Thank Richard Milhous Nixon! I didn't make it up. In the early 70s US Atty General John Mitchell tried to scare the Washington Post off the Watergate story by telling Ben Bradlee that the his boss, the publisher Katherine Graham, would soon find her "tits caught in a big wringer". According to Woodward and Bernstein. We tend to think of judges as statues made of marble, I believe though that she's got to be feeling the pressure from MS/BUSH.EXE in a physical way. Just as physical a sensation as David Sentelle surely experiences in being the hand that cranks that wringer. There is a good chance of negative consequences for her if she tries to apply the law and defend the public interest. At every twist of procedure and indeed every minute, she faces the choice of passively rubberstamping this bill of goods or sticking up for principles and the people and taking a bullet. Wouldn't that churn anybody's gut?
Except that the case was remanded to her for the specific purpose of coming up with and applying a remedy. What they are really doing is threatening her with Sporkinization. (Imagine a Spork where you least want it, twisting back and forth and plunging forward repeatedly) Judge Sporkin was reamed because the DOJ and Microsoft made a claim that he was demanding remedies to abuses not proven in the DOJ's case against MS, that he wanted to be both judge and prosecutor, which overstepped his Constitutional bounds. As long as Judge K. refrains from any remarks that could be used to insinuate that she is trying to remedy wrongs not proven by the case in Judge Jackson's court and upheld by the appeals court, then she should be safe to hold out for something better.
Then if they Sporkinize her anyway, and they may, it will become completely obvious to anyone that the Appeals Court and the Bush DOJ are conniving to get a powerful rich defendant off the hook in spite of the fact that Microsoft are as guilty as Michael Jackson in an orphanage or Olly North in the White House.
They are trying to threaten her with the same reaming the Court of Appeals laid down on Stanley Sporkin back in 96 (?) Sporkin refused to authorize a consent decree settlement agreed upon by DOJ and Microsoft because he thought it wasn't strong enough as a remedy. The Appeals Court which is full of nice reasonable people like David Sentelle who for example, had overturned Oliver North's conviction and had also appointed Ken Starr as special prosecutor since the previous special prosecutor wasn't sufficently rabid, threw Sporkin off the case saying he didn't have the authority to withhold his signature to a settlement reached by plaintiff and defendant (one wonders why we have judges at all then). However, the big difference between these two cases and what was used to hang Sporkin, was that an argument could be made from things he had said that he believed not just that the remedy to be ineffectually weak, but that he wanted the remedy to include corrections for Microsoft abuses that DOJ never argued or tried to prove in the case. The Microsoft/DOJ as appellants argued that this was an inappropriate blurring of function: Judge Sporkin couldn't be both Judge and Prosecutor. Blowing this minute and dubious distinction about remedy and sufficient remedy up into a separation of powers type argument, the appeals court went on to "reluctantly" accept Microsoft's contention that since Sporkin had mentioned having read a book , Harddrive, about Microsoft he was unduly biased against them and that bias was the motive behind his finding against them and his intent to apply a remedy stricter and more far reaching than DOJ wanted. The consent decree was handed then to Thomas Penfield Jackson for his immediate signature, (who must have also wondered why a rubber stamp at DOJ wasn't used instead, since according the Appeals Court his signature was non-optional.)
Later on, when they could get around to voiding the entire content of Sporkin's finding against Microsoft, the COA did so. This is what shocked Judge Jackson into carefully separating his findings of fact from his findings of law, as he said himself, when predictably Microsoft was brought back into the courts again on a antitrust beef. For reasons of tradition, and because appeals courts are not supposed to try cases but sort out the application of law to verdicts and findings, Appeals Courts tend to leave findings of fact alone, and address only legal conclusions of lower courts. As it happened they did exactly as Jackson predicted, unfortuately his comments to a writer may have helped justify the obstruction from above, at least to the public.
As others have said before, if Judge K. is persuaded by the dissenting nine states and the Tunney comments and she tries to apply realistic remedies to Microsoft she will find her tits caught in the same big wringer.
This wayward reference to "separation of powers" is Microsoft and the Asscleft DOJ reminding Judge K. about what has happened to her predecessors on this case, particularly Sporkin. It would be really great if she had the balls to charge right back into the lion's den and force the Appeals Court to brazenly and shamelessly save Microsoft from their guilt once again! Are we not entertained?
