Excuse me, but Widgets are easily the most retarded thing out of Apple since the Dock.
There isn't one of them that gives you functionality that your browser doesn't already afford.
But sometimes the "form of delivery" matters. I personally dislike "sports cars", but I can't think of another analogy right now - you could say that a ferrari/bentley/etc. doesn't give you functionality that a here, but people still want them over and above the other (unless you define excessive speed/comfort/etc. as functionality). Widgets are delivered in a ready-access form that browsers do not provide -
When I got Tiger, I was expecting/thinking that of the features they were touting, I'd be making a lot of use of Spotlight and that I wouldn't launch dashboard, ever. But it's turned out the other way around. It turns out I'm one of those anal retentive types who, because I order all my files in fairly discrete folders, don't *need* Spotlight and hardly ever use it. But I use dashboard and widgets *all the time*, which was a complete surprise to me. I'd thought it would be useless to me, but it totally hasn't. Having some tools (or even some frivolous fun thing) just zoom in as-and-when I feel like it, on a practical basis, turns out to be completely different from having a browser window/tab open to a particular web-page etc. to flip to, and I'm speaking as a guy who has well over 40 tabs of pages of data/info/etc. to refer to and I never quit my browser.
The GPL protects big corporations because they know that enhancements made will not be incorporated in a proprietary system by their competitors.
OK. good point. but I would say their having a "collateral advantage" from the GPL doesn't lessen the fact that having the source code out is what we want in the first place?
The GPL does absolutely nothing to the independent software vendor, who must taylor code to different needs.
what you're saying is true, but the problem for them is that for them BSD doesn't actually meet their needs. I deal quite a bit with embedded hardware, and I can say it's pretty much a wasteland for non-linux deployment when it comes to embedded devices. Why is this? surely in terms of competitive advantage etc., as you pointed out, it would be better for them to use BSD and not have to release any source?
Well the problem is that embedded hardware is moving at a pace + includes so many variants that BSD simply doesn't do the job that they need - which in this case is to run at all. For a firm to want to make use of BSD they will have to undertake, on their own, the full costs of development of drivers, support etc.
and yet, almost everybody chooses to just use linux. why?
it definitely sounds great to a business-type to just "hey there's something out there people can get for free, but I just do a little fiddling and slap my logo on it and I can get $$!!!" (e.g. Dasani?). But when this "free" thing can't actually be used by you without a lot of effort, then... most people would just give it a pass and not invest the effort.
Those who DO invest the effort, however, are damn well not going to consider giving "charity" to competitors and release their code under a BSD licence. And this is why BSD hardware support etc. has fallen so far behind that of linux's.
(don't point out netbsd's many supported architectures to me - that's not the point. the point is whether it "can be used on *this* particular embedded doohickey with the peripheral devices I need to ship out")
the term "tragedy of the commons" comes to mind. all the firms who are excited by the "free"-ness of the BSD-licence AND have the wherewithal to actually develop/further the code DON'T recontribute back to the community, and the community gets basically stuck where it is while the genuine BSD-lience believers contribute slowly to the codebase. the greed of those who involve themselves in the BSD world for reasons OTHER than "to make the best code available" end up hurting the spread of the community itself; i'm certain plenty of work is duplicated again and again by those who grab a snapshot of the codebase and use that to develop.
Linux, in contrast, thanks to the GPL, by *forcing* returns to the community, even if a particular user (by which I mean company)'s motives are greed, will use that greed against it *for the good of the community nonetheless* (GPL enforcement is VERY important here).
and plenty of hardware manufacturers in the embedded space have decided that it's STILL worthwhile to put out GPL-ed code with their routers and doohickeys. win-win, for them and for anyone else who needs to do anything similar.
in which case if you want to have any ads that IE7 users will actually see, you have to... go to Microsoft and pay *them* to advertise?
MS gets a new, ad-based revenue stream that they can keep everyone else out of with the IE7 blocker - they probably figure people don't hate ads so much - I mean, hey, Google lives off ads, right? (then again, Google doesn't charge you $$$ in order to use your PC so their logic, if it's along these lines, would have a flaw)
In which case, "integration" will be complete. MS is free to integrate whatever it feels like, AND also sell you ads on your desktop.
