[tech-cord] alternatives

[George Tuttle]

Coordinators,       After visiting with relatives on the west coast and watching what's going on in the rest of the country, it looks like there are some major changes coming in our educational computer world.  Some time ago, I put out memo on the government and several other entities collaborating on putting together a linux kernel built from the bottom up with security in mind.  The real significance of that is starting to show up, every large computer vendor has a major alliance with the linux community.  Below is an excerpt from an email service I subscribe to .  LINUXWORLD is going on right now, so there will be much information coming from there.      Right now the big push is in the server area, but new products are coming out all of the time that support the client side as well.  WINE 1.0, a windows alternative that will run windows applications is nearing completion.  WINE 1.0 will run on linux or unix and will be basically free.  If you get a chance, look at STAROffice.  It is a great alternative to Microsoft Office products and it runs on linux now!  Microsoft's sales of Office has hit a wall because no one is upgrading.  Think about it yourself, how many more features can you stand to use in a new version of Office.  I spend my time trying to shut off those "special" features!      This has gotten a lot longer than I intended so in closing I would say, keep an open mind and look around.   George   LINUXWORLD: PROPRIETARY ERA IS OVER, IBM EXEC TO SAY Posted January 29, 2002 05:54 Pacific Time IN HIS KEYNOTE address at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo on Wednesday, a top IBM executive plans to proclaim that the heyday of proprietary platforms are over and that open-source computing will be what primarily shapes e-businesses, particularly open-source grid computing. William Zeitler, senior vice president and group executive of IBM's server group, will credit the open-source community for "revolutionizing the industry" and say that those vendors not aligned with that community will "be on the wrong side of history." For the full story: http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/01/29/020129hnzeitler.xml?0130weam