I suppose the market they are worried the most about is small video stores that would make digital recordings of PPV or HBO movies and then sell or rent the copies.
Other than that, you would have to be paranoid to care. Last week's football game or a Simpsons episode has so little commercial value that it wouldn't be worth the effort.
I suspect that their solution is to quash recordable digital media. Compatible DVD-WO doesn't exist yet, and DigitalVHS has been in limbo forever, and DV camcorders are limited to a short record time. I suspect these facts aren't coincidental. --
>These computers will be hooked up to cable, not an antenna.
Hmmm, how do you figure? I'd think that if ~30 channels would be available over their air, quite a few people would drop their cable service. (Are the extra 50 channels worth it?)
Also, broadcast digital will be a standard format, and therefore easier to build a tuner card for. Digital cable runs a different standard on each system, so you would still require an external box (which could mean you would only need an extra cable box, and firewire/whatever-becomes-the-standard input.) --
The limits to their spectrum expanded significantly when Congress granted them both the digital and the analog spectrum for free.
With current television hardware, HDTV will be a failure. Most people don't even have TVs good enough for DVD resolution, and many (such as myself) even get crappy NTSC pictures. The market for system which potentially has 2x DVD resolution has to be very limited.
And the broadcasters know this -- they'll broadcast enough HDTV until they can declare it a failure. Then they'll start using their digital spectrum for multiple networks over the air (or for paging services, etc.).
Meanwhile, wait for the whole digital transition to be declared a partial failure. That means the broadcasters can hold onto both the analog and the digitial spectrums, for free, until Congress can be convinced to ignore the money being waved in their face and turn off every little old lady's analog TV. It probably won't happen before 2015.
The broadcasters aren't stupid here -- they know that "everyone" isn't going to move to HDTV for a long time, and plan to take maximum advantage of the situation. They're in the process of pulling of one of the greatest scams in US history. --
Trying to peg Clinton as the perpetrator of this is a little strange -- Congress (Republican and Democrat) got millions of dollars in lobbying money from broadcast interests to pass the bill requiring digital transmission.
Now, I'm not saying Clinton didn't get his share of the pie, but my understanding is that the FCC is under a legal mandate to ensure the digital transition happens smoothly. --
People *would* use an alternative stack if it improved gaming performance. They would even, gasp, reboot to switch back to the MS stack so that everything worked. --
Active Directory uses existing NT domain names as second+ level Internet domain names. Since the hyphen is a valid NetBIOS name character, Win2000 has to accept Internet domains with a hyphen.
So for example, if upgrade the NT host with the netbios name BLUE-SCREEN in the LanMan domain BCAST-STORM, the Active directory hostname could become blue-screen.bcast-storm.microsoft-.com. So, the hyphen might be ambigous in traditional definitions, Microsoft pretty much has to accept it for back-wards compatibility (as changing an NT domain name is virtually impossible.) --
OK - this is less sarcastic: My post was an attempt to explain the situation, not justify it.
WinModems are a product of Microsoft's monopoly, not a cause. Or, consider them a "network effect", where the lack of OS competition allows vendors to cut corners and design/package only for one or more of Microsoft's OSes.
Back to the original post I was replying to -- there is no secret Microsoft winmodem specification. In fact, each different kind of "winmodem" is actually incompatible with each other. Most of these have had no specs released at all, or the Linux community would have written drivers. What Windows does have is the TAPI layer (sometimes called Unimodem), which presents a uniform interface to applications for different kinds of communication interfaces (regular modems, parallel port modems, ISDN TAs, winmodems, etc.). This solves the Windows 3.1 problem where each comm application supplied it's own driver, which was a support nightmare.
Many of the winmodems do not have Windows NT/2000 drivers yet, which is going to slow Win2000 adoption as much as it slows Linux adoption. Hope that pops the conspiricy bubble around here.
