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You can get a shitty computer from Evil Satan for the same price, without the contract.

The specs are similar or even higher in some cases, and they don't ship with the crippled Celeron processors. I'll take an AMD processor over the yucky Intel Celeron processor any time.

Sorry, but this story reads more like an advertisement than a story.

The specs are similar or even higher in some cases, and they don't ship with the crippled Celeron processors. I'll take an AMD processor over the yucky Intel Celeron processor any time.

Sorry, but this story reads more like an advertisement than a story.

Well I fucked that up:

Walmart.com

Need an edit button...

If you are worried about CD rot, check these out. Mam-A standard CD-Rs. Or google Mam-A CD-Rs

So unless Gartner counts all No OS computers as Linux, then you're absolutely right. No one is going to buy a low cost Linux computer at Walmart and slap a pirate version of Windows on it, when they can get a cheaper computer at WalMart with No OS. This is the description of the No OS computers: "These PCs are completely assembled, but do not have an operating system or any other software loaded on the hard drive. They are a perfect solution if you want a new PC and own a full version of Windows that has never been installed, or if you have an alternative operating system, such as Linux."

Perhaps the vast quatities of boxen that Wal Mart is shipping has something to do with it. I still don't believe for a second that these numbers are fair and unbiased, and I think their polling methods may be in error, but Wal-mart does ship a lot of computers to people who are very familiar with Windows, not Linux.

How about this for $248, or $168 without HD/CD. Brand new.

Oh, good Lord, you are sniffing glue, right? Microsoft is alive and well., and the only vanilla box you can get for below $350 is a used piece of shit that has Windows ME installed. Get out of your basement, your parents need the space.

You could easily put together a cheap computer with one of these. The system requirements of a P3 700mhz wont exactly break the bank, and you could still probably get a desent sized hard drive and still pay less than a PSX or TIVO-like device. Besides, who needs the ability to play PS2 games when there are much better games you could play with that computer.

The PSX includes a TV recorder, a large hard drive, and a DVD burner to save recorded TV shows. Comparable products that don't require a full PC sell for over $800 -- and they don't play PS2 games, either.

You can put together the hardware for $350, but you assume (rightly so, around here) that everyone has a free powerful computer to put it all in, and nobody minds a cheap uninsulated case sitting next to their TV to encode everything.

"You forgot that in order to get print from your digital camera, you need a printer."
Ahh...see there's another big difference. To this date, I have yet to actually print out a photo. They go up on my website, or into a digital picture frame. I don't *have* to print them out. However, with a regular film camera, you *have* to print them out in some form.

"25 CD @ 2$ per = $50"
Where are you getting gouged for CD's? $15 for 50 CD's at Wal-Mart.

Storage cost is minimal and takes up little space. First of all, let's look at harddrive storage. 250 GB, 3.5" drive for $200 will store 125000 2MB pictures in the space of a VHS cassette. How many albums will it take to store 125000 negatives or slides?
Even if we use CD's, 125000 pictures will fit on 625 600MB CDs, or about $180 worth (at the price above). I think even 625 CD's will not take up as much room as 125000 negatives in a organized album.

Digital is still a better deal. Even if you develope your own photos and negatives, you still have to deal with dangerous, smelly chemicals, *and* you have to have room for a darkroom. A friend of mine had to convert an extra bathroom into a darkroom to develope her photos. Meanwhile, I just plug my camera into my computer...

Film is definitely not without it's place, but for a beginner, digital is the sensible choice.

"I stayed with Windows 98 for its stability?

"Andrews hasn't upgraded his PC from Windows 98 or Office 2000. 'I'd just as soon have a stable operating system--my time is more important.'"

It's an interview with another individual, illustrating the unwillingness to go through the hassle of upgrading when the current system is adequate.

"I have to reboot every morning and it takes 10 minutes? Duh. You're using 98."

10 minutes is an exaggeration used to make a point, and is perfectly acceptable. The time to save work, close applications, reboot, and get back to where you were before could well take several minutes. Oh, and he's using Office 2003, which doesn't run on Windows 98.

