At least, the Sun package database (/var/sadm/install/contents) is plain text and fully greppable. It is actually very nice. RPM would be a good choice if it didn't suffer so much from bloating featuritis.
If you want an LVM, you have to load DiskSuite, and the documentation leaves a great deal to be desired.
The DiskSuite documentation is fine. I learned DiskSuite all by myself just using the Answerbook and the man pages.
UFS, Sun's native file system, supports journaling, but is loaded by default without it and very little mention is made of the importance of turning it on.
People who really want and need journaling already understand its importance.
I know that HP-UX is very recently getting dynamic kernel tunables, I hope Solaris is as well. I certainly enjoy them in Linux.
The Solaris `ndd` command allows run-time changes to many tunable paramters for device drivers. The 'mdb' man page mentions some things about modifying a live system kernel, but I have never tried it.
Some of this stuff is really old.
Some of Sun's paying customers are pretty old, too.
it's time to remove every SysV utility that can be replaced by a GNU equivalent.
Only after those GNU "equivalents" are actually standards-compliant. Also, the GNU tools often abandon the KISS philosophy of UNIX, which often gets in my way (yes, extra features can be a PITA). It slices, it dices, it cures the common cold...but I just want a text editor!
CDE on my workstation makes other people ask me if I drive an Edsel.
CDE does exactly what it was intended to do. It is very functional and useful and is very appropriate for a workstation. However, Sun is responding to the "eye candy" kids out there by adopting GNOME as a replacement for CDE.
Microsoft can afford to play follow the leader - they have the money and the bloody minded resove to catch up from the rear.
Their strategy is actually pretty damn smart: let others get burnt by the risk of innovation, then let us repackage anything that was modestly successful and sell it as our own (while pushing the true innovator into obscurity).
Take off every clusters of natalie portman petrified with hot grits poured down their pants...
...and rinse, lather, and repeat!
BTW, is rinsing hot grits off of one's body supposed to be sexy or disgusting? Does this depend on how hungry one is?
Who's willing to eat the grits rinsed off of Natalie Portman for ten moderation points? Yes, that's ten moderation points! Any takers? Whoa!!! Okay, everyone, form a line...no shoving!!
Windows 95 --> Slackware Linux and GNOME on the PC and OpenBSD as a PPP dial-up firewall on my laptop
My desktop is fully customized with icons and scripts for my wife (who is very smart, just less UNIX/Linux savvy). OpenBSD is a wonderful OS for pretty much any network infrastructure need. Userland PPP in OpenBSD is awesome.
Granted, I spent quite a bit of time getting this setup fully customized just like I wanted it, but the reward is a very secure setup that is safe from port scans and script kiddies. I know that a "grandma" couldn't set it up, but that's mainly due to the dedicated firewall computer. A single host would be much easier (but less trustworthy--and in the true sense of trustworthy, not that Palladium trash).
Quicken --> GNUCash
GNUCash's import of Quicken QIF files works well, but it takes a few tries to get the export/import procedure just right. Sometimes the accounts need a little manual intervention to finish the process. You know you're okay when all the balances are correct. Given how much data we transferred, I really give GNUCash a lot of credit for working as well as it did.
MS Office --> OpenOffice or AbiWord/Gnumeric
Works perfectly for everything I need. Gnumeric took over the budgeting feature of Quicken.
Internet Explorer --> Mozilla
Mozilla really has been a truly great browser.
Games
That's what our PlayStation is for.
I have not booted MS Windows in my home in months, and I have not missed it one bit.
One warning is that Linux/GNOME/GNUCash/Mozilla doesn't feel like Windows/Quicken/IE in most respects. However, my wife complained about it for only one day, and, after adapting her routine, she thinks it's just fine (and she isn't just being polite to make me happy).
Software is complex, and nearly everyone is in denial about it. Many people think it is some sort of magic, where just adopting the right buzzwords will make something everything they dreamed for. Everyday, someone breaks out of this fantasy after learning a very very hard lesson, but, sadly, for each of these people there are three more who are just beginning the process.
The software industry is also infantile when compared to ship building, chemical rocketry, airplanes, electronics, book publishing, and house building. These industries have already learned all the hard lessons, and there is a culture in place that guides young and old.
The software culture is more like the fashion industry than engineering, right now. Everything is in flux, established procedures are never established for long, what broke the last system is quickly forgotten, and youth rules the roost.
