quit yer whinin' (Score 2)

You know, in about 1994, a colleague of mine was
emphatically telling me about how this free little
operating system he was tinkering with was going
to pose a big threat to Microsoft. I looked at
him pretty incredulously as he described what we
all know as the open source model of development,
and the fact that linux is free.
In the intervening time, I became a convert during
my time as an MIS guy working with relatively
uncomplicated mix of Windows machines and Sun
boxes, because it did a lot of things we needed,
it didn't suck, and, hey, it's free.
To see linux go from nothing to a primetime slot
on CNN in less than 5 years is something to be
applauded--we shouldn't sit here like geeks at
a star trek convention nitpicking the broadcast,
because newspeople who view their computer as
just something to type up reports on won't
understand that one can just take any cheap
PC clone and turn it into a machine capable of
just about any task in hours. CNN's audience
isn't the slashdot audience (hm, maybe that night
it was--slashdot effect in Nielson ratings?).
Maybe next year, we'll see the penguins in the
background of the CNN newsroom.