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Microsoft Attempts to Woo Students With 'Crowdsourced' Laptops
theodp writes "Q. What do Chris Brown and Steve Ballmer have in common? A. They both want you to Beg for It. GeekWire reports that Microsoft is touting its new Chip In program, a crowdfunding platform that allows students to 'beg' for select Windows 8 PCs and tablets that they can't afford on their own. Blair Hanley Frank explains, 'Students go to the Chip In website and choose one of the 20 computers and tablets that have been pre-selected by Microsoft. Microsoft chips in 10% of the price right off the bat, and then students are given a link to a "giving page" to send out to anyone they think might give them money. Once their computer is fully funded, Microsoft ships it to them.' Hey, what could go wrong?"
Come on, I really wanted to try it out... Not that I'm a student or going college or so ;-) Just trolling their systems a bit. Besides, a cheap Win8 PC is good for running Linux, isn't it?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Then I don't think anyone wants one. Begging and debasing yourself for a computer makes sense, if you really need one. Doing it for a computer that suffers from delusions of being a tablet? What's the point?
So instead of just leaking money through flopping products, Microsoft have decided to skip the middle man (themselves and their H/W partners) and just give the money (in the form of laptops) to the few hipsters who actually want their crap
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Can we just beg for them to:
Remove Windows 8 from a laptop we already bought
Make Windows 8 and 8.1 (so basically 8.2) not suck so badly
or just beg for them to stop begging us to beg them for Windows 8 machines.
Who in their right minds wants a Windows 8 laptop ?
I'd rather have a damp pizza.
So it's a 10% discount for spamming your contact list
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
This almost reminds me of all those e-mails from way back when that say if you forward the e-mail to 10 or so friends, Bill Gates will send you a free PC. I'm already very suspect of any e-mail asking for money, even if it is from someone I know.
You could end up with a laptop with Windows 8 on it.
...but it really doesn't help when this kind of project tries to get people to turn it into spam. Want to drive your early 1980s Vanagon through China on the Silk Road, and write a book about the experience? Good project for crowdsourcing (but didn't make its kickstarter goal). Want to record an album with your band or film a documentary on something super-nerdy? By all means give it a shot.
Poor student wanting to buy a device Microsoft picked for you? Just makes the whole concept of crowdsourcing look like what it is: begging. The appeal of crowdsourcing, in my opinion, is that if the project succeeds, something fun, interesting, or exciting gets brought back that the people who helped it happen get to enjoy. Not just the person who gathered the funds.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Begs for Windows 7.
So it was true! Shopes was wtrong.
Instead of making them beg for their lives, how about investing in the future and giving laptops out to students?
Every time some marketing outfit wedges in "social" because they think the younger set will latch on just because they see the word, I die a little inside.
Glad I wasn't the only one to instantly make that connection. :D
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
1. microsoft already enjoys lock-in at most universities and private colleges. shit like outlook and sharepoint has unfortunately shoved years of well-maintained unix to the roadside in an effort for universities to seem more cutting edge. protracted multi-month outages (ahem, University of Kentucky) requiring expensive consultants drive alongside patch tuesday now in the race to time best wasted.
2. 90% of the engineering labs, the ones we slashdotters fondly pine for, are sadly Microsft lock stock and barrel. each desltop basically exists as a $500 PuTTY workstation.
id be willing to guess microsoft is trying to reduce the amount of apple on campus. in the arm and in the backpack of millions of students rests the most egregious chunk of the student loan, the macbook. Microsoft wants that few inches of space so badly they can taste the sweat off steves greasy forehead, but theyve failed catastrophically in the past and if history is any indicator, this will just serve to ever cement microsoft as the spreadsheet king. the Zune was a godless abortion, the netbook was an underpowered way to piss off university hackers, and the tablets are about the only thing left until you realize apple has been doing it better for years. Now we're going for the laptops...and its worth noting most $college macbooks run XP or 7 so as to comply with university requirements for courseware. Make no mistake however, they roll back over to mac whenever theres a party and someone needs to fire up a jukebox playlist fitting for kegstands.
making college kids beg wont work. at the end of the day sure, theyre accustomed to it with their parents but microsoft doesnt represent anything they inherently need that they cant already download off bittorrent or use a lab for. victory has defeated you microsoft, your ubiquity is the titration point at which college students simply dont care about your products. they all know windows, they all use it, but there is no fundamental 'want' or drive you can possibly conjure up that will spur kids to fall to their knees the way steve jobs could get them to.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I can already hear the Internet scams popping up right now.
You go to some family get-together.
Uncle: Hey Jimmy, I got that message about the laptop you wanted. I donated $300 for you!
Jimmy: Umm, I never signed up for any laptop nor did I send you a request to donate to buy one for me.
*crickets*
But I couldn't find the MacBook Pro running Windows 8 via Boot Camp.
#DeleteChrome
14 year old girls getting naked on cam for money for a laptop? ... Thanks Microsoft... Gigidi, gigidi...Ballmer
I am beging MS to add modern mix and start 8 to the base os in windows 8.1 or newer.
Took me a while to figure out the submitter was trying to make a rap music reference. I kept trying to figure out what tech company had a CEO named Chris Brown and couldn't think of any. For future reference: if you are going to make a rap reference in a post, please use someone nerds actually listen to like MCChris, OptimusRhyme, or MCFrontalot. KThxBye.