In time, this will change. Software Engineers won't be laughed at for their vagueness of title. Newness of technology will actually be considered before risking a whole project on it. One day, people will be conservative (but smart and creative) when creating such complex systems.
And, in time, people will come to understand what software really costs. Million-dollar contracts won't be alwarded for ten-million dollars worth of work. People won't want their Golden 6-speed Lexus delivered this afternoon for the price of a Chevy Cavalier. One day, they will learn.
And that would be why a Pentium IV 2.8Ghz is the fastest tested on SpecInt [spec.org]?
My earlier post used "high-availability" and "zero-error" not "fastest on the planet" with respect to Sun (even though the UltraSPARC III does do well on the benchmarks).
Sun pays more attention to ensuring the CPU will operate correctly and consistently than Intel does on the Pentiums. This may or may not be the case for UltraSPARC vs. Itanium; I really don't know.
The UltraSPARC III, for example has ECC on all external busses, not just memory. It also has an independent diagnostic bus. These sorts of features (and lots of cache RAM) are why Sun's CPUs are more expensive than Pentium 4s and Athlons.
Just being on top of SpecInt does not declare someone a winner of the processor "war". Most of Sun's customers know this. Most of Intel's and AMD's customers don't.
IIIi? I thought the Roman numeral for 4 was "Iv" not "IIIi". I guess Sun isn't too bright anymore.
IIIi is the four-way scalable version of the thousands-way scalable III. It's mainly a cheaper processor for lower-end workstations and servers. The potentially dual-core UltraSPARC IV is on the horizon, also, but it will be a drop in upgrade for the III and is independent of the IIIi.
One theory I have is that Sun recognizes that super-high frequencies result in less reliability than Sun will tolerate, driving them to new CPU architectures. Remember, Intel cares more about marketing and big business than they do about truly high-availability and zero-error CPUs, which leads to their high frequency yet terribly inefficient Pentium 4. Sun's chip designers are just as talented as Intel's, and if Sun wanted to release a 5GHz CPU they would. It's interesting that Sun chose the asynchronous architecture instead of taking Intel's route of over-the-horizon pipelines and other tricks.they chose
I agree with this bozo, the DOI should have put Solaris on every office schlep's desktop!
I read your sarcasm. However, Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 would be very suitable for office desktops. CDE and Gnome can be site-customized by the sysadmin, and software like Mozilla, StarOffice, Evolution, etc. are really a formidable set of applications that are available for Solaris. On top of that, the Solaris kernel is bulletproof and was designed with networking and distributed management in mind from nearly the beginning.
I think picking among Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X would be very hard to do, since each is an excellent platform trading various strengths and weaknesses. Fortunately, due to standards, these systems could exist very well in a heterogenous environment even with common logins, shared filesystems, and network printers. Uniformity is just not a strong argument to make when choosing Microsoft.
I'll pull one thing out of your spew of lies and damn lies:
Drive Letters
They're irrelevant in NTFS as you can mount anywhere as under Unix, in addition to drive letters.
Actually, they aren't lies but my personal list of things that annoy me about Windows and Microsoft, in general. For things like "3rd World Corruption", think Peru. For things like "Not Engineered for Security", think recent comments by Microsoft VPs. For things like "False Advertising", think about MS ads spouting "Low TCO this" or "scalability that". None of this is stretching the truth.
As for drive letters, take a look in the Registry and other config files. The drive letters are everywhere. Whoever decided what went into the Registry for software like MS Office obviously had no experience with data modeling. Most likely, the Office development team abuses the Registry out of laziness. Simple operations like moving a software application from one filesystem to another can be nearly impossible without a painful cycle of edit, see things break, edit, ad nauseum. It really is unsettling whenever I see such glimpses of Windows' underpinnings.
The only real disadvantage of Windows (and Linux) vs. Commerical Unix are mass-deployment and backup tools.
Don't forget the Registry, DLL Hell, Office File Format Lock-In, EULA-of-the-Month Club, DRM, the Upgrade Treadmill, the GUI Frontal Lobotomy, BSA Audits, Drive Letters, IE Everywhere, Competitor Aquire and Crush, False Advertising, Not Engineered for Security, Automatic Updates, #1 Virus Host, Tax Evasion, 3rd World Corruption, Congress Payroll, Embrace and Extend, and the Microsoft "we got you where we want you" XPerience.
