The free version of AntiVir will not scan or protect from files opened or accessed from a network share. A fair compromise by them for an other wise very good free product but something you should be aware of if you have a home network with shared resources.
You can test and verify this operation on any vendors antivirus product with the eicar test virus.
I guess plenty of people are willing to accept their restrictions after all.
People want an easier way to get legal access to specific music other then buying a complete CD from a retailer. People are not accepting the Apple solution because they like it, they are doing it because there is not really many options to choose from or it is the lesser of a few evil's and the iPod itself plays a huge role.
Does my use of Comcast broadband mean I like the terms of service? I abide by them but I don't have a choice If I want internet access greater then a 56k modem.
hardware-based DRM solutions that will lock you out even more.
Yeah, and that will take how much longer to bypass? Hardware has been hacked since the days of the first cable boxes starting getting popular in the 70's and I have no reason to believe it will suddenly stop when hardware DRM comes around.
Pulling the "I don't care, I'm gonna do it anyway" attitude will only solidify the **AA's fear and interest in making it near impossible to move digital content around.
Near Impossible? See above. The DMCA, DRM, Copyright extensions, Broadcast Flag, Regional DVD's, various CD copy prevention schemes and many others are there for copy prevention but there are many other advantages the media compaines get from it. Mainly, protection of their current business model of creation and distribution and airplay control and to get your money more then once. Think about payola, comments from the media executives in yesterdays article about collaborating to raise prices of online media, fighting to block "local" low power radio stations, bundling stations on cable and others. You may like the way things and see nothing wrong with them, many people do not like it and do not want to wait until it is too late.
Step 1: Insert the cd and let autorun take over and do everything for you.
If that does not work or you run into problems during game play, follow this 20 step procedure (if one is even available) and hope you eventually get it to work, if you can not get it to work, too fucking bad.
As an owner of a few EA Games, I've been down that road many times.
If you break apart the article, you will see many conflicting points and information, I don't know who is to blame, the reporter or the industry itself.
General point with these three statements:
All five of the major music companies are discussing ways to boost the price of single-song downloads on hot releases
The industry is also mulling other ways to charge more for online singles.
Several record-company executives acknowledged that pricing changes are being discussed at all five major companies. Sounds a lot like a price fixing scam to me. IANAL but to the layman, this seems odd that they could get away with something like this.
Another issue:
That growth is why some in the industry are uncomfortable with the talk of price increases. Most music-company executives believe that the download market is still in a critical early-growth stage, which could be disrupted by raising prices. So.. offer it low initially and screw them later
How about this gem:
The music companies are reluctant to talk openly about their wholesale-pricing strategies, but they are quick to blame the retailers for higher prices. A spokeswoman for EMI, for instance, stresses that the retailers, not record companies, ultimately set the prices consumers pay. That's odd, the "big five" are trying to figure out how to raise prices but on the other hand, they are quick to blame retailers for raising the prices.
Another point:
Some executives, for example, believe they should be charging a premium for the online versions of older tracks because consumers may be willing to pay more for harder-to-find material It is not worth us selling in a store but we will screw you online. It would not be hard to find in a store if they did not want it to be. That goes completely against this statement:
Unburdened by manufacturing and distribution costs, online music was supposed to usher in a new era of inexpensive, easy-to-access music for consumers. You think the "consumer" would see the effects of this but obviously not. All of these points add up to one thing. The record companies as a whole, are a bunch of scammers and will screw you any chance they get.
doesn't need to have the monitor on for more than maybe ten minutes per bootup Using one of those new fangled GUI's huh?;)
You do not need a monitor AT ALL. I have been running some form of Samba on Linux in my home network since the mid 90's. It sits now as a P200/256MB and various drives totalling about 400GB. Yes only a P200 but easily supplies my home network with roughly 8MBytes/sec over the wire. I use SSH for connecting and upgrading and the only time I ever need a monitor or KB is for troubleshooting after a hardware upgrade that goes wrong and prevents it from restarting. For a while I had a dumb terminal hooked to the serial port for local access but that novelty wore off and I chucked it in the trash. Although not streaming, my mp3's are on that server and shared.
You never know. A sidearmed throw with some spin at close range into some soft tissue of an unsuspecting bystander might cause some serious problems.
Re:High end car mechanic is a great job!
