At least in the United Kingdom it is. I don't know about the USA, but over here if Dell pulled this BS, you would be able to take them to court under the 'Sale of Goods' act.
It would not even cost you anything, since we have something called a 'Small Claims court' which deals with consumer disputes such as this.
I don't know if you have such a thing over there. Another angle to try would be the credit card company. In the UK, the credit card company is jointly liable for anything you purchase with it.
So there is another avenue to explore.
Finally, how the hell can they claim that a laptop display with three or less broken pixels is 'acceptable' ? You can bet that Michael Dell's laptop screen has all its pixels functioning.
As in all things, the squeaky gear gets the grease, so complain, complain loudly, complain often. Make it cost-ineffective for them to mess you around.
It's called 'data smog'. Information used to be scarce, now it is ubiquitous. We are all desparately trying to 'drink from the firehose', but our human brains have not evolved fast enough.
The only real answer is to disengage from the media hype machine. Stop watching TV news, stop surfing the net etc.
Having said that I think Mr Katz is on dangerous ground when he says unfiltered news in untrustworthy. Often the best sources are the uncensored ones straight from the front line.
I guess by the law of averages at least one NASA mars probe would eventually get through:-)
Seriously though, this is good news, the more data we have on Mars, the easier it will be when we attempt to colonize it.
I can't help thinking that we are not spending enough money on cool space research like this. Why does congress always seem to resent paying for NASA ?
NASA is a clear demonstration to the world of Americas ingenuity and power. I think at times like these we should be looking to provide them with more funding rather than cutting their budgets. After all, space research has lots of practical spin-offs, like teflon for example.
I think that it was simply a case of bad timing. There are a lot of pressures on the spectrum, and if you cannot show the 'suits' an almost immediate return on investment, they shut you down.
How many of the so called dot-com bombs were not really failures ? One problem of the way we plan business in the USA is our short-termism.
In Japan, corporations like sony etc have plans that take in the next 20 years!
I'm not really surprised that the uptake of these wireless services did not make big $$S. Its a shame, but I expect we will see a similar technology emerge from the ashes.
The BeOS contains some of the most sensible use of C++ I have seen anywhere. To write application frameworks takes a different skill set from writing applications. The need to balance generality agianst over-complexity and performance is a fine line to tread. In my opinion BeOS was one of the most elegantly crafted OS's I have ever seen.
The boys at Redmond could learn a lot from looking at the BeOS application kits.
We could always use a new encryption technology.
Although I would expect that the signal would probably need to go through some other encryption system to make it harder to crack.
It strikes me that this system is almost an 'obscurity' based encryption which we all know is never a good thing:-)
The technique reminds me of something I read a while back about a 'directional' loudspeaker that could target an individual person in a crowded area (e.g. an airport). It was sort of like 'laser' but using sound waves from different sources which created an interference sound at a certain point.
Change is a good thing. Too many people don't like progress. I remember when slashdot didn't have any ads at all. But the quality of the site was still as good as it is now.
Everyone knows bandwidth is not free. We should all realise that someone has to create the content that we consume.
Now, I am not sure whether a subscription scheme is a good idea or not, but surely most people will not have a problem with bigger ads, since most of us either ignore them, or run one or other of the filtering proxies such as Junkbuster or WebWasher. Let's just hope andover.net don't find a way around that:-)
One more step towards 'world domination'. I wonder if Linus ever thought his creation would be running on hardware as diverse as 390 mainframes, palm pilots and playstations ?
I just hope Sony bring out the hard drive, I can imagine some extremely cool new games coming out as a result of this initiative.
Apple have been producing well-designed awesome machines for years and years, and yet the general public still prefer their nightmare of PCs with all the baggage that go with it. (Windows Blue Screen of death, IRQ conflicts, windows.ini problems etc etc).
How is it that the consumer continues to buy PCs ? I mean, when the US auto industry produced crap products it didn't take us long to switch to the superior Japanese product. And now the US auto manufactures have raised their game to compete.
So what is it that makes PCs so different ? I used to think it was the software, but Word and IE are available for Macs. There must be some other reason. I cannot for the life of me work out what that reason is.
The world would be a better place if we switched to macs (or even Linux at least that doesn't crash every five minutes like Windoze!)
Only purist 'license zealots' will worry about the terms of the license. This is great because it means a whole load of great apps can now be ported to run native on Macs.
