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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."
Interesting admission indeed. I am calling the SPA right now. I'd like to see those Win2003 server licenses Michael.
A Wal-Mart notebook to go right next to my Arby's MP3 player. Although perhaps the logo can be sandblasted off so that users won't die of embarassment.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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!
So let me guess, instead of Clippy you have a little bouncing yellow smiley face that keeps darting in and changing the numbers on all your Excel documents?
Bazing!
There's a neat link at the bottom of the article to another article about $200 being the magic number for PCs.
I've always thought this would be a neat idea for corporations: Several fairly powerful servers, running everything from file sharing to groupware (on BSD or Linux, SMP, etc.). A bunch of cheap PCs with no hard drives and Knoppix-type CDs configured for the company's network. All files accessed via NFS, etc.
Talk about a) inexpensive solution and b) easy support. 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. But the computers are still powerful enough to do plenty of processing on their own.
Upgrades are a cinch - distribute new CDs to everyone.
With $200 computers (how much cheaper would they be without hard drives?) it's more than possible.
Hrm.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
They are rebranded machines from Asia, so expect about the same level of linux/*BSD/etc support as any other obscure lowest bidder import type of notebook (kludgy but improving). It will be interesting to see if this takes off though. Laptops are, for many people, more of a fashion accessory than a computing device (think marketroid/execubot wannabe gearheads). Walmart brand laptop wouldn't have the same fashion value as a "Ubertron Mega Wassus 90009".
====
Crudely Drawn Games
I wonder if these will run Lindows or XP.
:p
Does this question really need to be asked? They will run FreeBSD of course!
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
10 PRINT "Trash 80s suck!"
20 GOTO 10
running it and walking out. Ah, memories!
Let me guess they have spiral binding and come with their own pencil!
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
Thank You.
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!
"For the same reason Dell and Gateway can get TVs, there's no reason Wal-Mart can't get computers," Baker said.
I really hope Wal-Mart decides to sell notebooks with both Lindows and Windows. It will never be mentioned in the press, but many people would buy the cheaper of the two, then chuck Lindows and replace it with a pirated copy of Windows.
Microsoft will no doubt fight this tooth and nail. They know that seeing two identical machines side by side in Wal-Mart, people will see how expensive Windows really is. Then there will be more reason to mainstream more Linux software, especially games.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Alienware and Sager both already sell Clevo laptops as their own house brand (after neon spraypaint, etc.). Pretty good units, so a Walmart-branded one might be an OK computer.
There are already comments whining about Walmart quality - how much differentiation is there among the vast majority of PC's today anyhow? Sure there's always premium gear, but most of the stuff for sale in stores, whether it says WalMart, HP, or Dell on it is all low-end gear designed for price, and will probably last out its useful lifecycle.
It is surprising how WalMart is making the high-tech play; netflix, itunes, now laptops, yet they've skipped consumer electronics (no walmart-branded TV's, DVD players, etc.). Their other areas for house brands are clothing and pharmaceuticals - seems like they target areas where they think there is alot of profit, and try to take some fat out of it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
everybody is interested in seeing Windows or Linux on one of these machines, but how about no OS at all! no crashes, no bugs, heck it won't even start up providing one of the most secure environments you can get :)
It is immensely difficult to compete with a corporation that gets massive amounts of government assistance in tax incentives and loans. The idea that Walmart won in the marketplace isn't true. They beg local governments for preferntial treatment in everything from tax treatment to land zoning. These are the reason Walmarts prices can get so low. Corporate welfare for the largest retailer in the world.
How quickly we have all forgotten, from just weeks ago, Walmart's hiring of illegal aliens too.
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.
(And as a Walmart Employee) Walmart has to be stoped.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
You aren't kidding.
I just built a Linux computer for my parents (dad's an older guy in his 60's) instead of a windows machine... and it's precisely because of the software cost.
