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Poor, oppressed Microsoft. The company has only 94 percent of the market in operating systems for desktop computers, and for some reason, the Anti-Trust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice once argued that this represented an illegal monopoly.
Microsoft cast itself as a victim when those proceedings
started, and now the company is at it again. Here's a
caution: You may have trouble stifling your laughter when
you hear that Microsoft is the main supporter of an outfit
called The Initiative for Software Choice.
So far, the only choices that I've ever seen Microsoft support were things like a choice between Windows XP Home Edition and Windows Professional Edition, or a choice between Microsoft Works and Microsoft Office.
And if that bothered the U.S. government, or one of the
states that sued Microsoft, the logical solution would be
put your money where your mouth is.
When Microsoft
is a continuing criminal enterprise, don't support it by
buying Microsoft products, especially with public
money.
American state and federal governments have wimped out, rather than work toward a solution, but there are other governments on this planet.
Many of them, unlike ours, do prefer to avoid supporting secretive monopolies. So they're starting to support and use open-source software (i.e., Linux, a PC version of Unix, a heavy-duty operating system invented about 30 years ago at Bell Labs).
One Linux-friendly place is China, where the government
does not want one company to manipulate or dominate the
Chinese market.
The German parliament encourages
government to use open-source software whenever doing so
will reduce costs,
as well as getting more
stability
and security
than Windows provides.
IBM's Linux manager said There's not a large government
in the world we're not talking to.
Here are governments attempting to insure competition,
save money and provide more reliable and secure computer
systems. Most of us would think that was a good idea, but
Microsoft says that's unfair, and it wants a level
playing field.
Go figure. On the home-office front, I decided it was
time to put my energy where my mouth is, and so in the past
month I've moved from Linux dabbler to Linux user. I
haven't been able to move everything away from Windows yet,
but at times I have been able to enjoy three or four
straight days in a Microsoft-free environment where there's
no Blue Screen of Death and no mention of Illegal
Operations,
as if Microsoft wrote our laws.
I've got a dual-boot machine, with two hard disks, one dedicated to Linux. I use a Red Hat package, which you can get for free; I paid for mine because I wanted the books and some place to call if I got in serious trouble. For the past month, all my writing, emailing, and web surfing have been done under Linux.
For writing, I hate graphical word processors because they're always wanting things like fonts and margins, instead of letting you put one word after another. Linux has annoying editors like that -- StarOffice resembles Microsoft Office, and thus its word processor looks a lot like Microsoft Word. But even under the graphical interface, I can easily open a terminal window and run an editor called JOE (for Joe's Own Editor) that can be configured to work like good old WordStar.
I had some trouble getting an internal PCI-slot modem to work, though it finally happened. If I had to do it over again, I'd just get an external modem.
Surfing the net is about the same as on any other
machine, except in Linux you don't have Microsoft Internet
Explorer. You do have Netscape, as well as KDE's browser
(Konquerer
). I preferred Opera under Windows, and
there's a Linux version to use now. If I'm in a hurry,
there's the Lynx browser, which has no graphics and thus
races along because you don't have to wait for images to
download, which can be interminable out here in the boonies
where Qwest refuses to invest in service improvements, no
matter how much money the state gives Qwest for service
improvements to rural areas.
I liked Eudora for Windows email. I haven't found a Linux equivalent, but the KDE desktop email client works well enough. It won't properly display email that is in HTML format, though.
At first that seemed a flaw, but then I realized that it
was only spammers or obnoxious strangers who sent me
bloated drivel instead of plain ASCII text. So this
flaw
has turned out to be an excellent spam filter:
if the message starts with HTML tags, I can trash it
immediately.
There is the problem that Linux is often perceived as a cult, and its users as cultists. I can live with that. If the alternative to being a cultist is allowing the minions of some distant billionaire to control how you express yourself and manage your affairs, then the more such cults and cultists, the better.
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