Re:Join the Revolution
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Linux vs. Windows
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The customer is only at a disadvantage if there isn't a viable replacement for Microsoft's software, but that isn't really the case anymore. Operating systems and office suites are becoming a commodity, and Microsoft is structured in such a way that they are not likely to be able to survive on commodity profit margins.
Who knows what would have happened if the DOJ had split Microsoft up. Personally I am glad that the DOJ didn't set a precedent of meddling in the software industry. One thing is certain, the market is taking care of Microsoft's monopoly without much in the way of government intervention.
Re:Join the Revolution
on
Linux vs. Windows
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Exactly. Linux is going to win for economic reasons. Microsoft's ridiculous profit margins are drawing competition like moths to a flame. Wal-Mart has made a living out of low margin retailing, and they obviously see an opportunity to undercut the rest of the hardware OEMs by offering computers without Windows.
The fact of the matter is that removing "the Microsoft tax" from the price of PCs is good for the entire computer industry (except for Microsoft, of course). Non-natural monopolies are very hard to maintain over time. The invisible hand of the market is simply working overtime to route around Microsoft.
While it is true that the PostgreSQL project doesn't include full text searching there is a full text searching engine for PostgreSQL. The "problem" is that it is licensed under the GPL, not a BSD-style license, and so it is not included in the official distribution. Here's the link.
OpenFTS has been around for quite a while, and is used pretty heavily, so there really is very little reason to put up with MySQL's many shortcomings.
Oh really. I think that you will find that historically the worker had far fewer rights than they do now. It wasn't until fairly recently that indentured servitude was made illegal. Back when this country was founded there were more people willing to be indentured servants than there were positions. This is despite the fact that indentured servitude was generally a very hazardous undertaking. So don't tell me about the "good old days" of labor laws. Labor laws in the U.S. are more pro-worker than they have been in the country's history.
The primary reason that labor laws have become more worker-friendly (in first world countries) also has far more to do with the low levels of unemployment and the ubiquitous welfare safety net than any sort of legislation. Employers have to work much harder to attract good workers than they did in earlier times. In the 1800's to be out of work meant your family could easily starve to death. In the 2000's being out of work in the first world countries doesn't even preclude luxuries like cable television.
I used to live in Peru, so forgive me if I don't cry a river for the plight of an American programmer that can't even be bothered to read an employment contract.
Now let's run this through a real life example. You spend years creating something completely different. Something new enough that it truly deserves a patent (say something on the order of public key encryption), and you create a product and start to market it. The big software companies, especially Microsoft, immediately set to work cloning your work, and within a year they have competing products.
However, you have a patent on the really clever bits, right? So you are saved.
Wrong! Instead, when you approach Microsoft and friends about licensing your patents they simply show you 20 patents of theirs that you violate. Microsoft has patented the double-click, for crying out loud. Your patent lawyer then advises that you sign a cross-licensing deal with these companies, and asks you for a big fat paycheck. So now you have spent years creating the software, and tens of thousands of dollars patenting your ideas and you are still screwed.
The only way for the little guy to win with patents is to see where the market is going, patent ideas that are likely to block upcoming software innovation, and then sit back and wait. The trick is to write absolutely no software. That way you don't violate anyone else's patents. In fact, that's what a lot of companies are doing. They don't actually create any software, they just lay out landmines for the folks that are actually doing the real work.
Don't tell me that promotes innovation, because I don't buy it.
Whatever. I had similar wording in my employment contract. I asked to have it reworded and it was reworded. The contract that I ended up signing stated specifically that I owned everything that I developed on my own time that wasn't related to the development I did at work. I even got permission to contribute to Free Software projects that I *did* use at work.
Caveat Emptor, let the buyer beware. If you don't read your employment contract you can't expect someone else to do it for you.
