Friday liberty blogging - "Bush frightens terrorists"

I read again yesterday that same comment on GW Bush and his impact on terrorists. "What you don't seem to understand, you f@¤#! Europeans, it's that Bush frightens terrorists, he scares them to death!"

I have never quite understood the train of thoughts that might lead to that. Let alone the idea that scaring people to death is probably what makes terrorists, let's concentrate on the evidence:

There has been only one major terrorist attack on the US (of foreign origin) in the whole history of the nation. And it happened during the Bush administration!
- I will not deduce that Bush failed because of this. No, it's just a sample value. It falls short of making a statistic.
- But no one can deduce that Bush did great work. He did the worst work of all Presidents of the US, as he was the only one to get a terrorist attack.

Finally, let me add this little thing. Killing someone is the easiest thing on Earth. Anyone can go in the street and kill people. Any day in your office, you can decide to kill a colleague and do it. So one cannot stop people from going mad. So if you vote for a President because of his words on stopping terrorism, you're just encouraging more lies.

Kill Microsoft and you don't need to virtualize

Yeah, sometimes, I lose my tempers at Microsoft. But I'm not the only one. Today a colleague told me that the day Microsoft was removed, we would not need virtualization anymore.

:-?

"Yeah. Of course!
Look, why do we virtualize? To reduce the costs of having so many machines and reinstalling them.
Why do we have so many machines? Because they are different, we can do different things on each of them. Yet, we need to do a little of each of these things.
Why are they so different? Because one player: Microsoft, doesn't play the game of compatibility, but plays the game of anti-compatibility."

"So, take the problem in reverse order", he said
"If Microsoft disappears, almost only Unix-like players remain. They can homogeneize their differences very quickly. If they don't, small layers of compatibility can be added quickly, because the root differences are small.
If we can do very similar things on these different systems, we will choose those we need for the things we need. We will not be forced to have all of them.
Then we can have fewer machines. Regroup small tasks on a single computer. Without virtual machines! No need neither to buy a specific system nor to run a virtual machine in order to implement a specific software.
Goodbye VMWare, goodbye Java, goodbye wine!"

That's, of course, very optimistic. But it's nice to hear someone optimistic these times. When I come to think of it... remove SQL Server incompatibilities, and you can run almost any application choosing the database you will use! And with the broad (in average) compatibility of C and C++ software, you can use the same software whatever the OS... That's what I call saving money.
Sounds promising. When do we start?