The iPod is being marketed *now*, but do you remember when it was first introduced? Did you see any ads? And yet, it was *word of mouth* that started it being picked up. It was the product itself that kicked it off, people saw other people using it, liked it, got one themselves... and the cycle repeated. It wasn't until a substantial amount of people started using it - in fact IIRC it wasn't until after the NY times had an article on it - that Apple saw the market *did* like it and started going full-blast with a full-on marketing push to get it into the mainstream. Which worked/is working.
But it was still the product that did it by itself at the beginning.
you're taking it out on the wrong guy. that poor kid's probably trying to make a few bucks in order to have some pocket money.
there was nothing stopping you from politely telling him how/why he's wrong, that he shouldn't be trying too hard to be helpful when it involves saying things he doesn't really know, which can harm people who can end up buying something wrong for them (does Circuit City have a decent returns policy?), and, hey, he'd have had an on-the-job learning experience.
"fuck off, moron"? speaking as a guy with fourteen Macs, I have to say I wish assholes like you wouldn't buy Macs. It's distasteful having to think oh-i'm-so-smart types like you are jumping on the bandwagon. nothing's stopping you from going to ebay yourself some remaindered AlphaServers or something.
you mods who gave this guy +4 insightful - you should be ashamed of yourselves.
in the pre-OS X days, i'd had a pretty wide range of utility tools to try out, and in my experience norton for mac was the *least* likely to resolve any problems, except for ones that only it saw, and sometimes not even that (it'd report a particular error, I told it to fix it, it'd report the same error again the next scan/pass I tried. this happened progressively less often as norton got updated so I mentally filed it under "bug".
it got so that on being asked for advice i'd just tell people to avoid norton (which seemed to have the most publicity/marketing budget), and go straight to Alsoft diskwarrior, which i have seen recover drives that all the other utilities have given up on (refused to even see, in the case of norton!)
i'm more curious as to whether there'll be two separate chassis/machines (one from IBM, one from Sony... or even more per Cell-partner?), or of it's just going to be one basic machine that may/may not have different corporate logos slapped on it?
(i'd think it'd almost certainly be linux, no uncertainty there:-)
hrm. actually, an even bigger question... will there be blinkenlights! *memories of the BeBox*
I meant restore the 7 pcs they'd upgraded. I would assume the 60,000 died either because those 7 were feeding them, or because or an incompatibility with the upgrade.
hypothetical scenario - they "upgrade" the 7 PCs. the 60,000 other PCs start going down left and right. the guys say "oh shit!" and they restore these 7 PCs... and the other 60,000 PCs *do not come back up*. what do you do then?
it's entirely possible that whatever the upgrade broke that the other 60,000 PCs depended on, resulted in things getting munged up on those PCs in *permanent* way (registry damage?).
in which case one wonders about whether/how all those 60,000 others were backed up (or, more likely, not).
If you want to see a more sensible response to a Cease and Desist letter, see this one in response to a Apple C & D from an actual lawyer.
I just read it - the macintouch lawyer sounds fairly cool (it's nice to see non-legalese in a "legal response"). But I'm not entirely sure how meaningful it is - after all, Apple *got* what they wanted (Macintouch took down the things Apple objected to).
I would have modded this up except that it was at 5 already.
particularly considering apple's own long history in OS development being abandoned (well, of course, there's the corporate-maneuvering angle what with NeXT and Jobs)....
Actually, the alternative to NeXT at that time was Be - and, I dunno, BeOS though not UNIX per se, *was* pretty UNIX-y - ls, ps, they were all there.
You know, *assassins* are the type to take out single, lone, "high value" targets, right?
Sneaking into fortresses/castles, creeping up and then offing the bad guy, or else maybe using some nice long-distance sniper rifle to take out the bad guy, or maybe choice application of poisons at the right bottle of wine, etc.
This is not appropriate for *spam*, where we're talking about waves upon waves upon unending waves in what we would call a "target rich environment". Assassination? No, more like machine-gunning, or artillery, or, I dunno, nukes.
I think "privacy" is something that means different things to different people.
would it make a difference to you if Google explicitly guaranteed that no *human* entity would get to look at your data, and that any machine-automated use of the data would be limited to a specific task (and nothing else, and never would this be changed without your consent)? In such a situation I wouldn't mind.
