Anyone know the list price for MSOffice, Photoshop, Nero and Norton Antivirus/spam/spyware etc. cost???
Going along this line of thought, you can easily come up with however high a number you want. (i.e. "Blender replaces Maya, so there's $6000") The response you'll always get is that since most of the Free Software is also available for Windows, none of these savings are innate to Ubuntu.
Probably it's best to promote Ubuntu based on its most obvious benifit: All of that software is pre-installed, and it gets *automatically updated* by the OS. That means that for a multi-desktop deployment, patches and updates take *zero* admin time. This includes major new versions of both the OS and all the programs, not just minor bugfixes. Buy a Dell with Ubuntu on it today and you shouldn't need to do *anything* other than let the user press the "Update" button when prompted for years - as long as Firefox / Evolution / OpenOffice meets your needs.
Also Ubuntu have VNC and Xwindow is client server anyway, so compare to cheap Vista without terminal service is totally wrong.
This basically never comes up. Large deployments use volume licensing, and home users mostly don't use remote desktop connections. Sure, it's useful for someone else to provide support for your system - but making the tech's job easy isn't something that people think of when they buy computers.
Linux is multiuser too, which vista can really support multiuser??
Even XP handles this reasonably well. I'm sure Vista does too.
Ubuntu is worth $1000 or more if you have to pay for every single utility etc.
The actual number, in dollars, will be different for every user - and they're the only one who can really do a cost comparison for themselves. Enough to say that if you go with Ubuntu and the included software meets your needs, you're *done* with paying for big pieces of software and their upgrades for a very long time.
And there is a 3d card. Not the best but its something.
The Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics *does* provide 3D acceleration. Unless you're actually planning on playing UT2003, UT2004, Doom 3, or Quake 4 (or something like WoW under Wine) the Intel card is strictly better than the Nvidia card - it's got Free Software drivers, which make it noticeably more stable and feature complete.
I'm not buying a laptop until quad-core units roll out.
That'll probably be a while - like late next year. The whole MCM trick that Intel is doing for quad core doesn't work very well in a low-power portable computer, and AMD has no plans for quad core notebooks on their roadmap either.
Then Dell will see higher sales numbers. Maybe that will make up for the machines that Dell sells with Vista on them that get wiped for Ubuntu (because the buyer wanted some model not offered with Ubuntu yet).
It is sort of sad that they're not selling the Celeron E520 with Ubuntu on it. That would work great, and it would be an amazing deal if they priced it at ~$310. On the other hand, I guess they're assuming that anyone who would consider Linux is savvy enough to spot the Celeron / Core2Duo difference immediately - and that they strongly prefer performance over price.
In any case, if you want the *cheapest* pre-built Linux boxes, there's always MadTux Affordable Linux PCs. =P
Not every computer user is a gamer. In fact, gamers are in the minority.
It's true that computer gaming is one of the few tasks for which Windows is obviously more appropriate than Ubuntu, but that's not enough reason to say that Ubuntu is inappropriate for most people. Ubuntu even works pretty well for the occasional gamer - UT2004 online is a lot of fun.
Personally, I'd rather spend the $50 and have all the hardware work out of the box - and have it be an actual *bug* that the manufacturer will fix if I find a hardware problem. I definitely wouldn't trade ACPI hibernate support for either $50 or one notch of processor speed upgrade.
That may be the problem. IMHO a cheap laptop with Mandriva is a lot better potential learning tool.
Have you actually taken a look at what the OLPC XO system can do? Some of the stuff, like wireless mesh network that keeps routing when the machine is turned off, just can't be replicated on a "generic PC" system. Further, the entire system is built from the ground up to be "highly configurable" and user-porgrammible - it has a "View Source" button!
Normally I'd be right with you on saying that a "generic" "normal computer" is better than something new that some organization hacked together and that there's no reason to re-invent the wheel and replace a solid Desktop Linux distro like Mandriva - but after actually looking into the OLPC stuff in detail, they've got me convinced. They really have built something that will be more useful & usable than just dropping a laptop on some poor kids and saying "they've got a laptop, they're better off now".
Since when is Linux recomemded for the least technical users?
Linux is perfect for the least and most technical users. The least technical user will never try to do anything that won't "just work", and the most technical users can just deal with any problems. The people who have problems with Linux are the ones who know how to do some moderately complex task on some other system, and get confused when it doesn't work the same way on Linux.
Lighten up Nicholas if you really care about getting computers into the hands of kids.
Negroponte isn't trying to get laptops into the hands of kids, he's trying to give them a platform to learn on. The OLPC project has gone through contortions to get software and hardware that are appropriate for disadvantaged children to use as an educational platform. Intel is offering cheap laptops with Mandriva.