MacOS X really is the best of all worlds. You have the stability reliability and scalability of Unix/Mach with the familiar ease-of-use of the mac. Too bad the clunky old PC still seems to rule the roost with the general public:-(
I keep my pilot in my pants pocket. So far I have dropped it twice, trodden on it by mistake once, and sat on it, again by mistake. It is still working. I wonder if the the Sony machine would be able to take that kind of punishment. It just seems a bit flimsy. On the other hand it looks pretty cool.
I wonder when they will get linux running on this, that would be pretty impressive, a cool looking system running a cool OS!
They give the PC a much more 'human' feel. I really hate those boring beige boxen.
I wonder if we could get some kind of 'case swapping' going on here. I'll swap my $15 generic case for one of those cool and funky wooden ones.
I would be a bit concerned about the effects of overheating on the wood though, with a Pentium system drawing around 40W, there needs to be plenty of ventilation or that wood could go up in smoke!
We can tick off another feature that the 'linux is not ready' brigade use against us. Journalling file system means Linux is now more than ready for the enterprise.
Linux just seems to be going from strength to strenght while Micro$oft struggle to persuade their (l)users to upgrade to yet another version.
It just goes to show the power of the Open Source 'bazaar' development model.
I am a bit concerned about this GRUB thing, does it replace LILO ? I've only just got the hang of lilo after all these years. I hope all my enrgy has not gone to waste.
Anyone know if this version will have support for the new higher speed USB that is coming out soon ?
The Economist has got it wrong before.
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 1
But this time I think their analysis is correct. Big Blue got the point where its arrogance became its downfall. I can see the same thing happening to Microsoft.
A telling moment for me happened when I was watching 'south park' the movie. When a cartoon Bill Gates got shot and everyone in the theater laughed, I knew Microsoft's days were numbered.
You cannot screw the customer over time and again and get away with it.
LOTR is a masterpiece. I doubt Hollywood will treat Tolkein's work with the respect it deserves. No doubt they will ignore some of the subtler aspects of the story to turn it into a simple good guys vs bad guys action adventure.
I will probably go and see it anyway, but I just hope they haven't destroyed Tolkein's vision completely.
While it is a good thing to have a computer-literate workforce, simply subsidising the cost of a PC was not the best way for Ford to proceed.
What would have been more sensible would have been to provide computer training (like say RedHat certification or something like that), which would actually help the employee progress in their career.
Simply giving them a PC was not a structured approach.
My guess is that a lot of these PCs ended up being used for the kids to do their homework on, or more likely to play games.
Ford is right to think of innovative ways to increase computer literacy, but it looks like they didn't put enough thought into the 'Model E' project.
A large number of Linux users are condescending dorks like you.
OK, So perhaps I wasn't as nice as I could have been, but you really should have seen this guy. He really couldn't get his head around the idea that there were other OS's apart from Micro$oft.
I don't have a problem with gamers using Mandrake, anything which gets Linux onto more machines is fine by be. I just wonder if the gamers know what they are letting themselves in for ?
My first experiences with Mandrake were not good. It destroyed my Windows partition without warning. (fortunately I had a backup, but this was hardly a user-friendly thing to do).
My impressions of Linux are that it is a very powerful system, but it doesn't 'suffer fools' if you know what I mean.
Maybe this gamers Linux will do plenty of hand-holding and have a really easy to use installer. I hope so, or as I mentioned before, the newsgroups will be flooded with newbies whinging about how they trashed their machines.
Slashdot Mirror
It would not even cost you anything, since we have something called a 'Small Claims court' which deals with consumer disputes such as this.
I don't know if you have such a thing over there. Another angle to try would be the credit card company. In the UK, the credit card company is jointly liable for anything you purchase with it. So there is another avenue to explore.
Finally, how the hell can they claim that a laptop display with three or less broken pixels is 'acceptable' ? You can bet that Michael Dell's laptop screen has all its pixels functioning.
As in all things, the squeaky gear gets the grease, so complain, complain loudly, complain often. Make it cost-ineffective for them to mess you around.
Here is the link to the Data Smog book
The only real answer is to disengage from the media hype machine. Stop watching TV news, stop surfing the net etc.
Having said that I think Mr Katz is on dangerous ground when he says unfiltered news in untrustworthy. Often the best sources are the uncensored ones straight from the front line.
Seriously though, this is good news, the more data we have on Mars, the easier it will be when we attempt to colonize it.
I can't help thinking that we are not spending enough money on cool space research like this. Why does congress always seem to resent paying for NASA ?
NASA is a clear demonstration to the world of Americas ingenuity and power. I think at times like these we should be looking to provide them with more funding rather than cutting their budgets. After all, space research has lots of practical spin-offs, like teflon for example.
