Read my post again, and, specifically, look at the links. They show Ruby being trashed in the performance deparment, though a lot of Ruby appologists will tell you that those benchmarks somehow "aren't really applicable to Ruby." Basically, I pretty much agree with you on all fronts.:-)
It's a good language, but it certainly has its weaknesses, not the least of which are performance or the lack of a good UI toolkit.
Once again, Apple has not called into question the right to publish the material. The actual publication of the article is not at issue. What is at issue is the leaking of the trade secret, which is part of *federal* law. Even so, California is a state with even further trade secret provisions.
Apple is suing the *leakers*. The bloggers that published have merely been subpoenaed for the identity of the source of the leaks.
The whole point of the concept of a trade secret is that it's up to the company to exercise due diligence to prevent the secret from escaping. The more people the company exposes the secret to, the bigger the risk they take, NDAs or not, and they have to judge who they can trust and the cost/benefit ratio of additional disclosure of the secret. That's just part of life. Once it has escaped, it is no longer a secret, and nothing can reverse that.
The court has previously found that Apple excercised a sufficient level of due dilligence for the case to continue. They've also made a strong enough case that both trade secret regulations and that breach of contract occurred for discovery to reach this point.
Again, Apple is not suing the bloggers, they're suing the leakers as John Does and seeking their identity from the bloggers. There's a huge distinction there.
At the direct expense of Apple, which is a publicly-owned company. This point of view would result in Apple losing what competitive advantage they may have had, and thus, lessen the incenvtive to compete on anything more than in the first place.
Trade secret laws exist in order to encourage competition, you just have to have a more complete view of competition than "If everybody can do it, then there's more competition" for this to make sense.
That's actually a really good question I wish I knew the answer to.:-)
I'd say there's certainly a good possibility they'd be conisdered protected, especially given the anti-trust investigations into Microsoft, but I certainly can't say one way or another with any kind of definitive confidence.
At any rate, it's certainly a much more complicated question than the Apple trade secret issue IMO.
If a reporter at the NYTimes comes into posession of information that is some company's trade secret and publishes it, is that protected under the first amendment?
Yes.
You're only partially correct. The actual publication is most likely legal, however, the original leaker of the information is still culpable.
But somehow "bloggers" appear to be different from "news sites", such as CNet (I dare say them announcing the move to Intel chips was a fair bit more damaging of a "trade secret" than some cancelled bit of GarageBand hardware), and shouldn't enjoy the same priviledges, despite sharing the same medium, material, and purpose.
And this is where you, along with most of bloggers get it wrong. It has much, much less to do with the fact that they're bloggers and not a more traditional media than it does the fact that their is no basic legal right to protection of journalistic sources. Hayes vs Branzburg established the precedent that sources are only protected in the event that it serves a greater public interest and that revealing the sources would have a negative impact on the flow of information in an otherwise free society.
What was leaked here was information that categorically falls under the very definition of a trade secret (down to the fact that the leaked slides were very clearly marked "Apple Confidential." We're not talking about Apple dumping toxic waste or something - we're talking about leaking information on an unannounced consumer electronics product which is protected under trade secret law in its own right.
Apple is not suing to shut the blogs down. They're suing the leakers and have *subpoenaed* the bloggers for the indentities. Personally, I have serious doubts that the Puducah Post, New York Time, or CNN would be able to successfully argue that their sources deserve the journalistic shield protection afforded to whistleblowers in a case like this when there's a clear trade secret law violation in contention which posed no possible public danger.
At least this copy of the story gets the issue at hand correct. The last story made it out to be a story about "Are Bloggers really Journalists" when, at its heart, this story is more about trade secret law than anything. The story isn't "Do bloggers have the same rights as 'real' journalists?" so much as it's "Do bloggers has the right to withhold their sources when trade secret law is at issue?"
The metric for 'traditional' journalists in the past has been that sources may be withheld if it serves the greater public good - IE: the Pentagon Papers case. The uphill battle the EFF is facing here is proving that leaking a trade secret about a music recording device or computer is somehow enough in the interest of the public good that the bloggers' sources deserve special protection.