I absolutely do not want some human person mucking about through information about my online purchases etc., but - assuming Google can handle their systems well enough not to be rooted by anybody - i really could not care less if some machine decides to flag down my activity and ask me if I wanted yet another SATA drive for a good price (and the answer is yes!).
until the machines become self-aware, conscious entities, I would assume they could care less (or rather, are *incapable* of caring) what I want to buy online either (actually, if Google's systems DID emerge into consciousness, I doubt it'd find my online activities interesting either. "Hanging out on Slashdot? doesn't this guy have anything better to do?"). The only thing to worry about would be whether, through incompetence or maliciousness, our data is exploited for some other purpose. if it's a rules-based system "if X user keeps hitting star wars paraphernalia sites, offer X user star wars adverts", and no nefarious individual finds out this info ("hrm, I'll bait him with a fake ebay sale"), what harm is there? (honest question - I'd like to know).
sounds more to me like an overt declaration of war against Microsoft. I mean, everyone knew the war was coming (MSN search vs Google), but this would count as the first actual open hostilities, no?
HIS OWN IP... so that Chewbacca is pink and 3 feet tall he can do that.
so you're saying that the fans have no say or value, that their memories and emotional investment are not worth any more than the $$ they have handed over to the business and that that's ALL they can ever hope for, to have their money be worth taking?
another thing that needs to be remembered, is that these article writers have a schedule.
they've got to output something every month/week/whatever whether or not they actually have got anything worthwhile to say.
this explains a lot of the mountain-out-of-molehill projections/fantasies that are based on half-understood premises.
i actually gave up my businessweek subscription a long time ago when i came to the realisation one day that they are consistently wrong.
Any of you guys who want to actually read a business/economy related paper that actually is written by guys who usually know what they are talking about, check out The Economist.
i'm sure they deliver them at night. i mean, if I knew that many hard disks were coming in, I'd round up all my mini-driving buddies and pull an ocean's-eleven...
considering the integration Outlook Express, Entourage et al have with Hotmail, for many people Hotmail *isn't* just "web"-mail.
that said, I'm still waiting for the storage upgrade they promised, up from 2MB to whatever. I was going to retire my hotmail account and go elsewhere, but I decided to wait when they announced. It's starting to sound like what they've been known to do in the past - announce vapourware in order to delay migration/movement to elsewhere.
Another rant - why use Itanium processors? In order to get good performance from EPIC architechture you need specially optimized compilers, which won't be available for many years (by then this supercomputer will be obsolete).
You're assuming the only decision-making criteria is performance. Cost, marketing/PR value, and not to mention politics, definitely factors in. Intel may be cutting NASA a major sweetheart deal.
I think dell would be better off spending their money making the Dell DJ a more desirable product.
I'm thinking this offer means something else entirely - it could be possible that this means sales of the Dell jukebox are so *low* that they are desperate to get stock off their hands.
Dell likes to spout off on how they hold no inventory, etc. etc. - but that's not strictly true, particularly for devices that aren't as commoditized as PCs.
You can't leave a factory idle and then fire it up as-and-when you need one or two units of a product. The smallest production runs aren't going to be in the single digits.
It might be easier for Dell with PCs since motherboards, hard disks, all that are going to be MUCH easier to get in the open market than the custom ASICs, frames/casings for the player etc. that they need for this. There's no "ATX", or "ITX" standard for the circuit boards inside music players, practically everything in there is going to be semi-custom-made.
(and, in any case, it's also been pointed out inventory for PC parts etc. is just being shoved off to their suppliers and it just keeps it off Dell's books, it doesn't mean there's "no inventory")
(and, it may not be Dell that's getting totally desperate, depending on the contract signed with Dell it could be the supplier that's desperate to get jukeboxes off their hands and offering it at an even lower price to Dell).
Actually, this reminds me of something - in the early days, before 802.11b was everywhere and 802.11g showed up, the proponents of 802.11a were actually saying that one of the advantages of 802.11a was that at 5GHz the waves were *less* able to propagate beyond the walls of the building (and therefore was better, security-wise). I didn't know whether to think that they had a point, or that they were getting desperate (g was on the horizon and i think everybody could see that with backwards compatibility to b, they had a major advantage). Another nail in the coffin for 802.11a then?
This looks cool - but I don't understand the specifications on their website. It says "native 1280x768" resolution at one point, and yet also says "displays up to 1280x1024". Which is it?? I don't think my video card supports the 1280x768 resolution, and I *really* don't want to read "super-widescreen text", i only like it for movies...
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me, but Widgets are easily the most retarded thing out of Apple since the Dock.
There isn't one of them that gives you functionality that your browser doesn't already afford.
