemony in large enterprise environments with a “full stack” for end-user acceptance as a desktop OS. Consumers may enjoy its niche status, but In the enterprise, Apple is a “Coulda Been” contender of unfulfilled potential.

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How to run Linux on Windows Server 2008 R2

It’s been a while since we’ve had a hardcore Geek Sheet installment, and I promise that this one will be a real winner.

Some of you may be aware that the updated Hyper-V bare-metal hypervisor virtualization layer in Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2 (Which is due to be released August 14th to MSDN and Technet customers) now has support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (SLES) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 (RHEL). Additionally, Linux support and performance has greatly improved over the initial Hyper-V release. Microsoft also recently released it’s Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC) under the GPLv2 Open Source License.

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The Open Source Reptile Hunter

The Open Source Community’s strength has always been in its numbers and the will of developers contributing to projects to drive project initiatives in the direction they desire simply by voting with their time and willingness to contribute. If a project no longer meets their requirements, be it from a licensing or political perspective, they simply cease working on it and go onto other things that interest them instead.

That is the beauty of of Open Source, in that it is pure Social Darwinism and Software Phylogenetics at work. Even if you have a bunch of large natural predators, such as Constrictus Siliconvallis, it’s not possible for them to swallow entire communities, even if they buy the companies that run the projects themselves. And like evolutionary trees, if projects are to be compared to Phyla, they do indeed branch off.

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2016: Welcome to The Screen

In the not so far off future, computing for most of us will be reduced to remotely delivered subscriber services, running on cheap, commodity high-definition display units.

What is The Screen? I don’t think it has been well defined what the interface or the experience really is going to look like, but I have a very good idea. Certainly, I’m not expecting anything along the lines of Minority Report or even something like Microsoft’s “Surface”, although it’s certainly possible that some day, people might use UIs like that for certain niche applications. Initially, early versions of The Screen will almost certainly look very much like the platforms you use now — Windows, Mac, and definitely Linux.

The only difference is you won’t own the computing hardware it runs on — all you’ll really need is a screen (an HDTV with HDMI inputs) mouse, keyboard and broadband, and you’ll be buying your computing services like a utility, just like you pay your electric or Cable TV bill today. And like your Cable TV bill, you’ll subscribe to computing “Channels”, complete with applications and hosted data, with balls to the wall clouded backup services to match.

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Microsoft, Please Release Windows Server as a Workstation

As I write this column, I’m using the Milestone 3 release of Windows 7. While it’s still probably too early to make any sweeping judgments about a product that is probably close to a year from release, if current results are even a fleeting indication of what is in store, I’m not impressed. With the exception of a few tweaks, Windows 7 looks to be just another Vista.

Read the rest of this article at DATAMATION.

I’m so disappointed the Internet didn’t melt. Can I get my money back?

I admit it, even I was skeptical. When I received the first demonstration of the Silverlight plugin and the NBCOlympics.com web site back in March of this year at the 2008 Microsoft Technology Summit, where a group of Open Source experts gathered from around the world were asked for feedback on various aspects of Microsoft’s emerging technologies, I truly believed that when they finally rolled that website out, that NBC was going to be overwhelmed with traffic and the site would come to a screeching halt, resulting in a catastrophic embarrassment for Microsoft and NBC.

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Adventures with Windows Vista

As I mentioned in a previous post, circumstances have recently required that I buy a new desktop PC.

Read this article on ZDNet Tech Broiler.