If this is the same case (I know Apple had filed several) that I'd read on previously, the EFF's lawyers had done a relatively poor job of even addressing this issue, and the Judge pretty much called them on it in a previous brief. The EFF seemed to be making the same mistake most of the blogosphere has in confusing what the actual basis of Apple's case in this matter is.
It's nice to see some Slashdotters are finally picking up on the true issues at hand in this case.
Here's the quick summary:
The being sued in this case apparently violate their NDA with Apple, leaking information on unannounced products to the bloggers. This is in direct violation of any contracts they mave have with Apple and trade secret law. Bloggers in turn post this information online. Apple sues the Does, and subpoena the bloggers for their identities. Bloggers try to fight subpoena on journalistic shield grounds under protections traditionally afforded to whistleblowers.
So that's where we are now. The problem for the bloggers is that that protection has generally been afforded when it serves the greater public good - the case I've cited again and again on this point is the NY Times and the Pentagon Papers. They have to prove that the leaking of the information was somehow in the interest of the great public good to win that kind of protection.
The biggest problem they have is that, rather than even attempt to argue this point, the EFF's lawyers more or less tried to turn this into a vague First Ammendment issue, arguing for protections which have never traditionally been afforded to the media, regardless of their chosen medium. And the judge basically took them to task for it in a previous brief. If anyone can find the PDF of the ruling from this previous Slashdot story, I'm sure there'd be some karma in it for you. It covers everything from previous cases to the fact that the documents in question were very clearly labeled "APPLE CONFIDENTIAL." It's incredibly well written and documented, and really should be read by anyone who wants to better understand the core issues of this case.
I've posted this in another thread, but the basic thing is this - the metric of whether sources are protected in the past has been if maintaining the anonynomity of the sources of the leaked information serves the great public good. This is why the leaker of the Pentagon Papers was protected.
In this case, I think you're going to have a pretty hard time arguing to a judge that leaking information on an unreleased consumer electronics product (which is protected under trade secret law) is somehow in the interest of the greater public good and that the bloggers' sources should be afforded the same type protection provided to whistleblowers.
If previous briefs in this case are any indication, the EFF's response to this facet of the case has been to basically stick their fingers in their ears while screaming "But the First Ammendment!" Unless they've seriously rethought their approach to this one, the bloggers' sources may very well be up a creek in this one.
That was more or less my point. If you look at the links I provided in my post, they show Ruby being absolutely thrashed as far as performance goes. I've seen it suggested that the 2.0 VM should be much, much faster, which is swell, but for the here and now, the language tends to be slow.
Once again, I've got nothing against Ruby as a language, the passing experience I've had with it showed it to be a fairly elegant, easy-to-use language. That doesn't make it the all-powerful duct tape of the universe that spits out 42 to every problem the fanboys would have you to believe it to be, however.
I can't think of any reason people would choose C or Java over Ruby.
Even other scripting languages like Perl,Lua, or Python would clearly be foolish choices as well.
Seriously, Ruby's a great, well thought-out language, but if you listened to the hype you'd think that there couldn't possibly be anything better for any task at all. The fanboyism that's grown up around the language is starting to become really irritating.
While in this case, Ballmer may be sharing more information than necessary, talking about your private life doesn't make you a bad CEO.
"Pressed about security by Mr. Mossberg, Mr. Otellini had a startling confession: He spends an hour a weekend removing spyware from his daughter's computer. And when further pressed about whether a mainstream computer user in search of immediate safety from security woes ought to buy Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh instead of a Wintel PC, he said, 'If you want to fix it tomorrow, maybe you should buy something else.'"
This particular case stuck with me because it happened May of last year, just before Apple announced the Intel switch. At the time people were shocked the (relatively) new Intel CEO would suggest using a competitor's product. A month later, it became clear that that wasn't the case at all.
While you have a point, it's ignoring the context that the telcos have been whining for months that sites like Google and services like VoIP are 'unfairly freeloading on *OUR* pipes.' They want to essentially double dip on popular applications.
