On Mon, 15 Apr 2002, at 5:59pm, Bill Sconce wrote: > Unfortunately, whenever you use proprietary software you accept a set of > risks.
Here, here! Free Software is about Freedom! > Win4Lin creates a DOS environment which is sufficiently authentic to > convince Microsoft Windows(tm) 9x that it has a DOS system to run on. Minor technical correction: Win4Lin is actually a reasonably complete VM (virtual machine). It has to be; Win9X uses DOS as a loader and for some low-level functions, but generally relies on its own drivers to handle hardware. Simply emulating DOS is by no means sufficient to run Win9X. The difference between Win4Lin VMware (the other popular payware VM available for Linux) is that Win4Lin is optimized to run Win9X, while VMware tries to be a more complete VM implementation. VMware can thus run more and do more, but pays a significant performance penalty to do so. (It is for that reason that I use Win4Lin most of the time. (Actually, most of the time I run Linux.)) > And the once-a-year need to run another of those applications which is > only available for a Microsoft(tm) environment: in this case, > tax-return-preparation software. This year, I used an online service, http://www.taxactonline.com, to do my personal taxes. It worked just fine under Linux, and was quite cheap, too. (The tax calculations are actually "free"; they just charge to submit them electronically.) I do not know that system would meet your needs (I suspect, in fact, that it would not), but it does give hope that, despite Microsoft's best efforts, some things are migrating to a platformless, web-based world. > None of this untrustworthy computing has any place on a system into which > I load personal or financial data. My tax data! Yikes. I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds it ironic that the company whose chairman is now pushing "trustworthy computing" has also been convicted of violating Federal Law. Going to Bill Gates for "trustworthy computing" is like asking Al Capone for tax advice. Thanks for the article, Bill. Good stuff! -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
