Not to mention the OEM copy of XP MCE sitting in a draw that I’d lost track of (I think the system is now using a regular XP Pro license) or the miscellaneous systems that have affixed OEM licenses but for which there is no (misplaced) physical media.

Accordingly, if I want to obey the OEM sticker directive, I’ve got to download a CD ISO from a torrent site (because I don’t fork out for MSDN). But MSDN is increasingly attractive; it effectively offers the desired outcome. Unlicensed, unactivated systems that work perfectly well on a subscription basis… sure, subs suck, but whenever they stop their XP activation servers we’re all going to be screwed, anyway, so it hardly matters.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here making a list (on paper, which I’ll store with the physical media) of all the licenses in use, and roughly where. Thanks to the unauthorised rebuilding of systems that I own and have built from scratch so often (resourcefulness in anyone else’s book, evil work of a pirate to the draconian OEM overlords) whatever descriptions are attached to aforementioned systems is likely to be rendered completely untrue in eighteen months time when I once again get around to the wholesale slaughter rebuilding of them all. Intermittent reinstalls will probably happen, too, unless I’m driven so insane by the inability to discern one license from another I end up, as I do now, simply taking out the lot and shooting them all a new install.

To Microsoft: whatthehelldoyouwantmetodo? I am so not forking out the at-least-$2000 you would have me pay for retail Vista licenses for this lot–it’s that much because Vista Business retail licenses come in at a delicious $500 each. Say it with me: hell no. I’ve heard from a reliable system builder source that you’ve been telling them that the new OEM rules work in their favour as it’ll bring them more business. Sure, but it’s pretty crappy business if I don’t say so myself. I have absolutely no interest in becoming a Microsoft certified system anything, simply because it’d mean dealing with your crap in a professional capacity, and I deal with it quite enough in a professional capacity trying to do other sorts of development as my job, thankyouverymuch. I’m not going to pay a Microsoft tax twice (first for certification, second for individual licenses) just because you claim that your crappy system builders do it better than DIY-ers.

Whenever the time comes around to upgrade to Vista, if I ever deem it worthwhile on the other home desktops here not for any commercial pursuits (still running Business in response to the crippling networking capabilities of all Home line products), I’ll be making a trip to my local store, who, for what it’s worth, don’t even offer retail Vista Business for sale on their website, but mention the OEM edition an awful lot, with the token “(only sold w/ new system or to a system builder)” tacked on to placate anyone from officialdom who comes looking. I haven’t had the pleasure of breaking OEM conditions-of-sale (that’s all they are… are such things even legally enforcable in this country?!) just yet, but have no doubts there will be ample places that want to take my money when and/or if I do.

I’m actually in the position of having one spare XP license (two if you count XP MCE) at this point, but am sorely tempted to install Linux on at least one of the three systems I’m taking care of tonight just to avoid having to deal with these mediocre attempts at extortion in the future. It’s not morally defensible to refuse to acknowledge system builders as “original equipment manufacturers” when they are, in fact, conducting exactly the same tasks as their so-called ‘certified’ builders. Clearly, it’s not being pursued for retail sale: the only retail products that belong in an operating system product mix are upgrades for people who enjoy having computers that don’t work (i.e. most of the population, anyway).

It’s an indictment upon the difficulty of upgrading/reinstalling Windows that so few people take this route: quite frankly, the products don’t work. Everyone who is unqualified (in the literal, capable-of sense, not some arbitrary didacourse, paidMSsomemoney sense) to build a computer, in my experience, is unqualified to successfully install Windows independently. Even if they succeed at booting from a CD, negotiating the installer prompts (admittedly better than they used to be), manually answering questions about daylight savings and other such things that should long since have been dealt with automagically (c’mon, we’ve had GeoIP products for what, ten years now? Longer?), or at least correct from the outset (two HP machines last week were insistent the default timezone should be Singapore. They shipped in Australia. Is it so bloody hard to pick a populous east-coast state zone as the default?), chances of users correctly installing things such as drivers in post-install stages are slim to none. Nearly all phone a tech-saavy friend (I know no-one who’s ever called the Microsoft support line for OS installs… more should, but few do).

