I bet if eve sent out her own noise, she'd be able to tell what resistors the other two where using by measuring the reflections and be reasonably undetectable while she did it. She might even be able to use the noise either person sent out to do the same thing and remain passive.
I always thought the value of quantum cryptography was that the states were truly discrete and impossible to measure without at the same time changing them and making the intruding presence known. The scary part about quantum crypto is that I personally don't understand quantum mechanics well enough to feel comfortable with it, and worse, I don't think quantum physicists really do either.
I did that. I'll be the first to be fired. I found my coworkers were quite eager to go off and train our replacements. But at least when I starve on the streets, I'll have my integrity.
However the RIAA has a tremendously larger budget than most ISPs (ignoring AT&T, Time Warner, etc.) This is just another action that you need lawyers to go to court to resist, and more protection money you have to pay to keep the mafia away. It makes it harder for ISPs who want to do the right thing, to be able to do so and still pay their employees.
I'm not sure, it seems to me that what is right, and what has left, has turned 90 degrees. I used to be on the right, but now I think both parties are bug-fuck insane. The republicans seem to have gone totally fascist. Another 8 years of that shit and we're going back 200 years to a religious monarchy. The democrats are mostly the same, but don't especially like the religion side of things. I think they'll lead us to just a plain old bureacratic dictatorship, that eventually will collapse under several tons of BS.
No one is out there for personal freedom. No one is out there who can say that the job of the government is to protect citizens from both enemies abroad, and the domestic ones: primarily corporations, especially those with large legal budgets. Really none of the candidates are afraid of the citizens much anymore, we're just tools in a phony holy war of the inconsequential.
I agree, and I live in Austin, TX and will go home and open my router right away. Bad IT infrastructure should NOT be an excuse for the government to run into your house and seize your materials, no matter how heinous the crime. Most of us on/. are smart enough to know how to protect ourselves, but I can easily see less technically savy people using commercially available products get framed for things because they don't understand their technology.
There are 4 open wireless networks in range of my house, what are the odds that someone has a printer hooked up? How hard would it be for me to send kiddy porn on their network, and then print it out on their printer? Hell, if I had those inclinations, I could use the neighbors wifi for kiddie porn, right from the comfort of my own home. Risky sure, but if this is the level of police investigation in the matter, it seems like my neighbors would serve for me!
The sad thing is, it wouldn't have been hard for them to establish this persons guilt without a doubt.
The part of his comment that had the teeth tho was making them non-transferable, and only ownable by a person. Thus the company can't take ownership. I think this is actually a reasonably good idea, as it allows individuals to have incentive to innovate, regardless of where they work. Right now if I invent faster-than-light travel or something else earth shattering, my company owns it. I'll get my paycheck plus the $20K patent bonus we get (if it is approved by both the business AND lawyers, very hard to do) once, and that'll be all. My company however, will get a lot of money. Thus although I consider myself a creative and innovative person, any ideas and thoughts I have are usually lost in 16 hour workdays to pay the mortgage and put food on the table.
CORPORATIONS never innovate anything at all, they just fund the results. Individuals do the thinking and develop the ideas.
So while at one point arguing accessing RAM copies of their game client is wrong (copyright violation!), their own software is accessing OTHER programs in RAM and sending information about them back to blizzard.
I think the logical thing to do here is to allow Blizzard to succeed, and then bankrupt itself under it's own stupidity.
I think she thought of that, but because she can make a sizeable amount of money by giving birth to children and selling them off, she's worried that her reproductive system is in danger of being taxed. This article is a metaphor, trying to distinguish usage for "fun" versus "profit" as a straw man. Based on the outcome, she may indeed "seek more lay".
Now having seen the picture next to her review, I think regardless of how tax laws are interpreted, she is free from any tax liability whatever.
His position is completely rational for those of us who have worked with Broadcom. Even their closed source stuff is often junk and requires tremendous effort to work around, with poor support and impossible management. Even after signing NDAs and GETTING chip specs or sample code, you're still left out in the dark.
Anything that manages to get out in the free world needs to stay there, and any reasonable person will do his best to ensure it does. Further, using the GPL as a weapon against Broadcom, forcing them to open up their specs is really to the collective advantage of everyone.
Be careful with the term "better players". There's a standard, and then there are bugs. One could call IE a "better browser" because it handles degenerate HTML, but in fact that actually led to a reduction in quality of content, not browsers.
