Slashdot Mirror
Free IBM Computers For UK Households
Albanach writes "The Scotland on Sunday newspaper is reporting that UK firm Metronomy are offering 200,000 IBM PCs free of charge to UK households. Of course, there is a catch - advertising. Accepting the terms and conditions will get users a free IBM PC running Windows XP, but they will also be required to watch three minutes of TV style advertising for every hour of computer use and undertake to use the PC for a minimum of 30 hours per month."
or... why watch?
nice reminder to take a break - go the toliet, don't get headaches, don't get carpal tunnel syndrome.
In order to get this PC, you would have to watch 90 minutes (1 and 1/2 hours) minimum of advertising each month. I am not sure the PC is worth sitting through that amount of advertising.
-Valen
Is it just me, or are dotcom bubble things back in fashion?
This was back in '99
It's just a BloJJ
c'mon, do you really think they won't have thought of that?
What displays the ads? software. What else does the software do?, well, it probably sends signals over the Internet. So if the signals aren't sent, there's something wrong, and they take the PC back.
Also, how else would they enforce a 30-hour per month minimum?
Now. What else do the ad software transmit...
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
How about switching on the ads when its time to go to work/sleep? =)
Another solution not involving a second PC. Install a stupid program simulating user activity, let it run 30 hours/month when you're not home. For the rest of the time just do what you want (i.e. kill the advertising program or run linux).
"The economy in the U.K. is horrid right now. Nobody has any money or work and everyone is on welfare."
Oh, come on, it's not that bad. If people have no money, how come house prices have risen by about 40% in the last two years ?
"What use is advertising to "poor" people if they can't buy most of the crap you are hawking?"
Come off it, this is still a pretty wealthy country, on world-wide basis. It remains to be seen whether this is a good idea, but I'm sure IBM have done their sums, and a bit of research.
"I would have picked Germany, at least they have money. Seig Heil!"
Stop being a prick.
"Oh, in case you are wondering I'm British."
Yep - and the kind of Brit that the rest of us are ashamed about.
Ghost the disk that comes with the computer onto an old, fairly useless pentium. Write a script to watch the ads for the contractually required time. Put the old pentium in a cupboard with an ethernet cable and forget about it, except for once a month, when you drop in the CD of new ads.
Format the nice new fast computer with whatever os you choose, and use it as you please.
They get their ads "watched" three times an hour, 24/7, by a genuine internet-connected PC running all the spyware they feel like, and you get to use the new hardware as you like.
Well, a thing or two could be said about the value of the demographic group 'people without enough disposable income to buy a cheap PC'.
What does a cheap PC cost? $299? $200? If I offered you $200 would you take it? I hope you would.
/. readers, they're not for our parents either. These are for people who know *nobody* who knows about computers. All they know is that it's 2003 and everybody is supposed to have a computer in their home. And this one is free. It's like a free gift of $200. And they have to watch some ads. For you and me that's a dealbreaker but not for some people.
These PCs are not for
Get off your high horse. Some people *like* the idea of a free couple of hundred dollars. It's nice that you don't but don't condemn other people for liking free money.
Build your own website - full service homepage system your m
I can't see any reason why the 'simulator' program would be required. Why not just run the computer overnight with the monitor and speakers turned off?
Has anyone picked up on the fact that they're deploying Intel Celeron CPUs ? Don't Intels have a unique CPU ID ? I'd be surprised if their monitoring software didn't report back the ID of the host machine and send it to head office.
In fact the s/ware that displays the ads may very well refuse to run on anything other than an "official" machine.
Sorry about all of the probably but I am too lazy to go and hunt down a copy of their actual tems and conditions ;-)
Oh, come on, it's not that bad. If people have no money, how come house prices have risen by about 40% in the last two years ?
Because of the scam among lenders to loan massive amounts of money to borrowers who can't afford the repayments, because the mortgage is overgeared, and by encouraging mortgage applicants to lie about their income. This has been extremely well-documented in the past months, and has certainly contributed to a feverish (unhealthily so) property market in the UK.
