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The cheap computer phenomenon
One of the big stories of 1998 was the impact of ultracheap
computers. The marketshare of computers which had stayed
firmly stuck around 40% of US-households
increased to 50%. Similarly
Intel's market share collapsed in the mail-order and retail PC market:
75% of overall unit sales in the 1997 fourth quarter to about 49.5%
in the most recent period. The cheapest computers reveal
a trend of making money off services rather than hardware, with
an associated lack of choice (don't expect to run Linux on these things):
$300 PCs are shipping in France but you must use a specific
ISP, zero-cost PCs
are available if you agree to being bombarded by adverts even
if you are not online (remember 1984: the TV things were always on),
and finally zero-cost iMacs
are available if you pledge to spend 3600 dollars over 3 years at
some online mall. Moreover, the cost has already hit the industry:
AMD is hurting while system development of Tier 1 manufacturers
is leaving the US, being done instead by contract manufacturers
in countries where electronics labour costs are less than a buck
an hour. More people on the internet may be good, but at what
cost?
Free software works. Free hardware is usually a different story. There's a significant cost involved behind a computer like this, usually absorbed by advertising or markup. If only real PCs were available for sub-$400 for me to drop Linux on. :)
HOORAY
http://www.yellow5.com/pokey
Why is more people on the net good? To me it means more attention from dumb legislators, more spam, more stress on the net's bandwidth, and a general "laming down" of the net.
Will
Look, the masses are simply not going to spend thousands of dollars per PC. If you WANT to buy high-end hardware, that option is still available to you, but _herr omnes_ does not have that kind of money to blow on what are essentially toys.
In order for dirt-cheap PC's to be possible, the components have to be commodified. Likewise the assembly of the components has to be as cheap as possible - which means overseas labor. It's just a logical outcome of the cheap PC phenomenon.
The upper-tier PC vendors who were hoping to cash in on consumer interest in PC's generated by the Internet, will be screwed, because their business models don't include essentially free PC's. Oh well, those're the breaks.
The reason *most* people are interested in PC's in the first place is because of the Internet. If all you want is web browsing and email, why pay big bucks for a general-purpose computer? It makes no sense.
The relevance to Linux: well, switching to Linux would save the free-PC vendors about $20-30 per PC, which could really add up when you start thinking about the mass market ($20 x 200 million = BIG MONEY!!!).
Why should we not expect to be able to run Linux on these? Hardware to new?
Forrest W
"What!!!" you say?
Well look how much Macintosh's cost until recently. Historically they've been about $1000-$2000 more than a compairable PC.
Ok, look at Sun workstations. Less powerful than a PC, no 3d sound, high quality speakers, monitor, or software, and they can be 10x the price of a compairable Wintel machine.
DEC Alpha workstations, HP workstations, etc.
SGI are increadably more than Wintel machines. Now they have that new line based on Intel chips and run NT, and guess what: they are CHEAP! About 10x less than their MIPS versions.
Think I'm just full of crap? Then check out this link at Maxium PC (formally BOOT): Report Says 'Microsoft Study' was Flawed. Has better facts than my driveling.
I think you should really thank Compaq and AMD for the low prices (Compaq opened up the pc world which was monopolised by IBM at the time). On the other hand, I don't see how MS whose W2K requires a 300 mhz pc with 64 megs is helping to lower PC prices.
...Were and still are to this day a huge player in cheap PCs with high performance...
:)
Can't wait to upgrade this old Pentium to an Abit BX6 2.0 and a Celeron 300a overclocked to 450MHz...
Alan Cox said in a recent interview that he compiles the kernel on a Cyrix MII ...
Iuri Wickert
even if, hypothetically, you do redirect the ads to dev/null, the company sending you the ads wont mind. after all, they still register that you got the ad.. so they still get to charge the person buying ad space just as much as if you'd actually looked at the ads.
Its happening all over again... when we thought that the net would revolutionize the way people learn, who wouldnt have the means to, the way people express themselves, the way people discuss, the way people share, it all went belly up on us.
