June 2007 Archives

My mistake -- iPhones sold out THIS MORNING in Sherman Oaks.

A tableful of iPhones is being mobbed by geeks three deep, sweating over each other like a pen of sweaty hogs. iPhones are still available and being sold (I guess $500 gadgets don't move as easily as Nintendo Wiis)sold out this morning. I'm with the 3-year-old, so we'll be playing "Dora the Explorer" in a minute.

But just think how many grubby germs will be on the glass faces of those iPhones on that table. I'm sure somebody on "CSI" will be lifting prints off of an iPhone any day now.

Gmail users pretty much know that if you don't want to use the Web interface for Google's free e-mail service, you're limited to POP access, with which all of your mail is downloaded to the client computer and deleted from the server (or, at your option, left there for you to delete later).

But while Googling for infomation on Gmail and IMAP -- the protocol that allows all of your mail to remain on the server -- I found this petition, signed by 10,000 geeky types, calling for Google to offer IMAP with Gmail.

The page, well worth a read, describes what POP and IMAP are and why Gmail and Yahoo Mail should offer it. Also, the author spends much time describing the functionality of one of my favorite mail providers, fastmail.fm, which offers IMAP service. Fastmail.fm's free accounts are Web-based and IMAP only, and the company isn't shy about telling you why IMAP is better than POP.

From this page: A 2004 (but still relevant) Washington Post story on why IMAP beats POP.

And a commenter here recently informed me that AOL Mail offers IMAP connectivity. In fact, it looks like AOL offers both IMAP and POP.

A reason for AOL to exist (besides AIM)? I'm thinking so.

The word is that it takes more servers -- and more money -- to offer IMAP, but I wonder if not needing to download all the spam that clogs e-mail accounts these days via POP makes up for the larger number of connections to the server by those using IMAP. And since Web-mail users are basically connecting via IMAP anyway, what's the harm in actually offering it as a choice.

I know what the answer is, at least for Yahoo Mail: They can't show you ads when you're not using their Web portal.

The horror -- HORROR, I TELL YOU -- in the enterprise about the iPhone's former inability to access e-mail from the now corporately ubiquitous Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers has been addressed by the fine folks in Redmond:

The update is expected to address the many issues Exchange 2007 users have been having, including with Mac Mail and the fact that when they access their mailboxes on a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 server, certain IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) clients cannot open the bodies of the e-mail messages, which triggers an error message.

This fix is important as the iPhone will work with Exchange Server via IMAP4, Keith McCall, chief technology officer of Azaleos and a former Exchange executive, told eWEEK.

"Exchange 2007 has had some difficulties with the IMAP4 protocol implementation, which are at least partially expected to be addressed with Exchange 2007 Rollup 3. We are currently testing these fixes to see that they do address the issue with Mac Mail," he said.

For the rest of us, that means that iPhone users will be able to access e-mail with the IMAP protocol, meaning the mail remains on the server and won't be tied to the internal memory of the iPhone. So you can access your e-mail with the phone, then access it again with your desktop e-mail client.

Does this mean that Yahoo (and maybe Google) will be offering IMAP service to their e-mail users? Both currently offer the POP protocol, in which all mail is downloaded to the device itself and then either erased from the server or kept there (to be dealt with via a Web interface). I've tried using POP mail while keeping messages on the server, and it's a pain in the ass. When I see an e-mail, I want to either keep it or delete it right then and there -- so that's why IMAP, especially in this age of total connectivity, is the way to go.

Robin Harris of the ZDNet blog Storage Bits writes an obituary for his 160 gigabyte drive, which spun its last spin on June 27:

I declared the drive dead at 11:43 am, PDT, this morning, and disconnected the power for the last time.

Here's the meat of his post, the advice you, me, Bobby McGee and everybody else should heed:

Lessons learned: your disk drive will fail

Archiving to a hard drive? Big mistake. Archive to two hard drives. They’re cheap.

The drive was just about three years old. The Google data suggests three years is a good time to retire a disk. I think I’m going to follow that advice from now on. I was just relieved that I got everything off in time.

Listen to me, people, follow this advice. I don't think I own a hard drive that's less than three years old, maintainer of old, cheap crap that I am. All the more reason to man up and do these multiple backups.

Archive to two drives -- that's the way to do it. And get the largest drives you can get for a reasonable price. That way you can, if possible, partition the drives and back up multiple PCs to each drive, keep the two drives in DIFFERENT places. And it doesn't hurt to keep a THIRD or FOURTH copy of your essential data (pictures, files, e-mail) on writable DVDs or CDs (all the more reason to add a DVD writer to your system).

Especially in this age of digital photos, with the old-school negatives becoming a historic remnant (and did you ever reprint an old photo anyway? But I digress), it's more important than ever to guard those image files and make sure you don't lose your family's photographic history.

"Linux System Administration," one of the newer books in the category from O'Reilly, is another must-get on my list. My recent book acquisitions include both the No Starch and O'Reilly "Linux Cookbook" volumes, plus a fourth-edition "Linux in a Nutshell" that I got used for a couple bucks.

Those O'Reilly books are truly worth their weight in the proverbial gold -- and they're damn heavy, so that's a lot of weight.

From what I've seen -- and you can see a lot at the O'Reilly site -- "Linux System Administration" really helps you get things done, with lots of step-by-step to take you through setting up a server, handling mail, doing backups and bash scripting -- all the things you'd need to know if you were suddenly thrust into the position of acting like a sysadmin.

I can't vouch for the many suse- and Red Hat-focused books out there, but "Linux System Administration" focuses on Debian due to its stability and freeness, and it's a book that many of us need, whether we can admit it or not (and I'm admitting it big time).

Given Linspire's recent "intellectual property" deal with Microsoft, by which MS agrees not to sue Linspire or its customers over so-called patent violations in Linux (and leaving the rest of us out to dry), should I continue to use the freelinuxemail.com service sponsored by Linspire?

First of all, I love the service -- run by fastmail.fm -- because it offers the IMAP protocol, has a super-fast Web interface and in the case of freelinuxemail.com (as opposed to the plain fastmail.fm version) comes with outgoing SMTP service for free (fastmail.fm wants you to either pay for SMTP or use your ISPs server).

All my mutt experiments during my Month on the Command Line were done with freelinuxemail.com, and while I'm not currently using the service, I still have the account there.

But given Linspire's recent actions, I'm feeling a bit squirrely about using the free e-mail. I'm a longtime user of Yahoo Mail, and I've never seen a conflict there -- if, as a so-called "journalist," I didn't actually use this stuff, how could I write about it?

But the Linspire thing has got me thinking. If I want IMAP mail, I could stick to the service provided by my ISP, DSL Extreme (which I pay for), I could upgrade my own fastmail.fm account, or find another provider entirely.

It's a dilemma. What do you think I should do?

AntiX, the Fluxbox-based, 128 MB RAM-friendly version of Mepis is now in its "pre-final" stage, with a final release from its maker anticapitalista expected in early July, according to the developer himself on the Mepis forum.

As I've said, AntiX is promising -- and will probably leap right over Fluxbuntu in polish, usability and functionality. The only drawback is that it doesn't run in 64 MB of RAM. But for those with 128 MB or more, AntiX is, thus far, a great Linux distro.

Anticapitalista's post tells you where to get the "pre-final" ISO (and gives the login and password you need for the FTP site).

I consider AntiX a step up from the other Fluxbox biggie, Damn Small Linux, because AntiX offers the quick desktop environment of Fluxbox while providing the flexibility of apt and Synaptic for adding apps to the system. It won't run on the low-spec systems that DSL excels on, but for those with mid-level hardware (128 MB and above), AntiX is poised to become quite a player in the distro field.

This is not a joke. This is a real book, "Debian Für Dummies," written in German and coming to Amazon on Sept. 7, 2007. The authors, Jan-Marek Glogowski and Florian Maier, have been posting blog entries to the book's page on Amazon.

What's next, "Debian Does Dallas"?

Seriously, given the dearth of Debian books (and no, Ubuntu books don't count), I sincerely hope "Debian Für Dummies" makes it into English. I'd rather see an update of "The Debian System," but the author's Web site (down at present) says that it's not coming any time soon. No clue about an update for "Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible."

Is it too much to ask, a Debian book updated to cover Etch?

The magazine Popular Science and Popsci.com have released their annual list of The Worst Jobs in Science for 2007.

It is worth mentioning that working for Microsoft as a security team member is ranked sixth in the list, just slightly better than Whale-Feces Researcher or Forensic Entomologist.

The bottom-10:

Number 10: Whale-Feces Researcher
They scoop up whale dung, then dig through it for clues

Number 9: Forensic Entomologist
Solving murders by studying maggots

Number 8: Olympic Drug Tester
When your job is drug testing the world’s top athletes, there’s no way to win

Number 7: Gravity Research Subject
They’re strapped down so astronauts can blast off

Number 6: Microsoft Security Grunt
Like wearing a big sign that reads “Hack Me”

Number 5: Coursework Carcass Preparer
They kill, pickle, and bottle the critters that schoolkids cut up

Number 4: Garbologist
Think Indiana Jones— in a Dumpster

Number 3: Elephant Vasectomist
When your patient is Earth’s largest land animal, sterilization is a big job

Number 2: Oceanographer
Nothing but bad news, day in and day out

Number 1: Hazmat Diver
They swim in sewage. Enough said.

It's more intuitive, more eye-candyish than ever, writes Garett Rogers of ZDNet. You've tried Google Docs, haven't you? If they could come up with a way for me to print witthout the Web page title above and timestamp below, I'm sold. That's where a hopefully-in-development Google Gears helper app comes in. Hopefully.

I swear, I will dump offline text editing if I can get the elusive smart quotes and easy printing out of Google Docs. In other words, if Google Docs recognizes that all writing is not meant for Web pages and blogs, but for things like print articles and, heaven forbid, books, it'll be world-domination (or at least office software domination) time for big ol' Google.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet collects the early review buzz on the iPhone. The verdict? Not ready for prime time. In Kingsley-Hughes' words:

Overall, I’m disappointed. When I look at the iPod of the MacBook, I see real cutting-edge innovation. Sure, you can buy cheaper but it’s hard to buy better. The iPhone lacks this cutting-edge feel and is missing key cellphone features present if phones which cost less than half the price Apple expects you to pay for the iPhone. It’s not a tool, it’s a shiny bauble.

You know you want it. You want to touch it. Caress it. Tap it. It's the iPhone virtual keyboard, and Apple previews it in this video.

The beta version of RealPlayer 11 is out and it's free.

Among the new features, RealPlayer 11 allows users to burn videos
to CDs in the VCD format. (You will need to buy the $29.99 RealPlayer Plus to burn to DVDs).

RealPlayer 11 is also capable of recognizing video content protected by DRM (digital rights management) and blocking it from being recorded.

RealNetworks is also planning additional features - such as allowing video content to be downloaded to iPods and other portable devices.

Microsoft Corp. launched Tuesday its "Windows Live Folders" service, which will give computer users up to 500 megabytes of online storage space. Microsoft made the service available to 5,000 users on Tuesday night but plans to make the service widely available later in the summer.

Microsoft's move is in direct response to the unlimited space service offered by Yahoo! Mail, the 5 gigabytes offered by AOL and the nearly 3 gigabytes offered by Google's Gmail.

Slash Gear reports that printer giant Epson will release a desktop and laptop that run the Linux operating system:

EPSON is looking to release both a desktop and laptop running the open-source OS. The Endeavor LX7800 desktop will feature processors ranging from Celeron to Core 2 Duos, (sorry, no AMD here) though little else is known about these.

Their Endeavor LX1000 laptop will sport a 15-inch XGA screen and an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M GPU. Little is known about either of these systems, though they will be BTO and running TurboLinux.

And sources tell Joe Panettieri of Seeking Alpha that HP wants to follow Dell in offering Ubuntu Linux-equipped systems, catching the wave that the fast-growing Linux distribution produced by Canonical has created in the marketplace:

Dell's initial success with Ubuntu apparently has caught Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) attention. Sources close to HP tell me the company hope to offer PCs with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed in a few months -- or perhaps even a few weeks.

Growing interest in Ubuntu Linux is easy to explain. After all, Ubuntu is simple to use and friendlier than Windows in some (but certainly not all) ways. For instance, Ubuntu boots up fast -- really fast -- and isn't bogged down with dozens of desktop icons or menu options that you'll never use. Nor does it require certain types of security software that can further slow down your PC's performance.

Panettieri also points out the potential pitfalls of pre-loaded Linux, and the short article, alon with the site from which it came, are well worth looking at.

Fluxbuntu is back, says project leader Joe Jaxx at Fluxbuntu.org of the fledgling Ubuntu variant that installs with a Fluxbox window manager (fast, light -- a great alternative to GNOME, KDE or Xfce.

