[LI] [Article] Editor's Notes on latest linux planet

[Nagendra <ewiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Editor's Notes on latest linux planet
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True story:

So there I was, standing in one of those seemingly endless lines at
CompUSA, waiting to purchase a Christmas present for my son. Anyone
who's ventured into an actual brick-and-mortar retailer this season know
that the trend this year is to clutter the check-out area as much as
possible--even to the point where it's a physically uncomfortable
situation.

As we were standing there, my wife pointed out a copy of TurboLinux 4.0
sitting on a bottom rack, mostly because she suffers a heightened
sensitivity to penguins as a result of me dragging home every possible
penguin plushie and figurine from trade shows. (OK, I might have gone
overboard when I picked up some penguin ornaments for the Christmas tree
at Target.) Before I had a chance to respond, the guy in front of me in
line blurted out, "Yeah, I wish I had some of that stock."

Of course, TurboLinux, Inc., is a privately held company, and I pointed
that out to the bearded stranger. "Whatever," he replied. "I meant that
I wanted a piece of Linux stock," pronouncing it as "lie-nux." "Did you
see what it's selling for now? Unbelievable."

Sensing that any discussion of the subtleties of Linux involving
distributions, hardware vendors and software developers would be lost on
my fellow prisoner in line, I concurred that Linux was indeed a hot
commodity on the stock market and definitely one worth watching. I asked
him if he used Linux.

"Heavens no!" he quickly replied. "I finally have my Windows machine set
up just the way I like it. Besides, I'm really only interested in it for
my stock portfolio. I have no intention of running it."

I expressed some surprise at this, pointing out that I was running
multiple Linux boxes both at home and at work and was generally pleased
with Linux as a desktop operating system.

"Bet you still have one machine running Windows," he said. "At one point
I looked into running Linux, but I found out that I can't run Quicken or
QuickBooks on it. That's when I decided to stick with Windows."

Sadly, he was right: my family does all its personal finance on Quicken,
and I run my business's accounting software under QuickBooks.

"And besides, everyone I know who's interested in Linux comes from an
investment viewpoint, not a user viewpoint," he quickly added. "Everyone
knows that Linux is for geeks and servers."

True story.

--Kevin Reichard
   Managing Editor
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Virtually yours,
Nagendra

73's, VU2CLN, ICQ : 4779564 | nagendra@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
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