It is difficult to believe that Asus did this out of love for Redmond. I wonder how much MS paid for this special treatment, or did they threaten Asus with higher prices?

This might actually make sense economically for ASUS:

_Maybe_ less support calls.

_Very deep_ discounts/kickbacks from Microsoft.

Personally I am very glad that I got the Linux version of my Eee PC 901: More flash disk and more ram, for a little less money.
Currently I run the latest Ubuntu Netbook remix, and I'm very happy with it. The last time I booted it into XP must have been during Easter, to debug a Windows problem.

Terje

I think ``kernel'' is the word you were looking for. Nice try though.

Errr, where exactly? I see a couple of Powerpoint links on Google. Newsflash - all Powerpoint files linked on Google say "Microsoft" next to them because that's who made Powerpoint. Neither of the presentations actually seem to be from, to or about Microsoft.

Hope you bought your Thinkpad used; IBM's PC division has always been in bed with Microsoft, and I doubt Lenovo is any better. This is just more of the golden rule, "He, who has the gold, makes the rules." in action; it will continue as long as Microsoft maintains it's ill-gotten monopoly.

"Sucks that the company is "disloyal""

Well those two words have never been uttered in succession before... and never will again!

I don't know what people are getting so upset for, it's just marketting, it doesn't mean anything. It's not like they're gonna be saying on their linux pages "but you'll prob want the windows version, cuz this one's shit"... no, their linux page is gonna be bigging up their linux product (presumably, I cba to look). Is like when a waiter says "excellent choice sir" when you choose the soup, the guy who cooks the chicken isn't gonna pipe up and say "what's wrong with the chicken?!". Everything is better than everything else, depending on what you're looking at.

Also excellent reasons not to use Vista and Windows 7.

This website is such a hack-job. I can't believe MS or Asus was involved. The video player is FlowPlayer, the tracking uses Google Analytics, the fonts are all wrong for a MS job. There's no copyright, disclaimer, contact. Nothing. I call bullshit.

That, and I don't believe MS would be encouraging people to use XP with Vista taking so much heat and Windows 7 just on the horizon.

I love Asus motherboards and hardware. That said, the site looks very fishy to me. It doesn't look "professional" at all. The Asus and Micro$hit websites look really polished and complex. Itsbetterwithwindoze looks like an attempt to start a new flamewar between the M$ and OSS camps while putting Asus in the middle of the crossfire.

I agree with you, I think its bullshit.

This website is such a hack-job. I can't believe MS or Asus was involved. The video player is FlowPlayer, the tracking uses Google Analytics, the fonts are all wrong for a MS job. There's no copyright, disclaimer, contact. Nothing. I call bullshit.

To be fair, it is better designed than Asus' own website.

And those people are incredibly naive.

Or perhaps they have an expectation of truth and honesty, and not finding that, believe that integrity is in question.

Naivety, once vanquished, leads to skepticism. Skepticism leads doubts, doubts make us look somewhere else for truth.

Um have you ever tried to call ASUS tech support? They are not going to get less support calls. You cant get to anyone at tech support to begin with.

Tried installing a printer in Windows lately?
Tried installing a printer in Linux lately?

With servers Windows is waaaaay behind Linux. My Tyan 1U servers and IBM xSeries eServers all Just Work(tm) with Linux, while setting them up with Windows involves screwing around with RAID driver disks and all kinds of crap.

My ThinkPad T61p Just Worked out of the box, including automagic download of the 3D drivers for the nVidia card on the first boot.

Yes, I concede, Windows is ahead in the area of cutting edge desktop hardware due to the fact that OEMs still place priority on supporting their new hardware under Windows.

Enjoy this state of affairs while it lasts, because it won't for much longer.

One should note that this is the UK division not the corporate offices in Taiwan. I think someone's doing some cowboy marketing within their UK sales division.

I'm none to happy about this little song and dance they're doing (I liked my eeePC with Linux on it... Can't wait for the Cortex-A8/A9 netbooks to show, though. Double the battery life, same power and capabilities- literally.)