All I'm trying to say is if the ps2 or ps3 is the "reference" player, and they handle all legal streams ok, then there is nothing at all wrong with them and you should just buy a ps3 and not worry about it. If someone releases non-compliant blu-ray, then they need to recall their damn disc. I'm not clear on what failed to work on the ps2, but it doesn't make it a better player if it plays broken content, it only encourages more broken content.
Best ISP I've ever had, without question. It's sad they had to sell out to the enemy when the forces of Dubya more or less ruined their business by allowing monopolies exclusive access to our wires. I hope one day they can rise again (w/o best buy...ick).
I think his point is that while Garth may not have wanted to do business with iTunes, but saw fit to do it with other providers, the likely end goal of all this is that unless you have the hardware that works with the service that he DID choose, he is hurt, and you are hurt, and the only happy people are the middlemen who'd rather you had to buy all of them. You're then down to this game-console type business model, where you eventually are giving HW away to prop up some bogus content business you locked down and marginalized by contract. Restricting the market to a few really big, powerful players is still not a free market.
Any time you put a monopoly in the system, capitalism breaks and the only person that benefits is the one with the most money.
I actually know a lot of people in the hi-tech industry who do not want an internet connection at home. They don't: a)want their kids to use it (pr0n, etc.), b)they don't want their employers expecting them to bring their work home with them, c) they think it will erode "the family", d) they want absolute control over what comes in to their house, etc.
Agree with them or not, personalities like this transcend backwards bible thumping rednecks. You'll find people in all walks of life who will adopt unexpected positions on technology.
Of course you can cast a pointer to a physical address, you cannot cast one to a PowerPC DCR, it has no physical address. The only way to access them are via special opcodes.
You're correct, and it's my preferred way of dealing with them. It was a fast example, but: 1) Note you still have "__asm__" in there, that causes the compiler to emit that instruction 2) One of the more common reasons to be accessing DCRs in the first place, is for example, setting up the cache, or doing some "pre-C code" initialization 3) Many special instructions or chip registers require more than a simple one liner depending on the variety of PPC. You'll end up with a multiple step bound define for accessing an address and a data registers, both within a DCR to cause a move to occur.
One way or another, asm is unavoidable. It's one thing to say "eh, i'll learn it OTJ if I need it", but it's a lot to learn and a totally different system of thinking than the current OOP abstract and expand methodology that's successful at the higher level. Understanding how hardware actually works is not strictly the domain of hardware engineers, a lot of us cannot code at all. I happen to do it a lot, but I don't really want to...it's just that we have so few good FW people (in every place I've worked).
Now off to service one of said FW people, who doesn't understand an ISR...
Most people I know tend to prefer to use the GNU tool chain. Sometimes it's more of a hindrance not to use the mfg's compiler (Cypress PSOC for example), but usually they are not standard, quirky and expensive to boot... if you can use GNU, I personally would. Plus, working in a bigger company, you tend to do the same sorts of things for different platforms, and have a working set of high-level code you'd rather not debug all over again; just rewrite the HW specific stuff {boot vector, device manipulation code, MMU stuff, etc.}, but keep your c code, makefile magic, etc. That said, it's 90% of the job to do the low level stuff and schedules being what they are, you don't want to waste any time rewriting the high level stuff just because your compiler handles #define differently.
ISRs are easy since they're fundamentally just a function pointer and sometimes a special return opcode. High-level languages get all but the return code, and it's common enough that they have extensions to cope with it. However most processors have instructions and operations that occur that do not have high-level language counterparts. High-level languages are algorithm oriented by definition. They don't understand the processor so much and use a subset of it's instruction set they need to do their work. Accessing that missing piece of the instruction set is where assembly is not just to geek-out, you just have no choice. Worse, quite often the exact order of instructions, the number of NOOPs etc, is so important you must put it in by hand. All that stuff high level languages and ultimately applications rely upon (virtual memory, HW abstraction APIs, etc.} requires assembly to manipulate the processor. No one should go through that if they're building a web app, for example, but that doesn't mean the modern world has thrown such things by the wayside, quite the opposite.
