And one way they achieved compatibility with Ubuntu was to pull out the modem! As far as I can see, there's no way to configure a modem into the non-laptop models.
I think maybe you meant "Arbeit Macht Frei". At least that's how I felt about the only two times I've entered a Wal-Mart.
That said, I don't think it will hurt Dell's brand to sell there -- at any rate the injury will be less than that to Starbucks' brand for putting outlets inside Target stores.
My problem is that, IF THE PRICE IS THE SAME, I might as well get the Windows Version and install Linux myself. That way I'll have the Windows license, too.
Yeah, that would seem to be in your self-interest in the short term. Except that Microsoft will be using your money to destroy the future of Linux. And that's against your long-term self-interest.
Call me Mr. Obvious, but have you tried pouring the pressed coffee through a filter? I always rinse paper filters before use to lessen that yucky flavor they impart.
It may be bad for any Linux Guru's around making them go prematurely bald by having them rip their hair out when some Dell customer asks them 'Wheres Internet Explorer?' or 'Does this thing have google?'
This is the real challenge for Dell -- making sure that people who buy a non-Windows PC have realistic expectations. They might do this by having a linux portal for their sales page, which will then mostly attract people who already know about linux and what to expect.
But Ubuntu has two major challenges. A. Making sure that newbies who buy Dell/Ubuntu have a happy experience. B. Making more newbies aware that Ubuntu exists, and what to realistically expect from it.
A. is a holistic distro/community/communications challenge, and is already embedded in Ubuntu from top to bottom more than any other distro (except Linspire I guess). B. is pretty much all marketing, and could be done partly through Dell itself, with splashy pages introducing Ubuntu and explaining how it is not Windows.
Or Dell and Ubuntu could decide to punt on attracting to newbies, and just go with the linux sales portal approach, and just ride the existing ramp of slowly increasing linux desktop marketshare. That would avoid creating disappointed newbies and destroying linux's reputation by overselling it too early. But I find it hard to believe that would be worth Dell's investment.
So it leaves me curious to see if Dell will actually *market* Ubuntu, or just make it an experts-only option.
Bloatware and spyware on a Linux system is something I had hoped I'd never get to see. The same goes for anti-spyware. If Dell includes them it will trigger a dirty vicious cycle.
Never fear. If Dell ships Ubuntu with crap, then the community will quickly come up with a linux version of the PC Decrapifier" that people use to remove the bloatware from windows-based Dell PCs.
Of course, I'd rather see Dell not ship the crap to begin with. But if the crap lets Dell sell me the box for 10% less, I'll take it with the crap and remove it myself. Or just wipe the box and install my distro of choice.
Up until now I was expecting that when Dell rolls out their PCs with Linux pre-loaded later this month, the price for the same system with Windows would only be about $30 more. And for that little difference, I thought, of course you might as well buy Windows just-in-case, and dual boot linux.
I think it's very healthy to be suspicious about datamining. Personally I contribute to the EFF and ACLU over concern for privacy issues, and do my part to keep privacy on the radar of my congresscritters. Obviously technology is making it cheap and convenient for the gov't or ChoicePoint to amass data on the citizenry like never before, and the potential downsides are enormous (with Fascism being the worst case).
But if you get a chance to listen to the podcast, the Kaiser guy gives some examples of where datamining just within Kaiser has produced some extremely useful results. (I don't think he uses the term "datamining", btw.) For one thing, pharmaceuticals go through very limited testing by their manufacturers. And once they get FDA approval, there is not much follow-up.
Remember Vioxx, which the FDA pulled off the market recently? It was Kaiser's data that showed it was causing harm across their patient population. And that's not the only example.
Personally I'm much more concerned about your last point, privacy, than I am about possible fraud. Having been through cancer care for a family member, record portability would be such a win that it outweighs any fraud issues, IMHO. And actually I'd tend to think technology would help improve your letterhead scenario. (Records can be digitally signed, etc.)
But preserving privacy is going to take some heavy lifting, especially if we want to enable organizations to share data. Centralized databases of any kind make me shudder.
The UK is ahead of the US on technologizing healthcare, and will probably provide some case studies on what to do and what not to do. Given their penchant for being monitored by cameras and such, we probably can't expect them to be a shining example in the privacy department.
For the US healthcare system, technology has a huge role to play in improving things. Lots of low-hanging fruit, and an important mission given the state of things:
- Efficiency. The inefficiency of paper is pretty obvious. Nuff said.