A little shuttle cube, duron processor, 512 of RAM, 160GB drive, DVD/CD-RW combo drive... all for under 500 bucks. When he wanted windows, I informed him that his OS, office suite, and antivirus would almost double the cost of his computer... I did a quick assessment and realized he could do all the stuff he wanted on Linux (including utilize a USB printer and a USB scanner). I even set it up so I can administer it remotely via SSH (or even webmin tunneled over SSH if I'm feeling really lazy).
Needless to say, my mother and father are now big fans. I say good for Walmart if they want to market machines with linux and windows side-by-side... I'd like to see the sales numbers on that deal.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Wal-Mart is the Microsoft of stores. Wal-Mart is crushing American companies. They demand lower prices, forcing American companies to outsource overseas, causing losses of American jobs. If they cannot or will not cut the prices to levels that require slave labor, Wal-Mart goes to overseas companies. The result? Americans who shop at Wal-Mart are shopping themselves out of a job.
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!
When I was in high school, and using PDP printer terminals in my computer programming class (yes, this goes way back), I wrote a program that would lock out keyboard input, go into a loop of form feeding paper, and never stop until someone pulled the plug. I then named my little program "SEX.BAS" and put a warning at first when it run that this was a dangerous program, not to touch it.
I left it in our class's shared directory and waited. About 15 minutes later a cluster of male students were sitting around the terminal whispering, when suddenly the paper began form-feeding at high speed and they panicked! Ah, that was fun, preying on the natural curiosity of my fellow geeks.
"If Wal-Mart, which sells PCs from companies such as Hewlett-Packard and eMachines, moves into the notebook market successfully, it could send ripples across the PC industry. The retailer's typically aggressive pricing could compel manufacturers such as Dell, HP and Toshiba to reduce their notebook prices in response, analysts said."
... commodity commodity commodity commodity "
I KNOW there are people who hate Walmart, but I don't. Any store that forces hardware prices down to closer to manufacturing cost is fine by me. Over priced hardware has made over price software viable for far too long. I want to PAY for true innovation and pay commodity prices for things that have long since become commodities.
Picture a big fat guy dancing around on stage clapping his hands:
"commodity commodity commodity commodity
"Give it up for MEEEEE"
Arima, as pointed out in this article. It says here that Walmart has already placed an order for 100,000 notebooks for their test-run.
Gotta get me one of these!
as long as if something goes wrong and you need to call tech support, they don't have those walmart greeters answering the call....
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/968577/posts2 d3b7fbf49b6df44390aa6459ab46c88&showtopic=3074 o main.htm
2 91.htm
e =UTF-8&q=walmart+alabama+eminent+domain&btnG=Googl e+Search
http://www.americasdebate.com/forums/index.php?s=
http://www.wchstv.com/newsroom/qod/030929.shtml
http://freedom.orlingrabbe.com/lfetimes/eminent_d
http://www.badbusinessbureau.com/reports/ripoff67
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o
C:\>
Walmart already has their own isp..
1 03 468&path=0%3A103468
$9.94 a month..
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/catalog.gsp?cat=
Though the access terms are kinda funny. They say first month free, 700 hours free then go on to say unlimited email and internet access.
Needs some clarity.
DRACO-
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.
Wal-mart has found a notebook they can sell for $14.95 that will be a hit with their target
demographic from Ohio Art.
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
Here are your server software licenses, thank you very much. You can even get a license plate.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Because clearly, anyone who is against corporate strongarming must be living off mommy and daddy.
Guess what, junior? I'm 23, live completely off my own buck and have since I was 17, and I still have the balls to stand against a corporation that abuses capitalism.
I'm one of those people who hate wal-mart (and I don't shop there as a result), so I'll comment. I'll grant that wal-mart has demonstrated a lot of innovation when it comes to supply lines and inventory management, but I despise their low price mantra.
As if it wasn't bad enough that the wal-mart chain has destroyed downtown industry all over America in favor of big box stores, if a stateside business can't meet their price point they go with an import. So much for the effort to buy american that Sam Walton pushed when he was alive.