That the Olympics still matter to people in some way.
No. The "games" are now just a low rent adjuct to the corporate sponsored corruption of professional sport, which is an ever running sewer. As uplifting as an enema.
(And I was a jock in highschool...no not the one that tormented you, but all the same...)
Their site is inacessable? Good! May they and their site both rot in obscurity.
Hey then I guess they should stop trying to steal free help and assistance at taxpayer expense since they know this code/IP is strictly proprietary to begin with, eh?
If they want to keep the benefits for themselves then they should be content with such funding as the FREE MARKET will provide, period. If the free market won't fund it then it can't have been worth much right? Or maybe the dominant ideology of my country is just a sham, I dunno.
They wouldn't want to be called thieves, parasites, and defrauders of the public treasury I'M SURE --Right?.
Actually I think the expensive iPaq appliance with the TFT screen (@~$599) is discontinued but the newer model with plain old crt screen built-in (@~$299) is in current production.
The tft screen was small and it made the box expensive.
I have no comment about the use of "MSN companion OS" in the iPaq - except to say this product is still being made and sold.
ThinkNIC has not failed.
If the eOne people can make a product that has a low enough price to reflect its status as an appliance, and like ThinkNIC allows the owner flexibility in deploying it, choosing their ISP and method of connection, then maybe they can make a go of it too.
If you're going to help people by improving access to hardware and software it needs to be mainstream stuff, not something that will be seen as "welfare ghetto" stuff that will stigmatise the children when they turn up at school not knowing what the richer kids know.
Bullshit.
Give them Linux and open source and they will turn up at school knowing 5 times more about computing than their lazy friends who grew up able to afford the latest Windows wanker-ware and so bought it without thinking about it - and stopped thinking.
...now, for some of you, it doesn't matter. You were born rich, and you're going to stay rich.But here's my advice to the rest of you: take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs...
And take them down.
Just remember: They can buy anything, but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget that.
Thank you.
--Hermann Bloom, Natatorium dedication speech Rushmore
When the OS costs _nothing_ or 2 dollars or 29 dollars, it's obvious that hardware costs are going to overshadow basic OS costs, eh?
That aside, if you are living in or near a major city you can very easily pick up perfectly good used hardware in local PC shops and have a basic desktop in the PII 350 mHz class for under 200 dollars. 17 monitor for $75. That's not bad at all. I see this used equipment advertised in papers alongside new systems and when i go to these stores there are always stacks of Dells, IBM, HP and the stacks are there because there is demand for the stuff. You see tech guys come in and literally load a company van with it. This may sound a little weird but it's exciting to see so much utility lying around cheap as dirt. Linux and open source software strike me in kind of the same way, want to run a router for your home? grab a P166 for 35 bucks stick some used nics in it and set up a network. Run SAMBA and email on another old box, set up a webserver and opennap on another. There's not much limit to what you can do providing you can afford the bandwidth for it to make sense. The hardware is plentiful and cheap and the software is powerful and free.
Consider that in many of the homes of those less fortunate the television and VCR cost as much as that used PII system - and that those 2 items will defintely be there.
Internet access can be less than $20/mo for dialup in the US and in some cases (again in the US) it can even be free. High speed access of course costs money and I don't expect that to change.
On the whole though, this gap is one can be bridged if we try.
It would be nice to see some leadership on this matter from government to help bridge the gap. I agree that lack of familarity with computing and online access will be yet another barrier isolating the less fortunate from the mainstream of opportunity enjoyed by the middle class and up, but I am sad to say that this all seems a world away from the interests and concerns of our present government.
To them, charity is $234 million in retroactive tax breaks for Enron.
I think this is maybe a misunderstanding (maybe disinformation?) - YOPY.com (gmates) just recently changed their site to accept orders and showcase the YOPY's product launch.
Samsung's spokesman probably is denying that they'll distribute it themselves, which is not news.
Maybe someone should beat on their withered, liver-spotted forearms with a clawhammer so that they can't pick up a coffee cup, type on a keyboard, or steer a car without excruciating pain.
Then maybe they'd begin to empathize? Isn't funny how a bunch of (mostly partisan hack) appointees who don't know what real work is get to decide what you can take and what you must put up with?
As always the answer is: Move the government closer to the people.
