Do not get me wrong, Dell is already selling servers with Redhat Linux and Novell SUSE Linux pre-installed. However, Dell has yet to sell any desktop or laptop that comes with any variant of Linux.

To confuse things even further, Dell does sell a range of products that do not come with Windows - open-source desktops and laptops that come with FreeDOS.

FreeDOS is a free DOS-compatible operating system for IBM-PC compatible systems. It is not a Microsoft operating system and is not qualified for Windows licensing use under any existing Microsoft Volume Licensing Program.

The survey is quite primitive (only six questions) that indicates an early market study. It is designed to capture the PC usage pattern of would-be buyers. The questions include:

• Would your Dell system with Linux factory installed be for home or office use?
• Which systems should we prioritize on for Linux factory installation?
• What types of activities will you perform on your Dell system with Linux factory installed?
• Which languages should we prioritize on?
• For a tested & validated Linux install, what type of software support would you require?
• Which Linux distribution should Dell prioritize on?

Direct2Dell, the company’s direct communications channel for customers, gave some hints on the motive of the survey.

Your feedback on Dell IdeaStorm has been astounding. Thank you! We hear your requests for desktops and notebooks with Linux. We’re crafting product offerings in response, but we’d like a little more direct feedback from you: your preferences, your desires. We recognize some people prefer notebooks over desktops, high-end models over value models, your favorite Linux distribution, telephone-based support over community-based support, and so on. We can’t offer everything (all systems, all distributions, all support options), so we’ve crafted a survey (www.dell.com/linuxsurvey) to let you help us prioritize what we should deliver for you.

The idea of getting Linux pre-installed on Dell was promoted 110,756 times at Dell IdeaStorm, the idea-sharing platform by Dell, making Dell seriously think about providing the option to its customers.

If you want a Dell with Linux pre-installed sooner, do take the time to fill in the survey. The survey will end on 23 March.

As usual, the product comes with software to ease drive management.

Momentus 5400 FDE.2 hard drive with the Wave Systems management software makes it easy for administrators and users to create and back up passwords, and for administrators to control hard drive policies and security settings.

The software also leverages Seagate’s DriveTrust Technology to allow administrators instantly and easily erase all data cryptographically so the drive can be safely redeployed or discarded.

Seagate’s DriveTrust security technology exploits the hard drive’s closed environment in the following ways:

• Transparent AES hardware-based encryption
• Pre-boot authentication required
• On-the-fly drive erasure
• Hashed passwords maintained on the drive
• Emergency password recovery file kept on a separate device

Is the market ready for the product? A recent Ponemon Institute study found that 35% of all computer data breaches involved lost laptops or other digital devices.

The primary hurdles of encrypting sensitive or confidential information are concern about system performance (69%), complexity (44%) and cost (25%). Momentus 5400 FDE.2 provides an easy and convenient way to lower the concerns.

Seagate offers three different models - 80GB, 120GB and 160GB for the new product, all featuring perpendicular recording method. The performance of the hard drive has not degraded due to the overhead of encryption when compare to Momentus 5400.3 drives, which does not employ any encryption.

The ASI C8015, expected to be available as soon as April, is world’s first notebook with Seagate’s encrypting hard drive.

Windows Vista has less than 1% of the market share according to a market research report released on Thursday. Aliso Viejo-based Net Applications Inc, the company tracking the operating system market share, gives the figures below for each OS in the market for the month of February.

• Windows XP: 84.33%
• Windows 2000: 4.75%
• Mac OS X - PowerPC: 4.29%
• Mac OS X - Intel: 2.09%
• Windows 98: 1.50%
• Windows Vista: 0.93%
• Linux: 0.42%

Windows Vista 0.93% market share is a vast improvement over January’s 0.18%. Despite Microsoft’s intention to spend half a billion dollars marketing Vista, conversions from XP won’t be the norm until 2009. The primary reason to stay in Windows XP is the lack of needs. Most killer applications reside on the Internet these days.

If you look at the PC sales with Vista pre-installed, the market penetration engine for most Windows versions, a report one week after the Jan 30 official launch shows promising figures.Overall unit sales for the week ending February 3, 2007, jumped 173% when compared to the previous week and increased 67% year-over-year.

The sales spike shows there are people waiting for Windows Vista and are willing to spend on a new PC for the new OS. People buying new PCs with Vista also choose higher-end version. Vista Home Premium outsells Vista Home Basic by 2:1 on desktop and 4:1 on notebook.