As someone who has been both an employer (with my own business) and an employee I can tell you that this has far less to do with "corporate rights" and far more to do with employment contracts. Employment contracts specify what the employer expects in return for a wage. You can't hardly blame your employer for trying to get the best of the bargain. After all, you are trying to get the best deal you can get from your employer as well.
Exactly. This is all about making it easier for Intel to sell Itanium servers. Intel doesn't want to go through the expense of designing and QAing separate Itanium motherboards for the five or six people that actually want Itanium. If the Xeon and Itanium share the same motherboard then OEMs can stock one motherboard and "upgrade" customers to Itanium if that's what they want.
If AMD wasn't serious competition with their AMD64 chips then Intel wouldn't even release 64 bit Xeons, but as things stand they don't have much of a choice.
Borders doesn't want to replace their store with a kiosk. After all, they have gone through the considerable expense of leasing a store and filling it with books. What's more, if all you need to get into the book sales business is a fancy printer a pile of paper and a kiosk then Borders is very likely to start facing competition from more small time vendors and even vending machines.
The book business is hard enough for Borders without having to compete with thousands of new book vendors that don't have to carry inventory, don't have to pay for expensive real estate, and that might not even require employees (vending machines with insta-books).
Personally I have nearly switched 100% to reading on my Handspring. I am not interested in paper books.
I shouldn't have used the word receipt. I don't want something that the voter could take home. What I really want is a computer generated ballot that could be easily verified. This ballot would constitute the official vote, and it would be left in the ballot box (or it wouldn't become part of the official vote). No one would be able to verify how you voted outside of the polling place. If thugs can come into the polling place with you and see how you vote you are screwed no matter what system you use. At least using this system criminals would have to have enforcers in the polling place looking over your shoulder. With an electronic system that doesn't use human verifiable paper ballots the criminals simply have to compromise the vote taking software and the keystroke logger. Heck, if the criminals were clever enough this could easily be untraceable. I could think that I voted for one guy, while the software was secretly voting for someone else.
Basically I want to look down at my ballot when I am done voting, and be able to see:
President: Joe Schmoe
Senator: Random Hacker
Mayor: John Q Public
In most cases this ballot wouldn't be used. However, if the results of the election were contested we could still count the ballots. If voters were made aware that the paper ballots were the "real" vote, then the voters themselves could verify that the machine was doing the "right thing."
I haven't seen the Florida ballots, but their are plenty of systems that use ballots that can be verified for correctness by the voter. In fact, one of the major problems with the Florida ballots (apparently) was that it wasn't very easy to verify that your vote was cast correctly after the fact.
According to the the Democrats thousands of people went into the polls and mistakenly voted for the wrong guy. I want a paper ballot that is human verifiable because I don't want to make the same mistake. Personally, I think that ballots *should* be discarded if they are not filled out correctly, but that's one of the benefits of using an electronic poll booth. You simply push the big friendly touch screen and the machine creates a ballot for you. With this sort of a system there are no hanging chads, no mis-marked holes, and it is then easy to look at the ballot and read it to make sure that the names on the ballot match the folks that you want in office. What's more, the computerized record can be used to actually count up the votes. The paper ballots would count as the "official" record of the vote, but they would only be used in those cases where the election was contested.
This would render the system far more impervious to hackers because voters would be able to verify that the machine voted correctly. If foul play was suspected auditing the system would be a simple matter of counting the votes manually.
Unless I get a paper certificate that I can verify for myself, and that counts as "my vote" in cases where a recount is called for, I am not interested in switching to a new technology.
There are plenty of tricks that can be played unless the voter can verify a hard copy ballot themselves. In nearly all cases these ballots wouldn't be used, but they would allow for recounts of suspicious votes. Keystroke logs are a nice touch. Unless, of course, the keystroke logger is tampered with. hard copy receipts, on the other hand, can be verified on the spot by the voter, and are much more difficult to modify successfully after the fact.