Jaxx writes:

We were really expecting to release Fluxbuntu Feisty as the Final and First version of Fluxbuntu but we ran into the following problems which were critical:

1. We started 3 months into the Ubuntu Feisty development cycle, which means we lost 3 months in development time compared to everyone else (Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu). This also came from starting late within the Dapper/Edgy development cycle.

...

Now we could fix all these things in Feisty, but by the time we do and release, we might have just released Gutsy (and it will also delay Gutsy Development another three months). So I have decided to have Fluxbuntu Final when Gutsy Gibbon is released in October.

...

Standard Features:

1. The ability to choose whether you want to have just VESA support or card specific support

2. The ability to choose which variant of the Fluxbuntu Desktop Environment you wish to use

3. Automounting of Removable Devices

4. On System Documentation on how to use Fluxbuntu

5. Graphical System Configuration Utilities

6. More Intuitive Menu

7. REALLY Nice Artwork

Experimental Features:

Here are some features we are looking at (might or might not be in Gutsy):

1. Document revision control

2. The ability to take your desktop with you and use it on any Fluxbuntu computer.

I liked the Fluxbox window manager so much from my use of it in Damn Small Linux that I recently took my Debian box running GNOME and installed Fluxbox on it. Once I figured out (from the Mepis help pages, no less) how to get a menu on the thing, I started to build it just the way I want it, fine-tuning the apps and menus. And now I have Fluxbox with the power and stability of Debian beneath it. All I need now is a terminal program that defaults to bigger type than Xterm (I have to ctrl-right-click every time to bump up the type size, and I'd rather have it as a default. I'm not above using the GNOME terminal, which is surprisingly quick).

I also like the new AntiX spin on Mepis that is also based on Fluxbox, which is great for low-spec systems ... as long as they have 128 MB RAM, since AntiX (and probably the Mepis code underneath it) can't handle the 64 MB limit of my $15 Laptop but runs great on my test box (Via C3 1 GHz-based thin client, CD and hard drives out of the box via a long cable, 256 MB RAM).

One of the attractions of AntiX, besides a lot of apps that I really like, is that it has Synaptic, although that feature wasn't working the last time I tried it. AntiX isn't even in beta yet, so I'm giving its developer, a guy who goes by the handle Anticapitalista, the benefit of the doubt).

Since Mepis' founder Warren Woodford ended development on MepisLite, I'd been hoping somebody would reconfigure Mepis for the rest of us ... i.e. the low-spec-running world that I'm pretty much working in all the time. And AntiX is a great step in that direction. It's what Fluxbuntu should be aspiring to.

Back to Fluxbuntu: Having a lightweight environment wrapped around the Ubuntu base is a very worthy project, and I hope Jaxx and Co. really do get things back on track.

My impressions of Fluxbuntu's last release candidate were less than glowing. Its developers have a worshipful view of the Linux command line, which is great if you're running a command-line distro -- and anybody can install a stripped-down Ubuntu and build it up from there. But in Fluxbuntu, it all seemed to be done at the expense of even script-drive configuration help (I didn't expect any GUI configuration utilities). If you do throw people into an environment meant for experts only, it's nice to give the non-experts the tools they need to make use of what you're offering them.

When I tried the last Fluxbuntu release candidate, right out of the box I had to figure out how to set a static IP address at the command line. It's really not that hard -- except when you've never done it before. What's needed with Fluxbuntu is extensive documentation on how to set up and use it. Having a couple of good Linux reference books is a must for anybody using the OS, more so for a distro like Fluxbuntu, in which getting your hands dirty, so to speak, is needed on a regular basis.

Even so, I'd sure like to see Fluxbuntu rise again and become a full member of the Ubuntu family.

Lyz Krunbach of the O'Reilly Network, a real sysadmin who knows way, way more than I do, writes a nice entry about when she uses Debian and when Ubuntu (in her case, Xubuntu with the Xfce desktop).

The question comes about because, as I've discovered myself, installing and running Debian isn't really any more difficult than Ubuntu (which is supposed to be the newbie version of Debian). And yes, Debian does run faster. Why? I don't know. All I know is that it does.

Here's a sample of Lyz's post:

Some people prefer the older, thoroughly tested packages included in Debian Stable, others want the similiarly stable but consistently newer packages in Ubuntu Stable. Speed is important as well, a couple people I spoke with were unimpressed with the “bloat” that a full default Ubuntu install brings along, and at times expressed that newer desktop environments were slower and heavier in general than the older ones, thus creating a preference for the older packages in Debian.

Today I continue to use Xubuntu on my desktop, I did a server install which decreases much of the previously mentioned bloat. I did switch back to Debian on my laptop for a couple reasons, I wanted to consolidate my Debian development onto one machine, and I fell into the old hardware camp where the older version of XFCE in Debian simply ran faster than the version in Xubuntu. The wireless on my Debian laptop gives me some trouble, and requires manual configuration, but it’s something I can live with and is part of the “well-supported hardware” caveat.

But the crux of the entry is that after years of talk about it, Linux is really ready for the desktop. Not exactly news, but this time it's more "real."

The Communications Workers of America has released a report on how the web access speed in the U.S. compares to other nations. I have to admit that the results surprised me - not because the U.S. wasn't at the top of the list but because how meager our speed seems compared to other countries.

Here are some numbers:

The median U.S. download speed 1.97 megabits per second.
In Japan: 61 megabits per second.
In South Korea: 45 megabits per second.
In France: 17 megabits per second.
In Canada - yes, Canada - 7 megabits per second.

The report also reveals that among the states, the East Coast is definitely speedier than the West Coast.

The Top Five: Rhode Island, Kansas, New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts.

Computer maker Dell Inc. is trying to regain the lead in the
notebook computer world (HP is the current PC market leader)
by adding a splash of color to their notebooks - faster processors?
better graphics? who needs that!?

How about a "ruby red," "sunshine yellow" or "espresso brown" notebook?

In this digital age we live in, hard disk space is at a premium. To help deal with this problem, Seagate is introducing the Barracuda ES.2 and 7200.11 1TB hard drives. They both offer up to 1TB (1 terabyte) of disk space. The drives are expected to start shipping in the third quarter. The 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 will likely be priced at $399.99. There was no price estimate for the Barracuda ES.2.

As seen on craigslist:

I need someone to "camp out" in line for me at The Apple Store in Santa Monica. You will need to show up at The Apple Store at 7am on Friday, and hold my place in line until 6p.

The job pays $200

The Universal Solar Charger from Brando is a God-sent for the gadget lover.
The device is small enough to carry around but don't let that fool you.
It also uses good ol' fashioned electricity to charge a variety of gizmos such
as cell phones and mp3 players

BSD is so mature, so orderly, so ... run by adults. Or so says the PR (what little there is).

But whenever I try to actually run BSD, I run into trouble. I haven't tried any BSDs since my review of FreeSBIE back in April, so recently I figured I'd give some BSD distros a spin.

Since I was no fan of the FreeSBIE live CD, I figured I would try a hard drive install. I wanted to put FreeBSD on my test box -- the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client (VIA C3 1 GHz processor, 256 MB Ram, ECS EVEm motherboard, with external CD drive and interchangeable hard drives).

I was ready to sacrifice my Debian drive to the cause. But FreeBSD quit somewhere in the bootloader.

I already knew that the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz Pentium II MMX and a scant 64 MB RAM) might not be the best candidate, but out of obligation I tried to run two live CDs: FreeSBIE and TrueBSD. Neither would load. I didn't expect anything with only 64 MB of RAM, and my expectations were met.

So I figured I'd try FreeSBIE on my Dell box (3 GHz Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM). It booted to a shell, but when I tried to start the GUI with startx, the whole thing went to shit. Now I've learned a lot in the past few months, and I'm sure I could hack the X config to get Xfce running, but I just didn't have it in me. TrueBSD (I know it's release 0.1, but it's the only one available) wouldn't load at all.

On my Maxspeed test box, FreeSBIE would load, but I couldn't get anything better than 640x480 resolution, and even as root I couldn't edit xorg.conf to change it. Oh ... and it couldn't find my Ethernet adapter. TrueBSD wouldn't boot at all.

I'd still love to run one of the BSDs, and I'm not giving up, but all the hype about how the "maturity" of BSD's code and philosophy doesn't hold much water when it won't install it on equipment that doesn't blink at Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Fluxbuntu, Debian, Puppy, Damn Small Linux, Mepis, Knoppix, Slax and ZenWalk.

I've gotten many comments over the months about how I should try PC-BSD, but I want the full "ports" experience of FreeBSD (and I'm open to NetBSD and OpenBSD, too). DesktopBSD would probably be easier, but I don't want to be locked into KDE.

I want to love BSD (I already love the free, comprehensive documentation for FreeBSD), but it's got to show me a little installation love first.

Anticipating an increase in service demand - thanks to Apple's much-hyped iPhone - AT&T has hired 2000 temporary employees and has trained them on how to sell Steve Jobs' latest gadget.

Considering that AT&T has some 1,800 stores nation-wide, the surge in available staff amounts to just one extra person per store.

One more thing - in case you were wondering - we are NOT (sadly) getting any kickbacks from Apple Inc., there's just plenty of iPhone-related news coming out regularly.

That's right, contingent on AT&T's takeover of BellSouth, the communications giant must offer DSL service for $10 a month.

THAT'S $10 A MONTH, PEOPLE.

It's slower than the average DSL line -- 768Kbps down and 128Kbps up -- but still, it's wicked cheap. (And I'm all about the cheap.)

Go here to see if you can get the $10 deal (you can't have had AT&T DSL anytime in the past 12 months ... and there's a heavy geographical component, too).

But ... the great Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing (and sci-fi literary fame) tells you why you SHOULDN'T DO IT:

... even at $10/month, AT&T DSL should be avoided like the plague. These are the scumbags who illegally wiretapped the entire Internet for the NSA, who broke net-neutrality to find "copyright infringements, and who inspired NBC to call for a law requiring all ISPs to do the same (imagine -- a law forbidding network neutrality!). Seriously: the only day I wouldn't piss on AT&T is if they were on fire.

From BoingBoing:

I pondered for a while whether this story belonged on "Click." It is, after all, step one in what could become the ultimate anti-clicking culture.

Turns out Japanese electronics maker Hitachi Inc. is developing technology to help coach potatoes alleviate the strain on their remote-control finger.

The "brain-machine interface" developed by Hitachi Inc. analyzes slight changes in the brain's blood flow and translates brain motion into electric signals.

Russell Shaw of ZDNet finds the patent Apple is applying for that will render your iPhone uncapable of being recharged if its stolen.

ZDNet tipped me off to Apple's iPhone video guided tour, guaranteed to increase your lust for the pricey new, not-yet-released gadget you can't have.

Can you believe this bullshit? In Microsoft's new Word 2007, the .doc format has taken a back seat to .docx. Luckily there's a way to handle these files in Open Office, the free, open-source office suite -- at least for the Linux version. Novell had an ODF Converter that works on .docx word processor documents ... and this Linux Planet article shows you how to take the .RPM Novell package and convert it to a .DEB package that can be installed in Debian and the various Ubuntus.

I imagine a future version of Open Office will support .docx natively, but for now, there's this solution. Or ... you could tell people NOT to use .docx, stick with their old MS Office software or, for the love of god, just start using Open Office, AbiWord/Gnumeric, KOffice, or even Ted.

Soapbox time: I support the move to the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF), which is native to OpenOffice 2, and I hope it goes forward. I'm naturally skeptical about Microsoft's own open-document format, OpenXML, simply because having a company generally opposed to open standards creating and controlling an open standard is counterintuitive and probably counterproductive.

And like it or not, at this point Microsoft's .doc and .xls file formats for Word and Excel, respectively have pretty much become universal -- with many non-MS programs able to read and write them in most cases. That's probably why MS created the .docx format in Office 2007 -- they need to give users a reason to purchase yet another version of Office that they probably don't need. Most Word and Excel documents (or, if you prefer, and I do, word-processing documents and spreadsheets) are fairly simple and don't need a whole new generation of features and formatting. It's nice if you need it, overkill (and costly overkill at that) if you don't.

Now mind you, this is coming from someone that reads an occasional spreadsheet if it comes preloaded with data, and uses word processors for WRITING. I don't generally drop photos, tables, spreadsheets, other graphics, et al., into my documents. I just write it and post/send it where it needs to go. Some people use Open Office (and MS Word, too) to produce publication-quality documents, and I say more power to you, but for the rest of us, we don't need any new proprietary formats that prevent us from freely exchanging documents and being able to actually open, read and edit them.

The days when everybody needed to have Word and Excel -- the branded versions -- on their PC, or risk not being able to do their work are long, long past. And that's why we need ODF. I'd love to switch the default in my Open Office Writer from .doc to .odf -- and that day is coming, methinks, sooner than later.

