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Microsoft's Athens PC
OneLeg noted that the Seattle Times has a story on Microsoft deciding to partner up with HP and
work on new PCs with a simpler, more controlled architecture. Including things like integrated telephony into the PCs, and in general, being a bit more Maclike and locking Linux out of the desktop market.
The XBOX will now come with a monitor, an HP label, and Windows XP. Yay!
Oh wait, this is a bad thing... I think.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Microsoft has made hardware standards for quite some time. They still haven't gotten in the hardware business (other than peripherals.) And why on earth is it so awful that MS is trying to make Windows better? We (the /. crowd) always bitch about how much it sucks, why don't we applaud MS when they do something to try to fix it? Setting up a standard for PC hardware that they think will integrate better with Windows is fine IMO - if it helps make "the" consumer OS better for the consumer, more power to them. I don't blindly support monopoly abuse, but I really don't think that's what's happening here. I think that MS is taking steps to make the PC better (by integrating telephony and other "cool" features). The system they've set up has some real innovation and isn't merely copying the work of others. I think we should at least see it before mindlessly bashing it (as some of the other comments have already done.)
When the hardware receives an incoming call, the software automatically pulls up the caller's contact information and photo if the data are stored on the system.
Well, time to get to work today...
No, too fat... Hm, no picture? No support... Yikes! Fugly, no help for you... Whoa, hold on a minute! Yes, Tech Support is ready to hump- er help you!
Point 2. Microsoft will not allow Linux on this machine.
I'd like to see them try.
I'm no coder, but there are thousands of people out there that can crack whatever MS tries to do (search for 'xbox' on Source Forge for examples...).
They can do whatever they want. I personally don't care. If there's a machine that's controled in this fashion, I won't buy it. It's really that simple.
No Sales == No Production
No Production == Bad Idea
Bad Idea == Bag It.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
About one week before you get your Cease and Desist issued under the DMCA, because you had to crack the "protection mechanisms" of the box in order to boot an unsigned OS on it.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Microsoft (and Intel, and now HP, give them their credit as well) have been pushing and prodding the hardware guys into progress for more than a decade. The problem is that most hardware companies have no vision, no desire to innovate, no sense of design.
I've been to every WinHEC for the last few years and every year Microsoft is urging the hardware vendors to drop the legacy stuff. ISA slots suck and make Plug-and-Play a miserable experience, but we're only now seeing their complete and total death in new products. Microsoft and Intel pushed the standards to get rid of them.
Most PCs are built from standard components with standard dimensions and standard interfaces. Everything is interchangable. That decoupling has made the PC industry great and driven prices way down, but the Apple counterexample shows what tight integration and some design sense can buy you in both hardware and software. Both Microsoft and Intel would like to see a bit more innovation going on, and WinHEC is one place that they try to make their case.