Not that I necessarily think that the XP auto-updater is a bad thing; I haven't come to a conclusion for myself yet.
Whenever you log in on your XP system (of course, no password in XP-home at least) a flurry of packets fly off to Mord- er Microsoft and to the OEM you bought the system from. You have no way of knowing the content of that communication. Since it's all closed source,no one can comb through it for vulnerabilities or trojans like they could for the code for apt or rpmfind. A typical user has no way of knowing that the communication is even taking place at all unless they are running something like tcpdump on the network.
Does that help? Basically, when you buy XP you are wittingly or unwittingly complicit in your own surveillance. You have given your consent in principle, to be spied upon because you were sipping your morning coffee while XP talked to the higher authorities about you. You looked away and sipped instead of yanking the cat5 out. I say in principle because we've seen that all the consent required for this government to violate your Constitutional rights is that you and others do not resist it with force. Though no one posting here can say for certain what passes through this security hole now, neither can anyone deny that, with a hole like this opened in your systems, a hole which everyone is being conditioned to accept as normal, a feature of their OS, there is literally NO LIMIT to the severity of your insecurity. While you're sipping that coffee, the convenient updater can convert your computer system into a telescreen into your private thoughts, business plans, governmental policies, and so on without end, no matter where you live and what flag you salute. It used to be that spyware was an annoyance foisted on the public sporadically by marketers. Now with XP, spyware connects a government approved monopoly to your most trusted communications and private papers. You don't have to be an anticapitalist socialist or a government hating libertarian to understand that at some level the distinction between a government approved monopoly and an agency of that government is essentially null, or so small it's not worth discussing. (Or maybe someome could point out examples to me where ATT told the government it would not cooperate in its counterintelligence efforts against antiwar protestors and civil rights leaders in the 1960's)
Between the 2 of them, Windows XP users have poor Goatse-man beat by a painful mile for the infinite elasticity of their holes. I have no doubt that the Feebs and Dept.of Deathdance have a million things they'd like to talk over with MS in that regard.
Re:and the bios is for what, exactly?
on
LinuxBIOS Gains Steam
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Typical, when they're not decrying Microsoft for embracing and extending, they themselves are embracing and debilitating...
Anyway, why an embedded device would want to use x86 hardware is beyond me...
because it's incredibly cheap maybe, with a mind boggling array of useful peripheral hardwares?
The aim of LinuxBIOS doesn't even remotely touch on some competitive manuevering as you ignorantly suggest.
Installing a LinuxBIOS ROM in place of normal DOS compatible microcode is something you do to modify I>commodity off the shelf hardware hardware to -for example- make your appliance system boot Linux to multiuser + network runlevel from a cold start in 3 seconds or less. It is a very specialized aftermarket improvement for hardware integrators - not motherboard OEMs or PC sellers- and has nothing whatever to do with the kinds of exclusionary practices Microsoft is famous for. It is not practical for general use PC system design, since kernel upgrades mean plugging in a new ROM or reprogramming the old one in a special ROM burner. It is for dedicated appliances only.
In short, Anonymous Coward, if you can't comment intelligently, and without smallminded paranoia, you may want to forgo commenting at all.
You can install Windows 98 or trade if you have the storage - BYOS (bring yer own storage) Of course the same stipulation holds for any Linux distro except the miniatures, like "Jailbait".
A larger flash device, a laptop hddrive, a Tardis brand ROM module, any of these should accomodate a "man-sized" OS.
After reading specs on it, I don't think that you can use things like "Companion" email without going to MSN to activate the service, which entails a monthly fee. You can do that and dial into your present non-MSN isp, but that's not the same as being freee to "use your own ISP" to my mind.
So if you really want to use it freely with your choice of internet services you may need to replace the OS/software.
You can dial into your own ISP.(whoa, head getting dizzy from all the freedom!) Get a little closer to the specs, this thing is almost hardwired to MSN until you flush its OS/Browser. It's not just a matter of the dialer being set to ring MSN.
I'm not saying don't buy one, just be aware that if you really want to use it, and Bill Gates hanging on your tit @ 10/mo. wasn't what you had in mind, you've got to hack your way out.