My point is performance is not the only reason to use assembly, it's often not even a good one. Smarter people have debated that in flamewars for 20 years, it rages on. At some point or another assembly becomes the ONLY way to do certain things, you either do it explicitly in your code, or through other trickery. If you do not understand assembly language, and you do not understand processors and hardware, you cannot hope to do that work...precluding you from some very nicely paying firmware jobs and OS development jobs, which from my vantage point actually DOES have a shortage of labor. It seems to me, if you're a student trying to get a wide background in computing, and computing architecture, you still must learn assembly for one processor or another. Even if for nothing other than the understanding you gain of how processors work.
You're writing software for a low-speed or low-memory chip for an embedded system (e.g. one of the PIC chips). Such chips are used either because they are cheap or because they need very little power. You can often program these chips in some variant of C, but if you need that last drop of performance, you use assembly.
You're writing software for any chip, on any platform, that requires direct hardware level access, e.g. device drivers, boot code, or core-features. No machine, no matter how fast can be programmed exclusively in C. For example, in C you simply cannot a DCR on a PowerPC. You need a special instruction w/o a high-level language equivalent. You can't cast a pointer to a physical address, it is not mapped to physical memory. You also cannot enable, or disable instruction cache from any C function call. The list goes on. There are a number of places it is totally impossible to use a high level language to do things.
There are a whole lot of these out there, in the consumer, enterprise, military, etc.
Are you nuts? How could any reasonably educated person answer "no"? How could a slashdot editor allow this to be posted?
I do it every single day I go to work and it's not even my job. You cannot, now or ever, ignore that hardware exists beneath all those layers of abstraction, obfuscation and OS APIs or BSPs.
C is great, I love it. I'd never write something in asm that I did not have to write, but it's not hard to find situations where it is absolutely essential. You simply cannot do some things in C that you can in assembly, especially as we go multi-core, especially as we use different architectures (like PowerPCs and their DCRs). Every time you send some screwball-over-http packet, somewhere down there, someone wrote a device driver that at a minimum blocks up your packet and refills transmit fifo's in response to ISRs, a lot of which cannot be done without precise control over hardware. And that's just computing hardware, you cannot forget the incredible number of embedded devices out there on which you can't even get a java interpreter to fit. Yes, processors are now fast enough that writing complex routines in assembly is not necessary but for many things, you MUST do it.
Every game console, set top box, computer, car, guided missile...hell even some toasters has assembly in there somewhere. If anything the growth of embedded development has made assembly, and processor architecture more important than ever.
EyePee addresses are traceable only to whatever you have that terminates them, such as a wireless cable/router, or at worst, your computer. They are not stamped inside your head or buried in an RFID in your skin such that they necessarily place your hands on a keyboard/mouse such that you're necessarily engaged with whatever activity was occurring on that link.
In all probability they asked her if she was using her computer at such and such time, and she said yes, allowing it into court. That they managed to get the logs from Google is another matter entirely, but I suspect Google had no choice.
I'm one of those rare freaks out there that actually uses the cell phone for *gasp* emergencies and quick phone calls
I'm with you. That's how I use my cell now. But I see immense value in data over cell at work, but cost is the issue at the moment. My employer effectively censors my access to MOST websites, whether they are genuinely illicit or just offensive to their corporate heads (rumor is slashdot was censored at one point before I was here, but employee rage fixed it), or just being viewed as "anti-productivity" (webmail, etc.). I spend 12-14 hours a day at work, thanks to the benefits of offshoring, I need to conduct some personal activities at work to maintain my existance. Unrestricted data communications would be great.
$150/month? No freakin way, I can't afford it, and it's neither reliable nor fast enough to be worth it. With higher latencies I can continue my current shadow IT methods. $50/month assuming it works perfectly is better. Until then...eh.
Or maybe Dell knows, like we all do, that customers want cheap PC hardware and are either going to pirate the OS, or very optimistically, already own it and simply need new HW. It's been noted a number of places that as cheap as Dell is, it's still cheaper to build your own, mostly because there's $0 in SW costs. In spite of/. popular opinion, cheap computers are exactly what many of us continue to want and put a $0 value on the bells and whistles of that fruit company.
Finally, it's not a great secret that Vista isn't exactly flying off the shelves, perhaps Dell wants to become OS agnostic so as not to be seen by third parties as helping MS. There's another perenially troubled HW maker that happens to make a great OS, that many of us would like to see on PC hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet if eve sent out her own noise, she'd be able to tell what resistors the other two where using by measuring the reflections and be reasonably undetectable while she did it. She might even be able to use the noise either person sent out to do the same thing and remain passive.