Currently, thats something that Unix just can't do, at least not on the same level as Windows can do it.
Since when? Did NIS, LDAP, Kerberos, and ACLs suddenly disappear from Solaris? UNIX vendors have been selling centralized policy administration tools for years. With a little thought and planning, they can even be efficient. Many of them have very nice GUIs, too.
There are even "trusted" versions of UNIX if you want to go crazy with military-style need-to-know setups.
Basically, Microsoft is delivering nothing new, here, except more marketing spin.
One out of two installs needs substantial work due to Win95/Win98/WinME configurations with years of clutter, garbage and registry hell.
High prices for broadband unfortunately appear to be a Microsoft tax.
Thanks be to Windows! All hail Gates!
Seriously, Windows has cost the world billions upon billions of dollars of wasted effort (two weeks per user per year said Bill Gates himself). Your analogy to cars is a good one. I wish I knew why the software user culture became so backwards relative to everything else in our lives. Nothing else operates like the Microsoft "economy."
If the user preferences are set up properly (simplified HTML), SlashDot is very responsive over a modem. So, even though SlashDot may be compelling right now, it will need to be ruined with Flash UIs, Applets, hundred-function JavaScript hacks, streaming background music, and large animated images before it becomes compelling enough for broadband. Considering all this, I think I'll stick to my modem.
I am still waiting to hear one good reason to run Netscape 7 instead of Mozilla!:-)
For Solaris, Netscape 7 is delivered in pkgadd format making installation trivial. Once installed, all the Mozilla customizations are just a 'vi prefs.js' away.
I have both Mozilla 1.0 on Linux and Netscape 7 on Solaris and have them configured almost identically. The only difference to a casual observer would be which animated graphic is displayed in the top right corner.
I guess that depends on what CAD software you use. Pro/E's entry-level packages are only several thousand dollars per seat (expensive if you are using a $49.95 CAD package, but not so bad otherwise), and PTC announced that they will support Pro/E on Linux, soon. If you need more beef, you could always get a Blade 2000 with Solaris. Both of these options are totally MS-free.
It's probably also worth noting that Intel does NOT list the P4 as a "server processor". The P4 is listed as a desktop or workstation processor.
Quite honestly, I think workstations tend to be more floating-point intensive than servers. For example, how many floating-point calculations does 3D CAD software do vs. Sendmail or LDAP?
So, new PC customers should be buying "servers" for any graphics, mathematics, or scientific work. This only increases my dislike of Intel's marketing tactics.
Perhaps Intel should market the P4 as an administrative assistant's toy, and let the engineers and scientists go to Sun, SGI, HP, and IBM for real workstations?
Seriously, let's figure out how to write software in the first place, then figure out how to do all the whiz-bang stuff.
I really think that software quality has stagnated, where funding nearly always stops short of allowing proper design and quality controls.
Who at Microsoft and IBM are going to ensure that the super-self-healing code can heal itself and in a usefully wide variety of situations?
Once such abstraction reaches a new threshold, how many people will be left around the world who can diagnose a real problem when it occurs?
I've seen repeatedly that higher abstraction does not always result in a better system. I know many "software engineers" who can't even determine that basic network issues or OS contentions are "breaking" their software. All they care about are their nifty buzzword-compliant IDEs with code highlighting. Once the population finally degrades to where nearly everyone is like this, what then?
Will the same thing happen to Intel products in China?
I honestly don't care if China tells Intel and Microsoft where to stuff Palladium. Perhaps Taiwan would find ways of supplying both markets? Perhaps China could find ways of developing their own software or using Free software to their advantage?
If Microsoft and Intel think they can barge into other countries telling them how to do things, then their arrogance needs a good kick in the face.
It's paving the way for music and movies that won't play at all unless you have a Palladium-enabled processor.
Does that Palladium-enabled processor require an Internet connection? If it does, perhaps that is the worst crime associated with Palladium. Why should my PC need to phone home about a rented DVD?
Slashdot Mirror
The Solaris package system is an abomination.
At least, the Sun package database (/var/sadm/install/contents) is plain text and fully greppable. It is actually very nice. RPM would be a good choice if it didn't suffer so much from bloating featuritis.
If you want an LVM, you have to load DiskSuite, and the documentation leaves a great deal to be desired.
The DiskSuite documentation is fine. I learned DiskSuite all by myself just using the Answerbook and the man pages.
