Toronto Linux User Group Online is invited to the Microsoft Platform Technical Briefing Dinner (fwd)

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

Hi,

I attended a presentation like this around the same time last year where Bill 
Hilf was the featured enthusiast for hire. He was glib (N.B. nothing to do 
with glibc) and well rehearsed. He made a few valid points but for the most 
part, it was a combination of half truths, straw man arguments, red herrings, 
and non sequiturs. If you followed some of his arguments to their logical 
conclusions, you should be convinced to adopt Apple's OS X, not Windows. He 
emphasized Microsoft's highly integrated "stack", marketing speak, not tech 
speak, often, while pointing out that Linux did not offer this. After all, 
what is more highly integrated than Apple's products? Hilf seemed to be 
especially excited about the new shell, monad, in Longhorn and how one could 
access the .NET framework from the shell. He wrote some trivial scripts that 
using monad and .NET to output fancy charts representing system load, never 
mind the fact that can be done any number of ways in Linux. Of course he 
would portray that variety of choices as a disadvantage, and in some 
respects, he would not be totally wrong.

I doubt any of the people in attendance who were comfortable with *nix changed 
their minds about Microsoft after that evening but I suspect that the 
Microsoft FUD message resonated with the people who were ignorant of *nix. 
There were a few gentlemen at my table who had never seen Linux in their 
lives and were shocked when I showed them this "archaic" OS on my laptop 
running Mandrake with KDE. They were *really* impressed when I showed them 
Windows XP Pro safely contained within a VMware virtual machine. (I take 
perverse pleasure in running Windows that way. It reminds me of various sci 
fi movies with brains being kept alive in jars and that sort of thing.)

Having said this, no matter what you may think of Microsoft, it is a major 
player and one that should not be ignored. If for nothing else than to burn 
Microsoft's money and get a "free" copy of Windows Server 2003 (of which I 
have, count 'em, two, from such events), the event is wortwhile. If you do 
cross platform software development, as I do, it is quite useful to have a 
menagerie of Windows boxes kicking around to test things.

Speaking of cross platform development and testing, I am on a PyQt for Windows 
adventure these days. One of these days, I should do a TLUG talk about the 
various technologies I have been using for the last few years, PostgreSQL, 
Webware for Python for XML-RPC services, Mozilla XUL/XBL, PyGTK, Qt, Mandrake 
Linux, Subversion, and maybe even a talk about creating RPM packages, with an 
emphasis on Mandrake's urpmi but that will have to wait until my workload is 
a little lighter.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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