MS Office for Linux might not be any good, but that wouldn't be because MS released crippled versions. Microsoft wouldn't be the ones doing the porting. The proposal calls for the licensing of the code and the Office "franchise" I guess you'd call it, to others. Of course, MS Office on Linux might still suck because it may turn out that no one but MS has the resources to successfully port that whale to X/ QT/ GTK+ , but that's a different issue from sabotage.
If it didn't suck, the bleatings of the true believers would not deter its adoption by a single hour. As you can see from the postings of sysadmins all over this page, the day MS Office becomes available for Linux, thousands of desktops all over the corporate world will be reformatted to ext3 (or reiserfs). Corporate IT will adopt MS Office for Linux, or not, and corporate IT will decide its success, quite apart from anything Free/Open/MIT/X-license fanatics have to say about it.
Like a lot of people , I think it would be better to have a 10 year requirement for MS to fully publish their document formats. Make that 15 years - if you want 5 years of partial compliance from Microsoft you'll have to budget another 5 years at least for their squirming, insolent footdragging and outright defiance.
The bottomline in this country is that capital has completely captured the regulatory authority of government, and through its media ownership drastically undermined the legitimacy of government oversight with a Long March of corporate subsidized pro-elite ideology - now 20 years old at least. MS therefore can be guilty as hell and yet there is insufficient political will to enforce the laws regulating behavior of monopolies. The people have been told to disengage from these matters and for the most part they have. The legislators have been told not to bite the hand that feeds them and they have pulled out their own molars to avoid giving offense. Two judges so far have pretty much wrecked their careers trying to deal with MS like they would a normal defendant so the writing is on the wall for any future judge. They see the clout of the defendant, and like the Republican T. P. Jackson, they can see the ideological slant of the Court of Appeals above them: if MS can be let go on a technicality and they can be screwed in the process, that is what the Court of Appeals will do.
Under a crony capitalism style of government, which we see perfected under Bush II meaningful regulation of monopolies is impossible. (Heck, cartels of energy firms are convened behind closed doors to draft administration "energy policy" and the Vice President goes so far as to openly defy an order from Congress to reveal who was present at these meetings!) At least you can't look for sincere effort from the Feds to obtain a restoration of free and fair markets, or anything like justice. The Dems largely lack the spine to piss off corporate benefactors although the party nominally supports antitrust regulation. It takes them too long to work up the determination to do something about flagrantly abusive monopolies. And trustbusting is just not a value that remotely squares with mainstream GOP politics anymore. It's not like they are hiding that fact either: as a presidential candidate, Bush declared his sympathies were completely with Microsoft on the day they were first "convicted" and his antitrust division chief, Charles James, publicly extolled the consumer benefits of the MS monopoly during the trial. Let's face this honestly and frankly: there can be no doubt about the ideological riptide that Justice must swim against now and for the next 3 years at least. There should also be no surprise that things have come to this sorry pass. The role of big money in elections has so far overshadowed mere votes that even a party committed to antitrust regulation can only manage to do a half assed job of it.
So if there is a block of states litigating for something that somewhat reflects the fact that MS lost the antitrust case and was indeed judged to be a monopoly, illegally shielding its core market from competition and illegally leveraging that core monopoly to pursue monopolistic dominance in related markets, then you have to get behind whatever the states came up with as their alternative settlement proposal. This is the last hope folks, whether we think it's "ideal" or "flawed". There are simply no more options on your side and criticism is a luxury you can no longer afford. You can choose to let yourself be carried out by the riptide, or throw your strength in with those who are rowing back to shore, though at a slant.
Judging whether MS Office for Linux is desirable you have to weigh it against the aboslutely certain alternative. There's no mystery about what that is anymore. The alternative is nothing. Under the Bush Asscroft regime and the settlement they agreed to with MS, there will be NOTHING in the court ordered remedies that even touches on the heart of the problem, which is the entwined OS and applications monopoly. So your choice is really between what these 9 states have proposed, hoping they can get it all, and on the other hand, a crony capitalism settlement, a legal forfeit, that amounts to a Federal imprimatur of approval upon the Microsoft Windows monopoly and essentially a GOVERNMENT GRANT of MONOPOLY, rather than any kind of remedy or punishment.
Office for Linux (plus the required inclusion of Sun's JRE in Windows) is better than that submission and by a breathtakingly huge margin.
(Just so no one says I am assuming too much, I know that a requirement that MS Office be ported to 3 other non-MS operating systems doesn't necessarily mean that Linux will be one of those.)
