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The opposition

© Ian Carr-de Avelon

It is often suggested that when you feel that you are as good as you ever could be, you should look at the opposition to see how you could be better. I tend to be my own worst critic, so looking at the opposition generally brings a sense of relief that maybe I am being too hard on myself. I was looking round a client's office recently and started thinking not about the problems which they would have changing to Linux, but the problems which their present system inflicts on them.

Computers started with mathematical theories about "general purpose machines." Today when computers are built in to everything from cars to photocopiers it is easy to think that that was always intended, but by general purpose machine the mathematicians simply meant that it could be used to evaluate any mathematical function; it was not limited to just one type of problem and other problems would require changes to the machine on a level with melting it down and starting again.

The vision of modern computers which a computer engineer has is similar to this in that one PC is basicly like another. You can't eg. read a CD-ROM if there is no CD-ROM drive available, but essentially all PCs are the same and through a network you could read a CD-ROM on another system. With Internet you could use a CD-ROM drive at the end of the Earth. So we have an office with a general purpose computer under every desk and they are networked and they have an Internet connection to the rest of the world. Anything which could be accomplished with any of the hardware, could be made available to anyone in the whole wide world; that is in theory, the practice is rather different.

Only one of the PCs runs Linux, and I look after that for the client. The rest are all Windows systems. Looking at the PCs running windows I always see lots of problems, and I would like to suggest Linux as the solution, but I know that it is not always that simple. For example the book keeper has a program which is provided by the bank with which the company account can be checked. That program is only provided in a windows version, so either the book keeper has to keep windows or it would be necessary to run a Linux system with the Windows emulator WINE and check that there are no problems. They have one PC which is used for Desktop Publishing, if that were moved to Linux they wo

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