Rick Hodgin has an interesting opinion piece on geek.com. In spite of its clumsy title -- "Death knell heard for Microsoft and really all proprietary efforts" -- its a well written piece on why you should start getting comfortable with open source.

The French police reckon they saved €50 million switching to Linux, the New York Stock Exchange did it a couple of years ago and Amazon have been using it for almost a decade. If you're a user of Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, Blender, Audacity, NVU, OpenOffice.org, Apache or MySQL you're already part of the movement. And if you're not, it really is worth a look!

Here's a little mystery for you. Imagine you have three files on a Windows machine called

Windows will have no problem opening the appropriate program when you double-click them because of those three-letter extensions. If however you drop the extensions or mix them up, you'll have problems.