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You've Got PC
freitasm writes "Geekzone is reporting on the AOL Optimized PC, a 2GHz Intel Celeron PC with 256MB RAM and 50GB ATA-100 HDD. It'll cost US$299.99 from Office Depot stores, with a commitment of 12-month AOL subscription. More information on AOL Optimized website." There's also a Reuters story.
As I recall we all got the system, cancelled the contract and hacked the P.C. Sounds like this time we do the same thing, but we don't have to hack it.
Any ideas on how to make their contract unenforcable? I'm thinking pseudonym + PO Box personally.
$299 for a PC, heavily subsidised by an AOL subscription.
This is like a cellphone plan being applied to home PCs.
I wonder how much of that $299 is for the Windows license? This is linux's opportunity in my mind...if PCs become throw-away items (e.g. equal to or less value than a console system) at what point do the corporate masters figure 30-40% of your capital costs going to Microsoft doesn't make much sense?
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
$299 gives you an entry level PC. Looks like its enough to surf the web with and do most day to day stuff. Surprised by the lack of DVD drive, but maybe they figure that most people are interested in download and burn? Certainly not something for Doom 3, but then again I'm not surprised. You also need to be subscribed to AOL for one year. This really sounds like a similar approach as that used for mobile phones.
Reading the FAQ, I see mention of 'AOL Office Writer', 'AOL Office Calc' and 'AOL Office Impres'. Searching the net reveals nothing on the programs, though the closest I could find were matching names in the Open Office suite. Other than the names I wonder if they are one and the same?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
From the article: "The AOL Optimized PC also comes bundled with the AOL Office suite, a version supplied by Sun. This suite of productivity applications consists of: AOL Office Writer, AOL Office Calc and AOL Office Impress." This is a nice step for Open Office in terms of exposure to Windows users.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
Regarding the 256MB of RAM...
I still can't figure out why today's PCs are still shipping with 256MB as the standard. Windows XP behaves much worse with 256MB versus something like 512MB.
It's like when I purchased my car a few years ago. With like 1000 miles on it, it handled horribly in snow and bad weather. I thought the car was designed poorly, until I realized it was the tires. I had a very important part of the package slowing everything down.
My point: Who cares if it's a 2gHz CPU? With 256MB you'll be paging to that 5400RPM drive too much to notice the benefit.
Here is an interesting account of why AOL uses such truely BIZARE drivers to connect to the network (among other weird AOL things) that I found on usenet a while back while doing research into only playnet software:
Brian Heyboer writes:
>I can't tell you for sure, but I suspect they are afraid it will give
>away some of their security systems that are also used in the AOL
>software. Remember, there was a lot more on the Q-Link end than just
>the interface for the users. There was also their entire billing and
>password security system. There was also a "back door" of sorts where
>Q-Link menus and what-not could be updated via AOL.
AOL is in fact largely based on rewritten QLink (nee PlayNet)
code. Many of the algorithms are unchanged.
>Another possibility is that they cannot rather than will not. Q-Link
>licensed the software from Playnet and acquired the rights to it only
>after winning a lawsuit against the receiver of the bankrupt Playnet.
>They never did get all the source code and documentation the lawsuit
>gave them the rights to. So, they may not be able to either because the
>terms of the judgement don't allow it or they simply don't have it all.
In fact, they may not have the right to resell the technology;
it depends on what rights they got. (I suspect they eventually got all the
rights, though.)
They did, however, have all the source code and documentation
for the PlayNet system, at least as it was when they licensed it (we made
a number of mods later to PlayNet, some of which were activated and some
never were). I spent a number of days down there training various
programmers there on the design. One thing added after QLink (now AOL)
licensed PlayNet was a quite complete auditorium/panel/etc setup with
queuing, moderators, etc, run entirely via online messages (no client
software change required). This was complete and tested and finished
the week before PlayNet declared bankruptcy, so no one ever actually used
it. There were other things too, but I remember that because I was working
on it as PlayNet went under. Of course, they made their own mods
(initially mostly cosmetic, but they added lots of stuff later).
As must be obvious, I was one of the main (and last) programmers at
PlayNet. It's _really_ amusing to look at AOL today and say "I know why
users are limited to 10-character names.", and see many other elements of
the original PlayNet design unchanged (even though the reason for them is
LONG gone). For example, the 10-character name limit was largely based on
how many screen names we could display in the room header in chat within
4(?) 40-character lines on a C64 screen. Ditto the screen-name defaults (I
remember us sitting around BS'ing about how we'd handle that, and conflicts
- so now you have JoeS12345.) Online messages and how they popped up were
another Playnet idea (remember, the next-most-sophisticated system at the
time was Compuserve's ASCII "CB". Much has changed in AOL, of course, but
it's kind-of heartening to see just how well a design from 1984-85 for 64K
6502-based machines has held up over the years, at least in the broad
strokes.
The system (PlayNet and QLink) was actually quite sophisticated.
It was run by programs written in a multi-tasking state-machine language.
(Yes, your C64 was multi-tasking when doing this - N state-machine tasks
plus the "main" (basic/etc) task, which ran the game or whatever if needed.
Things like Online messages caused a new task to be started.) The
communications protocol was designed (by me) to error-correct the X.25
padmodem link, obey a limit on packet size (128?), and minimize the
number of packets (since we were charged both by the hour and the packet
back then). It used CRC error-checking (yes, in a C64), asymmetric
sliding-windows, piggybacked-acks, selective retransmit
"The Wright brothers were the first to fly with a heavier-than-air machine, but boy did they have a lousy plane"