…or how I learned to stop Microsofting and love the Linux
It should have become obvious to people when the north-eastern US power outage happened a few years ago: malware is dangerous. The computer world is riddled with flaws that make it possible for a kid playing around on the computer in his bedroom (or more recently, a programmer writing a Trojan intended to steal money …
Continue reading ‘“Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash”’ »
This bug was filed back in 2005, but I just discovered it. It’s a nasty one, but between Apple and various Linux distributions, I think they’re making headway on it. The description starts out: Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace. This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to …
I generally find Verity Stob pretty over-the-top, but she didn’t have to exaggerate this one much, if at all. It’s an old one, but it had me smiling and nodding because I’ve seen more than my fair share of Windows machines with nearly every one of the symptoms she mentions. Far too often they’ve been …
I started using Ubuntu three years ago, pushed to it by the advent of Windows Vista and Microsoft’s stated intention to force all Windows users to it. It was quite an effort to switch at that point, but it was a lot easier than it had been even a year earlier. And with every new …
Continue reading ‘“Ubuntu Lucid Lynx: free OS that Just Works”’ »
Just for balance, after yesterday’s thorough Microsoft-bashing post, here’s an Apple-bashing one that I thoroughly agree with too. I still plan to get a fourth-generation iPod Touch when they come out later this year, to replace my aging first-generation one, because it’s still the best non-cell-phone organizer available at present — but I’ll get it …
Why? Probably because Microsoft is rapidly fading into an irrelevant computing has-been, and Windows 7 is good enough that most people no longer feel the urge to abandon the Windows ship.
Smart move on Canonical’s part, getting themselves on more machines to get more manufacturers to sign maintenance agreements with them. Who says you can’t make money by giving stuff away? 😉 (But you can definitely make more money with commercial software, which is why more than half of my development work is commercial.)
Last Friday, I discovered that I needed a 64-bit version of Windows for development purposes. I had a 64-bit version of Windows XP on a spare machine, but I haven’t set it up since the recent move, and until we get more stuff organized, I frankly don’t have the room. But it occurred to me …
I’ve spent the last few days integrating my new math library into the Windows project I started coding it for. Yesterday morning I was ready to try running the integrated copy, but I had some kind of problem starting it up. I couldn’t track it down very easily though, due to how long it took …
I’ve dealt a lot with software piracy issues, primarily with Project Badger (detecting and preventing piracy is one of its primary purposes). And I didn’t have to learn the hard way that you have to be very careful before calling any user a pirate, or allowing your software to do so — paying customers don’t …