"Or how about Wal-mart putting out a PC with Sun Linux?"

Sun Java Desktop Systems

Any more examples of points "supported by... B.S."?

Dude, Sun is f*cking nuts. First, the sell this rebranded microtel linux thing and call it java, and sell it at Walmart of all places. Then, in not the too distant past they say they are going to give away hardware and sell subscription software, and now they are saying that they are going to open source Solaris. Dunno if they plan to sell a subscription to the source or whatnot, but I think its a pretty weak business plan to open source something so that we can fix it, and then charge us for it. Btw, it should be more common knowledge that Sun's TCP/IP performance has dropped about 30% from version 7 to 9. This has been measured multiple times by a coworker of mine, and Sun has no response to our findings.

"I don't think there's any doubt about that but that isn't enough. The question is whether "Windows" is a generic term in computer graphical interfaces and it seems pretty obvious that it is."

I don't think that's the real question here. Windows is the de-facto OS, and has been trademarked for years. Whether it was generic or not, it would cause a great deal of confusion if somebody else released a "Windows" OS. The judge should really pay attention to that, especially when Lindows looks so much like Windows.

It's fun to hate Microsoft and all, but this just ain't right. You especially don't want this case to help Microsoft 'compete' with other companies. "Palm is a generic term for palm-top computers, we should be allowed to rename our PocketPC brand to PalmPC."

"The days of engineering-led technology companies are coming to an end," Mr. Dell declared.

It doesn't then follow that Dell will prosper. I bought my last computer at Walmart for $200. That should worry him.

How about one of these for $20 and an x10 cam strapped to the front? I'll sell em to the marines for 1/10th what CMU wants for theirs.

"Create your own Microtel SYSSRBB102 1U ATA Rackmount Server With Xeon Processor"

They can call it "Tungsten". Oh wait....

Why are so many hopping onto this downloaded music craze. I thought Apple Itunes, which looks like the field leader, was not making any profit at all, and was just using it as a tool to boost thier ipod sales. Does Walmart and mp3.com really think they fare much better?

Wal-Mart is doing it for the same reason as ITMS is -- they want to attract people to the Wal-Mart website and hope they will buy other stuff. Apple hopes their DRM lock-in will make you buy an iPod.

As for mp3.com who knows yet? Whatever they are doing I highly doubt they will be selling non-drm'ed mp3 files on the scale that ITMS is selling their files. A crying shame.

So now they want more money (because it's actually working) and they want to basically make it stupid for you to buy an album from iTunes because they are more expensive than the $12.99 you can pay at Walmart.

ITYM $9.44

Or $.88...

1) Windows 2003 as a "router box"? What are you protecting? A honeypot? (Does a day go by without word of yet another windows virus/worm/problem? I thought the statistics folks were quoting somewhere around 20-30 NEW bugs/viruses/worms per DAY. Most not being widespread, of course.)

2) I HAVE installed Linux on a 25 Mhz 486 with 16 Megs of RAM. It's no big deal. Installation was absolutely trivial!(*) Recognized all my network cards and other hardware right out of the box. Pretty much a plain-jane default install. Had all my compiler tools. Network mounted drives. Awk. Perl. Tcsh. Ssh. Even ran Apache.

(*) Well, there was one little problem: The motherboard wouldn't recognize my CDROM drive. But once I told BIOS it didn't have a CDROM drive, it would boot. And Linux, being Linux, would automatically ignore the BIOS settings, find the CDROM, and use it just fine.

3) $300 for a new system? Try $158.98 a box. Or $248 for a faster system with harddrive & CD-ROM.

Don't forget to add another $200 for Windows XP Pro.

4)

Many eyes constantly looking over, improving and tweaking code will always turn out a better product than an elite few.

In theory, yes. In reality, there are, in most open source projects, very few active committers. Sure there's lots of people who commit the odd "typo" patch or something of the like, but there are very few actual "team members" that are working on the architecture.

