IT weeks 2 and 3

Muddiest Point

Are the hardware parts for all computers essentially the same? All of the material in-class dealt with PC's, but this only makes up .2% of computers manufactured in 2003, according to the Wikipedia article. So do my cellphone, calculator, and car have basically the same stuff, as in motherboard, CPU, peripherals, etc?

Week 3 Readings

I used to run Linux on a partitioned harddrive. I've often thought about going back because I liked how smooth it ran, and the fact that everything is open source. The problem I ran into at the time was I had a WinModem, which was not compatible with Linux, so with no internet access I had a bit of trouble accessing the miriad of software available. I do have a tendency to run open source software made for Linux and adapted for Widows (ie VLC Media Player and Open Office Suite). The ideas are seeping into the corporate realm also. I worked in the dental field for several years and we were getting ready to implement an open source dental office management software package to replace SoftDent (Owned by Kodak).

I found the Wikipedia article much more tangible than the one from kernelthread.com. I read both of them, but I admit that I mostly browsed the one available on kernelthread. I was having trouble seeing the point of knowing the startup order of the machine and details like that. I understand that some find that information important, but I didn't really. Though, I found the history of Mac Os X very interesting.

Windows still reigns supreme, but the security issues seem to be its downside. I have considered many times switching to Mac for security reasons. I think it is good that Windows is striving to fix the problem. I haven't used it much, but I don't like Vista, it seems to glitchy, and I'm not very happy with the new interface. I suppose I will get used to it over time, but by the time I do Windows 7 will be out and I'll have to get used to another layout probably. Windows NT was the most stable kernel and they stopped using it, which I think was problematic, at least they will be builiding off of Vista so that hopefully they can work out some of the bugs.