linux

If the world unfolded as predicted by Bill Gates, printed newspapers would be dead in the next four years. While he may turn out to have been directionally correct and merely wrong about the timing, it's been interesting to watch the world change around Microsoft and slowly render the software giant impotent at a time when newspapers continue to hang around and even start new print publications.

Neil McIntosh loves his little new Eee: "Don’t you just love the sound of.. er… paradigms being shifted in the morning?"

I've written previously about the significance of disruptive, low-end products in general, and Linux for consumers in particular. And I've noted that my kids, my mother, and my mother-in-law are all running Linux.

In some ways a milestone is just a rock. In other ways it signifies the end of one thing and the beginning of something new. A couple of milestones this week:

Larry Magid has a warm and fuzzy piece about Linux on the desktop on nytimes.com today.

I previously wrote about how my elderly mother is now running Linux on her laptop, which was unusable under Microsoft Vista.

In July I ranted about Microsoft Vista, sparked by my elderly mother's acquisition of a laptop computer that came infested with it. I vowed to replace it with Linux, and the result was a prominent link on Google searches for "I hate Vista," a steady stream of comments from irritated Vista users, and a couple of angry rants from Microsoft fanboys.