[dba-Tech] So long, Norman

That's actually a quote from one of my fave singer-songwriters, to wit,
Warren Zevon. The song is The Great Pretender and it's on his second album.
But the point here is not about Warren Zevon, it's about my final
liberation from Microsoft.

I have at last converted my main squeeze to a native boot of Linux Mint 11.
Inside that, I run Oracle VirtualBox, and inside that I run the only
instances of Windows that I care about, each of which emulates a client
workstation with only and exactly what the clients run.

I have to tell you that for the first time in at least a decade, I finally
feel free from the fellows in Redmond. The few times that I need to do some
development for a client, I run a VM to do so. The rest of the time I'm
living in Linux/Mint, and I love it.

I do need to purchase a new laptop this month, but that's another story. It
will probably come equipped with one or another version of Windows 7, and
having toured the Windows 8 preliminary versions, I can see no reason to go
there. Mind you, all this needs to be taken with a large grain of salt,
since I am almost 65 years old and have little to no desire to retain my
place on the bleeding edge. I have a stupid-phone and no tablets or any
other fancy techno-vices. I'll continue to maintain the apps that I already
have in the field, but from here on in my native OS is Mint, not Windows.
For that kind of work, a VM will do just fine. I can precisely emulate what
the client runs, right down to Windows/Office/SPs, so that I'm 100%
confident that if it works in my VM, it will work on their hardware.

And after that, my friends in Redmond, I have lost interest in your future
directions. I simply do not care any more.

-- 
Arthur
Cell: 647.710.1314

Prediction is difficult, especially of the future.
  -- Niels Bohr