Scientists thought that the area around Chernobyl would be a wasteland for decades. Instead, it's now a flourishing haven for wildlife (at least, according to Wikipedia).
That is because humans moved out for good cause and nature is working its way back. Maybe a few new species will spring up in that area in the next few hundred thousand years.
Earth will heal itself in a few million years post mankind. People are like a cancer to this planet. At some point there will not be much non-human life left, and then man will decline as a species and perhaps a smaller, more efficient socially evolved model will replace him.
What I find to be self evident is that the real issue is simply to many people, not enough planet.
More truth to that than so many realize. Research to show past, present and future growth curves in human population of places like Africa, China, India and it is a mathematical fact mass starvation is shortly inevitable unless we have one wild assed big WWW III. It will make Ethiopa look like nothing.
Yet we do nothing to prevent it. How can we? Are we going to shoot someone for having too many babies? Pull out the nukes because many contries will ignore any international law and populate until they bump elbows and cry for aid? Likely not. The suffering of starvation will happen to many.
Maybe scour the bottom of the ocean for seawead and algee. There will eventually be nothing left. And then mankind will be forced to either annialate himself with technology or intelectually and socially evolve. This will hit long before we see welcomed global warming up North.
Your quite right on this. Novell bought XIMIAN, a key component to really making a serious run at Microsoft's desktop but when it came to marketing it they fell right down without so much as gasp. Self destructive.
results are better networking between Solaris systems and Windows.
Does than mean IPec on Windows now works? Heck, I have BSD, 2 Linux and 2 Solaris doing IPSec natively and together but getting Microsoft Windows OS to do it is a nighmare nemisis. But not holding my breath. But it is about the only reason to upgrade to Vista I can think of.
Meaning, I wasn't getting paid enough any more to deal with all of the shit I had to deal with.
You sure hit the nail on the head with that one. While politicians are golfing, and while sales people ate lobster we crafted for crap wages. When things looked good programmers were the first to go. Sort of dumb really. But shows the point that good programming personnel were expendable and abused.
There is not a shortage of programmers, there is a shortage of skilled functional honest management and pay.
Once Windows automatically downloads IE7 next month, then compare downloads. IE7's stats will skyrocket next month when it's deployed to home users. (Most companies are delaying the roll-out for additional testing. So expect usage rates to slowly increase over the next year.)
Knowing Microsoft they timed this so that they could be the last in and change the default browser back to IE.
Time for me to turn off automatic updates so that my only XP system is (relatively) stable. (others are 2 solaris, 3 Suse, 1 RH).
How many Windows installs were installed in 2 days when Win98 was released?
That was 8 years ago and people were desperate to get off of 95. In converting to human terms it happened in the 1800's. Or at least last century - litterally. Second point, I bet it costs a lot less! Next, didn't even have to leave my seat and upgraded in seconds including download time. A whole lot less painful than Windows 98 or IE updates.
...e-voting machines are flawed, have no paper trail or the like.
And who says I can't throw in a couple of hundred forged votes into the can/box?
The problem both methods, electronic and paper have is how integral are the processes behind them. So while your statement is true, the same can be said about paper.
The real answer is to do both. Although it assumes the constituants can read, most do in North America. When a person votes, their eVote goes off site immediately, and it prints the paper ballot. The ballot can then be manually verified by the voter and put in the box. Then count both, and they should agree. If not, the vote was flawed somehow. But this would mean political zealots can't cook the voting process so easily. It is why it isn't a popular solution.
The best part, we can get the preliminary results 5 minutes after the poll closes closing the windows of fraud. In this day and age we shouldn't have to think about who wins for 3 days or hours. Rememeber Florida?
It seems to me that the only people who don't take wikipedia seriously are those who feel threatened by it. Employees of traditional encyclopedias and M$ shills who want to keep selling Encarta, and so on.
Sure beats miopic views from one author, one professor and one source. Better yet, it can evolve to beome more complete.
