I was under the impression that at least early on Microsoft kinda sorta turned a blind eye to pirating - that way they could spread their stuff far and wide. Only after everyone was "hooked" did they start tightening the screws.

I remember how easy it was to install ms office (and other sw) throughout a business with a single set of installation CDs/diskettes + add extra bogus seats/connections/licenses to your server etc.

Just sayin'

George Carlin

Yayy for logic... I like that argument!

I guess maybe you could argue that based on our "new" ideas you could say God could ?exist? in a quantum state - being able to create a rock heavier than he could lift or not AND being able to lift said rock or not. So he could be omnipotent and powerless depending on your observation.

so then I guess it's possible based on our current "scope of knowledge" and critical thinking skills that now we can safely ignore everything in that text? ;-)

Not trying to hate of course!!

I think it depends on exactly what you want to teach your general public. If you want to go down and dirty with installation & good documentation then maybe something like "gentoo" (or it's derivatives).

Otherwise if you just want to familiarize them with a basic gui interface similar to what they're used to and also simple maybe try something like Lubuntu or Xubuntu? Ubuntu's Unity may be too radical a departure for this (yet).

Mint is cool but stability might be a concern depending on the flavor especially if you want the old-school gnome paradigm.

Just my 2 cents..

Thanks for the heads up!!

Will investigate this further - don't want to make a mess of a project even messier. For us wysiwyg is not all that critical. Eclipse seems to have some nice team oriented features and is (possibly) a standardized tool that can be used for django (python), straight python & postgresql dev.

There does appear to be a commercial plugin "MyEclipse" or something but that's not what was asked about I guess.

Otherwise I've used the non-wysiwyg bluefish.. I notice there's also the "Aloha Editor" - http://aloha-editor.org

I'm starting a django project and have decided to try and use Eclipse. I'm a newb with that dev platform so am not sure if it will meet all your reqs. The plugins are quite extensive though.

I've also heard that the "grey goo" scenario is a bit overstated given that:

Organisms have already evolved optimal survival strategies over the millennia and if nanobots were made of organic material they would be "prey" to some of these.
- and -
The energy requirements for taking on such a task is unlikely to be satisfied in the current environment (especially if made of non organic materials)

Having written a (still running) patient flow management system in html3 + hidden frame + javascript - sadly no ajax it is my belief that with proper care a web interface can be used in place of certain local apps. For processes that do not involve complex graphical/video wizardry (i.e. most business apps??) HTML[5] seems adequate enough. This includes many day to day internal business applications where the benefits of management, maintenance & security outweigh most of the drawbacks: bandwidth, hw compatibility, less seamless UI etc.

Separating out the business data and logic/api from the interface also does wonders (ye olde "n-tier" architecture) for the client-side concerns. Everything properly validated through the server-side logic layer.

Migrating an existing local app to the web can be a headache though - then you run into potential usability issues with user expectations and proper program "flow".

What's the definition of "free" we are using here?

Seems to me you really want your code in the "public domain" since BSD requires some sort of attribution and therefore is not really "free" either.

I dunno maybe you could have that nuclear waste pile explosion blow open a temporary dimensional wormhole causing the moon to bounce around the universe or something. Then you could pass by a different planet / system each week and still maintain some semblance of scifi cred.

I currently use NXClient w/Neatx for that kind of remote access/management. It works well with both Linux and Windows backends.

I guess the difference is accessing various os's with a single protocol rather than using NX & RDP (like the NXclient does) + also possibly getting around some of the builtin limitations (available only on certain flavors of Windows, limited # accesses by default etc) of RDP.

Sounds interesting if the performance is decent.

Uh, maybe no because then you'd be missing the point of the car..to drive it. Maybe instead you'd have to hot-wire the car each time and instead of a steering wheel you had to manually turn the wheels yourself oh and no seats but the thing runs like crazy and is extremely theft resistant.

If you have a service using an opensourced app then either license won't make much of a difference unless said competitor decides to distribute their version. At that point the GPL would appear to be the better choice as you would at least get any changes back.

Isn't it true that GPL (up to v2 at least) code that is "inhouse" does not have to be distributed? That seems very business friendly in this age of "application services".