I'm positive that it's not a Microsoft or ASUS site. If it is, it's definitly marketed much differently than other sites I've seen.

For one, I didn't see any Microsoft or Asus Logos or links anywhere on the site. MS can't help but slap a Microsoft logo somewhere on their site. Asus is no different. All I see is Windows and EeePC.

Both companies have distinct styles on how they present their advertising campaigns, and this site follows neither.

MS and ASUS would have links everywhere taking you to all of their offerings. There is no links on this site whatsoever.

MS tends to target Linux when it comes to the server side. Although I can see them starting a linux netbook "get the facts" campaign soon, I don't see one anyware on Microsoft's official site. The most I see is press releases touting windows sales on netbooks.

Asus has a Linux investment. Unless MS dropped off a suitcase that has so much money in it the light comming off of it starts to turn the room green, I don't see them badmouthing their own OS.

Less than the time that would otherwise have been spent on cleaning out all the preinstalled crap every vendor throws in "for free".

Check out the terrible JPEG distortions of the one and only image. Other than the video, that image is the whole site.

This Arbirtron Ad Agency must have really been the lowest bidder. I wouldn't be surprised if they used MS Paint.

Hell yes. Seriously, the site looks like it was designed by a 5 year old downs victim and while I don't like the Microsoft and Asus sites, none of those two are made nearly as bad.

+1 to the questioning legitimacy crew.

Until MS/Asus confirm or deny a participation in this, I will treat is as non-existant.

Nothing to see here, move along.

PS: And if I had mod points atm, I wouldn't have bothered to post this but instead just modded up the grandparent.

Along the way, I've found that trust-based relationships can be made. Often, it's more with individuals than the organizations that they represent. You build mutual trust, then go from there.

Without trust, we're a bunch of warring autonomous micro-nations.

For many of us, integrity is above making a buck. Yes, we have to survive, but we can do so without lip farting, lies, FUD, and so on. The gift of communications has incumbent upon the gift, the onus and responsibility to do the best to speak the truth.

In this context, Asus has demonstrated their sense of that responsibility. In turn, we take note of that. We file that information for decisions made later. Perhaps they'll listen that we now categorize them as lackey sycophants of Microsoft. Perhaps not.

Seriously, they are taking Microsoft marketing money (just like Dell, HP, Lenovo, IBM, etc.) and stating simple facts.

Their custom version of Linux (or ANY version of Linux) IS unfamiliar to windows users. There ARE major compatibility issues between Linux and Windows - Applications from one can't run on the other, and documents from one CAN be incompatible with the other. Do workarounds exist for most issues, CERTAINLY, but those are just that WORKAROUNDS, that, you know, work around incompatibilities.

Additional claims on the site are:

"Trusted - Windows delivers a dependable experience that Microsoft and a worldwide community of partners stand behind" - this is true, there are countless MS partners and MS does provide a "dependable experience" (even MS detractors can't argue with that!)

"Familiar - Windows is easy to use and familiar so you can be up and running right away" - with 94% market share (Mac at 5% and Linux at 1%) it is reasonable to assume that most people are familiar with the Windows environment.

"Compatible - You can be confident that your devices and applications will work with Windows - more than any other platform" - the MS Windows ecosystem has more applications than either the Linux or Mac environments, and there are Windows-only devices in the market (printers, modems, on-board RAID controllers, etc.) that it is trivial to prve that there are more devices that work with Windows than other OSs.

Now, having said all that, this is not an MS or ASUS website - this is a troll to see how much traffic this site can generate.

View the source of the HTML - no copyright asserted, no authorship claimed, only some "google-analytics.com" javascript voodoo at the bottom of the page. There is no way either organization would develop a webpage annonymously.

Michael Sharp went to Godaddy and registered the domain 5-Dec-2008 - I know, he lives in Washington state, but he's having a bit of fun...

(The website is too thin, and there are small issues that scream fake to me - kerning, lack of contact info, no mention that Windows ia a registered trademark, links to additional info, etc.)