Couldn't agree more with your statement "only people who don't take wikipedia seriously are those who feel threatened by it".
Mars doesn't have the same gravity that the Earth does, nor does it have a magnetic field to stop incoming solar wind. The water could have evaporated, and since it is a lighter element (than CO2, which is most of Mars' atmosphere) it could have just blown away.
So does that mean Earth is just loosing H2O more slowly than did Mars? Comforting, sort of.
But I get a kick out of astro-science. We know so little about the universe it isn't funny. We assume the universe is growing, while it may be that we are shrinking as Earths density is changing however minutely. We assume life elsewhere is not there as we cannot prove it exists. Yet we continue to have wars over religeous control of people, yes, that is what all the killing is about in the middle east. Think, what if mankind put the same effort used in planetarty civil war to peacefully get to the stars? It would be truly awesome.
Unfortunately, mankind is not yet mature enough for the stars. Maybe in 10,000 years if we don't annialate ourselves first.
I'm about to take my RHCE next month. RedHat can't die NOW. That's unfair.
Don't worry, Red Hat will not die next month as has been predicted for years, in fact it may do the opposite. If Oracle starts shipping Red Hat into corporate I/T it is also an endorsement of the technology. Thus, open doors even in close minded Microsoft shops.
No one in corporatate America is looking at what China and India are doing with Linux. In fact, if you do getting a RHCE gives you a future. And contrary to noisy minority, Linux is doing quite well.
Look to the future when spending so much time learning. Sooner or later China is going to ship database applances, then ERP/CRM appliances and the Microsoft server high maintenace clutter we see today will shrink. This will follow the same market curves as did toasters, cloths, cars, TVs, monitors and computer chips.
Further, your learning skills that are portable to alternatives like SUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, the BSDs and others. You even have the option of creating your own distro.
Vista is nice. It certainly (IMHO) not worth an upgrade, and I'm not buying a new PC. I don't see any benefits. I see it breaking my music, or making it harder for me to play it.
Shhhhhhhhush.... don't let the cat out of the bag. All those non-Vista compliant machines are going down in price and make good Linux systems for cheap!
Agreed. But maybe I agree because of some Microsoft code:
/* code fork from DOS 3.10 */
/* printf("Welcome to MSDOS 3.11"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 1.0"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 2.0"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 3.1"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 3.11"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 95"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows NT 3.0"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows NT 3.51"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 98"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows CE"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows Me"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows NT 4.0"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 2000"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows XP"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 2003"); */
printf("Welcome to Windows Vista");// next 40 billion
Yawn. Maybe the the next version will be Hasta or LA. Then like CE + ME + NT it will add up to something like CEMENT.
Open-source software is expensive if you want a commercial support contract (because you are asking a professional to spend a lot of time learning).
How is this going to be different say for any new commercial or open source product a company has or is about to get? Learning in I/T is a given (unless you want to be RIFed or outsourced) or only hire chair mushrooms. But in any case, learning challenges follow both open and closed source.
Closed-source software doesn't have the function that you want, and you cannot fix it to add the funcion that you want.
Mind you, you did hit on the big advantage of closed source, you cannot practically change it so irrational management can't push you into the "Whirlpool of death by uncontrolled customization" that can occur. But the flip is you are at the mercy of the company you deal with, including their aquistion costs, being aquired by someone else, support pricing, new learning employees etc., you must expect "vendor lockin".
Why does this surprise anyone? Propriety software traditionally undergoes a formalized, designed testing process.
Not always. Perhaps some companies do but it is far from a universal practice. More the common practice is to whip it out as fast as possible and patch it later. Even if a company has a QA, they are often just documenting the bugs found for future releases. Understaffed and politically managed developers may take years to fix issues. This is very common and I suggest the norm in business grade software.
Most seasoned systems administrators with a software development background know which companies tend to be better and worse. And it is no different with Open Source, some projects are better than others.
