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Gateway Puts Wasted Cycles to Work
f. liszt writes "Gateway will be offering for sale to corporations the processing power available from networked display PCs in their stores -- seems like a logical enough idea."
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They must have one hell of an inventory problem if they are resorting to this for some extra cash!
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
hmmmm...a company selling idle time with their product models to make money...doesn't sound like a bad idea...i think victoria's secret should get in on this...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Alright so its their cycles, but what about the Cancer and SETI screensavers? Do something useful for the good of mankind, with the spare cycles. oops sorry, I got confused there...big corporation and caring about others....
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
Gateway Inc, increasing their profit by a total of $2000, $1000 of which will go to the Long Island, NY store that found the winning key. Gateway stock (NYSE:GTW) immediately went up to to 3.51 from a previous $3.50 per share following the announcement.
This has been a problem since the 1970s. Back then, for some reason whenever we were in a Radio Shack it seemed funny to stop by a TRS-80 display model and type in something like:
The salespeople probably would have chased us out of the store if they weren't so busy scribbling down every customer's address and the part numbers of every blister pack in the store on those little paper sales slips.
I read the headline and thought that they were taking old Honda motorcycles and converting them into Segways.
Pet store hamster wheels sell power to the grid!
- - - Patent applied for and deliver us from evil
"Gateway has 272 Gateway Country stores. With 7,800 floor model PCs, ..."
...
1. Install distributed computing client on first PC.
2. Install distributed computing client on second PC.
3. Install distributed computing client on third PC.
4.
...
...
7801. Profit!
I have a suggestion for Gateway's CTO: Calculate the money you've made running SETI@Home and the cancer project on your desktop for the last year, and multiply that by 7,800. That's what you can expect.
Ok, I may have forgotten some of the details of Sinclair BASIC, but you get the idea
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
It is M$ gimmick. They're gonna take your snaps while shopping PCs. Have a look at this new technology that takes snap through monitor.
Hmmm... Ok.. Chivas on the rocks.
I used to do something like:
10 input "Hi! What's your name";a$
20 print "You sure are ugly, ";a$;"!"
30 goto 10
Coming back later, I noted that people would say very nasty things to the insolent Commodore 64.
It's too bad I wasn't more enterprising then, or else I would have typed:
10 input "Hi! Please enter your SSN or credit card number for a free gift!";a$
20 open "goodies",8,4,1
30 print#1 a$
40 close#1
50 print "Thanks! I love you lots!"
100 goto 10
Good thing they usually didn't have a disk drive attached.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
GWB: Ha! We've just discovered your plans, damn terrorist!
Saddam: Terrorist for what?
GWB: UN inspectors just found these mass destruction weapons plans on your PC.
Saddam: Heh, check better, yankee. That's a mirror of YOUR mass destruction weapons plans at the Pentagon! We just sold some processing power and storage space to your network.
GWB: Oh...
Saddam: Wait. One more thing.
GWB: What?
Saddam: Here's the bill. Cash only, thanks.
This guy can ALWAYS use computing power ... and it appears as though he has money to burn! I'm sure that he'd buy processing power in bulk!!!!
I wonder how much bandwidth is included in Crap-way's "processing power" price .... and if they threw in a couple SMTP servers .... that would be a steal!
:)
/. regularly, this is a (weak) follow-up to this article about our favorite person, notorious email spam king, Alan Ralsky. :)
This way, customers could come to the Gateway store for a sneak preview of the spam email they would be receiving that week! Everybody wins!!!
BTW: For those people the don't read
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Gateway enters the top 5 of supercomputers with the world's largest Beowulf cluster.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I used to do the same thing on Commodore 64's in stores. However, before putting the PC in an endless loop, I would disable the break key using a POKE command (POKE 808,234 if I remember correctly), so that my pathetic little program was unstoppable.