I suppose that I hadn't thought of these environments as a chance to add the features that I would like to see in next gen Window Managers. I also don't have an accelerated driver (never needed one before), but I am sure that one would help with OpenGL acceleration.
BTW the link on your home page to "Melts in Your Mouth, Now with Bass" is broken. You are missing an l out of your last name.
This doesn't sound like a "personal" project. This sounds like he took the code that his previous employer had paid him to create with him when he went to Google. Google then took this code, and launched it as part of their (obviously commercial) offerings.
That's not good.
It just goes to show that it's not only Free Software that has to deal with the issue of code swiping.
Actually Mono/GTK# is quite likely to quickly become more cross-platform than Java. There are plenty of platforms that are underserved by Sun's JVM (the BSDs, Linux on anything but x86, etc.). Because Mono is Free Software it is very likely to get ported to all sorts of niche platforms that Sun is never going to be interested in.
The problem, of course, is that the illusion of "3D" doesn't give you any extra screen real estate. In fact, the illusion of 3D wastes screen real estate. Just look at the Windows shifted so that they are sideways. There is a triangle of space at the top and the bottom of every Window that gets wasted so that you create the illusion of depth. If you simply shrunk the Window so that it fit in the same square (without adding the illusion of 3 dimensions) the text in the Window would be easier to read while still using the same amount of space.
I know what you mean about the importance of screen real estate, but adding the illusion of 3D only makes things worse. That was my point. A Window manager that allowed me to have more miniaturized windows would be sweet, but you don't need 3D illusions to do that.
Exactly, minimization + icon view would give you exactly the same thing without wasting valuable screen real estate faking the illusion of 3D. Oh, and the text would be easier to read too if it was simply smaller instead of smaller and distorted to fake 3D. For those of us that can read 2D icon view is far more practical. The pretty picture crowd is probably very impressed with this, however.
Oh wait, 2D icon views have been done before and are about as innovative as getting sand in your shorts at the beach. We need a new fancy dan way to make my computer less useable.
Actually, their computers are even more high tech than that. They are using Infinite Improbability Computers. No matter what data you put in all you get out are invoices for $200 hammers.
OK, I can sort of buy that. However, if you want to see enough of the actual contents of the document then the application is still going to take up a non-trivial amount of space. If anything the "illusion" of spinning the application on an axis wastes some space at the top and bottom of the app.
it seems to me that precisely the same functional effect could be had by simply arranging your applications in a 2D grid. The major differences would be that A) text in the applications in the 2D grid would be easier to read, and B) Your applications would make better use of the screen real estate.
If you take a look at Sun's final "Organize Your Screen" example, you can see what I mean. The mini icons on the task bar at the bottom are far more useful for seeing what applications you have running than the sideways full-sized windows, and they take up a good deal less space too. They would take up even less space if the designer hadn't insisted on making them look 3D. It seems to me that the only potentially useful bit of this Window Manager would be the panel.
Exactly. None of the examples show what happens to all of these "sideways" applications when I want the application I am currently using to fill the whole screen. I don't see how Looking Glass is any better than minimizing, and I definitely don't see how it is better than minimizing plus virtual desktops.
Besides which, what happens to sticky notes on the back of an application when the application gets closed (or crashes)? And what happens to their nifty CD Spinner GUI when you are browsing through hundreds of CDs?
Somehow I am guessing that a 200 year old gift card with a face value of one dollar would be worth slightly less than even a brass coin.
Inflation definitely effects gift cards. Assuming, of course, that the issuer of the gift card was even still in business (which they probably aren't).
Exactly, employee ownership is a good thing, but high tech companies don't give out stock options because it improves employee participation. They give out stock options because it allows them to appear more profitable than they really are.
Microsoft has a ridiculously high Price/Earnings ratio. They have to "grow" or their stock price goes down. Anti-Virus software represents one of the very few significant software niches that Microsoft doesn't already dominate.