On retail sales of Vista, the number is down nearly 60% compared to XP. More than 30% of the buyers choose Vista Ultimate, which is listed for $399. Vista’s poor retail sales contrast with Office 2007’s strong first-week retail sales, which more than doubled Office 2003’s first-week sales. Office 2007 is indeed more innovative than Windows Vista.

The collapse of talks between Viacom and YouTube/Google just few weeks ago had resulted in 100,000 video clips been removed from the popular video site. What are the tricks that Joost has put in place to win the trust from Viacom? The answer is simple - Joost is designed for commercial video content from day one.

Joost makes it possible to distribute streams of video to its users using P2P technology. There is no central server involved in the process. Each user plays a role in distributing real time video streams just like BitTorrent.

There is no Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection applied on the content. Each user only gets a fragment of the content and it is not saved on the disk to make up the whole video watchable offline.

Yes, it is that simple to solve both bandwidth and DRM issues that most media companies like Viacom are deeply concerned. Joost makes distribution of high quality video online possible. It is designed to give users the same experience as the normal TV.

As of today, Joost remains in beta and you can only join the service by invitation only. The users need to download and install an application in order to use Joost service. Watch to see Joost in action on the CBS report below.

Written and directed by Josh Faure-Brac, the video starts with the usual fights between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The fights are meaningless and both should just concentrate on providing their respective users the best of Internet connected experiences. The Internet will make platform war obsolete forever.

When compared to Commodore 64, the best selling single personal computer model of all time, Windows Vista and OS X are both far more advance. Both platforms have added more and more features that are identical and often indistinguishable with the common intentions of facilitating better connected experiences. Why the fight?

On Wednesday, Google has decided to lift the restriction to join the nearly 3-year-old service in North America and a swath of Asian and South American countries. The primary reason for the restriction was to give away time for Google to build up the infrastructure to accommodate the generous amount of free storage provided by the e-mail service. Google has built enough of them now. However, Gmail is retaining its “beta,” or test, status, signaling that Google still considers the service to be a work in progress.

In December, Gmail attracted 60 million unique visitors which is far behind Yahoo!’s 249 million and Hotmail’s 236 million. Advertising revenues remain a heavy weight in the revenue structure of companies like Google and Yahoo!. Advertisements are usually priced in proportion to the daily traffic of a site.

Providing free email service to users remains an effective method of generating enormous traffic for the sites which translates into huge sum of money. Google is fully aware of that and want a piece of the cake too.

Delivering very targeted advertisements (smart advertising) are possible by analyzing the profile of millions of email users. Users are normally asked to fill in a long list of questionnaire designed to reveal his/her buying habits.

A more aggressive example would be like what Google is undertaking now. Google electronically scans the content of all emails so it can display advertising links tied to the subject. Gmail’s advertising methods have raised some privacy concerns and turned off some potential users.

It remains to be seen how much additional users Gmail can attract after opening up.

A Brussels court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 newspapers that complained the Google’s “cached” links offered free access to chargeable contents. The court ordered Google to remove any articles, photos or links from its sites.

Google faces a fine of 1,000 euros a day if it does not remove the copyright violated contents within 24 hours once it has been told in the future.

The media companies have been vocal about their dissatisfaction with Google in the past months. These media companies have established sales channels that are more lucrative than putting their contents online. Two incidents stand out.

1. News Corp. has subpoenaed YouTube for the identity of users who uploaded full episodes of Twentieth Century Fox’s prime-time series 24 before they even debuted on television. YouTube gave up the identities, according to a Fox statement last week.

2. Viacom demanded earlier this month that YouTube remove more than 100,000 clips after failing to reach a licensing agreement with YouTube.

Most Internet users do not care much about the legal issues that Google is facing. They are ready to jump on to the next available website offering the same service any time. Google needs to be cautious at handing these legal issues. Personally, I think Google should concentrate more on contents created by amateur publishers.

Microsoft marketing power is once again proven phenomena. The video shows you what a Vista ad looks like when presented on five 40″ LCD displays in JFK airport. The ads is undeniably “clear” and gives tons of “Wow”.