Me too, as how can this statement even be verified:
The study found that no open source project had fewer software defects than proprietary code. In fact, the analysis demonstrated that proprietary code is, on average, more than five times less buggy.
This might give a hint on what is up:
Working with the Homeland Security Dept. and Stanford University, my firm, Coverity...
The US government politicians control government, including Homeland Security, this we know and we all know of Microsoft soft and hard contributions to politicians.
But the key is in what Coverity is trying to sell, a code analyzer.
I guess we cannot blame Micro$oft (directly) for this, but their results on IIS and Outlook were suspiciously not posted. Or perhaps they didn't even look at Micro$oft? In fact, we don't know what commercial source it was compared to do we?
Another flawed and cooked report for sure. Certainly the "dissenting opinions already exist" link in the original post has more merit.
Trouble is there are a lot of people out there that worship Micro$oft. You are right about the marketing hype being just that, hype to get everyone to buy it like minion sheep. Maybe an effort to pump and dump an otherwise stagnant (MSFT) stock as it really hasn't done much in the last 5 years. I would have rather owned RHAT. I might even buy Vista it if I can get a legal copy with office for $19 like those in Taiwan or China. But I am not going to hold my breath.
For me, I have maybe 6-7 years left in the I/T business to retirement, then I will be free of Windoze. Windoze will go down in history as the operating system that made white collar America unproductive but entertained.
Now it is time for the Micro$oft trolls to mod this troll down. But remember a troll is also about an individual's perspective.
You will not last long in Uppsala Sweden, the taxes are high and language barriers will prevent you from getting a date or a job. Forget about visa issues.
...This is a recurring theme again and again with hurricane Katrina, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bin Laden, the economy, energy prices, the whole torture thing and recently with senator Foley...
Ok, add in Pearl Harbor, Trojan horse etc as this is not a new theme.
I guess the Washington Post is now just another cheap tabloid as there is really no news here. Does it mean they really knew anything at all?
I predict:
Microsoft will have a zero day exploit shortly
Some US or UN solder will be killed soon
A bomb will go off in the US sometime
Someone will die in a car accident today
Someone will be murdered today
An airplane will go down sometime
A ship will sink sooner or later
All of the above are near certian or occur.
Unfortunately you need details, all of who, what, when, how and where. A person is not culpable unless you know the details or can reasonably get them.
The biggest flaw I have with the current administration is how on this planet can Bin Laden hide and live for so long.
The reason is that wireless devices must comply with wireless standards. The firmware plays an important part in creating this compatibility.
Theo said:
We would also like Intel to GRANT us distribution rights for the binary firmwares of their 3 wireless chipsets.
Theo is not asking to change the firmware, just the API to use it and the clear right to distribute it. So what am I missing with your statement?
The hacking community already knows which chips are not FCC compliant (even with their labels saying so) and can allow power and frequency changes. In fact, some commercial products already do the in band frequency changing because they don't want normal 54g wireless to talk to their equipment. Trust me, it does not work unnamed video surveillance company.
This is like banning how to use hammers because they might be used illegally. Clearly this is a "excuse" used buy manufacturers such as Intel and Broadcom.
Now what I might believe, be it simple fear or collusion; is that they want their drivers included with Microsoft products and are worried that Microsoft stating anti-FOSS rhetoric will in fact hurt their chances of this. Be it real or not.
So I don't buy their products until they can get OSS support. Even when I purchase a XP machine today, I know I will run Linux on it someday. So I only buy hardware that best matches Linux, OpenBSD and Solaris (x86). I find OpenBSDs hardware platform guide (http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html) also to be a good reference for hardware that is reliable, stable and generally works the best for all OSes.
Intel's behavior won't affect the market one way or another.
Coincidentally, I am shopping for a PC that will run open source software from day one. I was pondering is it to be a core duo or a X2?
I think Intel can scratch me as a future customer. I am not going to email, I am going to quietly just buy the AMD system in the next few days as I figure market share will have the biggest impact.
