Sorry but I'm with the GP, unions are no longer about fairness. They simply bully their employers over every little whim, resulting in chicken-little policies and grossly inflated wages.
The fact that a freshly-trained, uneducated, inexperienced laborer can earn a middle-class wage from day one, with full benefits, should be a warning sign that something is wrong with the system. I'm not talking about risky jobs, I mean stuff anyone can do like holding a freakin' construction sign (because a steel pole apparently isn't good enough). Meanwhile you have extremely talented people with double-degrees and 10 years experience, earning a lot less simply because they don't have a greedy union to bully their employer. Not only is the employer virtually forced into giving annual raises, but termination is taboo in all but criminal situations.
I firmly believe we've reached a point where offer and demand are sufficient to regulate employers. Unions have too much power and not enough responsibilities. It is far too lopsided. All those assholes we're stuck working with - or not, because they go on stress leave every six months - they are a drain on the system. People worry that the loss of unions will result in widespread employee abuse, but really they can only abuse you as much as you let them.
A long time ago, someone told me that I shouldn't "look for employment", I should be "offering my skills". Employers need employees more than we need them. Abusive employers will find they have more trouble recruiting good staff, while those who respect the work force will thrive "organically", without the need for heavy-handed unions.
Anything, really. Windows' built-in firewall does the job for most people. Beyond that, the only option worth considering is a firewall that is completely outside of your desktop PC, e.g. a residential router or small linux box with IPtables. Think of it this way: if your desktop gets a virus/rootkit, any software running on the same machine is also compromised, including the firewall.
Big clue: it IS corporations. In case you've been living under a rock for the past century, I'd like to point out that the U.S. government has been a rather transparent executor of corporate dirty work. Or do you still believe 9/11 was an unprovoked act of random terrorism ?
U.S. officials tell all the other countries what to do. That's why it is by far the most hated nation on the planet. To the rest of the world, the U.S. is a fat retarded bully. We put up with your shit, biding our time... Why do you think China is such a big "threat" ? Because they have the manpower, the desperation and now technological and financial capability to wage full-scale war with the U.S.
You don't hear about, say, Iceland shitting their pants over foreign military developments - because generally Iceland doesn't go out of its way to piss other nations off.
"Due to the laws of physics, we aren't unlimited, but we'll do the next best thing and make it easy for you to monitor your usage and judge how much you are spending on bandwidth!"
Too many words. People are stupid. Lies work better. I go now.
Now maybe I'm a little too old-school, and a little too logical, but it seems to me like the functionality they're boasting should be implemented at the GUI level, not in the individual apps. Flash video is an unfortunate hack, that came about because no one did what should have been done: provide a cross-platform way for a browser to tap into the GUI's existing video abilities. Windows has DXVA and the legacy VFW architecture, Linux has XvMC and VDPAU, Mac has Core Video.
SVG ? Vector primitives. Windows provides that in GDI+, Linux has Cairo, and Mac has Quartz 2D.
Or, if we wanted to be pompous elitist bastards, we could say that all of this crap could have been handled by OpenGL and OpenCL, if only those big dumb wealthy corporations would get off their pedestals and recognize the value of open standards. But we're not going to do that, now, are we ?
I mean, semi-seriously, all our shiny expensive toys are very fragile. If the greatest danger is having them hit the floor, then let's make the floor mushy and soft instead of these steel-and-concrete gear crushers.
I'm sure I'd have gone through a dozen smartphones this year, if my apartment weren't covered in nice fluffy carpet.
The gist of it is that someone is making money off of something that's free, and a 3rd party things that's wrong. So tell me, WHY is it wrong ?
OSM is free software. Free to do anything you want with it. Nowhere in its license does it say "If you have lots of money, you have to give us some". For a nation so terrified of watered-down socialism, that's a pretty socialist attitude.
Which part of the equation is "wrong" ? Is it the getting rich part, or the not getting rich part ? If the guys developing OSM were bazillionaires, would this still be an issue ? If there were no money at all, and Bing were the brainchild of a tiny little non-profit org, would this still be an issue ?
There is no issue. If the OSM people wanted money for their work, they would ask for it like everyone else.
That's why I like the 4th guy. He's a bit more random in his playing style, but he actually nailed several ramps back-to-back, unlike the other perfectionists. His score didn't go quite as high, but he spent a lot less time idling and played it like a normal person rather than a committee-designed robot.