But sometimes the "form of delivery" matters. I personally dislike "sports cars", but I can't think of another analogy right now - you could say that a ferrari/bentley/etc. doesn't give you functionality that a here, but people still want them over and above the other (unless you define excessive speed/comfort/etc. as functionality). Widgets are delivered in a ready-access form that browsers do not provide -
When I got Tiger, I was expecting/thinking that of the features they were touting, I'd be making a lot of use of Spotlight and that I wouldn't launch dashboard, ever. But it's turned out the other way around. It turns out I'm one of those anal retentive types who, because I order all my files in fairly discrete folders, don't *need* Spotlight and hardly ever use it. But I use dashboard and widgets *all the time*, which was a complete surprise to me. I'd thought it would be useless to me, but it totally hasn't. Having some tools (or even some frivolous fun thing) just zoom in as-and-when I feel like it, on a practical basis, turns out to be completely different from having a browser window/tab open to a particular web-page etc. to flip to, and I'm speaking as a guy who has well over 40 tabs of pages of data/info/etc. to refer to and I never quit my browser.
The GPL protects big corporations because they know that enhancements made will not be incorporated in a proprietary system by their competitors.
OK. good point. but I would say their having a "collateral advantage" from the GPL doesn't lessen the fact that having the source code out is what we want in the first place?
The GPL does absolutely nothing to the independent software vendor, who must taylor code to different needs.
I don't get what you mean?
what you're saying is true, but the problem for them is that for them BSD doesn't actually meet their needs. I deal quite a bit with embedded hardware, and I can say it's pretty much a wasteland for non-linux deployment when it comes to embedded devices. Why is this? surely in terms of competitive advantage etc., as you pointed out, it would be better for them to use BSD and not have to release any source?
Well the problem is that embedded hardware is moving at a pace + includes so many variants that BSD simply doesn't do the job that they need - which in this case is to run at all. For a firm to want to make use of BSD they will have to undertake, on their own, the full costs of development of drivers, support etc.
and yet, almost everybody chooses to just use linux. why?
it definitely sounds great to a business-type to just "hey there's something out there people can get for free, but I just do a little fiddling and slap my logo on it and I can get $$!!!" (e.g. Dasani?). But when this "free" thing can't actually be used by you without a lot of effort, then... most people would just give it a pass and not invest the effort.
Those who DO invest the effort, however, are damn well not going to consider giving "charity" to competitors and release their code under a BSD licence. And this is why BSD hardware support etc. has fallen so far behind that of linux's.
(don't point out netbsd's many supported architectures to me - that's not the point. the point is whether it "can be used on *this* particular embedded doohickey with the peripheral devices I need to ship out")
the term "tragedy of the commons" comes to mind. all the firms who are excited by the "free"-ness of the BSD-licence AND have the wherewithal to actually develop/further the code DON'T recontribute back to the community, and the community gets basically stuck where it is while the genuine BSD-lience believers contribute slowly to the codebase. the greed of those who involve themselves in the BSD world for reasons OTHER than "to make the best code available" end up hurting the spread of the community itself; i'm certain plenty of work is duplicated again and again by those who grab a snapshot of the codebase and use that to develop.
Linux, in contrast, thanks to the GPL, by *forcing* returns to the community, even if a particular user (by which I mean company)'s motives are greed, will use that greed against it *for the good of the community nonetheless* (GPL enforcement is VERY important here).
and plenty of hardware manufacturers in the embedded space have decided that it's STILL worthwhile to put out GPL-ed code with their routers and doohickeys. win-win, for them and for anyone else who needs to do anything similar.
in which case if you want to have any ads that IE7 users will actually see, you have to ... go to Microsoft and pay *them* to advertise?
MS gets a new, ad-based revenue stream that they can keep everyone else out of with the IE7 blocker - they probably figure people don't hate ads so much - I mean, hey, Google lives off ads, right? (then again, Google doesn't charge you $$$ in order to use your PC so their logic, if it's along these lines, would have a flaw)
In which case, "integration" will be complete. MS is free to integrate whatever it feels like, AND also sell you ads on your desktop.
Ha, yeah, well, I'd agree :-)
Do you think it was him replying to me as an AC?
Anyways if you read his orig post the whole "foreigner" thing kinda irked me too (borderline racist?).
(you have a slashdot acct?)
I'm not so sure about this.
The iPod is being marketed *now*, but do you remember when it was first introduced? Did you see any ads? And yet, it was *word of mouth* that started it being picked up. It was the product itself that kicked it off, people saw other people using it, liked it, got one themselves... and the cycle repeated. It wasn't until a substantial amount of people started using it - in fact IIRC it wasn't until after the NY times had an article on it - that Apple saw the market *did* like it and started going full-blast with a full-on marketing push to get it into the mainstream. Which worked/is working.