I always thought the value of quantum cryptography was that the states were truly discrete and impossible to measure without at the same time changing them and making the intruding presence known. The scary part about quantum crypto is that I personally don't understand quantum mechanics well enough to feel comfortable with it, and worse, I don't think quantum physicists really do either.
That said I can't RTFA because the server died...
I did that. I'll be the first to be fired. I found my coworkers were quite eager to go off and train our replacements. But at least when I starve on the streets, I'll have my integrity.
...then every teenage boy is going to jail.
However the RIAA has a tremendously larger budget than most ISPs (ignoring AT&T, Time Warner, etc.) This is just another action that you need lawyers to go to court to resist, and more protection money you have to pay to keep the mafia away. It makes it harder for ISPs who want to do the right thing, to be able to do so and still pay their employees.
I'm not sure, it seems to me that what is right, and what has left, has turned 90 degrees. I used to be on the right, but now I think both parties are bug-fuck insane. The republicans seem to have gone totally fascist. Another 8 years of that shit and we're going back 200 years to a religious monarchy. The democrats are mostly the same, but don't especially like the religion side of things. I think they'll lead us to just a plain old bureacratic dictatorship, that eventually will collapse under several tons of BS.
No one is out there for personal freedom. No one is out there who can say that the job of the government is to protect citizens from both enemies abroad, and the domestic ones: primarily corporations, especially those with large legal budgets. Really none of the candidates are afraid of the citizens much anymore, we're just tools in a phony holy war of the inconsequential.
I agree, and I live in Austin, TX and will go home and open my router right away. Bad IT infrastructure should NOT be an excuse for the government to run into your house and seize your materials, no matter how heinous the crime. Most of us on /. are smart enough to know how to protect ourselves, but I can easily see less technically savy people using commercially available products get framed for things because they don't understand their technology.
There are 4 open wireless networks in range of my house, what are the odds that someone has a printer hooked up? How hard would it be for me to send kiddy porn on their network, and then print it out on their printer? Hell, if I had those inclinations, I could use the neighbors wifi for kiddie porn, right from the comfort of my own home. Risky sure, but if this is the level of police investigation in the matter, it seems like my neighbors would serve for me!
The sad thing is, it wouldn't have been hard for them to establish this persons guilt without a doubt.
You can on the XPSs. In fact the highest end xps still doesn't work with vista (esp with raid 0 and the 8800 nvidia card).
The part of his comment that had the teeth tho was making them non-transferable, and only ownable by a person. Thus the company can't take ownership. I think this is actually a reasonably good idea, as it allows individuals to have incentive to innovate, regardless of where they work. Right now if I invent faster-than-light travel or something else earth shattering, my company owns it. I'll get my paycheck plus the $20K patent bonus we get (if it is approved by both the business AND lawyers, very hard to do) once, and that'll be all. My company however, will get a lot of money. Thus although I consider myself a creative and innovative person, any ideas and thoughts I have are usually lost in 16 hour workdays to pay the mortgage and put food on the table.
CORPORATIONS never innovate anything at all, they just fund the results. Individuals do the thinking and develop the ideas.
So while at one point arguing accessing RAM copies of their game client is wrong (copyright violation!), their own software is accessing OTHER programs in RAM and sending information about them back to blizzard.
I think the logical thing to do here is to allow Blizzard to succeed, and then bankrupt itself under it's own stupidity.
4) He's trying for the republican ticket in '08. I think he just might get it, too.
I think she thought of that, but because she can make a sizeable amount of money by giving birth to children and selling them off, she's worried that her reproductive system is in danger of being taxed. This article is a metaphor, trying to distinguish usage for "fun" versus "profit" as a straw man. Based on the outcome, she may indeed "seek more lay".
Now having seen the picture next to her review, I think regardless of how tax laws are interpreted, she is free from any tax liability whatever.
His position is completely rational for those of us who have worked with Broadcom. Even their closed source stuff is often junk and requires tremendous effort to work around, with poor support and impossible management. Even after signing NDAs and GETTING chip specs or sample code, you're still left out in the dark.
Anything that manages to get out in the free world needs to stay there, and any reasonable person will do his best to ensure it does. Further, using the GPL as a weapon against Broadcom, forcing them to open up their specs is really to the collective advantage of everyone.
Be careful with the term "better players". There's a standard, and then there are bugs. One could call IE a "better browser" because it handles degenerate HTML, but in fact that actually led to a reduction in quality of content, not browsers.