Those guys who just sit there all day, planning their shot like a goddamned golfer, are indeed ultra-boring. There was a crap pin, I think it was Stargate, that had a truly game-breaking oversight in that one of the trick shots could be jammed. Hitting it the first time was difficult, but it was so close to a secondary flipper that if you timed it right, the flipper would just barely wedge the ball against the cup, triggering the bonus for as long as you held the flipper. I remember when I was a kid, people would have a shitty round and ask me to take over the last ball to do the trick, just to score a free game. It was mind-numbing but it's not like a 10 year old has anything better to do:P
Tricks that are cool/impressive in a pinball game: ball stops (because I suck at them), fast loops, precise tilt saves and the efficiency metric I label "points per second". Ultimately it all boils down to knowledge of that particular table and a smooth flowing rhythm.
I have two takes on this. On one hand, why the hell are we relying in data written in an unallocated portion of the disk ? (yes I know how booting works). On the other, what makes these idiotic DRM freaks believe they have any right to trample all over that portion of the disk ?
The way I see it, both parties are doing it wrong. I'm leaning in favor of Grub, only because it actually has a noble purpose unlike the DRM, but that doesn't exonerate it of wrongdoing. If Grub is going to evolve into something more than just a simple bootloader, then maybe it's time it got a partition for itself. I'm perfectly cool with it having a mini recovery system vibe going on, but when you blindly sneak things into the filesystem equivalent of "No Man's Land", sooner or later something's going to break.
Or maybe this is a sign that we need to start pushing more towards a universal BIOS-based bootloader, and frankly I'm amazed we even got this far without one. I can think of very few non-PC platforms that don't have an on-chip bootloader.
What, no mention of the "revolutionary" U-Force controller for the old 8-bit NES ?
I have fond memories of trying to play SMB3 on that thing. I did find one cool secret move though: if you smash it into a million pieces, you immediately and permanently gain +3 charisma.
Yeah that's a different effect. I don't know what the nitpickers would call it... it's not really addiction, just a physical withdrawal. He didn't get depressed from quitting, but his body was craving all the other crap that's part of anti-depressants. A lot of things can trigger that very same reaction, and not just drugs. Some foods even!
You don't get addicted to them, but many doctors love to prescribe those for life. Granted, it's a voluntary choice to continue but given the wealth of pharmaceutical disinformation out there, my gut reaction to this article is that Big Pharma has "identified" a group of vulnerable, low-self-esteem suckers to push pills onto.
In a recent development, researchers have found that school makes kids violently and inexplicably sick. Victims of this epidemic complained that "their stomach hurts real bad" and "the nurse said I should play video games until I feel better".
The in-depth multi-year study has also found that 9 out of 10 cancer victims had attended grade school at least once in their life. The surgeon general strongly advises parents to pull their kids out of class indefinitely to reduce the risk of getting cancer 70 years later (or a job).
In other news, a leading computer engineer proposed the shocking theory that "kids are little lying sacks of shit", with the corollary that "school administrators are big lying sacks of shit". Sources confirm the scientist has long maintained a habit of divulging unsavory facts and opinions on various internet forums. CmdrTaco was unavailable for comment.
I don't see what the big fuss is... it's your name. If someone has your email address, they probably have some sense of who you are. If you don't trust them with your real name, then at the very least have some forethought and give them a throwaway email address.
Me, I'm Bill Lambert. My email address is billco@fnarg.com . Says so on my whois records. Big fucking whoop. That's what spamassassin is for.
I'm not much of an Apple fanboi, but my observation is that even after 3 years of iPhone, the only semi-contender is Android. Every other imitator has been a half-assed Symbian piece of crap with the typical 4-color graphics and a processor that can barely edge out the 8086.
Sure, a shit ton of idiotic Taiwanese imitations will flood the market, and they will all have the same fundamental shortcoming: poor quality software and no 3rd party apps. Do you really expect app developers to target all these obscure, unsupported, docs-written-in-mandarin slabs of fail ?
It's quite simple: there is room for two platforms. There's Mac, and there's PC. iPhone vs Android. iPad vs ??? GooglePad ? Realistically that's the kind of clout it would take to launch a true competitor.
True radiosity is very computationally expensive, as you say (basically raytracing), but one can fake it for game purposes by creating a faint omni light source at the flashlight's head, and another where the light "beam" intersects any objects. This would have helped Doom 3 TREMENDOUSLY.
