Author Archives: Donncha

Idle Words – must look at this blog later. He’s the guy behind blogdex.

Microsoft wins again, they got away lightly. Dave has plenty of links and things to say about it.This morning a lengthy email from Mark Twomey arrived about this very subject, I asked him if I could post it here, so here it is:

The MS ruling, why it doesn’t matter.
From: Mark Twomey
To: donncha_@_linux.ie
Date: Sat, 2 Nov 2002 01:17:18 +0000

From getting the crap kicked out of it, in both the court room and the press, the night before LAID, to them sliding home safe tonight, it appears we have come full circle. I know they’ve gotten bigger and are still eating up the largest profits of anyone else in the IT industry, but when you think about it we have more real options of what we want to run on our desktop, (and on our servers), today than we’ve ever had.

To focus on peoples desks, years ago when all this started, Linux was rather raw in the userspace, while the MacOS was the veritable tower of babel, System 7 kludged & jerry-rigged seven days to Christmas. Today, throw 98% of people in front of a properly configured system (More your problem than mine ;-p), and they could get everything done they may have wanted to do on Windows with ease and not miss a beat. The usability is there, the stability is there, the apps are there, and if anything both non-windows systems are more functional than whatever MS are hawking to the public these days.

Microsoft is rapidly turning into IBM. Time alone is starting to make them irrelevant to people who have no real use for them anymore. Before you couldn’t ignore them, now unless it’s paying you to do so, anyone can feel free to opt out of the Windows world and chances are they’ll have a better quality of computing life when they do so.

M.

Linux Today – Dave Jones: What to Expect in Linux 2.5

Phoenix is very nice!

Over on Skipping Dot Net they’ve taken the decision to use qmail instead of Sendmail. I have absolutely no problem replacing Sendmail on a server with something else, but qmail? I get the shivers at even the thought of configuring it.
I’ve used Sendmail for years (see my install-sendmail script to the right) and if I was going to replace Sendmail on a server, I’d probably go for Postfix. I’ve used that MTA before and it was a doddle to configure and I’m told it’s great performance wise too.

A long essay on Ownership and the consequences of ceding ownership to others. Good read.