My regular desktop computer, Twoflower*, that I use for work and play is dying…

Twoflower is pretty old now by PC terms and is becoming quite unreliable. I built it about 4 or 5 years ago I guess, although I can’t remember exactly when, and it has been a good workhorse until quite recently. But the time has finally come to move on.

I was going to write a bit about this MAJOR announcement myself today; but there’s not much point.

Glyn Moody has covered most of the bases in his usual eloquent style.

This was another interesting podcast. I’m obviously a fan of Mr. Vance (has anyone ever called him “Mr.”?) - maybe I’m the first. I also need to meet Matt Asay at some point… have much to discuss.

LOL…

So here we have it. It isn’t Microshaft’s fault that all your PCs keep getting infected with nasty viruses. It’s YOURS.

Some M$ fanboy or paid spokesman called Michael Kleef really does take the biscuit here.

It is nice to see that Ubuntu Linux was found to be the most difficult system to crack in the pwn2own “hack contest”, when Vista gave in on the third day when 3rd party apps were game. OSX fell first, on the second day due to a Safari bug.

Not so nice to see breaking systems called “hacking”. Again, hackers build stuff, they don’t brake it. It makes me extra sad to see so many Ubuntu and Linux-loving bloggers happy about the failure of other systems. Calling your system good is good marketing. When you laugh at failures in other systems it is laughing at their users, which does not make them interested in you or your offering.

After this article I picked up on recently about the 30,000+ desktops having moved to Linux in India, we now have the news this morning that the French Paramilitary Police Force will be dumping ALL it’s Microshaft software in favour of Open Source Linux. And they are, somewhat surprisingly in my book, choosing Ubuntu rather than their own - home grown - Mandriva distribution.

Anyway, this is a pretty big story as the lead paragraph states:

Yesterday, we decided that we needed to get a new laptop for our business.

Nothing particularly staggering about that you might think. And, on the face of it you’d be spot on. However, as you probably know, our company The Open Learning Centre is focused on delivering business solutions and services based on Open Source technology.