On Wed, Jul 03, 2002 at 03:50:10AM +0000, John Hinsley wrote:
> On Wednesday 03 July 2002 01:34, Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 02, 2002 at 04:17:04PM -0700, Tim Rowledge wrote:
> > > Take a look at
> > > http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/301-350/00320_global_civil_society.ht
> > >ml and consider what we might be able to do with Squeak. But do it quickly
> > > before it is unlawful...
> 
> >
> > What we need is an alternative hardware platform.  Fortunately, it is
> > likely that such a thing will still exist even if AMD and Intel bend
> > over for MS.  China makes a lot of the motherboards nowadays, and they
> > are properly distrustful of the NSA/CIA/FBI backdoors that are almost
> > certainly built into Windows.  With over a billion people, they're a
> > big enough market that VIA will probably produce a version of their
> > x86 CPU without MS DRM built in.
> 
> > > PS No joke. If we can't do _something_ to stop this sort of utter evil
> > > _we_ will be the piglet rotating on the spit. Forever.
> 
> Agreed. For a little horror lurking inside the EULA for Windows Media Player, 
> see this only slightly hysterical article in the Register:
> 
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25956.html
> 
> More generally, I'm starting to think that M$ are going nuts. (Perhaps the 
> "Linux is cancer, M$ is tertiary syphillis" tag wasn't far wrong?) Even given 
> that they could convince Intel and AMD and Cyrix -- 

Intel and AMD don't need convincing, they're quite enthusiastic.  Is Cyrix still
making chips?

> all the x86 manufacturers 
> -- to shoot themselves in the foot, what's to stop Sun and Apple (and Jecel!) 
> turning up the hardware production lines and offering a far better 
> board/chipset to replace the whole Wintel PC concept? 

Well, Sun isn't competing in the PC space, so nothing is stopping them
from doing so.  However, if Macintoshes were suddenly unable to read
Word files, receive email from Hotmail users, etc., then Apple would
be dead.  I'm sure that Steve Jobs will do his best to avoid being
sucked into Palladium, but he may eventually have no choice.

Joshua


> Of course, one thing is for sure -- such hardware will probably run just about 
> any OS you like, providing it isn't Windows.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> John
>  
> 
>