Based on the assumption that the crapware makers pay for having their stuff bundled, in the hope of selling subscriptions (or whatever) to inexperienced users:
By all means, buy the Windows computer and reformat to Linux. You will end up doing Microsoft a favor, but the crapware vendor has wasted his advertising money. I dislike this guys as much as Microsoft, and would settle for damaging them instead of MS.
Now if lots of people do this, I predict two consequences: 1) Crapware bundling will no longer be an attractive business model. Maybe some crapware vendors go out of business:-) 2) The license costs of Windows are no longer compensated by crapware advertising money. At that point, computers bundled with Windows should actually become more expensive than the Linux versions.
Yep, and it might be a good idea to repeat this with some other stuff that looks at least borderline credible. Bussard's "polywell" fusion device comes to mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
Both Lerner's and Bussard's approach are not exactly proven, but they seem believable enough that investing a few millions (as opposed to billions in Tokamak research) seems worthwile.
Then those who are in the research for money will get out, and if we want further progress in pharma publicly funded research might have to fill in the gap.
Considering the large sums health insurance pay out today for drugs, it could actually be more cost efficient to do so and put the results in the public domain. Then there would be real competition in manufacturing of those drugs, which should keep the sale price low.
I'm not sure how well this would work out, and that's why I wrote "possible exception of pharmaceuticals".
For question 2, there are copyrights and patents to consider.
Copyright: Eric Flint (who is an author himself) makes a pretty good case for 40 years' copyright on literary works, possibly with the addition that copyright does not run out during the lifetime of the author: http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos3 I think this argument can be extended to movies and music.
Patents: I think those already do more harm than good. While patents help the inventor, they also can be used against anyone who made the invention independently and just was a bit slower to file for the patent. Which is compounded by patent offices handing out patents for far too vague ideas with too little explanation. That breaks the basic covenant that the inventor gives away his secret and gets a temporary monopoly in exchange.
Also, if you look at the history of important inventions, many of those pop up in different places at nearly the same time, not always patented. I take this as evidence that inventions happen when the time is "right" (the supporting technologies are there) and patents as incentive are not needed.
Overall, I think the patent system is counterproductive in most cases and needs to be abolished. With the possible exception of pharmaceuticals. In that field, the clinical studies take long enough that competitors might copy the drugs before they get on the market, so the original developer pays for the research without having a benefit.
Not news in general, similar tricks were possible 10 years ago on Unix. IIRC Windows 2000 even offers a "repair" option in the setup program that merely resets all paswords.
This might, however, be a way for legitimate users to get more control of their system. AFAIK the "Administrator" account in Vista is not quite the same as "root" on Unix/Linux.
Well, DOD is slower under WINE. At least with the default settings of WINE. I have not researched the exact cause of the slowdown, so it could be any of the following: -The NVidia Linux drivers being inferior to the Windows ones (I'm running their closed source driver for Linux). -more overhead in the Xserver compared to the Windows DirectX API -overhead in WINE's translation from DirectX to OpenGL, including software fallbacks as you suggested.
Obviously not all of those would be the fault of the WINE team, and the results may differ for other games. Especially if the game uses OpenGL on Windows, in that case I'd expect the translation to Linux API calls to be much simpler.
So far, the only program I have really tried is DOD:Source, a Steam game. But based on this: -Running the installer worked -I had to fiddle with the WINE registry a bit, fortunately some forum explained how to do that -now DOD runs crash-free (since yesterday, RC1 still had a bug that made it crash) -yes, DirectX works (good enough to support the HL2 engine, but probably not 100% complete yet) -the performance hit is significant, so don't expect to run the very latest games on WINE yet
That one backfired. If you believe the data on http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html, SWG is down to about 100k subscribers. According to the same chart, EVE Online (which is also not for everyone) is approaching the 250k from below, after 5 years of steady growth.
So a well designed niche game can be a better success than a would-be mass market title:-)
EVE has a low-cost purchase option too: Something like $20 for the game including first month of play (I'm too lazy to find out the exact price now). That means you pay only a few dollars on top of the subscription price for that month. Of course EVE has the advantage of lower distribution costs. You download the client, you don't buy a box that has to be shipped and takes up space in a shop.