Microsoft's Anti-Virus moves aren't about security, they are about economics. Microsoft is simply doing what it has always done. Microsoft lets its competitors find out the profitable software niches, and then Microsoft uses its cash hoard to buy themselves a seat at the table. Once Microsoft is in the game they use their influence with the major OEMs to make sure that their product is preloaded on quadzillions of machines. Eventually Microsoft's product becomes the de-facto standard, and an army of MCSEs begin spending their time and effort rooting out the last vestiges of the "non-standard" or "legacy" applications.
On the plus side Microsoft's Anti-Virus software is likely to be less expensive than the competition. So it will probably be a net win for consumers.
Spot on. Microsoft (and Sun) are only talking about subsidizing hardware because it is the only scenario that gives them any chance of maintaining their current ridiculous profit margins. Even now you can get a pretty decent machine for around $400, in 5 to 10 years the average PC will almost certainly be even less expensive than that. It was easy to hide software costs when the average PC cost over $2000, but now the commodity hardware is literally screaming for commodity software.
The software manufacturers plans are to offer you a "free" (retail value $300) and sell you a software subscription for $10-$20 per month (depending on whether you talk to Sun or Microsoft). This would allow the software companies to stamp out piracy (these machines would phone home periodically to see if the subscription had been paid up), and it would give them the stable income stream that they have dreamed of for years. Waiting for customers to upgrade would be a thing of the past.
The problem with this vision, of course, is the fact that there are plenty of other folks that are perfectly happy to give consumers an even better deal. $20 per month sounds pretty expensive when you can get a comparable computer equipped with Free Software for about $100. Microsoft put a PC on every desktop (in the first world), but the hardware manufacturers want to do much much better than that. They want to make PCs truly ubiquitous, and to hit the price points that will make that possible they can't afford the ridiculous profit margins that the U.S. software companies currently enjoy.
Like you said, the future belongs to super-cheap, general-purpose hardware running mostly Free Software.
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The customer is only at a disadvantage if there isn't a viable replacement for Microsoft's software, but that isn't really the case anymore. Operating systems and office suites are becoming a commodity, and Microsoft is structured in such a way that they are not likely to be able to survive on commodity profit margins.
Who knows what would have happened if the DOJ had split Microsoft up. Personally I am glad that the DOJ didn't set a precedent of meddling in the software industry. One thing is certain, the market is taking care of Microsoft's monopoly without much in the way of government intervention.
Exactly. Linux is going to win for economic reasons. Microsoft's ridiculous profit margins are drawing competition like moths to a flame. Wal-Mart has made a living out of low margin retailing, and they obviously see an opportunity to undercut the rest of the hardware OEMs by offering computers without Windows. The fact of the matter is that removing "the Microsoft tax" from the price of PCs is good for the entire computer industry (except for Microsoft, of course). Non-natural monopolies are very hard to maintain over time. The invisible hand of the market is simply working overtime to route around Microsoft.
While it is true that the PostgreSQL project doesn't include full text searching there is a full text searching engine for PostgreSQL. The "problem" is that it is licensed under the GPL, not a BSD-style license, and so it is not included in the official distribution. Here's the link.
OpenFTS has been around for quite a while, and is used pretty heavily, so there really is very little reason to put up with MySQL's many shortcomings.
Oh really. I think that you will find that historically the worker had far fewer rights than they do now. It wasn't until fairly recently that indentured servitude was made illegal. Back when this country was founded there were more people willing to be indentured servants than there were positions. This is despite the fact that indentured servitude was generally a very hazardous undertaking. So don't tell me about the "good old days" of labor laws. Labor laws in the U.S. are more pro-worker than they have been in the country's history.
The primary reason that labor laws have become more worker-friendly (in first world countries) also has far more to do with the low levels of unemployment and the ubiquitous welfare safety net than any sort of legislation. Employers have to work much harder to attract good workers than they did in earlier times. In the 1800's to be out of work meant your family could easily starve to death. In the 2000's being out of work in the first world countries doesn't even preclude luxuries like cable television.
