Slashback: Newton, Wal-Mart, Eats

Slashback tonight brings you quick updates on the stolen copy of Newton's Principia, Linux at Wal-Mart (dot com), Free software vs. free software in India, and food for the desperate computerist. Read on!

Honestly, where would they have unloaded that anyway? yorgasor writes "Yahoo reports that the stolen copies of Newton's Principia have been successfully recovered. The thieves are also suspected of other thefts from several Moscow and St Petersburg libraries."

They have everything. An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Lycoris joins Lindows and Mandrake in being preloaded for walmart.com: 'The new $199 Desktop/LX Certified MicroTel PCs include the Desktop/ LX operating system. Desktop/LX also includes the following incredible software features without any additional downloading:'"

Who needs a war? Krieger writes "I found this link to the definitive browser wars at HardOCP, where you get to play checkers to prove your browsers superiority. Taking the browser wars to a new high/low?"

Here's the hook, can you pass that sinker please ... JoeWalsh writes "According to this article, earlier this month RMS visited India and tried to convince them to use Free (as in freedom) Software. Then along comes Bill Gates this month, handing out free (as in beer) software, and suddenly India isn't interested in RMS's message. A choice quote: "We are a poor country. We cannot develop operating systems and platforms on our own." Did RMS tell them they couldn't use GNU/Linux, or is this more Microsoft propaganda at work?"

Comments

Walmart "computers"

[blate]

What they don't tell you in the advertising is that many of these cheapie Walmart PC's run a processor from Cyrix that VASTLY underperforms Intel/AMD chips of the same speed. Another example of how MHz/GHz are not a good measure of system performance. Also, another example of how there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Re:Walmart "computers"

[AmigaAvenger]

umm... 8 mb is more than enough for divx, avi's, mpegs, ANY other full screen video you want to watch...

1024*768=786432 (total pixels)
786432*3 = 2359296 (we have 3 color per pixel)
2359296 / 1024 = 2304 kilobytes (1 byte per color-pixel) (assumed 24 bit color, 16 million...)

end result is 8 megs is more than enough for some very nice triple buffered video, and double the amount needed for double buffered.

Re:Walmart "computers"

[tiny69]

I just received my $200 Walmart special yesterday. So far I'm more than happy with it. I had originally planed on installing Slackware as soon as I recieved it, but I decided to mess around with Lindows first. The default desktop is a heavily modified version of KDE that looks very similar to a Windows 2000 desktop. Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word Viewers are listed in the "Start" menu, but they don't seem to work (haven't looked into it yet). The mouse scroll wheel is configured to work by default. The default daemons listed by netstat as listening for new connections are smbd, cupsd, lisa, and dhclient. The thing I don't like so far is that the system auto logs into Xwindows as root!!

The only thing that I'm worried about is the cheap components breaking. If they don't, then the sytem is more than worth it. I'm seriously thinking about buying another one to upgrade my Pentium 90 firewall.

Re:Walmart "computers"

[squiggleslash]

I have one too. It's running Slack 8.1, and with the exception of the video chipset having a bug (put Option "SWcursor" in the Device section of your XF86Config file to avoid the pointer suddenly having an offset) I've found it completely trouble free.

It's more than fast enough to run most Linux software. Only hi-res video (720x480 and better, ie it will not play DVDs) seems to be beyond it. VCDs and VCD-resolution DIVXs and such scale up and run smoothly using a video chipset for which XFree86 supports the XV extension. I recommend recent builds of MPlayer.

It's also one of the quietest machines I've ever used. There's a faint hum, but it's quieter than my laptops. I have no problem tucking it away next to a bookshelf in the living room.

I'm rather pleased with it. Best $200 I've spent in a while. The bizarre insults against potential owners in this thread seem to me to be misplaced snobbery - one might explain them by refering to the writings of certain, pillars, of 20th Century psychology, but I'd probably be seen as trolling.

Re:Walmart "computers"

[kesuki]

Granted, the graphic card has enough memory, But does the Processor have enough power? The Cyrix processor Lacks a FPU. Without FPU you're talking 1/3 the playback speed, on MMX Enhanced FPU requiring multi-media applications. That's right, this 800 MHz-1.0 GHz cyrix chip is going to run about as fast as a Celeron 333-450. Everything that doesn't need FPU integers is going to run as snappy as on a 1.0 ghz system, but video, audio, math intensive routines etc, are all goint to be hosed by the fact that they're not optimized for no-FPU cpus, and as such a FPU has to be Emulated to perform DivX playback.
Now you're probably wondering "but my Pocket PC PDA can play DivX.." Which is true, up to a point, and that point is that at extremely low resolutions, an an extremely low resolution screen, DivX playback becomes possible. and the Windows Media PocketPC edition is designed to optimize for a no-fpu environment, so, even though a DivX codec might need to emulate FPU, nothing else on the system is, so you can get by.
so forget 1024x768 resolution on the cyrix PCs for DivX playback, you'll have to full screen the movie, and decode at it's Native resolution, not at the current desktop resolution. avoiding the scaling should save enough cycles to allow clean playback. but, again, only because the DivX codec can turn off most features that enhance visual quality when playing back on a slower machine.
Also, keep in mind that your calculations are only per-frame, and that can only hold true if the video memory can dump and rewrite the data at least 30 times per second. With shared memory, you might have problems, as you need to use 70MB/s of the memory thruput Just for the video card's usage... the decoder is also goine to use an identical amount of memory thruput, plus whatever memory thruput the OS and the codec need for themselves. True, even SDRAM should have enough thruput, but theory and practice aren't the same, playback is going to take more out of these systems, and stress it harder.
Getting these cyrix $200 systems is almost like getting a 3 year old celeron box... for someone who has a three year old celeron, they might be looking at the current crop of computers with envy, but if they bought this bargain machine from wal-mart they'd be dissapointed.
I really can only recommend this machine for people so financially strapped that it's the $200 linux box, or nothing. Or people willing to use it as a $200 all-in-one firewall/router/(possibly a personal ftp/webserver), and who don't have linux compatable hardware in thier old PC. (eg: a machine that would be a nightmare to try to get linux running on)