Don't themable window managers (and applications) mean that you can make your screen look just about any way you want it?
In some senses. And I am tempted to say, often in superficial senses. Themes don't change all the icon sets used by filemanagers etc. which pretty much assures that your desk environment icons won't be coordinated with the chosen skin. Or alternately, that the small number of skins you can use without retching will be limited to an even smaller number that are in some harmony with the icons. Which is too bad either way you slice it since ALL the desktop environments for X and Linux have crude ugly icons "designed" either by people who hate and/or can't see color, or by people who just can't be deterred by the knowledge that they are in way over their heads and competency.
It would be nice if a company that backs and adopts a desk environment (not naming any names) would spend a little money on a purely graphic makeover. just as an attempt to show what could be done.
You're as mad as Hell and you're going to continue taking it like the rest of the sheep until you lose the fear of being shot in the streets by riot police.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't make it up. In the early 70s US Atty General John Mitchell tried to scare the Washington Post off the Watergate story by telling Ben Bradlee that the his boss, the publisher Katherine Graham, would soon find her "tits caught in a big wringer". According to Woodward and Bernstein.
We tend to think of judges as statues made of marble, I believe though that she's got to be feeling the pressure from MS/BUSH.EXE in a physical way. Just as physical a sensation as David Sentelle surely experiences in being the hand that cranks that wringer.
There is a good chance of negative consequences for her if she tries to apply the law and defend the public interest. At every twist of procedure and indeed every minute, she faces the choice of passively rubberstamping this bill of goods or sticking up for principles and the people and taking a bullet. Wouldn't that churn anybody's gut?
Judge Sporkin was reamed because the DOJ and Microsoft made a claim that he was demanding remedies to abuses not proven in the DOJ's case against MS, that he wanted to be both judge and prosecutor, which overstepped his Constitutional bounds.
As long as Judge K. refrains from any remarks that could be used to insinuate that she is trying to remedy wrongs not proven by the case in Judge Jackson's court and upheld by the appeals court, then she should be safe to hold out for something better.
Then if they Sporkinize her anyway, and they may, it will become completely obvious to anyone that the Appeals Court and the Bush DOJ are conniving to get a powerful rich defendant off the hook in spite of the fact that Microsoft are as guilty as Michael Jackson in an orphanage or Olly North in the White House.
Sporkin refused to authorize a consent decree settlement agreed upon by DOJ and Microsoft because he thought it wasn't strong enough as a remedy. The Appeals Court which is full of nice reasonable people like David Sentelle who for example, had overturned Oliver North's conviction and had also appointed Ken Starr as special prosecutor since the previous special prosecutor wasn't sufficently rabid, threw Sporkin off the case saying he didn't have the authority to withhold his signature to a settlement reached by plaintiff and defendant (one wonders why we have judges at all then).
However, the big difference between these two cases and what was used to hang Sporkin, was that an argument could be made from things he had said that he believed not just that the remedy to be ineffectually weak, but that he wanted the remedy to include corrections for Microsoft abuses that DOJ never argued or tried to prove in the case. The Microsoft/DOJ as appellants argued that this was an inappropriate blurring of function: Judge Sporkin couldn't be both Judge and Prosecutor. Blowing this minute and dubious distinction about remedy and sufficient remedy up into a separation of powers type argument, the appeals court went on to "reluctantly" accept Microsoft's contention that since Sporkin had mentioned having read a book , Harddrive, about Microsoft he was unduly biased against them and that bias was the motive behind his finding against them and his intent to apply a remedy stricter and more far reaching than DOJ wanted.
The consent decree was handed then to Thomas Penfield Jackson for his immediate signature, (who must have also wondered why a rubber stamp at DOJ wasn't used instead, since according the Appeals Court his signature was non-optional.)
Later on, when they could get around to voiding the entire content of Sporkin's finding against Microsoft, the COA did so. This is what shocked Judge Jackson into carefully separating his findings of fact from his findings of law, as he said himself, when predictably Microsoft was brought back into the courts again on a antitrust beef. For reasons of tradition, and because appeals courts are not supposed to try cases but sort out the application of law to verdicts and findings, Appeals Courts tend to leave findings of fact alone, and address only legal conclusions of lower courts. As it happened they did exactly as Jackson predicted, unfortuately his comments to a writer may have helped justify the obstruction from above, at least to the public.
