What happened to the guts?, Jan 26, 2007

Microsoft all but eliminated mainstream software competition. As a result, Microsoft became the primary source of advertising revenue for mainstream publications. You don't bite the hand that feeds you.

Microsoft has once again suckered a company. It dangled pretty, shiny short-term gains in front of Novell/SUSE while, at worst, planning their long-term extinction, at best, planning to use the success of Novell/SUSE to bleed its customer base.

If I say "proprietary operating systems need to disappear", I mean they should be wiped off the face of the earth. When I say Linux should disappear, I mean that end users shouldn't need to know it's there. Big difference.

I can sum up the way Microsoft beat the competition in just a few words. Microsoft won the market by leveraging its virtual monopoly on the desktop.

Novell engineer and manager Allison Singh recently predicted in an Africa-based tectonic magazine article that Windows will become a niche operating system, replaced by Linux as the new standard. A gestalt of recent trends, events, and stories should tell you that this prediction is right on the money. A gestalt, by the way, is a perception or conclusion that goes beyond the sum of its parts. Here are three of the many parts that comprise the gestalt.

I recently spent the better part of a week working with the latest version of the open-source GNOME graphical desktop environment on Linux. I've decided that the only way to explain the regression of GNOME over the years is that Microsoft and/or SCO moles have infiltrated the GNOME leadership in a covert effort to destroy any possibility that Linux could compete with Windows on the desktop.

Webmaster's note: A humorous piece to help you start off your summer - when we're all worried about what we look like in a bathing suit

I came up with a brief guide to help computer geeks — in particular, the geeks who are fans of Linux — count the calories they expend during the day. Here follows that informal guide, grouped by topic