(Note, "WinModem" is actually a 3Com brand name - I'm talking about them in the generic sense.) --
Microsoft has nothing to do with Winmodem "specifications". Perhaps you can argue that a communication API like TAPI makes winmodems possible, but I highly doubt that was Microsoft's original intent.
Face it -- the average PC buyer wants spend $800 and get a complete package including monitor, printer, modem, *and* a respectable Megahertz number. Because they can't include last year's CPU, the OEMs pretty much have to cut corners everywhere else. So they save $5 and package a winmodem -- no big conspiricy.
Since many Winmodems don't even work in Windows NT (or 2000?), I'm sure Microsoft isn't that happy about the situation either. It deprives them of some upgrade revenue. On the other hand, if you have the secret Bill Gates memo ordering Dell to ship winmodems to stop the evil 1% market share of Linux and OS/2 users, you'd better put up or shut up. --
You are correct of course. However, in the US a good portion of the upper middle class lives in low density suburban and exurban areas. In addition, people like to work from summer cottages and ski resort areas.
So, there's a big lucrative market to get broadband to areas where it isn't feasible to provide DSL or cable. I would expect to see wireless solutions that provide at least 100-200Kbps rolled out within the next few years. The cellular/PCS infrastructure is already there, and provides good coverage in all but the most remote areas. Considering how the cost of mobile phone service is dropping through the floor, I would imagine that the companies are very interested in any revenue-enhancing services.
So, I would tend to agree with Ion++, widespread broadband is going to be available by 2005 or so. (Which is not say that modems are going away -- I know a few people still happy 28.8K modems for simple things like mail access, even though 56K access is pretty much universal.) --
Why stop at Linux? If a third party vendor wanted to implement their own Windows TCP/IP stack, it's certainly possible.
In fact, several of the old 16-bit Winsock vendors (Trumpet, etc.) did sell stacks for Win95 and NT that claimed some advantage over the Microsoft implementation.
(I'm ignorant of the actual technical details, but I would imagine that the MS stack is weighed down with various backwards compatibility issues, as well as the NBT stuff.) --
I've seen teletext systems on some US cable systems, ususally on a public access channel that offers library announcements and school lunch menus and the like. However, I would imagine these things are disappearing as systems are upgraded to digital and they get rid of those giant Zenith (etc.) cable boxes that are apparently needed to support this feature. --
I wasn't as clear as I could have been -- of course the core OS is very different between OS X and Copland. My point was that the Carbon API is very similar to the idea behind the Copland API -- the old MacOS toolbox with all of the unmodern nastyness removed.
The big difference as far as 3rd parties is concerned is the Classic environment. This means they don't need to update every application they may have ever released. Furthermore, Carbon on MacOS 9 gives them time to transition. Much of the resistance to Copland was based on the fact that virtually everything was going to break (and then break again with the next major revision which was called Beethoven or something.) --
Not just Microsoft -- Adobe also refused to endorse the Copland approach. Of course, now they are all on the Carbon bandwagon. (And isn't Carbon just a revised version of Copland?) --
Don't forget both the PIII and K7 are desktop chips, and the market for the top processor speed desktop is pretty thin and consists of people that are willing to pay somewhat of a premium to get what they percieve as the best possible. Considering the meager performance difference between 733 and 800 Mhz, many people are shelling out big bucks for what is essentially a status symbol. (Most corporations intentionally buy 6 mo old chips, like 600Mhz, or steer clear entirely and buy Celerons)
Since this high end market isn't going anywhere, and you can only charge so much for a desktop chip, AMD might as well keep the revenue coming in by just staying 1-2 steps ahead of Intel.
