Chin Wong has written an article on why some businesses should consider shifting to Ubuntu.  In my opinion, this article is a best of breed for such a topic.  Chin is a good writer that clearly conveys his thoughts in an organized and objective manner.  It is not strategic, biased, or emotional like other other Ubuntu blogs and articles.  This was a breath of fresh air.

While the Linux Counter aims to determine how many Linux users there are worldwide, the Ubuntu Counter "aims to catalogue the number of registered machines using the numerous variants of the Ubuntu Linux distribution".

If you use Ubuntu, consider joining the Ubuntu Counter project.  I did.

I like to hear the experiences of people switching to Linux (especially Ubuntu) from other desktop systems such as Microsoft Windows, Apple, and others.

Although the benefits of using Linux are well cited all over the internet, it's the personal accounts or testimonials that prove these benefits.

Ubuntu Story is a website that let's people share the Linux history and how they found Ubuntu.

For some reason or another, I've always enjoyed topics of Ubuntu and Fonts so this post on how to create or edit fonts on Ubuntu was a pleasant read. 

The author does a particularly nice job of highlighting some font related tools one can install on Ubuntu such as FontForge, Specimen Font Previewer, Fonty Python (lol, what a good name), Waterfall and Font Image.

I have serious concerns about all this news on how Windows update service had no downtime compared to Apple update service and Ubuntu update service.  My concern is that it is being hyped up as a massive Ubuntu failure. 

If one pays attention to the details, the monitoring timeframe of each service was for April 1 to June 30, 2008.  That's 3 months!  

Are 3 months supposed to be some kind of indicator that Ubuntu or Apple fail miserably compared to Windows?

• Why not measure for 4 months?  Maybe the Windows server had a HUGE failure for days before April 1?  And maybe on July 1 it went down again for days? 
  
• I don't know about you, but I'd prefer a service that went down once for a full day in a given year over a service that crashed multiple times, each time for an hour, throughout the year.  To me that suggests the people behind the first service are more knowledgeable.  When a service shows it continually has problems and can't be fixed, I begin to worry about their technical expertise.
  
• What was the server load for that time period?  How many download requests did each have?  Does the time period correspond to some recently released security or bug fixes? 
  
• Monitoring occurs by checking the URL's: archive.ubuntu.com, www.update.windows.com and swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index-1.sucatalog.  Are we sure there were no DNS issues during the 3 months? 
  

These servers operate 24/7, 358 days of the year.  I demand Pingdom AB group compare their data for 6 months, 1 year, 2 years and 5 years if the data is available.

I understand they probably don't have data for server load, server requests, number of updates/fixes, and access to any DNS issues.  Someone would need to do a bit of legwork to get all of that.

With all of these information gaps, any claim made that Windows update service outperforms the other 2 update services is meaningless.