UFS, Sun's native file system, supports journaling, but is loaded by default without it and very little mention is made of the importance of turning it on.
People who really want and need journaling already understand its importance.
I know that HP-UX is very recently getting dynamic kernel tunables, I hope Solaris is as well. I certainly enjoy them in Linux.
The Solaris `ndd` command allows run-time changes to many tunable paramters for device drivers. The 'mdb' man page mentions some things about modifying a live system kernel, but I have never tried it.
Some of this stuff is really old.
Some of Sun's paying customers are pretty old, too.
it's time to remove every SysV utility that can be replaced by a GNU equivalent.
Only after those GNU "equivalents" are actually standards-compliant. Also, the GNU tools often abandon the KISS philosophy of UNIX, which often gets in my way (yes, extra features can be a PITA). It slices, it dices, it cures the common cold...but I just want a text editor!
CDE on my workstation makes other people ask me if I drive an Edsel.
CDE does exactly what it was intended to do. It is very functional and useful and is very appropriate for a workstation. However, Sun is responding to the "eye candy" kids out there by adopting GNOME as a replacement for CDE.
Having multiple monitors is nothing new, they were doing that 10 years ago with the Windows SDK...
Don't forget that UNIX workstations were doing it years before 10 years ago. No serial ports, either. Real multiple frame buffers.
Microsoft can afford to play follow the leader - they have the money and the bloody minded resove to catch up from the rear.
Their strategy is actually pretty damn smart: let others get burnt by the risk of innovation, then let us repackage anything that was modestly successful and sell it as our own (while pushing the true innovator into obscurity).
BTW, is rinsing hot grits off of one's body supposed to be sexy or disgusting? Does this depend on how hungry one is?
Who's willing to eat the grits rinsed off of Natalie Portman for ten moderation points? Yes, that's ten moderation points! Any takers? Whoa!!! Okay, everyone, form a line...no shoving!!
...try and make my house MS free.
I've done just that, and it really has been nice.
Windows 95 --> Slackware Linux and GNOME on the PC and OpenBSD as a PPP dial-up firewall on my laptop
My desktop is fully customized with icons and scripts for my wife (who is very smart, just less UNIX/Linux savvy). OpenBSD is a wonderful OS for pretty much any network infrastructure need. Userland PPP in OpenBSD is awesome.
Granted, I spent quite a bit of time getting this setup fully customized just like I wanted it, but the reward is a very secure setup that is safe from port scans and script kiddies. I know that a "grandma" couldn't set it up, but that's mainly due to the dedicated firewall computer. A single host would be much easier (but less trustworthy--and in the true sense of trustworthy, not that Palladium trash).
Quicken --> GNUCash
GNUCash's import of Quicken QIF files works well, but it takes a few tries to get the export/import procedure just right. Sometimes the accounts need a little manual intervention to finish the process. You know you're okay when all the balances are correct. Given how much data we transferred, I really give GNUCash a lot of credit for working as well as it did.
MS Office --> OpenOffice or AbiWord/Gnumeric
Works perfectly for everything I need. Gnumeric took over the budgeting feature of Quicken.
Internet Explorer --> Mozilla
Mozilla really has been a truly great browser.
Games
That's what our PlayStation is for.
I have not booted MS Windows in my home in months, and I have not missed it one bit.
One warning is that Linux/GNOME/GNUCash/Mozilla doesn't feel like Windows/Quicken/IE in most respects. However, my wife complained about it for only one day, and, after adapting her routine, she thinks it's just fine (and she isn't just being polite to make me happy).
Software is complex, and nearly everyone is in denial about it. Many people think it is some sort of magic, where just adopting the right buzzwords will make something everything they dreamed for. Everyday, someone breaks out of this fantasy after learning a very very hard lesson, but, sadly, for each of these people there are three more who are just beginning the process.
The software industry is also infantile when compared to ship building, chemical rocketry, airplanes, electronics, book publishing, and house building. These industries have already learned all the hard lessons, and there is a culture in place that guides young and old.
The software culture is more like the fashion industry than engineering, right now. Everything is in flux, established procedures are never established for long, what broke the last system is quickly forgotten, and youth rules the roost.
In time, this will change. Software Engineers won't be laughed at for their vagueness of title. Newness of technology will actually be considered before risking a whole project on it. One day, people will be conservative (but smart and creative) when creating such complex systems.
