The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
His Mac has a Fedora installation set up as a dual boot but he said the wireless connection with Fedora was rather flaky and managing the brightness of the display was a problem as well.
Famous people use the Mac too. Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of the PHP programming language, said he had bought a Mac because he could not get a non-Windows laptop. And he was certainly not willing to pay the Microsoft tax.
Lerdorf uses the Mac all the time; he has a Linux VM running which he uses for development. His co-location server runs Debian.
For Neil Cox, a senior IT professional who provides support to small businesses in Canberra, the one reason for a Mac was great hardware. And Cox has no use for OSX - he has stripped it off and is running Lenny on the Macbook.
"Great hardware," he said when asked why he had a Mac. "I've bought Macs since 1985. Had one Dell laptop and didn't like it."
Cox is a command-line person by and large but said he occasionally used GNOME.
Louis Suarez-Potts, community manager for OpenOffice.org at Sun Microsystems, said he was a Mac user because "much of what I do requires tools that are reliable." He also runs Linux in a virtual machine, using VMWare for the purpose.
James Turnbull, who works as a senior network specialist with a big Australian corporate, said he was using a MacBook simply because he had gotten into using OSX at a stage when both GNOME and KDE, the two most used Linux desktop environments, were "not at their prettiest."
"I have a dual boot with Ubuntu," Turnbull said. " The Mac is a good piece of hardware. But my next buy is going to be one of the netbooks on which I'll put Linux."
I asked two other conference attendees for their input but they did not wish to be quoted.
There were quite a few others I spotted running Linux on the Mac. It looks like Apple need have no worries that Linux will lower its sales numbers.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