- Record portability. Again, an obvious win to anyone who has been referred to see specialists and must complete a separate history for *each one*. Truly ridiculous.
- Reduced error in prescriptions. Many people get multiple prescriptions from different doctors who aren't fully aware of everything the patient is getting. And sometimes these combinations are dangerous.
- Datamining. This is the really really big one. And it's not about marketing to patients. It's about being able to learn from all that data out there that is currently locked up in paper and kept in separate silos (not shared between organizations).
The Commonwealth Club had a recent talk given by George Halvorson, CEO of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals. It includes a lot on how Kaiser is trying to improve their healthcare system using technology. Here is the podcast , worth a listen if this topic interests you.
One take-away I did get from Mr. Halvorson is that healthcare in the US won't be saved by technology, but the data tells us what would save it. The majority of costs come from just a few chronic illnesses, including heart-disease and diabetes (but not cancer, which is only 5% surprisingly). These diseases are largely preventable, but it will require widespread behaviour change in America: diet and exercise, I hate to say.
Today, the flavoring is still done with kola nuts and the "spent" coca leaf. In the United States, there is only one plant (in New Jersey) authorized by the Federal Government to grow the coca plant for Coca-Cola syrup manufacture.
Copyright law is the mechanism by which GPL works, but SOFTWARE PATENTS are the real issue here, as Bruce explains very well in his talk.
The "protection racket" is about the patents that MS implies Linux infringes on. And as Bruce points out, pretty much any non-trivial software probably infringes on someone else's software patents.
That's because software patents in the USA have been doled out too easily. They are absurd.
What's worse, Bruce explains, there is actually a _penalty_ for trying to figure out if your own software infringes. Because if you can be shown to have infringed on a patent you actually know about, the damages are tripled.
Small companies and individual software developers are at the biggest risk. Because big companies have portfolios of patents that they routinely cross-license, thereby protecting themselves from each other. The small guys are locked out. And of course, little guys don't have the money to maintain a legal defense even when they are totally in the right, forcing them to settle.
I agree, but Linux missed the Win98 upgrade window entirely. I hope it catches the tail end of the WinXP upgrade window.
Of four different Win98/ME computers I helped manage, only one (mine) is now primarily Linux-only, and one is about half-time Linux.
Case 1: mom, WinME, 500MHz Celeron. Usage was mainly AOL and basic digital photo album stuff. Linux could easily cover her hardware and application needs, but I couldn't wean her from the AOL interface. So we replaced WinME with a $550 Dell/Vista box. She's happy.
Case 2: girlfriend, Win98, 1.6GHz P4. Heavy Excel user. Semi-technical, and able to learn new things. I had her dual-boot Fedora for over a year. She used Fedora happily for browsing whenever Win98 was acting up (often). She was the most likely candidate for a switch to Linux. But she complained bitterly about OpenOffice usability. In the end, I had to upgrade her PC to XP. She's fine with paying $150 for the MS Office upgrade. For her, this is a good value. She also needs to edit PDF files, and I couldn't find a Linux replacement for the Adobe app she uses. Otherwise she was impressed with Linux stability, and didn't need much help to figure out basic web/email/office.
Case 3: a non-techie, older user, with Win98 on a 1GHz Duron. Like mom, she mostly uses AOL and photo albums. Like the other PCs, 98 has become unstable over time. I installed Ubuntu as a dual-boot for my own maintainance purposes, and she loves it because Ubuntu is totally stable and the system feels fast. She's still a little confused about how to find her files and get to her AOL mailbox. Learning new stuff is hard for her. She boots Ubuntu about half the time, still using Win98 to get to AOL or user her old photo album tool. My recommendation for her is to upgrade to XP, but she doesn't want to spend any money on this system. Ubuntu is making the difference in her case because of cost and ease of use, and her limited needs.
Case 4: Me. A programmer, Linux-only for years now. I occasionally miss gaming, and the other day my DSL went down and I remembered I had no driver for my softmodem. I had to boot 98 to get online. But Linux far outweighs the minuses for me.
Linux has allowed 2 of us to keep our old hardware. XP did that for one. OpenOffice hitches nixed Linux for one.
Oddly, Win98's increasing cruftiness (rather than any other need) is what spurred hardware and/or software upgrades in all cases. Otherwise Win98 still meets almost all the needs of every user.