As others have said before, if Judge K. is persuaded by the dissenting nine states and the Tunney comments and she tries to apply realistic remedies to Microsoft she will find her tits caught in the same big wringer.
This wayward reference to "separation of powers" is Microsoft and the Asscleft DOJ reminding Judge K. about what has happened to her predecessors on this case, particularly Sporkin. It would be really great if she had the balls to charge right back into the lion's den and force the Appeals Court to brazenly and shamelessly save Microsoft from their guilt once again! Are we not entertained?
That's not the slashdot effect my friend. That's the dumbass effect, and it's all on their end.
No. The "games" are now just a low rent adjuct to the corporate sponsored corruption of professional sport, which is an ever running sewer. As uplifting as an enema.
(And I was a jock in highschool...no not the one that tormented you, but all the same...)
Their site is inacessable? Good! May they and their site both rot in obscurity.
If they want to keep the benefits for themselves then they should be content with such funding as the FREE MARKET will provide, period. If the free market won't fund it then it can't have been worth much right? Or maybe the dominant ideology of my country is just a sham, I dunno.
They wouldn't want to be called thieves, parasites, and defrauders of the public treasury I'M SURE --Right?.
Actually I think the expensive iPaq appliance with the TFT screen (@~$599) is discontinued but the newer model with plain old crt screen built-in (@~$299) is in current production.
The tft screen was small and it made the box expensive.
I have no comment about the use of "MSN companion OS" in the iPaq - except to say this product is still being made and sold.
ThinkNIC has not failed.
If the eOne people can make a product that has a low enough price to reflect its status as an appliance, and like ThinkNIC allows the owner flexibility in deploying it, choosing their ISP and method of connection, then maybe they can make a go of it too.
Bullshit.
Give them Linux and open source and they will turn up at school knowing 5 times more about computing than their lazy friends who grew up able to afford the latest Windows wanker-ware and so bought it without thinking about it - and stopped thinking.
And take them down.
Just remember: They can buy anything, but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget that.
Thank you.
--Hermann Bloom, Natatorium dedication speech Rushmore
When the OS costs _nothing_ or 2 dollars or 29 dollars, it's obvious that hardware costs are going to overshadow basic OS costs, eh?
That aside, if you are living in or near a major city you can very easily pick up perfectly good used hardware in local PC shops and have a basic desktop in the PII 350 mHz class for under 200 dollars. 17 monitor for $75. That's not bad at all. I see this used equipment advertised in papers alongside new systems and when i go to these stores there are always stacks of Dells, IBM, HP and the stacks are there because there is demand for the stuff. You see tech guys come in and literally load a company van with it. This may sound a little weird but it's exciting to see so much utility lying around cheap as dirt. Linux and open source software strike me in kind of the same way, want to run a router for your home? grab a P166 for 35 bucks stick some used nics in it and set up a network. Run SAMBA and email on another old box, set up a webserver and opennap on another. There's not much limit to what you can do providing you can afford the bandwidth for it to make sense. The hardware is plentiful and cheap and the software is powerful and free.
Consider that in many of the homes of those less fortunate the television and VCR cost as much as that used PII system - and that those 2 items will defintely be there.
Internet access can be less than $20/mo for dialup in the US and in some cases (again in the US) it can even be free. High speed access of course costs money and I don't expect that to change.
On the whole though, this gap is one can be bridged if we try.
It would be nice to see some leadership on this matter from government to help bridge the gap. I agree that lack of familarity with computing and online access will be yet another barrier isolating the less fortunate from the mainstream of opportunity enjoyed by the middle class and up, but I am sad to say that this all seems a world away from the interests and concerns of our present government.
To them, charity is $234 million in retroactive tax breaks for Enron.
I think this is maybe a misunderstanding (maybe disinformation?) - YOPY.com (gmates) just recently changed their site to accept orders and showcase the YOPY's product launch.
Samsung's spokesman probably is denying that they'll distribute it themselves, which is not news.
I imagine. After all, ZDnet is SUPPOSED to do this kind of thing for them.
Then maybe they'd begin to empathize? Isn't funny how a bunch of (mostly partisan hack) appointees who don't know what real work is get to decide what you can take and what you must put up with?
As always the answer is: Move the government closer to the people.