Now, cheap laptops with Mandriva are great - the problem that Negroponte is complaining about is that Intel is positioning their cheap laptops as a replacement for the OLPC project's educational platform - when it doesn't have anything like that to offer.
Why did you buy some random system from a retail store when there are tons of vendors like http://www.system76.com/ that actually offer well supported Ubuntu systems? The Dells are going to be great for having something to recommend to people who are mainstream-brand obsessed, but they're not all that's out there for Ubuntu systems.
There's absolutely, positively no chance the spyware and shareware crap like that pays them back more than they spend on the Windows license to begin with.
That's not true. Windows OEM is costing Dell like $30. Pre-installing stuff like Norton demos is easily worth like $5. That means that if Dell pre-installs six pieces of crapware, they break even.
They should have to provide the bandwidth advertised.
What they'll say is this:
"We provide the bandwidth that we advertise, but to improve connection quality for important applications we use traffic shaping to de-prioritize certain abusive applications like P2P, streaming video, and any TCP session that lasts longer than 5 minutes. Our service is intended for low volume personal use, and not for high volume business applications or damn dirty pirates."
I don't buy it, but even so, I am not interested in metered access. Not when unmetered is a viable alternative.
Unmetered really *isn't* a viable alternative - not unless ISPs are legally prevented from degrading the service for high bandwidth applications. If they are allowed to just keep degrading the service instead of upgrading, the "unmetered" service will just keep getting worse - never better.
So... say an ISP has sold 3 meg / 512 k "unlimited" connections to 25 customers who are all sharing an oversold 10 meg fiber link to the internet. Does the ISP ever have a financial incentive to upgrade that 10 meg pipe? No. If customers start complaining their connection is slow, the ISP can cancel the account of whoever is using the most bandwidth cheaper than they can upgrade. If they want to add one more user, they just do it. Then it's shared 26 ways. Only if everyone decides to use more bandwidth at the same time does the ISP have any incentive to upgrade their infrastructure - and even then they'll probably just *slow down* that service and introduce a new "fast" connection - say 5 meg / 768k for twice the money running on a 20 meg link that never gets upgraded.
Basically, "unlimited" connections are only OK for infrastructure development if they really are unlimited, and in that case some sort of per-gig charge will end up making more sense to the ISP. On the other hand, a per-gig charge *always* encourages both increases in infrastructure when the customers demand it *AND* some usage restraint on the part of the customers.
Mobile phone plans make it really easy to check how many minutes you've used. I see no reason why internet plans can't make it easy to check how many gigs you've used.
I would much rather see these throttled plans than any sort of pay per bit or pay per minute schemes...
Why don't you like "Pay per bit" schemes? They make a hell of a lot more sense than transfer caps. I know that I'd much rather have my internet connection keep working and get billed a couple more bucks at the end of the month rather than have my connection randomly stop or get horribly degraded.
As it is, ISPs are forced to look at high bandwidth users as "abusing" the service. That leads them to try to conserve their limited resource (bandwidth) by constraining high bandwidth users. But there is no motivation for the users to conserve or for the ISP to buy more capacity. If the ISP actually billed high bandwidth users, they would be *profiting* off bandwidth usage. That way they would A.) have no reason to cut anyone off and B.) be economically motivated to build out their capacity as demand increased. Further, users who weren't willing to pay (small) bandwidth fees would be motivated to waste less bandwidth. (Because if they aren't willing to pay for it, it really is a waste)
I've never really been behind the anti-Microsoft movement that has in the past insisted that they're abusing their monopoly.
They were found, in court, to have abused their monopoly pretty badly. If you ever have some free time, I suggest you sit down and read the judge's "Findings of Fact" in that case. It pretty readable in spite of being a formal legal document, and once you'll read it you'll have a much better understanding of why a judge thought they were abusing their monopoly.
One does not throw away money by not using the Firefox affiliate links. If nobody used affiliate links, Amazon would be able to afford to broadly lower their prices, through decreased payouts and staff reassignment/downsizing. Once prices are lower, one has more money by which to directly donate to Mozilla.
I strongly doubt that you'd see a noticeable price drop if Amazon ended their affiliate program. If we ignore affiliate sales for a moment, we can see that Amazon is competing with other online stores reasonably successfully with their current prices. The affiliate sales are *in addition* to that, and result in extra sales at a lower margin. If they lowered their prices overall, they'd lose all the extra money they're making on their non-affiliate sales.
Amazon paying money to the people surreptitiously using referral codes means that Amazon charges more to the consumer overall.
