Not really. From the article:

"While the proprietary solution was deemed to be slightly more cost-effective over the full period, the strategic advantage of being free to take its own IT decisions led the city council to decide in favour of the migration to GNU/Linux. "

and also from the same:

"The Microsoft solution would have made it necessary to introduce an Active Directory system, which would have meant a strong lock-in and would have caused significant follow-up costs.

RT

Maybe calling yourself a shareholder makes you feel all warm inside, but unless you own gazillions of shares you still have no say whatsoever in the way the company is run -- not to mention the fact that with a dividend of $0.13/share, it'd make for a piss poor investment.

Come to think of it, the only way for you to really make money with Microsoft is to sell your shares or, in other words, NOT to be shareholder.

RT.

Sorry, couldn't resist... ;-)

Reece

Anyway, here goes:

Username: virtualbsd
Password: virtualbsd

root: root4u

Reece

That's why VirtualBSD mentions VMware Player (or better) explicitly and only places hints about VirtualBox in /boot/loader.conf and /etc/X11/ReadmeVirtualBox.txt (you may also want to run /usr/local/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl as you won't need them any longer).

As I see it, the only problem is that there is no free (as in beer) VMware Player for OS X as the only option is VMware Fusion -- and I don't know if Parallels can run VMware appliances, but that one ain't free either.

Reece

True, as long as you run it as a server and don't need fancy graphics, audio, and whatnot -- and does a fine job at that. But try it on a modern, off the shelf PC, notebook or netbook and you won't be so lucky. I mean, even a onboard NIC might be problematic!

That said, this is clearly not FreeBSD's fault (as vendors seldom release source code or specifications and stick to binary drivers for select Linux distributions at best) but the result doesn't change: it's a very daunting task to get any kind of modern desktop oriented FreeBSD (that's not their goal either, but I digress).

Reece

Maybe a long shot and not quite what you have in mind, but I think that Spotlight is close enough -- and it's fast too. So fast, in fact, that's also my application launcher of choice.

Reece

Speaking of which, and yes this is a shameless plug, just recently I've prepared a desktop ready FreeBSD 7.1 RELEASE based on the Xfce 4 Desktop Environment. Okay, it's not Linux, but comes with Firefox 3, Thunderbird 2, OpenOffice.org 3, VLC, Pidgin, Xchat, Gimp, etc. installed an ready for use. It's available via torrent -- in case anyone cares! ;-)

Who decides what is and what's not illegal? For some things the distinction is obviously quite clear and would be easy to have some general consensus but, once you have a bit of legislation (and technology) in place, you have a system that is ripe for abuse -- just think about what they're doing with the DMCA, for instance.