Whenever you log in on your XP system (of course, no password in XP-home at least) a flurry of packets fly off to Mord- er Microsoft and to the OEM you bought the system from. You have no way of knowing the content of that communication. Since it's all closed source,no one can comb through it for vulnerabilities or trojans like they could for the code for apt or rpmfind. A typical user has no way of knowing that the communication is even taking place at all unless they are running something like tcpdump on the network.
Does that help?
Basically, when you buy XP you are wittingly or unwittingly complicit in your own surveillance. You have given your consent in principle, to be spied upon because you were sipping your morning coffee while XP talked to the higher authorities about you. You looked away and sipped instead of yanking the cat5 out. I say in principle because we've seen that all the consent required for this government to violate your Constitutional rights is that you and others do not resist it with force. Though no one posting here can say for certain what passes through this security hole now, neither can anyone deny that, with a hole like this opened in your systems, a hole which everyone is being conditioned to accept as normal, a feature of their OS, there is literally NO LIMIT to the severity of your insecurity. While you're sipping that coffee, the convenient updater can convert your computer system into a telescreen into your private thoughts, business plans, governmental policies, and so on without end, no matter where you live and what flag you salute. It used to be that spyware was an annoyance foisted on the public sporadically by marketers. Now with XP, spyware connects a government approved monopoly to your most trusted communications and private papers. You don't have to be an anticapitalist socialist or a government hating libertarian to understand that at some level the distinction between a government approved monopoly and an agency of that government is essentially null, or so small it's not worth discussing. (Or maybe someome could point out examples to me where ATT told the government it would not cooperate in its counterintelligence efforts against antiwar protestors and civil rights leaders in the 1960's)
Between the 2 of them, Windows XP users have poor Goatse-man beat by a painful mile for the infinite elasticity of their holes. I have no doubt that the Feebs and Dept.of Deathdance have a million things they'd like to talk over with MS in that regard.
Anyway, why an embedded device would want to use x86 hardware is beyond me...
because it's incredibly cheap maybe, with a mind boggling array of useful peripheral hardwares?
The aim of LinuxBIOS doesn't even remotely touch on some competitive manuevering as you ignorantly suggest.
Installing a LinuxBIOS ROM in place of normal DOS compatible microcode is something you do to modify I>commodity off the shelf hardware hardware to -for example- make your appliance system boot Linux to multiuser + network runlevel from a cold start in 3 seconds or less. It is a very specialized aftermarket improvement for hardware integrators - not motherboard OEMs or PC sellers- and has nothing whatever to do with the kinds of exclusionary practices Microsoft is famous for. It is not practical for general use PC system design, since kernel upgrades mean plugging in a new ROM or reprogramming the old one in a special ROM burner. It is for dedicated appliances only.
In short, Anonymous Coward, if you can't comment intelligently, and without smallminded paranoia, you may want to forgo commenting at all.
You can install Windows 98 or trade if you have the storage - BYOS (bring yer own storage) Of course the same stipulation holds for any Linux distro except the miniatures, like "Jailbait".
A larger flash device, a laptop hddrive, a Tardis brand ROM module, any of these should accomodate a "man-sized" OS.
After reading specs on it, I don't think that you can use things like "Companion" email without going to MSN to activate the service, which entails a monthly fee. You can do that and dial into your present non-MSN isp, but that's not the same as being freee to "use your own ISP" to my mind.
So if you really want to use it freely with your choice of internet services you may need to replace the OS/software.
You can dial into your own ISP.(whoa, head getting dizzy from all the freedom!) Get a little closer to the specs, this thing is almost hardwired to MSN until you flush its OS/Browser. It's not just a matter of the dialer being set to ring MSN.
I'm not saying don't buy one, just be aware that if you really want to use it, and Bill Gates hanging on your tit @ 10/mo. wasn't what you had in mind, you've got to hack your way out.
If it didn't suck, the bleatings of the true believers would not deter its adoption by a single hour. As you can see from the postings of sysadmins all over this page, the day MS Office becomes available for Linux, thousands of desktops all over the corporate world will be reformatted to ext3 (or reiserfs). Corporate IT will adopt MS Office for Linux, or not, and corporate IT will decide its success, quite apart from anything Free/Open/MIT/X-license fanatics have to say about it.