That's true, to some extent, but Amazon charges you the same price whether you use a referral code. If you don't like Amazon's referral-code based marketing plan, buy your books at Barnes & Noble. Amazon happens to have paid for a search toolbar in the official Firefox package - if the Mozilla Foundation wants to accept their money for that (and they do), they only have the choice between including a referral code or not. Not doing so would be throwing away money.
Somehow I don't see the other option (default to donating to Amazon.com) as being better than what they have now. If you want to use a different affiliate link, you can always click through to Amazon.com from somewhere else.
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Going along this line of thought, you can easily come up with however high a number you want. (i.e. "Blender replaces Maya, so there's $6000") The response you'll always get is that since most of the Free Software is also available for Windows, none of these savings are innate to Ubuntu.
Probably it's best to promote Ubuntu based on its most obvious benifit: All of that software is pre-installed, and it gets *automatically updated* by the OS. That means that for a multi-desktop deployment, patches and updates take *zero* admin time. This includes major new versions of both the OS and all the programs, not just minor bugfixes. Buy a Dell with Ubuntu on it today and you shouldn't need to do *anything* other than let the user press the "Update" button when prompted for years - as long as Firefox / Evolution / OpenOffice meets your needs.
This basically never comes up. Large deployments use volume licensing, and home users mostly don't use remote desktop connections. Sure, it's useful for someone else to provide support for your system - but making the tech's job easy isn't something that people think of when they buy computers.
Even XP handles this reasonably well. I'm sure Vista does too.
The actual number, in dollars, will be different for every user - and they're the only one who can really do a cost comparison for themselves. Enough to say that if you go with Ubuntu and the included software meets your needs, you're *done* with paying for big pieces of software and their upgrades for a very long time.
The Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics *does* provide 3D acceleration. Unless you're actually planning on playing UT2003, UT2004, Doom 3, or Quake 4 (or something like WoW under Wine) the Intel card is strictly better than the Nvidia card - it's got Free Software drivers, which make it noticeably more stable and feature complete.
Every one of the systems includes an integrated NIC. It should show up in the "additional items" section at the bottom.
That'll probably be a while - like late next year. The whole MCM trick that Intel is doing for quad core doesn't work very well in a low-power portable computer, and AMD has no plans for quad core notebooks on their roadmap either.
1. Hey, my windows office that I copied from my buddy doesn't install!
You copied it from your buddy? Must be that DRM copy protection.
Have you ever seen shockwave work anywhere? Have you seen Homestarrunner.com?
It's already installed, but it's called "Rythmbox Music Player" in the menu for some reason.
GIMP is a more advanced version of Photoshop. Don't you hate it how new versions of software change things around?
Then Dell will see higher sales numbers. Maybe that will make up for the machines that Dell sells with Vista on them that get wiped for Ubuntu (because the buyer wanted some model not offered with Ubuntu yet).
Make sure you're getting all the same components. The base Vista E520 comes with a Celeron processor, and the Ubuntu E520 starts with a Core 2 Duo.
It is sort of sad that they're not selling the Celeron E520 with Ubuntu on it. That would work great, and it would be an amazing deal if they priced it at ~$310. On the other hand, I guess they're assuming that anyone who would consider Linux is savvy enough to spot the Celeron / Core2Duo difference immediately - and that they strongly prefer performance over price.
In any case, if you want the *cheapest* pre-built Linux boxes, there's always MadTux Affordable Linux PCs. =P
Not every computer user is a gamer. In fact, gamers are in the minority.
It's true that computer gaming is one of the few tasks for which Windows is obviously more appropriate than Ubuntu, but that's not enough reason to say that Ubuntu is inappropriate for most people. Ubuntu even works pretty well for the occasional gamer - UT2004 online is a lot of fun.
Personally, I'd rather spend the $50 and have all the hardware work out of the box - and have it be an actual *bug* that the manufacturer will fix if I find a hardware problem. I definitely wouldn't trade ACPI hibernate support for either $50 or one notch of processor speed upgrade.
Have you actually taken a look at what the OLPC XO system can do? Some of the stuff, like wireless mesh network that keeps routing when the machine is turned off, just can't be replicated on a "generic PC" system. Further, the entire system is built from the ground up to be "highly configurable" and user-porgrammible - it has a "View Source" button!
Normally I'd be right with you on saying that a "generic" "normal computer" is better than something new that some organization hacked together and that there's no reason to re-invent the wheel and replace a solid Desktop Linux distro like Mandriva - but after actually looking into the OLPC stuff in detail, they've got me convinced. They really have built something that will be more useful & usable than just dropping a laptop on some poor kids and saying "they've got a laptop, they're better off now".
Linux is perfect for the least and most technical users. The least technical user will never try to do anything that won't "just work", and the most technical users can just deal with any problems. The people who have problems with Linux are the ones who know how to do some moderately complex task on some other system, and get confused when it doesn't work the same way on Linux.