What can this lead to? One of a couple things, the way I see it. First, they implement serious traffic shaping and packet prioritization at the ISP level or higher. While this certainly would have an effect on Google and their ilk, having to either pay up or deal with a negative impact on their site, which, while not out and out blocking, could certainly cost them traffic, and hence money. That's where the extortion comments are coming from.
The applications that will suffer more, however, are things like VoIP. If they were to essentially drop things like VoIP into a 'bulk traffic' type filter, it could render VoIP applications essentially useless. So again, on the consumer side, you have a 'pay up or get out' ultimatum.
Now here's the real kicker - if those services wish to remain competitive, they're pretty much going to have to pony up the cash to be prioritized. So what happens? *Everyone* ends up paying the protection money so they're not at a competitive disadvantage. The net result of all this? Since everyone's traffic is 'priority' consumers end up paying more to end up with essentially the same level of service we have today. Except if your application uses something that doesn't make it into the 'priority' filters. In which case, you're now paying more for a lower level of service.
That's why you're seeing such a backlash against the concept of a tiered internet. It completely breaks many of the fundamentals the internet it built on, and the only people that gain from it are the telcos.
To be honest, I didn't intend for it to be entirely fair, it was just the most readily available comparison. I felt the comparison to OS X (A new release averaging every 18 months) was a bit stretched in the other direction, so I went with Debian since the point was 'too long between releases.':-)
They don't have to release yearly for it to be more effective. But going *over* 5 years between major releases of a desktop operating system takes it to the opposite extreme. As it stands, Windows XP was released 4.5 years ago. In comparison, people constantly complained about Debian Woody being ancient, but the lapse between Woody and Sarge was almost exactly 3 years.
Microsoft's biggest problem is that they're coming to realize that their operating system just plain was not designed with some of today's realities in mind. As a result, they end up undertaking massive reengineering projects instead of solid incremental updates.
While I don't disagree with most of your post in principle, you're not entirely correct in asserting that celluar service is a 'fixed cost' utility. While cellular towers are a one-time cost + maintenance for the providers, each tower can only service so many users.
So cell providers do the same thing internet service providers do - they sell over capacity. The difference is, the cell company's way of keeping usage in check is to essentially sell time on the tower. It's annoying, but for the most part works.
What *really* sucks for a customer is when a provider completely oversells what they're capable of in an area. I had Cingular, for example, and people would try to call me and get not my voicemail, but a busy signal when my phone claimed to have full signal. While people generally leave voicemail, half the time they just give up when they get a busy signal, meaning I missed a lot of calls that I needed to have received.
Cingular pretty much jerked me around on the issue for a few months, until I was talking to a manager about helping him set up a VPN for a few of the stores in the region and asked him about it. Long story short, the root cause was basically that people were getting busy signals because my phone was associating with towers that were overloaded. And apparently the areas of town I spent 85% of my time in were serviced by overloaded towers.
Fortunately, I got them to cancel my contract with no 'service fee' after 9 months because of the issues I was having, and I'm on T-Mobile now which has been flawless. Just another perspective from a consumer that's seen a bit of the flip side as well.
Acrobat had the marketing dollars of Adobe behind it. Your average layperson doesn't talk about 'PDFs' they talk about 'Acrobat files.' Ekiga is a bit player in a saturated market. It is not Kleenex, Coke or Xerox.
If it was a market leading product with a budget behind it, they might have the luxury of choosing an esoteric name and still gaining acceptance from the average user. The reality is, that luxury doesn't exist for them.
As another pointed out, Skype is at least pronounceable. Secondly, Skype has a commercial venture with marketing dollars behind it to engrain a brand in the average person. That's not exactly a luxury Open software has.
The only piece of free software aimed at end users to really get that kind of marketing push to date is Firefox, and even so, only a fraction of the general public would know what you're talking about if you brought it up.
This is all ignoring that Ekiga isn't going to be a good name to market around in the first place.
Re:Ekiga? What the hell is an Ekiga?
on
Ekiga 2.0 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
Ekiga is the name of the project's primary coder's girlfriend from what I've read. While a sweet sentiment, it's still a terrible name for a software project - as I've already posted elsewhere in the thread.