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 1
This concept is not just for the exotics. You can find an expert that deals with a specific car line in almost any area. I've been able to find a great mechanic that deals with Mustangs at every place I've lived in the last 12 years. These guys know the mods, the car inside and out, and what does and does not work. Even relatively simple things are quick and painless. As a bonus, they encourage you to get the parts yourself and they will install them. Not many places will do that because they lose the markup.
My county has mapping tools online. It provides detailed overhead views, demographic info, and many useful tools, including tax and assessment information.
Not my address but you can enter 10604 Bristow Road as a good search example of what they offer. The concept and amount of imformation they have does not really bother me.
Most of us (our circle of friends with kids) require the younger children (9 or so and under) to ask for assistance before playing a console.
You don't have time to make a backup (a one time thing) but you have time to help them every single time they want to play a game? That's odd.
Most of us are from the school of thought that children should learn from an early age that they are responsible for their actions, and that expensive items should be treated with care and respect.
Nice textbook answer. If that honestly works for you and nothing gets broken, you are in the very very tiny percentage of people that concept really works for, or extremely lucky. I am confused though as you contradict yourself with this:
Kids have a high propensity to break ANYTHING
This next line is equally questionable and is terrible advice to give to someone:
making a backup copy of a $50 game is fine and dandy, but you can't make a backup copy of the $200+ console and the $50 mod chip that you bought to make backup copies so your kids didn't break the game.
I thought it was obvious to everyone but a DVD/CD is much more prone to breaking and being damaged then the console is. You are saying why make backups at all if the hardware could break at some point. You'd think it would make sense to backup the things you can, specially when they are easiest thing to break in the loop.
A cheap network adapter would be nice. Although I have not tried it myself, there is a modem to modem method of establishing a PPP connection to your local network with the DC. Not ethernet but it should be a reliable connection.
For Divx I've only used dcmplay. I do not know the relationship if any between it and Pocket Divx but this one suffers from sync problems also.
Even with the obvious negatives of the DC, it was a very capable console and there is still a decent amount of development floating around for it.
Electricity is a product, it is electrons traveling down the wire, work on your car is a service performed. Taking a cd from a record store is taking an actual product. You copying a file from me is NOT stealing a PRODUCT at all, what if you copied the exact clothes I am currently wearing? Is that considered theft? What about copying the paint scheme off my custom van, looking at my custom made porch swing and making your own the same way, how about getting the same exact hair cut as me? These are examples of intellectual property and may or may not be covered under copyright, trademark, patent or trade secret laws, copying them is a copyright violation. You can not take or steal away intellectual property from someone but it may be possible to make unauthorized copies of it.
Steal an audio cd from Walmart and get caught, potential for a small fine. Download or upload the same cd's contents to someone online, face up to $150,000 fine per song. Do the potential fines appear to be in relation to the crime commited?
You can get a preowned Dreamcast (DC) at EBGames for $15 at a physical store or $19 online. Scope out DCEmulation for tons of homebrew ports and games (Mame, other emu's, mp3 player, divx player and many others) or fire up alt.binaries.cd.image.dreamcast for some commercial rips and work released by others. It even runs Linux (although a little dated) to a VGA monitor with KB support. The DC does not require any "chips" or internal hacks to run anything and has an internal modem.
Even further offtopic but I use my DC often, mostly for NES emulation and simply playing the games I've bought for it over the years.
They are normally lost because the companies own success or use general use (or unintended use like a verb) of the trademarked and or patented product name and also a lack of action to prevent misuse of the word. A good description of the concept is here . Aspirin had more factors then just a generic name and was lost quickly. Interestingly, I remember Yahoo having commerical asking, "Do you Yahoo?".
Not to be confused with the Adobe Reader that just about everyone has. Every place that I have used or maintained Samba, I've also installed a network PDF printer for the client workstations to use (using this guide as a reference). Of course why stop there, you can also use the same concept descibed in the above link to install various printers like jpg, tiff (color and group 4 fax), and just about any other printer that gs can export to. These virtual printers make a great document converter for those people that you want to share stuff with that may not have the specific application to print or open the native file you may have to send them. Another advantage is printing confimations, receipts, web pages etc.. in electronic form instead of on paper.
