Flutterby™! : Rushkoff runs Ubuntu 2007-04-05 20:43:18.20126+00

Rushkoff runs Ubuntu

2007-04-05 20:43:18.20126+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments

Douglas Rushkoff buys a Vista laptop, ends up running Ubuntu:

But the fact that I'm now using it as my principle(sic) operating system means something else: that soon a whole lot of people will be, too. Linux has finally arrived. Maybe not this year, but 2008 will almost certainly be the year of Ubuntu in the same way 2005 or 6 was the year of Bittorrent. It will reach critical mass, penetrate the general market, or do whatever it is that means coming of age.

Via PlasticBoy. The whole "fear every time I tell Windows it can update" thing is bad enough with "Windows Genuine Advantage" playing some hidden heuristic as to whether or not it'll let you continue to run, but now that I've seen Vista in the wild I'm more sure than ever that next year's tax prep software might be on the Mac, might even be a web app, will hopefully be running on Linux, but I'm not locking myself into any more Microsoft.

I've used TurboTax's online tax prep for two years running. It does everything I've needed and alot more. This year, it was little frustrating because it kept losing it's "secure connection" every so often. It's also a little more sluggish to do things like play with business deductions. But it works and I'm sure by next year it'll be even better.

As far as Ubuntu goes... I still have this one "killer app" called ESRI ArcGIS that keeps me wed to Windows. What's ironic is that ArcGIS, in it's earliest incarnations as ArcInfo Workstation, ONLY ran on Unix. But a few years ago their system architects decided to port the entire environment to COM and only release for Windows. It was a move that is looking more far-sighted than I would have expected. The COM objects are now bundled in a product called "ArcServer" that can be accessed via either the web browser or a client similar to Google Earth and WorldWind called ArcGlobe Explorer (which is a different product from ArcExplorer). The ArcGlobe Explorer client will be ported to more platforms....

BTW, as I get further off-topic, WorldWind has been completely re-written as a Java application and is no longer dependent on Windows or DirectX.

#Comment Re: made: 2007-04-06 01:20:28.485724+00 by: Mark A. Hershberger

TaxActOnline.com helped me through my taxes this year. #2 of the taxprep websites in a PC World review. #1 was TurboTax's online version.

The problem I have (as someone noted in Rushkoff's comments) is games. Everything else there is a reasonable or even better *nix replacement for (although I will be sad to lose The Bat!, one of the best email clients I've ever encountered). I mean, what I normally run is email, a web browser, emacs, and ... um ... maybe Gimp once in a while. And games.

I hate to think that I would have to have a Vista setup lying around just to run games, but I suspect that's what I'm looking at within the next two years.

I'm not a gamer, so I'm asking -- don't you see dedicated game consoles taking over most of the hardcore game market in the near future? Or is there a difference in the kinds of games that are available, where both platforms will stick around for a while?