Yeah, there's a few logistical issues to work out but I'm sure Sony can take the load if prepared (I'm not being sarcastic...).
Good point, because if the game finally takes off this is exactly what you are going to get: more load. If the servers cannot handle the extra players of the open week, they won't be able to handle more regular subscribers either.
With sufficient RAM and disk (which are cheap enough these days) even the slower C2D processors will give very nice performance. Except for gamers and people who want the lastest Microsoft operating system, I'd expect such a laptop being more than fast enough 5 years from now.
By that time, you will probably be on your second battery (Li-Ion ages with or without usage), and if you can find a third one after that is a matter of luck as the model may be out of production. Let alone other parts that can go bust.
In short, for most people this machine will probably break hardware-side before the lack of performance becomes an issue.
Don't be an ass. The best outcome would be Microsoft taking great care of its customers, so that millions of people aren't hassled and inconvenienced.
I have yet to see an almost-monopoly that pays great attention to its customers. Your "best outcome" would be nice but has the chance of a snowball in hell.
The best that is halfway realistic (and I might be a tad optimistic here) is that enough people use something other than Microsoft's products to a) get the attention of Microsoft management and show them that shafting the customer does not work in the long run. b) weaken Microsoft's almost-monopoly enough that there is meaningful competition. This would help to keep them honest in the future.
I think it is difficult to make laws against all ways of shafting the customer. Obviously anticompetitive behaviour should be punished, and I think the EU fines against Microsoft are OK, but don't expect the law to cover all possibilities.
In this case, it is up to the users to finally get a clue and stop buying software that servers anyone except the customer. I really hope this news makes it onto a few more technology websites and M$ gets to feel it in their sales numbers.
It does not have to be Linux (I dimly remember reading that OEMs have used FreeDOS to get around contracts that forbade them to sell PCs without OS), but a newbie-friendly Linux distribution would be the best choice if they bother to offer another OS at all.
And I'd really like to see Microsoft trying to beat Ubuntu on price (evil grin;-)
...but ultimately the personality of Linux fans gets in the way causing the inevitable forking of a distro and confusion among users...
Forks happen. But unless the original developers screwed up in some way, they tend to stay irrelevant and die off. Offhand, I can think of two forks that gained some significance:
1) X.org which mostly replaced XFree86. People were unhappy with the progress of XFree86, and when XFree86 changed its license on top of that, some developers took the last version with the old license and developed it into the X.org server.
2) The Firebird database. Borland had open-sourced a version of Interbase, but then they changed their mind and went closed source in later versions again.
In both cases, the old developers disappointed the Open Source fans and someone else put in the work to continue the project in Open Source style.
Because the Linux box could also run on the latest Intel processors. And I don't think a PC with carefully selected components is inferior to an Intel Mac.
In Germany, for instance, EULAs would be considered "general terms and conditions". Those only are binding if the customer had a reasonable opportunity to review them before buying. So
-if you buy some boxed software and are presented with the EULA on installation, I'm pretts sure it is unenforceable.
-if you download the software from the internet and the EULA was only one click away, I guess a German court would find the EULA enforcable.
For anything in between, I recommend asking a lawyer;-)
I would predict they have a long road of nuiscance planned for EFI crackers. They only need to plan about 5 years worth of them, because in 5 years there will be new hardware nuiscances that spwan a whole new list of software nuiscances.
I agree about the 5 years, but for a different reason: Considering how much progress in user-friendliness Linux has made in that time, I guess it will catch up to the Mac OS X of today in another five years. So either Apple has something new and shiny by then, or cracking OS X will be pointless for most purposes.
This is also why to the chagrin of many geeks, the desktop metaphor just won't go away. It works, and it works well.
True. I'd like to add that the occasional annoyance is usually due to poor implementation. Examples include -inconsistent GUI design in general, where you learn some principle just to find out it is NOT applicable to all of the application -Windows Explorer failing to update itself after you moved around some files -Focus stealing by popups (Windows again)
All of these are not a fundamental failure of the desktop metaphor, but individual failures to apply it well.
