I woke up feeling funny yesterday morning.
The sun was shining brightly through the window, but it was the same window that the setting sun uses to illuminate my bedroom! Strange...
I went to the sink to shave. Being slightly OCD, I tend to notice small things. Thus, I noted that the water was swirling counterclockwise down the drain. I live several thousand miles north of the equator, this made no sense at all.
So I thought I would log on and check out the news. But when I moved the mouse to wake up my sleeping system, it looked...different.
The start button was gone, replaced by a little orange circle.
My brand-new machine that I had brought home from Best Buy two days earlier had come with Windows Vista. This didn't look anything at all like Vista.
I pressed the little orange circle. The menu popped up, but again, it looked...different. It was leaner, I guess. It was more to the point. But I missed all of the cool visual stuff that Vista would do.
Where was my Vista? What had happened? I looked for Internet Explorer but couldn't find it. But the Start button had a menu choice called “Internet,” and there was something called Firefox Web Browser there. I opened it, and sure enough, there was my Google home page. Thank goodness not EVERYTHING had changed. I went to cnn.com to try to find out why things were so weird all of a sudden.
The headlines looked pretty much the same, wars, typhoons, outrage over gas hitting $2.00 a gallon...HUH? It was nearing $4.00 when I filled up last Monday!
Again, strange, but by now my slightly OCD eye had been caught by an ad for TigerDirect.com: Get a loaded PC for $199! Wow, that sounded cheap. So I clicked on it.
The TigerDirect site gave the details: Intel dual-core E2200, 1 gig of RAM, 200G hard drive, speakers, multimedia reader, DVD burner, and Ubuntu 8.02.
I was familiar with everything but this Ubuntu. What was that? I typed Ubuntu into Google and was directed to their website. The site was pretty cool, actually, until I started reading about this Ubuntu thing. Then, I became puzzled.
Ubuntu was an operating system. That rang a bell. I had heard the techies at work refer to Windows XP as an operating system, and how much better it was than Vista. It seemed like I had even heard them mention Ubuntu, as well, in those breakroom conversations that they had that I had eavesdropped on and found nearly impossible to keep up with.
I looked the site over for Vista machines. I didn't find any! There were Macs, bare-bones systems with no operating systems, and others with operating systems like Fedora, PCLinux, and SUSE. But no Vista, XP, or Windows anything.
Well, my mama didn't raise no fool. That 200 buck computer must be missing some pretty important features to be that cheap. So I read the fine print.
The hardware all seemed to be in order, though I'm no expert. But it was when I read the details of this Ubuntu that my head really began to spin.
It seems that Ubuntu comes with an office application that handles word processing, spreadsheets, slide shows, and even a database. Gee whiz, that sounds like Microsoft Office Professional! When my copy of Office Standard expires in three months. I'm going to have to shell out 300 bucks to keep it from dying! And Office Professional costs a lot more than that! This was insane!
Ubuntu also came with an email program, a whole bunch of games, software for graphics, a music player, and a bunch of other stuff, too. And it said that thousands of other programs were available through Synaptics Package Manager. Aha, THAT must cost a lot.
But in the meantime, I get all of that for 200 bucks??? I had just shelled out $499 (that sounds better than 500 bucks, doesn't it?) for a system that sounded a lot like this one, except that I would have to pay for Office to keep working, and also Norton Security Suite. Plus it had a lot of useless icons on the desktop for stuff like AOL.
AHA! THAT was what was missing! I went back to the fine print, yep, sure enough, no mention of firewall, spyware killer, or virus protection. Obviously, this Ubuntu stuff let you get infected with anything that came along, sort of like my last computer did when I ignored the Norton warnings about updates stopping unless I paid up.
To confirm my suspicions, I typed “Ubuntu spyware” into Google. Lots of returns, I went through a few. Hmm, the biggest issue seemed to be ads on websites! And most people recommended installing something called Ad-Block on Firefox to stop them. And it was FREE!
So I tried “Ubuntu viruses.” I went to the site at the top which told how to install virus protection under Ubuntu. The instructions seemed a little geeky, but right at the top it said you probably didn't need to, unless you were running a network of Ubuntu machines! But if you DID want to install it, you could. It didn't say how much it cost, though. THAT was probably the catch.
It was then that I noticed a flashing little icon at the bottom of the screen. Remember, I'm borderline OCD. Anyhow, I clicked on the icon and it told me that Ubuntu had updates available. Wait a minute, I was RUNNING Ubuntu? I guess so. I said okay, then it asked for a password. I didn't think I had one, but I tried the one I used at work. It worked here as well. What was THIS going to cost?
After a few minutes of downloading and installing, it said it was up to date. So I closed it.
So this is Ubuntu. Hmm, it's different looking, but everything seems to be about where I expect it. I inserted a CD full of our vacation pictures that I had picked up from Walgreen's last week. Yep, there they are, in that program that popped up.
So if everyone's running Ubuntu all of a sudden, where are all of the Vista and XP computers? I typed XP into Google. There were some returns about Extreme Programming and something called an xml parser. Hmm, what about Vista? Vista lighting, City of Vista, Vista tools, nothing about Windows Vista.
This was getting even weirder. So I typed “Microsoft Windows” in.
The top entry was from Wikipedia. According to the article, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer developed Microsoft Windows as a commercial alternative to Free Open Source Software. The program was ahead of its time, according to the article, and caused Linux developers to get to work building GUI desktops. A year after Windows' release, Microsoft folded.
I got up and splashed cold water in my face in the bathroom. THIS time, I noticed that the water was swirling CLOCKWISE. I went back to the computer to discover that it was back to normal. Yep, there was that Vista desktop that I had seen before I went to sleep last night. The Wikipedia page I had been viewing now was a lot longer in length, and gave a history of Windows from 1.01 to Windows Server 2008.
About then, my Norton security program popped up and reminded me that I had 88 days left to pay for it. My news alert icon popped up and said that gasoline had reached an average price of $4.01 a gallon in the US. I hit the back button to find TigerDirect (I had a hard time finding that button, BTW) and the $200 system was gone. In its place was a system that cost $549.99. It came with a dual core processor, 1 gig of RAM, a 400 gig hard drive, and a DVD burner. Oh, and Windows Vista Home Premium. And trial versions of Norton security suite and Microsoft Office.
I suddenly had a sick feeling in my stomach. Then, I went to Google, (or rather, MSN search, which is what popped up, I wish it would STOP DOING THAT!!!), and typed in Ubuntu. Thank God, it was still there.
Postlogue: Would hot systems cost 200 bucks, or gas still be under two bucks a gallon if the comical collection of circumstances had not fallen into place for Microsoft to end up dominating the OS market? Probably not. In fact, with the literary license I used here to have the FOSS movement existing at the time of Windows' inception, an argument could be made that the movement itself might never have come to be without an obnoxious Microsoft to spawn it. But still, just think of what a world that runs on open source software would be like...