PC World magazine has released the results of its annual survey on Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

The survey, which tallied the responses of more than 6000 PC World and PCWorld.com readers, ranked several ISPs based on aspects such as connection reliability, download and upload speed and customer service.

Verizon fiber connection came on top of the list in overall satisfaction, while AOL and Charter ranked the lowest.

Here are the survey results

If you're reading this blog, I can safely assume that you are fond of gadgets and technology. If that's indeed the case, you may want to consider signing up for the European Space Agency's guinea-pig program (okay, that's not the official title).

On the plus side, you get to play with all the gadgets astronauts - okay, cosmonauts - work with during actual space missions and you get paid for it!

The down side? You and 5 other people get to spend 520 days in confinement in a small facility in Moscow with a rationed diet, limited water and no booze!

From the ESA website:

"In order to investigate the human factors of such a mission ESA has teamed up with the Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) and will send a joint crew of six on a 520-day simulated mission to Mars.

The simulation follows the mission profile of a real Mars mission, including a exploration phase on the surface of Mars. Nutrition will be identical to that provided on board the International Space Station.

The simulations will take place here on Earth inside a special facility in Moscow. A precursor 105-day study is scheduled to start by mid-2008, possibly followed by another 105-day study, before the full 520-day study begins in late 2008 or early 2009."

Who thought a 233 MHz laptop with 64 MB of RAM -- one purchased for $15, mind you -- could run so damn well. I've been using Firefox to handle my e-mail (and now to post this entry), with Damn Small Linux 3.3 as the Linux distro, and I must say that I am very, very pleased with the way everything's working.

I finally figured out how to save my configuration -- by adding the line /home/dsl/.filetool.lst to the /home/dsl/.filetool.lst file itself (it sounds redundant, or perhaps recursive, but rest assured, adding the name of the file to the file itself enables the backup/restore feature. Since this laptop -- a Compaq Armada 7770dmt doesn't have a USB drive, I went to the backup/restore menu under System and typed in hda4, because that is where I want my filesystem to live (it's also the partition where DSL is installed). It worked, my files saved upon exit, were there upon reboot, and all is well with DSL.

I also recently installed Fluxbox -- the window manager in Damn Small Linux and AntiX -- on my Debian box, and since I had to pretty much jump-start the menus and am now building up my configuration, I'm learning a whole lot about what is fast becoming my favorite window manager. It'll be even better when I add ROX filer.

Here's my Fluxbox tip of the day (and for those who already know it, bully for you): To switch from one workspace to another from the keyboard, hit ALT-F1, ALT-F2, ALT-F3, ALT-F4 for each of the four workspaces. Another thing I recently learned is that you can have way more than four workspaces. I saw somewhere in the Fluxbox configuration a way to add more. I can't remember whether it's in the fluxconf application or in the menus themselves. I'll get back to you on that one.

But again, can you imagine using a 233 MHz laptop with a scant 64 MB of memory and not complaining about slowness? Hell, I'm using 802.11b (not the faster g) and I'm not even noticing the slowdown from 100baseT Ethernet.

That brings me to my Linux tip: The Orinoco Wavelan PCMCIA wireless card has been autodetected by every flavor of Linux with which I've tried it. I have the Silver version (go for it, or the gold, but not the bronze). It doesn't have WPA security, but for cheapness, it's the way to go -- they sell all the time on eBay.

From Linuxdevices.com:

Days after unveiling Foleo, Palm announced plans to sell off about a quarter of the company to Elevation Partners, an investment firm run by Fred Anderson, and associated with corporate housecleaning. As CFO, Anderson helped engineer Apple's most recent turnaround.

In less interesting news, Astraware will bring Soduku and Solitaire to the Foleo, and MotionApps will offer its mDayscape personal information manager for the device.

If Palm can only get the price of the Foleo down from $400 to $300, then we'll talk.

French government defense officials are warning against the use of BlackBerrys, alleging the British and American intelligence agencies could be eavesdropping on calls and emails sent through the network.

This latest move by the French could be considered paranoid and silly, but certainly on par with the "Freedom Fries" campaign from a couple of years ago.

After all, the U.S. goverment would never eavesdrop on anybody...wait a second!

Ars Technica reports that Apple today released OS X 10.4.10, proving additional driver support for USB devices, RAW cameras and, inevitably more. Security updates, too.

So while Leopard remains four months away, get 10.4.10 today.

Nicholas Carr knows the future. It's in his upcoming book, "The Big Switch:Our New Digital Destiny" (out Jan. 7 2008). These quotes come via Andrew Keen's The Great Seduction:

A hundred years ago, businesses began dismantling their waterwheels, steam engines, and generators. After producing their own mechanical power for centuries, they suddenly had an alternative. They could plug into the newly built electric grid and get all the electricity they needed from central stations. The cheap power pumped out by electric utilities didn’t just transform how businesses operate. It set off a chain reaction of economic, social, and cultural changes that brought the modern world into existence.

Today, a new technological revolution is under way, and it’s following a similar course. Companies are beginning to dismantle their private computer systems and tap into rich services delivered over the Internet. This time, it’s computing that’s turning into a utility. The shift is already remaking the computer industry, bringing new competitors like Google and Salesforce.com to the fore and threatening stalwarts like Microsoft, SAP, and Dell. But the effects will reach much further. Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did.

Not so incidentally, Andrew Keen is author of the currently hot "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture."

Russell Shaw of ZDNet has a theory:

This is just pure speculation, mind you, but I have a bit more than a hunch that now-former Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel’s departure from that post was hastened by his inaction in terms of getting Yahoo! as deep into social media as it could have been.

Awful interesting that just two days after Semel gets kicked upstairs to a “non-executive chairman post, comes rife rumors that Yahoo! and News Corp. are negotiating a trade of blue-chip social media property MySpace to Yahoo! in exchange for News Corp. (Rupert Murdoch, you know) acquiring about 25 percent of Yahoo!

...

My hunch is that Semel stood in the way of negotiations to make this rumored deal work. For yet another appearance of interaction, his CEO title was taken away from him.

It seems that Google is once again ramping up its Gdrive project -- offering you, the regular guy/gal, a whole lot of space to store anything you damn well want, or so says Garrett Rogers on his Google blog at ZDNet.

I love this stuff. Any fear of having my data stored on a remote server owned by a huge corporation is outweighed by the fear of my losing it due to aging equipment and shoddy backup regimens.

Rogers points out that Microsoft and AOL are already on the case. I even signed up with AOL's Xdrive at one point, though I have yet to actually ... use it.

With Xdrive, by the way, the first 5 gigabytes is free. For 50 GB, it's $9.95 a month. That's a way for AOL to make back all that dialup money it lost over the past five or so years. As usual, Xdrive integrates seamlessly with Windows desktops, somewhat kess so with Mac and Linux. Isn't that the way it always is? Would it kill these megagiants to program for Mac and Linux?

Let's hope Google can do better, shall we?

Update: I checked my Xdrive account, and I had one file in there. I deleted it, but the whole thing is still there waiting for 5 GB of my crap. Whoever integrates the best Web-based apps with all this storage is going to win the race in this space -- and right now that's Google.

I love my gadgets. Whether is my iPod, cell phone, digital camcorder, I simply love them.

Having said that, many a time I have wished there was an "easy button" to silence those inconsiderate cell-phone yappers at restaurants, hospitals, schools, pretty much anywhere there's a cell phone signal and, of course, on the road.

Fortunately, the company e-mobile has come up with "a wide variety of Cell Phone Jammer to block phone signals"

ZDNet is as obsessed with the iPhone as anybody else and got these shots via Endgadget. Also, Jason D. O'Grady of ZDNet reports, there's a dedicated YouTube button in the second row of virtual keys in the picture. A dedicated YouTube button? For the love of Pete!

Rumors emerged Wednesday about Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. contemplating the swap of social networking website MySpace.com for a stake in Yahoo!

The news come only days after the departure of Terry Semel as Yahoo!'s chief executive.

Gateway announced Tuesday a voluntary recall of some 14,000 notebook battery packs due to - surprise - overheating and scalding hazzard. The recall affects some, but not all Gateway 400VTX and 450ROG series notebooks sold between May 2003 and August 2003. The batteries were made by Samsung Electronics.

Check out Gateway's battery website for instructions on how to know if your notebook's battery pack needs to be replaced.

If so, take a tip from Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica:

Anyone who thinks they can sneak into an AT&T store hours ahead of the 6 PM iPhone launch has another thing coming, according to new rumors reported by (you guessed it) AppleInsider's sources. Tipsters from within the AT&T retail stores have told the site that they plan to close the stores temporarily a couple of hours before the official launch in order to prevent crowding inside of the retail space and allow the employees to put up displays worthy of making an appearance on the Broadway hit "Jesus Christ Superstar."

"[AT&T stores] will be setting up roped queue lines for when they re-open at 6:00 p.m.," said one tipster, who spoke with representatives at his local AT&T retail store in a smaller suburban market in central Pennsylvania. "They then plan on staying open till 10:00 p.m."

Me: laughing my ass off at Jacqui's final graf:

Since no one seems to be clear what the status is on supply, I guess we're left to guess on that one until the last second. And by "last second," I mean when some angry geek goes postal because he or she was a mere two people away from the cutoff.

AND ... if you're that geeky, there's an iPhoneDevCamp to teach you how to develop apps for the thing:

It's more of an intensive boot camp than a conference, since the primary goal seems to be to get as many people as possible together to talk about, learn about, and write applications for the iPhone. There will be a few presentations in the beginning as well, but most of the time will be dedicated to actual development. And developers, if you don't have a shiny new iPhone by July, don't worry: it's recommended but not required.

The good news is that the DevCamp is free, and will be held from July 6 to 8 in the Bay Area. No venue has been picked yet, but the organizers are trying to nail that down quickly. The organizers are also actively seeking sponsors and a few presenters, so if you can help out in either of those capacities, you might want to let them know.

And there's MORE, MORE, MORE iPhone news from Ars Technica's Infinite Loop. While Click's Armando Hernandez already reported on the battery life, the other news is that the iPhone's surface will be "optical-quality glass" instead of plastic:

Those who were concerned that the iPhone would display the same level of delicious scratchability as the iPod can now rest eas(ier) knowing that the front will not be quite as scratchable as its previous audio-only predecessors.

While we all know how close Apple and Google are becoming (would I be surprised to see Google buy Apple? No), beginning today, owners of Apple TV will be able to watch YouTube videos on their newish box. So if you have a hankering for British cell-phone salesman Paul Potts singing operatic arias, you can do it.

But the big news, learned by me from Ars Technica's Infinite Loop, is that you can do the exact same damn thing on your shiny, keyboardless new iPhone beginning June 29 -- launch day for the lusted-after gadget.

As Ars' Jacqui Cheng so wittily writes:

The company says that a new, Apple-designed app (wow, thanks for specifying that, Apple) will allow users to stream YouTube content to the device through WiFi or EDGE. This announcement only comes a few days after YouTube launched its own, "universal" version of YouTube Mobile. Apple just isn't content to let other people do the work, I guess.

The iPhone will apparently be able to stream YouTube videos upon launch on June 29, so you'll never have to miss out on your buddies' video blogs.

I don't know if "Web operating systems" is the best name for what this post is about, but I continue to be intrigued with what might more accurately be called "desktop environments over IP," meaning full desktops of applications that work via a Web browser. While Google is slowly getting into this space with Google Docs and Spreadsheets (and is trying to offer offline functionality via Google Gears, there are plenty of others -- Microsoft included -- vying for what I think will be the future of business and personal computing.

Stan Schroeder of FranticIndustries offers a very detailed review of 10 such services.

One of the most intriguing is Desktop on Demand, which basically pipes a Linux X server over the Internet to your browser. Still, you need a helper app on your PC, so it doesn't exactly have the "use anywhere" functionality that I think makes this kind of service essential -- that and they're not accepting new users at present, so I couldn't try it.

Way down in the comments to Schroeder's article, somebody mentioned eyeOS.org, an open-source project -- and it looks pretty good. Signing up for an account was a little bit squirrely, but I was able to do it, and I'm pretty impressed with it. You can write documents, save them in folders, create a spreadsheet and even open a Web browser (yep, a browser within a browser -- not exactly the most useful thing in the world, but you can do it).

I'll definitely be keeping my eye on eyeOS. Schroeder did cover it in an earlier Web-OS roundup.

One of the most noted Web-app developers is 37signals, which was recently covered (and very positively at that) by Time magazine. When it comes to collaboration among many workers in different places (which is how 37signals itself is run), they've got quite a lead in the Web-application field. I don't quite understand what they're doing, but I do plan to check it out. The one thing they've done that most geek types have heard about is Ruby on Rails, a Web-app development platform. Alas, I'm not anywhere geeky enough for that ... yet.