Now the net is a paradise to companies and their marketing agencies. On-line shopping malls all around us, bloddy Portals that are the same as AOL, SPAM...
And thats where Linux comes, me thinks... Free, can run in cheap computers, would be great to peope who cant afford much. But has it been on the media?No. Have the governments looked at it?No. Instead news talk about the latest merge on-line and the governments just want bill Gates to stop by.
Eduardo
Surfing the web and getting email shouldn't have to cost you 3k, this is just common sense. I am a firm believer in "You pay for what you get", and this is as true in technology. I know of a few people who have bought sub-1k computers in the past six months, four of them have had hardware problems. Four are Intel Celerons, one a Cyrix and one an AMD K6. But for what they want them to do, the computers will do it.
Now I will spend the cash for a box to play games with "smooth as butter" frame rates and superior performance for 3D rendering and desktop publishing and so forth. I know alot of people who feel the same. The more savvy people build thier own. But you can still rack up a healthy bill doing that as well.
It just comes down to people having to know WHAT they want out of a comoputer, plain and simple. But for alot of people, this is no easy task. So AOL goes on...
Now that it's possible to get 64, 96, or 128 meg of simm or dimm memory fairly cheaply, will swap partitions start to become a thing of the past for average Linux users?
(just average users, not high-end scientific or development compiling stuff who will probably always need all they can get)
"notice"? and how are they going to "notice"? Is there some logic embedded in the ad which will allow the marketers to "notice" that it's going to /dev/null? I'd love for you to explain to us the technical details of how this works.
Otherwise, it's obvious that YOU are the nitwit. go away.
The direct computer model might work better, becuase you get exactly what you want as a comsumer. Dell and Gateway know this. Now if they could install linux.
I love cheap components like that scsi hard drive that crapped out on me in less than one year.
-A
We have Apple, AMD and Cyrix to thank for keeping the big boys on their toes..Linux is on its way up and will do the same thing.
Actually, microsoft software is VERY expensive, thus the hole antitrust thing.
The only thing is that those 2 did is make hardware like a commodity, and cheaper. But that would have happened anyway..
Man, get a grip.. Climb down off the Bill Gates Mobile.. I agree with the other AC, that Amd and others are causing the low prices.. As as far as prop. hardware(sun, dec, hp, sgi) being slower, CRAP.. I'd put a Sgi R12000 or a Sun Ultra 2 360 up against a intel chip anyday, and the sgi/sun would cook the intel chip, and eat it for dinner..
.07 micron stuff in production, things will jump overnight..
But, I'll tell you what, as soon as intel starts dropping their instruction sets away form i386, their chips will get a lot faster overnight, regardless of the Mhz..
And as soon as TI gets their
So stop trying to buck the system, if you don't want ads, don't sign up. But at the same time, don't complain that you have to pay for computers/access and don't screw it up for the rest of us by hacking the service.
Go ahead and get this service and install LINUX on it. While you are at it, why don't you make some changes to that OS and sell it without the source? It's just as ethical.
I understand that OSS is about free as in speech, not as in beer.
Coprorate desktop models from name brand manufacturers all come with the ability to lock the case in place. Some even have the ability to lock up the floppy drive and CD-ROM drive, to keep employees out of the system.
Before you get offended by this, remember, it's your employers computer at work, and the free-pc is not a requirement at home. You can get another job, and you can buy your own computer at home. You have free will, use it.
True, the "beauty" of the free market is that the people with the most money (i.e. the people who don't need more money) get all the money they want, and the people who need the money can't get it. The people who are hiring the people for $1/hr could easily afford to pay them $10/hr. But since these people have no money, they're not considered human beings and so, obviously, we should only pay them $1/hr. As long as we can get them to make us richer, anything's OK.
Let's look at some price changes over a few years ago:
Then Now
==== ====
CDROM drive $150 $30
Floppy drive $70 $20
16Mb DRAM $600 $40
1.2Gb hard drive $300 $100
Windows $70 $90
We have Microsoft to thank for cheaper PCs?