GnomeMeeting to Ekiga is quite probably the single worst name change I've ever seen in a piece of software, commercial or free aside. They went from a name that clearly communicated the software's purpose to something cryptic that isn't even easily pronounceable. (Yes, I am aware of the new name's origin, that doesn't make it any less terrible a name for a software project).
So the new name fails on pretty much every front. It fails to communicate the purpose of the program. It fails to be something the average person will actually remember. It fails to be something that's not going to scare off a neophyte. As a program that's bandied about for inclusion in Gnome proper, this pretty significant IMO.
Microsoft does, however, provide drivers for common hardware with the base install of Windows. The SiL3112 is about as common as you get in the realm of SATA controllers - almost every board with SATA on it before SATA was integrated into most northbridges that I've seen is a SiL3112. Not including support for that is damn near tantamount to leaving out support for IDE controllers these days.
The quote from the MS product manager in another article I read (not sure if the slashdot article is the same one) was that Vista will not support EFI booting in Vista until at least the launch of Longhorn server, and will not happen on 32 bit systems period. He also used the vague term 'a later version of Windows client' and wouldn't clarify whether this meant a service pack for Vista or a later release entirely.
So the summary may not be entirely spot on, but it's pretty darn close to the reality of what MS' Vista product manager had to say about the situation.
Actually, your father's situation is exactly what Toughbooks are designed for. From the city's perspective, it's less expensive to pay a 50% premium for a ruggidized notebook once than to pay to fix or replace it later if it gets damaged.
Given his job (from what you've described) requires being in active construction sites, it's not inconceivable that accidents happen. If you've never worked in government, IT managers have a tendency to overspec equipment anyway, so if they're going to pay a premium, from a taxpayer perspective, I'd prefer they buy something that will hold up in the environment it's going to be used in.
Support and service. I've had an Alienware notebook in for repair for nearly a year now, because it has a bad screen inverter and the part just plain wasn't available and Alienware wouldn't give the customer the time of day because it was out of warranty. Interestingly enough (timing wise), she just brought in an inverter she was finally able to find on eBay yesterday. We'll see how that goes.
At any rate, while this may not be the norm, I've heard horror stories about Alienware refusing to support their equipment and giving the customer the run around even while in warranty for me to avoid them altogether.
That's the case with all Panasonic notebooks. The two best notebooks I've ever owned were Panasonics, and we're talking original Pentium class machines. The only problem is they make Apple hardware look cheap.:-)
I'm not disputing that. I'm simply saying that making a deal like this when you're currently being sued under accusations of being an abusive monopoly doesn't help your case.
It just seems poor judgment to me for Intel to make a deal that gains them so little when they're under increased scrutiny. That was the only point I was making.
Slashdot Mirror
Read my post again, and, specifically, look at the links. They show Ruby being trashed in the performance deparment, though a lot of Ruby appologists will tell you that those benchmarks somehow "aren't really applicable to Ruby." Basically, I pretty much agree with you on all fronts. :-)
It's a good language, but it certainly has its weaknesses, not the least of which are performance or the lack of a good UI toolkit.
Apple is suing the *leakers*. The bloggers that published have merely been subpoenaed for the identity of the source of the leaks.
The court has previously found that Apple excercised a sufficient level of due dilligence for the case to continue. They've also made a strong enough case that both trade secret regulations and that breach of contract occurred for discovery to reach this point.
Again, Apple is not suing the bloggers, they're suing the leakers as John Does and seeking their identity from the bloggers. There's a huge distinction there.
At the direct expense of Apple, which is a publicly-owned company. This point of view would result in Apple losing what competitive advantage they may have had, and thus, lessen the incenvtive to compete on anything more than in the first place.
Trade secret laws exist in order to encourage competition, you just have to have a more complete view of competition than "If everybody can do it, then there's more competition" for this to make sense.
That's actually a really good question I wish I knew the answer to. :-)
I'd say there's certainly a good possibility they'd be conisdered protected, especially given the anti-trust investigations into Microsoft, but I certainly can't say one way or another with any kind of definitive confidence.