Negroponte isn't trying to get laptops into the hands of kids, he's trying to give them a platform to learn on. The OLPC project has gone through contortions to get software and hardware that are appropriate for disadvantaged children to use as an educational platform. Intel is offering cheap laptops with Mandriva.
Now, cheap laptops with Mandriva are great - the problem that Negroponte is complaining about is that Intel is positioning their cheap laptops as a replacement for the OLPC project's educational platform - when it doesn't have anything like that to offer.
Why did you buy some random system from a retail store when there are tons of vendors like http://www.system76.com/ that actually offer well supported Ubuntu systems? The Dells are going to be great for having something to recommend to people who are mainstream-brand obsessed, but they're not all that's out there for Ubuntu systems.
That's not true. Windows OEM is costing Dell like $30. Pre-installing stuff like Norton demos is easily worth like $5. That means that if Dell pre-installs six pieces of crapware, they break even.
What they'll say is this: "We provide the bandwidth that we advertise, but to improve connection quality for important applications we use traffic shaping to de-prioritize certain abusive applications like P2P, streaming video, and any TCP session that lasts longer than 5 minutes. Our service is intended for low volume personal use, and not for high volume business applications or damn dirty pirates."
Unmetered really *isn't* a viable alternative - not unless ISPs are legally prevented from degrading the service for high bandwidth applications. If they are allowed to just keep degrading the service instead of upgrading, the "unmetered" service will just keep getting worse - never better.
So... say an ISP has sold 3 meg / 512 k "unlimited" connections to 25 customers who are all sharing an oversold 10 meg fiber link to the internet. Does the ISP ever have a financial incentive to upgrade that 10 meg pipe? No. If customers start complaining their connection is slow, the ISP can cancel the account of whoever is using the most bandwidth cheaper than they can upgrade. If they want to add one more user, they just do it. Then it's shared 26 ways. Only if everyone decides to use more bandwidth at the same time does the ISP have any incentive to upgrade their infrastructure - and even then they'll probably just *slow down* that service and introduce a new "fast" connection - say 5 meg / 768k for twice the money running on a 20 meg link that never gets upgraded.
Basically, "unlimited" connections are only OK for infrastructure development if they really are unlimited, and in that case some sort of per-gig charge will end up making more sense to the ISP. On the other hand, a per-gig charge *always* encourages both increases in infrastructure when the customers demand it *AND* some usage restraint on the part of the customers.
Mobile phone plans make it really easy to check how many minutes you've used. I see no reason why internet plans can't make it easy to check how many gigs you've used.
Why don't you like "Pay per bit" schemes? They make a hell of a lot more sense than transfer caps. I know that I'd much rather have my internet connection keep working and get billed a couple more bucks at the end of the month rather than have my connection randomly stop or get horribly degraded.
As it is, ISPs are forced to look at high bandwidth users as "abusing" the service. That leads them to try to conserve their limited resource (bandwidth) by constraining high bandwidth users. But there is no motivation for the users to conserve or for the ISP to buy more capacity. If the ISP actually billed high bandwidth users, they would be *profiting* off bandwidth usage. That way they would A.) have no reason to cut anyone off and B.) be economically motivated to build out their capacity as demand increased. Further, users who weren't willing to pay (small) bandwidth fees would be motivated to waste less bandwidth. (Because if they aren't willing to pay for it, it really is a waste)
Yup. Exactly the same way that when SCO sued, they were forced to show which lines of code had been copied.
They were found, in court, to have abused their monopoly pretty badly. If you ever have some free time, I suggest you sit down and read the judge's "Findings of Fact" in that case. It pretty readable in spite of being a formal legal document, and once you'll read it you'll have a much better understanding of why a judge thought they were abusing their monopoly.
I strongly doubt that you'd see a noticeable price drop if Amazon ended their affiliate program. If we ignore affiliate sales for a moment, we can see that Amazon is competing with other online stores reasonably successfully with their current prices. The affiliate sales are *in addition* to that, and result in extra sales at a lower margin. If they lowered their prices overall, they'd lose all the extra money they're making on their non-affiliate sales.
That's true, to some extent, but Amazon charges you the same price whether you use a referral code. If you don't like Amazon's referral-code based marketing plan, buy your books at Barnes & Noble. Amazon happens to have paid for a search toolbar in the official Firefox package - if the Mozilla Foundation wants to accept their money for that (and they do), they only have the choice between including a referral code or not. Not doing so would be throwing away money.
Somehow I don't see the other option (default to donating to Amazon.com) as being better than what they have now. If you want to use a different affiliate link, you can always click through to Amazon.com from somewhere else.