Take another brand I will not buy, Broadcom. Their reference design uses Linux for wireless, they even license it but will not open source it. This is quite hypocritical to say the least.
I guess some of these manufacturers are intimidated by Microsoft perhaps not including their drivers if they support open sources. Supporting open sources will cost these companies almost nothing in fact benefit them greatly. They can make the chips and hardware and get the open community to provide first class drivers.
3COM used to distribute everything you needed to know to program their cards, even some sample source. Coincidentally they became the most popular when this practice was in place.
So there are those that will not buy open source unfriendly products. Even Microsoft fanboys should head this as in the future it could mean they can't recycle the PC for anything but the OS they purchased it with.
Shouldn't DRM be uncrackable even with access to source code? Just like open source encryption methods?
If it was designed by a competent organization, was truly meant to be unbreakable; such an encryption method would be quite effective and difficult to break even with the source code . Except for the low tech method below, quite effective.
The real issue is current DRM methods are not really encryption at all. Look at current methods of encryption as encoding. Encoding is different than encryption as all encoding does is translating the source data from its native state to a seemingly obfuscated state using a known formula.
In more laymen's terms current encoding methods are like locking your car door with a piece of cellophane tape leaving the keys inside.
But no mater how effective DRM becomes, there is nothing to stop the low tech way of copying the tunes. Simply play it off a licensed machine and record it going to analog speakers storing it unencoded and unencrypted. Yes, some loss occurs but not that much if done correctly. Probably in part why they didn't spend the money on real encryption in the first place. It is too easy to bypass.
I gave up the paper copy of PC World in 1995, and many others since. I used to get 8-10 mags a month but I am now down to one. The reason is simple, the internet has replaced the paper. Articles are now timely and places like Slashdot make it even more timely. And if I want the article at work I don't have to go home to get it, just remember where I saw it.
I do have a grievance with some old time online publishers with their insatiable popups and "overadvertised" presentations. I understand the need for advertising but some go far too far with it. For those, I just don't visit as their content tends also to be fluffy. I figure my limits to online avertising is simple, use the side bars and an odd block in the middle, but if represents much more that 25% of the screen space the article has to be extra good interest to keep me there.
I even go as far as to block some well known advertising sites too. I do it as at one point or another they have load music or get too pervasive.
And I subscribe to very few. In fact, Slashdot is the only one right now. Slashdot is what people think, not just one persons opinion which blows away miopic articles payed for by vendors. It is part of Slashdots success.
Slashdot Mirror
Scientists thought that the area around Chernobyl would be a wasteland for decades. Instead, it's now a flourishing haven for wildlife (at least, according to Wikipedia).
That is because humans moved out for good cause and nature is working its way back. Maybe a few new species will spring up in that area in the next few hundred thousand years.
Earth will heal itself in a few million years post mankind. People are like a cancer to this planet. At some point there will not be much non-human life left, and then man will decline as a species and perhaps a smaller, more efficient socially evolved model will replace him.
What I find to be self evident is that the real issue is simply to many people, not enough planet.
More truth to that than so many realize. Research to show past, present and future growth curves in human population of places like Africa, China, India and it is a mathematical fact mass starvation is shortly inevitable unless we have one wild assed big WWW III. It will make Ethiopa look like nothing.
Yet we do nothing to prevent it. How can we? Are we going to shoot someone for having too many babies? Pull out the nukes because many contries will ignore any international law and populate until they bump elbows and cry for aid? Likely not. The suffering of starvation will happen to many.
Maybe scour the bottom of the ocean for seawead and algee. There will eventually be nothing left. And then mankind will be forced to either annialate himself with technology or intelectually and socially evolve. This will hit long before we see welcomed global warming up North.
Think Novell won't fuck this up again? Wrong.
Your quite right on this. Novell bought XIMIAN, a key component to really making a serious run at Microsoft's desktop but when it came to marketing it they fell right down without so much as gasp. Self destructive.
results are better networking between Solaris systems and Windows.
