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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.
Though I suppose it is actually on target, if someone only has $300 and can afford the $24/month payment, it might be a simple way to get a PC a little "cheaper" up front. Just too bad it has to be AOL.
Full list of features:
Why don't they send them in the mail for free like the CDs. Seems like a marketing strategy change to me.
$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?"
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.
Buy now, pay later.
If its not coming out of your pocket today, its cheaper.
People don't think long-term when making purchases. That's why banks can sell consumer credit at high interest rates with low repayments over rediculously long times.
People joke about "Wogs and Cash", but the concept of never going into debt for a non-incoming generating purchase has a lot going for it.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
"The computers will come configured with a simple desktop with large icons that send users to specific areas of the AOL service or applications loaded on the computer. They can also be preconfigured for Spanish language speakers."
Say it. You know you want to. You know it's coming. The best case mods. Ever.
The fallout from this offer may very well be the annoyance of techies everywhere. If the target audience are the people who have yet to buy a home computer then a lot of those people will be pretty much clueless with it. So it will follow in a lot of cases, these people will download or otherwise get viruses galore and/or adware. Since these new people only spent what was it 299 on a new computer, they aren't going to want to pay some tech 60 bucks an hour to fix their computer. Their tech friends will be used and abused. We will be called in to fix their problems. If the problem is software and we fix it for free than all is right with the world. The fallback on fixing a computer once is that forever more that person can say that, I think what you did 6 years ago is screwing up my computer now. Also, there is a hardware issue. These computers have the cheapest possible hardware, parts are going to die in them a lot. Well, back to the poor techie that got stuck fixing there computer. If you find out that lets say their harddrive is pooched, then they will ask how much it will cost. You will tell them and they will give you the look, like I told them that they have to hand over a years salary to fix it, then they will say well, could it be this or is there a way I can get by not using this right now...I can go on
So my assertion is cheap PCs are only a headache for techies. Any techie who finds out that someone has one of these type of computers, run run away, very fast even
Nuttles
Christian and proud of it
I wonder if the keyboard will default to Caps Lock turned on
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"
Half the posts are saying "Who cares? It's an entry-level $299 computer." Someone please tell me why a normal computer user (the type who uses AOL) needs anything faster than a 2GHz Celeron with 256MB of RAM?
Word Processing? check.
Web surfing? check.
Email? check.
Office applications? check.
Solitaire? check.
All of the above simultaneously? check.
Doom 3? Oops!
Other than video games, a typical "entry-level" PC like this does fine. This is the same thing as Microsoft having trouble getting people off of Windows '9x.
The Mah & Pah with a 500Mhz PII doesn't need anything faster. Their broadband is still slower than the speed that their PC can render a web page. It still plays chess better than they do. And they don't notice the few seconds of paging when the switch apps.