The ability to view the actual source code, to change it however you feel like to suit your current needs, is invaluable for developers. It allows you to understand precisely what is going on all the way down to the iron.

Frequently, this "many eyes" approach to understanding the system results in improvements, both large and small. Inefficiencies are corrected. Bugs are fixed, rather than worked around. Changes are submitted back up. Rarely, projects are forked.

It's a very Darwinian environment. All that matters are your results. You can work on any aspect your little heart desires. From architecture to device drivers. You just have to produce quality work.

You mention thousands of developers on Windows. I'm just curious: How many people do you think it takes to write a line of code? Or to create an architecture? 'Cause, you know, my computer only has one keyboard... (Though emacs can display the same buffer in multiple windows on different machines... But we're talking windows here, not UNIX.)

5) Longhorn, 2008: Microsoft claimed a lot of features for Longhorn. Last I heard, they had gone the Dilbert route, and shifted those features to the "Future Development" column. Thereby moving up the date.

On the other hand, having witnessed Microsoft's amazing abilities to stick to a time-table with win95a, win95b, win95c, win98, win98se, winME, winNT, win2000, winXP, etc...

Yah. 2008. Maybe.

And don't forget to add another year or two on, to let them get the kinks out... Somewhere around Longhorn-Service-Pack-TWO it ought to become usable.

1) Windows 2003 as a "router box"? What are you protecting? A honeypot? (Does a day go by without word of yet another windows virus/worm/problem? I thought the statistics folks were quoting somewhere around 20-30 NEW bugs/viruses/worms per DAY. Most not being widespread, of course.)

2) I HAVE installed Linux on a 25 Mhz 486 with 16 Megs of RAM. It's no big deal. Installation was absolutely trivial!(*) Recognized all my network cards and other hardware right out of the box. Pretty much a plain-jane default install. Had all my compiler tools. Network mounted drives. Awk. Perl. Tcsh. Ssh. Even ran Apache.

(*) Well, there was one little problem: The motherboard wouldn't recognize my CDROM drive. But once I told BIOS it didn't have a CDROM drive, it would boot. And Linux, being Linux, would automatically ignore the BIOS settings, find the CDROM, and use it just fine.

3) $300 for a new system? Try $158.98 a box. Or $248 for a faster system with harddrive & CD-ROM.

Don't forget to add another $200 for Windows XP Pro.

4)

Many eyes constantly looking over, improving and tweaking code will always turn out a better product than an elite few.

In theory, yes. In reality, there are, in most open source projects, very few active committers. Sure there's lots of people who commit the odd "typo" patch or something of the like, but there are very few actual "team members" that are working on the architecture.

The ability to view the actual source code, to change it however you feel like to suit your current needs, is invaluable for developers. It allows you to understand precisely what is going on all the way down to the iron.

Frequently, this "many eyes" approach to understanding the system results in improvements, both large and small. Inefficiencies are corrected. Bugs are fixed, rather than worked around. Changes are submitted back up. Rarely, projects are forked.

It's a very Darwinian environment. All that matters are your results. You can work on any aspect your little heart desires. From architecture to device drivers. You just have to produce quality work.

You mention thousands of developers on Windows. I'm just curious: How many people do you think it takes to write a line of code? Or to create an architecture? 'Cause, you know, my computer only has one keyboard... (Though emacs can display the same buffer in multiple windows on different machines... But we're talking windows here, not UNIX.)

5) Longhorn, 2008: Microsoft claimed a lot of features for Longhorn. Last I heard, they had gone the Dilbert route, and shifted those features to the "Future Development" column. Thereby moving up the date.

On the other hand, having witnessed Microsoft's amazing abilities to stick to a time-table with win95a, win95b, win95c, win98, win98se, winME, winNT, win2000, winXP, etc...

Yah. 2008. Maybe.

And don't forget to add another year or two on, to let them get the kinks out... Somewhere around Longhorn-Service-Pack-TWO it ought to become usable.

1) Windows 2003 as a "router box"? What are you protecting? A honeypot? (Does a day go by without word of yet another windows virus/worm/problem? I thought the statistics folks were quoting somewhere around 20-30 NEW bugs/viruses/worms per DAY. Most not being widespread, of course.)