I don't think anyone questions that John Carmack is a super-genius, but some of his WTF moments make you wonder if he ever steps outside his "bubble".
I never understood why people are so pedantic about the $/100km metric. It's not better, it's different. I'm assessing how far my money can take me.
If a car gets 10 miles per buck, and I have to drive 20 miles to work every day, I know that commute is costing me $2 each way. If it were instead "10 bucks per 100 miles", the math is simply inverted: I can travel to or from work 5 times for 10 bucks. One is more intuitive for short trips, the other for long ones, but it's the same damned thing.
Frankly if people lack the mental capacity to invert a fraction, what are we doing putting them in control of a 3000lb killing machine ?
I've been "trying" KDE 4 for maybe a year or so. I like some things, but I hate most of them. At 4.5 it still feels like someone's abandoned alpha. Every new release brings new UI candy, yet breaks long-standing functionality or fails to address real usability problems (like that stupid desktop peanut - whose idea was that?).
What particularly irritates me is that they seem to be reinventing non-desktop features. Not only is this very much against the "Unix way", but they're doing a terrible job of it and the whole mess is wholly unnecessary. I don't know if we as users are doing a poor job of informing the devs about desired functionality, but I would love to meet (and murder) the person who thought Akonadi would be a good idea.
Perhaps I'm a minimalist, but I like KDE for mostly one thing: KIO slaves. I love the fact that I can open up a file browser and treat remote files almost as though they were local. That makes my life as a developer and sysadmin so much easier. Everything else is fluff to me, as long as I can fire up Kate and edit my remote server's configs I'm happy. On the flip side, everything that gets in the way of that location-shifting goodness is EVIL! Akonadi is evil. Half-assed transitions to libssh2 are evil. Godawful "toaster" notifications and ambiguous error messages are evil. The plasma interface engine randomly crashing every few hours is evil. All those unfinished K apps that nobody uses are evil. I could go on...
It seems the KDE people have forgotten that, above all, we just want a GUI to make our lives easier. Streamline it, trim off the fat, we're Linux users for fuck's sake. People are flocking to minimalist interfaces like Fluxbox, just to get out of KDE hell.
Really, that's all people care about. Multiply by the average cost of a gallon of fuel, or kwh of charge, and spit out a number any cousin-fucking retard can understand. Maybe then people will become a tiny bit more conscious about efficiency, and/or take arms against the energy cartels (a nerd can dream, can't he ?)
There is some truth to your statement, but in reality even the big established names get pirated just as badly as the little guys. I frankly don't think it makes any difference, except that the big guys have been drinking the DRM kool-aid for over a decade and are thus conditioned to point to piracy as the root of all their problems.
Real problem #1: Game sucks, not worth $59.99 Real problem #2: Product costs $59.99 in the first place Real problem #3: Marketing is barking orders at production staff Real problem #4: Retail software distribution is anachronistic
Solve those, and you'll find the burden of "lost sales to piracy" is lessened because all those people on the fence will start buying more games. You can't do a think about the hardcore leechers who never pay for anything, ever, so quit crying over those imaginary dollars.
Ok so the "reseller" shorthand is inaccurate, and yes I know how it actually works with TekSavvy renting transit over the DSLAM only. The problem is Bell is still involved in the process, and as we have seen, Bell has taken advantage of that position to throttle other people's traffic in a very anti-competitive fashion.
I still think the solution to all these moronic issues is to dissove both Bell and Rogers and assimilate them back as government-owned services. At best, for-profit utilities do not benefit anyone but the stockholders. At worst, they funnel too much power and control into narrow and untrustworthy cartels.
Even if they limited non-Windows offerings to the Latitudes, I'd be fine with it - they tend to have better bang for the buck anyway, but at least do it across the entire product line. Too often I've seen the FreeDOS or Linux option relegated to the catastrophic sub-$500 units, at which point you might as well buy an equally crappy Acer from your local taiwanese PC supplier.
Preinstalled software is supposed to be a convenience, not a shackle. If they're going to do it wrong, I'd rather they avoid bundling software at all.
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Sorry but I'm with the GP, unions are no longer about fairness. They simply bully their employers over every little whim, resulting in chicken-little policies and grossly inflated wages.