The point stands: retail licenses are for newbies, OEM licenses should be accessible to everyone who doesn’t give a crap about shiny packaging, manuals, and shooting their wallet to bits.

Here endeth the rant.

When they announced it a whole bunch of people were getting a little grumpy about how it didn’t work with Windows update — a few of the same were getting grumpy about how Microsoft didn’t release a version for Linux, but no further comment required on them… you’re all of an intelligent enough bunch to realise aforementioned people fall into the category of … well, you know.

Obviously, it’s no big deal — the whole point of that image it is that it hasn’t (and won’t) update, allowing you to keep testing on older platforms.

But then, this afternoon, I go and shut down the image (I know, suspending is faster, but I was trying something different) and all of a sudden it goes and says it’s installing 7 updates before it shuts down. In usual XP fashion.

So what gives?

I found myself yelling at it “you’re not even a real operating system! Don’t you get it? You’re going to be used and trashed in a couple of months anyway! Why do you care if you’re virus and spyware ridden by the end of it?” Possibly a strange response, but there we go.

Got me thinking about (human) clones, actually. Much musing to be had there. Maybe I’m just strange…

In a small bus environment, WSUS means you can avoid potential headaches like that. In a paranoid reluctant-MS-user environment, it means you can (illegally) crack your (legally purchased) operating system, and enjoy updates without having to hand out your details on a platter. Or, alternatively, if you’re a comprehensive Microsoft pirate from the server to the desktop, you can take further advantage of their hospitality by enjoying the fine update services they have to offer. ;-)

Hey, if you’re going to steal software at least do it well!

More generally speaking, WSUS just looks like a cool tool. You download once, apply many, and manage what patches do/don’t get installed from a central location.

Disclaimer: I haven’t tried WSUS, this is just second-hand. We only use appropriately licensed Microsoft products here. I’m publishing this because being subversive is fun, if a little childish, and this could conceivably (legitimately or otherwise) be of use to someone.

Now that that’s out of the way (to self: must stop choosing obscure titles), I thought I’d announce I’ve decided that Evolution really isn’t so bad as it’s cracked up to be (by me, in previous posts. Yeah, so I’m contradicting myself in the space of 24 hours. It doesn’t really matter how long it takes me to contradict myself, because anyone capable of using the search tool on this site proficiently can juxtapose the two contradicting pieces quite anachronistically. Yeah! English buzzwords! C’mooonnnnn, Thursday!). I spent part of today (more than I should have) checking out other clients, and I’ve decided that, unless I want to go with mutt or something (I’m not going to say how tempting that was lest I be pushed into a big geek hole and buried with free software), I’m actually doing okay.

Which is kind of a depressing thought, truth be told. Not that Evolution is acutally that bad, but it’s fairly far from perfect. It’s more stable now I’ve re-installed Ubuntu (gosh that sounds like Another Operating System), and little interface quirks are becoming slowly less significant, but I’m… rather annoyed that it ate my contacts list. Or, that GAIM ate my contacts list and Evolution let it.

Actually, I just remembered that I haven’t tried Opera’s mail client in several years… so I might do that. It doesn’t integrate particularly well (I’m currently trying to figure out some arcane command to make the damn thing print, because it’s not reading from my printcap file or something, and I use it to print in preference to Firefox because Firefox’s print rendering is second to none in the bad-quality stakes), but I’d rather a standalone app that worked really well over a vaguely-integrated app that often crashed and allowed other applications to steal its data, as well as making backup in open formats impossible.

