After another long break, here is a pungent recapitilation of opinion. This arrives as, yet again, the ridiculous annual cycle of contract renewal - so typical of the East Asian way of doing things - looms large.

It also reflects upon the difficulty of transitioning between Operating Systems - and the reasons why some people find this so very difficult . . .

So in the midst of sleepless nights, rising spring/summer temperatures and an increasing workload, plus the prospect of renewing my contract (and asking myself at all hours of the day and night whether either option is really what I want), my correspondence with my editor back in Stevenage, England always seems to go the same way: I have gravitated back towards Mandrake/Mandriva and despite the various pitfalls experienced along the way, find now that I feel comfortable under Mandriva - indeed, much more comfortable than under Windoze. He, on the other hand, uses only Windoze for all that he does - the reason being, of course, familiarity with the world of proprietary software and an unwillingness to get out of the metaphorical bath as long as the water is warmer than the surrounding air. I even suggested to him - on several occasions now - that if he himself was unwilling to spare himself the time to download a LiveCD and change a single BIOS setting for an hour or two of pleasurable enlightenment, I could do it for him and post the result to him back in Stevenage. Needless to say . . . I have yet to receive a sensible reply.

How deep and pervasive is the tendency to accept the "route of least resistance" and use the same gear, follow the same precepts and be as much of a sheep going "baa baa" as all the others around you? And just how dangerous is this? Computer viruses in the _NIX world seem to be few and far between. Could this be because the "least privileges" paradigm is so much more intrinsically safe than the tightly-integrated (for speed of operation) and essentially unprotected paradigm of Windoze?

When I suggest to him that he might even be able to forget (mostly) about anti-virus software, for example, if he took one of his older PCs and configured it to act as a Linux server, interfacing to his Windoze machines usiing Samba, I am met with silence. Yet he works for a business which has to fork out each year for licences from the likes of Micro$oft (each time they upgrade; they only upgraded to XP Pro unwillingly from Win98SE last year!!!), Symantec, and whoever's database and DTP software they use routinely. Why? Because they just don't appreciate that there are alternatives. He doesn't seem to believe me when I tell him that I can now do everything (except webcam) under Mandriva that I can do under Windoze XP; he doesn't believe me when I say that you can download a complete OS for free and install it and get free upgrades, and add bits to it as much as you like, and at no extra cost except for a little bit of regular effort. He sticks with M$ irrespective of possible penalties because his mind is conditioned to accept the idea, however illogical it may be from the standpoint of, say, a programmer or straightforward Net security. Conditioning - or should I say "brainwashing" - can be a powerful tool in the wrong hands.

As I tried to say to him this week, the choice of which actual OS you use is irrelevant - the important point is that you maintain the openness of mind and flexibility of attitude that allows you to adapt to new circumstances. You also choose horses for courses. For example, he has had to migrate a database from what was originally a DOS application to some other form usable under XP. At the time he was telling me about this I had just got Mandrake 10.0 up and running as a dual-boot with XP Pro and began my investigation of what was out there by way of other OSes, and surprise, surprise, DOS is alive and well and the question would have to be asked: "Why migrate out of DOS when the app would be faster and more powerful on a modern system than it was originally?"

It makes me think about the arguments of so-called "Die Hard" command-line Linux bods. The CLI is not the be-all and end-all of Linux but if you are serious about using Linux, then you should be able to do a range of things without resorting automatically to a GUI. I like to use a GUI environment but I would be the first to admit that to be lost when you install new ATI drivers, and to then be unable to get back into the X environment because you couldn't use the CLI as an administrator, is . . . rather foolish. Once upon a time I knew nothing about word processing or other things under Windoze, but that didn't stop me learning. Nor, for that matter, did the fact that I could buy a new PC with Windoze pre-installed stop me either from (a) learning how to re-install and configure it or (b) learning how to hack and build PCs myself (with a little help from ICS). I have not bought a PC system with an OS pre-installed since 1997; I have always built my own since that time. Now I have widened my choice of OSes, too.

There are certain people in this world who are hell-bent upon dominating their chosen fields. Some people want us to destroy our planet by polluting it to death driving cars - as long as they make their money while it happens, they don't care. Others are tied to a particular cosmology or nature-worship and programme themselves not to accept alternatives. And still others want to continue foisting buggy, exploit-ridden OSes prematurely upon a gullible public as a tool for business efficiency and production as well as the enjoyment of their favourite chosen media. Some of them make so much money that they actually want to force national legislators to do their bidding; the customer has become the enemy, a cash-cow to be dominated and exploited to fill the company coffers. That is the world originally of IBM, of car manufacturers and now of Micro$oft. I don't want to be a prisoner in that world.

There is another preconception, no doubt fostered by M$ (but not, apparently, by IBM, who now support Linux - surprise, surprise!), that because "Open Source" often also means "free", this somehow equates to "inferior". This neglects the fact that some of the most useful stuff you can use under Windoze is also FOSS - think of things like Gambas, Audacity, Open Office (and other productivity suites), all the army of media players and everything else. You can pay for a better version, but if companies like Real or WinAmp want to make a sale, you need to demonstrate first that what you intend to purchase actually works - hence the functionality of the free version must be sufficient to satisfy the needs of most non-purchasers.

The implication seems to be that the programmers and coders at the proprietary software houses are somehow more capable than others. While it is true that some coders are more able than others, it is really just stooping to cheap insults to say something like this.

Now we find ourselves in a strange situation. Micro$oft's next OS is reportedly not capable of functioning 100% on existing systems; it will be bigger and (one presumes) much more expensive; because many of the functions likely to be subsumed as either first-party (e.g. Office) or third-party (anti-everything sloshing around on the Internet, and then some), adding to the annual cost, something like Linux, which can do everything and more that XP can currently do (ish), should be perfectly poised to capture more PC market segment. There seems to be constant argument about when this will happen. I look at the various Linux-related sites like Linuxquestions.org and DistroWatch and what do I find? There are hundreds of versions of Linux, and more alternative OSes besides. I use Mandriva on my desktop and have done for over a year now; how can we say that the "Linux Desktop" hasn't arrived?

What is holding back the mass uptake of an OS like Linux (in its many packages) is not the fact that it is a bad choice; the real holdup is fear of the unknown, coupled with a new learning curve and the veritable forest of FUD which arises every time an established concern wakes up one morning and discovers to its horror that it now has competition. The same thing is happening with audio and video media; everyone with a PC has the potential to create his/her own radio or video feed. The solution? Clampdown. Denial. FUD. DRM. But the horse bolted long ago. The reason being that media should be (and are, for most practical purposes) OS-independent, and this is clearly a good thing. Standards compliance is more important than platform. Someone in Venezuela, running Linux, should have their video files viewable in Adelaide using Solaris or in Prague running Windoze. Standards compliance allows all of them to communicate via the Internet, and to use this entity as a vehicle for transmission. People need to be enabled and empowered to find and implement their own solutions; what they do not need is for "solutions" to be imposed.

So, getting back to my erstwhile editor back in Blighty, I repeatedly suggest to him that a transition to Linux, at least in part, would be good for him and for the business for which he works. He complains that XP locks up on their system on a daily basis, something which has actually NEVER happened to me on Linux. File formats and even databases now run as well on Linux as they do under Windoze; why settle for something which is demonstrably bad for your business? But no. He is used to what he's used to, and change is difficult to stimulate.

A conditioned mind is as sure a prison as any gilded cage; more so, as it does its dirty work without bars to see.