But it was still the product that did it by itself at the beginning.
you're taking it out on the wrong guy. that poor kid's probably trying to make a few bucks in order to have some pocket money.
there was nothing stopping you from politely telling him how/why he's wrong, that he shouldn't be trying too hard to be helpful when it involves saying things he doesn't really know, which can harm people who can end up buying something wrong for them (does Circuit City have a decent returns policy?), and, hey, he'd have had an on-the-job learning experience.
"fuck off, moron"? speaking as a guy with fourteen Macs, I have to say I wish assholes like you wouldn't buy Macs. It's distasteful having to think oh-i'm-so-smart types like you are jumping on the bandwagon. nothing's stopping you from going to ebay yourself some remaindered AlphaServers or something.
you mods who gave this guy +4 insightful - you should be ashamed of yourselves.
There's a Darwin port to x86....
I'd be interested in seeing a comparison between Darwin and linux on x86 as well.
in the pre-OS X days, i'd had a pretty wide range of utility tools to try out, and in my experience norton for mac was the *least* likely to resolve any problems, except for ones that only it saw, and sometimes not even that (it'd report a particular error, I told it to fix it, it'd report the same error again the next scan/pass I tried. this happened progressively less often as norton got updated so I mentally filed it under "bug".
it got so that on being asked for advice i'd just tell people to avoid norton (which seemed to have the most publicity/marketing budget), and go straight to Alsoft diskwarrior, which i have seen recover drives that all the other utilities have given up on (refused to even see, in the case of norton!)
i'm more curious as to whether there'll be two separate chassis/machines (one from IBM, one from Sony... or even more per Cell-partner?), or of it's just going to be one basic machine that may/may not have different corporate logos slapped on it?
:-)
(i'd think it'd almost certainly be linux, no uncertainty there
hrm. actually, an even bigger question... will there be blinkenlights! *memories of the BeBox*
I meant restore the 7 pcs they'd upgraded. I would assume the 60,000 died either because those 7 were feeding them, or because or an incompatibility with the upgrade.
hypothetical scenario - they "upgrade" the 7 PCs. the 60,000 other PCs start going down left and right. the guys say "oh shit!" and they restore these 7 PCs... and the other 60,000 PCs *do not come back up*. what do you do then?
it's entirely possible that whatever the upgrade broke that the other 60,000 PCs depended on, resulted in things getting munged up on those PCs in *permanent* way (registry damage?).
in which case one wonders about whether/how all those 60,000 others were backed up (or, more likely, not).
If you want to see a more sensible response to a Cease and Desist letter, see this one in response to a Apple C & D from an actual lawyer.
I just read it - the macintouch lawyer sounds fairly cool (it's nice to see non-legalese in a "legal response"). But I'm not entirely sure how meaningful it is - after all, Apple *got* what they wanted (Macintouch took down the things Apple objected to).
I would have modded this up except that it was at 5 already.
.
particularly considering apple's own long history in OS development being abandoned (well, of course, there's the corporate-maneuvering angle what with NeXT and Jobs)...
Actually, the alternative to NeXT at that time was Be - and, I dunno, BeOS though not UNIX per se, *was* pretty UNIX-y - ls, ps, they were all there.
You know, *assassins* are the type to take out single, lone, "high value" targets, right?
Sneaking into fortresses/castles, creeping up and then offing the bad guy, or else maybe using some nice long-distance sniper rifle to take out the bad guy, or maybe choice application of poisons at the right bottle of wine, etc.
This is not appropriate for *spam*, where we're talking about waves upon waves upon unending waves in what we would call a "target rich environment". Assassination? No, more like machine-gunning, or artillery, or, I dunno, nukes.
Assassination would take too long.
they sure don't care much about privacy.
I think "privacy" is something that means different things to different people.
would it make a difference to you if Google explicitly guaranteed that no *human* entity would get to look at your data, and that any machine-automated use of the data would be limited to a specific task (and nothing else, and never would this be changed without your consent)? In such a situation I wouldn't mind.