Here's a bit of business-running wisdom from 37signals, via the Time article (emphasis mine):

37signals isn't shy about dispensing one thing without charge: advice to small-business owners. On the company blog, Signal vs. Noise, Fried shares what he's learned about the art of streamlined teamwork with more than 65,000 readers. First, kill all your meetings; they waste employees' time. "Interruption is the biggest enemy of productivity," he says. "We stay away from each other as much as we can to get more stuff done." Use asynchronous communication and software instead to exchange information, ideas and solutions. Next, dump half your projects to focus on the core of your business. Too much time and effort are wasted on second-tier objectives. Third, let your employees decide when and where to work so they can be both efficient and happy. As long as their fingers are near a keyboard, they could as easily be in Caldwell, Idaho, as in Chicago.

Yeah!

For some reason, testing and using Linux got me interested in trying to read and manage my e-mail with traditional mail clients, even though it was contrary to my experience, habit and nature. From almost the first time I had access to Internet e-mail, I've sent and received it via an online interface, going all the way back to AOL. (That doesn't count the Los Angeles Valley College-based BBS I used in the early '90s that offered free Internet mail that I could download with Usenet news as QWK packets and read and write offline with a shareware DOS program whose name totally escapes me.)

For my personal mail, I've tried quite a few services, but Yahoo keeps upping the ante as Gmail and others nip at its heels -- and Yahoo has kept me with such seemingly benign announcements as "more storage!" "dots in your e-mail address!" "unlimited storage!"

To keep my geek cred, I do have an account on Gmail (especially since I used to be a heavy user of Blogger.com and Google Groups, which now either require or strongly suggest you have a Google account, the "benefits" of which include a Gmail address). I've never used Gmail much, not because it's better, worse or different than Yahoo Mail, but just because everybody knows my Yahoo address, and that's what I use.

Gmail does offer free POP mail service, meaning it can be used with a traditional mail client, and Yahoo offers POP access for a fee (well worth it if you need to use a mail program), but since I'm at different computers during the day and week, managing e-mail that's not on a central server just doesn't work for me -- I need it all to be in one place, accessible anywhere, at any time.

That's what made IMAP service -- where mail stays on a Internet-accessible server -- so intriguing to me when I started to experiment with Linux. But even the Daily News doesn't offer IMAP. And while Web-based e-mail clients basically deal with mail over an IMAP server, neither Yahoo nor Google offer it. It's ironic. But not helpful

So I configured SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, Evolution, and more recently Sylpheed and Mutt, to receive my POP mail from Yahoo and the Daily News' e-mail system. But downloading all my mail to one computer, as I said, doesn't work for me. And while all e-mail clients allow you to tell the mail server to keep the mail when download it via POP, there's no way to "manage" that mail via the client software -- I can't get rid of the messages until I go to the paper's Web-based client, so it's just better for me to do all my e-mail from the Web, even if our Web mail site is slow as molasses much of the time.

Even with IMAP, you have more "portability." But who wants to set up a dozen different programs on a half-dozen PCs? I've done it, but it's just too much complexity.

Still, if you want free IMAP mail, Fastmail.fm is the place to get it. For most accounts, they don't even offer POP mail. And they make an excellent case for why IMAP is better than POP and why a Web interface -- especially theirs -- is better than both.

If you want to use a traditional mail client with Fastmail.fm, you can, but the company's Web interface is blindingly fast. But there's a small catch; for those who do want to use a mail client, Fastmail.fm doesn't offer nonpaying users to access its SMTP server for outgoing mail, instead suggesting you use the SMTP server offered by your Internet service provider. However, a Fastmail.fm offshoot sponsored by Linspire -- freelinuxemail.com -- offers free SMTP access to use with your client software. At one point recently, I successfully set up mutt to access freelinuxemail.com via IMAP and to handle my Daily News POP mail at the same time, sending mail for each service via different SMTP servers.

Now that Linspire is among those Linux providers who have signed "intellectual property" protection deals with Microsoft, you might feel differently about using their free, sponsored e-mail ... and if you really do like what Fastmail.fm is doing, it's well worth paying for an enhanced level of service ... or you can just stick with the free version and stay with their ultra-fast Web interface, or use your ISP's SMTP service, if you're allowed (some ISPs don't let you use their SMTP server if you're not doing so from your home IP address, but my ISP -- DSL Extreme -- is not among those and can be accessed from anywhere).

And for those who want to use a client and crave the speed of mutt (or the University of Washington's pine e-mail program), I've found that Sylpheed is much faster than Thunderbird, Evolution and SeaMonkey when it comes to traditional Linux GUI e-mail clients, especially for old, creaky hardware like I use. And Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and some version of Sylpheed are even available for Windows, should you want to get away from Outlook for your e-mail client needs on the Microsoft platform.

I did have a lot of fun with e-mail on the command line -- using fetchmail to get the mail, mutt to read it and reply, and msmtp to send it (I never got around to sorting it with procmail or using the full sendmail server program). And while I'm amazed at the flexibility of these programs -- while being equally fascinated and intimidated by their complexity and lack of usable, real-world not-a-geek documentation -- I have to do what works for me.

And that is the Web. It's not sexy-geeky, and even though plenty of those around me at the Daily News are figuring out how to use Thunderbird or (gasp!) Outlook Express to POP their company e-mail, the functionality I need -- e-mail anywhere that's always there -- is done better through a Web interface than it is via any mail client, from mutt and pine to Sylpheed and SeaMonkey.

And while I reserve my right to go back to a traditional mail program, I'm going to stick -- for now -- with flexible, grab-it-anywhere Web mail.

So how are you dealing with e-mail? I'd love to know.

I first heard about Welsh cell-phone salesman-turned-opera-singing sensation Paul Potts a couple of days ago on NPR's "Day to Day," (here, too) and even though he's on a British reality show that doesn't even air over here, his YouTube videos are causing a sensation all around the freakin' world. Here he is wowing Simon Cowell and the other judges:

here's another Paul Potts video:

And as if there was any doubt, Potts did win the competition:

In an effort to bring you, the home viewer, more news, tips, tutorials and overviews of as many corners of technology as we can, Daily News online master of all he surveys Armando Hernandez has joined the Click team. Check out his entries on fire-prone laptop batteries and Apple's longevity claims for the iPhone's own battery, which we hope won't be catching fire anytime soon.

Seriously, folks, Armando is the go-to guy when it comes to maintaining Dailynews.com, and he's helped me countless times with my HTML and photo-editing difficulties.

Remember last year's recall of Sony batteries? You know, the one that affected more than 10 million notebook batteries, including Toshiba's, Dell's and Apple's?

Well, it seems not everybody tended to that recall notice.

At least three more fires have been recently attributed to Sony's lithium-ion battery overheating.

In response to those fires, Japanese electronics maker Toshiba - who already feature a list of defective batteries and affected notebooks on their website - is stepping up efforts to contact customers who may own a notebook featuring the affected battery.

Apple Inc. announced Monday that its highly-anticipated iPhone (coming to a retailer near you on June 29) will have a longer-than-expected battery life (8 hours of talk time, 7 hours of video playback, 6 hours of Internet use, 24 hours of music playback and 10 days on stand-by mode), leaving the competition in the dust. Currently, devices such as Palm Inc.'s Treo and Research in Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry Curve offer 4 hours of talk time.

Apple said in January that it expected the iPhone to offer 5 hours of "talk/video/browsing" and up to 16 hours of audio playback.

Apple's announcement is good news for us long-distance commuters. Now we can weave our way through traffic all the way from L.A. to New York without having to recharge.

I just installed Fluxbox in Debian ... and already got a lot of help -- especially in how to get a working menu installed -- from this wonderful Mepis page.

You know, I was all set to wipe the Debian drive and install FreeBSD, and when the latter's install program totally broke, I saw it as a sign that I needed to spend some time with Debian ... so I will.

After wiping out my Ubuntu 6.06 LTS install and redoing it because I totally screwed up GRUB, last night I opened up Carla Schroder's "Linux Cookbook" and saw the many errors of my GRUB-installing and -configuring ways.

This is the most helpful, clearest explanation on how to make GRUB work that I've seen. Ditto for the rest of the book, which has everything from package management and working in Vim, to configuring mail and Web servers.

I'd still like to see a detailed "recipe" on setting up an entire single-user command-line e-mail setup with mutt, but I'll leave that for the next edition.

Otherwise, I can't say enough good things about "Linux Cookbook."

After inking "intellectual property"/interoperability deals with Novell, Xandros and now Linspire, there's nobody Microsoft would like to bring to the mat more than Red Hat, according to PC World:

"We'd love to do the same deal with Red Hat," said Tom Robertson, general manager of corporate interoperability and standards at Microsoft in an interview Friday. "We're always open to talking with them."

That sentiment so far has not been the same on Red Hat's end, as the company has said it's not interested in a deal. Red Hat spokeswoman Leigh Day said Friday that is still the case.

"We continue to believe that open source and the innovation it represents should not be subject to an unsubstantiated tax that lacks transparency," she said in an e-mail.

Aside from the breaking-news aspect, this is a good article to read for a little background, including the dubious financial arrangements involved in Microsoft's move into the Linux space.

And for those who haven't read the 6,000 stories between then and now, this whole megilla began with a May 28 Fortune article in which Microsoft Steve Ballmer throws down the gauntlet on so-called patent infringement.

Buried deep in his blog, Canonical head Mark Shuttleworth discusses his position on the whole Microsoft "intellectual property" claim regarding Linux and open-source software and what, as the man behind Ubuntu, he's comfortable and not comfortable doing with Microsoft. Here is his comment in its entirety:

Mark Shuttleworth says:

Neither Canonical nor the Ubuntu project have any interest in signing an agreement with Microsoft on the back of the threat of unspecified patents. We have consistently (but politely) declined to pursue those conversations with Microsoft, in the absence of any details of the alleged patent infringements.

Speaking for myself, I welcome Microsoft’s openness to the idea of improving interoperability between free software components such as OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, and believe that Microsoft’s customers, many of whom are now also Linux users, will appreciate Microsoft’s efforts in that regard. I have substantial reservations about the quality of the specification for Microsoft’s OpenXML document formats and do not believe that Microsoft will limit it’s own Office implementation to that specification, which makes the specification largely meaningless as a standard. A specification which Microsoft won’t certify as being accurate as a representation of Office 12’s behavior, and will not commit to keeping up to date in advance of future revisions to MS Office, is not a credible standard.

After many years of participating in the free software community I know that neither I nor any other free software programmer has any desire to infringe on any intellectual property (trademark, copyright or patent) of any other person or company. Many of us are motivated precisely to ensure that we work on platforms which DON’T cross that line. So it is somewhat offensive to be threatened with an allegation of an IP infringement. I’m sure Microsoft doesn’t realise that its actions are being received in that light, otherwise they wouldn’t continue. But it is getting rather tiresome. I would be very happy to see the details of any alleged patent infringement so that we can engage with Microsoft more constructively on the subject.

Mark

So there you have it -- Canonical welcomes any efforts by Microsoft to improve "interoperability," isn't a fan of OpenXML, doesn't want to infringe on anybody's patents or trademarks, thinks Microsoft's threats are ill-advised, a and would like to actually deal with the issue rather than respond out of fear.

But most of all, he's not going to sign any IP agreements with Microsoft, meaning one of the biggest dominoes in free Linux will not fall.

(Thanks to commenter Zeke for tipping me to this item)

While Ed Bott at ZDNet had to wait for Dell to come and replace a fried motherboard (said frying happening during an unsuccessful BIOS upgrade), once he got the box running, it just flew on Windows Vista -- and he says all reports of slowness about the new Microsoft OS are, in this case, unfounded:

I’ve read several complaints about Vista taking too long to display menus or open Explorer windows. Everything’s downright snappy here. Menus show up instantly, and with the exception of Windows Mail, which takes five seconds or so to start, I experience nothing that makes me feel I’m having to wait even a little.

and:

Over a network using the C521’s Fast Ethernet (not Gigabit Ethernet) adapter, it takes me 16:51 to copy 6.3GB of files. On a nearly identical system running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 and plugged into the same Ethernet switch, copying the same batch of files from the same source takes 16:56, a statistical dead heat. I plug in a 500GB USB drive and copy more than 80GB of music files to the Music folder, and the file transfer moves just as quickly as it does on Windows XP.

Shoulda popped for the gigabit Ethernet, I think ... but it's good to see a happy Dell/Vista customer.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Linux-Watch and Desktop Linux predicted that Linspire would run into Microsoft's arms by interpreting Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony's remarks after Microsoft announced its Xandros deal, and now SJVN thinks that Mark Shuttleworth -- a guy who doesn't bad-mouth Redmond at all -- may be the next to do a Microsoft patent-protection deal:

Ubuntu has also recently partnered with Dell to deliver Linux on PCs and laptops from the first top-tier computer vendor to commit to Linux. I'm sure those desktop users would also like the goodies that Microsoft and Linspire will be delivering in Linspire 6 -- namely: access to Microsoft proprietary multimedia codecs; VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) over Microsoft IM (instant messaging) compatible clients; and Microsoft fonts.