Re:Overclocking is stricly amateur level
on
DDR3 RAM Explained
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· Score: 1
Seems you have the same priorities like me:-) Performance wise, a mid-level PC does fine for me (my latest one is an AMD dual core with a Nvidia GT8600 GPU). But the reliability better be above average. That means -no overclocking -reliability enhancing extras where they are not too expensive (ECC RAM is one of those) -choosing vendors that have a history of good quality rather than flashy features -not necessarily the very latest technology, as older stuff is often more mature
Of course, this will not solve software problems. At the moment I have two programs that will reproducably crash Windows 2000:-( If I can get them to run reliably under WINE in Linux, Windows will be booted a lot less on my machine...
2ndly. Why favouring those socalled "emerging markets" while WE had to pay full premium prices for these products? Has anyone thought of that?
Because Microsoft thinks they can get away with it. They have zero loyalty towards their customers. So they make the wealthy people in the USA and Europe pay more, but where poverty might actually lead people to choose Linux over a $30 difference, Windows is made cheaper.
Slightly OT: Such behavior is nothing new, 10-20 years ago several EU car makers did it. You would get the same car in Spain for a few thousand less than in Germany. It was newsworthy because the car makers also put pressure on the dealers not to engage in re-imports (in our example, from Spain to Germany). That was illegal inside the EU. Some car makers ended up paying pretty big fines. Not as massive as the recent EU fines for Microsoft, but the EU commission did something about it.
They want to limit the specs so that any machines sold over that spec must be sold with a Windows operating system.
I think you've misread TFA. They limit the special discount offer to machines with limited specs.
For any machines sold over that spec, Windows costs the regular price. I guess the idea is to keep Linux out of the low-end market where it would make a big difference to the overall price, if Windows was sold at normal price.
But Microsoft cannot get away with forbidding sales of machines without Windows. That is classic anticompetitive behavior. Some dealers might cave in, but this is exactly the stuff they were dragged into court over before. Even in the USA I think they would not get away with that a second time. In the EU, they would get slapped silly.
Usually, you know what hardware you have and you apply the correct drivers. Also, many setup programs have safety checks built in, as in "stop installation when correct chipset is not detected".
In this case it seems that HP and others took disk images from Intel machines and copied them onto AMD machines. That circumvents any test the driver developer might have implemented in the setup program. At best, the driver will re-check for the correct chipset at startup (and what then? Refuse to run and leave the OS minus an important driver? Almost as bad).
In short, the really surprising thing is that the computers did NOT fail under SP2. The OEMs made a pretty stupid mistake here and deserve to be bashed.
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Based on the assumption that the crapware makers pay for having their stuff bundled, in the hope of selling subscriptions (or whatever) to inexperienced users:
:-)
By all means, buy the Windows computer and reformat to Linux. You will end up doing Microsoft a favor, but the crapware vendor has wasted his advertising money. I dislike this guys as much as Microsoft, and would settle for damaging them instead of MS.
Now if lots of people do this, I predict two consequences:
1) Crapware bundling will no longer be an attractive business model. Maybe some crapware vendors go out of business
2) The license costs of Windows are no longer compensated by crapware advertising money. At that point, computers bundled with Windows should actually become more expensive than the Linux versions.
Yep, and it might be a good idea to repeat this with some other stuff that looks at least borderline credible. Bussard's "polywell" fusion device comes to mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
Both Lerner's and Bussard's approach are not exactly proven, but they seem believable enough that investing a few millions (as opposed to billions in Tokamak research) seems worthwile.
Then those who are in the research for money will get out, and if we want further progress in pharma publicly funded research might have to fill in the gap.
Considering the large sums health insurance pay out today for drugs, it could actually be more cost efficient to do so and put the results in the public domain. Then there would be real competition in manufacturing of those drugs, which should keep the sale price low.
I'm not sure how well this would work out, and that's why I wrote "possible exception of pharmaceuticals".
I think that is a good answer to question 1.
For question 2, there are copyrights and patents to consider.
Copyright:
Eric Flint (who is an author himself) makes a pretty good case for 40 years' copyright on literary works, possibly with the addition that copyright does not run out during the lifetime of the author:
http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos3
I think this argument can be extended to movies and music.
