Getting sidetracked for a minute again, I also note that a Linux system would be ideal to develop specialised solutions such as, err... inflight connectivity
I'm thinking about things like the relative ease of programming cheapest-path connectivity, opportunistic caching for latter use while on a cheap link, etc.
I was under the impression that most real time software on aircraft was *nix based due to it's reliability ? May be wrong, I just thought one of my lecturers once mentioned it. Would make sense to me, win up times in months are unusual, where as *nix uptime in years is quite common on the servers I run. Of course, individual mileage may vary.
I VM purely for the odd win application that won't work wine (very few and far between). It allows you to live in a secure enviroment, whilst you still get access to win apps if you REALLY need it (and mostly you don't).
Apart from that I avoid Win like the plague, it's scary that so many people do their internet banking on Win \ Vista. Truly scary. A "friend" of mine once loaded
Aircrack and
Metasploit onto his
Fujitsu lifebook U and automated the wireless cracking so that Metasploit attacks started immediately after the wireless network was hacked. Walking around "his" local estate it was truly scary as to how many wireless networks were once cracked and then the WinXP \ Vista machine compromised. I believe a 20min walk yielded around 3 hijacked PCs \ Laptops. Couple that with the fact that you can buy
servers for pennies. It doesn't take much to put this stuff together, and in the wrong hands ? *shudders* For internet banking it's got to be linux with SELinux running. Anything less is extremely dangerous.
Anyway, I've now drifted right off topic. Sorry folks