They've been saying this for several years now. "'X' driver support is getting better everyday!" "'Y' new distro will solve device compatibility issues!" "'Z' developer will have perfect Windows API integration and then the average user won't notice the difference!"

Puh-lease. Mod me what you like but the fact remains that, while there have been some damn good advances towards this state, "much longer" is not a quantifiable term. The linux zealots out there are predicting The Year of the Linux Desktop but are they really doing anything to make it happen? The Users' Home is the place of the Linux Desktop and Ubuntu is the most notable distro behind the movement, but they're not going to do it alone. It needs to be a global and unified effort across the entire linux community, and this is the biggest challenge facing them against the public Windows opinion.

Businesses are a good start because if they can get Windwos-equivalent software -- not "Windows-only-just-good-enough-for-most-users" software -- on their employees workstations then the home will follow naturally.

Since when we're they never not that? Did you honestly think that Asus put Linux on their EEE PCs because they really believed in the ideas of GNU and the GPL? Seriously? They put it on there probably to lower margin costs and to make money on some gullible GNUtards who are apparently just now realizing that Asus was out to make a buck and not to spread their ideology.

Have you really never worked for a company that actually practiced what it preached when it comes to ethics and responsibility?

I've had bad bosses and good bosses, but only once have I had a scumbag boss. Outside of the scumbag, everyone wanted to treat our customers fairly and be able to sleep nights. To a certain extent that is self serving because we wanted to keep our customers, but we often spent many hours trying to resolve a problem for a customer, or implement a feature they wanted. If a customer was unhappy we tried to make them happy. If they felt we had let them down we tried to fix that.

That behavior goes up the chain. If you are not a scumbag chances are you don't want to work for a scumbag, and that is a recursive relationship.

Now, every place I have ever worked has tried to figure out how we could get our hands on more money, and that includes charging whatever the traffic will bear for our products. But that is not lying or cheating. We set a price upfront, and if what we produced was worth it to our customers, they paid it and felt like they got value for their money.

I can't believe my experience in business is that different from most peoples. What makes you think that if you work for a corporation (which most people do) you suddenly turn into a scumbag?

tag "itsatrap"

I bet all my modpoints that that site is fake. Anyone who RsTFA could see the same. It looks terribly amateur, is not mentioned elsewhere by either company and is just a bit too convenient for flamewar purposes. Sorry guys, nothing to see here.

The smart Linux people will carefully assess the entire picture. And I mean the whole thing.
When in the real world, people return the product, you don't squeal about MS, Windows, or anything else. What you do is really assess and work the problem. If they are being returned - why, and beyond why, what could be rectified, and what needs work.

Unix advocacy is utterly pointless and meaningless in the consumer space. Its not going to cut ice with users, and people.
After it shipped, people had to spend time making things work, new distributions have had to be built to cover short comings, and problems, and at the final point, companies that bought into what they were told 'Linux' is ready - have found the real world picture to be a rock and a hard place.

Linux companies I presume made the OEM deals with these companies, if people want to vent, vent at the product shipped.
It_is_not the users job to fix your broken, none working OS.

So, after having high returns, vendors turned away from you.
Learn a lesson. In the meantime, the reality of this is a harsh one. Within the limited confines of 'netbooks', a controlled, limited hardware base, and small requirements in terms of apps and OS, Linux came up short. Its an area where Linux should have hit for home runs everywhere. Absorb the lesson, learn from it, take some humble pie, quite blaming MS, The users, The vendors. This is an area where you should be kicking the absolute crap out of Microsoft, AND you should have been bending over backwards with vendors to ship higher spec machines, given MS's attempt to limit and lock it down.

Wether lessons are learned or not will reflect wether any vendors come back. Bringing them back will take double the work now.

Thank you for doing homework on it. I was just gonna do the same.

Does the register's name match any other site?

They did it out of love for sales.

Look around you.

WalMart has tried to make a go of every flavor of OEM Linux. Every form factor.

No-name and the Dell brand name.

The dearly departed include Lindows, gOS, Sun Java, Xandros...

and so on endlessly.