Patents:
I think those already do more harm than good. While patents help the inventor, they also can be used against anyone who made the invention independently and just was a bit slower to file for the patent. Which is compounded by patent offices handing out patents for far too vague ideas with too little explanation. That breaks the basic covenant that the inventor gives away his secret and gets a temporary monopoly in exchange.
Also, if you look at the history of important inventions, many of those pop up in different places at nearly the same time, not always patented. I take this as evidence that inventions happen when the time is "right" (the supporting technologies are there) and patents as incentive are not needed.
Overall, I think the patent system is counterproductive in most cases and needs to be abolished. With the possible exception of pharmaceuticals. In that field, the clinical studies take long enough that competitors might copy the drugs before they get on the market, so the original developer pays for the research without having a benefit.
Not news in general, similar tricks were possible 10 years ago on Unix. IIRC Windows 2000 even offers a "repair" option in the setup program that merely resets all paswords.
This might, however, be a way for legitimate users to get more control of their system. AFAIK the "Administrator" account in Vista is not quite the same as "root" on Unix/Linux.
Well, DOD is slower under WINE. At least with the default settings of WINE. I have not researched the exact cause of the slowdown, so it could be any of the following:
-The NVidia Linux drivers being inferior to the Windows ones (I'm running their closed source driver for Linux).
-more overhead in the Xserver compared to the Windows DirectX API
-overhead in WINE's translation from DirectX to OpenGL, including software fallbacks as you suggested.
Obviously not all of those would be the fault of the WINE team, and the results may differ for other games. Especially if the game uses OpenGL on Windows, in that case I'd expect the translation to Linux API calls to be much simpler.
So far, the only program I have really tried is DOD:Source, a Steam game. But based on this:
-Running the installer worked
-I had to fiddle with the WINE registry a bit, fortunately some forum explained how to do that
-now DOD runs crash-free (since yesterday, RC1 still had a bug that made it crash)
-yes, DirectX works (good enough to support the HL2 engine, but probably not 100% complete yet)
-the performance hit is significant, so don't expect to run the very latest games on WINE yet
That one backfired. If you believe the data on http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html, SWG is down to about 100k subscribers. According to the same chart, EVE Online (which is also not for everyone) is approaching the 250k from below, after 5 years of steady growth.
:-)
So a well designed niche game can be a better success than a would-be mass market title
EVE has a low-cost purchase option too:
Something like $20 for the game including first month of play (I'm too lazy to find out the exact price now). That means you pay only a few dollars on top of the subscription price for that month.
Of course EVE has the advantage of lower distribution costs. You download the client, you don't buy a box that has to be shipped and takes up space in a shop.
Good point, because if the game finally takes off this is exactly what you are going to get: more load.
If the servers cannot handle the extra players of the open week, they won't be able to handle more regular subscribers either.
With sufficient RAM and disk (which are cheap enough these days) even the slower C2D processors will give very nice performance. Except for gamers and people who want the lastest Microsoft operating system, I'd expect such a laptop being more than fast enough 5 years from now.
By that time, you will probably be on your second battery (Li-Ion ages with or without usage), and if you can find a third one after that is a matter of luck as the model may be out of production. Let alone other parts that can go bust.
In short, for most people this machine will probably break hardware-side before the lack of performance becomes an issue.
I have yet to see an almost-monopoly that pays great attention to its customers. Your "best outcome" would be nice but has the chance of a snowball in hell.
The best that is halfway realistic (and I might be a tad optimistic here) is that enough people use something other than Microsoft's products to
a) get the attention of Microsoft management and show them that shafting the customer does not work in the long run.
b) weaken Microsoft's almost-monopoly enough that there is meaningful competition. This would help to keep them honest in the future.
I think it is difficult to make laws against all ways of shafting the customer. Obviously anticompetitive behaviour should be punished, and I think the EU fines against Microsoft are OK, but don't expect the law to cover all possibilities.
In this case, it is up to the users to finally get a clue and stop buying software that servers anyone except the customer. I really hope this news makes it onto a few more technology websites and M$ gets to feel it in their sales numbers.
It does not have to be Linux (I dimly remember reading that OEMs have used FreeDOS to get around contracts that forbade them to sell PCs without OS), but a newbie-friendly Linux distribution would be the best choice if they bother to offer another OS at all.