The fact that a freshly-trained, uneducated, inexperienced laborer can earn a middle-class wage from day one, with full benefits, should be a warning sign that something is wrong with the system. I'm not talking about risky jobs, I mean stuff anyone can do like holding a freakin' construction sign (because a steel pole apparently isn't good enough). Meanwhile you have extremely talented people with double-degrees and 10 years experience, earning a lot less simply because they don't have a greedy union to bully their employer. Not only is the employer virtually forced into giving annual raises, but termination is taboo in all but criminal situations.
I firmly believe we've reached a point where offer and demand are sufficient to regulate employers. Unions have too much power and not enough responsibilities. It is far too lopsided. All those assholes we're stuck working with - or not, because they go on stress leave every six months - they are a drain on the system. People worry that the loss of unions will result in widespread employee abuse, but really they can only abuse you as much as you let them.
A long time ago, someone told me that I shouldn't "look for employment", I should be "offering my skills". Employers need employees more than we need them. Abusive employers will find they have more trouble recruiting good staff, while those who respect the work force will thrive "organically", without the need for heavy-handed unions.
Anything, really. Windows' built-in firewall does the job for most people. Beyond that, the only option worth considering is a firewall that is completely outside of your desktop PC, e.g. a residential router or small linux box with IPtables. Think of it this way: if your desktop gets a virus/rootkit, any software running on the same machine is also compromised, including the firewall.
Big clue: it IS corporations. In case you've been living under a rock for the past century, I'd like to point out that the U.S. government has been a rather transparent executor of corporate dirty work. Or do you still believe 9/11 was an unprovoked act of random terrorism ?
U.S. officials tell all the other countries what to do. That's why it is by far the most hated nation on the planet. To the rest of the world, the U.S. is a fat retarded bully. We put up with your shit, biding our time... Why do you think China is such a big "threat" ? Because they have the manpower, the desperation and now technological and financial capability to wage full-scale war with the U.S.
You don't hear about, say, Iceland shitting their pants over foreign military developments - because generally Iceland doesn't go out of its way to piss other nations off.
"Due to the laws of physics, we aren't unlimited, but we'll do the next best thing and make it easy for you to monitor your usage and judge how much you are spending on bandwidth!"
Too many words. People are stupid. Lies work better. I go now.
Nah, more like National Harperism, aka mr thought control, aka mr billion-dollar-bogus-G20-summit-with-police-staged-vandalism, aka Dubya Eh?
He is a big time New World Order proponent. Nuff said.
Now maybe I'm a little too old-school, and a little too logical, but it seems to me like the functionality they're boasting should be implemented at the GUI level, not in the individual apps. Flash video is an unfortunate hack, that came about because no one did what should have been done: provide a cross-platform way for a browser to tap into the GUI's existing video abilities. Windows has DXVA and the legacy VFW architecture, Linux has XvMC and VDPAU, Mac has Core Video.
SVG ? Vector primitives. Windows provides that in GDI+, Linux has Cairo, and Mac has Quartz 2D.
Or, if we wanted to be pompous elitist bastards, we could say that all of this crap could have been handled by OpenGL and OpenCL, if only those big dumb wealthy corporations would get off their pedestals and recognize the value of open standards. But we're not going to do that, now, are we ?
Why not make the ground soft ? :)
I mean, semi-seriously, all our shiny expensive toys are very fragile. If the greatest danger is having them hit the floor, then let's make the floor mushy and soft instead of these steel-and-concrete gear crushers.
I'm sure I'd have gone through a dozen smartphones this year, if my apartment weren't covered in nice fluffy carpet.
The gist of it is that someone is making money off of something that's free, and a 3rd party things that's wrong. So tell me, WHY is it wrong ?
OSM is free software. Free to do anything you want with it. Nowhere in its license does it say "If you have lots of money, you have to give us some". For a nation so terrified of watered-down socialism, that's a pretty socialist attitude.
Which part of the equation is "wrong" ? Is it the getting rich part, or the not getting rich part ? If the guys developing OSM were bazillionaires, would this still be an issue ? If there were no money at all, and Bing were the brainchild of a tiny little non-profit org, would this still be an issue ?
There is no issue. If the OSM people wanted money for their work, they would ask for it like everyone else.
That's why I like the 4th guy. He's a bit more random in his playing style, but he actually nailed several ramps back-to-back, unlike the other perfectionists. His score didn't go quite as high, but he spent a lot less time idling and played it like a normal person rather than a committee-designed robot.