Oh, and by the way, you do recall that Linspire 6 will be based on Ubuntu, don't you? And, that Ubuntu will be compatible with Linspire's revised CNR (click and run) software distribution system?

Sounds to me like it would as easy as falling off a log for Canonical to add some Microsoft features of its own to Ubuntu Linux distribution.

I didn't get a chance to ask Shuttleworth if he has something in the works for Ubuntu with Microsoft at the Summit, darn it. But, if you see some news about Ubuntu partnering up with Microsoft sometime soon, well, just remember that you read it here first.

I'd be stunned if this happened, but I can see it. Given Microsoft's deal with Novell, I wonder if Dell will switch it up and start offering Novell's openSUSE or SLED on the desktop either in addition to or instead of Ubuntu. If Mark Shuttleworth thinks that an MS patent deal is the horse to ride, he might just get on it.

But ... with Shuttleworth starting such intiatives as a totally-FOSS version of Ubuntu with no closed-source drivers or anything else, would he really go the other way and do a Microsoft deal?

If running Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux have taught me anything, it's the value of Dillo, the little Web browser that could. It loads wicked fast on my older systems, and while it doesn't do CSS or Java, what it does do -- display Web pages and the images on them -- it does quickly and well.

Dillo isn't part of the standard Add/Remove utility in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, but it is available in Synaptic. I installed it that way and then added it to the Applications menu in GNOME via the easily-found Alacarte Menu Mditor (Applications-Acccessories-Alacarte Menu Editor).

I'm going to do the same thing with mtPaint (which I don't even think is available via Synaptic, although there is a Debian package available to download.

Funny -- I could never figure out how to add things to the menus in XFCE, but with GNOME it's blissfully easy.

In his Linspire Letter, CEO Kevin Carmony talks about why he decided to make a deal with Microsoft, trading some technological info for an assurance from Microsoft that the Redmond giant won't sue Linspire's Linux customers for "intellectual property" infringement.

Here's his reasoning, in part:

Today, Linspire announced our latest partnership, one with Microsoft, to bring even more choices to desktop Linux users, and together, offer a "better" Linux experience. Just as Steve Jobs announced in 1997 that "the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over," I too believe it's time for Linux to do the same. Rather than isolating Linux, I believe we need to understand, as Apple did in 1997, that Linux exists in an ecosystem and must work with and interoperate within that ecosystem. As unpopular as it may appear to some, Linspire is willing to take a lead in this effort. Some people booed Steve Jobs back in 1997, but if you trace the history of his announcement, I think it was an incredibly smart move for both Microsoft and Apple, issuing in a new era for both.

Nice ... get yourself neck-deep, then compare yourself to Steve Jobs. Even Steve Jobs knows he's a crazy f---. Or should know. Rich, cunning, possessing uncanny instinct, etc. ... but still kind of crazy.

Here's more from Carmony:

So about a year and a half ago, I contacted Microsoft and asked for a meeting to discuss how we could work together to make a "better" Linux. I was confident Microsoft would welcome my invitation, because I knew there could be an economic incentive for them to do so. As I had expected, they welcomed my call, and I immediately flew to Redmond for the first of many meetings over the following months, taking place in both Redmond and San Diego, culminating in this week's announced partnership.

...

(and here's the kicker, emphasis mine)

As good as Microsoft believes Microsoft Windows is, some people will in fact choose Linux. If Microsoft can contribute in a win-win way towards a "better" Linux experience, some people might be willing to pay a little extra for that. After years in the prominent position of desktop computer operating systems and applications, Microsoft certainly has many assets, which can be brought to bear to improve Linux (technology, interoperability, intellectual property, distribution channels, marketing, etc.).

About the "pay a little extra" part, Carmony addresses it again in the Q&A (again, emphasis mine):

How much more will I have to pay for this "better" Linux?

Nothing actually. Linspire has decided to cover the cost of these enhancements without raising the retail price of Linspire. Freespire will remain free, and the retail version of Linspire will remain at $59.95.

How bloody sporting of them ... and everybody who hasn't made just such a deal with Microsoft ... guess it's long-walk-short-pier time, eh, Mr. Carmony?

And what about GPLv3, which is supposed to nix (pun intended) this sort of thing? More from Carmony:

As I mentioned last week, hopefully the drafters of the new GPLv3 will take such options into consideration as they finish their work. It's important that Linux not be relegated to a 3rd-class player behind Microsoft's and Apple's operating systems, which do provide for this type of interoperability with the legacy desktop computer ecosystem.

I'm about to go all caps ... wait for it ... IT'S NOT GONNA HAPPEN ... NOT ... GONNA ... HAPPEN.

And here's Kevin Carmony's parting shot:

I'm sure some people who feel strongly about this will turn to other distributions, and I respect that. I do, however, think many more will end up coming to Linspire Linux for the enhanced experience they find from a distribution that works with as many partners as possible in an effort to make Linux work better. This announcement doesn't take any choices away from anyone; it just adds one more option. Choice is a good thing. I'm glad we have lots of them today as we choose a desktop OS.

It's NOT about an "enhanced experience," it's about worrying that Microsoft is going to chew you up and spit you out.

Now's not the time to get between the sheets with Microsoft. I couldn't disagree more with Kevin Carmony -- the Linux (or GNU/Linux, if you prefer) and general open-source community doesn't need Microsoft or Apple to help make "Linux work better." It seems as if Microsoft needs Linux ... or Linux companies, for that matter, to boost its own softening business.

And I resent Carmony bringing Apple into this whole mess. Apple isn't threatening to sue anyone, least of all the users and distributors of Linux. Would I like to see iTunes on Linux? For sure. Will Apple bring Safari to Linux. Maybe -- but, really, who cares?

As I've said in just about every editorial I write on this topic -- and since Microsoft is doing one of these deals just about every other week, I repeat it all too often -- let's just go to court and hash this thing out.

Microsoft and the Linux distributors it's aligning itself with need to remember that the Redmond-friendly Bush administration has a year and a half left in office. The next president and his Justice Department probably won't look very kindly on Microsoft's maneuvering -- and those of us using free, open-source software shouldn't do so either.

-----------------------------------

Linspire's press release on the deal.

In my geeky haze, I forgot to blog about my triumph last week: I set up the $15 Laptop, a Compaq Armada 7770dmt (233 MHZ Pentium II with a whopping 64 MB RAM) to triple-boot Windows 2000, Puppy Linux 2.14 and Damn Small Linux 3.3.

I managed to do them in order, so first Puppy (a traditional, not frugal install due to the low RAM) installed GRUB for me, and then when I added DSL (frugal install), a new GRUB bootloader was added, and that one did pick up Windows (and DSL, of course) but not Puppy. So I found /boot/grub/menu.lst in the Puppy install, copied the code over to DSL's GRUB, and I was able to boot Windows, Puppy and DSL from the GRUB screen.

It was a geek-in-training triumph.

So yesterday I figure I can perform the same magic on the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client, the 1 GHz VIA C3 processor/256 MB RAM box that I use to test distros. I have three hard drives that I can switch in and out via a long IDE cable that allows the drives to sit on the desk next to the thin client box.

I had my Ubuntu 6.06 LTS/Windows 2000 drive hooked up. So first I add a frugal-istall of Puppy 2.14. I manage to get Ubuntu back into the new GRUB. And then I make yet another partition and try to add a frugal install of DSL. I figure that if I can do it WITHOUT a new GRUB, I can modify the Puppy Grub to account for DSL and have a quad-boot machine.

Long story short, DSL won't alllow an automated install without GRUIB, and pretty soon I can only boot DSL and Windows -- no Puppy, no Ubuntu.

I worked on if for a little while, but today I just decided to get rid of all the Linux partitions and start over.

For the first partition after Windows, I made a 512 MB Linux swap file. Then I made one big partition for Ubuntu and let the installer do its thing. The 140 updates I needed after the 6.06 install just finished.

I hadn't made that many mods to my old Ubuntu, so it won't take me too long to get this one where I want it. And I can start fresh with my Flash problem.

Bottom line: It'll take me awhile before I become a GRUB master.

What I took away: Puppy and DSL are fast, but they run even faster when installed to the hard drive. My previous installs of both have been "traditional," but the "frugal" install is better for both because it's simpler. You have maybe 3 or 4 large files on the partition, allowing for a very easy upgrade -- just drop in the new files to go to the next version.

You can even have a frugal install in a partition being used for something else, I think -- as long as you know how to boot it, it can coexist with another distro.

My triple boot did work -- Windows, Puppy and DSL. I should give up, but I probably won't. I think install order is important (in lieu of really mastering GRUB).

And I'm almost through with needing to put Windows on these boxes, so it'll be all Linux (and maybe some BSD) in the future. Next time I'll try DSL first, then Puppy, and then Ubuntu/Mepis/what have you. Or I could just try to really, really understand GRUB and all things about the master boot record.

I saw a plug for the Command Line Warriors blog in a British Linux magazine.

An enjoyable read, to be sure, with lots of GUI content, Mac OS X stuff, general Britannia and even shell account info.

Especially notable are the iPod and Linux series, Installing Gentoo series and Intro to the OS X command line.

My quick hint for OS X users:

Go to Applications, then to the System Utilities folder, then run Terminal. That's the OS X command line (your box is running BSD Unix, and it's there in all its glory).

at the prompt type this:

top

You will see most of the running processes on your machine and the percentage of memory and CPU power they are using.

To turn off top, on the PC it's ctrl-C. Maybe it's the same in OS X. If not, try Apple-C, or just close the Terminal window.

Today it's Linspire agreeing to a Linux technology deal with Microsoft that includes "IP protection" for customers, with IP standing for "intellectual property," and Microsoft basically agreeing not to sue users of Linspire's Linux distro.

Curiously, Freespire -- Linspire's "free" version -- isn't included in the IP protection deal but will benefit from greater integration between Open Office and MS Office.

This follows Novell and Xandros' deals with Microsoft on the Linux-distro side, as well as royalty deals with key end users (whose names escape me momentarily), they truly are falling like dominoes.

But the Linspire deal has more far-reaching implications, since Ubuntu is set to begin using Linspire's CNR ("Click and Run" package management sometime in the future, and with Linspire beginning to base its code on Ubuntu. This seems to be putting Ubuntu's parent Canonical closer to being in bed with Microsoft -- something that would go down less than well with Ubuntu's growing, vocal fan base.

But the Linux distribution companies are going down like dominoes. If Red Hat doesn't bite -- and I can't imagine they will -- the apocalypse will not yet be upon us.

But one thing is clear -- crystal, mother-f'n clear. Microsoft is using a divide-and-conquer strategy with the FOSS (free, open-source software) community and hoping to make deals on their terms and avoid dragging this whole sorry, sorry mess into court.

But that's where it's headed -- and quickly.

(Addendum: For those who remember, Linspire used to be called Lindows until legal threats from Microsoft over trademark prompted the name change.)

The theory that Apple's Safari release is a step along the way to Apple offering pre-bundled Windows on its Macintosh line is offered today on Ed Bott's Microsoft Report:

So, my prediction: Come October, when Leopard ships, Apple will announce that anyone buying a new Mac can order an Apple-customized version of Windows Vista preinstalled on the same system. If I’m an Apple stockholder, do I care that those machines aren’t running OS X full time? Absolutely not. Windows can hang on to most of its market share, while Apple cuts a huge slice out of the hardware market currently owned by less nimble, less cutthroat competitors.

I’d consider buying an Apple-branded box if it came with Windows preinstalled. Would you?

Hmmmm. The only reasons I don't think that this is totally whacked out are:

A) Plenty of people are already buying and loading Windows on their Intel Macs,

B) It's no skin off of Microsoft's nose whether somebody buys Windows for the Mac or PC platform, as long as they buy Windows,

C) The Mac is a big player in the high-end laptop and desktop market, and Microsoft would love to broaden its market in that segment.

D) As Mr. Bott says, Apple stands to make money by selling Windows -- money it's leaving on the table now by making machines that run Windows and telling customers to buy the OS elsewhere.

E) I keep forgetting that Steve Jobs sees Apple as a hardware maker, even though Apple's software has been a powerful motivator for hardware purchases over the years.

Scot Hacker at O'Reilly Network thinks the real reason for Safari's port to Windows is because of the search bar. Since the searches generally go through Google, Apple gets a cut of the ad revenue generated by those queries.