;-)
And I'd really like to see Microsoft trying to beat Ubuntu on price (evil grin
Forks happen. But unless the original developers screwed up in some way, they tend to stay irrelevant and die off. Offhand, I can think of two forks that gained some significance:
1) X.org which mostly replaced XFree86. People were unhappy with the progress of XFree86, and when XFree86 changed its license on top of that, some developers took the last version with the old license and developed it into the X.org server.
2) The Firebird database. Borland had open-sourced a version of Interbase, but then they changed their mind and went closed source in later versions again.
In both cases, the old developers disappointed the Open Source fans and someone else put in the work to continue the project in Open Source style.
Because the Linux box could also run on the latest Intel processors. And I don't think a PC with carefully selected components is inferior to an Intel Mac.
So it is all about the quality of the software.
In Germany, for instance, EULAs would be considered "general terms and conditions". Those only are binding if the customer had a reasonable opportunity to review them before buying. So
;-)
-if you buy some boxed software and are presented with the EULA on installation, I'm pretts sure it is unenforceable.
-if you download the software from the internet and the EULA was only one click away, I guess a German court would find the EULA enforcable.
For anything in between, I recommend asking a lawyer
I agree about the 5 years, but for a different reason:
Considering how much progress in user-friendliness Linux has made in that time, I guess it will catch up to the Mac OS X of today in another five years. So either Apple has something new and shiny by then, or cracking OS X will be pointless for most purposes.
True.
I'd like to add that the occasional annoyance is usually due to poor implementation. Examples include
-inconsistent GUI design in general, where you learn some principle just to find out it is NOT applicable to all of the application
-Windows Explorer failing to update itself after you moved around some files
-Focus stealing by popups (Windows again)
All of these are not a fundamental failure of the desktop metaphor, but individual failures to apply it well.
On his blog
http://msinfluentials.com/blogs/jesper/archive/2008/05/08/does-your-amd-based-computer-boot-after-installing-xp-sp3.aspx
Johansson (partly) blames HP and other OEMs for using the same disk image for Intel and AMD PCs. He also gives some directions on fixing the problems.
Seems you have the same priorities like me :-)
:-(
Performance wise, a mid-level PC does fine for me (my latest one is an AMD dual core with a Nvidia GT8600 GPU). But the reliability better be above average. That means
-no overclocking
-reliability enhancing extras where they are not too expensive (ECC RAM is one of those)
-choosing vendors that have a history of good quality rather than flashy features
-not necessarily the very latest technology, as older stuff is often more mature
Of course, this will not solve software problems. At the moment I have two programs that will reproducably crash Windows 2000
If I can get them to run reliably under WINE in Linux, Windows will be booted a lot less on my machine...
Slightly OT:
Such behavior is nothing new, 10-20 years ago several EU car makers did it. You would get the same car in Spain for a few thousand less than in Germany.
It was newsworthy because the car makers also put pressure on the dealers not to engage in re-imports (in our example, from Spain to Germany). That was illegal inside the EU. Some car makers ended up paying pretty big fines. Not as massive as the recent EU fines for Microsoft, but the EU commission did something about it.
I think you've misread TFA. They limit the special discount offer to machines with limited specs.
For any machines sold over that spec, Windows costs the regular price. I guess the idea is to keep Linux out of the low-end market where it would make a big difference to the overall price, if Windows was sold at normal price.
But Microsoft cannot get away with forbidding sales of machines without Windows. That is classic anticompetitive behavior. Some dealers might cave in, but this is exactly the stuff they were dragged into court over before. Even in the USA I think they would not get away with that a second time. In the EU, they would get slapped silly.
Usually, you know what hardware you have and you apply the correct drivers. Also, many setup programs have safety checks built in, as in "stop installation when correct chipset is not detected".
In this case it seems that HP and others took disk images from Intel machines and copied them onto AMD machines. That circumvents any test the driver developer might have implemented in the setup program. At best, the driver will re-check for the correct chipset at startup (and what then? Refuse to run and leave the OS minus an important driver? Almost as bad).
In short, the really surprising thing is that the computers did NOT fail under SP2. The OEMs made a pretty stupid mistake here and deserve to be bashed.
Looks like a screwup by OEMs that was exposed by the service pack.