This FUD again? On systems I've spec'ed recently, I can manually de-configure *all of that garbage* except the AOL trial. There's NO F'ing way AOL pays Dell enough to cover the cost of Vista Home Premium.
They can tell the EU "see, we're not a monopoly in the office software space".
They can continue to sell MS Word to the increasing number of governments who are committed to making public documents available in a non-proprietary format.
What if the price differnce is spent in making sure the linux works on everything? I mean Dell forks a Distro, setd up maintainers, brands it themselves and you have the option of Dell linux or MS windows for the same price?
From a recent post by a Dell guy on the Fedora Advisory Board list, I get the impression that Dell isn't in a hurry to fork a distro even just for re-branding. And that's juuuust fine by me. I don't care what distro they offer, so long as the hardware can be made to work with any Linux distro.
If that means a Dell repo with some proprietary drivers, that's fine with me (for now). I wouldn't want Dell to offer ATI or nvidia hardware only for Windows configurations.
#3. The price cannot be higher than the equivalent Windows box.
Yes. Ideally, I should be able to toggle the Dell order-customization wizard between Windows and Linux with exactly the same hardware and see the price drop before my eyes.
But failing that, it would be great to have a mostly-similar hardware but completely supported-on-Linux box at several different price points. Last time I checked that was true for the $700 range, but not the $500 deals from Dell we're used to. (Could just be that the Vista Tax hasn't been crushed by Moore's Law yet. I'll check again next week.)
In a comment on his blog, the author said the number of "key volunteers" (those with over 50 patches) who produced the 27% of total patches is 125. He doesn't look at those who produced less than 50 patches. And that's 27% of not just Firefox patches:
The analysis focused on Gecko, Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla Application Suite, NSS, Toolkit and "Other Apps".
I'd just love to see how many paid MS employees for IE and Outlook there are, and what their patch rates are. (Red meat: how many did it take to copy Mozilla's tabs for IE7? Better a couple of years late than never, eh?)
Average consumers won't even hear about this. Just like in the California settlement, I don't know anyone who actually filed. Two people I know started the process and were intimidated by the paperwork because they didn't have receipts for computers they bought years before and were afraid of being audited. (They both had legitimately purchased copies of eligible MS products.)
Hopefully the money that doesn't go to the lawyers will at least go to schools or something.
Slashdot Mirror
And one way they achieved compatibility with Ubuntu was to pull out the modem!
As far as I can see, there's no way to configure a modem into the non-laptop models.
The latest ELER episode cover's Dell's Linux Support efforts.
I think maybe you meant "Arbeit Macht Frei". At least that's how I felt about the only two times I've entered a Wal-Mart.
That said, I don't think it will hurt Dell's brand to sell there -- at any rate the injury will be less than that to Starbucks' brand for putting outlets inside Target stores.
Yeah, that would seem to be in your self-interest in the short term. Except that Microsoft will be using your money to destroy the future of Linux. And that's against your long-term self-interest.
Actually the Torque engine is a relic from Tribes 2. Everybody hold down your space bar to ski between cubicles!
Call me Mr. Obvious, but have you tried pouring the pressed coffee through a filter? I always rinse paper filters before use to lessen that yucky flavor they impart.
This is the real challenge for Dell -- making sure that people who buy a non-Windows PC have realistic expectations. They might do this by having a linux portal for their sales page, which will then mostly attract people who already know about linux and what to expect.
But Ubuntu has two major challenges. A. Making sure that newbies who buy Dell/Ubuntu have a happy experience. B. Making more newbies aware that Ubuntu exists, and what to realistically expect from it.
A. is a holistic distro/community/communications challenge, and is already embedded in Ubuntu from top to bottom more than any other distro (except Linspire I guess). B. is pretty much all marketing, and could be done partly through Dell itself, with splashy pages introducing Ubuntu and explaining how it is not Windows.
Or Dell and Ubuntu could decide to punt on attracting to newbies, and just go with the linux sales portal approach, and just ride the existing ramp of slowly increasing linux desktop marketshare. That would avoid creating disappointed newbies and destroying linux's reputation by overselling it too early. But I find it hard to believe that would be worth Dell's investment.
So it leaves me curious to see if Dell will actually *market* Ubuntu, or just make it an experts-only option.
Never fear. If Dell ships Ubuntu with crap, then the community will quickly come up with a linux version of the PC Decrapifier" that people use to remove the bloatware from windows-based Dell PCs.