At any rate, it's certainly a much more complicated question than the Apple trade secret issue IMO.
You're only partially correct. The actual publication is most likely legal, however, the original leaker of the information is still culpable.
And this is where you, along with most of bloggers get it wrong. It has much, much less to do with the fact that they're bloggers and not a more traditional media than it does the fact that their is no basic legal right to protection of journalistic sources. Hayes vs Branzburg established the precedent that sources are only protected in the event that it serves a greater public interest and that revealing the sources would have a negative impact on the flow of information in an otherwise free society.
What was leaked here was information that categorically falls under the very definition of a trade secret (down to the fact that the leaked slides were very clearly marked "Apple Confidential." We're not talking about Apple dumping toxic waste or something - we're talking about leaking information on an unannounced consumer electronics product which is protected under trade secret law in its own right.
Apple is not suing to shut the blogs down. They're suing the leakers and have *subpoenaed* the bloggers for the indentities. Personally, I have serious doubts that the Puducah Post, New York Time, or CNN would be able to successfully argue that their sources deserve the journalistic shield protection afforded to whistleblowers in a case like this when there's a clear trade secret law violation in contention which posed no possible public danger.
At least this copy of the story gets the issue at hand correct. The last story made it out to be a story about "Are Bloggers really Journalists" when, at its heart, this story is more about trade secret law than anything. The story isn't "Do bloggers have the same rights as 'real' journalists?" so much as it's "Do bloggers has the right to withhold their sources when trade secret law is at issue?"
The metric for 'traditional' journalists in the past has been that sources may be withheld if it serves the greater public good - IE: the Pentagon Papers case. The uphill battle the EFF is facing here is proving that leaking a trade secret about a music recording device or computer is somehow enough in the interest of the public good that the bloggers' sources deserve
special protection.
If this is the same case (I know Apple had filed several) that I'd read on previously, the EFF's lawyers had done a relatively poor job of even addressing this issue, and the Judge pretty much called them on it in a previous brief. The EFF seemed to be making the same mistake most of the blogosphere has in confusing what the actual basis of Apple's case in this matter is.
It's nice to see some Slashdotters are finally picking up on the true issues at hand in this case.
Here's the quick summary:
The being sued in this case apparently violate their NDA with Apple, leaking information on unannounced products to the bloggers. This is in direct violation of any contracts they mave have with Apple and trade secret law. Bloggers in turn post this information online. Apple sues the Does, and subpoena the bloggers for their identities. Bloggers try to fight subpoena on journalistic shield grounds under protections traditionally afforded to whistleblowers.
So that's where we are now. The problem for the bloggers is that that protection has generally been afforded when it serves the greater public good - the case I've cited again and again on this point is the NY Times and the Pentagon Papers. They have to prove that the leaking of the information was somehow in the interest of the great public good to win that kind of protection.
The biggest problem they have is that, rather than even attempt to argue this point, the EFF's lawyers more or less tried to turn this into a vague First Ammendment issue, arguing for protections which have never traditionally been afforded to the media, regardless of their chosen medium. And the judge basically took them to task for it in a previous brief. If anyone can find the PDF of the ruling from this previous Slashdot story, I'm sure there'd be some karma in it for you. It covers everything from previous cases to the fact that the documents in question were very clearly labeled "APPLE CONFIDENTIAL." It's incredibly well written and documented, and really should be read by anyone who wants to better understand the core issues of this case.
I've posted this in another thread, but the basic thing is this - the metric of whether sources are protected in the past has been if maintaining the anonynomity of the sources of the leaked information serves the great public good. This is why the leaker of the Pentagon Papers was protected.
In this case, I think you're going to have a pretty hard time arguing to a judge that leaking information on an unreleased consumer electronics product (which is protected under trade secret law) is somehow in the interest of the greater public good and that the bloggers' sources should be afforded the same type protection provided to whistleblowers.
If previous briefs in this case are any indication, the EFF's response to this facet of the case has been to basically stick their fingers in their ears while screaming "But the First Ammendment!" Unless they've seriously rethought their approach to this one, the bloggers' sources may very well be up a creek in this one.