Speaking of open formats, I’ve discovered that OpenOffice.org 2 is storing its documents in OpenDocument format. This means that the SXW extension is now ODT. I’m a little disappointed that this seems to be binary data rather than something like XML… although it seems there are elements of that to it, but they’re scattered amongst binary junk. The XML part might just be OO.o’s implementation rather than a core part of the spec, I don’t really know. There appears to be some kind of XSLT going on, judging from references to styles.xml in the test document I created. Another possibility is that there are several pieces of data contained in some kind of compressed format, but I don’t know exactly what and don’t have the skills to find out! Or, at least, don’t know where to start and hence efforts are frustrated. It’s probable all this information is on the OpenOffice or Oasis websites, but I can’t be bothered looking. I care, but not that much.

My main motive in discovering what’s going on here is the potential integration of OpenOffice with web frameworks, and how open formats (particularly SGML/XML based ones) simplify parsing by an order of magnitude.

For me, the databases are generally ancillary things that are merely there to fill in spaces in CSS-based designs, so I always backup design aspects, but rarely the database itself, because there’s no original content there. Well, yeah, but there’s vitally important structure that’s just been thrown away. Doh!

Oh well, nothing I can (read: should) do about it now, maybe between tomorrow afternoon and Thursday. Think of it as post-humous ITF study. Because that’s all it’s going to get.

It appears they’ve fixed the segfault problem I wrote about a few days ago, because they’ve changed the version number (heh, and presumably a few other things) and now it works fine. Standard Synaptic upgrade should do the trick nicely. This, incidentally, will take you to the latest Firefox version (1.0.6 at time of writing) as opposed to (I think) 1.0.4 in the last (segfaulting) release. For the first time in a while, the repository is actually up to date with Firefox’s frenetic release cycle!

Not that it matters, really… none of the bugs reported have been rated critical, or the IT press would have had a field day with it. Besides, the only reason we’re not seeing the same cycle with IE is that they appear to have temporarily given up, and now only seem to roll out updates with operating system patches (probably not much less regular, but, with Windows now strongly encouraging users to allow auto updating, far less noticable). I’m still browsing happy on Firefox.

My SuSE desktop isn’t booting into X (or, is, but the proceeds to become unusable… go figure — the numlock key still works, and it’s fine in runlevel 3, but as soon as X starts, out go the network interfaces and display!) — which wouldn’t be a problem on any normal system, but I’m fairly sure I’ve whinged in the past about how stupidly stupid SuSE is when it comes to doing things in any standard way… even binary stuff like NVidia’s Linux drivers it manages to mangle, which is the problem here — I can’t uninstall them, and I can’t reinstall them, because SuSE apparently requires special treatment. Sort of. The NVidia guide says you can manually install it but it won’t handle kernel upgrades on its own (e.g. you’ll have to reinstall the drivers every time, like on all other distros!) — except, this problem was caused by a kernel upgrade and SuSE’s failure to deal with it on its own, and now I’m up the proverbial creek because manual intervention isn’t an option (or rather, it’d be faster just to reinstall another operating system, or something.)

There is good news, though (not that this has substantial/any impact on the rest of the world — it’s good for me, and this website is all about my status as a “cheap exhibitionist”! — plus the fact that you’re reading this implies that you’re either bored enough to be interested, or objectively interested… but I digress even more!).

I’ve thrown Fedora from the third floor of this house (I love being able to do that!!), and replaced it with FreeBSD (I could say it’s all Dale’s fault — yes, click the link, he’s running his blog on a snazzy new domain!), but that’s hardly true… having said that, his good reports certainly played a part in that decision). It’s not going to handle routing anymore, but will be proxying as soon as I get that adequately setup, if only for the purpose of ad blocking (and possibly bandwidth — I’ve used a ridiculous amount thus far this month, to the point that I’ll actually be going over the 10GB soft-limit if things continue this way… meh! Shouldn’t be a big issue.). Its primary function is as a Samba server, functioning as a domain controller and file/print server. It’ll also be handling scanning, although that’s completely separate from Samba functionality.

