Sorry to abandon such a productive and longrunning team rant in midstream, but I will be departing for elsewhere on vacation "soon" and may only read the list sporadically until August (if at all). It has been ever so productive, though -- I now UNDERSTAND why Vista is so slow and what it is doing in there. Putting a content-nanny into the hardware layer in a mix of nonexistent hardware and software protocols that expect it to be there -- I'm amazed that home systems run at all!
If this "flies", it will have really, really profound consequences in the consumer marketplace and indirectly to both linux and beowulfery. The core of the whole scheme relies on cooperating hardware, with new nanny-firmware and driver information that must be kept secret, making it essentially impossible to write open source drivers for it, period. In fact, one reason Microsoft may have opted to "commit suicide" in this way is that if they get away with it, Linux is dead. They will have succeeded in co-opting the driver layer in such a way that open source solutions literally cannot function. We should all be very scared, and should all be raising holy hell with our congresspeople about this. This is de facto legislation by executive decision on the part of a single monopoly, precisely the kind of thing that I personally have feared for well over a decade now as Microsoft's market power has gradually transformed into political power. In the meantime, I hope y'all have a productive period, and anybody who wants to take over the 'bot job for a while, enjoy...;-) rgb -- Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