Oh, the Merry-Go-Round broke down
It made the darndest sound,
The lights went low,
We both said "Oh!"
And the Merry-Go-Round went
"Um-pah-pah, um-pah-pah, Um-pah! Um-pah! Um-pah-pah!"

WalMart has tried every known sleazeball sales gimmick: the mini board in the maxi case: sold like a flea market BoomBox stereo.

The only customer is the ever-hopeful geek - the sheep who can be sheared as often as you like.

WalMart with its fantastic, enormous, unprecedented, purchasing power has never been able to consistently undersell OEM Windows by so much as $50.

Even when the Linux product is overstock purchased in carload lots. Sweepings off the warehouse floor.

It all comes down to this:

The Windows netbook has better specs than XP desktop of 2001 with integrated graphics. The dual core Atom with ION graphics is not far off.

The back list of MSDOS, Win 9x and Win XP titles that will run on this platform is immense.

You have a viable platform for mobile PC gaming. The legacy PC game. It works with your USB or wireless printer. Your camera.

It is the perfect compliment to your Windows laptop, your desktop replacement, your XBOX 360, your Zune.

That's your sales pitch - clear, concise, easy to understand, and it does its job damn well.

Not only that, but:

• the page doesn't contain a single link to either the Asus or Microsoft websites
• there's no copyright notice or any other legal advisories anywhere on the page
• neither the Asus nor Microsoft logos appear anywhere on the page
• hell, it doesn't even mention the name Asus, and only once mentions Microsoft
• as others have stated, the visual quality of the site is far worse than horrible

You'd have to be pretty naive (or blinded by Microsoft-hatred) to actually think either of these companies had anything to do with this site.

Great! Now we have it from Asus itself that it ships hardware that has major compatibility issues... with software pre-installed by Asus itself. Given that the company is obviously so inept, who tells us that there aren't any similar compatibility issues between the hardware and its BIOS. Well probably there are, and we should warn friends, family and employers to shy away from such a lousy brand.

Ok, so in reality Asus was probably paid by Microsoft to say this. Like the so numerous companies that were paid to display an "XXX recommends Microsoft Windows" on their website. But if they sell out their judgment so easily, why should they be trusted on anything else that they say? That too would be a reason to run.

And strategically this whole thing is really really stoopid on Asus' part, especially now after all the competitors (even Acer!) have brought out similar mini-laptops running Linux.

...and in this case, it's entirely legitimate.

From what I can see, it looks like the premade Linux distro for the device still exists. If it's still preinstalled on the device by default, you have even less to worry about, since that will mean that no matter how much Microsoft try and promote themselves, they will still have inertia to deal with.

Microsoft are doing what they always do; banking on the concept that most people don't want to engage in intellectual activity, personal initiative, or personal responsibility. For the most part, it's nearly always a very safe bet for them; they have human nature on their side, and they know it.

If you want to beat them at this game, what you need to do is promote the advantages inherent in doing something different. That means:-

- Hardware resource efficiency from CLI or light GUI applications that they will never be able to match. Cplay [sourceforge.net] or LXMusic [xmms2.xmms.se] for music, Dillo [dillo.org] for limited web browsing, (but enough on an embedded platform) PCManFM [sourceforge.net] for file management, etc.

- Greater security. Microsoft still cannot honestly compete with the root security model, and you can laugh at them if they try. Linux simply does not get viruses.

- As long as the "big two," contemporary desktop environments and ALSA are avoided, Linux also still has infinitely greater robustness.

Microsoft's solutions are vastly technologically inferior to UNIX. Always.

Microsoft cannot hope to compete on technical merit, but where they generally do beat Linux or the BSDs is via exploitation of the most base and/or negative elements of human nature; fear, laziness, reluctance to make choices or assume responsibility for those choices.

Stop fighting amongst yourselves about how best to get the neurotypical population to drink Stallman's Kool-Aid, and then gnashing your teeth when they predictably don't want to. That isn't going to work. Linux can beat Microsoft exceptionally easily on technical merit, and if you confine things to X apps, that is primarily what end users care about.