The routing aspect of things is now being handled by a D-Link DI-624 wireless router, which does 802.11g, and has an inbuilt BPA client (which, incidentally, sucks. Working on that problem, too — it seems as though different firmware might make the world a better place, but exactly which firmware remains to be seen…) — it’s also got 4 wired ports, only two of which are in use — one uplinked to the main switch, the other directly into the server.

FreeBSD is fun, but it took me a while to figure out how to get root via remote access. There’s something mildly depressing yet strangely funny about jumping up and down shouting “g0t r00t!!!” in reference to a computer you have physical access to, but I did, nonetheless :-P Shrug, it wasn’t a problem I’d had before… learning experience? ;-)

I’m currently having fun with ports, which is great, because I haven’t really got the foggiest idea if I’m doing this right. I feel like I should have updated the ports index when I first installed, because I know for a fact some of the stuff listed here is oldish… but whether that’s for security reasons or whatever else I honestly couldn’t say. It matters less now, because I’m not using this thing as a directly-Internet connected device, which is good. I contemplated sticking one interface of it onto a DMZ, but figured that probably wasn’t be best of ideas, seeing I’m the one responsible for patching and otherwise DoingStuff™ with the system… shrug!

Samba’s just been compiled and installed, and I’m grabbing vim before attempting anything further, simply because I find myself lost without being able to type “vim filename” and having it DO something, instead of just giving me errors. I’m a long long way from being any kind of vim guru, and it’s overkill considering how I use it (open file, press Insert to edit, press escape, :wq), but using “edit” just doesn’t feel right. As soon as that’s done compiling (it’s still downloading patches painfully slowly from some US server — is there any way to change the source of download for ports??), I’ll start getting Samba up and running, which involves installing OpenLDAP, setting up users and stuff in there, then figuring out how to make Samba a nice happy domain controller, pointing Windows clients to it, setting up login scripts to make the clients mount drives nicely, and then fix my other SuSE desktop (haha, don’t think it’ll stay SuSE much longer… suggestions anyone? :)) with a view to getting it to authenticate users with the domain controller (presumably using… some Linux thing… Kerberos? Shrug. I’ve got no idea what I’m talking about, as should be plainly clear to anyone who does by now!). Following that, I get to setup Squid, and then AMP which’ll be fun. And then an email server. I’ve discovered I can send outbound messages on my own SMTP server without any problems (cue applause), but I don’t know if Telstra is stupid by default with inbound MTA stuff… I’m sure if it doesn’t work you’ll read all about how terrible they are here as I jump up and down and cry about it, before calling Technical Support, listening to their groooovy hold music (seriously, it’s great — no crappy “Your call is important to us” rubbish, just cool jazz… at least, it was last night. I nearly plugged my phone into the new amp to hear it better, coz the speakerphone wasn’t doing it justice!), and then resolving the whole thing with a few mouse clicks.

Oh, and I would take photos, but there isn’t really anything that looks new and interesting that I haven’t posted already, so… I won’t yet :P That means don’t ask for less talk and more pictures, Steve :P

Well, whatever. I’m still using PDF documents, and probably will be for a while, but I’m going to rant about it anyway. So there’s an installer, right? Okay. Preferred method of installation: Evil Adobe Download manager. Option for normal download? Yup. Why didn’t I use it? Call me stupid or something… I’ll get to exactly why.

So last week some time I was at Steve’s office, and he said that Acrobat Reader 7 is loads faster than 6. I’m not sure if I started dancing then and there, but it was good to hear. Today, I bother to do something about it on this laptop (which, incidentally, has just had a long-overdue RAM upgrade, and still loads Acrobat 6 like crap), which involved going to the Adobe website and following the links, then filling out three dropdown menus to present me with more choices.

