Slashdot Mirror
Wal-Mart to Offer Wal-Mart Notebooks
ducomputergeek writes "Cnet News.com is running an article that Wal-Mart plans to launch its own line of notebook computers. I wonder if these will run Lindows or XP. We've purchased a couple low cost boxes with no OS's for cheap file servers and they've worked pretty well."
I've been shopping walmart.com for tech books for quite awhile (they are the cheapest)! This is good news, I wonder if they will be offering Linux on the laptops, or any other desktops!
I don't care if it isn't able to run the latest video games. I'd like to see a sturdy notebook computer that has good battery life and a price under $500.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Is it me or by 2025 everything will be Walmart. I can see this orwellian type world, where 20 story tall Walmart stores dominate the landscape. And giant city sized Walmart's where the peons (everybody) work, like the middle age vassals all over again. Your overlord will be Baron Von Mildred, the silver haired 400 year old woman who greets you everyday with a smile and a cat o'nine tails. Gonna be fun!
most people who purchase laptops are not purchasing their first machine. onw, where most people who buy the emachines $399 at best buy, or the microtel (?) special at wal-mart for $199 are not going to jump on a $799 laptop. in some markets, price is everything, like gasoline. but in some markets, there are other intangible factors. not the least of course is the fact that going into most laptop type environs (offices, coffee shops, college classrooms, etc.) there will be a stigma.
let me give you an example. in william grieder's book "secrets of the temple" about the federal reserve, (great book), he tells the story of bluefish. now, for those of you who don't kow much about bluefish, it is plentiful on the east coast, but not the best eating fish. but, when bluefish prices were higher, it sold more. as it price dropped, it actually sold less. why? well, it became a "cheap" fish. when it's price went back up, its sales did too. with the laptops, apple is selling tons, and they are not the cheapest. i don't think wal-mart will sell lots of laptops. people are looking for something a little more. for me, the clincher on the ibook was the screen. i couldn't deal with the cheaper laptop screens. my guess is that most laptop buyers are a little more discriminatory.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Maybe not as many people as you think.
I've purchased a few of the lindows boxes, and I chucked lindows before I even finished unboxing them, but I didn't replace it with windows. I replaced it with debian. And I've been very happy with them since.
Yep,
:-)
:-)
server based computing is the answer.
Forget the CD look at etherboot, no CD no hard disk. No fscking way my users can hose the machine with software. If they break the hardware just wander down with a replacement.
LTSP is one project working on Xterms.
For my money we are still waiting for fault tolerant clusters before this really takes off. I want cheap Xterms connected by ethernet to my FT cluster. A node fails no problem another will auto take over with no downtime ot any user. Auto load balancing ie Mosix. Cheap replacable server farm baby
The best bit is that it's coming, the work is now being done on more than one project
Selling PCs at supermarkets has rocked the German PC market.
ALDI (a very popular discount retailer, similar to Wal-Mart) began selling computers a few years back, both desktop PCs and laptops. They still do so on a regular basis and just this week they had a not-too-bad all-in-one all-purpose PC for home users.
These computers are special time-limited offers, marketed in large quantities over a few days, about twice a year. So limited that when the first series was sold in 1997, one customer tried to secure his PC using a gun.
Aldi has become so successful that its main supplier Medion has slowly become the #1 computer manufacturer in Germany (although it is unclear wether it can hold that spot - the company is struggling, too).
Several other competing supermarket chains have joined the market with their own line of bargain PCs and now there are a number of "Schnappchen PC" offers popping up in several supermarkets chains before Christmas every year. You pick up your fully-installed, ready-to-go PC right next to your milk, bread and toilet paper.
Although computer pros initially laughed at the thought of buying an ALDI PC, it turned out to be a pretty good offer. Thanks to huge numbers of absolutely identical PCs to be sold, the company preparing these boxes had time to slash prices and still do the configuration better than what you'd often get at the likes of Dell or your local selfmade-PC-shop.