It is estimated that 7.5 cents of every consumer dollar (excepting auto purchases) go through the wal-mart's registers. They have such a dominant position that businesses can't afford not to do business with wal-mart. For many it is a lose-lose proposition.
I think there are many wasteful and incompetent american businesses that need to be put out of their misery, but wal-mart is decimating many a good business. Their impact on the US economy is such that we should question seriously the low price mantra.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Economies progress by making jobs more efficient so resources are freed for new jobs. You can't make new products unless some old product goes away or becomes more efficiently made.
It's hard to figure out who gets retrained in what way and how much. No system could be perfect. That Wal-Mart makes companies more efficient is not to be denied. That some companies don't adapt and go out of business, well, their workers and capital go into other businesses eventually, and the economy gradually becomes more efficient. If there were no unemployment benefits, the economy would become more efficient faster, but more people would suffer. If unemployment benefits were too easy to get and keep, the economy would progress more slowly. The trick is figuring out the best compromise. No one can ever know where that line is, and it keeps moving.
</LongWindedRamble>
Infuriate left and right
What happens if, God forbid, you get hit by a bus, or a drunk driver, or if you were kidnapped by a marauding band of scantily clad amazons? How will your parents manage their new computer? Do they know how to do any administration tasks like installing software, or installing a new printer?
I don't wish this on anybody, but in a previous job, I had to create a "hit by a bus" book, so that other people could do any of the frequent admin tasks that they might need, in case I was ever incapacitated. Now granted, most of these things (new users and backup-recovery) are not needed on a home machine, but if you have to ssh into your parent's box for any reason, then it isn't parent-safe enough.
That being said, I've set my parents up with the most parent-safe setup I can imagine. Yes it cost a bit more than $500, but I know that they won't have to find someone who knows KDE or Gnome, or how to re-compile a kernel when they want to plug in a new digital camera. I got them an iMac, and I never have to deal with administration of their machine. It cost a bit more, but I don't loose sleep over worrying if it is working or not.
-- Len
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.
A computer light enough to place on my particle-board desk (purchased at wallmart) without breaking it!
No, You shut-up!!!!
1. Read headline "PR Release!"
2. ???
3. +1, Informative.
Might I suggest the following:
"2. Check that the content is informative"?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That is one of the most beautifully ironic statements I've ever seen on Slashdot.
If you read my original post, you'll see that I was speaking hypothetically. I honestly don't know which lines of clothing are produced under what working conditions. However, if presented with compelling evidence, I wouldn't ignore it.
Who am I to say what is ethical? I'm a firm believer in Kant's categorical imperatives. Specifically, the second: "Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means." I'm not opposed to helping the third world nations develop by giving them jobs. But I am opposed to the rampant corporate practice of using human beings as just another resource. Their goal is to extract as much labor from the world as they can, while giving back as little as they possibly can. It's a classic case of using another human being as a means to your own ends.
And I highly doubt that you're posting from a cramped hut in India, which you share with your seven brothers and sisters. Ignorant bastard from the rich world, indeed. If you have the time and connectivity required to post your angry, pointless vulgarities, you're probably as rich an ignorant bastard as I am.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
If you read the history of the original catalog retailers, like Montgomery Wards and Sears, you will find that they were hated when they first started expanding, because they were killing small town stores (that had no competition and could keep prices high). They would organize catalog burnings. Now of course, Sears is struggling and Ward is gone. Things change, especially in retailing.
There are a number of other retailers you could throw in the "once seen as powerful destuctive forces, now pretty much gone" - Woolworth, K-Mart, A&P. All were seen as destroying "mom and pop" stores, and all are pretty much destroyed, or at least not nearly as powerful as they used to be.
Even now, Target seems to be beating the heck out of Wal-Mart. I know tons of people who shop at Target, myself included, while I know no walmart regulars.
So I predict that eventually something will replace walmart, in the same way it replaced a ton of businesses that "nobody could compete with".
I have blog like everyone else