Re:Walmart "computers"

[sfe_software]

use of mplayer for full screen divx (as in the ads) = bad

Losing 8 megs isn't really much. I run mplayer full screen on my "media box" all the time, which is an IBM Aptiva, PIII 450 with 96 megs of RAM, and it does so just fine. mplayer doesn't use *that* much memory.

And I'm using a cheap video card (not shared memory though) using the vesa output (something that should work about the same on any modern video chip). Not to mention the other tasks that box is always doing (firewall/gateway, network file server, Apache/PHP/MySQL pretty much idling but still using RAM).

There's a big difference between decoding and displaying MPEG video (Divx), and playing 3D games which require intense GPU processing. We had full-screen MPEG video back in the 486 days. Not as high quality, sure, but even the Weezer video on the Win95 CD wasn't all that bad, and worked nicely on a DX or, better yet, a Pentium system...

I'm just rambling again...

Re:Walmart "computers"

[clare-ents]

My cacheless celeron 300 (o/c 375) could software decode DVD at 1024x768 only very rarely dropping frames so I imagine this would just about do.

Walmart selling 300K Linux PCs / Month

[bstadil]

There is a story over at theInquirer today about a major win for Cyrix / Via from Walmart.

They are having some server problems so I have included portions from the article here

Via wins big Wal-Mart Linux PC order

C3-Cyrix-Centaur selling 300,000 PCM?

By Mike Magee: Tuesday 19 November 2002, 09:58

TAIWANESE SEMI firm Via has secured an order from massive shop Wal-Mart for two of its C3-Cyrix-Centaur X86 based processors. The Economic News reports that Via and Wal-Mart will create two budget machines running flavours of the Linux OS. There's also a plan for the chip company to make low cost sub $300 machines running Windows Eyecandy. The article claims that Medion is also set to clinch a deal with Via, while Legend and the Founder Group also use some of the C3 processors.

Correction: Via selling 300K Cyrix C3 chips / Mont

[mbrubeck]

That article doesn't say that Wal-Mart is selling 300,000 Linux PCs per month. It says that Via is selling 300,000 C3s per month to buyers including Wal-Mart.

Re:Poor as in "Poor Judgement"

[shaitand]

Where did you find office for $90? last I looked you were looking at over $200 for the small buisness editions and more yet for professional.

Re:Where's the food reference?

[Ratbert42]

You mean the Dilberito.

Actual WalMart Computer Experience

[Lord Ender]

My uncle wanted a computer as cheap as possible (as a 2nd PC in his house). I had him order a walmart PC with Mandrake. What he got was a decent PC with an AMD Athlon processor, 256MB Ram, 20GB hd and onboard video/sound, along with a PCI ethernet card and modem, all assembled. When I came over to help him set it up, I just plugged in the keyboard and mouse and monitor (which he already had). It was much easier than building him one, and it only cost $400. Then he said he wanted Win2k instead of Mandrake... well guess what. The walmart PC cam with a single CDROM that had drivers for all the hardware for every version of windows! So 40 minutes later, he had a full Athlon system. I didnt have to install any hardware or hunt down any drivers on the internet. Walmart is doing a good job with their PCs.

Re:Clueless masses

[Chris Pimlott]

What a dumbass post. How will they buy them? See, there are these things called stores. Walmart has a few. In fact, Walmart has a lot. In fact, Walmart is the largest retail company in the world.

Walmart sells a wide range of products to the 'lowest comment denominator' customers. They may not have the money to buy high end but they're not dumbasses; they know if they buy a computer for $200 while Dell advertises computers for $1000, their computer is not going to be the newest and fasters and it's not going to run everything.

Leaving aside the traditional Walmart customer...
Many Linux geeks I know run multiple boxes, often on old hardware. A cheap no-frills box you can pick up with a 20 minute trip and use for a mail server, firewall, database, etc isn't a bad deal.

Re:Clueless masses

[Anonamused Cow-herd]

What a dumbass post. How will they buy them? See, there are these things called stores. Walmart has a few. In fact, Walmart has a lot. In fact, Walmart is the largest retail company in the world.

Now, the dumbass post called the article: "This exciting new $199 Desktop/LX Certified MicroTel PC will be available for purchase exclusively from the WalMart Online Lycoris Catalog."

So Joe Blow thinks : "I want to be able to access the internet. I will buy a computer. I will buy the $200 computer from Wal-Mart. This computer is only sold on the internet. I want to be able to access the internet. I will buy a computer."....

Maybe the dumbass poster assumed that you would have read the article. I guess he didn't think you would be a dumbass.