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Is the Dell/Microsoft Alliance Fracturing?
An anonymous reader asks: "Dell has historically been the most loyal of all Microsoft's partners. Even today, it is very difficult to avoid paying the Microsoft tax on most of Dell's desktops and notebooks. Recently, two things have made the news where Dell is not toeing the Microsoft line. First, was the announcement that Dell is trialling shipping desktop and notebook PCs in the UK with Firefox as the default browser, instead of IE (announcement confirmed here). Today we have news that Dell is not going to support HD-DVD, despite reported incentives that recently induced HP to do so. So, what are some theories as to why Dell has lately been less of a friend to Microsoft, and what does this mean for the future? Does it mean that it might soon become possible to order Dell's full line of personal systems with Linux installed, or no OS/FreeDOS to save the Microsoft tax?"
Today we have news that Dell is not going to support HD-DVD, despite reported incentives that recently induced HP to do so. So, what are some theories as to why Dell has lately been less of a friend to Microsoft,
I don't know about a cohesive theory to tie all of it together, but for the HD-DVD thing, I would suspect Dell's not supporting it because it keeps getting delayed, because they can't seem to get their shit together finalizing the AACS "content protection".
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Dell is under no obligation to ship IE with their machines
Unless IE has been decoupled with Windows recently without anyone being told, Dell, like everyone else, has no choice in the matter.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
You can get an approximate value of the shovelware by comparing the business machines to the consumer versions at Dell. The business machines (optiplex, latitude, workstations, servers) do not include any of the trials or demos. They typically cost about $50 - $100 more (before corporate discounts) than consumer.
However, as your purchase volume goes up the cost of the business machines becomes less than that of consumer because high volume purchasers use less support (per machine) than low volume. In a corporate environment there is likely to be a help desk that fixes most of the problems that would otherwise hit support.
BS. Yeah, the first thing a clueless user would think is rm -rf, right? They won't know the rm command exists, let alone use it while they su to root.
All they'd do is use their desktop, be that gnome or kde, and manage the files they see as *icons* with their *mouse*. IF they delete something accidentaly, that obviously cann't be anything vital to the system, since linux won't let you do stupid things like this, while you're logged in as a user.
On the other hand, in windowsland, how many times have you seen a clueless user deleting vital system files? Exactly! TOO many times. ("what's this msblabla2131.dll? hmmm must be a virus, lets delete it.")
VStrider.