Now, if AMD had a 1Ghz big cache server CPU, they would best served by getting it to market as fast as possible and stomping on the Xeon with undeniable numbers. --
I'll back you up. My 'new' P2-450/Ultra2SCSI/MatroxG400 doesn't feel 4 times faster than my old P133/WideSCSI2/Mystique220. Except for bootup time, normal GUI apps seem about the same speed (maybe Netscape launches twice as fast, but it's still perceptable at a point when the genius designers of Netscape 4.x said it wouldn't be.) The only real differences is Quake or processor heavy jobs. --
Yes we all know that Microsoft is so successful because of "good marketing" and OS/2 and everybody else failed because of "poor marketing". Quite an incisive analysis.
The truth is OS/2 was hamstrung by some technical issues, product positioning issues, pricing issues, IBM's dubious relationship with the rest of the PC industry, and so on. (I could go on, but OS/2 is way off topic). All issues related to marketing, certainly, but nothing that affected the actual promotion of the product.
The fact is IBM carpet bombed people with free or cheap copies, had huge TV ad campaigns, the OS/2 Fiesta Bowl football game, and huge influnce. Every person who was in IT in 1990 was well aware of OS/2. It had limited to large deployments at virtually every large corporation. This whole "poor marketing" wrap just makes it sound like it died in obscurity, which certainly isn't true. --
Apple really should provide LanMan / SMB support built-in, along with Novell and NFS support. Network interoperability has always been one the huge arguments against Macs in corporations, Apple has heard people bitch and has *never* fixed the problem (insisting instead that the NOS vendors emulate AppleShare on the server).
This is a long standing bitch of mine, ever since the old days when the AppleTalk NLM kept taking down my Novell 3.1 servers. --
Yup, BSD is the historical choice from Next. I believe that BSD was also used when Mach was an academic project (worked on by several Apple/Next engineers), so the code is very stable.
Still, it should be possible to put a Linux subsystem on Mach, as that's what Apple did with MkLinux. The code is out there, so except for licence issues, someone will probably do it. --
In August 1997, Microsoft signed a five-year commitment to support Macintosh versions of its software and has been pleased by the arrangment, Browne said...
Well, when Office 2002 (which could be the last version for a while) finally ships for the Mac, the old MacOS will hopefully have been dropped. It would be beyond stupidity if anyone shipped a product at that point for a dead API.
I'll bet a six pack that all MS's development will be on Carbon, not Cocoa/YellowBox/OpenStep. --
This AC is right on. Maybe some of you like providing technical support for computer illiterate friends and relatives, or when you hear about their Windows 98 woes, it makes you happy because you can advocate Linux, but as far as I'm concerned my advice = money and time, so I try to keep my mouth as shut as possible. (If you know any lawyers, they have the same problem of people trying to get free, accurate advice out of them.)
Now, I know it pleases some of you to drop a Linux box on your mom that you can telnet into to do all of the admin, but when my mom wanted something to surf the web, I sent her an admin-free solution. Unfortuantely, Microsoft is the only one with a product on the market right now, so it was a WebTV. (If she needed word processing, it would have been an iMac.)
The hardware cost differential between a WebTV and a real computer isn't all that great. But the services cost difference is enormous. Don't forget -- every time you telnet into Gramma's Linux terminal, you are essentially providing a $100/hour subsidy to her computer use. (If you are providing Win98 support, knock the price down to $50/hour + travel.) As any business will tell you, hardware/software costs are nothing compared to the support.
And, while I'm on this kick, I can't wait until someone provides an Internet Terminal box for corporate executives. These guys by-in-large are very busy (too busy to learn how to use Windows often), and if they use a computer, it's only for e-mail, WWW, and viewing Powerpoint presentations and other summary reports. Yet, the IT department insists on giving them $7000 ThinkPads that they never take out of the $1500 docking station. A glorified portable web box that always works and requires no support is really all they need. --
I can see it over at Intel HQ now -- "Those bastards at Microsoft have moved another $2 billion of our product. Damn them!!!"
They companies are joined at the backward-compatbile hip, and they both know it.
However, Intel is pissed at MS because of how badly they've handled the 16 to 32-bit transition. MS shipped it's first 32-bit OS eight years after the i386 shipped, and still to this day, 15 years later, most desktops run an OS that's largely 16-bit.
