The Hubble’s main ACS camera appears to have suffered a short circuit that has resulted in the camera powering down and entering a safe mode. The engineers seem to think that it is rather unlikely that it will be returned to working order, and the problem may affect the actual praticality of the scheduled final reservicing mission. Bummer.

Today, Microsoft has finally released their long coming upgrade to the venerable XP line. I’d say that now is the perfect time for you to move on. No, not by upgrading your box from Windows XP to Vista, but by keeping your $200+ dollars in your pocket, and shifting to an operating system where the authors still work for you.

I’ll make a specific recommendation: try out Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu is an African word, meaning “humanity to others”. It’s a software product with a philosophy, one that goes beyond the basic ideas of free software. In their own words:

The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Philosophy: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.

More than just a philosophy though, it’s a great product. The basic distribution fits on a single CD. It installs quickly and painlessly. It has versions which are optimized for the desktop and for servers. The desktop version includes OpenOffice (which includes a wordprocessor, spredsheet, presentation software and a database, with the ability to exchange documents with Microsoft Office), Firefox for web browsing, Evolution for email, and software for goofing around with pictures and ripping and playing CDs. The server version includes all the software needed to create a LAMP webserver (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), and can IBM’s DB2 and other databases like Postgres. You can install any of over 16,000 ported packages to either of them.

And mostly, it just works. Gnome, the desktop environment provided, is very nice and should seem very familiar to anyone used to Windows or the Mac. If you use your computers primarily to access the web, send email, do some light word processing, or even some heavy word processing, you’ll probably move relatively effortlessly to Ubuntu. As you gain more experience, you’ll probably find that you want to learn more, and luckily, the Ubuntu community websites provide excellent help. Just surf over to help.ubuntu.com and start reading. You may find that you have to invest a little bit in learning, but this time is far from wasted. You’ll begin to find that you can do all sorts of things with Ubuntu that would have been difficult with Windows Vista.

Cast off your shackles. Try something new!