I used to live in Peru, so forgive me if I don't cry a river for the plight of an American programmer that can't even be bothered to read an employment contract.
Now let's run this through a real life example. You spend years creating something completely different. Something new enough that it truly deserves a patent (say something on the order of public key encryption), and you create a product and start to market it. The big software companies, especially Microsoft, immediately set to work cloning your work, and within a year they have competing products.
However, you have a patent on the really clever bits, right? So you are saved.
Wrong! Instead, when you approach Microsoft and friends about licensing your patents they simply show you 20 patents of theirs that you violate. Microsoft has patented the double-click, for crying out loud. Your patent lawyer then advises that you sign a cross-licensing deal with these companies, and asks you for a big fat paycheck. So now you have spent years creating the software, and tens of thousands of dollars patenting your ideas and you are still screwed.
The only way for the little guy to win with patents is to see where the market is going, patent ideas that are likely to block upcoming software innovation, and then sit back and wait. The trick is to write absolutely no software. That way you don't violate anyone else's patents. In fact, that's what a lot of companies are doing. They don't actually create any software, they just lay out landmines for the folks that are actually doing the real work.
Don't tell me that promotes innovation, because I don't buy it.
Whatever. I had similar wording in my employment contract. I asked to have it reworded and it was reworded. The contract that I ended up signing stated specifically that I owned everything that I developed on my own time that wasn't related to the development I did at work. I even got permission to contribute to Free Software projects that I *did* use at work.
Caveat Emptor, let the buyer beware. If you don't read your employment contract you can't expect someone else to do it for you.
As someone who has been both an employer (with my own business) and an employee I can tell you that this has far less to do with "corporate rights" and far more to do with employment contracts. Employment contracts specify what the employer expects in return for a wage. You can't hardly blame your employer for trying to get the best of the bargain. After all, you are trying to get the best deal you can get from your employer as well.
Exactly. This is all about making it easier for Intel to sell Itanium servers. Intel doesn't want to go through the expense of designing and QAing separate Itanium motherboards for the five or six people that actually want Itanium. If the Xeon and Itanium share the same motherboard then OEMs can stock one motherboard and "upgrade" customers to Itanium if that's what they want.
If AMD wasn't serious competition with their AMD64 chips then Intel wouldn't even release 64 bit Xeons, but as things stand they don't have much of a choice.
Borders doesn't want to replace their store with a kiosk. After all, they have gone through the considerable expense of leasing a store and filling it with books. What's more, if all you need to get into the book sales business is a fancy printer a pile of paper and a kiosk then Borders is very likely to start facing competition from more small time vendors and even vending machines.
The book business is hard enough for Borders without having to compete with thousands of new book vendors that don't have to carry inventory, don't have to pay for expensive real estate, and that might not even require employees (vending machines with insta-books).
Personally I have nearly switched 100% to reading on my Handspring. I am not interested in paper books.
I shouldn't have used the word receipt. I don't want something that the voter could take home. What I really want is a computer generated ballot that could be easily verified. This ballot would constitute the official vote, and it would be left in the ballot box (or it wouldn't become part of the official vote). No one would be able to verify how you voted outside of the polling place. If thugs can come into the polling place with you and see how you vote you are screwed no matter what system you use. At least using this system criminals would have to have enforcers in the polling place looking over your shoulder. With an electronic system that doesn't use human verifiable paper ballots the criminals simply have to compromise the vote taking software and the keystroke logger. Heck, if the criminals were clever enough this could easily be untraceable. I could think that I voted for one guy, while the software was secretly voting for someone else.
Basically I want to look down at my ballot when I am done voting, and be able to see:
President: Joe Schmoe
Senator: Random Hacker
Mayor: John Q Public
In most cases this ballot wouldn't be used. However, if the results of the election were contested we could still count the ballots. If voters were made aware that the paper ballots were the "real" vote, then the voters themselves could verify that the machine was doing the "right thing."