Microsoft, on the other hand, just wants to keep Intel honest (and out of the software business). They also desperately want to get into the 'glass house' midrange market, and they think that Intel is the only company that can get them there.
Advantage: Intel. (Notice how Intel supports more and more platforms through investments in Be and RedHat, while Microsoft has gone from supporting four platforms to one. If MS bungles IA64 like they bungled IA32, Intel will just go elsewhere.) --
It seems like you got it in reverse here -- being "processor agnostic" is probably not huge feature over at Intel. Like Microsoft, they owe a huge chunk of their market to backwards compatibilty concerns, and are more than happy to engineer around them. What you call "8086 garbage" is Intel's ace in the hole. (Notice how Compaq markets the Alpha at Linux users and not Windows users.)
Which is not to say that Intel doesn't like Linux. It gets their CPUs into markets that were once exclusively owned by workstation RISC chips, and in this case gets them into an embedded situation that they might not have been in a few years ago.
However, Intel knows that they need to provide a better product to keep the Linux users on their platform. To that end they are paying to improve gcc's performance on IA32 and running a project to ensure that Linux/IA64 ships when the chips do.
However, they are also pulling quite a few political strings, like buying big chunks of influential Linux companies like RedHat/Cgynus and VALinux. This will ensure that the distribution end of the Linux, Inc. is firmly wedded to Intel, and they will remain the better supported platform. --
Agreed, the software itself doesn't have much commercial value. That having been said, Slashdot does provide one of the best discussion engines that I've seen on the WWW. Certainly one of things that holds the audience is the feature set of the software (and, of course, bitching about that feature set - moderation, metamod, karma, etc.) --
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose the market they are worried the most about is small video stores that would make digital recordings of PPV or HBO movies and then sell or rent the copies.
Other than that, you would have to be paranoid to care. Last week's football game or a Simpsons episode has so little commercial value that it wouldn't be worth the effort.
I suspect that their solution is to quash recordable digital media. Compatible DVD-WO doesn't exist yet, and DigitalVHS has been in limbo forever, and DV camcorders are limited to a short record time. I suspect these facts aren't coincidental.
--
>These computers will be hooked up to cable, not an antenna.
Hmmm, how do you figure? I'd think that if ~30 channels would be available over their air, quite a few people would drop their cable service. (Are the extra 50 channels worth it?)
Also, broadcast digital will be a standard format, and therefore easier to build a tuner card for. Digital cable runs a different standard on each system, so you would still require an external box (which could mean you would only need an extra cable box, and firewire/whatever-becomes-the-standard input.)
--
The limits to their spectrum expanded significantly when Congress granted them both the digital and the analog spectrum for free.
With current television hardware, HDTV will be a failure. Most people don't even have TVs good enough for DVD resolution, and many (such as myself) even get crappy NTSC pictures. The market for system which potentially has 2x DVD resolution has to be very limited.
And the broadcasters know this -- they'll broadcast enough HDTV until they can declare it a failure. Then they'll start using their digital spectrum for multiple networks over the air (or for paging services, etc.).
Meanwhile, wait for the whole digital transition to be declared a partial failure. That means the broadcasters can hold onto both the analog and the digitial spectrums, for free, until Congress can be convinced to ignore the money being waved in their face and turn off every little old lady's analog TV. It probably won't happen before 2015.
The broadcasters aren't stupid here -- they know that "everyone" isn't going to move to HDTV for a long time, and plan to take maximum advantage of the situation. They're in the process of pulling of one of the greatest scams in US history.
--
Trying to peg Clinton as the perpetrator of this is a little strange -- Congress (Republican and Democrat) got millions of dollars in lobbying money from broadcast interests to pass the bill requiring digital transmission.
Now, I'm not saying Clinton didn't get his share of the pie, but my understanding is that the FCC is under a legal mandate to ensure the digital transition happens smoothly.