True, but I would have some ethical problems with this. I think if they're nice enough to give me a free PC, I should be nice enough to pay for (through watching ads). Which is why I'm not even considering this thing to any great extent; I don't need a free PC (who does?), and I'd either have to live with ads for a while (eww) or have a large ethical problem. In a sense, I'd see it as unfairly taking it from them.
READ the contracts. The free PC thing is free FOR TWO YEARS ONLY. Then you gotta give it back. Whats the point in reformatting the hard drive and reconfiguring it if you have it for only 2 years ? Then you have to give it back exactly as it was..which means you gotta back up the old drive.
The code that spews the messages up to the screen could send back a verification that it isn't being dumped to /dev/null. Of course, this sort of thing could be reverse-engineered and altered, so that one could spoof any ad-display-verification dealie, but that would take time.
As far as Sengan's comment that one should not expect these boxes to run Linux, iMacs will certainly run it (and one could even buy stuff browsing under Linux). The Presarios they're offering free will run it as well (although that ad software probably only runs under Win95/98).
(/x.xx)(/x.xx)
That is not a good idea at all. You are taking the same position as the record companies that are trying to hold back MP3, or phone companies trying to prevent DSL from eating T1, or Amazon from killing bookstores. Unless you are a communist/socialist, you let the markets fall as they may. Sometimes big shifts happen. It is rarely in anyones interest to prop up and support an uncompetitive industry. (By uncompetitive, I mean an industry that would not survive if left alone.)
I bought my DEC Alpha 166Mhz with 32Megs of RAM for less than 200 bucks, and I had a 2 gig SCSI2 for it, and its all mine no adverts screwing with my head. if anyone wants one http://www.cpumicromart.com Linux rocks on it Now I just need to get Mozillia to work good.
Dipshit,
Last time I checked they werent giving away free TV's.
Perhaps if the Networks gave the TV to me I might (I am not the original poster). But, I paid for the TV myself, and therefore feel no obligation to watch the commercials on TV.
I believe that the original poster's argument was that the my cost of the PC would be the requirement to get the ads. You are comparting the Free PC to Free Air Waves, not a Free TV.
Ares, who is not anonymous, just lazy.
As for Macintosh being more "expensive", while the initial cost is indeed higher, a few things are worth considering:
/.ers don't seem to appreciate that this, for many Mac fans, represents the very core of the platform's appeal. I realize that /. is more a hangout for geeks and nrrrds than artists, but there are quite a few of us lurking here I suspect, and in many cases have different computing priorities than yourselves.
At my multimedia job, I am FAR more productive on my Mac than my WinTel using co workers in terms of uptime. The NT boxes are a collosal pain in the ass to keep running. When a problem arises, it can take DAYS to restore order. These guys know NT inside and out, but they're SUPPOSED to be making 3D animations, not doing troubleshooting all day. The cost of them maintaining these cheap PCs instead of making graphics on them has cost my company thousands of dollars. In 99% of issues arising on the Mac, a resolution can be found in under fifteen minutes, or, in the event of a system needing reinstallation, under an hour.
Plug and Play is another obvious advantage. It can take hours and hours to get a video capture board, new hard drive or graphics accelerator working on the WinTel side of the house. On the Mac it just works. I've seen this with my own eyes, and many of my fellow artists in other companies report similar circumstances.
The platform which allows a painter, sculptor or video artist to transfer his or her very valuable analog skill set with the least amout of hassle is the Macintosh. With it's very consistant user experience and idiot-friendly trouble shooting protocol, the Mac ensures that the artist will spend more time making things, and less time dicking around with the OS.
The Mac OS more closely resembles, and behaves like traditional art materials than any other OS. Sadly, many
A.C.ing it, as my remarks regarding $$$ flying out the window at my company in public would bring severe repercussions on my head.
I agree. The net was good around 1994
when there was already quite a bit of
information there, but it was all
non-commercial and still had that distinct
community feeling.