All Microsoft ever do...all they ever CAN do...is appeal to fear and laziness. They don't actually offer their customers anything better; they just keep said customers in a state of terror about accepting anything better, if said something better is non-Microsoft.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Mahatma Gandhi

This quote might have looked intelligent the first time it was used; it doesn't now.

Also, remember something else. Gandhi, like Stallman, had a martyr complex. Martyrdom is a tactic which relies on a certain assumption about the moral nature of the opponent in order to be effective. If the opponent is amoral and doesn't care about your stance, then the moral high ground, and thus martyrdom as a tactic, is worthless. All they will do is laugh, steamroll you, and then continue with what they were doing anywayz.

There is a time and a place for martyrdom. If it is to be used effectively, it is definitely not a tactic for general use.

Likewise, don't be a parrot.

No, but it has occurred to me that you are just making shit up because you were shown to be wrong. Put up the evidence that the link was hijacked or admit you were wrong.

Yes, of course the Eee PC is a success because of the attention it got for using Linux and because it was the "first" netbook. However, the number of netbooks sold with Windows vastly outstrips the number of netbooks sold with Linux.

Let's post the whois of itsbetterwithwindows.com and make the guy's name public here:

Registrant:
      Michael Sharp
      12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd.
      Box 238
      Kent, Washington 98030
      United States

      Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
      Domain Name: ITSBETTERWITHWINDOWS.COM
            Created on: 05-Dec-08
            Expires on: 05-Dec-09
            Last Updated on: 05-Dec-08

      Administrative Contact:
            Sharp, Michael rdcpro@hotmail.com
            12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd.
            Box 238
            Kent, Washington 98030
            United States
            (877) 788-8066 Fax --

      Technical Contact:
            Sharp, Michael rdcpro@hotmail.com
            12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd.
            Box 238
            Kent, Washington 98030
            United States
            (877) 788-8066 Fax --

      Domain servers in listed order:
            NS61.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
            NS62.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

Hello, friend! I am also quite pissed.

Let's wait one year from when they purchase their Windows-disabled Eees, when their machines are clogged with spyware and malware and the registry's broken and the little Atom CPU desperately tries to actually do some work whilst constantly swapping things in and out of RAM. Let's wait until then and tell them "It's Better With Windows!(tm)".

I say f*ck this! I'm not buying another Asus product in my life!

Damn, it feels good to vent!

But the way the site is done.... it's almost like it was done to SAY one thing but reflect another.

Corporate Overlord #35 told Underling #3586586 to say MS is better. Underling follows the letter, but not the word.

Hrm.

MS cheats, that's why.

Corporations have at most the conscience of those at their head. Their only responsibility is to make money one way or another.

Contrast that with the FOSS tribe. We're a collective of individuals with some corporate hangers-on. Most of us have consciences, and collectively we have a very good conscience.

We compete on our own terms, that's why. Eventually, the market will wise up. That's why MS cheats, to push that day off for as long as possible.

Well, at least once Expert Sexchange [experts-exchange.com] was good for something:

I am an independant web and application developer, specializing in Content Management and Collaboration. My company, CollaborationPeople, Inc. serves clients in Seattle, Washington and the greater Puget Sound Region, although I have clients as far away as Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, CA and Portland, Or.

I primarily work within the following platforms:

Collaboration:
        Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS 2007)
        Windows SharePoint Services (WSS 3.0)

Web Content Management:
        Telerik Sitefinity CMS
        MCMS 2002
        MOSS 2007

I have previously taught in the Continuing Education Department of Bellevue Community College in Washington State, focusing on XML technologies and the occasional COM+ class.

I program in a number of languages, but primarily C#. I also like to use Python, mostly with Plone, a content management and portal framework built on Zope.

If you need a consultant for a specific project, let me know!

Regards,
Mike Sharp

rdcpro@hotmail.com

Ick.

np: Tocotronic - Samstag Ist Selbstmord (Digital Ist Besser)