Basic Philosophy Part II: Computers and Technology - Continued

Standards and Open Source

My third general rule is to use non-proprietary software whenever possible. Standards are very important and not adhering to them can be very expensive. In 1990-92 I developed an extensive hypertext teaching system using a proprietary package. It had many nice features and it claimed to be evolving into a cross-platform system. By 1994 it was clear this had been a major mistake as it was not cross-platform (all non-MS Windows development had stopped) and the appearance of Mosaic made it apparent that HTML and the Web was the way to go. So, I spent a very large amount of time transferring the material to Web format and vowed never to make the same mistake. I hate repeating mistakes as it is much more fun to make new ones. ;-)

So now any web work I do is compliant with W3C standards. I am also a strong advocate of Open Source software. I am not an operating systems bigot and I don’t really like any of them. I sometimes am a firm believer in the idea that computers are an alien plot to make sure that humans don’t get any real work done.

I personally use Windows XP machines, Mac OS X machines, and Linux machines. I will admit that XP is an improvement over Windows 2000 which was an improvement over Windows NT. I spent many hours reloading NT systems until I would load something that crashed everything and I would have to start over. XP seems to have solved that problem. I don’t use the Mac that much but I think it is a nice OS; it’s just that the systems are so expensive for what you get. I prefer Linux (I use Fedora Core 2) for my web servers and for a lot of my other work. But for home, I still use mainly my XP machine because that’s what my games require – I am a RTS gamer and play the Age of Empire series and Rise of Nations.

I don’t really think that Microsoft is intrinsically evil. They are just like any other large organization, i.e. , out to crush the opposition and rule the world. Standards and Open Source are the best hope of avoiding that fate. The best allies of Microsoft are the entrenched IS departments who don’t want to change. I’ll be talking more about this later.