you fools! if the feds had simply said "you don't have to pay any more," people would have been happy enough. giving back the $18 was a huge mistake on their part, however. it's a small enough amount that nobody really cares, yet had they kept it, they could have done something useful with it. like not raise another tax. or buy a few new toilet seats. or take the illuminati jews from the center of the earth out for a steak dinner.
Exactly. No large vendor wants the headache of tech support and the legal issues that accompany even one version* of linux. Hence, we're not likely to see Dell or anyone make a big push in the OSS direction.
Perhaps a better angle would be for the OSS vendors to take this matter into their own hands. For example, RedHat buys a Dell PC, puts RH on it, and you get OS support from them and hardware support from Dell, or via some deal between the companies. Point is, one company alone won't make OSS dektops happen.
*(give them redhat, they'll want ubuntu and support...)
this reminds me of the CBDTPA (consumer broadband and digital television promotion act), wherein an intrinsically impossible system was proposed for encryption/copy protection to be implemented at every stage of media delivery.
The point that no one seems to get is that to be perceived by humans, media must be analog at some point. be it with pirating movies with a camcorder, tape recording FM radio, or capturing a stream, there is no way around it. period. the riaa is clearly just getting frantic and ignoring the obvious (or banking on ignorance?).
Isn't part of the beauty of the internet that it's so distributed? This whole story makes it sound as if there are a couple of huge servers in a closet somewhere "controlling the internet." Seems to me that the more distributed we can make not only the individual content hosts, but also the hosts controlling the thing, the more reliable, redundant, and fast we can make the internet.
One thing to be wary of is that, if this comes to be, the control will be in the hands not of the "techies," but of the politicians, just as in the U.S. Thus, don't think that a horde of do-gooder non-U.S. techies will be the internet's savior. I fear it will be the same story whatever happens, because politics always win over tech.
"On the desktop, Dell has been installing Linux on its Precision workstations for a couple years."
On the business desktop, maybe. When I bought a new Dell Dimension recently, and politely asked for no operating system, I was politely told that that coulnd't be done due to OEM restrictions.
So, the servers and workstations are a great start, because they partnered and support it. Only a similar concept for home users has a chance of succeeding, not this half-assed half-offering.
Though I am quite opposed to the U.S. taking a position as the world's watchdog, there is a lot of merit to the U.S.'s ownership claim here; we did invent the thing, after all. Doesn't the U.S. government, as the developer of the technology, have a right to its own "intellectual property?"
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<obligatory>In Mother Russia, the Egg Lays You!</obligatory>
you fools! if the feds had simply said "you don't have to pay any more," people would have been happy enough. giving back the $18 was a huge mistake on their part, however. it's a small enough amount that nobody really cares, yet had they kept it, they could have done something useful with it. like not raise another tax. or buy a few new toilet seats. or take the illuminati jews from the center of the earth out for a steak dinner.
Exactly. No large vendor wants the headache of tech support and the legal issues that accompany even one version* of linux. Hence, we're not likely to see Dell or anyone make a big push in the OSS direction. Perhaps a better angle would be for the OSS vendors to take this matter into their own hands. For example, RedHat buys a Dell PC, puts RH on it, and you get OS support from them and hardware support from Dell, or via some deal between the companies. Point is, one company alone won't make OSS dektops happen. *(give them redhat, they'll want ubuntu and support...)
this reminds me of the CBDTPA (consumer broadband and digital television promotion act), wherein an intrinsically impossible system was proposed for encryption/copy protection to be implemented at every stage of media delivery. The point that no one seems to get is that to be perceived by humans, media must be analog at some point. be it with pirating movies with a camcorder, tape recording FM radio, or capturing a stream, there is no way around it. period. the riaa is clearly just getting frantic and ignoring the obvious (or banking on ignorance?).
Isn't part of the beauty of the internet that it's so distributed? This whole story makes it sound as if there are a couple of huge servers in a closet somewhere "controlling the internet." Seems to me that the more distributed we can make not only the individual content hosts, but also the hosts controlling the thing, the more reliable, redundant, and fast we can make the internet. One thing to be wary of is that, if this comes to be, the control will be in the hands not of the "techies," but of the politicians, just as in the U.S. Thus, don't think that a horde of do-gooder non-U.S. techies will be the internet's savior. I fear it will be the same story whatever happens, because politics always win over tech.
"On the desktop, Dell has been installing Linux on its Precision workstations for a couple years." On the business desktop, maybe. When I bought a new Dell Dimension recently, and politely asked for no operating system, I was politely told that that coulnd't be done due to OEM restrictions. So, the servers and workstations are a great start, because they partnered and support it. Only a similar concept for home users has a chance of succeeding, not this half-assed half-offering.
Though I am quite opposed to the U.S. taking a position as the world's watchdog, there is a lot of merit to the U.S.'s ownership claim here; we did invent the thing, after all. Doesn't the U.S. government, as the developer of the technology, have a right to its own "intellectual property?"