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Slashback: Newton, Wal-Mart, Eats
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?"
I'm very the stolen copies of Newton's Principia have been successfully recovered. I was having trouble around here without the laws of physics.
I think India's rationale for going with Bill Gates offering over Richard Stallman's offering is fairly simple to explain: Bill's offering a finished product, no polish necessary, at no cost. RMS is saying you can have the greatest software in the world if you put your mind to it and pointing to a bunch of half-written software.
Which would you rather have? Just take a look at the statistics in the places where people can choose to pay for Windows or get Linux free to get an idea of why the opportunity is so tasty to India.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I would like to add that i see nothing here about food. move along.
Oh, please. It's a CHEAP computer in every sense. It's mean to be sold to clueless masses with no cash and no skills, not somebody looking to replace their PIII with custom everything.
It's gonna use the lowest cost stuff they can find and you know what? That's entirely appropriate. Get over it.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
OH GOD, The Humanity!
...I wish I could convince an entire country that not paying for software is just too damn expensive.
I don't get it. Where are the "eats for the desperate computerist"?
I thought that this was a comment on something like the Dilberito.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
You know, /. has gotten things wrong before, but mixing up Checkers with Connect Four is a first.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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.
Help fight continental drift.
The PR says it compares to an 800MHz Celeron. Whether it DOES or not, I dunno.
It's not a super-powerful computer, of course, but for $199, it's certainly not a rip-off. I'd have no trouble recommending that to some people.
In a quote from the article, Bill says:
"We can save money in terms of speed of development or by being able to run on less expensive hardware."
So I guess that's why WinCE handhelds are less expensive than Palm pilots. Oh, wait, they aren't less expensive. Oh but then there is desktops. Oh wait, what about the $199 walmart PC running linux being less expensive than the Windows counterpart... Considering that Linux runs on just about anything, the "less expensive hardware" just is totally untrue. Let's see Windows XP run on a 386 with 8M ram. Nice FUD Bill.
OK, I'll supply one. Remember when that guy who draws Dilbert was going to launch a line of prepared food products for geeks... like Dilburritos, or something like that?
When things seem really bleak and hopeless, just think about what a total, colossal failure that must have been, and you'll be cheered up in no time!
- Have a picture
That article doesn't say that Wal-Mart is selling 300,000 Linux PCs per month. It says that Via is selling 300,000 C3s per month to buyers including Wal-Mart.
I hope those theves get there library cards taken of them and a 90p fine for each day they didn't return the book.
Walmart is the beginning of the end of American Middle Class. They kill a lot of small individually owned mom and pop stores when they move into a town. In the future we will all get to work for them at minimum wage and buy cheap crap from Asia. It is ironic that everyone is up in arms about M$'s behavior but is very passive about what is happening to small businesses. In my view both M$ and Walmart are predatory.
I grew up in the Fulda Gap, where did you?
Hiring (or promising) to hire a whole bunch of Indian programmers. Heck i would adopt windows on a couple of boxen if M$ decides to invest heavily in TI market..after all those people are not going to spend their whole lives working for MS...sooner or later they will move on, and presto! Inda has educated progammers with world class experience!
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
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.
I don't understand how Walmart expects to sell this stuff. The price tag that is on this kind of computer will appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator customer. One that doesn't have money or the internet. So how are they supposed to buy it without internet access? And if they do buy one and when they can't run the lastest games(re:windows based games on it) they will return them. (Or pirate old copies of Windows 98 to run on them.)
Most people "in the know" would avoid them would they not? Most Linux geeks that I know would want high end equipment not cheap junk. I've got an old celeron that has trouble running X. How the heck is this going to run Lindows, lycoris or Mandrake 9?
So I can't figure out who this is marketed at? College students? First time "trailer home" computer buyers?
Some one there made a bad business move IMHO.If you have stock in Walmart I'd sell.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I went to that site to play a fair game of Connect Four in the hopes of getting a final answer as to which browser is truly better than the others. Unfortunately, hoodlums have logged in with multiple browsers to throw the game by playing poorly with one browser in the hopes of defeating a defenseless opponenent!
I mean, truly, who plays checker 3 to slot 1 when the opponent has opened with a classical Harvey the Wonder Hamster attack in slots 4,5, and 6!!
Outrageous! I see the only way this will ever be settled is through the time-honored (and FAR less unruly) game of Go Fish! Harumph, I'm taking my checkers and going home...
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
A diplomat [or insert any M$ name here] is a person who can tell you to go to hell [or buy their products...all the same] in such a way that you are actually looking forward to the trip!
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
I'm = I am
The verb is present. The sentence is missing a predicate adjective/nominative. Not, as another Slashdot English whiz pointed out, an object. "To be" is not transitive (and thus taking an object).
----------
I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
Whenever someone says something like that I hear: "We are a very poor country. We are all dunces. We can't raise our standard of living. Therefore we will eat at the crumbs and wallow in our own pity.
It's a shame people don't respect themselves more. And it's not like php requires that much more development ability then ASP does.
-BrentCartman: Tell them we'll have punch and pie.
Kyle: We're not gonna' have punch and pie!
Cartman: More people will come if they think we have punch and pie!!
- An orgy of clicking and death!
That reminds me... My Girlfriend blessed Bill Gates last night. I asked her why, and she said that He was responsible for the ubiquity of the mouse wheel and therefore for the extreme dexterity of the middle finger of my right hand.Sorry, but it's a true story.
Heh, scroll on my scrigidies. Goddamn Right.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
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.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
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)
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Guess RMS didn't do his homework. MS actually got in trouble in India years ago for hiring so many Indian programmersand shipping them off to the states. India told MS their programmers are a natural resource and MS can't drain any more. So MS has built a large development facility in India. So RMS is asking India's developers to work for free, Gates is giving them paychecks.
You see, it was like this. RMS came to our (non-descript, but *very* highly funded) university a couple of months back, evangelising on copyright misuse. The lecture theater was full to the brim of course and the audience, mostly consisting of CS grads, were quite taken by his rather impressive beard and his persistent plucking of his nose. Not to debase his talent or vision, but he has some very interesting stage-habits.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks back when Steve Ballmer made a stopover at our university. The theater, this time the largest available, was again filled to the brim. The university President shared the dais with him and we all had to register for the talk with our name and university IC No. The official reason for the registration is that seats are limited, which, in any case, was a sort of valid reason; seats were booked within two days of the announcement. Needless to say, everyone (that is, from all faculties) turned up to watch him speak.
I wasn't down at Mr. Ballmer's talk, but friends tell me that it had very little to do with the stated topic "Innovation and Entreprenuership" and more to do with X-Boxes and Tablet PC's. Ballmer's shiny scalp was, I believe, impressive, but apparently the audience found the X-Boxes and Tablet PC's more interesting.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me that Bill Gates made a better impression on India than RMS.
More than mere navel gazing.
Think about it. This is WalMart telling Joe Sixpack that Linux is the way to go. In their words "Desktop/LX is an exciting new Linux-based operating system (OS) that offers a user-friendly, powerful and open alternative to Microsoft Windows." Hundreds of thousands of kids are going to be doing their homework on those boxes.
Cost of computer: $2500
Operating System: $40 retail
Broadband Internet: $50/mo
Owning Graphical Browsers at Connect 4 using a Text Browser: Priceless