THE STORY of the city of Munich’s transition to Linux is longer than a festival of Fassbinder films but, just like a movie by the arthouse-meister, after an interminable prologue we’re finally getting to the action.
According to IDG’s Jon Blau, the first 100 of 14,000 PCs have lost Windows and gained Debian Linux and OpenOffice […]

Two Harvard economists have built a model to elucidate the battle between Windows and Linux. There’s an interesting interview with the authors in which they discuss their findings.
Their conclusion?
Our main result is that in the absence of cost asymmetries and as long as Windows has a first-mover advantage (a larger installed base at time […]

Microsoft has announced the US pricing regime for the latest incarnation of Windows:
Windows Vista Home Basic: $199

Windows Vista Home Premium: $239

Windows Vista Business: $299

Windows Vista Ultimate: $399
Security vulnerabilities thrown in at no extra charge.

Witty series of short movies explaining various reasons for buying an Apple Mac. Not recommended for Windows users unless they’ve been retrofitted with a sense of humour. The movies are clearly inspired by Umberto Eco’s celebrated essay arguing that the PC was a Protestant machine whereas the Mac was undoubtedly a Catholic one.

I guess nobody outside of Microsoft knows, but this quote from a column by the well-known commentator John Dvorak is interesting:
Researchers are reporting that as many as half of the business-owned PCs in operation now may not be capable of running Microsoft Vista.

Bruce Schneier drew my attention to a fascinating piece of research on the relative insecurity of different web browsers. He summarises the findings thus:
The researchers tracked three browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera) in 2004 and counted which days they were “known unsafe.” Their definition of “known unsafe”: a remotely exploitable security vulnerability had been […]

Andrew Brown is a long-term and experienced user of OpenOffice, the Open Source office suite. He’s written a pretty critical article about it in the Guardian. His main gripe is that a lot of irritating bugs remain unfixed. Then, right at the end, he says this: “But, for what it’s worth, I […]

… before we were rudely interrupted by a malware attack, we’re dedicated to the proposition that people who want to consider switching to non-Microsoft software ought to have a place to go. We’ve used the downtime to rethink the site — in particular to reconsider our strategy. Many users told us that what they […]

CMS are software packages which enable the creation and management of database-driven web sites (like this one). There’s a very informative and thorough review by Elliot Smith of six currently available Open Source packages — Drupal, Exponent, Lenya, Mambo, Plone and Silva. (Don’t ask me where they get these names!)

The non-profit Linux Coaching Organisation has a residential centre in the Auvergne, in deepest rural France, where you can go for residential courses at various levels. Neat idea: change your computing life, and eat lovely food at the same time! Block bookings for organisations also available, apparently. And St Etienne airport (with low-cost RyanAir […]