All I'm trying to say is if the ps2 or ps3 is the "reference" player, and they handle all legal streams ok, then there is nothing at all wrong with them and you should just buy a ps3 and not worry about it. If someone releases non-compliant blu-ray, then they need to recall their damn disc. I'm not clear on what failed to work on the ps2, but it doesn't make it a better player if it plays broken content, it only encourages more broken content.
Best ISP I've ever had, without question. It's sad they had to sell out to the enemy when the forces of Dubya more or less ruined their business by allowing monopolies exclusive access to our wires. I hope one day they can rise again (w/o best buy...ick).
I think his point is that while Garth may not have wanted to do business with iTunes, but saw fit to do it with other providers, the likely end goal of all this is that unless you have the hardware that works with the service that he DID choose, he is hurt, and you are hurt, and the only happy people are the middlemen who'd rather you had to buy all of them. You're then down to this game-console type business model, where you eventually are giving HW away to prop up some bogus content business you locked down and marginalized by contract. Restricting the market to a few really big, powerful players is still not a free market.
Any time you put a monopoly in the system, capitalism breaks and the only person that benefits is the one with the most money.
That and the part while she can don new trends as people give them to her, underneath she's only mildly attractive to sex starved geeks.
Seriously, they could have found a hotter chick...
I actually know a lot of people in the hi-tech industry who do not want an internet connection at home. They don't: a)want their kids to use it (pr0n, etc.), b)they don't want their employers expecting them to bring their work home with them, c) they think it will erode "the family", d) they want absolute control over what comes in to their house, etc.
Agree with them or not, personalities like this transcend backwards bible thumping rednecks. You'll find people in all walks of life who will adopt unexpected positions on technology.
Of course you can cast a pointer to a physical address, you cannot cast one to a PowerPC DCR, it has no physical address. The only way to access them are via special opcodes.
You're correct, and it's my preferred way of dealing with them. It was a fast example, but:
1) Note you still have "__asm__" in there, that causes the compiler to emit that instruction
2) One of the more common reasons to be accessing DCRs in the first place, is for example, setting up the cache, or doing some "pre-C code" initialization
3) Many special instructions or chip registers require more than a simple one liner depending on the variety of PPC. You'll end up with a multiple step bound define for accessing an address and a data registers, both within a DCR to cause a move to occur.
One way or another, asm is unavoidable. It's one thing to say "eh, i'll learn it OTJ if I need it", but it's a lot to learn and a totally different system of thinking than the current OOP abstract and expand methodology that's successful at the higher level. Understanding how hardware actually works is not strictly the domain of hardware engineers, a lot of us cannot code at all. I happen to do it a lot, but I don't really want to...it's just that we have so few good FW people (in every place I've worked).
Now off to service one of said FW people, who doesn't understand an ISR...
Most people I know tend to prefer to use the GNU tool chain. Sometimes it's more of a hindrance not to use the mfg's compiler (Cypress PSOC for example), but usually they are not standard, quirky and expensive to boot... if you can use GNU, I personally would. Plus, working in a bigger company, you tend to do the same sorts of things for different platforms, and have a working set of high-level code you'd rather not debug all over again; just rewrite the HW specific stuff {boot vector, device manipulation code, MMU stuff, etc.}, but keep your c code, makefile magic, etc. That said, it's 90% of the job to do the low level stuff and schedules being what they are, you don't want to waste any time rewriting the high level stuff just because your compiler handles #define differently.
ISRs are easy since they're fundamentally just a function pointer and sometimes a special return opcode. High-level languages get all but the return code, and it's common enough that they have extensions to cope with it. However most processors have instructions and operations that occur that do not have high-level language counterparts. High-level languages are algorithm oriented by definition. They don't understand the processor so much and use a subset of it's instruction set they need to do their work. Accessing that missing piece of the instruction set is where assembly is not just to geek-out, you just have no choice. Worse, quite often the exact order of instructions, the number of NOOPs etc, is so important you must put it in by hand. All that stuff high level languages and ultimately applications rely upon (virtual memory, HW abstraction APIs, etc.} requires assembly to manipulate the processor. No one should go through that if they're building a web app, for example, but that doesn't mean the modern world has thrown such things by the wayside, quite the opposite.