If you do not have enough “Wow”, Microsoft has much more - 100 of them to make you speechless. The top five:

• It makes using your PC a breeze
• Because all of your music is just a remote control click away
• It’s the safest version of Windows ever
• See your world in a whole new light
• It can find your stuff

PC World recently gave 15 reasons to go ahead upgrading to Vista and only 6 reasons to wait. I have to say there are valid reasons to stay despite only six against fifteen.

• Vista Is Incomplete: Vista probably won’t be truly ready for prime time until service pack 1.
• Vista Is Expensive: $99 (Home Basic), $239 (Home Premium), $399 (Ultimate), these prices are enough to keep you away.
• Vista Wants a New PC: Many of the benefits of Vista require hardware your current PC doesn’t have.
• Vista Is Time-Consuming: Installing any new operating system is time-consuming.
• Windows XP Isn’t Obsolete: Windows XP is a solid, well-understood, and highly functional operating system.
• Vista May be the Best Reason Yet to Buy a Mac: I am a supporter of the statement. I believe the best period is end of the year for both Mac and Vista (via bootcamp).

There are currently thirteen root name servers around the world. Most of the servers reside in the United States while the rest exist in multiple locations on different continents. The US government plays a key role in supervising the asset.

In the early hours of Tuesday, three key servers were hit by a barrage of data in what is known as a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). There is no evidence of damage proving once again the robustness of the Internet.

The servers under attacks are as follow:

• G-root, G.root-servers.org at Columbus, Ohio, USA
• L-root, L.root-servers.org at Los Angeles, California, USA
• UltraDNS, authoritative for .org and .info TLDs

The attack could be part of the attempt to exploit the DNS vulnerabilities of the Internet. Research last year suggested that holes in the net’s addressing system could leave 85% of the net vulnerable to take over.

The problem lies in the number of computers that have to be consulted to find the computers where that site is located. The average number is forty-six (46). The chain of dependencies between these forty-six computers creates all kinds of vulnerabilities that clever hackers could easily exploit.

Criminals such as phishing gangs would be interested in redirecting traffic from well-known sites so they can grab key login and personal details that would help them defraud web users. They could combine the attacks via known exploits with DDoS to achieve the goal.

They could use DDoS attacks to overwhelm the domain name directory leaving users’ computers with no choice but to look up website names via compromised servers. The compromised server would redirect the users’ computers to the criminals’ web server that looks exactly like the well-known site. Once a user is logged on to the site, the login credentials would be revealed to the criminals who have full control of the server.

1. You must be 13 years of age or older to register for the service. Wal-Mart Video Downloads complies with the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and no adult content is available on the site.

2. The service is not Mac friendly. The video that you download requires Digital Rights Management 10 (DRM 10) software, which is not compatible with the Mac OS X.

3. There are two formats on offer - PC Format and Portable Format. The Portable Format enables you to play the video in a portable player. The PC Format has 640 X 480 resolution, 30 fps and 1,500-1,700 kbps average bit rate. The Portable Format has 320 X 240 resolution, 30 fps and 500-810 kbps bit rate. You can purchase movies in PC/PC & Portable Format but only Portable Format is available for TV episodes.

4. A license file is associated with each video you download from Wal-Mart Video Downloads. You are free to backup the video in external hard disk or DVD. However, the backup video cannot be played anywhere outside the PC registered to the download or the portable devices that have been synchronized with that PC. If you want to watch the video on your TV, you need to connect the PC to the TV. The license is considered a “download to own” license and it never expires. This means the video download is yours to store for as long as you wish.

5. The Portable Format is not compatible with Apple iPod, Sony PSP or Microsoft Zune portable video players due to technology licensing restrictions. I wonder what portable video player are left in the market to play the Portable Format?

6. There is no time limit on downloading the purchased video. Once you have confirmed the purchase and the download automatically starts, you can no longer cancel it. Wal-Mart Video Downloads will only provide you a single successful download of your purchased videos. If you lose your video download, you need to purchase it again.

7. You can only download a maximum of two videos at a time. The others will be held in queue until the first two have completed. There is no way to accelerate the download.

8. You can play the movie while the remaining portion is still being downloaded. This feature has a name - “progressive downloading” provided by Wal-Mart Video Download Manager, a mandatory software to install to use the service.

9. You can transfer videos to a portable player only 3 times. Wal-Mart may be suggesting the customers to get a dedicated portable video player for the service.

10. You are not allowed to buy the videos outside the United States. How bizarre is that?