michael> Kendall, for people like myself who lack technical skills
michael> and who need to use programs that only work under windows,
michael> what can we do?
Eh, you don't lack technical skills as much, Michael, as you probably lack the time necessary to learning a new system. I happen to think for many users the investment is worth it, given what you get back, but obviously I'm not trying to make that decision for others.
My main point was to discuss the asymmetry between kinds of upset or discomfort progressive activists seemed willing to undergo in order to do the "right thing".
I started trying to use Linux in 1994 for moral reasons, and I became a vegetarian last year for moral reasons; the latter was much more difficult than the former. (Though I had my days of sheer frustration with learning a new, very unfriendly, back then, but less so now, operating system.) Maybe that's just a function of my being better at certain (probably otherwise useless) conceptual problems than I am at self-discipline and breaking a 30 year old carnivorous appetite.
I just thought with all the sociologists and economists and radicals on LBO, someone might be able to offer some interesting explanations about the asymmetry.
michael> If I could have something that could work some of my
michael> programs under Linux, I would love to do so.
Others mentioned some good ideas; I would say that if it's a matter of running one or two MS programs, perhaps required in your workplace (though universities are far more lax about this than corps -- at least in my experience) then you could run one of several Linux programs that effectively "emulate" MS Windows -- vmware is one such; another is called win4lin.
Large, heterogenous environments like universities are, by the way, interesting examples of why standards-based computing is a good thing, and why, concomitantly, it's in MS's best, dominance-preserving interests to subvert standards, as its admitted to doing on many occasions.
So let's say CS Chico *requires* the use of MS Outlook for email. Well, it would be nicer -- and I bet the computer science folks will have struck this deal -- to just require the use of any email program that knows how to speak "IMAP", the current best protocol for picking up email from another machine. MS wants to subvert IMAP, of course, since they don't control it.
The political and social and economic dynamics around computer standards are fairly fascinating and, to my knowledge, understudied (though I'd love to hear otherwise).
I published a piece earlier this year that tries to apply Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model (with bits of John Searle and Marilyn Frye thrown in for good measure) to a particuarly standards-obsessed part of the computing world, called "XML and markup language technologies" -- kind of the next-generation HTML, meant to power the Web for the next 10 or 15 years.
What I discovered was interesting (at least to a technology-interested leftist like me); while the "big lie" in the XML world is that, given some properties of the technology, it would lead to more openness, less monopoloy, more distributed institutional power, less vendor control -- the reality was likely to be much different.
The reality is the same old, same old: the institutions that control the standards (in this case, the "schemas" or vocabularies that define the XML languages that will power the Web of the near to mid-future) will have inordinate social power; and since the trends are to move every bit of possibly computerizable human interaction onto the Web, into an XML-based system of some sort (this is only a moderate exaggeration, actually), the future was, at least to someone with values like mine, very cloudy and very at-odds with prevailing dogmas.
Best, Kendall Clark