Does than mean IPec on Windows now works? Heck, I have BSD, 2 Linux and 2 Solaris doing IPSec natively and together but getting Microsoft Windows OS to do it is a nighmare nemisis. But not holding my breath. But it is about the only reason to upgrade to Vista I can think of.
Meaning, I wasn't getting paid enough any more to deal with all of the shit I had to deal with.
You sure hit the nail on the head with that one. While politicians are golfing, and while sales people ate lobster we crafted for crap wages. When things looked good programmers were the first to go. Sort of dumb really. But shows the point that good programming personnel were expendable and abused.
There is not a shortage of programmers, there is a shortage of skilled functional honest management and pay.
Once Windows automatically downloads IE7 next month, then compare downloads. IE7's stats will skyrocket next month when it's deployed to home users. (Most companies are delaying the roll-out for additional testing. So expect usage rates to slowly increase over the next year.)
Knowing Microsoft they timed this so that they could be the last in and change the default browser back to IE.
Time for me to turn off automatic updates so that my only XP system is (relatively) stable. (others are 2 solaris, 3 Suse, 1 RH).
Thanks for the heads up!
How many Windows installs were installed in 2 days when Win98 was released?
That was 8 years ago and people were desperate to get off of 95. In converting to human terms it happened in the 1800's. Or at least last century - litterally. Second point, I bet it costs a lot less! Next, didn't even have to leave my seat and upgraded in seconds including download time. A whole lot less painful than Windows 98 or IE updates.
BTW, the new 2.0 version looks good.
And who says I can't throw in a couple of hundred forged votes into the can/box?
The problem both methods, electronic and paper have is how integral are the processes behind them. So while your statement is true, the same can be said about paper.
The real answer is to do both. Although it assumes the constituants can read, most do in North America. When a person votes, their eVote goes off site immediately, and it prints the paper ballot. The ballot can then be manually verified by the voter and put in the box. Then count both, and they should agree. If not, the vote was flawed somehow. But this would mean political zealots can't cook the voting process so easily. It is why it isn't a popular solution.
The best part, we can get the preliminary results 5 minutes after the poll closes closing the windows of fraud. In this day and age we shouldn't have to think about who wins for 3 days or hours. Rememeber Florida?
It seems to me that the only people who don't take wikipedia seriously are those who feel threatened by it. Employees of traditional encyclopedias and M$ shills who want to keep selling Encarta, and so on.
Sure beats miopic views from one author, one professor and one source. Better yet, it can evolve to beome more complete.
Couldn't agree more with your statement "only people who don't take wikipedia seriously are those who feel threatened by it".
So does that mean Earth is just loosing H2O more slowly than did Mars? Comforting, sort of.
But I get a kick out of astro-science. We know so little about the universe it isn't funny. We assume the universe is growing, while it may be that we are shrinking as Earths density is changing however minutely. We assume life elsewhere is not there as we cannot prove it exists. Yet we continue to have wars over religeous control of people, yes, that is what all the killing is about in the middle east. Think, what if mankind put the same effort used in planetarty civil war to peacefully get to the stars? It would be truly awesome.
Unfortunately, mankind is not yet mature enough for the stars. Maybe in 10,000 years if we don't annialate ourselves first.
I'm about to take my RHCE next month. RedHat can't die NOW. That's unfair.
Don't worry, Red Hat will not die next month as has been predicted for years, in fact it may do the opposite. If Oracle starts shipping Red Hat into corporate I/T it is also an endorsement of the technology. Thus, open doors even in close minded Microsoft shops.
No one in corporatate America is looking at what China and India are doing with Linux. In fact, if you do getting a RHCE gives you a future. And contrary to noisy minority, Linux is doing quite well.
Look to the future when spending so much time learning. Sooner or later China is going to ship database applances, then ERP/CRM appliances and the Microsoft server high maintenace clutter we see today will shrink. This will follow the same market curves as did toasters, cloths, cars, TVs, monitors and computer chips.