My point is performance is not the only reason to use assembly, it's often not even a good one. Smarter people have debated that in flamewars for 20 years, it rages on. At some point or another assembly becomes the ONLY way to do certain things, you either do it explicitly in your code, or through other trickery. If you do not understand assembly language, and you do not understand processors and hardware, you cannot hope to do that work...precluding you from some very nicely paying firmware jobs and OS development jobs, which from my vantage point actually DOES have a shortage of labor. It seems to me, if you're a student trying to get a wide background in computing, and computing architecture, you still must learn assembly for one processor or another. Even if for nothing other than the understanding you gain of how processors work.
You're writing software for a low-speed or low-memory chip for an embedded system (e.g. one of the PIC chips). Such chips are used either because they are cheap or because they need very little power. You can often program these chips in some variant of C, but if you need that last drop of performance, you use assembly.
You're writing software for any chip, on any platform, that requires direct hardware level access, e.g. device drivers, boot code, or core-features. No machine, no matter how fast can be programmed exclusively in C. For example, in C you simply cannot a DCR on a PowerPC. You need a special instruction w/o a high-level language equivalent. You can't cast a pointer to a physical address, it is not mapped to physical memory. You also cannot enable, or disable instruction cache from any C function call. The list goes on. There are a number of places it is totally impossible to use a high level language to do things.
There are a whole lot of these out there, in the consumer, enterprise, military, etc.
Are you nuts? How could any reasonably educated person answer "no"? How could a slashdot editor allow this to be posted?
I do it every single day I go to work and it's not even my job. You cannot, now or ever, ignore that hardware exists beneath all those layers of abstraction, obfuscation and OS APIs or BSPs.
C is great, I love it. I'd never write something in asm that I did not have to write, but it's not hard to find situations where it is absolutely essential. You simply cannot do some things in C that you can in assembly, especially as we go multi-core, especially as we use different architectures (like PowerPCs and their DCRs). Every time you send some screwball-over-http packet, somewhere down there, someone wrote a device driver that at a minimum blocks up your packet and refills transmit fifo's in response to ISRs, a lot of which cannot be done without precise control over hardware. And that's just computing hardware, you cannot forget the incredible number of embedded devices out there on which you can't even get a java interpreter to fit. Yes, processors are now fast enough that writing complex routines in assembly is not necessary but for many things, you MUST do it.
Every game console, set top box, computer, car, guided missile...hell even some toasters has assembly in there somewhere. If anything the growth of embedded development has made assembly, and processor architecture more important than ever.
EyePee addresses are traceable only to whatever you have that terminates them, such as a wireless cable/router, or at worst, your computer. They are not stamped inside your head or buried in an RFID in your skin such that they necessarily place your hands on a keyboard/mouse such that you're necessarily engaged with whatever activity was occurring on that link.
In all probability they asked her if she was using her computer at such and such time, and she said yes, allowing it into court. That they managed to get the logs from Google is another matter entirely, but I suspect Google had no choice.
I'm one of those rare freaks out there that actually uses the cell phone for *gasp* emergencies and quick phone calls
I'm with you. That's how I use my cell now. But I see immense value in data over cell at work, but cost is the issue at the moment. My employer effectively censors my access to MOST websites, whether they are genuinely illicit or just offensive to their corporate heads (rumor is slashdot was censored at one point before I was here, but employee rage fixed it), or just being viewed as "anti-productivity" (webmail, etc.). I spend 12-14 hours a day at work, thanks to the benefits of offshoring, I need to conduct some personal activities at work to maintain my existance. Unrestricted data communications would be great.
$150/month? No freakin way, I can't afford it, and it's neither reliable nor fast enough to be worth it. With higher latencies I can continue my current shadow IT methods. $50/month assuming it works perfectly is better. Until then...eh.
Or maybe Dell knows, like we all do, that customers want cheap PC hardware and are either going to pirate the OS, or very optimistically, already own it and simply need new HW. It's been noted a number of places that as cheap as Dell is, it's still cheaper to build your own, mostly because there's $0 in SW costs. In spite of /. popular opinion, cheap computers are exactly what many of us continue to want and put a $0 value on the bells and whistles of that fruit company.
Finally, it's not a great secret that Vista isn't exactly flying off the shelves, perhaps Dell wants to become OS agnostic so as not to be seen by third parties as helping MS. There's another perenially troubled HW maker that happens to make a great OS, that many of us would like to see on PC hardware.