I haven't seen the Florida ballots, but their are plenty of systems that use ballots that can be verified for correctness by the voter. In fact, one of the major problems with the Florida ballots (apparently) was that it wasn't very easy to verify that your vote was cast correctly after the fact.
According to the the Democrats thousands of people went into the polls and mistakenly voted for the wrong guy. I want a paper ballot that is human verifiable because I don't want to make the same mistake. Personally, I think that ballots *should* be discarded if they are not filled out correctly, but that's one of the benefits of using an electronic poll booth. You simply push the big friendly touch screen and the machine creates a ballot for you. With this sort of a system there are no hanging chads, no mis-marked holes, and it is then easy to look at the ballot and read it to make sure that the names on the ballot match the folks that you want in office. What's more, the computerized record can be used to actually count up the votes. The paper ballots would count as the "official" record of the vote, but they would only be used in those cases where the election was contested. This would render the system far more impervious to hackers because voters would be able to verify that the machine voted correctly. If foul play was suspected auditing the system would be a simple matter of counting the votes manually.
Unless I get a paper certificate that I can verify for myself, and that counts as "my vote" in cases where a recount is called for, I am not interested in switching to a new technology.
There are plenty of tricks that can be played unless the voter can verify a hard copy ballot themselves. In nearly all cases these ballots wouldn't be used, but they would allow for recounts of suspicious votes. Keystroke logs are a nice touch. Unless, of course, the keystroke logger is tampered with. hard copy receipts, on the other hand, can be verified on the spot by the voter, and are much more difficult to modify successfully after the fact.
Oh yeah, it was just what I needed on a Wednesday working late. Thanks.
I suppose that I hadn't thought of these environments as a chance to add the features that I would like to see in next gen Window Managers. I also don't have an accelerated driver (never needed one before), but I am sure that one would help with OpenGL acceleration.
BTW the link on your home page to "Melts in Your Mouth, Now with Bass" is broken. You are missing an l out of your last name.
http://www.davefancela.com/Music/chocolate-rc1-B ASS.ogg
Thanks for the song.
This doesn't sound like a "personal" project. This sounds like he took the code that his previous employer had paid him to create with him when he went to Google. Google then took this code, and launched it as part of their (obviously commercial) offerings.
That's not good.
It just goes to show that it's not only Free Software that has to deal with the issue of code swiping.
Actually Mono/GTK# is quite likely to quickly become more cross-platform than Java. There are plenty of platforms that are underserved by Sun's JVM (the BSDs, Linux on anything but x86, etc.). Because Mono is Free Software it is very likely to get ported to all sorts of niche platforms that Sun is never going to be interested in.
Unless Sun does something drastica they will have imploded long before 5 years is up.
The problem, of course, is that the illusion of "3D" doesn't give you any extra screen real estate. In fact, the illusion of 3D wastes screen real estate. Just look at the Windows shifted so that they are sideways. There is a triangle of space at the top and the bottom of every Window that gets wasted so that you create the illusion of depth. If you simply shrunk the Window so that it fit in the same square (without adding the illusion of 3 dimensions) the text in the Window would be easier to read while still using the same amount of space.
I know what you mean about the importance of screen real estate, but adding the illusion of 3D only makes things worse. That was my point. A Window manager that allowed me to have more miniaturized windows would be sweet, but you don't need 3D illusions to do that.
Exactly, minimization + icon view would give you exactly the same thing without wasting valuable screen real estate faking the illusion of 3D. Oh, and the text would be easier to read too if it was simply smaller instead of smaller and distorted to fake 3D. For those of us that can read 2D icon view is far more practical. The pretty picture crowd is probably very impressed with this, however.
Oh wait, 2D icon views have been done before and are about as innovative as getting sand in your shorts at the beach. We need a new fancy dan way to make my computer less useable.
