A couple of stories have hit the headlines this year concerning the huge cost that some UK Local Governments incurred when dealing with malware attack on their Windows machines. If you missed them, Manchester City Council had a single USB infected with the infamous Conficker worm and it cost them — brace yourself — £1.5m (US$2.4m) of which £1.2m (US$1.9m) was spent on IT, of which a staggering £600,000 (US$980k) went on consultancy fees including money to Microsoft. A while later, Ealing Borough Council were hit with a cost of £500000 (about US$800k) when they were also hit by a single USB stick containing conficker. Some in the industry tweeted and blogged this as being a “hidden cost of using Microsoft Windows”. In the ensuing discussion, many pointed out that the high cost was really due to the lack of a proper patching and disaster recovery policy at the council. So which is right? Is dealing with malware a hidden cost of using Windows or of a poor IT strategy?

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

This is a story of hubris, nemesis and very bad language. Mine. We all like to have our egos flattered and I’m no exception, so when two old acquaintances told me their Windows laptops were infected with viruses I knew they were about to put the bite on me. They did. Could I fix them? Well, my vanity was flattered of course but it was to be a salutary experience that got me to thinking about whether it will ever be possible to wean users off Microsoft products.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

If you have ever read any of the articles I have written on Free Software Magazine you might just have noticed that my opinion of politicians is lower than a limbo dancer’s pole. A brief brush with political activism many years ago left me with a deep and visceral distrust and dislike of everything political and a determination never to become entangled with politics ever again. So, I was not exactly impressed when I read that George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor of the British Conservative Party, had recently advocated the adoption of “open source” in government IT contracts to reduce costs. Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? But it isn’t and here’s why.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

This last Christmas, I refurbished and installed computers for two of my children. As we still have a pile of old games in a drawer, I wanted to provide multi-boot systems. This was much easier and more satisfying than the last time I set up a Linux/Windows dual boot system (with LOADLIN.EXE, which I can’t really recommend today). I also wanted to test out the current state of FreeDOS (a GNU GPL-licensed operating system that emulates parts of MS-DOS 3.3 and MS-DOS 6.0). I did try installing ReactOS 0.3.7 instead of Windows on one of the systems, but I ran into installation problems I couldn’t work around (a topic for a later column, perhaps), owing no doubt to the immaturity of the (“alpha”) software.

The pace of software development — regardless of the licence — is pretty fast these days. The state of your systems need constant monitoring. New features, bug-fixes and (most important) security updates need to be properly managed. Here, in no particular order, are five ways that choosing a free operating system will make system maintenance a lot easier and simpler. In short they are ways that — when it comes to system updates — GNU/Linux beats Windows.

Regular readers of this column will know that I’m a fan of education and positive experience as an advocacy tool in place of shouting from rooftops. Winning the mindset of an average computer user — particularly home users — is never going to be a quick process but a recent experience showed me we still have some old and familiar hills to climb. How do we combat legacy reputations of GNU/Linux that are no longer valid?

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral. A little obvious but I couldn’t let this one pass.

( See here if you missed the entertainment as it happened. )

Steve Ballmer has recently sent a memo to every Microsoft employee. Ballmer’s memo leaked really quickly (I wonder if he expected it). After swallowing the corporate-madness part (but that’s allowed: he’s a “mad” corporate leader after all), one particular passage really grabbed my attention. Taking about Internet applications being popular, he wrote: “But we also need to make sure developers have the .NET skills to write unique Windows applications using Windows Presentation Foundation”. Which begs the question: does anybody still develop Microsoft Windows applications? Really?

Ryan Cartwright wrote an excellent article, Don’t compare GNU/Linux with Windows or MacOS – they are not in the same game.

I ran across the same blog he is referring to, while gathering potential stories for FSD and my reaction was very similar.

Ryan questions, “I mean how can you tell how many Ubuntu installs came of a single CD?”

Recently a blog post entitled “Why Desktop Linux is its own worst enemy has come across my feed-radar a few times. It’s yet another in the long line of “Linux ain’t ready yet” jeremiads and it doesn’t really say anything new yet it got on my nerves. Why?

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

Recently I’ve noticed an increases in the number of people I know who are migrating from Windows to GNU/Linux. Either my tireless advocacy is grinding them down, word is starting to spread. Perhaps they’ve actually seen Vista in action and decided to jump ship now. Either way there are some things they are going to miss when they make the leap.