The Battle (Continued)
,----[ Quote ]
| At 9AM, the man from Toshiba (keeping him anonymous. From now on his name
| is "Tosh") decided to phone me. He was irritated by the last email and
| decided to confront me on the phone... His confrontation was
| intimidating, but not enough to scare me off. I have too much invested
| into this to be put off by a phone call. From the conversation, I noted
| a few things:
|
| 1) He clearly hadn't read, or maybe understood, the emails that I have
| sent him. I could tell this by the way that he was still asking me
| questions that I have quite clearly stated the answers to, in the emails.
|
| 2) Scare tactics from multinationals these days are expected, if not
| welcomed.
|
| 3) He tried to convince me to take down my blog entries and publications
| of these conversations because they may be seen as slanderous, and
| "pulling down the company". I explained to him how I have not once said
| that Toshiba are a bad company. Rather, I have applauded their good
| notebooks, and also their great support on open source platforms. What
| I have done, is ask some questions that no one else is willing to ask.
| Questions that everyone is pretending not to have the answers for.
`----
http://soupofchicken.blogspot.com/2006/10/battle-continued.html
There is precedence as someone (from France, I suspect) had the cost of
Windows XP refunded.
Also see:
,----[ Quote ]
| Instead of fretting about getting a refund for a nice box with that
| legacy system that bogs down and crashes for no reason every other
| week, I would encourage users to save their money a little longer until
| they can afford the nicer boxes with no operating system, or that comes
| with a modern, robust system, such as GNU/Linux, already installed.
| After all, we sure don't want to encourage the folks at Microsoft to
| develop more shoddy software. It's kind of like buying a Yugo because
| it's cheap. It's cheap for a reason, and you get what you pay for.
`----
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/65792/
How To Find A Computer With GNU/Linux Pre-Installed
,----[ Quote ]
| One LXer reader's quest to find and list vendors selling computers
| with GNU/Linux pre-installed leads to the development of a GNU/Linux
| vendor database.
`----
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/66518/
There was also a COLA discussion on lack of choice access laptop vendors.
This discussion later reached the European Commission and many prominent Web
sites, e.g.
EU investigating new complaint about Microsoft
,----[ Quote ]
| European Union regulators are "studying" a consumer complaint that
| Microsoft Corp. forces computer makers to sell machines that are
| preloaded with Windows, excluding other operating systems such as
| Linux....
|
| The complaint comes as the regulator threatens to fine Microsoft as
| much as 2 million euros, or $2.5 million, a day for not complying with
| a 2004 antitrust ruling. The commission also has cautioned the company
| about bundling products into its new version of Windows, which will be
| released next year.
`----
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/276088_msfteu01.html
|
|
