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Just heard today that all the comp. Hewlet/Packard is shipping to China will have the linux os. The question is...is this a Chinese demand or a choice of H/P?

Chinese demand -- government decided to run Linux (like a lot governments do nowadays )

Go China
Go China
Go China!

Oh wait. That's right. DIRTY COMMUNIST DEVILS! Give 'em nothing except MS-DOS 1.0!

it's a chinese demand woodchip.
they don't consider windows to be secure enough.

(a lot of australian government "stuff" has been switched to linux for the same reason (among another important reason* ), the users don't care, they use it just as easy as windows.

*also they save hundreds of thousands of dollars)

Man, I love it when everyone else says "Linux is cheaper is more secure" and MS says "Windows is cheaper and safer". HA.

The Linux source is open. As a communist government with the desire to exert paranoid control over its people and "protect" them from the outside world, wouldn't you want to look at every bit of the code?

Especially now, with the FBI trying to get a new law into place that will force companies like Microsoft and AOL to create backdoors specifically for FBI eavesdropping. Couple that with the Patriot Act's poo-poo'ing on that whole nonsensical "permission of a judge" thing, and you've got 1984! That should be concerning not just to China, but to us as well.

In other news, HP has already been marketing desktops equipped with Mandrake Linux for some time underneath the radar.

MS won't do anything til it's too late. then we can watch them scramble to figure out a solution, which usually means it'll be a botched up pile of sheite

The PC market is also growing fast in China. In the west where the market situation is more stabilised, machines equipped with Windows are already so dominant that it would be difficult to get people to buy those Linux PCs instead of Windows ones. In China there's a lot more room.

I belive HP computers can be ordered with Red Hat.

if this was the Mcarthy (speling?) era, i'm sure MS would have some funny slogans to add the the propeganda war .

"if you use linux, you're a dirty pinko, commie, terrorist, druggie" (edit: oops )

i'm just waiting to see a "if you run linux you support terrorists" commercial.

The Chinese pirate 99% of Microsoft software anyways.

Trudat, when a nation of software thieves switches operating systems, you have to wonder whether this is good news or bad news for Microsoft. Either way, Microsoft is a whole lot more than it's OSs these days. Gates can still sell 'em all X-Boxes. Those are a little tougher to steal.

Basically this is the chineese saying that they paid too much for something that they were getting for free. It sucks that bad.

Nix is really starting to take off. Heck, even I've got a nix install now (granted, its a virtual machine for me to tinker with until I find a suitable box to actually put it on).

Oh, and one more thought: MS actually loses money per Xbox sold. Its the license fee paid for games to be run on the XBox that makes it worth it for MS.

Vader wrote:Oh, and one more thought: MS actually loses money per Xbox sold. Its the license fee paid for games to be run on the XBox that makes it worth it for MS.

Yeah, they're loosing what....$40 per xbox?

Not sure. It was a lot more since they axed the price in half tho.

Keep in mind that manufacturing costs have also gone down quite a bit since it first came out.