I will never be the same after yesterday, in ways that I cannot foresee. I suppose that my generation now joins the ranks of those who lived through unspeakable horrors and survived to tell about it. How naive I was to believe that the world is fundamentally different from that of our ancestors, whose lives were changed by bearing witness to the 20th century's vilest acts of war.

Apple definitely snuck away some interesting tidbits inside — things they didn't want people to know prior to release. Initially we thought the battery was going to be difficult to take out, but boy were we wrong!

• What should consumers do when they want to make the move to open source, but they need industry specific solutions that only run on Windows? This problem in particular is what bugs me about what I'll call open source crusaders who are always posting about how everybody should switch to Linux. If, after reading about the options that are not viable, you cannot recommend Linux on the desktop, then the last item (back office management) becomes even more important. After all, not running Linux on the desktop, but going open source in the back office complicates things:
• • Running Windows apps in VMware, dual booting, or separate Windows machines: This defeats the purpose. If I'm going to save money by running Linux, then why should I continue to buy Windows licenses for virtual machines or dual boot partitions? This also makes it harder on the end-user. My job is to make the end-user's job easier.
  • W.I.N.E.: Many of my industry specific apps use the latest Dot Net frameworks. WINE/Mono doesn't always run them.
  • Providing Windows only to employees that need to run the industry specific apps: Even if this group was smaller than every employee of my organization, I am still interested in standardizing. My department has enough work supporting one desktop platform. Two desktop platforms is not a viable solution.
  • Developing your own solution: We do not have the staff or the money to do this. It would cost more to develop and maintain our own solutions than commercial software is currently costing us.
• What are the best techniques and recommendations for open source software choice management? Books could be written on the subject. I'd buy those books! If you participate in development of an open source project, please have a web page with a complete list of features, a comprehensive pre-evaluation FAQ, and maybe even a comparison of your product to popular Windows alternatives. For example, one important question to answer for us MS administrators is: If this product has a logon feature, then how well does said logon integrate with Active Directory?
• How do I maintain a sensible back office environment when various premier open source solutions require differing platforms? What questions should I ask myself when deciding on a back office platform (ie Perl vs. PHP vs. Python) to standardize on, or at least have a preference for?

1. Microsoft makes more money from Office than from Windows.
2. Open Office is an easier introduction to open source for laypeople than Linux is. They're more likely and able to accept it. Hopefully, acceptance of one open source product will lead to acceptance of others, including Linux. In other words, free open source software becomes like the Force: once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny!