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."
Didn't a failed experiment like this happen in the U.S. already? This reminds me of all the free ISPs that used to exist for a brief time that are now all defunct or for pay.
There don't appear to be any technological barriers to just accepting the PC and reintalling the OS with something sane. Contractually, however, you're agreeing to watch the ads, so if you're not doing so, I suspect they'll just come and take the PC back. Also note that the PC remains the property of Metronomy, and is loaned to the end user for a 3 year period, thus they're well within their rights to just end the loan period early.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Personally, I am cool with advertisements in the middle of things I do passively ... like watching TV.
But when I engage in an active action like writing a paper or reading, advertising gets blocked or at best ignored totally
Given the low prices of PCs and concerns over privacy how many people are actually going to take up this offer?
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
I get to deal with 12+ hours of watching advertisements per month on my NON-FREE, PAID computer already. Go figure.
Hate me!
IBM Thinkcentre 411 inc vat
You just need to look at IBM's own website to realise that a same spec PC is 411inc vat - nowhere near the 800 this news article is claiming it's worth!!
1) Get the computer.
2) Reverse-engineer the network traffic.
3) Setup old 486 to simulate the PC receiving ads and simulate user activity.
4) Reinstall OS
5) ???
6) Profit!
Is it just me, or are dotcom bubble things back in fashion?
This was back in '99
It's just a BloJJ
Don't tell anybody, but when the adverts start, I'm going to CLOSE MY EYES! heheheee!
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!
There have been so many similar things, free ISP, even free telephony, paid by advertisement interruptions.
It always fails. Why?
Because it makes you feel like Alex in Clockwork Orange being force-fed evil media!
Right, right?
Will code a sig generator for food
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.
As some people have already stated, it is easy to take a bathroom break once an our, like watching TV except in this respect you don't have to worry about missing anything.
The 30 hour minimum per month would probably be easy to get around. Just leave the computer on when you are not using it. The commercials would probably "air" whether you are there or not. Or will it track keyboard/mouse movements?
If someone were to "hack" this then maybe they could have the commercials run, but in the background, and with no sound? They probably have some way to account for the commercials and 30 hours of use per month. If you could figure out how it communicates then you could just have it send out fake communications with your ID. This might even be able to be done under Linux.
It is curious that IBM is doing this with XP instead of Linux. If they implimented it with Linux they could retain the root password which could make it a bit more difficult to get around the conditions.
You might be able to dual boot between Windows and XP. You would just have to let it run 30 hours a month in XP. But the EULA probably prohibits installing other operating systems. But it probably prohibits hacking the communication too.
Promote Sensitivity on Slashdot, make me your friend.
"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.
Nope... he just forgot to insert the ads.
(looks over at the Compaq 5301 in the corner)
Where have we heard this before? Oh yes, Free-PC.
In 1999 or there abouts Free-PC was doing the "ad-supported computer" scheme. Of course, back then streaming video for ads was out of the question and so they just chopped a 1024x768 desktop to be an 800x600 desktop with standard animated GIF type ads around the surplus.
I was lucky enough to get one. Free-PC had no chance. I think they were toast even before the dot-com bubble burst. In the end, the were bought by eMachines who had no interest in supporting the crazy scheme so they sent us all letters giving us ownership of the computers.
Truth be told, I thought it was a decent machine for an (ugh) Presario. Has some kind of AMD, I think it was a K2-66 maybe. I kept lugging around because I intended to find an upgrade for it, but the fastest processor it supports (a KIII+) goes on eBay for ridiculously absurd prices.
But anyway, back on topic, I think companies are nuts to keep trying this. It took all of five minutes for people to figure out how to hack the Free-PC to be a normal PC (not to mention, play any game that used DirectX and ads go bye bye). I highly recommend people sign up for this. I'd bet dollars to pesos they go under in a year and everyone walks away with a free computer. History repeats itself right?
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
> I don't see anything limiting me to installing my own OS
Terms of conditions:
> "Every month, you will receive a cd containing adverts to be
> shown over the following four weeks. Each disc must be
> loaded onto your PC for the system to update. Should you
> fail to do this, your PC will be disabled."
So, if you understand what you wrote, are you suggesting that they'll ship a GNU/Linux version of their ad software?
Also, the terms and conditions say that you must connect to the internet at least once per month. Obviously this is so that some piece of software can transmit data to verify that you've installed your ads etc. Will this software be available for GNU/Linux? hey, maybe it will even be Free Software. no.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
I know you're just trolling but I'll bite anyway as someone has modded you insightful.
FYI:
Unemployment in the UK currently stands at 5%, compared with 6% in the US and 10.5% in Germany which puts the lie to your 'everyone is on welfare ' claim. BTW, Brits don't say 'welfare', it's call the dole which makes me suspect your claim to be British.
Inflation is at 2.6% compared with the US at 2% and Germany at 1.2%, however wages have increased 3.6% whicg puts the lie to your 'no-one has any money' claim.
And finally, the UK is running a budget deficit of 1.9% of GDP compared to Germany at 3.7% and the US at 4.6% (and Japan 7.7%). Not great, but better than most.
On the whole, the UK has ridden the downturn better than most countries.
Anecdotally, I used to work for a US s/w firm in the UK - when the firm folded with the tech crash, every single UK employee had no problem finding other work - to this day many employees in the US are still unemployed or at least under-employed.
Cheers,
Nick
PS All figures are from the Economist indicators section for November 22nd-28th 2003.
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.
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
--
Simon
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.
While I agree with many of your thoughts I do not agree that computers are out of reach for poor folks.
Here in Calgary I can and have bought several machines for under $200 Canadian - that is under 100 quid. As for them being underpowered? no... my desktop is an upgraded 1998 celeron 433 and it now runs at 1.3gHz (Note: tualatin core celeron's are faster and better than coppermine pentium III's in all respects ) and it has 384 MB ECC memory and I don't think you can even get ECC on P4's anymore.
This means that newer computers do not even measure up to the MINIMUM standard I use.
Note that a 1.3gHz Tualatin will run about 85-95% of the speed of a 1.8gHz P4. This is because of longer pipelines and a detuned core which imposes many additional cycles in order to get the same job done. Remember, Intel had to find some way to puff the numbers. [Besides - I'm not CPU bound anyways so my machine will NEVER run faster than now regardless of how many cycles per second I buy]
The cost of my upgrade? Under $100 bux Canadian. So a poor person should be able to put themselves into a 1.3 gHz machine with the upgrade for less than $200 quid - easily - and still have money in that budget to pay an enterprising smart student out of high school or uni.
--------------
IMHO, most poor people have enuf money for their boose and smokes. It isn't a question of cost - its a question of priorities.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.