O'Reilly's Hacker cites John Gruber for the following:

“It’s not widely publicized, but those integrated search bars in web browser toolbars are revenue generators. When you do a Google search from Safari’s toolbar, Google pays Apple a portion of the ad revenue from the resulting page. … The same goes for Mozilla (and, I presume, just about every other mainstream browser.) … For example, the Mozilla Foundation earned over $50 million in search engine ad revenue in 2005, mostly from Google. … Apple is currently generating about $2 million per month from Safari’s Google integration. That’s $25 million per year. If Safari for Windows is even moderately successful, it’s easy to see how that might grow to $100 million per year or more.“

Money -- it's what's for dinner. Not that there's anything wrong with it. (Insert your own cliche here).

I decided to connect the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper) drive today, and I've spent quite a bit of time using it for work. Now this isn't the highest-spec machine (only 256 MB of ram, 1 GHz processor), but it's doing pretty well.

Even IE under Wine performed swimmingly (as good as or better as on my Xubuntu 7.04 setup). Same for the GIMP. I had a GIMP crash in Windows today, but the GIMP is generally rock-solid on both platforms -- and certainly was in 6.06 today.

On a more disturbing note, I've had a couple of Firefox crashes. I get three tabs open, and at some point the whole program just shuts down. Oh, and I still don't have Flash working.

I tried to "sudo" it to life again, but the clock was off all day (whatever distro I was using last worked off of UTC instead of local time), and once I synchronized the box with the network time servers (which I think is totally cool, by the way), I was unable to sudo because of this:

sudo: timestamp too far in the future: Jun 12 23:06:24 2007

Hmmmm. Maybe if I reboot, all will be forgiven and I can sudo till the cows come home. But I don't want to do that just yet. I've got stuff to do.

I'm enjoying my Dapper day, and once again, FOR EMPHASIS, I don't find standard GNOME-driven Ubuntu to be any slower in any way than XFCE-based Xubuntu (questioning, in my mind, any claims Xubuntu makes for being quicker or working on desktops with lower RAM, since I consider 256 MB, at this point, to be pretty low for a "modern" desktop environment). If you like XFCE, that's one thing, but at least when it comes to Ubuntu, there's no advantage, in my book anyway, for choosing Xubuntu over Ubuntu. Now Fluxbox or JWM, that's a different story ...

Final question you might be asking: Why Dapper? Why not Feisty? Well, I think the LTS edition of Ubuntu is important -- not everybody wants to upgrade all the time -- and I already have the drive set up with 6.06. I have worked a bit with Xubuntu Feisty (that's the version to which I'm comparing Ubuntu Dapper), and I've just wanted to keep this LTS setup around.

Just so you know, I run these tests on a Maxspeed Maxterm thin client with the aformentioned Via 1 GHz processor and 256 MB of RAM, with the drives sitting outside the box. I have three identical IBM 14.4 GB hard drives to choose from, each at this point with two OSes on them. So hardware is pretty consistent, and I can run about a half-dozen distros without having to do a full install.

According to Chromatic at the great O'Reilly Network, a Firefox extension called It's All Text allows you, when browsing the Web, to write text into boxes on a Web page using Gvim as your editor (instead of just typing into the little box on the page). While it's way, way geeky, it's a great thing for people who know vi and Vim -- and it makes actually editing what you do so much easier.

... and I do have Gvim installed on my Windows box -- and I'll tell you a little secret: there's an "easy" version for those who don't have the vi command set hardwired into their little fingers.

I already told you that I'm trolling ZDNet's mighty blog page, and I came across what I think is THE BLOG ENTRY OF THE FORTNIGHT (from Robin Harris' Persistent Memory blog), an entry that tells you how what Apple is planning -- and patenting -- now has the potential to do what I've been predicting will happen for years now (but heretofore with no indication that it would ever actually happen):

Leverage technical advances in OS X and its implementation on the Intel platform to port the Macintosh operating system over to PC and end Microsoft Windows' dominance.

Or in short, steal Steve Ballmer's lunch and commence eating.

Let's get down to the nitty gritty. It's all about Apple's new ZFS filesystem, the software scheme that controls how your files are created, stored and accounted for. Not sexy, right? Oh, but it is. While Microsoft's NTFS filesystem that came in with Windows 2000 was much better than the previous FAT filesystem, it's nothing like the filesystems in Linux and BSD that work an entirely different way (don't ask me exactly how because I may be geeky, but I'm not that geeky ... yet).

As Robin explains it:

What is sexy is that combined with Time Machine, ZFS enables for the first time truly safe massive home storage. Time Machine provides the “set and forget” backup automation with a simple, intuitive restore function that leaves Mac and Windows users drooling. ZFS provides the best data integrity and, for free, high performance RAID. Yes, George, better than Intel’s ICH8 chip. And it works much better with flash drives.

...

Apple had Mac OS X running on Intel processors for five years before they announced the switch. With Apple’s experience in managing big migrations - from 68000 to PowerPC to x86, and from OS 9 to Unix-based OS X - one has to wonder if Steve (Jobs) will finally choose to make the Mac OS available on Wintel systems.

Apple already has a sizable Windows software business. They install their Bonjour networking with every copy of iTunes, where it works way better than anything Redmond has. Now they are adding a browser, Safari. By inserting ZFS under NTFS data structures - and virtualizing Vista - they could start selling Mac OS X on Vista machines while preserving the customer’s investment in Wintel software.

The patent application itself, according to the ZDNet blogger, concerns a method for easily and "touchlessly" converting a Windows filesystem into a Mac filesystem.

And at the risk of over-quoting (if only because I barely understand all this):

Apple had Mac OS X running on Intel processors for five years before they announced the switch. With Apple’s experience in managing big migrations - from 68000 to PowerPC to x86, and from OS 9 to Unix-based OS X - one has to wonder if Steve will finally choose to make the Mac OS available on Wintel systems.

Now I know hardware is important to Apple, even though its strong suit has ALWAYS been the software that makes it work, but having Apple and Microsoft truly compete for the hearts and minds of users on the PC platform is something that should happen -- and quickly.

I'm not calling it collusion, because companies can clearly do what they want, and Apple thus far has been super-nice to Microsoft by not competing directly with them and, in return, getting Microsoft's continued porting of Office to Mac. Now with Apple developing its own iWork suite -- and the steamrolling of the free, open-source Open Office into real offices everywhere, Cupertino doesn't need Redmond so much anymore. So it could happen. What do you think?

Can you tell I've been trolling the ZDNet blogs today? Here's another analysis of Apple's Safari-for-Windows announcement, this one from Alan Graham of ZDNet's Web 2.0 Explorer blog.

Among the things coming out of Safari for Windows, Graham cites a growing market share for Safari, a revitalization of QuickTime as a video medium of the Web (sorry, Steve Jobs, that ship has sailed, and the name on its backside is "Flash") and the (to me puzzling) connection between Safari and the nascent iPhone platform.

Here's his take on the iPhone connection (go to the whole item for the rest):

We know that Apple is releasing a Safari/webdev kit so developers can develop web apps for (the iPhone). Why limit this to Mac developers? The phone is obviously designed to appeal to Mac and Windows users, so to ensure development for the phone on the Windows side, they need a platform to build on. Safari will no doubt be the major component that ties the phone and iTunes together, and we’ll likely see an explosion of web app development this fall after the phone is released. Windows support is crucial to their long-term phone strategy and that is especially important when it comes to browsing. Just look at all the sites that are popping up to work with the Wii…I have no doubt in my mind we’ll see lean and mean Safari sites for the iPhone.

Apple does have some great programmers, and maybe they can turn Safari into something that has value for both Windows and Mac users. I still think that Mac OS X is one of the best GUIs out there (based on BSD for those who care to know, so it's directly comparable, in my mind, with all the Linux/BSD GUIs out there, including KDE and GNOME). If Cupertino can innovate in the browser space, it can and will bring more people to OS X and the Mac platform.

And the development of Safari will answer, again, whether or not the iPod was a lucky hit for Apple, or the result of great minds making great products. We'll see, won't we?

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 blog downloads and tests Apple's new Safari browser for Windows. Besides wondering why, he doesn't much like the look of it but does like its bookmarking and RSS capabilities.

He sums up thusly:

I don’t see Safari catching on in any big way on the Windows platform. Safari for Windows - yes, it does crash!!!It’s too ugly (really ugly, especially on Vista, in fact, I’m looking at it now and it’s so darn ugly that it’s actually making me angry) and there’s no one unique feature that stands out as being worthy of making a switch. I also wasn’t all that impressed by the fact that the browser crashed on me a couple of times in about an hour. The crashes, combined with the speed with which a exploit was uncovered make me wonder whether Apple can write code for Windows.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement. As I wrote yesterday, I'm really a creature of habit. Once I start using something, I pretty much stick with it until I find a reason not to. At that point, something new not only solves my particular problem with the old product but also gives me a host of new features I didn't even know were there, but which I now need and want.

That's how I switched from Safari to Firefox on Mac OS X. And while much has been made of Apple's melding of the iPhone and Safari (developers for iPhone can get it done solely with Ajax and Safari, or so I read), I'm not in the iPhone demo because a) I'm not wealthy by a longshot, and b) I ALSO keep my cell phones until they're obsolete, so my Motorola V180 is still rocking it big time with the new battery I just bought for it from eBay.

Talk at the Apple developers conference didn't just center on Safari, the iPhone and AppleTV. Steve Jobs was up there with the giant screen giving a preview of OS X 10.5 Leopard, the Macintosh operating system that's seemingly been delayed ... forever.

Revealed so far: The Dock and Finder are getting major overhauls. Go to the Ars Technica story for some of the gory details, more of which will be picked apart and parsed in future hours and days, to be sure.

(Image above of Steve Jobs showing off Leopard's "stacks" system of displaying folders in the Dock from Ars Technica)

Huh? What? Why?

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, what you've all been waiting for (or perhaps not), the Safari browser that Apple bundles with each and every Macintosh computer sold is now coming to a Windows desktop near you. (Stories here, here and here).

No longer content with Microsoft orphaning its IE browser (no doubt because of the initial development of Safari at Apple), the folks in Cupertino are bringing Safari to the masses -- the Windows-using masses.

You might inquire as to what Steve Jobs is smoking? But he's Steve Jobs ... so whatever it is he in fact is smoking, he's using $100 bills as rolling papers.

Again, why?

But Jobs and Co. have a plan: You will use Safari, O Windows user, because it will be the only way to run Web-compatible apps with the soon-to-debut iPhone. And you will also use Safari, you Windows XP and Vista users, you, because it will be distributed with the wildly popular, culture-changing content-pushing engine known as iTunes.

Jobs cites a 5 percent share of the browser market for Safari, 78 percent for IE, and 15 percent for Firefox.

As for the iTunes connection:

(Jobs) noted that there are a million downloads of iTunes a day, with 500 million of those going to Windows machines.

“We know how to reach these (Windows) customers,” Jobs said.

And Jobs says Safari is faster than Firefox and IE. Want to find out for yourself? Download the beta.

My 2 cents: I was initially a big fan of the Safari browser in OS X. IE on the Mac was dead, killed by Microsoft (for reasons that continue to escape me -- the development of Safari itself not being sufficient), and I thought that Firefox just took too long to load. So I got used to Safari, and it was running pretty well ... until most "sophisticated" Web apps started breaking like crazy. Blogger never worked that well, even before it had a total Googlized redo, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets wouldn't even try to work. Notice that it's Google in both cases? I don't know what that says about the whole deal, but I want to use both Blogger and Google Docs (formerly Writely), and Safari just can't do it.

So I started to use Firefox on the Mac, and I'm pretty darn happy with it. Once you load it (yep, it does take a long time on my iBook G4 1GHz), you can just leave it running and open a new Firefox window in seconds. Now if Safari for Mac "catches up" to Firefox in terms of sheer functionality, I'd be inclined to give it another try. (I'm on 10.3.9, and the Safari developers abandoned that platform long ago ... if Firefox does the same, I'll have to upgrade to 10.4, I guess. But for Mac at least, Safari is in pretty big trouble, in my opinion.)

On my Windows XP box, it's a bit different. I have Firefox loaded, but I rarely use it. I'm pretty happy with IE 6 (I haven't yet made the leap to IE 7 -- I could use the tabbed browsing, but I'm loathe to give up something that "just works.")

Safari for Windows? I'll probably try it. But as I've said before, if Steve Jobs really wants to shake this shit up, he'll release OS X -- IN IT'S FREAKIN' ENTIRETY -- for PC and knock Microsoft and the rest of the computer industry on its collective ass.

So while Safari for Windows is something, it ain't everything by one gigantic, bare-assed longshot.

I've been distro-hopping on the $15 Laptop -- a Compaq Armada 7770dmt -- and so far Damn Small Linux is running ahead of the pack. It does the best with my current 64 MB of RAM, and it looks great. But until now, sound hasn't worked. Before I got the $15 Laptop (purchased from Lots of Laptops), I did some searches on installing Linux on the Compaq, and this page had some useful info on the sound problem in Red Hat:

... from the list pick ES1688 -- that's not the one in the computer but it works if you pick the right setting. You have to select 220 irq 5 dma 1 and 330 ...