Actually, their computers are even more high tech than that. They are using Infinite Improbability Computers. No matter what data you put in all you get out are invoices for $200 hammers.
OK, I can sort of buy that. However, if you want to see enough of the actual contents of the document then the application is still going to take up a non-trivial amount of space. If anything the "illusion" of spinning the application on an axis wastes some space at the top and bottom of the app.
it seems to me that precisely the same functional effect could be had by simply arranging your applications in a 2D grid. The major differences would be that A) text in the applications in the 2D grid would be easier to read, and B) Your applications would make better use of the screen real estate.
If you take a look at Sun's final "Organize Your Screen" example, you can see what I mean. The mini icons on the task bar at the bottom are far more useful for seeing what applications you have running than the sideways full-sized windows, and they take up a good deal less space too. They would take up even less space if the designer hadn't insisted on making them look 3D. It seems to me that the only potentially useful bit of this Window Manager would be the panel.
Exactly. None of the examples show what happens to all of these "sideways" applications when I want the application I am currently using to fill the whole screen. I don't see how Looking Glass is any better than minimizing, and I definitely don't see how it is better than minimizing plus virtual desktops.
Besides which, what happens to sticky notes on the back of an application when the application gets closed (or crashes)? And what happens to their nifty CD Spinner GUI when you are browsing through hundreds of CDs?
Somehow I am guessing that a 200 year old gift card with a face value of one dollar would be worth slightly less than even a brass coin.
Inflation definitely effects gift cards. Assuming, of course, that the issuer of the gift card was even still in business (which they probably aren't).
Exactly, employee ownership is a good thing, but high tech companies don't give out stock options because it improves employee participation. They give out stock options because it allows them to appear more profitable than they really are.
Microsoft has a ridiculously high Price/Earnings ratio. They have to "grow" or their stock price goes down. Anti-Virus software represents one of the very few significant software niches that Microsoft doesn't already dominate.
Microsoft's Anti-Virus moves aren't about security, they are about economics. Microsoft is simply doing what it has always done. Microsoft lets its competitors find out the profitable software niches, and then Microsoft uses its cash hoard to buy themselves a seat at the table. Once Microsoft is in the game they use their influence with the major OEMs to make sure that their product is preloaded on quadzillions of machines. Eventually Microsoft's product becomes the de-facto standard, and an army of MCSEs begin spending their time and effort rooting out the last vestiges of the "non-standard" or "legacy" applications.
On the plus side Microsoft's Anti-Virus software is likely to be less expensive than the competition. So it will probably be a net win for consumers.
Spot on. Microsoft (and Sun) are only talking about subsidizing hardware because it is the only scenario that gives them any chance of maintaining their current ridiculous profit margins. Even now you can get a pretty decent machine for around $400, in 5 to 10 years the average PC will almost certainly be even less expensive than that. It was easy to hide software costs when the average PC cost over $2000, but now the commodity hardware is literally screaming for commodity software.
The software manufacturers plans are to offer you a "free" (retail value $300) and sell you a software subscription for $10-$20 per month (depending on whether you talk to Sun or Microsoft). This would allow the software companies to stamp out piracy (these machines would phone home periodically to see if the subscription had been paid up), and it would give them the stable income stream that they have dreamed of for years. Waiting for customers to upgrade would be a thing of the past.
The problem with this vision, of course, is the fact that there are plenty of other folks that are perfectly happy to give consumers an even better deal. $20 per month sounds pretty expensive when you can get a comparable computer equipped with Free Software for about $100. Microsoft put a PC on every desktop (in the first world), but the hardware manufacturers want to do much much better than that. They want to make PCs truly ubiquitous, and to hit the price points that will make that possible they can't afford the ridiculous profit margins that the U.S. software companies currently enjoy.
Like you said, the future belongs to super-cheap, general-purpose hardware running mostly Free Software.