Now that post title could imply several things, I’m either a nix sceptic or fan, well neither at the moment actually, I havnt’ been convinced either way.

I’ve just picked up on a BBC post entitled Battle of the Operating Systems. The BBC were looking (its closed now) for a Vista, Mac OS and Linux fan to go head to head to debate the comparative benefits of their favourite operating system. What was interesting was seeing the number of people singing the praises of linux distributions, mainly Debian and the Ubuntu distribution built upon it. Certainly its nice to see although probably more a reflection of the BBC News Technology readership than anything else.

Personally I find it difficult to choose a side on this one, I’ve used all three although I usually fall back to windows XP for most tasks, purely to be honest beacuse its the one I’m most familiar with (not to mention I don’t own a Mac), my school had a large network of Mac OS 9 machines which like windows I had a love/hate relationship with so I’ve had a pretty good period of use of Mac (granted OSX has changed a lot). And then there’s Linux, I’ve been running Ubuntu linux on my IBM X31 for the last couple of months and to be honest I was pleasently surprised.

The install was really easy and all drivers were there straight away, the fantastic array of free software available is incredibly useful and easy to install, not to mention the operating system runs at quite some speed. The similarities between it and Mac OS are most striking, Apple’s keychain is Ubuntu’s keyring etc. The only issue I’ve had is rather slow connection times with the Cisco wireless card installed in the laptop which in itself is causing quite a lot of frustration.

I’m hoping the BBC will make this ‘Battle of the Operating Systems’ available online, it’ll be interesting to see what people are saying at any rate!

Well I received a long awaited invite to the beta program for The Venice Project, the latest video start-up powered by the guys who brought us Skype and Kazaa along with a plentiful dose of P2P technology. The program installs easily with minimal prompting required, GigaOM has posted screenshots and a breakdown of the service, it seems he is about the only one who is going against the clearly stated policy on not posting screenshots!

The beta test program has a forum set up for the user group although the development team are understandably being quite coy at the moment about divulging too much information on the technology behind the application. The program uses a few open source technologies behind it of which there is a list here, aside from this there is not much information available at the moment. The application will in an hour download about 320mb of data and being P2P will upload as well on what seems thus far to be a rough ratio of 3:1 so for those with bandwidth limitations and other nasties this could potentially be an issue.

 In terms of where it stands in the market place its quite difficult to place, there is mention on the forums of in browser viewing and links in future versions, and there are mentions by bloggers and beta testers of placing it in the YouTube catagory. Personally I’d prefer it kept to mainstream content supported as it is at the moment by advertising which would maintain a certain quality of content which in all fairness does not exist on YouTube. The advertising can apparently be localised which of course puts it in an amazing position ahead of traditional television channels as well as better interactive capabilities off of this.

What would be great to see would be a version for the Nintendo Wii (or similar) console, the modern consoles are well equipped in theory it would seem (I’m not a developer so say this without full knowledge of the practicalities), to handle a platform such as this and would allow the venice project user to go back to the armchair. Video content isn’t generally interactive and is very much a lean back not lean forward sort of media so potentially a good thing. Have to wait and see what happens, a Mac version is on its way and there are promises of a linux version at which point it could in theory run on the PS3.