Further, your learning skills that are portable to alternatives like SUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, the BSDs and others. You even have the option of creating your own distro.
Vista is nice. It certainly (IMHO) not worth an upgrade, and I'm not buying a new PC. I don't see any benefits. I see it breaking my music, or making it harder for me to play it.
Shhhhhhhhush.... don't let the cat out of the bag. All those non-Vista compliant machines are going down in price and make good Linux systems for cheap!
Agreed. But maybe I agree because of some Microsoft code:
/* code fork from DOS 3.10 */
/* printf("Welcome to MSDOS 3.11"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 1.0"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 2.0"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 3.1"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 3.11"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 95"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows NT 3.0"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows NT 3.51"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 98"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows CE"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows Me"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows NT 4.0"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 2000"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows XP"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 2003"); */
// next 40 billion
printf("Welcome to Windows Vista");
Yawn. Maybe the the next version will be Hasta or LA. Then like CE + ME + NT it will add up to something like CEMENT.
Open-source software is expensive if you want a commercial support contract (because you are asking a professional to spend a lot of time learning).
How is this going to be different say for any new commercial or open source product a company has or is about to get? Learning in I/T is a given (unless you want to be RIFed or outsourced) or only hire chair mushrooms. But in any case, learning challenges follow both open and closed source.
Closed-source software doesn't have the function that you want, and you cannot fix it to add the funcion that you want.
Mind you, you did hit on the big advantage of closed source, you cannot practically change it so irrational management can't push you into the "Whirlpool of death by uncontrolled customization" that can occur. But the flip is you are at the mercy of the company you deal with, including their aquistion costs, being aquired by someone else, support pricing, new learning employees etc., you must expect "vendor lockin".
Not always. Perhaps some companies do but it is far from a universal practice. More the common practice is to whip it out as fast as possible and patch it later. Even if a company has a QA, they are often just documenting the bugs found for future releases. Understaffed and politically managed developers may take years to fix issues. This is very common and I suggest the norm in business grade software.
Most seasoned systems administrators with a software development background know which companies tend to be better and worse. And it is no different with Open Source, some projects are better than others.
Me too, as how can this statement even be verified:
This might give a hint on what is up:
The US government politicians control government, including Homeland Security, this we know and we all know of Microsoft soft and hard contributions to politicians.
But the key is in what Coverity is trying to sell, a code analyzer.
I guess we cannot blame Micro$oft (directly) for this, but their results on IIS and Outlook were suspiciously not posted. Or perhaps they didn't even look at Micro$oft? In fact, we don't know what commercial source it was compared to do we?
Another flawed and cooked report for sure. Certainly the "dissenting opinions already exist" link in the original post has more merit.
Trouble is there are a lot of people out there that worship Micro$oft. You are right about the marketing hype being just that, hype to get everyone to buy it like minion sheep. Maybe an effort to pump and dump an otherwise stagnant (MSFT) stock as it really hasn't done much in the last 5 years. I would have rather owned RHAT. I might even buy Vista it if I can get a legal copy with office for $19 like those in Taiwan or China. But I am not going to hold my breath.
For me, I have maybe 6-7 years left in the I/T business to retirement, then I will be free of Windoze. Windoze will go down in history as the operating system that made white collar America unproductive but entertained.
Now it is time for the Micro$oft trolls to mod this troll down. But remember a troll is also about an individual's perspective.
You will not last long in Uppsala Sweden, the taxes are high and language barriers will prevent you from getting a date or a job. Forget about visa issues.
Ok, add in Pearl Harbor, Trojan horse etc as this is not a new theme.
I guess the Washington Post is now just another cheap tabloid as there is really no news here. Does it mean they really knew anything at all?
I predict:
All of the above are near certian or occur.
Unfortunately you need details, all of who, what, when, how and where. A person is not culpable unless you know the details or can reasonably get them.
The biggest flaw I have with the current administration is how on this planet can Bin Laden hide and live for so long.
will just not buy Intel for my OpenBSD box's.
