I was so impressed that the New York Stock Exchange was switching over to Linux that I entirely missed the irony of it. My wife had to point out how the stock exchange seems content to use free and open software to power the trading of vast sums of money in mammoth for-profit corporate enterprises.
The kids inherited the old Dell Pentium III when the hard drive started acting strangely and the wife needed something she could depend on. The Dell originally came with Windows ME, and there was no way *that* was going to fly for the kids - how could I in good conscience, put that POS on a machine that kids will be fumbling with? Even if we somehow avoid the zillion virii targeted at insecure operating systems like ME, they will most certainly break something since as a normal user they have rights to delete even critical components of the OS. Legal options for a more up to date Windows are non-existent: even if I shelled out hard cash for a more up-to-date Windows, there is no modern Windows that will run decently on this (relatively ancient) hard-ware. There is only one serious answer: ubuntu Linux!
This is pretty much all hearsay at this point, but according to a story posted in April on Slated, Yahoo has been censoring comments and disabling the email accounts of users that suggest an open source alternative to Microsoft in their user-contributed ‘yahoo Answers’ service claiming it is a breach of their terms of service. The irony in this, or course, is that Yahoo’s entire system is powered by a bevy of FreeBSD servers according to Netcraft. Although I would miss the Yahoo Groups functionality I’ve grown to *like*, and now Flickr is owned by Yahoo too, I’m still glad I dumped that stock a long time ago - crash and burn Yahoo, good riddance.
And so it begins. Microsoft, in an unholy alliance with once-proud proprietary Novell, has unleashed the hounds. Hundreds of patent claims against Linux have been unleashed by the software Saladin. This isn’t a surprise, and ever since the Microsoft/Novell alliance in Nov. 2006, we have all been waiting for it. Microsoft has had their huge arsenal of patent lawyers on the job since then, filing a flurry of patents with which to sue little free software folks when the time came.
Standing in the way of this onslaught against free software is Richard Stallman and a small band of freedom fighters. As Linux vendors rush to protect themselves from the storm and one by one sign their souls away to Microsoft for protection, Stallman and the Free Software Foundation stand firm for freedom. If you promise to think a little bit he won’t say he told you so.
Stallman’s attorney, Moglen notes that “The free world says that software is the embodiment of knowledge about technology, which needs to be free in the same way that mathematics is free,” he says. “Everybody is allowed to know as much of it as he wants, regardless of whether he can pay for it, and everybody can contribute and everybody can share.”
I’m always on the lookout for cool Linux projects, and this one makes it so easy to create a bootable CD that can be used to turn any Pentium class PC easily into a full fledged arcade emulator that it’s certainly worthy of note. AdvanceCD uses Linux + AdvanceMame + Live CD + game ROMs (which you may or may not have) and allows you to create a working boot CD (you have to know how to boot your computer from a CD to use it) in a matter of minutes.
I had some reservations about writing this story up at all. A friend at work found an old discarded HP pavilion on the side of the road, fired it up and couldn’t log in as Administrator because somebody (smart) had changed the normally default [blank] password for that account. He had already asked several PC-smart folks to help him get in somehow to no avail, and had finally decided to impose on me. I love a challenge, and I thought it would be easy, so I hooked the machine up to my KVM at my work desk. I had some ideas about how to go about it, and as usual it included Linux.