Substitute ps2pdf in the above linked guide to gs for other printers, examples below
RGB color tiff at 300dpi: gs -sDEVICE=tiff24nc -r300x300
Standard Group 4 Fax (tiff): gs -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -r100x100
You have to consider volume also, not just pressing suppliers for cheaper prices. Even if Joes Battery had them for the same price, I can buy it there but Joe's is only one shop. What if that battery fails when I am on vacation? What if it fails one hour away? What if it fails on Sunday? What about 6pm on Saturday night? My work day plus travel has me gone roughly 12 hours a day. Where is Joe those other 12 when I have time? If I chose Wal-Mart, I can go to any store in the country and return it under warranty or simply just buy another one. Hell, two of my cars are manuals, I can push start it, drive to Wal-Mart and replace it right there in the parking lot 24x7 if I had too. I know saying that may label me as the stereotypical back woods and hickish Wal-Mart shopper that/.r's like to claim but so what;) I have done that and I got my car fixed in minutes and my family and I were on our way again. Being someone that had to call and wait for a tow truck, get dropped off at home, and having to wait until the next day until Joe could replace the $40 battery is not someone I'd be proud of either.
I know the battery is only an example but being previous military and moving around and driving A LOT of miles, I've been in that situation more then once. Buying a car battery from Wal-Mart makes perfect sense for convienence alone regardless of a few dollars difference. That concept applies to any nationwide business with a large presence.
What that family doens't realize is that walmart is the reason that half the small businesses in their little town are gone, and people are out of work.
Walmart puts no one out of business, the shoppers that stop going to the little stores does. People can and do choose what store they want to buy from. People choose Walmart over the small stores because of the prices, the hours, the convienence and the selection and who know what else. The people are voting with the dollar. You did not specifically mention it but I've heard an arguement that Walmart lowers prices until local businesses are gone, then raise them. That is complete bull. Walmart has the same prices over an entire geographical region, a car battery costs $39.95 in Charleston SC, Charleston WV, Pittsburgh PA, and Reading PA. Same with apple juice and underwear. You think they are going to raise the price in all of those areas when "Joes Battery shop" in Pittsburgh finally goes under?
Just check their websites that week, see what's on sale and what's in a particular store.
You can check salescircular.com for a particular area to see what they have in the paper ad also. Saves from scouring the Sunday papers. Like already stated, getting any rebates will not be easy.
A PC, being a commodity item and available at Walmart for $199, are far cheaper then the simple terminal running on a 8080 you describe. In fact, a full PC is cheaper then even a dumb video display terminal that has no processing power at all. Of course the PC with all its extra baggage is not as reliable and not as secure but only people like yourself think of that, not the PHB that makes the short term decision to make his numbers for the quarter.
You want this and that and so on.. I listen to and enjoy music, I don't care to sit around and look at a PR poster of the people that made the music. I do agree about the bitrate and/or ripping method but only on something recorded REALLY well like some of Telarcs releases like this one (and I do not like the real Beach Boys at all). 95% of non independant music and even a higher % of independant music is recorded with "average" quality that encoding to MP3 at 192 would not make much of a difference to the overall quality. Even less for someone that is used to listening to 12in vinyl (unless you've spent 10000's on your turntable, planer speakers, and your tube amplifiers and I've yet to see a vinyl setup that you could listen to while driving or jogging)
I don't know if you were joking or not but our company is switching document management software to Hummmingbird DM with integration into Outlook as our primary user interface. IMHO, we are sliding deeper and deeper into the into the MS lockin trap.
That would be my suggestion as well. Why should you pay for SMS on your personal cell phone (oh I know, you probably have a package plan, but technically you are still paying for it) for work? Do you own any stock in this company? If not, then why use your personal funds to help them?
Convienence comes to mind. Where I am now, we have Nextel's and a rotating on call pager. Some of us including myself also carry a Blackberry (with phone service also). All at the expense of the company. No problem but they are VERY picky about using those things for personal calls. So, I end up with a bat belt of wireless devices outside the office. I normally leave many at home when I go out but forward what I can to my personal SMS address or my personal cell phone number and end up only with that and the Nextel or the Blackberry, two is enough. I have more then enough minutes on my own phone and it is less a pain then carring everything around.
Have you been to a computer show since? Your police work had no effect.
In all honesty, I don't think I've ever seen a vendor at a computer show that did NOT operate similar to that. Although they normally don't claim it comes with an OS without a charge for the CD, it is common to mass install the OS for your verification and testing that the hardware actually works prior to leaving their table space. The result is the customer is very clear on what they are actually paying or not paying for and MS probably gets less then they should.
Slashdot Mirror
The free version of AntiVir will not scan or protect from files opened or accessed from a network share. A fair compromise by them for an other wise very good free product but something you should be aware of if you have a home network with shared resources.