That was enough to get sound in Puppy Linux (choosing ES1688 as the sound card and letting Puppy autoconfigure the rest -- as always, Puppy excels at hardware detection and setup).

But how do you configure sound in Damn Small Linux (I'm using version 3.3)? I searched for help with sound in DSL, specifically for Compaq laptops, and this page got me started:

open a terminal and type:

sudo rmmod soundcore sudo modprobe sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=0 mpu_io=0x330

and your Compaq Armada 1750 is no longer silent!

I don't have the 1750, but this was enough to get xmms to "play" a sound, even if I couldn't hear it.

I saw what was different. The Compaq 7770dmt uses dma=1, while the 1750 uses dma=0.

So I rebooted and tried this:

sudo rmmod soundcore
sudo modprobe sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 mpu_io=0x330

IT WORKED! I now have sound in Damn Small Linux on the $15 Laptop.

I don't like to generalize, so I'll get specific on the following inconvenient truths:

If you've got a 10-year-old PC and a 10-year-old Mac, you'll get way further with the PC if you want a decade-old computer that's productive today.

This is mostly due to the fact that the Classic Mac OS was abandoned by Apple, and there are almost no apps that have been updated so as to be useful in today's world of computing. In my experience, browsers and e-mail clients that run under the Classic Mac OS just don't work very well with today's Web pages and mail servers. On the other hand, most 10-year-old PCs will run Windows 2000 (or 98), and many will even run XP. And you can also run Firefox, IE, Abiword, Open Office, the GIMP, IrfanView, free antivirus software, EditPad Lite, even the dreaded Outlook Express for e-mail ... and the list goes on.

Windows is not slow. Some Linux distros are. On new hardware, you might not notice. On old hardware, you will.

I'm talking mostly about Windows 2000 here, and to a lesser extent Windows XP. I've run Win 2K on many, many platforms, and I'm continually surprised on how well it runs, even with low RAM. It may not be secure at all, may need lots of add-ons just to be usable and may be orphaned by Microsoft in a few years, but for now it's blazingly fast. I wish I had an XP disc so I could run the same tests with it.

While the Linux command line smokes anything Windows has to offer in terms of sheer speed, offers hundreds of up-to-date apps and can be a boon to productivity (as I learned during my Month at the Command Line), most of the Linux GUIs I've tried are a bit of a strain on the graphics capability of a PC, particularly of an older one with less than 512 MB of RAM.

Puppy Linux works great on most low-spec PCs, but in my experience, things like Flash and other multimedia files play with less trouble in Windows 2000.

Still, Puppy is much better than Xubuntu, which even though boasting a "fast" XFCE desktop, starts to chug considerably when Web pages have Flash on them. For an even faster experience than Puppy, there's Damn Small Linux.

But no matter the window manager, the apps themselves have much to do with performance. I suspect that much of my video problems stem from the Flash player in Windows being a better-written app than the one in Linux. All the more reason for Flash to be opened up to the community -- there's got to be a better player out there to be written. (Maybe the Democracy Player? So far, Gxine has been a disappointment.) If you happen to have an iPod, you're stuck. Apple doesn't appear to be interested in porting iTunes to Linux. I'm not happy about it, and you shouldn't be, either.

Still, there's much about Linux that Windows will never have, including:

a) a free, open-source base,
b) NOT being owned by Microsoft,
c) an extremely customizable desktop experience (from the command line, through basic X and small window managers, to the complex desktop environments of GNOME and KDE),
d) and did I forget to say that Linux is free?

Many, many people use pirated software -- I have, too -- and I don't like the feeling I get from doing it. Even if the apps are too expensive to begin with, and buying them would be out of the question, I don't think stealing the use of them is justified -- even if they're older versions that have been abandoned. (OK, I feel less bad about that, but I still feel way better running Linux and open-source apps whose developers want us to use them ... for free. And when it comes to much commercial software, asking paying customers to fork over hundreds of dollars on a yearly basis to keep their apps current -- is often abusive).

While I've seen many benefits from using Linux instead of Windows, I really don't think that sheer speed is one of them. Anybody who says that Linux is "faster" than Windows (NOT Vista) or Mac OS X, for that matter, at common desktop tasks has not had the same experiences I've had. As always, your mileage may vary, but I've been most disappointed in the XFCE-based Xubuntu, which doesn't seem any faster than regular Ubuntu with GNOME (or fasther than any number of KDE distros, of which NimbleX is my current favorite).

While Ubuntu and a standard desktop Debian both use GNOME, Debian runs faster.

And I'm not sure why. If you only read Web news about Ubuntu and Debian, you'd think that the people behind the extremely popular Ubuntu took an unformed, hard-to-use Debian and performed some kind of magic, bringing some kind of mystical computing power to the people. But Debian is surprisingly well-formed on the desktop, the install procedure is surprisingly like the alternate install of Ubuntu, and once you're up and running, there's not all that much different (except that Debian 4.0 Etch comes standard with more applications and, as I've said, runs just that much faster). And I haven't found running or maintaining Debian to be something only an "expert" can be -- especially since I'm far from being one myself.

It's marketing. Brilliant marketing. Ubuntu's best feature is its huge and helpful community at Ubuntuforums.org. There's a big Debian community out there too, but the Ubuntu people are just so dominant, even Debian users are wise to turn there for technical help since, at their core, the two distros are so similar (given that Ubuntu is derived from Debian, for those who don't know).

And while I'm on the subject, the Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux users are also extremely helpful -- they've come to this blog often with tips and suggestions, and I appreciate it greatly.

The only "modern" PC I have access to is my Dell 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM, and I'm not at liberty to install anything huge (read: a Linux distro) to the hard drive.

I suspect that on a newish PC, the big Linux distributions run like so much buttah and that any speed advantages that an old version of Windows offers is far outshined by the added security, equality and fraternity of free Linux.

It's always better to have new, maxed-out hardware -- a luxury I've never had (besides that, I'm too cheap). And it's mandatory to try before you buy. With Linux, it's easy. Once you have a broadband Internet connection and a CD (or preferably DVD) burner and have learned how to turn an ISO into a bootable disc, you have the keys to quite a kingdom. (Now's the time to rant about how Windows DOES NOT include a utility that can burn a bootable CD. I use and recommend ISO Recorder. Mac OS X also does a good job of burning ISOs with its Disk Utility).

If I were buying a new PC today, would I want it preloaded with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora/RHEL SUSE/SLED, Mepis or PCLinuxOS?

None of the above. I'd prefer a blank hard drive. Any computer user has much to gain by a) experimenting with many distributions, and going through the installation process is part of that experience. Just knowing that you can reinstall your OS if necessary is a powerful and necessary thing for any savvy computer user (and even for some less savvy). Let me install my own OS, thank you.

Are Macs too expensive?

Yes.

What makes you blog day after day after day?

I began blogging on technology with This Old Mac and This Old PC two years ago this month, and I've been posting at Click since September 2006 (that's nine months, by my count), and it's been an enjoyable ride thus far. I haven't lost my enthusiasm for learning about all this stuff, and that's what keeps me going. It's no secret that I've gotten the best response since I began writing about Linux (with many, many thanks to Lxer, which lets me pimp this blog as much as I can. Lxer is, hands down, the best place for news on Linux and free, open-source software).

And finally ...

Linux -- and the choice to use (or not to use) Linux -- is political. There's no denying it or getting around it

It's the same if you choose to run Windows or Mac OS. Cost, convenience, knowledge, passion, maybe even ignorance all factor in, but making the choice to run one, some, all or none of the many computer operating systems out there says something about you and about the OSes themselves (and the companies and communities that produce and support them).

Do the moral, technological and intensely personal factor in? You bet they do. And that's what makes all this so damned interesting and important.

Have you heard me moan? You must have.

"Why, oh why are used laptops so expensive? Even old, doggy ones go for way too far north of $100 -- and we're starting to talk doggy and unusable."

"Are those people on eBay high (on drugs -- they're already high on prices)?"

"If the sellers on Craigslist can't give even the most basic information about the laptop they're selling, and usually don't know it even when you e-mail and ask, why -- WHY -- do they think their 10-year-old laptop is worth $300? Just because they paid $1,000 in 1997 doesn't mean it has retained that much value A DECADE DOWN THE LINE?"

Enough moaning. After bidding on about 50 eBay laptops -- even the 300 MHz models with 1 GB hard drives, no networking (wireless or Ethernet) and no USB, can fetch $200. Everybody seemingly wants their very own laptop, and eBay is, if anything, a robust market.

I wanted a laptop, too. And I didn't want to spend ... anything.

After chucking eBay, giving up on Craigslist, and with nobody to give me the old, moldy laptop sitting in their closet, I went in a different direction.

I'd been watching the Web site Lots of Laptops for a couple of months. With shipping on heavy old laptops at a reasonable rate, the cost of the laptop itself from Lots of Laptops was ... whatever you wanted to pay. Yes, you bid on their laptops, too. But it's no eBay frenzy. First of all, these are, as the site admits, "Grade B and C" laptops. They go from 100 MHz to about 300 MHz in processor speed, they usually don't include hard drives (a corporate favorite -- retire the laptop and destroy/part out the drive so no "sensitive" information can be accessed), batteries, operating systems, etc. So I bid $5 for one. I got an e-mail back suggesting a higher bid, informing me that Lots of Laptops generally sold their inventory for somewhere between $15 and $30 apiece.

So I forgot about Lots of Laptops for awhile. After all, I'd have to put a little money into any laptop from there just to get it working, and who knows how much that would cost?

Well, between then and now, I've come into a whole lot of computer parts, many of them free, and still frustrated by my lack of ability to secure a laptop and not overpay, I tried Lots of Laptops again.

I found a good candidate: A Compaq Armada 7770dmt, with 233 MHz processor, advertised with 32 MB of RAM, no hard drive, no CD drive, but a floppy drive and a power cord. (As I said, most of the used laptops of this vintage, even the ones on eBay, don't include the power supply, which can run between $15 and $50 extra.)

So I bid $15, and Lots of Laptops bit. A Compaq Armada was sailing my way via UPS ground.

I took the time to look for the other parts I'd need. At minimum, a CD drive was mandatory. Luckily I found a new one for $10 (yes, on eBay, where parts can be refreshingly cheap).

The laptop finally arrived. It did come with the floppy drive and a power cord. Luckily the Compaq Armada 7770dmt doesn't use a standard laptop power "brick." The entire power supply is inside the case, and the AC cord plugs into the back. There's only a gaping hole where the battery used to be, but since no laptop of this age has a WORKING battery, I'm happy to save the weight. Maybe I can store a few CDs in there -- the hole seems big enough.

So I plug it in. I hit the power switch. I see a Windows 98 screen (holy shit! There's a hard drive in there! That wasn't supposed to be there, but I'm damn glad it is). That's all I see. It doesn't boot. It was advertised as "power up only," not "it boots," so I'm not surprised. But the "free" hard drive is a welcome bonus. The memory check reveals 64 MB instead of 32. Another nice surprise.

I try to boot from a floppy. Yep, I've got bootable floppies for Linux and Windows (the latter of which which I made from a great Web site, URL to come when I find it again). No go. "Disk controller error." So my floppy is bad.

I've heard that the BIOS on these old Compaqs isn't of the standard PC variety, and that the settings are stored somewhere on the hard drive. I can't access the BIOS, as I'm supposed to be able to do, with the F10 key, so maybe those settings AREN'T there.

But I pull the floppy drive, insert the CD drive, put in the Puppy Linux 2.14 CD ... and it boots into Puppy!

Holy shit, for $15 (plus $10 for the CD drive and about $20 shipping costs) I have a working laptop!

I didn't mention that I already have an Orinoco WaveLan Silver 802.11b wireless card from my old Macintosh Powerbook 1400, and it plugs into the Compaq just fine. Puppy autodetected it, and I was getting the Internet via Wi-Fi with minimal configuration (all I had to do was set it for "any" router and DHCP, the steps for which Puppy walks you through). Now with 64 MB of RAM (the max this laptop can hold is 144 MB -- the internal 16 MB plus two 64 MB SO-DIMMs), Puppy was NOT loading entirely into RAM, but it was running pretty well, just the same, very well given the 233 MHz processor.

Sound was also easy to configure, and I got a tip on that from yet another Linux laptop-oriented Web page.

A few days later, I decided to load Windows 2000. I did the install this morning, and I'm writing this entry over the Wi-Fi at the Los Angeles Public Library's Woodland Hills branch (no Wi-Fi gets into the Daily News building, and there's none coming from within it, either ... and I don't have a PCMCIA Ethernet card). I haven't had the time to download and install the service packs and the hundreds of security upgrades from Microsoft, but to its credit, everything pretty much autoconfigured (a first for me in Windows). Win 2K even picked up my Wi-Fi card -- no external drivers needed -- and configured it for DHCP, and I was off and running.

