Slashdot Mirror

No, but I've reinstalled XP on my own machine before. Fedora and Ubuntu both beat the daylights out of it when it comes to out-of-the-box hardware support, as well as preinstalled software. The thing is, my notebook PC didn't just come with a copy of Windows XP, it also came with a driver CD. The driver CD makes everything work.

Linux gets credit for making things as easy as possible, it really does. Most of the things that make installing Linux hard are beyond the developers' control. That's one reason why I think preinstalled Linux systems are going to change the game. Right now the primary way to get a Linux PC is to put Linux on a Windows PC, which is kind of like making a Hackintosh no matter how streamlined they try to make it. Buying a full-on Linux PC with hassle-free setup would be even easier. Plus, being able to use Linux frees hardware vendors from having to be tied to Microsoft.

I actually considered buying a Dell XPS Ubuntu notebook instead of a Macbook. But the hardware design of a Mac simply has to be seen to be believed, and their high resale value sealed the deal for me. Plus I can buy them refurbished, which means recycling a machine that would have been thrown out instead of buying a new machine that was made in China.

Yes, You hate censorship and tyranny. Put your money where your mouth is. Boycott China. http://www.boycottmadeinchina.org/

Unless it would be a major inconvenience, then nevermind and just wear your indignant attitude proudly.

The Chinese Government are filth-

Boycott Made In China

Google Search

I'm sort of Buddhist, although I'm not so sure about Confucius. I ought to fit in, more or less.

Hmmm... I think you'd better check the first few paragraphs of the link I found for my original posting. Or, just pin a note to your back saying "Persecute Me".

You made a good point, though:
Remember the "one child" policy? Well, all those little princes are growning up.

Yeah, and they don't have many princesses to marry. The one-child policy led to a very suspicious decrease in the number of baby girls, so we now have a lot of young men with no way to get a wife. I think it looks something like this:

1. Excess male population
2. ???
3. Conquest!

where ??? = [War | Prosperity], and Prosperity isn't looking like the most likely choice.

From the article:
US computer security firm iDefense discovered the code being circulated from Chinese websites. It said some computers were already being broken into using the new exploit code.

This puts a bit of a different spin on the previous story, in which Taiwan accused China of organizing a cyber-attack. I think this validates the position that Taiwan's government was simply disseminating a little cross-channel FUD... there may indeed be Chinese hackers trying to break into Taiwanese systems, but they're doing it on an ad-hoc basis, not as part of a government-sponsored attack.

Think about it... you're a hacker in mainland China, and you want to attack someone. Do you go after your own government? Only if your family doesn't mind paying for the bullet when you're convicted of espionage. Much safer to hit a country that your government wouldn't mind giving a black eye?

Hackers in China... hey, it looks like China is the new Russia!

an AC wrote In terms of military spending the US is so far ahead of anybody else. China is second and the US spends 12 times as much as China does. The US spends more than the next 13 biggest militaries in the world put together (that's more than China, Russia, the UK, France, Israel, North Korea and a whole load of others combined).


Yeah, it spins my head out that there's an organisation on the planet that spends 30 million dollars every single day.

On the other hand, fighting china is insane not because you couldn't win militarily, but because the economic fallout would destroy the world. Look at all the things made in china. China is the world's manufacturing plant. Most of our factories have been knocked down to make way for housing developments and malls. With that kind of market, not even SARS could check the growth of Chinese manufacturing.

Of course these folks believe that we could live without them, but I think that in a war you'd have to worry about the fact that the chinese manufacturing base is strong and healthy, while the western manufacturing base is in decline.

However, we also need to extend the boycott to products that are made in Taiwan. The Taiwanese support integrating Tibet into mainland China. In fact, the Taiwanese constitution states clearly that both Tibet and Mongolia are part of "One China". The Taiwanese have invested more than $60 billion into more than 60,000 businesses in mainland China.

We should condemn the behavior of the Chinese in Taiwan.