Reflections on the hardware industry

The answer, for the moment, is perhaps to channel our purchasing and development energy to those companies like Intel who look like they "get it". Certainly for video display PCs, I've been recommending Intel instead of VIA for some time now, because Intel really mean it with good open source video drivers, and VIA have the rhetorick but don't get it at all, and this translates to real troublesome support issues.