In the letter, which is quoted verbatim on Consumerist, Tracy Holland of Dell says that the spot in question “contains information that is confidential and proprietary to Dell,” and that this is “in violation of his or her employment agreement and confidentiality obligations.” As I was reading, I imagined the editor of Consumerist reading the letter and wondering “and all this relates to me how exactly?” Which is pretty much what the lawyer for the blog said in her response: “We came by this material entirely legally: we were provided it by a third party voluntarily, we did not use any improper means to solicit any Dell employee to breach any agreement he may have had with you.”

One of the funny parts is when the Dell lawyer sends a second email at about 2 a.m., saying “Thank you. Note, though, it has been almost nine hours since we made the request, yet the posting is still up.” In her response, the Consumerist lawyer starts with:

“Despite some suggestions to the contrary among some of our fellow beings, most humans need to sleep. Some of us also receive hundreds of emails a day and have to deal with every one of them. I received this email at 12am last night. It is 7am now. That’s a pretty good turnaround.”

Hilarious. I have a feeling my friend Lionel Menchaca, the head blogger at Dell — who we had on a panel at mesh a couple of weeks ago and who is a wonderful guy, and the architect of Dell’s successful blogger outreach program — would cringe if he read any of that exchange. Update: In fact, Lionel has cringed (or at least it reads that way) and has responded with a mea culpa here. Much props to him for doing so.

Naturally, the Ubuntu announcement has caused plenty of cheers in the Linux camp, since the release from Mark Shuttleworth’s Canonical is seen by many as the new standard-bearer for the Windows replacement vanguard (Michael Robertson’s Linspire, formerly known as Lindows, also had some early potential, as did Xandros and Novell’s Suse). And I have to say that having Ubuntu pre-loaded on a Dell machine would help with one thing: namely, finding drivers that work for all the various hardware inside a brand new machine, especially if it’s something fancy like a Media Center.

I don’t know if Michael Dell — who is a Ubuntu user, as Engadget notes — has had any of the same problems that I have, but I’ve been trying for days to get Ubuntu’s latest release running on an HP Media Center, and have had no luck. It installs fine, and loads and I get the nice Evolution desktop that comes with Feisty Fawn (as the new release is called, following the Linux “goofy name” rule). But the network card doesn’t work.

Let me note that I am not some Linux noob. I’ve installed and run Suse 8, 9 and 10 as well as Debian and Xandros and three or four other flavours of Linux. I have personally edited the x86config file and added mode lines by hand to get an LCD monitor working, and have SSH’ed into my Debian box remotely using putty and repaired my MySQL tables. So there.

Ubuntu can’t recognize the Intel network chip, no matter what I do. I’ve edited the modules file, installed various add-ons. Nothing. Intel has a Linux driver — but you have to compile it yourself and add it to the Linux kernel, and that’s a little too close to brain surgery for yours truly. Give me a box with it all pre-installed, and I would be a pretty happy camper. If there’s one thing Windows does pretty well, it’s the drivers.

In fact, as almost everyone who has seen it seems to agree, it is mind-numbingly bad. Not just un-funny, but cringe-inducingly un-funny — like say, your grandmother dressing like 50 Cent and trying to do a rap about adult diapers. What was Dell trying to do with this video? It isn’t aimed at consumers, because it’s all about proprietary standards. It’s clearly aimed at suppliers — specifically, aging suppliers with no sense of humour, or taste for that matter.

Not only is it un-funny in the worst way, it’s also about five times too long for a self-deprecating joke video (Nick Douglas will pay you if you sit through the whole thing). If the guys behind JibJab.com — whose style this imitates — were involved in this clip in any way, they should do themselves and everyone else a favour and go directly to Hell (Note: one of the founders responded in my comments to say they weren’t involved). And Larry Ellison should sue.

Update:

My friend Stuart said that howlingly lame videos like this are made all the time for supplier-type conferences, and that it wasn’t really designed for regular people to see — to which I replied that the lesson here is, in the age of YouTube, everything will eventually be seen, whether you want it to or not.