I absolutely do not want some human person mucking about through information about my online purchases etc., but - assuming Google can handle their systems well enough not to be rooted by anybody - i really could not care less if some machine decides to flag down my activity and ask me if I wanted yet another SATA drive for a good price (and the answer is yes!).
until the machines become self-aware, conscious entities, I would assume they could care less (or rather, are *incapable* of caring) what I want to buy online either (actually, if Google's systems DID emerge into consciousness, I doubt it'd find my online activities interesting either. "Hanging out on Slashdot? doesn't this guy have anything better to do?"). The only thing to worry about would be whether, through incompetence or maliciousness, our data is exploited for some other purpose. if it's a rules-based system "if X user keeps hitting star wars paraphernalia sites, offer X user star wars adverts", and no nefarious individual finds out this info ("hrm, I'll bait him with a fake ebay sale"), what harm is there? (honest question - I'd like to know).
If Google places it's name on a browser
sounds more to me like an overt declaration of war against Microsoft. I mean, everyone knew the war was coming (MSN search vs Google), but this would count as the first actual open hostilities, no?
HIS OWN IP... so that Chewbacca is pink and 3 feet tall he can do that.
so you're saying that the fans have no say or value, that their memories and emotional investment are not worth any more than the $$ they have handed over to the business and that that's ALL they can ever hope for, to have their money be worth taking?
another thing that needs to be remembered, is that these article writers have a schedule.
they've got to output something every month/week/whatever whether or not they actually have got anything worthwhile to say.
this explains a lot of the mountain-out-of-molehill projections/fantasies that are based on half-understood premises.
i actually gave up my businessweek subscription a long time ago when i came to the realisation one day that they are consistently wrong.
Any of you guys who want to actually read a business/economy related paper that actually is written by guys who usually know what they are talking about, check out The Economist.
i'm sure they deliver them at night. i mean, if I knew that many hard disks were coming in, I'd round up all my mini-driving buddies and pull an ocean's-eleven...
considering the integration Outlook Express, Entourage et al have with Hotmail, for many people Hotmail *isn't* just "web"-mail.
that said, I'm still waiting for the storage upgrade they promised, up from 2MB to whatever. I was going to retire my hotmail account and go elsewhere, but I decided to wait when they announced. It's starting to sound like what they've been known to do in the past - announce vapourware in order to delay migration/movement to elsewhere.
Another rant - why use Itanium processors? In order to get good performance from EPIC architechture you need specially optimized compilers, which won't be available for many years (by then this supercomputer will be obsolete).
You're assuming the only decision-making criteria is performance. Cost, marketing/PR value, and not to mention politics, definitely factors in. Intel may be cutting NASA a major sweetheart deal.
i think it could be an implicit acknowledgement that a "Java 2.0" will never be coming? :-) I mean, it'd be like Emacs et al, always 1.x.x
I think dell would be better off spending their money making the Dell DJ a more desirable product.
I'm thinking this offer means something else entirely - it could be possible that this means sales of the Dell jukebox are so *low* that they are desperate to get stock off their hands.
Dell likes to spout off on how they hold no inventory, etc. etc. - but that's not strictly true, particularly for devices that aren't as commoditized as PCs.
You can't leave a factory idle and then fire it up as-and-when you need one or two units of a product. The smallest production runs aren't going to be in the single digits.
It might be easier for Dell with PCs since motherboards, hard disks, all that are going to be MUCH easier to get in the open market than the custom ASICs, frames/casings for the player etc. that they need for this. There's no "ATX", or "ITX" standard for the circuit boards inside music players, practically everything in there is going to be semi-custom-made.
(and, in any case, it's also been pointed out inventory for PC parts etc. is just being shoved off to their suppliers and it just keeps it off Dell's books, it doesn't mean there's "no inventory")
(and, it may not be Dell that's getting totally desperate, depending on the contract signed with Dell it could be the supplier that's desperate to get jukeboxes off their hands and offering it at an even lower price to Dell).
Actually, this reminds me of something - in the early days, before 802.11b was everywhere and 802.11g showed up, the proponents of 802.11a were actually saying that one of the advantages of 802.11a was that at 5GHz the waves were *less* able to propagate beyond the walls of the building (and therefore was better, security-wise). I didn't know whether to think that they had a point, or that they were getting desperate (g was on the horizon and i think everybody could see that with backwards compatibility to b, they had a major advantage). Another nail in the coffin for 802.11a then?
This looks cool - but I don't understand the specifications on their website. It says "native 1280x768" resolution at one point, and yet also says "displays up to 1280x1024". Which is it?? I don't think my video card supports the 1280x768 resolution, and I *really* don't want to read "super-widescreen text", i only like it for movies...