Just my two cents

I was at OLS in 2004 and Jim’s talk was great.

I finally got time to sit down and read on my honeymoon to Rarotonga, Cook Islands and I took Flyboy and Silico. My bride and I really enjoyed both works and now we’re going to go off and buy ourselves the rest of Jim’s works. Here’s a URL to an image: http://jlcooke.ca/nomediakings_in_raro.jpg

NoMediaKings and Open-Source are very similar and both are noble causes which deserve special effort to support.

And 1justin – stealing is still stealing unless it’s free. And here’s a list of open-source applications which are widly viewed as superior in their markets (even to commercial products):
– Apache (Web servers)
– Linux (Hosted servers – web/email)
– PostreSQL (small-medium databases where Oracle’s fancy $100,000 features aren’t economically justifiable)
– Firefox (web browser)
– GAIM (all-in-one instant messaging, plugins are available for the fancy Voice and Video features)
– Tomcat (Servlet container for web applications)
– PERL, PHP, Python, Ruby and other useful scripting tools for websites and system administrators
– Qmail, sendmail, exim (SMTP servers – aka. the thing that runs the world’s email systems)

These are only the most obvious examples. And as long as corporations are bent on the “ever increasing revenue” model of business, open-source will stay relevant.

Cheers

Congrats on the move to linux. Just wanted to offer you assistance with your move, should you ever need it. Feel free to email me.

bill

hope you enjoy the switch. don’t be afraid to delve into the cli. once you begin to use it for tasks, your trips back to windows will become all the more frustrating when you realize how crippled an os is w/o a good cli

anywho, my advice is drop in a different linux distro (maybe on another machine?) in a few months. mandrake, red hat, and the like are great starter distros (mandrake was my first, 7.x i think), but there’s a whole world of variety out there. right now i run gentoo w/ blackbox as my wm on xorg. a pita to set up, but now it’s a smooth and fast running no frills get-it-done system with a ports tree (like free-bsd). whatever you choose, it’ll be an interesting trip

Also, you could always order the SP2 CD from Microsoft.

It’s free (even the shipping), and they don’t check nothin’ when you do it that way. Heck, at first they didn’t even check to make sure you could only order a limited number of copies. One guy ordered a thousand of them, then people got mad at him for wasting Microsoft’s money and increasing the delay for everyone else. Now even the original forum post that he made about it is gone =/ In any case, now you can only order five copies, which still seems like a lot to me.