[Sussex] What we've been waiting for

[John D.]

On Thursday 18 Mar 2004 20:33, Geoff Teale wrote:
> Chaps,
>
> The news we've been waiting for from Europe:
>
> http://europa.eu.int/rapid/start/cgi/guestfr.ksh?p_action.
> gettxt=gt&doc=IP/04/365%7C0%7CRAPID&lg=EN&display=
>
>
> ..in short - there has been no settlement with Microsoft, the punishment
> handed down will be as agreed.  Of course Microsoft will probably try to
> appeal, but  it may be they are not given leave to do so.

Well, even I'd like to comment, but for the life of me, I couldn't get the 
link to work (google kept ignoring everything after "gettxt......." and I'm 
too stupid to work out why). 

The link that Steve Williams posted, is a different matter. The salient facts 
in the article, that identified savings and improved stability over the 
equivalent M$ product, are excellent news (again) - the actual statistics 
i.e. the % savings quoted in parts of it, would only have to be "reasonably" 
accurate for even the most die-hard finance officer in any given company to 
at least sit up and take a look.

I'd think it's got the potential to provide the bean counters at M$ with a 
skull fracture, as opposed to just the headache :) I just don't think that it 
would be enough to stop M$ using the scatter gun marketing technique with 
more of the "why we're cheaper than linux" stuff or all the other crap that 
becomes public as to why M$ are superior - honest :P

regards

John

p.s. Oh, and while I remember, I've managed to get this mandrake 10 community 
running reasonably well i.e. there are a few small niggles but otherwise it 
seems solid - and as long as you don't select the "LSB" package, you get a 
default "mandrakised" 2.6.3 kernel. I appreciate they've made other changes, 
but compared to the earlier 9.1 that I had, my pcworld wonder cheapo system, 
now seems to skip along like a veritable "speed monster".

Also as a "kde person" most of the improvements in version 3.2 seem nice - one 
that I haven't quite got my head around yet is that the old k-mail standalone 
facility, now seems to have become part of an intigrated "kontact" app (in an 
Outlook sort of way), though it will still operate as a single entity.