That was more or less my point. If you look at the links I provided in my post, they show Ruby being absolutely thrashed as far as performance goes. I've seen it suggested that the 2.0 VM should be much, much faster, which is swell, but for the here and now, the language tends to be slow.
Once again, I've got nothing against Ruby as a language, the passing experience I've had with it showed it to be a fairly elegant, easy-to-use language. That doesn't make it the all-powerful duct tape of the universe that spits out 42 to every problem the fanboys would have you to believe it to be, however.
I can't think of any reason people would choose C or Java over Ruby.
Even other scripting languages like Perl, Lua, or Python would clearly be foolish choices as well.
Seriously, Ruby's a great, well thought-out language, but if you listened to the hype you'd think that there couldn't possibly be anything better for any task at all. The fanboyism that's grown up around the language is starting to become really irritating.
Full Story Here
This particular case stuck with me because it happened May of last year, just before Apple announced the Intel switch. At the time people were shocked the (relatively) new Intel CEO would suggest using a competitor's product. A month later, it became clear that that wasn't the case at all.
While you have a point, it's ignoring the context that the telcos have been whining for months that sites like Google and services like VoIP are 'unfairly freeloading on *OUR* pipes.' They want to essentially double dip on popular applications.
What can this lead to? One of a couple things, the way I see it. First, they implement serious traffic shaping and packet prioritization at the ISP level or higher. While this certainly would have an effect on Google and their ilk, having to either pay up or deal with a negative impact on their site, which, while not out and out blocking, could certainly cost them traffic, and hence money. That's where the extortion comments are coming from.
The applications that will suffer more, however, are things like VoIP. If they were to essentially drop things like VoIP into a 'bulk traffic' type filter, it could render VoIP applications essentially useless. So again, on the consumer side, you have a 'pay up or get out' ultimatum.
Now here's the real kicker - if those services wish to remain competitive, they're pretty much going to have to pony up the cash to be prioritized. So what happens? *Everyone* ends up paying the protection money so they're not at a competitive disadvantage. The net result of all this? Since everyone's traffic is 'priority' consumers end up paying more to end up with essentially the same level of service we have today. Except if your application uses something that doesn't make it into the 'priority' filters. In which case, you're now paying more for a lower level of service.
That's why you're seeing such a backlash against the concept of a tiered internet. It completely breaks many of the fundamentals the internet it built on, and the only people that gain from it are the telcos.
To be honest, I didn't intend for it to be entirely fair, it was just the most readily available comparison. I felt the comparison to OS X (A new release averaging every 18 months) was a bit stretched in the other direction, so I went with Debian since the point was 'too long between releases.' :-)
They don't have to release yearly for it to be more effective. But going *over* 5 years between major releases of a desktop operating system takes it to the opposite extreme. As it stands, Windows XP was released 4.5 years ago. In comparison, people constantly complained about Debian Woody being ancient, but the lapse between Woody and Sarge was almost exactly 3 years.
Microsoft's biggest problem is that they're coming to realize that their operating system just plain was not designed with some of today's realities in mind. As a result, they end up undertaking massive reengineering projects instead of solid incremental updates.
While I don't disagree with most of your post in principle, you're not entirely correct in asserting that celluar service is a 'fixed cost' utility. While cellular towers are a one-time cost + maintenance for the providers, each tower can only service so many users.
So cell providers do the same thing internet service providers do - they sell over capacity. The difference is, the cell company's way of keeping usage in check is to essentially sell time on the tower. It's annoying, but for the most part works.
What *really* sucks for a customer is when a provider completely oversells what they're capable of in an area. I had Cingular, for example, and people would try to call me and get not my voicemail, but a busy signal when my phone claimed to have full signal. While people generally leave voicemail, half the time they just give up when they get a busy signal, meaning I missed a lot of calls that I needed to have received.
Cingular pretty much jerked me around on the issue for a few months, until I was talking to a manager about helping him set up a VPN for a few of the stores in the region and asked him about it. Long story short, the root cause was basically that people were getting busy signals because my phone was associating with towers that were overloaded. And apparently the areas of town I spent 85% of my time in were serviced by overloaded towers.