And, in time, people will come to understand what software really costs. Million-dollar contracts won't be alwarded for ten-million dollars worth of work. People won't want their Golden 6-speed Lexus delivered this afternoon for the price of a Chevy Cavalier. One day, they will learn.
And that would be why a Pentium IV 2.8Ghz is the fastest tested on SpecInt [spec.org]?
My earlier post used "high-availability" and "zero-error" not "fastest on the planet" with respect to Sun (even though the UltraSPARC III does do well on the benchmarks).
Sun pays more attention to ensuring the CPU will operate correctly and consistently than Intel does on the Pentiums. This may or may not be the case for UltraSPARC vs. Itanium; I really don't know.
The UltraSPARC III, for example has ECC on all external busses, not just memory. It also has an independent diagnostic bus. These sorts of features (and lots of cache RAM) are why Sun's CPUs are more expensive than Pentium 4s and Athlons.
Just being on top of SpecInt does not declare someone a winner of the processor "war". Most of Sun's customers know this. Most of Intel's and AMD's customers don't.
IIIi? I thought the Roman numeral for 4 was "Iv" not "IIIi". I guess Sun isn't too bright anymore.
IIIi is the four-way scalable version of the thousands-way scalable III. It's mainly a cheaper processor for lower-end workstations and servers. The potentially dual-core UltraSPARC IV is on the horizon, also, but it will be a drop in upgrade for the III and is independent of the IIIi.
What I suggest, now when we have lots of transistors to play with, are asyncronous designs!
Sun Microsystems is already planning this for their UltraSPARC IIIi CPU.
One theory I have is that Sun recognizes that super-high frequencies result in less reliability than Sun will tolerate, driving them to new CPU architectures. Remember, Intel cares more about marketing and big business than they do about truly high-availability and zero-error CPUs, which leads to their high frequency yet terribly inefficient Pentium 4. Sun's chip designers are just as talented as Intel's, and if Sun wanted to release a 5GHz CPU they would. It's interesting that Sun chose the asynchronous architecture instead of taking Intel's route of over-the-horizon pipelines and other tricks.they chose
More people probably died from cancer or auto accidents in the last five minutes than died on Sept. 11. Where are your priorities, Anonymous Coward?
I agree with this bozo, the DOI should have put Solaris on every office schlep's desktop!
I read your sarcasm. However, Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 would be very suitable for office desktops. CDE and Gnome can be site-customized by the sysadmin, and software like Mozilla, StarOffice, Evolution, etc. are really a formidable set of applications that are available for Solaris. On top of that, the Solaris kernel is bulletproof and was designed with networking and distributed management in mind from nearly the beginning.
I think picking among Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X would be very hard to do, since each is an excellent platform trading various strengths and weaknesses. Fortunately, due to standards, these systems could exist very well in a heterogenous environment even with common logins, shared filesystems, and network printers. Uniformity is just not a strong argument to make when choosing Microsoft.
I'll pull one thing out of your spew of lies and damn lies:
Drive Letters
They're irrelevant in NTFS as you can mount anywhere as under Unix, in addition to drive letters.
Actually, they aren't lies but my personal list of things that annoy me about Windows and Microsoft, in general. For things like "3rd World Corruption", think Peru. For things like "Not Engineered for Security", think recent comments by Microsoft VPs. For things like "False Advertising", think about MS ads spouting "Low TCO this" or "scalability that". None of this is stretching the truth.
As for drive letters, take a look in the Registry and other config files. The drive letters are everywhere. Whoever decided what went into the Registry for software like MS Office obviously had no experience with data modeling. Most likely, the Office development team abuses the Registry out of laziness. Simple operations like moving a software application from one filesystem to another can be nearly impossible without a painful cycle of edit, see things break, edit, ad nauseum. It really is unsettling whenever I see such glimpses of Windows' underpinnings.
The only real disadvantage of Windows (and Linux) vs. Commerical Unix are mass-deployment and backup tools.
Don't forget the Registry, DLL Hell, Office File Format Lock-In, EULA-of-the-Month Club, DRM, the Upgrade Treadmill, the GUI Frontal Lobotomy, BSA Audits, Drive Letters, IE Everywhere, Competitor Aquire and Crush, False Advertising, Not Engineered for Security, Automatic Updates, #1 Virus Host, Tax Evasion, 3rd World Corruption, Congress Payroll, Embrace and Extend, and the Microsoft "we got you where we want you" XPerience.
