The Internet seems to be its natural companion. Already the vast majority of web pages are served by Apache, running mostly on Linux systems. For Linux geeks, it goes without saying. We're still less than halfway through the shift from personal to social computing. Most households do not have PCs, and most that do are not connected to the Net.
People are social.
Computing is social too, but only for a minority. There is still no computing appliance that's as social as the telephone. Well, a prototype of that appliance can be built right now by slapping just about any Linux, any desktop and any office suite onto a commodity PC too slow for Windows 98, and a Windows newbie will probably know how to use it. On the server side, the appliances are already here. The Cobalt Qube 2 is a seven-inch blue cube that anyone with an IP address can put on the Web in minutes and control easily over a browser.