Nowadays, even internet communities don't
provide that same community feeling,
rather they pepper you with ads and banners.
More people is not good at all.
The US government is very aggressive about removing trade barriers in other countries. No one can complain about software and hardware development being relocated to other countries. It's the implementation of US trade policies (snicker, snicker, ...)
Intel FUD? Sorry but I've never heard Intel say anything like "Linux runs best on Pentiums!" or something like that.
Uh, look Mr. d00d, I'd love it if cheap Wintel boxes were better than Suns at a 10th of the price, but the sad truth of the matter is you've been using a Pentium II as a crack pipe.
When you can buy a x86 box with something equivalent to Sun's system bus and I/O bandwidth, a 4MB onboard CPU cache, a true 64 bit CPU, an UltraSPARC's floating point performance, and scaleability to 64 processors then--well, then you'll pay as much as a Sun system costs!
Oh, that's right, you want 3D sound. Yeah, that's real important to those of us running data warehouses and decision support systems. I can tell my boss, Yeah, the system can't do I/O for shit because of the crappy system bus, and it can't move big batches of data around in memory for the same reason, and we're stuck at 4 CPUs, but WE G0T 3D S0UNDZ D00D!!!11!1!!1
Anyhow, for games a Playstation kicks any PC's ass for under $130. Doesn't crash or need to have the OS reinstalled, either. Gotta love those MIPS processors!
PC hardware is fine for office desktops, group file and print servers, Beowulf components, and stuff like that. Anybody running a really big RDBMS on that stuff is cheating themselves, especially if they've shelled out big bucks for Oracle or Sybase and then "saved" on the hardware.
Now HP9000s, on the other hand, are way overpriced. But that's another story.
The amd article got my attention. It looks to me like intel is dumping chips on the low end market in order to get rid of amd and cyrix. Maybe the justice department needs to look at this too. This just makes me want to say, "down with intel!!!!" I bought my first non-intel x86 chip this year, and I may never go back.
BTW isn't cyrix part of IBM? It would be hard to get rid of them!!
Celerons are fine, but those K-6's have weird network errors with ipx/spx installed.
;-) Your K6 isn't at fault for this. Are the cases well cooled? Decent heatsinks? Are you overclocking? Bad memory? Etc...? The only serious documented bug with AMD occurs with more than 32 MB in the system, and only in non-Windows/DOS systems (due to better memory management...). Me thinks you have other crappy parts than the CPU.
F00F off, You're the 0.9999725st AMD hater that I have read today! Cache this!
Try underclocking. If things work well then, either the CPU is defective, or you REALLY need a better heatsink.
Last, but not least, I agree with you on the whole bad/cheap idea. Perhaps that's your problem? Cheap parts aren't cheap in just price.
I run linux on a cyrix 686 mx (it is pretty much
the same as an mII.) I even read that the linux
kernel has some optimization for the mx. If you
can't compile the kernel on a 686 mx then how come
that is one of the options you can choice when
make config asks you what cpu you have? Under
/proc/cpuinfo it lists it as a cyrix 686 mx. So
linux knows I have a 686 mx, and it still didn't
blow up. Besides even if you have some other
strange chip, you can always run it as a 486!!!
people who work 12 hours a day in a factory .bash_profile
dont have time to dick around with their
.fvwmrc and
linux is not 'cheap' for them because
time is money.
It all makes sense now!
While I agree with most of your points, the last figures I saw (good to the end of 1997, IIRC) show that net bandwidth has been increasing by 4% - 5% greater than net use on a per year basis. So while it may not be being put to good use, available bandwidth appears to be one place the net is actually getting better.
They take the jobs because they are better and higher-paying than what's on offer. The alternative is usually subsistance agriculture, which makes computer assembly look awfully decent.
If those jobs weren't better, the third world folks wouldn't take 'em. That's the beauty of a free market.