Windows 2000 ships with Internet Explorer 5 (which kind of sucks) and little else, but as I've written previously, the OS really flies on older hardware, and if you've got a legitimate copy and have a reason to run Windows, both 2000 and XP are extremely hearty platforms, provided you get antivirus protection (I use Avast, although I haven't yet installed it here) and don't do anything stupid with Outlook (like use it).

Before the install, I pulled the 3 GB drive and put a 30 GB from my junk pile into the Compaq, and it's quieter now. I made a 12 GB partition for Windows, leaving enough room for at least two Linux distributions on the drive. I don't know exactly what I'll install next, but candidates are Debian 4.0 Etch, Xubuntu 7.04, Damn Small Linux, and maybe even Fedora or openSUSE (currently being shunned by Linux fanboys over parent company Novell's deal with Microsoft). But even though I rail against such deals in my editorials, I see a reason for Microsoft's existence from a technological standpoint (although I'd really like to see them stop threatening to sue everybody who doesn't do everything they ask at any given moment).

UPDATE: I just tried AntiX today -- a Mepis spin that uses Fluxbox and is meant for a minimum of 64 MB of RAM. So far it works really, really well. It's a bit more complex than Puppy or DSL. It has Synaptic, for instance, but also includes lots of command-line apps that I love, including mutt and nano (which are hard to come by in Puppy land). It doesn't look pretty (it's pretty much gray-black in color), but it runs really fast -- and I haven't even done an install yet (I'm running the live CD of rc5, based on Mepis 6.5, so it's not even at beta). Net configuration was a little tricky, but I managed to get my static IP done right.

But back to the $15 laptop. I've had excellent luck so far. Your mileage may vary if you purchase one from Lots of Laptops, and at this point I'd still recommend Craigslist, since you can at least see and try to boot the thing before you buy. And the company behind Lots of Laptops, Bob Johnson's Computer Stuff, also sells "whole" laptops with better guarantees starting around $170. There are also occasionally good laptop deals (meaning around $100) from the sales division of ElectroRent, and ... that's about it.

But the old laptops are out there. They just need to be found.

I got this comment on my Xandros-Microsoft editorial from a gentleman who left the name Bruce Layne (could be real, who knows?), and it's worth repeating here:

I purchased all four major releases of Xandros, starting with 1.0, and all the Premium versions when available. I received help from the great Xandros user forum and it was a real community. I paid it forward by helping others. I felt like I was contributing to a viable commercial alternative to Windows and the Microsoft monopoly. Now, after four and a half years, I learn it was a lie.

I'm currently installing PCLinuxOS 2007 on my computer and my wife's computer, and so far it looks better than the latest version of Xandros. http://www.pclinuxos.com

Overnight, I went from being a big advocate for Xandros to abandoning them after they stabbed me in the back. The programmers are good, it's apparently just some greedy executives who sold out the company, employees and users for a chunk of Microsoft monopoly money.

Lots more comments at forums.xandros.com, under Off Topic.

I've heard good things about PCLinux ... and I hope the transition goes smoothly. Before you commit, why not do a bit of distro hopping? Ubuntu, Debian (I recommend their desktop install very highly), Mepis -- and just about anything else near the top of Distrowatch, even Fedora, which just released a new version.

It seems that Microsoft has made some changes to the equation editor in Word 2007 that makes documents created with it -- which have the suffix .docx -- unusable by two of the world's most influential scientific journals, Science and Nature.

Even when the documents are saved in older formats by Word 2007, they still don't render the mathematical equations in such a way as to be compatible with systems used by the two journals.

Here's what Science had to say (thanks to itWire for the quote):

"Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science.

"Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 -- for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us -- was not designed to be compatible with MathML. Regrettably, we will be forced to return any revised manuscript created with the Word 2007 default equation editor to authors for re-editing. To get around this, please use the MathType equation editor or the equation editor included in previous versions of Microsoft Word."

I've heard of this .docx -- what are they smoking up there in Redmond? The world is NOT going to start buying Office 2007 en masse just so they can read Microsoft-created documents. I'm pretty sure those days are over. It's just another reason to try the free Open Office and its Open Document Format.

By making "intellectual property" deals with commercially oriented distributors of Linux, Microsoft isn't alienating anybody it hasn't turned off already.

So far, the two companies that have inked such deals -- Xandros and Novell -- are focused on selling server operating systems to large businesses. And while they may have community involvement, they're not community-oriented, like the Debian distro from which Xandros is derived, or even the wildly popular Ubuntu (itself a Debian derivative).

So Microsoft is sticking with business-centric companies for these deals, and I suspect the corporate customers of Xandros and Novell will, for the most part, applaud anything that keeps them from being harassed by Microsoft. And that legal pledge of non-harassment now becomes a marketing peg that Novell and Xandros can use to sell more server software. It's dirty business, it alienates the very people who are most passionate about your products, but it just might work for those involved.

That is, unless the GPLv3 -- the new free-software license designed to stop this kind of activity -- keeps it all from happening.

Author and free-software guru Richard Stallman puts it this way:

"Software patents are a vicious and absurd system that puts all software developers in danger of being sued by companies they have never heard of, as well as by all the megacorporations in the field. Large programs typically combine thousands of ideas, so it is no surprise if they implement ideas covered by hundreds of patents. Megacorporations collect thousands of patents, and use those patents to bully smaller developers. Patents already obstruct free software development."

As this story develops, keep an eye on Red Hat and Canonical. Red Hat, the biggest and probably longest-standing seller of commercial Linux product, has not entered into any such deal with Microsoft, and it's not for lack of trying on Microsoft's part (they go for the bigger fish first). And Canonical -- maker of the ultra-popular Ubuntu distro (you know, the one now being shipped with Dell PCs) -- risks alienating its large, active community if it made any deal with MS.

The problem with this whole can of worms is that Microsoft is gambling on never going to court. Once proceedings do start -- and I predict they eventually will -- Microsoft will have to name the patents it claims Linux and the other open-source programs are infringing upon, and then the advocates of free software will be able to challenge those patents in court. That won't be good PR for MS. And the legitimacy of many of these patents -- of which Microsoft is amassing thousands -- is questionable, if experts are to be believed. Among those who think Microsoft has overstepped is Linus Torvalds, the man who began the Linux project back in the '90s.

Where this all leaves the desktop -- i.e. the non-server segment of the market-- is more of a mystery. While corporations all around the world are paying big bucks for supported Linux and for Windows server products, too, the desktop market for operation systems in is a state of extreme flux.

Microsoft is doing all it can to discontinue sales of Windows XP to push the new Windows Vista, even though most of the hardware out there today isn't ready for it. And while Linux is sufficiently mature on the desktop for most users (marshaling more over with the huge amounts of free software that are relatively easy to install and very easy to maintain), there's no real retail market for Linux desktops, meaning anything that Red Hat or Novell is selling is not looking any better than Ubuntu, Mepis or any of the dozens of other top distros that have a desktop focus and which are totally, completely free for users.

At this point, even Ubuntu-maker Canonical knows the money is not in boxed, shrink-wrapped software but in the support of that software -- something Red Hat has been doing successfully and profitably for years now.

That's probably why Microsoft is making its move. It can probably handle shareing the server market with Linux because there are many, many enterprise users who not only won't but can't afford to pay Microsoft server software prices, even if they wanted to move over from Linux. And for the most part, such a move is not something these businesses and other entities are even contemplating.

But on the desktop, the MS Office suite has been under attack from the free Open Office for quite some time. And Open Office can run just as well under Windows as it does on Linux. (If it ever comes to Mac in a form that's as easy to install as it is on PC, look out!) Open Office, the Mozilla-created Thunderbird mail client and even the GNOME and KDE office suites just keep chipping away at the Microsoft revenue base. (And that's why Microsoft is fighting Open Office's open document format in favor of its own "open" standard.)

Once you lose the apps, next thing to go is the OS.

I do a lot of testing of operating systems -- many versions of Windows, many more of Linux -- and I'm not one who says Linux is better 100 percent of the time. Windows has its strengths, along with many weaknesses, and the claims made for Linux are often overblown. I can boot Windows 2000 on machines of questionable vintage and get a lot of things done, seldom crashing (the opposite of the crash-tastic Windows 98), with very forgiving video and audio support. Pity that MS isn't selling Windows 2000 for $20 a disc. I'd love to get XP and do more testing with it ... but one thing remains ...

Windows costs money, especially when you're not using the version that shipped with your PC. And Microsoft structures Windows to, shall we say, suggest that you purchase even more software from them, as well as software from other vendors, for such tasks as security, virus-prevention, file compression, graphic design, backup, recovery, disk maintenance and more.

In contrast, Linux is almost always free, with free upgrades, free utilities and applications (although some do cost money and are often worth it), open sources (letting you see what it's made out of, and letting you and others help fix what's wrong with it) -- and you can make one, 50 or 1,000 copies and do what you wish with them.

The power to try out hundreds of distributions and thousands of applications without paying anything is key. I'm not saying that everything in the world ought to be free, but for software the free way appears to be working just fine.

And if you're a corporation or individual who is uncomfortable with free software (and, presumably, just as uncomfortable stealing it from Microsoft, Adobe, etc.), there are boxed Linux (and other open-source) products out there at retail. And when you do pay, as I've said, you're often paying for technical support, which could very well be worth the money.

All Microsoft needs to do to "beat" Linux is to be better, to do what its customers -- current and future -- want. And isn't being "better" a whole lot better than issuing threats via technology reporters?

Microsoft should cast its eye toward Apple -- a company that uses better design, functionality and, well, Apple-ness to sell more stuff.

Being better -- it's what should be for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's dinner.

Before the Microsoft-Xandros deal was announced today, I hadn't thought much about Xandros, but a quick look at the company's Web page offers "free trial downloads," but also lets potential customers know that its products are for sale at Office Depot, Tiger Direct, Comp USA, "and other retailers near you."

Prices start with $39.99 for the home edition to $899 for the server edition with a year of "basic" support to $3,848 for three years of "premium" support.

And you still have to download and burn your own CD. Who's paying these kinds of prices?

For those who want to read the official Xandros press release on the Microsoft deal, please do.

eWeek delves further into the Microsoft-Xandros deal:

The (intellectual-property) assurance deal comes hot on the heels of the release of the fourth, and final, draft of the GNU General Public License Version 3.0 on May 31, which says that distributors that make discriminatory patent deals after March 28 may not convey software under GPLv3.

But that provision, which was designed in large part to stop similar patent deals to the controversial Microsoft-Novell one, does not stop Novell from distributing software under GPLv3 "because the patent protection they arranged with Microsoft last November can be turned against Microsoft to the community's benefit," Free Software Foundation Executive Director Peter Brown said.

When asked about this, Microsoft's (David) Kaefer (General Manager for IP and Licensing) told eWeek that this was the same legal structure used to clear patents in the Novell deal, and the IP assurances given to Xandros were almost identical to the covenant not to sue that it signed with Novell.

"This agreement was negotiated between the parties based on the current version of the GPL. Both Microsoft and Xandros will be flexible should new market developments require us to adjust. As a design principle we do our best to make certain our agreements comply with the legal obligations on both companies. GPLv3 is not yet finalized and there are probably others better positioned to comment" Kaefer said.

Following Microsoft's patent/payment pact with Novell the Redmond, Wash., computer OS and application giant has made yet another deal with a Linux company, this time with Xandros.

Xandros produces a Debian-based distribution for desktops and servers that already strives to be comforting and comfortable to Windows users, and in the current climate of Microsoft sabre-rattling would seemingbly be comforting itself and its own customers with assurances that they won't be sued for possible patent infringement.

From CNet:

Over the next five years, the two companies said, they will work on improving interoperability between their servers to improve systems management.

The pact calls for Microsoft to provide patent covenants for Xandros customers that ensure they are not infringing on Microsoft's intellectual property, according to the companies.

Xandros will also ship software for desktop productivity applications that translates between the Open Document Format and OpenXML, which is Microsoft's own document format.

The agreement will make it easier for Xandros customers to run a mix of Xandros and Microsoft software, Andreas Typaldos, CEO of Xandros, said in a statement.

Easier from a legal sense? Or a technical sense?

While Xandros isn't one of the Linux fanboy favorites (though it holds the No. 28 spot on Distrowatch, it is based on the non-commercial, totally free Debian, a company that will not be getting into bed with Microsoft, I assure you.

Microsoft might not be fond of going to court, preferring to partner up with its enemies, real and imagined, but I have a good feeling that this one is eventually going to end up right where MS doesn't want to be -- in court.