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
I agree its not worth that much but I think those prices don't include a monitor but that would still be only 500. Of course there is a P4 2.6Ghz which is 800 which is what they might of picked up.
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Firstly, advertising has proved time and again to be a sustainable business model throughout all media sectors. Why shouldn't this work too for PC/Internet Access?
It's a great way for low income families to get online, or gain experience of using PC's - thus increasing their employability.
The masses are more than happy to trade privacy for free stuff - cf loyalty cards.
Stop looking for the faults in everything!
Vacancy for signature. Apply within.
Some people *like* the idea of a free couple of hundred dollars. It's nice that you don't but don't condemn other people for liking free money...... And this one is free. It's like a free gift of $200. And they have to watch some ads.
/. readers- advertising-subsidised PCs are soooo 1999. I hear they come with a free pair of cargo pants that are subsidised by advertising some 14-year-old whizz-kid's website that's had $1 billion invested, but will be worth more than Disney when we get to the IPO.
Well, it's not free then. They get a computer in return for watching some ads. You can say that's an excellent deal and you may well be right, but it's not free.
Fact is, most "free" gifts aren't free at all, because you have to do something non-trivial to get them; often involving buying something else.
Anyway, you're right. These aren't for
Whoah, sorry dude. Nasty flashback...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
and it wont work for IBM.
IBM gets to dump whatever stock it can't shift onto people who won't complain what they get. I think it'll work just fine for IBM.
Metronomy on the other hand...
If you had a choice between a computer with adverts and one without, at the same price, you would of course choose the one without. So this begs the question of who buys a computer worth a few hundred quid for this, it seems fairly major inconvenience. Most people have computers these days, and even if it means a small to fair upgrade I'd bet most people would be unwilling. Especially if they were considering the performance overhead that the ad software is going to take.
The people left over using this are people who can't afford a new PC, and who lack the knowledge, time or wherewithal to make an old one work on older (or possibly less horribly bloated) software, or indeed the computer savvy to know that an older computer with such software is completely adequate for most peoples needs (we all survived on it however many years ago). What these people are also going to evaluate is that the benefits of having access to a computer and the internet is worth the advertising.
The problem we have is that when we raise the bar to enter society there are problems. Where there is no good public transport provision in an area, a car is nessecary to conduct a decent life (especially outside a city), leading to ghettoisation of those who don't. [On a side note the people who are ghettoised in inner cities not only suffer through not having a car, but their areas are sliced up by roads to which they have no access. Crippling communities, and flaunting what others have in front of their faces every day] What I am leading to, far too slowly, is that this leads us to a world where computers are a nessecary part of life in the western world, especially with the advent of the internet. People without have less access to the wealth in society, leading to a situation where advertisers can further force their way into the homes of people who are wise enough to realise what they could gain from the computer it places there.
The hardware upgrade spiral is the very most antisocial and upleasant aspect of the wintel cartel. Maybe govornments who want to free themselves from it should have schemes to recycle old computers and sell them cheaply (including software licenses). It'd probably help their GDP too.
In much the same way that they get TV shows in return for those shows being periodically interrupted by advertisements.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
Depends on what you're advertising. If you're selling luxury cars or high end home cinema systems then probably not. If you're selling soap powder, high interest loans for people with debt problems or tins of baked beans then probably you would. Also bear in mind that there will probably be some sort of spyware either in the PCs or in the adverts themselves that will allow the people sending the ads out to target the ads. If they see someone searching the web for bridging loans then their next ad break will probably contain at least one ad for a finance comapny or a debt councelling service, if they spend at lot of time on the Autotrader web site then their next ad break will have an advert for "Yes! Car Credit". A targeted and well defined audience for your ads, being able to get your ad infront of people who you already know are interested in your product, is a total dream for advertisers.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
Who cares if its got advertising. Sounds like another node for SETI or other distributed client.
To be fair, who cares if it works or not?
Surely it would be better for all people on the planet if cheap, crap, untargeted advertising was proven to be ineffective and all businesses that develop sub standard advertising techniques were to flop without mercy?