Language: English.
Operating System: Windows ME
Connection: Broadband

Wonderful, it’s offering to let me download Adobe Reader 6. Again. I know I’m running Windows ME and that’s a crime against humanity. Right now, I’d argue that Adobe download software and internal policy is a crime against humanity. Not only would it offer to let me download an old version of software, I also had my choice of spyware ridden toolbars and some crappy photo management software which they’re pimping like it’s actually making them money. Scary, no? The first hit is always free… no, I’m not a cynic. Never.

Josh trots off to Download.com to try and grab the latest Reader “illegally”, just for the hell of it, to see if it’ll work on this computer. Download.com, searches, finds Acrobat Reader, downloads Acrobat Reader, discovers it’s actually a crappy download stub (hey, I’m on snappy cable here, I don’t *do* checking file sizes!), which then proceeds to download (unannounced) three different pieces of software. “Ummmm.”

It finishes downloading these mysterious three components. Installer one launches. Yahoo! Toolbar? No thanks. Really, no thanks. No, really, take that toolbar away from me before I do something untoward with it. Crappy Adobe Photo management dru… err… software? No thanks. Really, no thanks. If I cared that much for your crappy software, I’d ask for it. As it stands, I’m perfectly happy with the most excellent Irfanview on Windows, and miscellaneous web-based photo management applications.

FINALLY. This is the part where I have the Acrobat installer itself run. But no. “I don’t like your Operating System, you anti-consumerist pig. Go grovelling to our buddies Microsoft and upgrade, quick smart. And buy some new hardware from some vendor that Microsoft approved so your new OS will run, okay? That’s right. In the meanwhile, we’ll punish you by making our reader software continue to run just as slow on your crappy four-year-old OS.”

Recommendation: Use plain text, or (if it’s absolutely necessary) valid (X)HTML, to send me documents. I’ll receive them in a better mood. (This comment endures only until I move into the new house, get my Linux desktop back, and can resume reading Adobe PDF files without even needing to see their product name. Ahh, Open Source.)

Spoiler: I’m using Liferea. Read on for why.

There’s the staple applications, as always, which people seem to leap at almost on impulse, are feed readers such as Straw, Syndigator or RSSOwl. And, for some reason, I’ve chosen none of these.

Straw

Straw looked good, but for the whole GNOME and Py*insert extension here* dependence thing… I’m currently running KDE on the desktop, and whilst it would have run fine, I’d rather not be tied down. That, and I’m uncertain as to how it would render content. The main thing was my dislike of Python extensions, though.

Syndigator

This, I glanced at fairly seriously, but the dependency monsters overran my utopian world, and as such it was left in the pile of refuse that is my application downloads folder (2.9GB, not including various operating system images which also reside on my hard drive, since about the start of this year). I think it was whinging about Perl or something, so I slammed the door on it before it had even finished speaking. Doo bee doo.

RSSOwl

This is an interesting kettle of fish. It looks most excellent, but, again for platform reasons, I chose not to use it. I’m pretty terrible in this regard, actually. If a product is coded in Java, I’m sorry, but I can’t afford to use it. Not because of any financial cost, or because of anything against the software itself — it’s just that the Java VM seems to swallow RAM like four-wheel drive cars from Sydney’s North Shore swallow fossil fuels… and I can’t afford that much RAM.

I’d be interested to explore this one at some point in the future, however.

So, why did I chose to go with Liferea?

Liferea

It’s easiest just to quote their own website to introduce this reader, so that’s what I’ll do.

Liferea is an abbreviation for Linux Feed Reader. It is a news aggregator for online news feeds. It supports a number of different feed formats including RSS/RDF, CDF, Atom, OCS, and OPML. There are many other news readers available, but these others are not available for Linux or require many extra libraries to be installed. Liferea tries to fill this gap by creating a fast, easy to use, easy to install news aggregator for GTK/GNOME.

Cool. I think it scores well on all those scores. The source archive gave me grief, but started co-operating after I installed some development libraries… that said, the — I’ll say “interesting” — file structuring system employed by SuSE 9.1 made errors crop up from various places during the actual build. Which sucked. So, I got lazy, and went off to grab a nice shiny pre-packaged SuSE RPM files from their SourceForge project page. Snazzy, hey?

