OStatic

I've seen a certain amount of gloating recently in the open source press about a memo from Bill Gates that the Seattle PI recently dug up. You know the one, probably: Bill tries to install some software from the net, and ends up flaming his people for a couple of pages with choice bits like The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. But so what?

Information Week has an interesting piece up about open source disaster recovery tools. It covers a lot of the good applications that can come to the rescue when you need to recover data or revive a computer. They include SystemRescueCD, BackTrack, Partedmagic, TestDisk and more. In addition to these open source tools, there are also a number of great freeware products in this general category, especially for preventative maintenance. Here are five of them, with a couple of open source gems thrown in, that can help you avoid disaster.

Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, technology columnist Lee Gomes has a series of modest suggestions for Microsoft as they try to frame the course of Windows 7. These include such common-sense ideas as cutting down the number of SKUs and implementing Time Machine-like system recovery features. But one of his suggestions seems even more outlandish: that Windows should become some sort of crazy open source software.