Currently, thats something that Unix just can't do, at least not on the same level as Windows can do it.
Since when? Did NIS, LDAP, Kerberos, and ACLs suddenly disappear from Solaris? UNIX vendors have been selling centralized policy administration tools for years. With a little thought and planning, they can even be efficient. Many of them have very nice GUIs, too.
There are even "trusted" versions of UNIX if you want to go crazy with military-style need-to-know setups.
Basically, Microsoft is delivering nothing new, here, except more marketing spin.
One out of two installs needs substantial work due to Win95/Win98/WinME configurations with years of clutter, garbage and registry hell.
High prices for broadband unfortunately appear to be a Microsoft tax.
Thanks be to Windows! All hail Gates!
Seriously, Windows has cost the world billions upon billions of dollars of wasted effort (two weeks per user per year said Bill Gates himself). Your analogy to cars is a good one. I wish I knew why the software user culture became so backwards relative to everything else in our lives. Nothing else operates like the Microsoft "economy."
You mean /. isn't compelling content!???
If the user preferences are set up properly (simplified HTML), SlashDot is very responsive over a modem. So, even though SlashDot may be compelling right now, it will need to be ruined with Flash UIs, Applets, hundred-function JavaScript hacks, streaming background music, and large animated images before it becomes compelling enough for broadband. Considering all this, I think I'll stick to my modem.
I am still waiting to hear one good reason to run Netscape 7 instead of Mozilla! :-)
For Solaris, Netscape 7 is delivered in pkgadd format making installation trivial. Once installed, all the Mozilla customizations are just a 'vi prefs.js' away.
I have both Mozilla 1.0 on Linux and Netscape 7 on Solaris and have them configured almost identically. The only difference to a casual observer would be which animated graphic is displayed in the top right corner.
...frankly, I am disgusted and disappointed to not have a Free alternative in between those two.
No, you are disgusted and disappointed to not have a free alternative in between those two.
We still need MS for CAD, though... :-(
I guess that depends on what CAD software you use. Pro/E's entry-level packages are only several thousand dollars per seat (expensive if you are using a $49.95 CAD package, but not so bad otherwise), and PTC announced that they will support Pro/E on Linux, soon. If you need more beef, you could always get a Blade 2000 with Solaris. Both of these options are totally MS-free.
Where would Classical music be today if copyrights lasted 140 years 140 years ago?
It's probably also worth noting that Intel does NOT list the P4 as a "server processor". The P4 is listed as a desktop or workstation processor.
Quite honestly, I think workstations tend to be more floating-point intensive than servers. For example, how many floating-point calculations does 3D CAD software do vs. Sendmail or LDAP?
So, new PC customers should be buying "servers" for any graphics, mathematics, or scientific work. This only increases my dislike of Intel's marketing tactics.
Perhaps Intel should market the P4 as an administrative assistant's toy, and let the engineers and scientists go to Sun, SGI, HP, and IBM for real workstations?
Seriously, let's figure out how to write software in the first place, then figure out how to do all the whiz-bang stuff.
I really think that software quality has stagnated, where funding nearly always stops short of allowing proper design and quality controls.
Who at Microsoft and IBM are going to ensure that the super-self-healing code can heal itself and in a usefully wide variety of situations?
Once such abstraction reaches a new threshold, how many people will be left around the world who can diagnose a real problem when it occurs?
I've seen repeatedly that higher abstraction does not always result in a better system. I know many "software engineers" who can't even determine that basic network issues or OS contentions are "breaking" their software. All they care about are their nifty buzzword-compliant IDEs with code highlighting. Once the population finally degrades to where nearly everyone is like this, what then?
There were certainly a few bright spots among the cast, such as Patrick Stewart. Of the five or so captains, he was the best.
Will the same thing happen to Intel products in China?
I honestly don't care if China tells Intel and Microsoft where to stuff Palladium. Perhaps Taiwan would find ways of supplying both markets? Perhaps China could find ways of developing their own software or using Free software to their advantage?
If Microsoft and Intel think they can barge into other countries telling them how to do things, then their arrogance needs a good kick in the face.
It's paving the way for music and movies that won't play at all unless you have a Palladium-enabled processor.
Does that Palladium-enabled processor require an Internet connection? If it does, perhaps that is the worst crime associated with Palladium. Why should my PC need to phone home about a rented DVD?