But what we end up with, in time, is workforces everywhere being reduced to near-subsistence wages. Nike has moved its manufacturing from country to country in Asia in search of the lowest possible wage, competitors follow suit. "American" automakers become Mexican ones, as long as two-dollar-a-day labor increases shareholder value. Ross Perot's famed "Giant Sucking Sound" was old news before he even coined the catchphrase; given time, that Sound will suck for nearly everybody. In Perot-ian fashion, let me direct you to this chart.
I don't mean to start a flame war, or to extend this thread; this is just a two-cents thing. My fear is that even though Amalgamated Widgets is helping out their short-term bottom line, they're reducing the pool of people who can afford to buy their products (Vietnamese shoe-assemblers make better money than a subsistence farmer until the contract runs out and the manufacturer moves to, say, Myanmar, but it's not so much more of a wage that they can run out and buy all the Modern Conveniences that we're used to in the West).
If a new middle class in these new economies doesn't form/grow in both number and in purchasing power faster than the middle class shrinks in the West, there may be a problem in the long run. Of course, there's eleventy-jillion other factors at play; I just wanted to voice a concern about a couple. It all seems like a dollars-and-cents equivalent to the Behavioral Sink. I don't expect a well-fed venue like /. to give a damn about this, though. Thank you for your time.
--
--
=8^
Amen. The downward spiral started the day AhOLe opened the spam gates. They proceeded to trample the net under their cloven hoves.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
"Now the industry is in trouble and trying to find an easy way out, raising prices and keeping the jobs in the US sounds good to me."
Last I checked, unemployment levels in the US were remarkably low. I believe that part of this is due to the ability to buy things from overseas at low costs, lowering the cost of employing people in America for jobs that can't be moved overseas and lowering the expenses of those same workers. These overseas workers also become new consumers for the stuff we produce here. Jobs aren't some fixed quantity, they're created when someone feels it is profitable to hire you. Lower the cost of employment (for example, by lowering the cost of the computer you work on), and it's more likely you'll be considered profitable. My company has probably been able to hire 5% more people simply because of lower computer prices.
I do agree, though, there has to be some morality in how we hire people overseas, that the jobs we provide should be better than the average livelihood in the foreign country.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I'd like to agree with the others that are roasting your genitalia over an open spit. Get off the Wintel bandwagon and face facts. SUN and other proprietary boxes have the advantage of running on a bus on a comparable speed to the chip. Instead of a bus speed 1/4th the speed of the processor (BX motherboards have a 100 mHz bus compared to the 400 mHz processor) hence creating a bottleneck. Also the video cards run a helluva lot faster to help allievate the bottlenecks. All external i/o devices run on a seperate bus, so that the multi-processor systems can actually talk to each other at their speed (be it 320 mhz or whatever). I too would pit a Sun Ultra system against a Wintel anyday.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
Bad idea on the manufacturer's part, that is...
/dev/null and the manufacturer wouldn't have a clue that I wasn't seeing the ads, since the incoming advertisement connections are politely accepted... :-)
What's to stop me from taking the PC and putting Linux on it? I could then redirect all the ads to
I really do NOT see how they're going to stop someone saying, "Hey! A free PC! Cool!", getting one, booting it off a boot disk and reformatting the hard drive. About the only way they could stop people from doing that is with a BIOS password that prevents changing the boot order of the computer. And even that is crackable: just remove the CMOS battery.
This idea will never fly.
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
3d world exploitation inevitably pisses of everyone involved, both at home and abroad. I know market pressures force this sort of stuff to happen, but shipping computer production to botswana or india *isn't* competition, for god's sake. It's a short-term stop-gap COP-OUT! I'm a rabid (albeit long-haired; think of me as a PJ O'Rourke republican) conservative and believer in markets but even *I* can recognise when greed gets out of hand.
*sigh*
What ever happened to good old fashioned ETHICAL capitalism? (Hey! It could happen! And occasionally has!)
There should be laws that say "NO! If you live *here* you CAN'T screw your neighbor for your own enrichment!"
I can't make adequate sense of what I'm trying to say here. I don't write that fast.