You can test and verify this operation on any vendors antivirus product with the eicar test virus.
I guess plenty of people are willing to accept their restrictions after all.
People want an easier way to get legal access to specific music other then buying a complete CD from a retailer.
People are not accepting the Apple solution because they like it, they are doing it because there is not really many options to choose from or it is the lesser of a few evil's and the iPod itself plays a huge role.
Does my use of Comcast broadband mean I like the terms of service? I abide by them but I don't have a choice If I want internet access greater then a 56k modem.
hardware-based DRM solutions that will lock you out even more.
Yeah, and that will take how much longer to bypass? Hardware has been hacked since the days of the first cable boxes starting getting popular in the 70's and I have no reason to believe it will suddenly stop when hardware DRM comes around.
Pulling the "I don't care, I'm gonna do it anyway" attitude will only solidify the **AA's fear and interest in making it near impossible to move digital content around.
Near Impossible? See above.
The DMCA, DRM, Copyright extensions, Broadcast Flag, Regional DVD's, various CD copy prevention schemes and many others are there for copy prevention but there are many other advantages the media compaines get from it. Mainly, protection of their current business model of creation and distribution and airplay control and to get your money more then once. Think about payola, comments from the media executives in yesterdays article about collaborating to raise prices of online media, fighting to block "local" low power radio stations, bundling stations on cable and others. You may like the way things and see nothing wrong with them, many people do not like it and do not want to wait until it is too late.
On the flip side...
How do you get [whatever] to work on Windows.
Step 1: Insert the cd and let autorun take over and do everything for you.
If that does not work or you run into problems during game play, follow this 20 step procedure (if one is even available) and hope you eventually get it to work, if you can not get it to work, too fucking bad.
As an owner of a few EA Games, I've been down that road many times.
General point with these three statements:
All five of the major music companies are discussing ways to boost the price of single-song downloads on hot releases
The industry is also mulling other ways to charge more for online singles.
Several record-company executives acknowledged that pricing changes are being discussed at all five major companies.
Sounds a lot like a price fixing scam to me. IANAL but to the layman, this seems odd that they could get away with something like this.
Another issue:
That growth is why some in the industry are uncomfortable with the talk of price increases. Most music-company executives believe that the download market is still in a critical early-growth stage, which could be disrupted by raising prices.
So.. offer it low initially and screw them later
How about this gem:
The music companies are reluctant to talk openly about their wholesale-pricing strategies, but they are quick to blame the retailers for higher prices. A spokeswoman for EMI, for instance, stresses that the retailers, not record companies, ultimately set the prices consumers pay.
That's odd, the "big five" are trying to figure out how to raise prices but on the other hand, they are quick to blame retailers for raising the prices.
Another point:
Some executives, for example, believe they should be charging a premium for the online versions of older tracks because consumers may be willing to pay more for harder-to-find material
It is not worth us selling in a store but we will screw you online. It would not be hard to find in a store if they did not want it to be. That goes completely against this statement:
Unburdened by manufacturing and distribution costs, online music was supposed to usher in a new era of inexpensive, easy-to-access music for consumers.
You think the "consumer" would see the effects of this but obviously not.
All of these points add up to one thing. The record companies as a whole, are a bunch of scammers and will screw you any chance they get.
doesn't need to have the monitor on for more than maybe ten minutes per bootup ;)
Using one of those new fangled GUI's huh?
You do not need a monitor AT ALL. I have been running some form of Samba on Linux in my home network since the mid 90's. It sits now as a P200/256MB and various drives totalling about 400GB. Yes only a P200 but easily supplies my home network with roughly 8MBytes/sec over the wire. I use SSH for connecting and upgrading and the only time I ever need a monitor or KB is for troubleshooting after a hardware upgrade that goes wrong and prevents it from restarting. For a while I had a dumb terminal hooked to the serial port for local access but that novelty wore off and I chucked it in the trash. Although not streaming, my mp3's are on that server and shared.
Yeah, but my fried Athlon won't kill anyone
You never know. A sidearmed throw with some spin at close range into some soft tissue of an unsuspecting bystander might cause some serious problems.
This concept is not just for the exotics. You can find an expert that deals with a specific car line in almost any area. I've been able to find a great mechanic that deals with Mustangs at every place I've lived in the last 12 years. These guys know the mods, the car inside and out, and what does and does not work. Even relatively simple things are quick and painless. As a bonus, they encourage you to get the parts yourself and they will install them. Not many places will do that because they lose the markup.