The ALDI PC is targeted at home users and its first versions were quite well thought-out and sold like crazy. (See gun story, linked above.)
These days, customers aren't that mad about the ALDI PC anymore, it seems. The recent offerings were more and more prone to feature-overload. The current ALDI PC comes with everything and a kite: Next to the standard stuff it includes a universal card drive, a TV-in card, a remote control, wireless keyboard and mouse, wireless LAN and a DVD burner on top of the DVD read only drive...
But still, ALDI teared down the wall, put massive price pressure on everyone else and literally brought the multimedia PC to the masses with a PC that's actually really ok.
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
The computers are throwaways, and you don't have to move data from a broken one to a new one. It's all on the servers.
What about Sun's system where you have a smart card that you can insert into a computer and your desktop pops up with everything still open, i.e. no logging out and back into the network? Everything is on the server, including any state regarding your login/desktop.
I hate how Windows handles logins. At work I have to download my profile, merge it with what is on the desktop. When I log out, it uploads it back to the network. In Unix/Linux your home directory and configuration reside on the server all the time. With Sun's solution, they take it one step farther -- the workstation is basically a monitor, keyboard and mouse plugged into ethernet.
Kind of reminds me of ye olde client/server systems with a mainframe and "dumb terminals." Now they call them "thin clients," but the concept is the same.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
You are so wrong, jeez, the decline in american manufacturing was cause primarily by the inflexibility forced upon mfg's by unions. It happened long before walmart dominated. For examples read "The End of Detroit". Protectionism never works, only accepting and adapting.
You may want to read the following article to get a more clear picture of how wal-mart operates. I read the article this morning, and it happens to be very timely.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Yes, I used to be on a city commission and needed to go to most of the council meetings. I've seen how local governments can get tricked by the idea that corporate welfare can actually create good jobs. I've seen it with areas being rezoned for some new condos (simiarly to your situation) and to giving preferential tax treatement for building a large do-it-yourself store (let's call it L for short).
The L's people had this presentation that a tax break for them would create hundres of new high-paying jobs. It was crap, like all these deals are.
They give an unfair competition to large corporations over small stores. The L went up, undercut local businesses because they were allowed to have larger profit margins from lower taxes, and killed local hardware stores. By the time I moved away, the L was employing about a hundred people, but four other stores each closed up taking away at least that many jobs in the process. Also, with no more competition, there was no check on L's service and prices. Nobody can tell for sure how this impacted the local landscape, since it pure guesswork, but I can tell you that L is not getting any better or cheaper. I hear they are actually having a hard time keeping a story that big open now.
Walmart just received government assistance to build a new supercenter too. It is happening across the US.
Wal-Mart Collapses U.S. Cities and Towns
Proposed ordinance in San Diego takes aim at Wal-Mart Supercenters
Denver officials are deciding whether to give Wal-Mart $10 million of our tax money so Wal-Mart can build a Supercenter at Alameda Square Shopping Center.
Just read up on the big-box closures all over the country now. Many of these cities are making the same mistakes again, gives huge incentives for people to now come into a story that Walmart has closed up after giving Wal mart incentives to build the store in the first place.
Many of these places cannot support a place like Walmart and it is no surprise when Walmart closes up after a couple of years later, after driving local stores out of business.
It's actually a race to the bottom. Every year walmart grows and as it grows it squeezes out competitors and ships jobs overseas. If things continue their trend they will have a monopoly in just a few years. What happens then?
I'll tell you what happens jobs leave china and go to cambodia or africa or someplace. They continue to to shift to countries where people are more destitute thereby leading to boom and bust economies all over the world. Eventually the chinese will want a 10 cent raise and the factories will all close up and move.
I predict that one day in the not too distant future some country will enslave an unpopular minority and the services of their slaves to walmart for the cost of subsidence. These slaves will work all day for bread and water making socks and t-shirts with the walmart brand on them.
At that moment we will have achieved maximum efficiency.
The natural tendency in a darwinian economy is a monopoly.
War is necrophilia.