And then it installed. Sexy. Easy to use. Familiar interface (akin to Ximian/Novell Evolution). Searching. Folders. Can use Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Netscape and Konqueror out of the box, as well as supporting opening links in a new tab (yes, I know it’s a fairly simple command switch… that doesn’t mean many products USE it!). Choice of Mozilla or GtkHTML as internal rendering engine. Docking in the KDE toolbar… and this is a GTK/GNOME product! It’s very cool. Thumbs up to the developers, who suggest that those

interested in mature RDF/RSS feed client projects for GNU/Linux

should consider the other products I’ve mentioned above… pfft! This is great, for me.

If you’re running Linux, BSD or Mac OS X, I’d recommend you check it out… there are people maintaining packages for Debian, RedHat/Fedora, SuSE, Gentoo, Slackware, FreeBSD and MacOS, links to which are available on their Installation page.

The gimmick?  It is a fishtank which is USB powered, from ELX.  Yeah.  And you thought the mug warmer was bad.

And the statistics?  Well, it’s the end of the first month this website has been fully functional — so semi-valid numbers for once ;)

Unique visitors: 203
Number of visits: 366 (1.8 visits/visitor)
Pages: 7183 (19.62 pages/visit)
Hits: 11009 (30.07 hits/visit)

Somewhat unsuprisingly, the day with the highest number of hits co-incided with the day after Whirlpool heard about iiCommunity — traffic wasn’t sustained, though — it dropped down to normal levels the day after that.

Hits, by Operating System that they came from:
Windows: 55.2 %
Linux: 42.7 %
Macintosh: 1.3 %

And by web browser:
Mozilla: 59.8 %
Some Flavour of Internet Explorer: 33.4 %
Opera: 2.9 %
and Netscape, coming in at a lowly 1.4%.

What other interesting stats are there?  Umm… Okay.  The day of the highest bandwidth usage co-incided with the release of the first draft of my Imaginative Composition — hehe, but it wasn’t that huge — chances are it was the public release of multiple-styles on that same day which was responsible for drumming up the traffic ;)

Ah well.  Next challenge: get some real content, get PageRank listings, sustain hits for the next month!  Hehe.  I have two weeks of holidays left in which to do various stuff, so perhaps I’ll squeeze in some coding time for this website.

It’s not holding the same interest anymore, though.  I mean… I enjoy it, in the problem-solving sense.  But only when a problem is defined and there are clear expectations and outcomes, not when I’m just randomly adding features to my website.

So, to define a need — some kind of file-storage thing!  Because people ask to see originals of various documents (e.g. that short story “Blurred Reality”), and it’s easier to preserve formatting and other such things in PDF’s than it is just copying text into a webform!  Well, that is one thing I want to work on.

What do other people think?  What else does this site need?  The document organisation thing would essesntially fulfil the waiting “Projects” sections purpose, so don’t say that.

I think something to show the most recent comments (ala Platform 7 front page) would be useful, although my design is too narrow to do that well… perhaps another redesign?

Use the comments thing, tell me what sucks most about this site, or is missing, or whatever!

I’ve been playing around with domains and forests (mmm trees) today. Connecting domain servers to different computers all talking to one central DNS box. Oh my how I love windows. Everything just works. Really I love windows. I don’t care what anyone else says. I find it stable, fast and easy to use. Isn’t that what computers are meant to be like? I also spent a far bit of time on a 12″ iBook with OSX 10.3.x very nice too. I like these operating systems because they have one company behind them pushing them in one direction, not some linux distro which has been split so many times it isn’t funny, or a technology release gone wrong (fedora anyone?). You need direction when building an operating system and that is what Microsoft and Apple both do. Great job guys.