Those guys who just sit there all day, planning their shot like a goddamned golfer, are indeed ultra-boring. There was a crap pin, I think it was Stargate, that had a truly game-breaking oversight in that one of the trick shots could be jammed. Hitting it the first time was difficult, but it was so close to a secondary flipper that if you timed it right, the flipper would just barely wedge the ball against the cup, triggering the bonus for as long as you held the flipper. I remember when I was a kid, people would have a shitty round and ask me to take over the last ball to do the trick, just to score a free game. It was mind-numbing but it's not like a 10 year old has anything better to do :P
Tricks that are cool/impressive in a pinball game: ball stops (because I suck at them), fast loops, precise tilt saves and the efficiency metric I label "points per second". Ultimately it all boils down to knowledge of that particular table and a smooth flowing rhythm.
I have two takes on this. On one hand, why the hell are we relying in data written in an unallocated portion of the disk ? (yes I know how booting works). On the other, what makes these idiotic DRM freaks believe they have any right to trample all over that portion of the disk ?
The way I see it, both parties are doing it wrong. I'm leaning in favor of Grub, only because it actually has a noble purpose unlike the DRM, but that doesn't exonerate it of wrongdoing. If Grub is going to evolve into something more than just a simple bootloader, then maybe it's time it got a partition for itself. I'm perfectly cool with it having a mini recovery system vibe going on, but when you blindly sneak things into the filesystem equivalent of "No Man's Land", sooner or later something's going to break.
Or maybe this is a sign that we need to start pushing more towards a universal BIOS-based bootloader, and frankly I'm amazed we even got this far without one. I can think of very few non-PC platforms that don't have an on-chip bootloader.
What, no mention of the "revolutionary" U-Force controller for the old 8-bit NES ?
I have fond memories of trying to play SMB3 on that thing. I did find one cool secret move though: if you smash it into a million pieces, you immediately and permanently gain +3 charisma.
Yeah that's a different effect. I don't know what the nitpickers would call it... it's not really addiction, just a physical withdrawal. He didn't get depressed from quitting, but his body was craving all the other crap that's part of anti-depressants. A lot of things can trigger that very same reaction, and not just drugs. Some foods even!
You don't get addicted to them, but many doctors love to prescribe those for life. Granted, it's a voluntary choice to continue but given the wealth of pharmaceutical disinformation out there, my gut reaction to this article is that Big Pharma has "identified" a group of vulnerable, low-self-esteem suckers to push pills onto.
So we'll end up with two boxes. One for the government (a honeypot of sorts), and one for illegal uses :)
In a recent development, researchers have found that school makes kids violently and inexplicably sick. Victims of this epidemic complained that "their stomach hurts real bad" and "the nurse said I should play video games until I feel better".
The in-depth multi-year study has also found that 9 out of 10 cancer victims had attended grade school at least once in their life. The surgeon general strongly advises parents to pull their kids out of class indefinitely to reduce the risk of getting cancer 70 years later (or a job).
In other news, a leading computer engineer proposed the shocking theory that "kids are little lying sacks of shit", with the corollary that "school administrators are big lying sacks of shit". Sources confirm the scientist has long maintained a habit of divulging unsavory facts and opinions on various internet forums. CmdrTaco was unavailable for comment.
I don't see what the big fuss is... it's your name. If someone has your email address, they probably have some sense of who you are. If you don't trust them with your real name, then at the very least have some forethought and give them a throwaway email address.
Me, I'm Bill Lambert. My email address is billco@fnarg.com . Says so on my whois records. Big fucking whoop. That's what spamassassin is for.
I'm not much of an Apple fanboi, but my observation is that even after 3 years of iPhone, the only semi-contender is Android. Every other imitator has been a half-assed Symbian piece of crap with the typical 4-color graphics and a processor that can barely edge out the 8086.
Sure, a shit ton of idiotic Taiwanese imitations will flood the market, and they will all have the same fundamental shortcoming: poor quality software and no 3rd party apps. Do you really expect app developers to target all these obscure, unsupported, docs-written-in-mandarin slabs of fail ?
It's quite simple: there is room for two platforms. There's Mac, and there's PC. iPhone vs Android. iPad vs ??? GooglePad ? Realistically that's the kind of clout it would take to launch a true competitor.