2) I HAVE installed Linux on a 25 Mhz 486 with 16 Megs of RAM. It's no big deal. Installation was absolutely trivial!(*) Recognized all my network cards and other hardware right out of the box. Pretty much a plain-jane default install. Had all my compiler tools. Network mounted drives. Awk. Perl. Tcsh. Ssh. Even ran Apache.

(*) Well, there was one little problem: The motherboard wouldn't recognize my CDROM drive. But once I told BIOS it didn't have a CDROM drive, it would boot. And Linux, being Linux, would automatically ignore the BIOS settings, find the CDROM, and use it just fine.

3) $300 for a new system? Try $158.98 a box. Or $248 for a faster system with harddrive & CD-ROM.

Don't forget to add another $200 for Windows XP Pro.

4)

Many eyes constantly looking over, improving and tweaking code will always turn out a better product than an elite few.

In theory, yes. In reality, there are, in most open source projects, very few active committers. Sure there's lots of people who commit the odd "typo" patch or something of the like, but there are very few actual "team members" that are working on the architecture.

The ability to view the actual source code, to change it however you feel like to suit your current needs, is invaluable for developers. It allows you to understand precisely what is going on all the way down to the iron.

Frequently, this "many eyes" approach to understanding the system results in improvements, both large and small. Inefficiencies are corrected. Bugs are fixed, rather than worked around. Changes are submitted back up. Rarely, projects are forked.

It's a very Darwinian environment. All that matters are your results. You can work on any aspect your little heart desires. From architecture to device drivers. You just have to produce quality work.

You mention thousands of developers on Windows. I'm just curious: How many people do you think it takes to write a line of code? Or to create an architecture? 'Cause, you know, my computer only has one keyboard... (Though emacs can display the same buffer in multiple windows on different machines... But we're talking windows here, not UNIX.)

5) Longhorn, 2008: Microsoft claimed a lot of features for Longhorn. Last I heard, they had gone the Dilbert route, and shifted those features to the "Future Development" column. Thereby moving up the date.

On the other hand, having witnessed Microsoft's amazing abilities to stick to a time-table with win95a, win95b, win95c, win98, win98se, winME, winNT, win2000, winXP, etc...

Yah. 2008. Maybe.

And don't forget to add another year or two on, to let them get the kinks out... Somewhere around Longhorn-Service-Pack-TWO it ought to become usable.

Go to walmart.com and see pre-installed Linux machines with newbie distros! SuSE, Xandros, Linspire and Java Desktop.

Please also try KDE 3.2 and GNOME 2.6, you will be SHOCKED how EASY THEY ARE!

By "add" you mean "ad" right?

Here's the Walmart ad

Here's a line from the ad:
Based on Linux operating system

Try this PC. It looks like it'll be available in stores too, but as I'm not in the US, I can't go and look.

WAL*MART?

And I expect one of MSFT's next moves will be to help make sure that newbie purchasers of "home" Linux boxes (such as the ones targeted to appear here) have bad experiences. Probably not too hard when such newbies are buying budget boxes from Walmart and won't be hooked into security-patch central, etc...

If MS can influence such "entry level" Linux experiences to go awry, that could be far better FUD and anti-Linux PR than anything coming out of the SCO/IBM/Baystar/RBC stunts...

Don't be surprised if you start seeing some REALLY SHODDY Linux configurations showing up at budget retail outlets...

It's just a domain name. I happen to hate dashes in them, apparently so does Wal-Mart.

Browsing around their site, they spell it Wal-Mart in print. The domain name is without the dash, and obviously no with an asterisk either. Their logo on the other hand is WAL*MART. I'm sure someone's probably gone over their site with a fine tooth comb making sure these things are consistent.

Really though, a fair comparison would have been between his Windows computer and a system with Linux preinstalled.

I dare say that the sound card would have worked out of the box had he done that.