Linux, whilst not guided in the same unilateral manner as both OS X and Windows, is still capable of consistent development values and policies allowing for a highly efficient, scalable and usable platform.  Linux on the desktop has not yet reached the maturity of even Windows (let alone the sophistication of OS X), a claim which I am yet to see contested.  Development policies resulting from Open Source are, by their very nature, open.  This does not REQUIRE fragmentation such as that which was described, although this is often a result.

The lack of control by a monolithic entity over a product permits innovation in the marketplace, resulting in technological advancement for the greater benefit of the entire community, not the bottom-line of a TNC software monopoly.  Not that TNC monopolies are bad — well, they are, but that isn’t the issue being discussed here.  TNC monopolies stifle innovation, and subject users to the decisions made by aforementioned monopoly — users have no choice, at this point, but to wait for the situation to change, or to switch platforms.

I can’t help but notice a striking parallel between Roman Catholicism and closed-source monopolist-software vendors.  My reasoning is a little abstract, so bare with me, here.  Both enjoy monolithic, absolute control over those within their respective structures — this, arguably, is a good thing — people with the knowledge are making decisions for the greater good of the organisation as a whole.

But what if those with knowledge aren’t making the correct decisions?  Or are pursuing a path which allows users no input or control over that which they are subject to (i.e. their belief system, being dictated by the Pope, or their software environment, being dictated by Microsoft)… are users supposed accept this path as being right, going with what those with knowledge tell them, or is there room for individual choice, even if this means questioning the entity, as Martin Luther did?

Open-Source, like the Protestant movement, does not require users follow an established structure.  To an extent, it allows users to choose for themselves — any apparent church structure within whatever denomination shouldn’t have the power to dictate the beliefs of individuals who profess that faith (as conservative Roman Catholics would believe); matters of faith are individual, as are all beliefs (n.b. this does not make individual beliefs CORRECT).

Because of this inherent propensity for deviation and fragmentation to occur, it has — not all people will see eye-to-eye on all things, and a framework in which people are free to make up their own mind does result in fragmentation.  Not always for the better.

Likewise, the Open-Source community allows for fragmentation to occur.  This is ideal for individuals, although not always for the community as a whole — this is where product vendors come in.

A key example, most relevant given comments made regarding Fedora Core 2, is that of RedHat.  They are an OS application vendor, with strong Open-Source ties, specifically in their financial and developmental support of the Fedora project.  Fedora exists both to serve the Open-Source community as a whole, as well as provide an environment in which development and testing may occur for the refinement of RedHats’ commercial-grade/Enterprise offerings.

In this, RedHat operates as an integrator.  Whilst the quality of freely (as in beer/speech/whatever else) available software released by the Fedora project may be of dubious quality at various stages of development, RedHat, operating as a commercial software solutions development organisation, ensures that the quality of their enterprise-grade offerings do not suffer.

Windows just works?  Often… although I would venture that in terms of ALL server related tasks, a solution from one proven OSS vendor would prove just as adequate.  Worried about interoperability?  That is a separate concern — remember, Windows doesn’t have a monopoly on the server market, and it is far from interoperable with *nix platforms.

Windows just works on the desktop?  Sure, in between the spyware and malware and virus outbreaks and other various system compromises.  I spent an hour today trying to get crap off a computer used by my brothers.  Spybot, AdAware — latest definitions, multiple scans, nothing resolved.  I spent the remaining 20 minutes manually hacking things down, thinking “this wouldn’t happen if this computer were running Linux”.

And it wouldn’t have.  I was (and am) sorely tempted to install a locked-down heavily customised version of Fedora (heh, Core 1, because 2 sucks, apparently ;)) on there, with Mozilla, aMSN and OpenOffice, and leave home indefinitely.  They would be perfectly fine until it ran out of disc space.

If they wish to play games?  Then why are they still using a Pentium 166 (OC’d to 200) with 48MB of RAM?  That doesn’t appear to be a consideration from where I am sitting.

What a shame, they won’t be able to install any software they want.  No dialers for you, I’m sorry.