There is a new paradigm in the industry that is there prompted by the changes in technology. I suppose your dad would not have understood the change as he was motivated by money. But then is everything based on money? Do I stop flying model airplanes because of money; Do friends of mine stop operating their boats because of money, and other friends stop writing software because of money? No, money is not always the motivation. Our motivation is our mind and the need to think, to solve problems and to be recognized. Yesm, I think your dad would have understood and made the transition. »

Today is mid May 2008, about 8 months after the initial article was written. My comments are as follows: Vista will have multiple service packs applied in the years to come, and with each will come some performance optimisation. XP used to crash often in the first year or two of it's life. The nice features of Vista are late in arriving. In industry, where many of the computers are destined, SaaS is taking over. SaaS is Software as a service. The need for companies to purchase big servers for their business systems is disappearing. The browser (firefox, Opera, Explorer, etc) will be the interface to the application. Networking allows the application to reside anywhere. Networking allows part of an application to be accessed from your own computer, and another part from another continent, while a third part from your ISP. Powerful desktops are essentially required to run the browsers. Vista will take a few years to be where XP is today. Hopefully Linux will have made sufficient advances to match what Vista has introduced as ideas for friendly desktop computing.. Even though today the tendency is to have a low low cost laptop with no hard disk and only flash memory. The software in these machines must have low footprints, eliminating the possibility of Vista to be installed thereon. »

Great article. Just the tool for a software developer or database expert. »

Thank you. A great reference. »

Linux needs fewer flavours. Or it requires a base system with the flavors being add-ons. In the base system would be the support for technologies such as telecommunications (tcp/ip) and wireless, video, sound, keyboards, printers, The other than base system would be our choice of KDE, GNOME, or other software. As far as illegal software, my understanding is that it is not illegal for use, but to distribute, and that latter limitation depends on the country of origin. So, livna, freshrpms and the other sites are offshore from the USA and are perfectly legal in their country. And as far as I know, it is perfectly legal for me to download from these sites. »