True radiosity is very computationally expensive, as you say (basically raytracing), but one can fake it for game purposes by creating a faint omni light source at the flashlight's head, and another where the light "beam" intersects any objects. This would have helped Doom 3 TREMENDOUSLY.
I don't think anyone questions that John Carmack is a super-genius, but some of his WTF moments make you wonder if he ever steps outside his "bubble".
I never understood why people are so pedantic about the $/100km metric. It's not better, it's different. I'm assessing how far my money can take me.
If a car gets 10 miles per buck, and I have to drive 20 miles to work every day, I know that commute is costing me $2 each way. If it were instead "10 bucks per 100 miles", the math is simply inverted: I can travel to or from work 5 times for 10 bucks. One is more intuitive for short trips, the other for long ones, but it's the same damned thing.
Frankly if people lack the mental capacity to invert a fraction, what are we doing putting them in control of a 3000lb killing machine ?
I've been "trying" KDE 4 for maybe a year or so. I like some things, but I hate most of them. At 4.5 it still feels like someone's abandoned alpha. Every new release brings new UI candy, yet breaks long-standing functionality or fails to address real usability problems (like that stupid desktop peanut - whose idea was that?).
What particularly irritates me is that they seem to be reinventing non-desktop features. Not only is this very much against the "Unix way", but they're doing a terrible job of it and the whole mess is wholly unnecessary. I don't know if we as users are doing a poor job of informing the devs about desired functionality, but I would love to meet (and murder) the person who thought Akonadi would be a good idea.
Perhaps I'm a minimalist, but I like KDE for mostly one thing: KIO slaves. I love the fact that I can open up a file browser and treat remote files almost as though they were local. That makes my life as a developer and sysadmin so much easier. Everything else is fluff to me, as long as I can fire up Kate and edit my remote server's configs I'm happy. On the flip side, everything that gets in the way of that location-shifting goodness is EVIL! Akonadi is evil. Half-assed transitions to libssh2 are evil. Godawful "toaster" notifications and ambiguous error messages are evil. The plasma interface engine randomly crashing every few hours is evil. All those unfinished K apps that nobody uses are evil. I could go on...
It seems the KDE people have forgotten that, above all, we just want a GUI to make our lives easier. Streamline it, trim off the fat, we're Linux users for fuck's sake. People are flocking to minimalist interfaces like Fluxbox, just to get out of KDE hell.
Or, for the idiotic mass public:
"Miles per buck"
Really, that's all people care about. Multiply by the average cost of a gallon of fuel, or kwh of charge, and spit out a number any cousin-fucking retard can understand. Maybe then people will become a tiny bit more conscious about efficiency, and/or take arms against the energy cartels (a nerd can dream, can't he ?)
There is some truth to your statement, but in reality even the big established names get pirated just as badly as the little guys. I frankly don't think it makes any difference, except that the big guys have been drinking the DRM kool-aid for over a decade and are thus conditioned to point to piracy as the root of all their problems.
Real problem #1: Game sucks, not worth $59.99
Real problem #2: Product costs $59.99 in the first place
Real problem #3: Marketing is barking orders at production staff
Real problem #4: Retail software distribution is anachronistic
Solve those, and you'll find the burden of "lost sales to piracy" is lessened because all those people on the fence will start buying more games. You can't do a think about the hardcore leechers who never pay for anything, ever, so quit crying over those imaginary dollars.
Hey I'd love to! Just put up about $50M in start-up capital and I'm there :P
Ok so the "reseller" shorthand is inaccurate, and yes I know how it actually works with TekSavvy renting transit over the DSLAM only. The problem is Bell is still involved in the process, and as we have seen, Bell has taken advantage of that position to throttle other people's traffic in a very anti-competitive fashion.
I still think the solution to all these moronic issues is to dissove both Bell and Rogers and assimilate them back as government-owned services. At best, for-profit utilities do not benefit anyone but the stockholders. At worst, they funnel too much power and control into narrow and untrustworthy cartels.
Even if they limited non-Windows offerings to the Latitudes, I'd be fine with it - they tend to have better bang for the buck anyway, but at least do it across the entire product line. Too often I've seen the FreeDOS or Linux option relegated to the catastrophic sub-$500 units, at which point you might as well buy an equally crappy Acer from your local taiwanese PC supplier.
Preinstalled software is supposed to be a convenience, not a shackle. If they're going to do it wrong, I'd rather they avoid bundling software at all.