I just sent $50 to Internet radio station Digitally Imported via Paypal.  Gotta practice what you preach.  The only radio station here in Austin to play electronic music gave up a few months ago and adopted an Urban format.  Sigh.

Now the only place on the FM dial you can hear music that's not thinly-veiled marketing dreck for the Entertainment Oligopoly is public radio.  And they insist on playing such a wide variety that it's essentially unlistenable.  Oh, well.  I'm just going to have to move to England if I want decent music on the FM band.

7:27:22 AM   

Imagine if Dell, Gateway, IBM and other major PC OEMs shipped a RedHat emulator with every copy of Windows.  Call it "Virtual RedHat for Windows."  Imagine if the non-settling states agreed to settle Microsoft's anti-trust case on the condition that Microsoft bundle a copy of Virtual RedHat with every Windows installation, and make it available through Windows Update.

Emulators...  Windows emulators for the Macintosh operating system have been popular for as long as there has been a Windows.  A few years ago, a product called VMware hit the scene.  VMware lets you run two operating systems on the same Intel PC at the same time.  And UNIX junkies who've been forced to use Windows have been running Cygwin for years (RedHat even supports it financially).

Opportunity...  Being a tech company that generally gets it, IBM saw the thousands of Linux applications that are packaged for RedHat and recognized an opportunity.  They added a "Linux compatibility layer" to AIX, their big-iron commercial UNIX OS.  The current version, AIX 5L (the "L" stands for Linux) has an "affinity" for Linux.  They added a compatibility layer that allows almost any application designed for Linux to build on AIX 5L unchanged.  That's right, no porting -- you just compile the source RPMs, which is typically two simple commands.

Almost There...  So why couldn't you do the same thing for Windows?  Sure, AIX had a head start given that it's UNIX-based just like Linux.  But Cygwin is already most of the way there.  What's lacking is interoperability.  Linux apps must be ported to Cygwin, and often the Cygwin versions lag behind.  But what if the OS gurus at, say, IBM and RedHat put their heads together and made Cygwin more like AIX 5L?

Borg...  I know what you're thinking.  Not only will Microsoft not help in this effort, they're guaranteed to fight it tooth and nail.  Well, they might be room to convince them, given that their anti-trust troubles aren't over.  And there's at least one PC vendor who wouldn't be afraid of giving Virtual RedHat a spin.

Real WORA...  Talk about "Write Once, Run Anywhere."  Virtual RedHat for Windows should be RedHat's desktop strategy.  Home and SOHO Windows users get access to every RPM on the planet right out of the box.  Enterprise customers get an operating environment that's much less heterogeneous -- without abandoning their investment in Windows.  Here's your escape hatch: Forget Microsoft's License 6.0 -- breathe new life into your Windows boxes with Virtual RedHat for Windows!

6:36:43 AM