[Beowulf] Vacation...

[Robert G. Brown]

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:rgb at phy.duke.edu