Since when did business care in the least about writing off a few hundred thousand dollars? This could be a tax writeoff for all we know.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
"A targeted and well defined audience for your ads, being able to get your ad infront of people who you already know are interested in your product, is a total dream for advertisers."
A targeted and well defined audience with money is a total dream for advertisers.
Unfortunately. Else, we would be able to pay homeless for watching commercials for houses, unemployed for watching commercials for headhunters and we could feed large parts of the continent of africa by showing 'round the clock advertising for food.
Soap powder producers and baked bean salesmen would get a much better return on investment by simply targetting low-income neighbourhoods with coupons. And high interest loans are targetted towards people who can make the payments, not the ones who'll file for bankrupcy when the first payment becomes due.
Disposable income is one of the absolutely most important metrics when it comes to the value of advertising time. If the demographic group has little disposable income, advertising time with that demographic just isnt worth very much.
This computer isn't free, and one should avoid calling it free. The agreement is for the loan of a computer in exchange for the labor of loading discs and watching advertising. This is an exchange of value, and the term free is used only because the consideration provided by the ad-watcher is solely non-cash.
Similarly, some recent 'cheap PC' offers have had a requirement to maintain some sort of ISP account. Thus, they should be referred to as having a cost of "$299 + 24*$19.95" in exchange for a computer and 24 months of ISP service. Calling it a "$299 PC" is simply dishonest. Marketers of course do this, but the media (including Slashdot) should know better.
Were I the Attorney General, I'd try to bring fraud charges against things that are labeled free when they in fact are not.
Well...because we can, and it makes an interesting afternoon...:)
But damn, people. All the suggestions of "2nd hard drive" "boot into Knoppix" "VMWare and run XP in the background" "hack this, hack that"
WHY BOTHER?
This machine is not aimed at you, nor anyone you know( ok...maybe your granny. but if you were a good grandson, you'd have hooked her up by now.). This is aimed at the current non-PC people. And as a way to get them into the virtual world, it's OK.
If/when a way is found to circumvent the adware, phone home routine, etc...the advertisers will get no return on their money. One by one, they will pull out, Metronomy will kill the program for lack of funds, and a lot of people will never get their free PC. The only ones that may possibly benefit will be the ones that get in early, as they may be allowed to keep the machine after Metonomy goes under.
Let's leave this one alone to sink or swim on its own accord. Personally, I think it'll sink, but we don't need to push it off the end of the pier.
There were a couple of companies that tried this. I got a free computer through FreePC.com back in '99.
I had just gotten out of college and had no computer at the time (and was pretty broke)... plus I had a strong suspicion that the company would go out of business... so I signed up on FreePC.com and got a free Compaq Presario.
Not a great computer, mind you -- 32 meg ram, 2 gig harddrive (I think.. maybe 1.5), 333 mhz cyrix processor, win 98, dial-up internet access included. But I added another 56mb RAM to make it useable and used a shareware tool called WinSniper to hide the ad windows (which were in a border around the screen, at all times). I still didn't have the whole screen to work on, which was unfortunate, but I didn't want to disable the software altogether, since it reported back to their site when I logged onto the internet.
So it was a subpar experience... but after a few months the company folded (as I had expected), I removed their software, and that was my computer for a year or two. Now it's retired. I keep meaning to install some variant of Linux on it, but never quite get around to it.
Anyway, this British program sounds like a similar scheme... I'm hoping they did a lot of research into why their predecessors failed so miserably before they launched this company. Yes, computers are cheap, but you need to get a lot of ad revenue to cover salaries for all the *support* personnel you will need. Plus, the demographics they're hitting are all bass-ackwards; advertisers want to pitch to people who are ready to *spend* money on new stuff... NOT people who are willing to suffer just so they can *avoid* paying a few hundred bucks for an inexpensive computer. Think about it.
--
This stare intentionally left blank.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
I can see a positive side to this. It forces people to take a break to get up and stretch while the commercials are on. I think all computers should have commercial breaks as to promote better health.
_nfotxn