Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Today I was reading about the “Reduced Functionality” capability of Windows Vista. According to that article, Microsoft has now enabled this capability, which renders a “nongenuine” copy of Windows essentially unusable.

Frankly, I just can’t see why anybody would want to use Windows Vista. I’m sure the questionable nature of this sort of functionality is quite obvious to most. And it’s also pretty obvious how the misidentification of an installation as being “nongenuine” could be quite disasterous. A completely legitimate installation of Vista locking up accidentally because of such functionality could cost an individual or business a great deal of time and money.

In recent discussion at Slashdot about “refocusing” the development of Linux, it was suggested that the various distributions should standardize on a common software package installation and management system. If that were ever to happen, which is quite unlikely, then pkgsrc would probably be the best option.

Those of us who are serious users of UNIX or UNIX-like systems have no doubt looked at

I’m sure that most people who follow developments within the open source community have read about Mark Shuttleworth’s high-end, free-software-only laptop idea. While his focus appears to be more ideologically-driven, I think such a laptop would be useful for those of us with more pragmatic concerns.

Understandably, his writing about this topic focuses mainly on the use of Ubuntu-derived distributions on such a laptop. But I think it would also be very valuable for users of systems like FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris and even Haiku.

Most of us have older PCs that we have little use for. Linux advocates often suggest turning such systems into home data servers. A number of people have written how this can be done, with one recent article suggesting the use of Ubuntu.

It’s often the most flashy and rapidly-developed open source applications that get the most attention. Most people focus on projects like Beryl, Metisse, Firefox, OpenOffice.org and Ubuntu. But we can’t forget the importance of the open source software an average user doesn’t see every day. This is a list of nine such programs and libraries.