The basic idea is, someone HERE is thinking "Hmmm... I can pay a 3d worlder *shit* to work for me and do an end run around domestic labor law; hell Clinton's in our pocket, look at all these mergers! Even Reagan wasn't that easy on business!"
Hope I'm making sense. I'm seeing red right now...
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Insofar as Microsoft and Intel have convinced a large number of Americans who would not otherwise buy a computer to buy one (and subsidize the rest of us), they have been responsible for the price drops. They've been handsomely compensated for their efforts, though.
The fact that the PC market is more price-competitive than the Apple market, the Sun market, etc., may have a little bit to do with it too.
I deal all day long with cheap computers at work. I mean 350 mghz computers that are sssllloooowwwwwwwww, have strange errors all the time and generally work like crap. They cost my company so much money that they would hit the roof if they realized. Believe me, Macs would be a bargain compared to these pieces of shit.
Celerons are fine, but those K-6's have weird network errors with ipx/spx installed.
Buy a good MB (Asus P2B), and a fast HD. Under 10ms seek, at least 256k of cache and ULTRA DMA or SCSI!!!!!!!The extra $200/pc is the best money spent.
if they stoped paying upper and middle managment such crazy salaries, and reinvested it in R&D, maybe they could come out ontop...
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
Sure 486s cost less than $100 today - but you can only get them second hand.
An expensive computer is like a Jaguar. Extra show
off value, but not extra benefit to your life over
a cheap one..
(Unless you're a Quake fan. *grin*)
The day is coming when a compuer has the same
value in our lives as a toaster: you replace it
when it wears down enough and the hard drive actuator says its last hurrah, not because of flashy ads advertising expensive processors for the machine that is as usefull as my perfectly nice clunky 486.
Code bloat used to sell. No longer.
So far, the MediaGX's around my house run Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Windows 98. Ironically, Windows NT won't install on these machines but it will run a pre-existing installation if restored from tape. Still, since I have no current need for NT, the Unixes on these boxes run just fine.
Kris
Kriston J. Rehberg
http://kriston.net/
Kriston
What to do? If one boycotts such products, the oppressed workers don't even have the choice of being tyrannised, but if one doesn't, the practice is supported and encouraged by each purchase.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
And if foreign corporations didn't own the natural resources of third world countries, third world folks wouldn't be reduced to being wage slaves to multinationals.
That's the ugliness of the (un)free market.
Hard drives crash all the time. If my HD on my new free PC happens to crash the first time I run a program on it, such as Partition Magic, well of course I'll have to reinstall the software.
If they didn't send me a CD, well, OK, I'll use one of mine; this here CheapBytes RedHat 5.2 CD is handy, I'll use it.
If they email me in a few weeks asking why I never seem to log on, well, maybe this Internet thing is just too hard, or maybe their software isn't working right, how should I know? I'm just a poor old country boy.
Hell, if the contract lets them take the computer back, it'll take months before they can get around to enforcing it. And then I just wipe the HD and give 'em their computer back. No harm done for me, I stored all my files on my servers.
And if the contract wasn't negotiable, it's not a valid contract.
Or, if you're scared of a few angry phone calls, well just set the damn thing up to dual boot. Log on once every couple of weeks and surf Slashdot, then boot back into Linux.
You are completely out of your fucking mind.
Windows has been steadily rising in consumer price, while OEM price has been fairly steady recently but is still usually higher than it was during the Dos 6.x/Win 3.x days.
Solaris is free for single-user noncommercial use.
BSD is free.
Microsoft may not charge a yearly fee, but they do have a penchant for releasing bugfixes as full operating systems, and they charge a shitload for them.
As for people hating the Microsoft gives away IE, are you on crack? Pretty much Netscape and the DoJ hate that. Nobody else gives a shit.
So. Chip makers are in a huge price war. Prices collapse. Jobs are moved to places with cheap labor.
Who loses?
