They were accused of this to :
– shut them up for fear of peer pressure.
– reduce their credibility among their peers.

you sound terribly militant in your stand against linux users.

And they also support the Eee PC which retails with a distro of Linux.

Probably one of the best hardware manufacturers for Linux.

I’d buy one again.

Ultimately, bumping MSIE up to 7.0 toasted my file system. That’s when I learned that the Toshiba ‘recovery disk’ begins with an Fdisk. I installed Ubuntu.

Thanks for the discussion about Foxconn. I’ve been contemplating building a desktop for my SOHO. I’ve built several of them in the past and was planning to put together a fire-breathing machine.

I can put that brand name on the ‘don’t bother’ list.

So … how’s ASUS doing these days?

Oh, and this tidbit for the MSFT fanboys — according to my blog server logs (6 blogs off a single root, only one is even remotely technical), Linux on end-user machines accounts for nearly 10% of my traffic. I suspect that it might be higher, but some of the OS signatures have been masked … probably to get around the defensive sniffing some websites do.

It’s easy to slam Linux — just ignore the facts.

>> If a company makes a product for its users and mis-represents it in some way, then that is the company’s problem. It’s consumers will deal with it. The fact of the matter is, 99% of its users are satisfied with the product.

I doubt 99% of its users are satisfied with the product. I’d like to see the survey you relied on to come up with that number. I doubt most users would even know who to put the blame on.

More importantly..

You should look at antitrust laws. These laws are there to protect the consumers so that they have maximal future choice and value (beyond the immediate). Monopolists have too much power. It’s so valuable that Monopolysoft would sacrifice a great deal simply to preserve their monopolies.

If monopolies are allowed to leverage their position to create insurmountable obstacles to competitors that have better products, the consumer and those building the alternatives suffer.

Thus, the company’s fate is not simply in the hands of consumers as you claim. To try and pass that off means that you do not want the government to come in on your behalf when I and my gang of thugs raid your beautiful home and run away with the goods leaving trash behind. We’d do this over and over I think if you decided to keep the government authorities out of the picture. I think you would go crying to the authorities. That is exactly what has to be done here, too.

And provide the link to that 1% or that 99% if you get the chance. I know you made that up. Regardless, consumers probably could be helped out a bit in becoming informed about the dangers and losses resulting from CLOSED SOURCE software that are used to hide secret hooks and extensions that keep the higher valued FOSS from being a viable solution for some that require a high degree of compatibility.

>> To the 1%, or in this case, 1 person that is dis-satisfied, Foxconn has acknowledged that it does not support the product with Linux. It has advised that the best course of action is to seek a refund.

It’s funny how they now seem to be cooperating a bit more. I wonder if in fact this kind of behavior affects more than 1%. I wonder if the FTC will agree that they are labeling their products appropriately. I wonder if other government agencies might also have interesting information to discover.

I’d rather not focus on Foxconn to the extent Monopolysoft is the real culprit.

>> There are 2 choices here. Get your refund and get on with life, or bitch and moan.

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that there are only two choices (snicker). I suppose then that B&M is pretty effective. It gets results.

>> Now for fanboys to go out and claim that Foxconn is colluding with Microsoft to destroy Linux, I’ll just say this. Grow up because no one cares.

Confused you are. Not on me being a fan of Linux, but about no one caring. I think you really overestimate the level of (dis)satisfaction out there with Monopolysoft products. I think a lot of people would be disappointed to learn that they are buying products from Foxconn that will tie them in to Vista and other Great(TM) Monopolysoft products.

If you have to go to the hassle to return a product, you want ALL your associates to know so that they can save themselves the time.

>> You can either choose to continue with your paranoia and flame the world that is out to get you, or you can get a life and start living in the real world with the rest of us. And yes, you can use Linux to your heart’s content in the real world, because we don’t care!

I think your view of the world is a little blurry here. This is classical talk from people that have a great hoax on consumers going and would like everyone to believe that only a few fringe “fanatics” are complaining. [The hoax depends on consumers' general lack of expertise with how software works.]

I am upset to have taken as much time as I did to reply to garbage like this comment you decided to put up. There are some good Linux distros to be made. Nowadays, many more people can create their own portable Linux distro. Firefox and free Openoffice are but the tip of what’s available… all for $0. [eg, distrowatch.com]

Nothing has been proven by Matthew (from whom you get your “it’s a Linux bug” bit). He could just as easily surmise that the error is in the firmware as in the kernel. Follow the conversation there instead of just reading the main post. http://mjg59.livejournal.com/94998.html

I completely expect that the fault lies by far with Monopolysoft. Foxconn’s negligence is likely in using Monopolysoft tools and then leaving things sort of sloppily (the devs are “inexperienced”) because they know to do otherwise would really hurt their sales and treatment from Monopolysoft.

Monopolysoft’s violations lie in their misimplementation of standards (or through picking odd impl paths where the std offers more than one as correct) and then fixes for the misimplementations are done for their systems through undocumented extensions to the standard. Antitrust authorities shouldn’t continue to allow Monopolysoft to keep their code closed while competing in markets that interact with markets where they already have a monopoly. OOXML was horribly problematic on purpose. [Not to say they can't extend ODF, but OOXML leaves them "off the hook" a lot easier]

Antitrust authorities need to take a good hard look at this.

“To summarise:

* There is no code in this DSDT that could determine that the system is running any Linux kernel of 2.6.9 or later. This may even be true of earlier versions – I’m not sure when _OSI support was added
* Even if the code did manage to determine that the system was running Linux, there are no codepaths that are Linux specific. Every piece of code is run on at least one version of Windows”

http://www.advogato.org/person/mjg59/diary.html?start=147

So there we go. Perhaps many eyes should be finding bugs and fewer fingers should be typing conspiracy theories.