Of course, I'd rather see Dell not ship the crap to begin with. But if the crap lets Dell sell me the box for 10% less, I'll take it with the crap and remove it myself. Or just wipe the box and install my distro of choice.
Up until now I was expecting that when Dell rolls out their PCs with Linux pre-loaded later this month, the price for the same system with Windows would only be about $30 more. And for that little difference, I thought, of course you might as well buy Windows just-in-case, and dual boot linux.
But if paying Microsoft means that I would be contributing to the death-by-lawsuit of free software, forget it. I'll buy the Ubuntu-only pre-load from Dell, and donate the difference to the Software Freedom Law Center or the The Linux Foundation's Linux Legal Defense Fund.
Microsoft should compete with free software on the merits, not on the threat of their legal department or the FUD of their marketing department.
I think it's very healthy to be suspicious about datamining. Personally I contribute to the EFF and ACLU over concern for privacy issues, and do my part to keep privacy on the radar of my congresscritters. Obviously technology is making it cheap and convenient for the gov't or ChoicePoint to amass data on the citizenry like never before, and the potential downsides are enormous (with Fascism being the worst case).
But if you get a chance to listen to the podcast, the Kaiser guy gives some examples of where datamining just within Kaiser has produced some extremely useful results. (I don't think he uses the term "datamining", btw.) For one thing, pharmaceuticals go through very limited testing by their manufacturers. And once they get FDA approval, there is not much follow-up.
Remember Vioxx, which the FDA pulled off the market recently? It was Kaiser's data that showed it was causing harm across their patient population. And that's not the only example.
Personally I'm much more concerned about your last point, privacy, than I am about possible fraud. Having been through cancer care for a family member, record portability would be such a win that it outweighs any fraud issues, IMHO. And actually I'd tend to think technology would help improve your letterhead scenario. (Records can be digitally signed, etc.)
But preserving privacy is going to take some heavy lifting, especially if we want to enable organizations to share data. Centralized databases of any kind make me shudder.
The UK is ahead of the US on technologizing healthcare, and will probably provide some case studies on what to do and what not to do. Given their penchant for being monitored by cameras and such, we probably can't expect them to be a shining example in the privacy department.
For the US healthcare system, technology has a huge role to play in improving things. Lots of low-hanging fruit, and an important mission given the state of things:
- Efficiency. The inefficiency of paper is pretty obvious. Nuff said.
- Record portability. Again, an obvious win to anyone who has been referred to see specialists and must complete a separate history for *each one*. Truly ridiculous.
- Reduced error in prescriptions. Many people get multiple prescriptions from different doctors who aren't fully aware of everything the patient is getting. And sometimes these combinations are dangerous.
- Datamining. This is the really really big one. And it's not about marketing to patients. It's about being able to learn from all that data out there that is currently locked up in paper and kept in separate silos (not shared between organizations).
The Commonwealth Club had a recent talk given by George Halvorson, CEO of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals. It includes a lot on how Kaiser is trying to improve their healthcare system using technology. Here is the podcast , worth a listen if this topic interests you.
One take-away I did get from Mr. Halvorson is that healthcare in the US won't be saved by technology, but the data tells us what would save it. The majority of costs come from just a few chronic illnesses, including heart-disease and diabetes (but not cancer, which is only 5% surprisingly). These diseases are largely preventable, but it will require widespread behaviour change in America: diet and exercise, I hate to say.
Quoth the maven:
Finally this thread is getting somewhere.
Copyright law is the mechanism by which GPL works, but SOFTWARE PATENTS are the real issue here, as Bruce explains very well in his talk.
The "protection racket" is about the patents that MS implies Linux infringes on. And as Bruce points out, pretty much any non-trivial software probably infringes on someone else's software patents.
That's because software patents in the USA have been doled out too easily. They are absurd.
What's worse, Bruce explains, there is actually a _penalty_ for trying to figure out if your own software infringes. Because if you can be shown to have infringed on a patent you actually know about, the damages are tripled.
Small companies and individual software developers are at the biggest risk. Because big companies have portfolios of patents that they routinely cross-license, thereby protecting themselves from each other. The small guys are locked out. And of course, little guys don't have the money to maintain a legal defense even when they are totally in the right, forcing them to settle.
Software patents in the US are the problem.
