You're right that they will lose the vast majority of their audience but from their perspective, it's the price to pay for a legitimate business with a huge brand name.

Remember that the company was bought for 8 million. For such a large brand recognition, thats peanuts.

Also remember that Napster, while not nearly as popular as it was is still profitable - very profitable. In fact, it has almost a million paying subscribers.

From a consumer standpoint, this is an epic fail but in business terms, it might really make sense.

I hate to say it, but it's likely that the dell product manager is spinning this in Linux's favor as best he can.
It seems weird that he'd want to piss off his supplier, right? I mean, why would he make any comment at all on the issue? Well, that's just the thing. When you tell your supplier that they are in less demand than they used to be, then you have some weight to throw around when it comes to relicensing.
This guy is just using the media as a pawn.

It's funny that wikipedia is probably the best for both uses of the term.
The new "open source" - free.
The old "open source" - you can look at the source of the work - revision history, contributors, etc.

As of now, the fourth result is a link back to this slashdot article.
I'm not sure it's intentional to taint the results at all and certainly not in this way, but it is funny!

There is tons of talk like this about swiss banks forcing US clients out. I guess the they're caving under pressure.
What I'm curious about are other tax havens people have been using in recent times above and beyond swiss banks...

You're complaining about one thing: a lower barrier of entry. And you're right. When a game is available to the lowest common denominator, it's bound to have, on average, a worse community than one that is harder to get to.

The solution is moving to a game that requires more effort. There are MMO communities out there that are harder to get into - customized private mmo servers, old muds, new muds, indie sandbox mmos, browser mmos, etcs... Any games with a niche crowd. There is no shortage of these out there.

It's not that this has ever changed. That $6/hour game was a total niche - something the mainstream wasn't interested in. Now there's a genre that takes off from those MUDs. But the games you nostalgia-ize about are still around; you just stopped looking hard enough.

The adage that the new is terrible and that the old is lost forever has failed again. It's never the outside that changes meaningfully; it's the perspective of the observer.

The same technology underlying remote desktop or similar systems is whats at work here - send a frame buffer - raw pixel rectangles - down the wire after some compression.

Most of the compression works on the idea that the delta doesn't change to much from frame to frame so they only send data about what did change. When that isn't true, say in the case of gaming, VNC clients stop working well. Certainly, they stop working well under a 1mbit connection.

Now there are a lot of VNC technologies out there - why haven't any of them gotten this right before? How come this guy can magically do what those vendors couldn't?

I'm sincerely asking. I would think it'd be damn hard to send high quality video streams of your desktop at some constraint network capacity.

Theres three explanations: this is snake oil, this company has developed a really awesome new compression scheme, or at least something was missing from that video.

Oh yeah - Poisoning the Well.
An enzyme is developed to make the wraith (blood sucking aliens) get sick and die when feeding off humans injected.
I know this makes me the worst kind of nerd for knowing this offhand...

GP is correct, even with Easy Peasy. That distro gets horrible battery life on my eee 1000. Better is eeebuntu, but even that gets horrible battery life. I love ubuntu; I used it as a desktop for work for the last year and at home, but I installed windows xp on my recent netbook purchase after frustration with the various netbook distros. The other thing about linux on a netbook is: firefox 3 runs javascript like a dog, and that really shows up when you don't have a beefy machine. It runs javascript much better on windows because its optimized for windows. Also, flash player videos tear like crazy. Turning off some of the compiz stuff works to an extent, but flash, again, is optimized for windows. That's the reality of the linux desktop, and that really pains me.