US, China reject Microsoft software

It ain't just governments either. Intel, for example, does not run its fab processing factories on Wintel equipment, but on OpenVMS and you know what...

Yet Blighty - the meaning of which has acquired a new sense due to the broken down nature of our educational, health and transport systems - is pinning its hopes on a DIM (Dell-Intel-Microsoft) future, all apart from Comrade Blunkett's scary and Stalinistic Ministry of the Interior.

A search on Netcraft reveals that most US .gov sites don't run Microsoft software at all, while over here the DIM agreement means our government serves Bill Gates.

The US Supreme Court must be looking at the Capellas Countdown with some interest as it's running Tru64. The doughty Department of Justice (DoJ) won't swallow the Compaq FUD about Sun Microsizzles, and is running Solaris. The SEC is running Linux and we understand Mr George Bush II is doing the same. Ms Kollar-Kotelly's own US district court runs Solaris.

Mr Tony, our former mascot, over at 10 Downing Street is heavily dependent on Windows NT4 and Win 98. Her Majesty the bestower of Knighthoods to IBM CEO's has decided Windows 2K is robust enough.

Comrade Blunkett's Ministry of the Interior runs Solaris 8 and Linux.

And it appears much of the NHS runs on NT4 and Windows 98 - except that after our year's experience from the inside we know that it is vastly undercomputerised and there are even Acorn BBC Micros running life-critical software at top heart hospitals here. And if you ask the doctors about computers.... expect a flea in your ear - there isn't even hot running water in some of the cardiac wards...

The European Union runs Sun Microsizzle's Solaris and the Reds in China have decided that rather than rely on Volish software, come the inevitable clash of cultures sometime this century, they're sticking to Linux too. µ