My county has mapping tools online. It provides detailed overhead views, demographic info, and many useful tools, including tax and assessment information.
/. effect...
Not my address but you can enter 10604 Bristow Road as a good search example of what they offer.
The concept and amount of imformation they have does not really bother me.
I doubt they will stand the
My 12yr old son uses his $199 Wal-Mart machine everyday. I wiped Lindows and put Mandrake on it but still no MS Windows.
Most of us (our circle of friends with kids) require the younger children (9 or so and under) to ask for assistance before playing a console.
You don't have time to make a backup (a one time thing) but you have time to help them every single time they want to play a game? That's odd.
Most of us are from the school of thought that children should learn from an early age that they are responsible for their actions, and that expensive items should be treated with care and respect.
Nice textbook answer. If that honestly works for you and nothing gets broken, you are in the very very tiny percentage of people that concept really works for, or extremely lucky. I am confused though as you contradict yourself with this:
Kids have a high propensity to break ANYTHING
This next line is equally questionable and is terrible advice to give to someone:
making a backup copy of a $50 game is fine and dandy, but you can't make a backup copy of the $200+ console and the $50 mod chip that you bought to make backup copies so your kids didn't break the game.
I thought it was obvious to everyone but a DVD/CD is much more prone to breaking and being damaged then the console is. You are saying why make backups at all if the hardware could break at some point. You'd think it would make sense to backup the things you can, specially when they are easiest thing to break in the loop.
Your "circle of friends" needs to change shape.
A cheap network adapter would be nice. Although I have not tried it myself, there is a modem to modem method of establishing a PPP connection to your local network with the DC. Not ethernet but it should be a reliable connection.
For Divx I've only used dcmplay. I do not know the relationship if any between it and Pocket Divx but this one suffers from sync problems also.
Even with the obvious negatives of the DC, it was a very capable console and there is still a decent amount of development floating around for it.
You really need to familiarize yourself with a description of Intellectual Property
Electricity is a product, it is electrons traveling down the wire, work on your car is a service performed.
Taking a cd from a record store is taking an actual product. You copying a file from me is NOT stealing a PRODUCT at all, what if you copied the exact clothes I am currently wearing? Is that considered theft? What about copying the paint scheme off my custom van, looking at my custom made porch swing and making your own the same way, how about getting the same exact hair cut as me? These are examples of intellectual property and may or may not be covered under copyright, trademark, patent or trade secret laws, copying them is a copyright violation. You can not take or steal away intellectual property from someone but it may be possible to make unauthorized copies of it.
Steal an audio cd from Walmart and get caught, potential for a small fine. Download or upload the same cd's contents to someone online, face up to $150,000 fine per song. Do the potential fines appear to be in relation to the crime commited?
You can get a preowned Dreamcast (DC) at EBGames for $15 at a physical store or $19 online. Scope out DCEmulation for tons of homebrew ports and games (Mame, other emu's, mp3 player, divx player and many others) or fire up alt.binaries.cd.image.dreamcast for some commercial rips and work released by others. It even runs Linux (although a little dated) to a VGA monitor with KB support. The DC does not require any "chips" or internal hacks to run anything and has an internal modem.
Even further offtopic but I use my DC often, mostly for NES emulation and simply playing the games I've bought for it over the years.
They were lost to common usage.
They are normally lost because the companies own success or use general use (or unintended use like a verb) of the trademarked and or patented product name and also a lack of action to prevent misuse of the word. A good description of the concept is here . Aspirin had more factors then just a generic name and was lost quickly. Interestingly, I remember Yahoo having commerical asking, "Do you Yahoo?".
Adobe Acrobat
Not to be confused with the Adobe Reader that just about everyone has.
Every place that I have used or maintained Samba, I've also installed a network PDF printer for the client workstations to use (using this guide as a reference). Of course why stop there, you can also use the same concept descibed in the above link to install various printers like jpg, tiff (color and group 4 fax), and just about any other printer that gs can export to. These virtual printers make a great document converter for those people that you want to share stuff with that may not have the specific application to print or open the native file you may have to send them. Another advantage is printing confimations, receipts, web pages etc.. in electronic form instead of on paper.