The bottomline in this country is that capital has completely captured the regulatory authority of government, and through its media ownership drastically undermined the legitimacy of government oversight with a Long March of corporate subsidized pro-elite ideology - now 20 years old at least. MS therefore can be guilty as hell and yet there is insufficient political will to enforce the laws regulating behavior of monopolies. The people have been told to disengage from these matters and for the most part they have. The legislators have been told not to bite the hand that feeds them and they have pulled out their own molars to avoid giving offense. Two judges so far have pretty much wrecked their careers trying to deal with MS like they would a normal defendant so the writing is on the wall for any future judge. They see the clout of the defendant, and like the Republican T. P. Jackson, they can see the ideological slant of the Court of Appeals above them: if MS can be let go on a technicality and they can be screwed in the process, that is what the Court of Appeals will do.
Under a crony capitalism style of government, which we see perfected under Bush II meaningful regulation of monopolies is impossible. (Heck, cartels of energy firms are convened behind closed doors to draft administration "energy policy" and the Vice President goes so far as to openly defy an order from Congress to reveal who was present at these meetings!) At least you can't look for sincere effort from the Feds to obtain a restoration of free and fair markets, or anything like justice. The Dems largely lack the spine to piss off corporate benefactors although the party nominally supports antitrust regulation. It takes them too long to work up the determination to do something about flagrantly abusive monopolies. And trustbusting is just not a value that remotely squares with mainstream GOP politics anymore. It's not like they are hiding that fact either: as a presidential candidate, Bush declared his sympathies were completely with Microsoft on the day they were first "convicted" and his antitrust division chief, Charles James, publicly extolled the consumer benefits of the MS monopoly during the trial. Let's face this honestly and frankly: there can be no doubt about the ideological riptide that Justice must swim against now and for the next 3 years at least. There should also be no surprise that things have come to this sorry pass. The role of big money in elections has so far overshadowed mere votes that even a party committed to antitrust regulation can only manage to do a half assed job of it.
So if there is a block of states litigating for something that somewhat reflects the fact that MS lost the antitrust case and was indeed judged to be a monopoly, illegally shielding its core market from competition and illegally leveraging that core monopoly to pursue monopolistic dominance in related markets, then you have to get behind whatever the states came up with as their alternative settlement proposal. This is the last hope folks, whether we think it's "ideal" or "flawed". There are simply no more options on your side and criticism is a luxury you can no longer afford. You can choose to let yourself be carried out by the riptide, or throw your strength in with those who are rowing back to shore, though at a slant.
Judging whether MS Office for Linux is desirable you have to weigh it against the aboslutely certain alternative. There's no mystery about what that is anymore. The alternative is nothing. Under the Bush Asscroft regime and the settlement they agreed to with MS, there will be NOTHING in the court ordered remedies that even touches on the heart of the problem, which is the entwined OS and applications monopoly. So your choice is really between what these 9 states have proposed, hoping they can get it all, and on the other hand, a crony capitalism settlement, a legal forfeit, that amounts to a Federal imprimatur of approval upon the Microsoft Windows monopoly and essentially a GOVERNMENT GRANT of MONOPOLY, rather than any kind of remedy or punishment.
Office for Linux (plus the required inclusion of Sun's JRE in Windows) is better than that submission and by a breathtakingly huge margin.
(Just so no one says I am assuming too much, I know that a requirement that MS Office be ported to 3 other non-MS operating systems doesn't necessarily mean that Linux will be one of those.)
Shame on George Lucas for dangling first incest and now bestiality before impressionable young minds.
In some senses. And I am tempted to say, often in superficial senses. Themes don't change all the icon sets used by filemanagers etc. which pretty much assures that your desk environment icons won't be coordinated with the chosen skin. Or alternately, that the small number of skins you can use without retching will be limited to an even smaller number that are in some harmony with the icons. Which is too bad either way you slice it since ALL the desktop environments for X and Linux have crude ugly icons "designed" either by people who hate and/or can't see color, or by people who just can't be deterred by the knowledge that they are in way over their heads and competency.
It would be nice if a company that backs and adopts a desk environment (not naming any names) would spend a little money on a purely graphic makeover. just as an attempt to show what could be done.
For those unfamiliar with KDE2.0, think of a half assed clone of Windows98.
Approximately Windows 97 or so.
Remember Genoa.