I agree, but Linux missed the Win98 upgrade window entirely. I hope it catches the tail end of the WinXP upgrade window.
Of four different Win98/ME computers I helped manage, only one (mine) is now primarily Linux-only, and one is about half-time Linux.
Case 1: mom, WinME, 500MHz Celeron. Usage was mainly AOL and basic digital photo album stuff. Linux could easily cover her hardware and application needs, but I couldn't wean her from the AOL interface. So we replaced WinME with a $550 Dell/Vista box. She's happy.
Case 2: girlfriend, Win98, 1.6GHz P4. Heavy Excel user. Semi-technical, and able to learn new things. I had her dual-boot Fedora for over a year. She used Fedora happily for browsing whenever Win98 was acting up (often). She was the most likely candidate for a switch to Linux. But she complained bitterly about OpenOffice usability. In the end, I had to upgrade her PC to XP. She's fine with paying $150 for the MS Office upgrade. For her, this is a good value. She also needs to edit PDF files, and I couldn't find a Linux replacement for the Adobe app she uses. Otherwise she was impressed with Linux stability, and didn't need much help to figure out basic web/email/office.
Case 3: a non-techie, older user, with Win98 on a 1GHz Duron. Like mom, she mostly uses AOL and photo albums. Like the other PCs, 98 has become unstable over time. I installed Ubuntu as a dual-boot for my own maintainance purposes, and she loves it because Ubuntu is totally stable and the system feels fast. She's still a little confused about how to find her files and get to her AOL mailbox. Learning new stuff is hard for her. She boots Ubuntu about half the time, still using Win98 to get to AOL or user her old photo album tool. My recommendation for her is to upgrade to XP, but she doesn't want to spend any money on this system. Ubuntu is making the difference in her case because of cost and ease of use, and her limited needs.
Case 4: Me. A programmer, Linux-only for years now. I occasionally miss gaming, and the other day my DSL went down and I remembered I had no driver for my softmodem. I had to boot 98 to get online. But Linux far outweighs the minuses for me.
Linux has allowed 2 of us to keep our old hardware. XP did that for one.
OpenOffice hitches nixed Linux for one.
Oddly, Win98's increasing cruftiness (rather than any other need) is what spurred hardware and/or software upgrades in all cases. Otherwise Win98 still meets almost all the needs of every user.
This FUD again? On systems I've spec'ed recently, I can manually de-configure *all of that garbage* except the AOL trial. There's NO F'ing way AOL pays Dell enough to cover the cost of Vista Home Premium.
Considering how Real ID is the USA's beta tagging program.
This article's handwaving BS answer to that question is what convinced me that it's pure Apple propaganda.
Microsoft benefits from this too.
They can tell the EU "see, we're not a monopoly in the office software space".
They can continue to sell MS Word to the increasing number of governments who are committed to making public documents available in a non-proprietary format.
Being as how Alienware is now owned by Dell and all.
From a recent post by a Dell guy on the Fedora Advisory Board list, I get the impression that Dell isn't in a hurry to fork a distro even just for re-branding. And that's juuuust fine by me. I don't care what distro they offer, so long as the hardware can be made to work with any Linux distro.
If that means a Dell repo with some proprietary drivers, that's fine with me (for now). I wouldn't want Dell to offer ATI or nvidia hardware only for Windows configurations.
Dell executives have donated $291,470 to Republicans and only $40,818 to Democrats.
Why would I want my pro-Linux dollars shooting me in the foot?
Yes. Ideally, I should be able to toggle the Dell order-customization wizard between Windows and Linux with exactly the same hardware and see the price drop before my eyes.
But failing that, it would be great to have a mostly-similar hardware but completely supported-on-Linux box at several different price points. Last time I checked that was true for the $700 range, but not the $500 deals from Dell we're used to. (Could just be that the Vista Tax hasn't been crushed by Moore's Law yet. I'll check again next week.)
I'd just love to see how many paid MS employees for IE and Outlook there are, and what their patch rates are. (Red meat: how many did it take to copy Mozilla's tabs for IE7? Better a couple of years late than never, eh?)
Average consumers won't even hear about this. Just like in the California settlement, I don't know anyone who actually filed. Two people I know started the process and were intimidated by the paperwork because they didn't have receipts for computers they bought years before and were afraid of being audited. (They both had legitimately purchased copies of eligible MS products.)
Hopefully the money that doesn't go to the lawyers will at least go to schools or something.