Fortunately, I got them to cancel my contract with no 'service fee' after 9 months because of the issues I was having, and I'm on T-Mobile now which has been flawless. Just another perspective from a consumer that's seen a bit of the flip side as well.
Acrobat had the marketing dollars of Adobe behind it. Your average layperson doesn't talk about 'PDFs' they talk about 'Acrobat files.' Ekiga is a bit player in a saturated market. It is not Kleenex, Coke or Xerox.
If it was a market leading product with a budget behind it, they might have the luxury of choosing an esoteric name and still gaining acceptance from the average user. The reality is, that luxury doesn't exist for them.
As another pointed out, Skype is at least pronounceable. Secondly, Skype has a commercial venture with marketing dollars behind it to engrain a brand in the average person. That's not exactly a luxury Open software has.
The only piece of free software aimed at end users to really get that kind of marketing push to date is Firefox, and even so, only a fraction of the general public would know what you're talking about if you brought it up.
This is all ignoring that Ekiga isn't going to be a good name to market around in the first place.
Ekiga is the name of the project's primary coder's girlfriend from what I've read. While a sweet sentiment, it's still a terrible name for a software project - as I've already posted elsewhere in the thread.
Since I have the karma to burn:
GnomeMeeting to Ekiga is quite probably the single worst name change I've ever seen in a piece of software, commercial or free aside. They went from a name that clearly communicated the software's purpose to something cryptic that isn't even easily pronounceable. (Yes, I am aware of the new name's origin, that doesn't make it any less terrible a name for a software project).
So the new name fails on pretty much every front. It fails to communicate the purpose of the program. It fails to be something the average person will actually remember. It fails to be something that's not going to scare off a neophyte. As a program that's bandied about for inclusion in Gnome proper, this pretty significant IMO.
Microsoft does, however, provide drivers for common hardware with the base install of Windows. The SiL3112 is about as common as you get in the realm of SATA controllers - almost every board with SATA on it before SATA was integrated into most northbridges that I've seen is a SiL3112. Not including support for that is damn near tantamount to leaving out support for IDE controllers these days.
The quote from the MS product manager in another article I read (not sure if the slashdot article is the same one) was that Vista will not support EFI booting in Vista until at least the launch of Longhorn server, and will not happen on 32 bit systems period. He also used the vague term 'a later version of Windows client' and wouldn't clarify whether this meant a service pack for Vista or a later release entirely.
So the summary may not be entirely spot on, but it's pretty darn close to the reality of what MS' Vista product manager had to say about the situation.
Actually, your father's situation is exactly what Toughbooks are designed for. From the city's perspective, it's less expensive to pay a 50% premium for a ruggidized notebook once than to pay to fix or replace it later if it gets damaged.
Given his job (from what you've described) requires being in active construction sites, it's not inconceivable that accidents happen. If you've never worked in government, IT managers have a tendency to overspec equipment anyway, so if they're going to pay a premium, from a taxpayer perspective, I'd prefer they buy something that will hold up in the environment it's going to be used in.
Support and service. I've had an Alienware notebook in for repair for nearly a year now, because it has a bad screen inverter and the part just plain wasn't available and Alienware wouldn't give the customer the time of day because it was out of warranty. Interestingly enough (timing wise), she just brought in an inverter she was finally able to find on eBay yesterday. We'll see how that goes.
At any rate, while this may not be the norm, I've heard horror stories about Alienware refusing to support their equipment and giving the customer the run around even while in warranty for me to avoid them altogether.
That's the case with all Panasonic notebooks. The two best notebooks I've ever owned were Panasonics, and we're talking original Pentium class machines. The only problem is they make Apple hardware look cheap. :-)
I'm not disputing that. I'm simply saying that making a deal like this when you're currently being sued under accusations of being an abusive monopoly doesn't help your case.
It just seems poor judgment to me for Intel to make a deal that gains them so little when they're under increased scrutiny. That was the only point I was making.