Amazing how far BACKWARDS Dell has come.

See: https://web.archive.org/web/20...

* Feb 1992 Linux runs fine (except for swapping) on a Dell 235D (25Mhz 386).

* Oct 1994 Dell employees help thier customers run Linux on Notebooks with a footnote that"In this isolated instance these are indeed the opinions of my employer"

* Jun 1995 Dell tests Linux on Notebooks and notes to potential customers "OS/2 Warp is supported. Linux isn't officially supported but unofficially, it works fine. I've been using these machines for over a year... I'm on the notebook design team at Dell.".

* Mar 1998 Ralph Nader sends a letter to Michael Dell requesting pre-installed Linux "after learning that Dell and other OEMs were reluctant to offer a Linux client PC on the grounds that it would harm the OEM's relationship with Microsoft."

* Aug 2000 Michael Dell says "configurations of all Dell products are now designed, tested and certified for Linux. Our factories can now customize each system -- from PCs to servers -- with Linux. "

* Sep 2005 Dell introduced a notebook with pre-installed Linux for the French market.

* Jan 2007 Dell introduced a notebook with pre-installed Linux in China.

It'd be nice to see Dell provide as much support as they did in the 1990s.

When the large companies in this space are calling for regulation, they're not doing it out of any sense of altruism.

They're doing it as a business strategy.

Specifically, they understand the power of Regulatory Capture - and know that if they and their lobbyists can write the regulations, they'll have an permanent monopoly on the industry.

Much of work in some companies is Open Sourced. Once it's posted on Github it'll be folded into the training data for the next *GPT anyway.

https://www.sixthtone.com/news...

https://jdcorporateblog.com/jd...

Such chickens cost three times the average, but are still in very high demand - http://chinaplus.cri.cn/news/c...

When Microsoft talks about "security" they aren't using the same definition of the word as you are.

In Microsoft's mind, security means:

• The untrusted end-user is unable to run any software without owning an appropriate software license.
• The untrusted end-user is unable to pirate any content without owning an appropriate license to the content.
• If you're suspected of using the OS for criminal purposes, the appropriate government authorities can get in your computer with an appropriate warrant. DoJ inside the US and DoD in jurisdictions outside the US - or maybe the Chinese government for the Chinese version of Windows.

In your mind, security would mean:

• You, rather than Microsoft, can choose what software can run on "your" computer.
• You, rather than Microsoft, can choose if you want to make a fair-use back-up of content you purchased.
• You, rather than Microsoft, can choose who can get in to your computer.

That's why the "security" question will never be perfectly solved.

The word means something very different to you than it does to the companies licensing stuf to you. And those definitions are incompatible with each other.

Biometrics, like a face or fingerprint, is not a replacement for the "what you know" part of authentication.

It's a good replacement for the "who you are" part - which corresponds better to a username.

It's easy enough to get someone's picture, and easy enough for oppressive governments to get someone's fingerprint.

I'm betting their Research Project is continuing....

They're probably using that apology letter to try to answer questions like:

* How susceptible is the Open Source Community to lame excuses from organizations that try to sabotage their work?

* How vulnerable is the Open Source Community to letting rogue organizations inject more defects just by changing the personnel of the people submitting compromising patches?

* Can groups that want back doors in Linux (hackers, government groups, etc) just switch the names of contributors and get to add more backdoor attempts even after their first people are banned?

The only way the Linux community can come out looking secure in the university's final research papers is to be extremely strict in the conditions of their return to the community.

There always has been an exodus. It's part of why Silicon Valley is so successful. Even in the 1990s I had friends moving to Costa Rica after doing successful businesses in Silicon Valley.

Stanford and Berkeley constantly churn out entrepreneurs and researchers in emerging technologies

Sand Hill Road's VC's constantly look for Stanford and Berkeley projects to invest in

SF's bigger financial institutions work with those VCs take the companies beyond the startup stage.

As the industry matures, those move out to make room for new innovation Silicon Valley is what it is because of a deliberately engineered close partnership of universities (Stanford, Berkeley), finance (Sand Hill Road for small ventures, San Francisco for bigger finance), industry (the Stanford Business Park, etc) and government (In-Q-Tel). This was intentionally modelled after a similar successful pattern around MIT. Great article on that here. http://www.netvalley.com/silic...

Report the professors who are spreading Corona Virus instead.

Considering places are moving toward all-electric home appliances as part of decarbonization effort", this might make sense many places: https://www.bakersfield.com/ne...

Also - obligatory KFC bitcoin mining rig: https://www.gamesradar.com/kfc...

Silicon Valley is what it is because of a deliberately engineered close partnership of universities (Stanford, Berkeley), finance (Sand Hill Road for small ventures, San Francisco for bigger finance), industry (the Stanford Business Park, etc) and government (In-Q-Tel). This was intentionally modeled after a similar successful pattern around MIT.

http://www.netvalley.com/silic...

That pattern continued with companies like Sun, Apple, Oracle, Netscape, Google, Lucidworks, Databricks.

Hard to see that happening in many other parts of the world.

Perhaps best to cascade firewalls from different vendors.

If you chain a Cisco firewall with a Huawei firewall, sure, each may allow some traffic through.

But unless they collude they will probably block each other's backdoors.

With SQL Server running in a Docker container in Azure's cloud, in many ways they're already doing this in a way that's invisible to some of their customers.

Just like the BSD derivatives before (SunOS 4, Ultrix, etc), it's totally expected that OpenAI innovations will mostly end up being proprietary.

Perhaps this is the right time for someone to create a similar community based more around FSF-like principles than OSI-like ones.