Linus Torvalds the self confessed benevolent dictator and father of LinuxSaturday, January 19, 2008
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I have collected 50 of my favorite "Linux quotes" of all time. Feel free to add yours. Enjoy! Powered by ScribeFire.
By Christina Laun
Open source software has a lot to offer the business world. Aside from the fact that they’re generally free, many open source programs are more secure, reliable and customizable than their proprietary counterparts. In fact, many large companies, including big names like Amazon, Google, and Yahoo, run their servers with Linux rather than Windows. Open source software is often some of the best software for the job, even when cost is no consideration. So how can you make open source software work for your business? Here are 50 apps that can help your office get on track to join the growing numbers of businesses that have made the switch to open source.
Desktop and Server Distributions
Email and Instant Messaging
Productivity
Imaging and Design
Content Management
Web Tools
Network and Server Management
Finances
Security and Tracking
Video games are big
A whole generation is growing up for whom video games are a key part of how they relax, whether it be fragging friends in a first person shooter or backing up the main tank in a Warcraft raid.
 A generation is growing up playing immersive online games |
Statistics from the the US Entertainment Software Association (ESA) back this up. It claims that the average player is 33 and has more than a decade of gaming under their belt.
All of a sudden, say academics and researchers, companies have realized that all the time employees spend gaming in virtual worlds is changing them.
Ian Hughes, IBM's metaverse evangelist, said many organizations were considering ways of harnessing the skills and familiarity their employees have with virtual environments.
This familiarity has driven many organisations to consider virtual worlds as places where employees can meet,
mix and get on with the job.
"A lot of people are more accepting of that way of working just because of games," he said.
"It's about harnessing that ability to play to get work done."
The formidable organizational skills needed to run a game team or guild, organize raids involving perhaps 40 people and co-ordinate their different abilities to defeat a game's strongest foes are all relevant to work, said Mr Hughes.
Game gear
But it is not just the skills that gamers hone in futuristic or fantasy worlds that businesses want to co-opt. Some are taking their inspiration directly from the way that online games are structured.
Dr Byron Reeves, a professor of education at Stanford University, said some firms were taking elements from games to overcome the difficulties of working life in the 21st Century. 
Skills learned on raids in games could apply to work too
"The problems associated with distributed teams, collaboration and information overload right now are so severe, and the opportunities so good, that they are willing to look at anything," he said.
Dr Reeves has founded a company called Seriosity that applies game elements to workplaces.
It was working with five or six unnamed Fortune 500 companies to harness the efficiencies of those game mechanics, said Dr Reeve.
One of the programs developed by Seriosity adds a virtual currency element to e-mail in a bid to help people cope with information overload.
Anyone sending a message adds some of their limited supply of virtual coins, called Serios, to show how important they consider that e-mail to be.
It was a more finely grained grading system than the low, medium or high importance flags found in most e-mail programs, said Dr Reeves.
It had other benefits too, he said. It revealed not just the flow of messages but also started to show who people pay attention to and who did a good job of getting responses.
Some companies were starting to adopt even more of the elements familiar from games.
"There are people right now trying to map it one-to-one," said Dr Reeves.
Level playing field
Convinced that games can help them thrive some companies have turned work groups into guilds, rewarded staff with experience points when they complete tasks, giving out titles and badges when a guild finished a project and portraying objectives as quests.
Some were also considering using a virtual currency as a reward system allowing workers to cash in their savings for benefits or extras for their office space. The top performing guilds also get to do the best projects. 
Virtual worlds could become key to future business life
None, so far, he said, were tying wages to how people performed in the quests and against other guilds.
"Mapping levels and points on to wages is the most extreme application," he said.
Companies were adopting game mechanics for several reasons, said Dr Reeves.
Partly because workers were so familiar with this structure, he said, and because people become powerfully motivated when they know how they compare to their contemporaries.
The main reason was for the transparency it gave to the way workplaces were organized and for revealing who got things done.
"It exposes those that do and do not play well," said Dr Reeves. "There is a leader board and you know the rules."
It had the potential to turn workplaces into meritocracies where the most accomplished are easy to spot because they have racked up all rewards, achievements and levels required for a particular post.
While it may not sweep away systems of privilege or end nepotism it had the potential to make workplaces fairer and take some of the grind out of the day job, he said.
"The whole idea here is to get the objectives of the individual players aligned with the objectives of the organization," said Dr Reeves. "Do that and you have something good."
Angela Barron, an advisor at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said games had long been used in training to expose personal preferences and prejudices.
Many organizations also used courses that revolve around games to help make teams work together better or expose power structures among workers.
She said this was the first time she had heard of elements of online games being used in a similar way.
"I would not have thought enough people play games for it to be a great motivator," she said.
But, she said, anything that helped staff develop a better working relationship and promote team work was likely to be a good thing.
For a start you need to have an open mind. Linux is similar in operation to windows but it is not windows. There are differences. Sometimes significant ones. Programs will have different names and will appear different. You will definitely have some learning ahead of you. However that learning will not be much different than going from windows XP to windows Vista. The most important thing is to expect things to be different and until you get used to where everything is you will have to do a bit of searching.
Installation of modern linux distributions is very simple now and in some cases even simpler and faster than installing windows. There are very few questions asked and in almost all cases the default answers are the right ones so the familiar next,next,next routine of installing programs will feel right at home.
Once your new linux is installed you will be presented with a different looking desktop to what you will be used to. That’s normal because it is a completely different operating system. Before throwing up your hands in confusion and exasperation take a minute or two to have a close look at what you see.
You will see going across the bottom of the desktop a bar similar but not quite like the windows task bar. In fact it does the exact same thing. Right where you expect the windows start button to be you will see a button that when clicked on opens up a menu exactly the same way windows does. That button may have a picture of a gear on it or it may be something else.
On that menu, just like windows, you will see several choices. Much more than a fresh install of windows will offer. That is because a freshly installed Linux gives you all the programs you need to do 90% of your daily tasks without having to install anything else. You will have your internet, email, word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, music player, instant messaging, scanning and photograph editor and of course the requisite card games. These are all ready to use as soon as you have finished installing linux.
All of these programs look and operate very similar to their windows counterparts so after a bit of playing around they will feel right at home. Until you get used to your new linux system just about all of the linux distributions will have a forum or mailing list that are populated by people from all over the world who are willing and even eager to help you on your path of learning. In fact most, if not all questions you will have will have already been answered in a document called a FAQ which is short for frequently answered questions. It is highly suggested the this document is read at least once.
Maintenance of a linux system is very easy too. With a good linux distribution all configuration that you need to worry about is presented in a very similar way to the windows control panel and you can easily adjust to the slightly different syntax. Upgrading and security patches are also handled automatically and in a linux system all installed programs from the packet manager are upgraded and patched by the distribution. You don’t need to have to manually monitor third party programs like with windows.
So when you decide to give Linux a try you will find that you will have an interesting time ahead of you. You will be confused sometimes, you will be frustrated sometimes. Sometimes you will feel like shooting your computer but then you have probably had those same feelings with windows. I can guarantee that your journey with linux will never be boring and you will learn a lot along the way.
- Locutus