At prices like these, I see microsoft losing out big time to other platforms like Linux which don't have the extortionate pricing structure.
Another side-effect will be the large scale piracy of Microsoft's product. Is this what they really want ?
How many of the so called dot-com bombs were not really failures ? One problem of the way we plan business in the USA is our short-termism.
In Japan, corporations like sony etc have plans that take in the next 20 years!
I'm not really surprised that the uptake of these wireless services did not make big $$S. Its a shame, but I expect we will see a similar technology emerge from the ashes.
The boys at Redmond could learn a lot from looking at the BeOS application kits.
It strikes me that this system is almost an 'obscurity' based encryption which we all know is never a good thing :-)
The technique reminds me of something I read a while back about a 'directional' loudspeaker that could target an individual person in a crowded area (e.g. an airport). It was sort of like 'laser' but using sound waves from different sources which created an interference sound at a certain point.
Everyone knows bandwidth is not free. We should all realise that someone has to create the content that we consume.
Now, I am not sure whether a subscription scheme is a good idea or not, but surely most people will not have a problem with bigger ads, since most of us either ignore them, or run one or other of the filtering proxies such as Junkbuster or WebWasher. Let's just hope andover.net don't find a way around that :-)
I just hope Sony bring out the hard drive, I can imagine some extremely cool new games coming out as a result of this initiative.
How is it that the consumer continues to buy PCs ? I mean, when the US auto industry produced crap products it didn't take us long to switch to the superior Japanese product. And now the US auto manufactures have raised their game to compete.
So what is it that makes PCs so different ? I used to think it was the software, but Word and IE are available for Macs. There must be some other reason. I cannot for the life of me work out what that reason is.
The world would be a better place if we switched to macs (or even Linux at least that doesn't crash every five minutes like Windoze!)
MacOS X really is the best of all worlds. You have the stability reliability and scalability of Unix/Mach with the familiar ease-of-use of the mac. Too bad the clunky old PC still seems to rule the roost with the general public :-(
I wonder when they will get linux running on this, that would be pretty impressive, a cool looking system running a cool OS!
I would be a bit concerned about the effects of overheating on the wood though, with a Pentium system drawing around 40W, there needs to be plenty of ventilation or that wood could go up in smoke!
Linux just seems to be going from strength to strenght while Micro$oft struggle to persuade their (l)users to upgrade to yet another version.
It just goes to show the power of the Open Source 'bazaar' development model.
I am a bit concerned about this GRUB thing, does it replace LILO ? I've only just got the hang of lilo after all these years. I hope all my enrgy has not gone to waste.
Anyone know if this version will have support for the new higher speed USB that is coming out soon ?
A telling moment for me happened when I was watching 'south park' the movie. When a cartoon Bill Gates got shot and everyone in the theater laughed, I knew Microsoft's days were numbered.
You cannot screw the customer over time and again and get away with it.
I will probably go and see it anyway, but I just hope they haven't destroyed Tolkein's vision completely.
What would have been more sensible would have been to provide computer training (like say RedHat certification or something like that), which would actually help the employee progress in their career.
Simply giving them a PC was not a structured approach. My guess is that a lot of these PCs ended up being used for the kids to do their homework on, or more likely to play games.
Ford is right to think of innovative ways to increase computer literacy, but it looks like they didn't put enough thought into the 'Model E' project.
He is almost the exact opposite of William Gates III. He is the Anti-Gates! :-)
Its good to see he's still around.
OK, So perhaps I wasn't as nice as I could have been, but you really should have seen this guy. He really couldn't get his head around the idea that there were other OS's apart from Micro$oft.
I don't have a problem with gamers using Mandrake, anything which gets Linux onto more machines is fine by be. I just wonder if the gamers know what they are letting themselves in for ?
My first experiences with Mandrake were not good. It destroyed my Windows partition without warning. (fortunately I had a backup, but this was hardly a user-friendly thing to do).
My impressions of Linux are that it is a very powerful system, but it doesn't 'suffer fools' if you know what I mean.
Maybe this gamers Linux will do plenty of hand-holding and have a really easy to use installer. I hope so, or as I mentioned before, the newsgroups will be flooded with newbies whinging about how they trashed their machines.
I watched a co-worker attempt to use my laptop which has debian installed on it. How I laughed he actually asked me if I was running XP !!
The dork thought that KDE was XP
Although world domination is the goal, I can't help but wonder if the windoze using public is ready for it.
Be prepared for a whole load of newbie questions to clog up the mandrake mailing lists and newsgroups!