In 1997, I bought a state-of-the-art Pentium II Gateway desktop direct from the manufacturer. I was proud of myself at the time for going direct and customizing the system according to my desired specifications.

But today, more than 10 years later, Gateway (now owned by Acer) has dropped its 1990s way of doing business and will concentrate on retail, e-tail and channel. Wasn't the Internet supposed to be the hip way to sell PCs? How things come full circle.

According to Gateway, the change in strategy should help the company cut costs.

Gateway began moving in this direction when it acquired retail PC vendor eMachines in 2004 and ran the short-lived Gateway Country store chain.

His was a life well-lived.

Reading through the news about the passing of Randy Pausch, the 47-year-old Carnegie Mellon computer science professor whose "Last Lecture" video later became a worldwide phenomenon, I was compelled to go watch it again (like so many are today).

I remember my revelation after one of my friends forwarded me the link of Prof. Pausch's lecture after it was posted on YouTube. At the time he was struggling with Pancreatic cancer and his words were meant as a legacy for his children and family.

The lecture, which Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow helped promote, later turned into a book and has reportedly been translated into 30 languages after it grew so popular.

It was more than talking about the value of hard work. What stuck with me were his points about living a life well -- and remembering those values throughout your day to day, no matter how mundane.

Some of the points were about:

The importance of letting children express their creativity

The importance of people vs. things

The importance of working and playing well with others.

Showing gratitude -- very important!

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had a nice choice of quote:

In May, Dr. Pausch spoke at the Carnegie Mellon University commencement. He said a friend recently told him he was "beating the [Grim] Reaper" because it's now been nine months since his doctor told him he would die in six.

"But we don't beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well," said Dr. Pausch, who urged the graduates to find and pursue their passion. He put an exclamation point at the end of his remarks by kissing his wife, Jai, and carrying her off stage.

If you haven't checked out the video (there are many on YouTube), it's worth a few minutes out of your day.

Well, everyone who knows what the issue is about, I would suggest.

And the lefties are crowing about it again today, with word that a blogger has helped secure statements of support for Net neutrality from each of the 13 Democrats challenging an incumbent Republican for a Senate seat this fall.

Matt Stoller, who blogs on the site OpenLeft.com, said he began his effort in mid-June. The goal was to elicit a policy statement from each of the Democratic challengers in support of Net neutrality, and today, he announced that he had succeeded. They're all on board, at least the 13 with at least $500,000 in their war chest.

Throughout the process, Stoller has kept a running tally of how much money each of the candidates has accepted in the form of campaign contributions from the cable and telecom industries.

Not surprisingly, a zero sits next to most of the candidates' names.

If Net neutrality is up your alley, Stoller is fighting the good fight. Grass-roots and all, it's a perfect match for the rhetoric of the larger groups that have been agitating for a "free and open" Internet that will keep the playing field level for all parties, large and small. What a story it would be for the lowliest blogger slay the two-headed lobbying dragon of the cable and phone companies.

Stoller's campaign drew predictable praise from some of the larger groups that have been championing the issue, such as Free Press and MoveOn.org.

To proponents of congressional action on the issue, a handful of Democrats announcing support is swell, but they are a long way from carrying the day on the floor of Congress.

Previous attempts at Net neutrality legislation have fallen well short of the mark, with votes falling largely on party lines. At present, there is one bill that takes up the issue in the Senate, and two in the House. None is likely to see any significant movement before the election-shortened session ends.

The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to take up the issue in an official manner next Friday, when it meets to consider a draft order introduced by Republican Chairman Kevin Martin calling for a censure of Comcast for blocking traffic to the peer-to-peer sit BitTorrent. If the two Democratic commissioners side with Martin, as is expected, the order will have a majority, and the FCC will have taken its toughest stand to date on Net neutrality. Martin's not looking to slap any fines on Comcast; instead it would impose some onerous reporting and monitoring requirements that the cable giant would no doubt abhor.

Should that come to pass, Free Press et al will no doubt declare another victory. But that victory will be a battle, not a war. Even with the expected gains the Democrats will make in the legislature in November, some folks are going to have to cross the aisle if anything's going to happen with this issue.

It's a little curious to me how an issue that draws support from a set of groups as diverse as the Writers' Guild and the Christian Coalition could remain so narrowly partisan.

An aide to Maine's Olympia Snowe, the lone Republican sponsor of the Senate's Net neutrality bill, once told me, "It's a shame it's got to be such a partisan issue. It's too bad, but that's just the way it is."

By now, we've gotten accustomed to hearing from presidential candidates' surrogates who make the rounds on the talking-head television circuit, taking questions from a host or sparring with a representative from the opposing camp.

Well, the Internet has thrown its doors wide open as a forum for the campaigns to engage each other in debate.