Substitute ps2pdf in the above linked guide to gs for other printers, examples below
RGB color tiff at 300dpi:
gs -sDEVICE=tiff24nc -r300x300
Standard Group 4 Fax (tiff):
gs -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -r100x100
300dpi Jpeg:
gs -sDEVICE=jpeg -r300x300
You have to consider volume also, not just pressing suppliers for cheaper prices. Even if Joes Battery had them for the same price, I can buy it there but Joe's is only one shop. What if that battery fails when I am on vacation? What if it fails one hour away? What if it fails on Sunday? What about 6pm on Saturday night? My work day plus travel has me gone roughly 12 hours a day. Where is Joe those other 12 when I have time? If I chose Wal-Mart, I can go to any store in the country and return it under warranty or simply just buy another one. Hell, two of my cars are manuals, I can push start it, drive to Wal-Mart and replace it right there in the parking lot 24x7 if I had too. I know saying that may label me as the stereotypical back woods and hickish Wal-Mart shopper that /.r's like to claim but so what ;) I have done that and I got my car fixed in minutes and my family and I were on our way again. Being someone that had to call and wait for a tow truck, get dropped off at home, and having to wait until the next day until Joe could replace the $40 battery is not someone I'd be proud of either.
I know the battery is only an example but being previous military and moving around and driving A LOT of miles, I've been in that situation more then once. Buying a car battery from Wal-Mart makes perfect sense for convienence alone regardless of a few dollars difference. That concept applies to any nationwide business with a large presence.
What that family doens't realize is that walmart is the reason that half the small businesses in their little town are gone, and people are out of work.
Walmart puts no one out of business, the shoppers that stop going to the little stores does. People can and do choose what store they want to buy from. People choose Walmart over the small stores because of the prices, the hours, the convienence and the selection and who know what else. The people are voting with the dollar. You did not specifically mention it but I've heard an arguement that Walmart lowers prices until local businesses are gone, then raise them. That is complete bull. Walmart has the same prices over an entire geographical region, a car battery costs $39.95 in Charleston SC, Charleston WV, Pittsburgh PA, and Reading PA. Same with apple juice and underwear. You think they are going to raise the price in all of those areas when "Joes Battery shop" in Pittsburgh finally goes under?
Just check their websites that week, see what's on sale and what's in a particular store.
You can check salescircular.com for a particular area to see what they have in the paper ad also. Saves from scouring the Sunday papers. Like already stated, getting any rebates will not be easy.
A PC, being a commodity item and available at Walmart for $199, are far cheaper then the simple terminal running on a 8080 you describe. In fact, a full PC is cheaper then even a dumb video display terminal that has no processing power at all. Of course the PC with all its extra baggage is not as reliable and not as secure but only people like yourself think of that, not the PHB that makes the short term decision to make his numbers for the quarter.
You want this and that and so on..
I listen to and enjoy music, I don't care to sit around and look at a PR poster of the people that made the music.
I do agree about the bitrate and/or ripping method but only on something recorded REALLY well like some of Telarcs releases like this one (and I do not like the real Beach Boys at all). 95% of non independant music and even a higher % of independant music is recorded with "average" quality that encoding to MP3 at 192 would not make much of a difference to the overall quality. Even less for someone that is used to listening to 12in vinyl (unless you've spent 10000's on your turntable, planer speakers, and your tube amplifiers and I've yet to see a vinyl setup that you could listen to while driving or jogging)
I don't know if you were joking or not but our company is switching document management software to Hummmingbird DM with integration into Outlook as our primary user interface. IMHO, we are sliding deeper and deeper into the into the MS lockin trap.
That would be my suggestion as well. Why should you pay for SMS on your personal cell phone (oh I know, you probably have a package plan, but technically you are still paying for it) for work? Do you own any stock in this company? If not, then why use your personal funds to help them?
Convienence comes to mind. Where I am now, we have Nextel's and a rotating on call pager. Some of us including myself also carry a Blackberry (with phone service also). All at the expense of the company. No problem but they are VERY picky about using those things for personal calls. So, I end up with a bat belt of wireless devices outside the office. I normally leave many at home when I go out but forward what I can to my personal SMS address or my personal cell phone number and end up only with that and the Nextel or the Blackberry, two is enough. I have more then enough minutes on my own phone and it is less a pain then carring everything around.
Have you been to a computer show since? Your police work had no effect.
In all honesty, I don't think I've ever seen a vendor at a computer show that did NOT operate similar to that. Although they normally don't claim it comes with an OS without a charge for the CD, it is common to mass install the OS for your verification and testing that the hardware actually works prior to leaving their table space. The result is the customer is very clear on what they are actually paying or not paying for and MS probably gets less then they should.
So you don't believe him?