--
The Trumpet, etc. stuff for Win 95/NT was 32-bit.
People *would* use an alternative stack if it improved gaming performance. They would even, gasp, reboot to switch back to the MS stack so that everything worked.
--
Active Directory uses existing NT domain names as second+ level Internet domain names. Since the hyphen is a valid NetBIOS name character, Win2000 has to accept Internet domains with a hyphen.
So for example, if upgrade the NT host with the netbios name BLUE-SCREEN in the LanMan domain BCAST-STORM, the Active directory hostname could become blue-screen.bcast-storm.microsoft-.com. So, the hyphen might be ambigous in traditional definitions, Microsoft pretty much has to accept it for back-wards compatibility (as changing an NT domain name is virtually impossible.)
--
OK - this is less sarcastic: My post was an attempt to explain the situation, not justify it.
WinModems are a product of Microsoft's monopoly, not a cause. Or, consider them a "network effect", where the lack of OS competition allows vendors to cut corners and design/package only for one or more of Microsoft's OSes.
Back to the original post I was replying to -- there is no secret Microsoft winmodem specification. In fact, each different kind of "winmodem" is actually incompatible with each other. Most of these have had no specs released at all, or the Linux community would have written drivers. What Windows does have is the TAPI layer (sometimes called Unimodem), which presents a uniform interface to applications for different kinds of communication interfaces (regular modems, parallel port modems, ISDN TAs, winmodems, etc.). This solves the Windows 3.1 problem where each comm application supplied it's own driver, which was a support nightmare.
Many of the winmodems do not have Windows NT/2000 drivers yet, which is going to slow Win2000 adoption as much as it slows Linux adoption. Hope that pops the conspiricy bubble around here.
(Note, "WinModem" is actually a 3Com brand name - I'm talking about them in the generic sense.)
--
Why will it be my downfall? I don't buy any of this crap, and the people that do generally don't ask me for my opinion.
--
Microsoft has nothing to do with Winmodem "specifications". Perhaps you can argue that a communication API like TAPI makes winmodems possible, but I highly doubt that was Microsoft's original intent.
Face it -- the average PC buyer wants spend $800 and get a complete package including monitor, printer, modem, *and* a respectable Megahertz number. Because they can't include last year's CPU, the OEMs pretty much have to cut corners everywhere else. So they save $5 and package a winmodem -- no big conspiricy.
Since many Winmodems don't even work in Windows NT (or 2000?), I'm sure Microsoft isn't that happy about the situation either. It deprives them of some upgrade revenue. On the other hand, if you have the secret Bill Gates memo ordering Dell to ship winmodems to stop the evil 1% market share of Linux and OS/2 users, you'd better put up or shut up.
--
You are correct of course. However, in the US a good portion of the upper middle class lives in low density suburban and exurban areas. In addition, people like to work from summer cottages and ski resort areas.
So, there's a big lucrative market to get broadband to areas where it isn't feasible to provide DSL or cable. I would expect to see wireless solutions that provide at least 100-200Kbps rolled out within the next few years. The cellular/PCS infrastructure is already there, and provides good coverage in all but the most remote areas. Considering how the cost of mobile phone service is dropping through the floor, I would imagine that the companies are very interested in any revenue-enhancing services.
So, I would tend to agree with Ion++, widespread broadband is going to be available by 2005 or so. (Which is not say that modems are going away -- I know a few people still happy 28.8K modems for simple things like mail access, even though 56K access is pretty much universal.)
--
Why stop at Linux? If a third party vendor wanted to implement their own Windows TCP/IP stack, it's certainly possible.
In fact, several of the old 16-bit Winsock vendors (Trumpet, etc.) did sell stacks for Win95 and NT that claimed some advantage over the Microsoft implementation.
(I'm ignorant of the actual technical details, but I would imagine that the MS stack is weighed down with various backwards compatibility issues, as well as the NBT stuff.)