Enter the Gift economy
need more hardware choice (to many systems with an small 128gb SSD) and why is cpu speed hidden on so meany of the systems. Also most of the system only have Intel video.
they contribute 10%
why not just let microsoft foot part of the bill, and then you pay for the rest yourself (assuming you can afford it)?
is this better than not having any laptop?
It's from a Nigerian prince asking for help for a laptop.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
CPU speed hasn't been a factor since Intel started releasing Core family chips. They reached a wall just shy of about four GHz, and have not gone beyond that ever since. Now most people just assume the chips are running ~3GHz * Multicore and don't actually care how fast the processor is.
I want you to want me.
I need you to need me.
I'd love you to love me.
I'm beggin' you to beg me.
I'll shine up the old brown shoes, put on a brand-new shirt.
I'll get home early from work if you say that you love me.
It's confirmed, Microsoft is a stalker ex-boyfriend intent on manipulating you into loving it.
So, if the value of the laptop is N and MS kick in N *. 10, I need to raise N * .90 to get this hardware with MS shitware loaded on it, right?
Can I raise N * .90 - M, where M is the value of the MS shitware (read: Windows, etc.) and get a laptop without the shitware on it?
Microsoft with another new half baked idea.
Painful to watch and execute me too ad campaign.
A day late and a dollar short.
Say what you will about them, the fuckers are consistent.
For some reason, I find it easier to imagine Ballmer hitting someone with a folding chair rather than kicking them in the nuts.
Please let me know when Porsche adopts this model.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
That 10% discount is almost as much money as you could save by forgoing Windows for something useable and free.
Sadly, it seems lately /. is no longer much value to anyone looking for anything other than some shit-on-MS frenzy.
I think it's interesting the way they're describing this. "Windows has already contributed 10% off the PC cost." Not "Microsoft" the company, but "Windows" the operating system. As if the software itself were somehow tapping into a bank account to contribute. Is Microsoft trying to avoid its own brand here? (All of which is just a bunch of marketing nonsense. Microsoft isn't "chipping in" 10%; it's offering a 10% discount. In exchange for... your personal info, and that of your friends and family with money.)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Microsoft would have to pay me the full price of the package for me to even bother looking at it before I rip that crapheap of an OS out and replace it with something not terrible.
Failing that, I'd image the drive and rip the OS apart and rebuild it in a VM until it works even remotely well.
Spamming friends for a not-even-free Win8 laptop, pffft, great idea guys.
What a great plan for Apple: students get 10% of the price of a Windows 8 machine in free MS money when they turn around and sell it to buy a real computer. :)
Aside from the Win8 issue. I don't see how this is a bad idea. Graduating highschool students do this all the time. They tell their relatives and friends of the family that they are graduating or whatever, everyone sends them a few bucks and then the graduate can use this money to buy something. I can totally imagine sending out and email to everyone I know saying my kid needs a new laptop for college and to chip in just a few cents or whatever you can afford.
Cannot one just go to the site, select a device and p
Windows 8: so bad, they can't even *give* it away!
Begging for Windows 8? That's got to be a real case of scraping the bottom of the barrel.
There are more problems with UEFI than 'secure' boot. I bought an HP box with Windows 7 and secure boot disabled. The thing wouldn't boot Windows after I installed the drive from my old PC as a secondary SATA drive (believe me, I tried every available BIOS setting). The Windows EFI bootloader insisted on trying to boot from the secondary (MBR-formatted) drive if it was there - even though a live-booted linux CD was fine with it. But if I left a gap in the SATA drive numbers, Windows would boot (and mount the SATA3 dirve as drive F:), whereas my live linux CD didn't even see it as SATA3 (apparently the BIOS didn't report it there with the gap).
Essentially, I was only able to 'use' this drive after I completely wiped it and replaced its MBR partitioning scheme with a GPT scheme. But my point is UEFI has 3 problems as I see it:
1) Secure boot locking out non-signed stuff (why can't it just warn you when you try to boot non-signed stuff and let you continue).
2) Weird implementations producing crazy, inexplicable behaviors. Including inconsistent ability to boot from external media, and some systems actually getting bricked by booting a Ubuntu CD.
3) Forcing use of GPT partitioning, which many Linux distros don't handle yet, and which even Windows doesn't need till you go over 2 TB drives.
Most of this is the result of an awkward transition to a possibly better partitioning and booting scheme, but forcing it on everyone - combined with poor implementations of much more complex firmware. Maybe it only seems intended to make dual booting hell. In any case, it succeeds beautifully.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
So, if you sign up, then rat out people who might give you money, does Micro$oft get their personal info???
The web site is frozen. Maybe they should have used Apache.
First fail more like it! HAHA!
(Sorry I was so slow responding, I had to masturbate to some cat pictures.)
The way that Jimmy seemed already prepared with that statement, not caught off guard at all, makes me think he was in on it.
Also, the sound of crickets imply this "get-together" was at night and outside, a park perhaps? It's seems that the Uncle suspected Jimmy the whole time, too, considering the time and place the event was setup. The uncle may have wanted to meet at a place with no witnesses, to confront Jimmy, lynch him, and then later dispose of his body.He probably invited you along to "get your hands dirty", so he could initiate you into his crime ring.
Q. What do Chris Brown and Steve Ballmer have in common?
Oh come on, /.! A question like that, and no mention of chairs in the comments?
No shock that Chris Brown wants you to beg... Rhianna probably begged him to stop as well.
Windows 8 tupperware parties?