(1) The chip makers, who lose their monopoly profits (Intel). Maybe AMD and Cyrix too. Stockholders in losing chip makers.
(2) The tiny minority of people who lose their high-paying, first world jobs. (Why is this a lose? Because they would not have stayed working for the chip maker unless it was better for them that way.)
Who wins?
(1) The tiny minority of people who gain low-paying, third world jobs. (Why a win? Because they would not have taken the job unless it was better that way for them.)
(2) Everyone who buys a computer, cheap or not. Price drops at the bottom have dragged down prices up and down the line.
The cost/benefit of who profits from the labor is a wash... everyone wants jobs, and it is hard to say that it is better to pay an American $20/hour to do the same thing that a Malayan will do for $1, if that means the Malayan and her family will starve.
So the reality is this is a matter of corporate profits, versus the savings of consumers -- those consumers being you and I.
Sengan makes this sound like a problem. It is not.
My company is selling K6-2 300Mhz eTowers for $399.99. They are selling faster than we can get them. Great little machines. No tech support problems, all quality Samsung parts. I bought a couple for myself. Runs Linux wonderfully.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
What is wrong with the computer industry? When a business is in need of money, the solution is simple...raise prices. Five years ago I was happily paying $3500 for a computer, and like many people I was happy when the prices started to slide, but everyone assumed that the slide would be temporary. This obviously wasn't the case.
Now the industry is in trouble and trying to find an easy way out, raising prices and keeping the jobs in the US sounds good to me. I realize that a lot of people are going to scream at the thought of paying more for a computer, but if it's neccesary to keep the industry viable, so be it. There's no reason for anyone to complain about spending $1500-$2000 on a computer (I've always found sub-$1000 PC's to be kind of a bad joke anyway).
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Or make a HD image with the program Ghost. You still have a copy of the original hard drive, and you can clear the existing when you need to make use of it. Then, when you want to use Windows, swap images with the Linux/Be/What Ever image and it only takes a few minutes.
As long as the software still exists, and you use their net service for 10 hrs a month and you display the ads, you are in good shape.
www.atacomm.com - The Leader in VoIP Product Distributi
Good to see someones thinking
Say, here's a thought...
If I understand it correctly, the whole Free-PC concept is based on a border surrounding an 800x600 user area on the screen, right? (whereas the entire thing is 1024x768). And ads are displayed in this border area, right?
So-- instead of cracking the system, reformatting the HD, booting off a floppy, etc.-- couldn't you just put a paper cutout over the screen, and literally block out the advertising?
(Well, granted, it still won't be running our favorite OS, but that does kind of short out the entire principle-- doesn't it?)
iSKUNK!
...Do you folks really think there's a Linux daemon for this ad thing that would automatically install on your partition if you made one? Doesn't sound to me like there's going to be anything to redirect...
And, as far as the legal thing goes, wouldn't it make more sense (since the thing IS free) to just spring $200 for a new drive and get to use your whole drive instead of having however much swallowed by ads? You could just leave the old one in there and remove the IDE cable. Leave the power one in, it'd give you that extra little technicality thing to be smug about...
cygnus
"I feel like a quote out of context."
Just raise the taxes on crack.
Intel is clearly in a price war with AMD & the former has somewhat deeper pockets. So, buy AMD.... To keep prices down and tech innovation up, but.... Free Trad/Liberalization of Markets, leads potentially to unethical companies exploiting cheap wages off shore (or @ home by disabling unions-of course it is a question of a sane balance), ie Nike, GM (seen the movie Roger & I ????) And/or read some Marx or Jurgen Habermas. So, my suggestion is to boycott companies who do this anti- general human well-being thingy. Remember boycotts s worked with drift net fishing & scared the hell of McDonald s, so the latter stopped chopping down rain forests. I mean, what is the point of stopping the Borg in their tracks, cause they are creepie, if you then load and EXCEPTIONAL OS called Linux, on the backs of third world sweat shop labor? Possibly inconsistent? Also, as a newbie, THANX to all you hackers who put together the amazing OS :-)