Opposing Views, a very young startup devoted to bringing experts who disagree together in debate on high-profile issues, entered the party today. The site, born only in late May with a modest $1.25 million in Series A financing, has pitted economic advisers from the McCain and Obama camp in a debate "Who has the best plan for America's economy?"

The format is accessible enough -- the debate topic's page displays one column of posts by each surrogate. There's not a lot of back and forth, and a lot of the talking points are (predictably) taken from the policy sections of the candidates' Web sites, but it's a neat idea.

The sparring that does take place comes in the form of objections -- when one participant takes issue with his opponent's comment, he can flag that post with an objection and register the complaint.

Opposing Views launched with experts to weigh in on more than 100 topics, so on the site you might find a debate on the death penalty (district attorney vs. Amnesty International), the existence of God (a rabbi vs. the group American Atheists) or global warming (Sierra Club vs. National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank).

The debate-by-proxy on Opposing Views picks up on the spirit of a recent effort by microblogging site Twitter, which hosted its own debate between the candidates' representatives in June.

In the political arena, the CNN/YouTube debates deserve the credit for getting a lot of this going. Even in the familiar format of each candidate standing at a podium answering questions in an allotted period of time, the participatory feeling of bringing candidates closer to the voters was significant. Sure that interaction was heavier on the symbolism than the substance, and the answers tended to glide along talking points, but still -- it was a milestone of sorts, if for nothing else than for the legitimacy the debates conferred on YouTube.

From the 'what another open foundation?' files:

PORTLAND. Dave Recordon of blogging vendor SixApart (they make MovableType which is the tech that powers this blog). just officially announced on the OSCON stage something called - The Open Web Foundation. The group is being supported by Google, SixApart, MySpace, Facebook among others.

Recordon said that he didn't really want to help start a new web standards organization but in his view no other group was doing - or wanted to do what the Open Web Foundation will do.

So what will they do?

According to Recordon - OWF will be focussed on open web standards to ensure data portability. The official explanation is that they are an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.

Frankly sitting here in the OSCON auditorium - I didn't get it. We've got far too many open specification groups already in my view and adding yet another to the mix further dilutes a crowded landscape. Sure open specification are great but aren't there enough groups out there and it's time to consolidate efforts and not create new ones.

I'm going to try and connect with Recordon at some point today (they've got a BOF here end of day) and I'll see if I'm wrong on this initial opinion that I've got - cause maybe I'm missing something (or not).

*UPDATE*  I did meet up Recordon later in the day - and after a really great conversation - I get it. I'll have a full writeup over on the main site soon * .

PORTLAND. Keith Bergelt CEO of Open Invention Network (OIN) took the OSCON stage this morning with a key message - Patents have a place.

The OIN was launched back in 2005 as a way to collect patents and then make them available under a royalty free grant to open source efforts.

"Patents may either enable or retard open source and Linux, depending on the motivation of the patent owners," Bergelt said.

The key for Bergelt is to have defensive patents to help protect the open source community against the negative aspects of patents and further SCO-like attacks.

Bergelt argued that defensive publication of patents - good patents that are part of the open source community actually helps to raise the bar for patents overall.

"Intellectual property is not a dirty word and we need to get the point across that there are ways to codify intellectual property inventions so there are broader benefits for community and defensive publications are one way."

From the 'not everyone is happy at Sun (though lots are)' files:

PORTLAND. Sun has been supporting the PostgreSQL database since at least November of 2005, a few months later they hired Josh Berkus.PostgreSQL core team member as PostgreSQL Lead for Sun's Database Technology Group.

Since then a lot has happened at Sun, notably they bought rival open source database MySQL for $1 billion. So now six months after the MySQL acquisition and two years after joining Sun, Berkus is leaving.

I've had the good fortune to meet up with Berkus to talk about his experience at Sun and why he's leaving.

"Obviously Sun acquiring MySQL was not really encouraging to me," Berkus told InternetNews.com. "It meant PostgreSQL being number two to MySQL within Sun. So it's just not a real exciting atmosphere for a PostgreSQL guy."

Berkus also told me that there was a larger issue for him as well which dealt with the reasons why he joined Sun in the first place. He alleged that Sun just isn't doing big and exciting things as they're focussed on revenue in the database division and that's what Sun needs to do.

"It's good for Sun to sell support for PostgreSQL but that's good for Sun," Berkus said. "I really went into Sun in the first place because Sun has a very large core of high end engineers who really had the opportunity to take PostgreSQL to a bigger scale and do some interesting things with it that we hadn't classically done in the open source community."

I asked Sun spokesperson Terri Molini about Berkus leaving Sun and she said that she wished Berkus the best of luck in his future endeavors.

Berkus isn't yet certain what those future endeavors may be, though he told me he is entertaining some offers.

On an interestign side note, at a Sun party at OSCON on Wednesday night, Berkus actually literally wrestled with MySQL founder Monty Widenius (you know those big Sumo puff things) with a large crowd of spectators cheering them both on. Who ever said geeks can't be physical?