--
I've seen teletext systems on some US cable systems, ususally on a public access channel that offers library announcements and school lunch menus and the like. However, I would imagine these things are disappearing as systems are upgraded to digital and they get rid of those giant Zenith (etc.) cable boxes that are apparently needed to support this feature.
--
I wasn't as clear as I could have been -- of course the core OS is very different between OS X and Copland. My point was that the Carbon API is very similar to the idea behind the Copland API -- the old MacOS toolbox with all of the unmodern nastyness removed.
The big difference as far as 3rd parties is concerned is the Classic environment. This means they don't need to update every application they may have ever released. Furthermore, Carbon on MacOS 9 gives them time to transition. Much of the resistance to Copland was based on the fact that virtually everything was going to break (and then break again with the next major revision which was called Beethoven or something.)
--
Not just Microsoft -- Adobe also refused to endorse the Copland approach. Of course, now they are all on the Carbon bandwagon. (And isn't Carbon just a revised version of Copland?)
--
Don't forget both the PIII and K7 are desktop chips, and the market for the top processor speed desktop is pretty thin and consists of people that are willing to pay somewhat of a premium to get what they percieve as the best possible. Considering the meager performance difference between 733 and 800 Mhz, many people are shelling out big bucks for what is essentially a status symbol. (Most corporations intentionally buy 6 mo old chips, like 600Mhz, or steer clear entirely and buy Celerons)
Since this high end market isn't going anywhere, and you can only charge so much for a desktop chip, AMD might as well keep the revenue coming in by just staying 1-2 steps ahead of Intel.
Now, if AMD had a 1Ghz big cache server CPU, they would best served by getting it to market as fast as possible and stomping on the Xeon with undeniable numbers.
--
I'll back you up. My 'new' P2-450/Ultra2SCSI/MatroxG400 doesn't feel 4 times faster than my old P133/WideSCSI2/Mystique220. Except for bootup time, normal GUI apps seem about the same speed (maybe Netscape launches twice as fast, but it's still perceptable at a point when the genius designers of Netscape 4.x said it wouldn't be.) The only real differences is Quake or processor heavy jobs.
--
Yes we all know that Microsoft is so successful because of "good marketing" and OS/2 and everybody else failed because of "poor marketing". Quite an incisive analysis.
The truth is OS/2 was hamstrung by some technical issues, product positioning issues, pricing issues, IBM's dubious relationship with the rest of the PC industry, and so on. (I could go on, but OS/2 is way off topic). All issues related to marketing, certainly, but nothing that affected the actual promotion of the product.
The fact is IBM carpet bombed people with free or cheap copies, had huge TV ad campaigns, the OS/2 Fiesta Bowl football game, and huge influnce. Every person who was in IT in 1990 was well aware of OS/2. It had limited to large deployments at virtually every large corporation. This whole "poor marketing" wrap just makes it sound like it died in obscurity, which certainly isn't true.
--
Apple really should provide LanMan / SMB support built-in, along with Novell and NFS support. Network interoperability has always been one the huge arguments against Macs in corporations, Apple has heard people bitch and has *never* fixed the problem (insisting instead that the NOS vendors emulate AppleShare on the server).
This is a long standing bitch of mine, ever since the old days when the AppleTalk NLM kept taking down my Novell 3.1 servers.
--
Yup, BSD is the historical choice from Next. I believe that BSD was also used when Mach was an academic project (worked on by several Apple/Next engineers), so the code is very stable.
Still, it should be possible to put a Linux subsystem on Mach, as that's what Apple did with MkLinux. The code is out there, so except for licence issues, someone will probably do it.
--
In August 1997, Microsoft signed a five-year commitment to support Macintosh versions of its software and has been pleased by the arrangment, Browne said ...
Well, when Office 2002 (which could be the last version for a while) finally ships for the Mac, the old MacOS will hopefully have been dropped. It would be beyond stupidity if anyone shipped a product at that point for a dead API.