Most Windows hardware will work with Linux, but that doesn't change the fact that the hardware is built for Windows. Complete interoperability--expecially with the newest devices, for which noone has had time to write drivers--is just not something to expect.

"The difference is Windows comes pre-installed on the system people buy, so they don't have to install and set it up."

"Beyond that, Windows has a clear advantage since you can buy a box with the software in it from your local Walmart."

Walmart? Preinstalled? Not Linux?

Ummmmmmmmm.... and more ummmm. I counted seven.

"The difference is Windows comes pre-installed on the system people buy, so they don't have to install and set it up."

"Beyond that, Windows has a clear advantage since you can buy a box with the software in it from your local Walmart."

Walmart? Preinstalled? Not Linux?

Ummmmmmmmm.... and more ummmm. I counted seven.

"Sez you. A reasonable person does not think that lindows and windows are the same word."

Read it on the screen? Perhaps not. Hear it spoken verbally? Nope, there's risk there.

"They also do not think the KDE and windows XP look or act the same. They certainly don't confuse the windows logo with the lindows logo."

Have a look at this screenshot here of Lindows. This is what Walmart is showing us. Sorry bud, that looks a LOT like Windows. Frankly, it wouldn't take long for somebody to buy this computer, then buy a Windows app for it not realizing it's not the same thing.

Simple as that. Damage can be done. The worst part is, the brunt of the damage goes to an unsuspecting customer. That's exactly why trademark law exists in the first place.

"Mmm yes. Somebody held a gun to Bill Gates head and forced him to file the lawsuit. Right on buddy."

He could choose between not filing the suit, and voluntarily give up the trademark. Most would agree that's force. Lindows made a very dumb move.

{or not released at all, just used within an organisation}

That's a myth; but one that even the FSF has helped spread (although not in the exact same form).

However, actually reading the text of the GPL will reveal that there is no special exception for organizations (or corporations). According to the license, you must apply the GPL whenever you "distribute" the modified software.

Some organizations have thousands of locations and a million members. To give a modified program to all those people would undeniably qualify as "distribution"; the fact that they're all "internal users" is irrelevant.

(Note that copyright law also has no exception for members of an organization)

To address the second part of zerocool's comment, I offer the the following as some of the societal results of 'people as consumers -- not customers'. This has created a desparate, adversarial environment in which commerce and 'consumers' meet in an inevitable clusterfsck....

Wal-Mart, their business practices and its consequenses.

Wal-Mart has a selection of rack mount severs. Look pretty cheap to me.

$91 for that "SiPix Pocket DV Camcorder" is a waste of money.... oh did you say you bought one?

The A70 is the same size but takes 3mp and 640x480 video, although it's considerably more expensive.

...not quite. When you bought your music from the iTMS, you already knew that you would only be allowed to play it within iTunes or on your iPod.

That's it.

If you want to play it on a different device, there are many other sources for your music, including buying a CD and ripping it into whatever format your heart desires.

Whether you agree that "information should be free" or not is irrelevant. By purchasing your music from iTMS, you agreed to Apple's restrictions.

Morals aside, Wal-Mart already sells a Sanyo brand DVD player that will filter out bad language (audio). It retails for about $60, apparently. It is interesting to see the evolution of this technology. I wonder how it works?

--dave

Now is it that hard to turn that into a nice link?

...here

I thought this was cool, you can pick up a Joystick with a built in Atari and 10 games for 20 bucks at walmart. Larger picture here

I thought this was cool, you can pick up a Joystick with a built in Atari and 10 games for 20 bucks at walmart. Larger picture here

re-read the article:
"It takes only about 30 seconds to recharge the battery enough to allow 80 hours of continuous operation of an MD player."

So that 80 hours means nothing in real world use, they just threw that in there to sound cool. They could have equally said "200 hours running a LED pen light" to sound more impressive, but they probably used MD players because:
a) they're fairly common and joe-schmuck is familiar with MD players (because they're sold at Walmart)
b) MD players already have a incredibly long battery life, 42-56 hours

Sun has delivered the first viable Microsoft Windows alternative.