Since all my boixes will eventually run OpenBSD either via VMWare or directly as the main OS, I will not buy Intel or any mobo with Broadcom on it.
You said:
Theo said:
Theo is not asking to change the firmware, just the API to use it and the clear right to distribute it. So what am I missing with your statement?
The hacking community already knows which chips are not FCC compliant (even with their labels saying so) and can allow power and frequency changes. In fact, some commercial products already do the in band frequency changing because they don't want normal 54g wireless to talk to their equipment. Trust me, it does not work unnamed video surveillance company.
This is like banning how to use hammers because they might be used illegally. Clearly this is a "excuse" used buy manufacturers such as Intel and Broadcom.
Now what I might believe, be it simple fear or collusion; is that they want their drivers included with Microsoft products and are worried that Microsoft stating anti-FOSS rhetoric will in fact hurt their chances of this. Be it real or not.
So I don't buy their products until they can get OSS support. Even when I purchase a XP machine today, I know I will run Linux on it someday. So I only buy hardware that best matches Linux, OpenBSD and Solaris (x86). I find OpenBSDs hardware platform guide (http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html) also to be a good reference for hardware that is reliable, stable and generally works the best for all OSes.
Intel's behavior won't affect the market one way or another.
Coincidentally, I am shopping for a PC that will run open source software from day one. I was pondering is it to be a core duo or a X2?
I think Intel can scratch me as a future customer. I am not going to email, I am going to quietly just buy the AMD system in the next few days as I figure market share will have the biggest impact.
Take another brand I will not buy, Broadcom. Their reference design uses Linux for wireless, they even license it but will not open source it. This is quite hypocritical to say the least.
I guess some of these manufacturers are intimidated by Microsoft perhaps not including their drivers if they support open sources. Supporting open sources will cost these companies almost nothing in fact benefit them greatly. They can make the chips and hardware and get the open community to provide first class drivers.
3COM used to distribute everything you needed to know to program their cards, even some sample source. Coincidentally they became the most popular when this practice was in place.
So there are those that will not buy open source unfriendly products. Even Microsoft fanboys should head this as in the future it could mean they can't recycle the PC for anything but the OS they purchased it with.
Why not fireballmer (Couldn't resist)
If it was designed by a competent organization, was truly meant to be unbreakable; such an encryption method would be quite effective and difficult to break even with the source code . Except for the low tech method below, quite effective.
The real issue is current DRM methods are not really encryption at all. Look at current methods of encryption as encoding. Encoding is different than encryption as all encoding does is translating the source data from its native state to a seemingly obfuscated state using a known formula.
In more laymen's terms current encoding methods are like locking your car door with a piece of cellophane tape leaving the keys inside.
But no mater how effective DRM becomes, there is nothing to stop the low tech way of copying the tunes. Simply play it off a licensed machine and record it going to analog speakers storing it unencoded and unencrypted. Yes, some loss occurs but not that much if done correctly. Probably in part why they didn't spend the money on real encryption in the first place. It is too easy to bypass.
I gave up the paper copy of PC World in 1995, and many others since. I used to get 8-10 mags a month but I am now down to one. The reason is simple, the internet has replaced the paper. Articles are now timely and places like Slashdot make it even more timely. And if I want the article at work I don't have to go home to get it, just remember where I saw it.
I do have a grievance with some old time online publishers with their insatiable popups and "overadvertised" presentations. I understand the need for advertising but some go far too far with it. For those, I just don't visit as their content tends also to be fluffy. I figure my limits to online avertising is simple, use the side bars and an odd block in the middle, but if represents much more that 25% of the screen space the article has to be extra good interest to keep me there.
I even go as far as to block some well known advertising sites too. I do it as at one point or another they have load music or get too pervasive.
And I subscribe to very few. In fact, Slashdot is the only one right now. Slashdot is what people think, not just one persons opinion which blows away miopic articles payed for by vendors. It is part of Slashdots success.