I'll bet a six pack that all MS's development will be on Carbon, not Cocoa/YellowBox/OpenStep.
--
This AC is right on. Maybe some of you like providing technical support for computer illiterate friends and relatives, or when you hear about their Windows 98 woes, it makes you happy because you can advocate Linux, but as far as I'm concerned my advice = money and time, so I try to keep my mouth as shut as possible. (If you know any lawyers, they have the same problem of people trying to get free, accurate advice out of them.)
Now, I know it pleases some of you to drop a Linux box on your mom that you can telnet into to do all of the admin, but when my mom wanted something to surf the web, I sent her an admin-free solution. Unfortuantely, Microsoft is the only one with a product on the market right now, so it was a WebTV. (If she needed word processing, it would have been an iMac.)
The hardware cost differential between a WebTV and a real computer isn't all that great. But the services cost difference is enormous. Don't forget -- every time you telnet into Gramma's Linux terminal, you are essentially providing a $100/hour subsidy to her computer use. (If you are providing Win98 support, knock the price down to $50/hour + travel.) As any business will tell you, hardware/software costs are nothing compared to the support.
And, while I'm on this kick, I can't wait until someone provides an Internet Terminal box for corporate executives. These guys by-in-large are very busy (too busy to learn how to use Windows often), and if they use a computer, it's only for e-mail, WWW, and viewing Powerpoint presentations and other summary reports. Yet, the IT department insists on giving them $7000 ThinkPads that they never take out of the $1500 docking station. A glorified portable web box that always works and requires no support is really all they need.
--
I can see it over at Intel HQ now -- "Those bastards at Microsoft have moved another $2 billion of our product. Damn them!!!"
They companies are joined at the backward-compatbile hip, and they both know it.
However, Intel is pissed at MS because of how badly they've handled the 16 to 32-bit transition. MS shipped it's first 32-bit OS eight years after the i386 shipped, and still to this day, 15 years later, most desktops run an OS that's largely 16-bit.
Microsoft, on the other hand, just wants to keep Intel honest (and out of the software business). They also desperately want to get into the 'glass house' midrange market, and they think that Intel is the only company that can get them there.
Advantage: Intel. (Notice how Intel supports more and more platforms through investments in Be and RedHat, while Microsoft has gone from supporting four platforms to one. If MS bungles IA64 like they bungled IA32, Intel will just go elsewhere.)
--
It seems like you got it in reverse here -- being "processor agnostic" is probably not huge feature over at Intel. Like Microsoft, they owe a huge chunk of their market to backwards compatibilty concerns, and are more than happy to engineer around them. What you call "8086 garbage" is Intel's ace in the hole. (Notice how Compaq markets the Alpha at Linux users and not Windows users.)
Which is not to say that Intel doesn't like Linux. It gets their CPUs into markets that were once exclusively owned by workstation RISC chips, and in this case gets them into an embedded situation that they might not have been in a few years ago.
However, Intel knows that they need to provide a better product to keep the Linux users on their platform. To that end they are paying to improve gcc's performance on IA32 and running a project to ensure that Linux/IA64 ships when the chips do.
However, they are also pulling quite a few political strings, like buying big chunks of influential Linux companies like RedHat/Cgynus and VALinux. This will ensure that the distribution end of the Linux, Inc. is firmly wedded to Intel, and they will remain the better supported platform.
--
Agreed, the software itself doesn't have much commercial value. That having been said, Slashdot does provide one of the best discussion engines that I've seen on the WWW. Certainly one of things that holds the audience is the feature set of the software (and, of course, bitching about that feature set - moderation, metamod, karma, etc.)
--
You think the average Linux OS CD has less than 35M lines of code? Think again. BillG needs to start cracking that whip harder.
(Of course not everything in a Linux distro is part of the OS, but that holds for Win2K also.)
--