Solution: an all-in-one package. Take a trusted-quality emulator, stick it on the CD with the games, and sell the package for $4.99 as an impulse item. Make it autorun on Win95.
AC, you obviously have no experience with computers. Even with a nice hard laptop, you have to pound and pummel quite a lot (especially if you're being 'gentle' because you don't want to damage that expensive screen) before you can get that accursed central nervous system to hand in its papers. This is just bio-goop! It won't pound. It will slosh and splatter. It's useless for murdering Palestinians.
OTOH, I can see a marketing campaign here: "It smashes! It eviscerates! It runs GNU/Linux!"
1. 802.11 cards are quite cheap. $40 is quite plausible, esp. with rebate.
2. A one-time $40 or $60 committment may be easier for some to swing than trying to set aside a fiver every month. Especially if your income source is variable, and payment methods are inconvinent/unavailable.
3. Where does dialup go for 5.00 a month? Cheapest locally is 10-12.00 per month.
I wouldn't mind a C3 notebook. I use a PII/266 now, and it has adequate performance for the Web browsing and wordprocessing I throw at it. A C3, in theory, should deliver better performance, and be cool and battery-efficient (I want 4 hours of battery life! Is this so hard?!) and affordable.
Aside from the dimensions, a possible price competitor is the Elitegroup Desknote. I've seen them at about USD 700, but you lose a LOT of mobility.
It is similar. People have certain expectations for what a content-playing device should do. Among these functionalities are reliable playing and *facilitation of copying*. When the functionality is lost, wether it's by smashing the device with a large mallet, or by deliberately neutering the design to appease the RIAA, this is important and worth reporting to the consumer.
>Nobody expects a Yugo, the zenith of Communist >cosumer goods, to be able to keep up with a tricked >out CJ-7 in a hill climb
However, when you offer the Yugo as the next-generation replacement to said CJ-7 (equivalent strategy: let's replace your perfectly good CD player with our NeuteredDisc(tm) players!), and your target market wouldn't be able to tell a Yugo from a CJ-7 at the dealership without two tries (the discs and players look, are packaged and priced similarly, and advertising rarely mentions crippling), you need to make it abundantly clear that you're not selling the same set of expectations.
Finally, the louder and more obnoxious the warning label is, the stronger its impact on discouraging manufacturers to adopt an unpopular technology. Would you put a big "We Screw Our Customers" label on every box, assuming you didn't work at MSFT? The principle here is somewhat similar, I suppose, to the stigma against NC/17-rated films shaping the supply side of the market: you can make them if you want, but good luck getting the consumer to look behind the scarlet letters.
>And the similarity is that Communists/Fascists, or >any other shade of totalitarian the Political >Science Departmet can classify, employ this labelig >tactic to force speech on others, just as this >fellow is trying to pull.
Take off the tin-foil hat!
This is more of a consumer-protection law than anything else. It's reasonable to expect the dealer/manufacturer notify you (and discount appropriately) when he tries to sell you known broken goods. Wouldn't you be a bit ticked if the CD burner you bought was used as a hammer by the store manager's kid, without any notice about it?
Copy-protection is making a product broken the moment it comes out of the factory. Note it as damage.
Why not just use a stored-value account shared between a wide group of (potentially) related merchants? I may only want one 50-cent transaction from one site, but if you link together 20 related sites, I might easily spend a $10 minimum transaction. When the payment comes in, hold it in a shared account and retain records of who owns what nickels. No probability games. I can even see this working for some of the major e-commerce service providers as a marketable feature.
Of course, it doesn't get back to the non-technical problem with micropayments: users don't want to stop every few minutes to authorize another payment.
I have an 800x600 screen on my laptop (IBM 385XD, used, about $300, pretty darn GNU/Linux compatible, but about 3.5-4kg), and stretch it to 1024x768 virtual at 16-bit colour with XFree86. It works well for my needs, which are just very light wordprocessing and web surfing. If I want a 1280x1024, I'll go home and use my desktop.
Seriously, you might check a used laptop seller. The one I visited was willing to unload (perhaps never reload after a wipe?) Windows on some models for a discount.
I seem to recall that this was actually done for a while... either with Win31 and Win95, or possibly Win31 or Win95 versus OS/2. Pick one, lose the rest at first boot. I bet it was great fun to ruin the floor model machines by picking the 'wrong' choice and explaining that the 'right' one wasn't available anymore to show.
Kudos to the Opera team for handling this situation with humour and grace, while still managing to make a valuable message in a manner where it will grab attention. It's nice to see fights addressed with humour and rhetoric rather than lawsuits.
Actually, don't knock the 9440. I had a VLB 9440 in my first serious GNU/Linux box (a 486/66 overclocked to 80). It performed surprisingly well in X11 for a system with only 20Mb of memory, although the combination of 256k cache, a 2.0.x level kernel, and the high bus speed didn't hurt.
There are definitely worse choices. I have an old Realtek 3106 card somewhere. ISA, 16-bit, but it can be jumpered to work in an 8-bit slot. It only does =256 colour modes. It's substantially brighter than any modern card (I believe old VGA cards output 1.0v on each signal line, and new ones do 0.7v), but that doesn't make up for the lack of speed. It dates from *1991*. I never even tried it under XF86, although I guess someone needs to check if the driver works.:)
It already exists... the problem is that it's pretty expensive. IIRC, they're much like the prepaid cellular cards... priced by the minute (or possibly some small number of hours). I recall them being pretty expensive-- ~USD 2.50 per hour IIRC.
1. Agree (perhaps with legal force) on a list of standard licence clauses.
2. Use only those clauses (again potentially through legal force)
3. Just write "Licence terms are 5, 8, 37, and 40." on the box. 5 square inches in a huge font.
4. Consumers can pick up a leaflet at the front desk explaining what 5, 8, 37, and 40 are. May also be included in system manuals, and other places software may be available.
It would be easy to understand because the terms would be predictable. People would research once, *know* that terms 8 and 21 are not suitable for their application, and wouldn't have to worry about sixty slight permutations of it that may or may not be suitable appearing.
>I have to goto the main building to fill the card >w/cash (but it does take credit card and debit).
The problem I see is that it's probably easier to get the money in than to take it back out of such a 'stored value' system again.
If you're lucky, it's something like laundry, where you'll use the services later. Even then, though, the firm offering the account service gets to use your money for free until you request it be applied to some goods or services.
You want an easier laundry day? Ask them to set the machines to accept $1 coins.
Based on the British TV we get here, a letter to them must have the right tone. Does this sound about right?
Dear Sirs:
While I live several thousand kilometres out of the market you're targeting, I always found your operating system fascinating based on third-hand accounts and freely-available workalikes. At times, I had even considered purchasing one of your machines via mail-order.
However, unfortunately, I am a GNU/Linux user FIRST, and a potential customer of yours SECOND. Your clumsy attempts to violate the GNU General Public Licence have been just the kick in the face I needed to make my purchase decision. See the pretty green American money I'm holding up? It's going for an Athlon.
In conclusion, get stuffed.
Thank you.
The sad thing is that I had really heard nice things about RISCOS... if it were possible to get an old machine inexpensively in the US, I would have tried it.
I'm a little worried myself. The 40-50mm screens they have now on the phones are too small for games, so do they really think a 9mm* screen will be usable?
*N gauge is so named because the rails are 9mm apart
Great. I should pay GBP30 (~USD 45), and enjoy having another external cable strewn around waiting to tangle with everything else, so the OEM can save USD 10 (GBP 7) by not sticking a floppy drive in.
Will the floppy-free box be cheaper? How much? Unless it's discounted enough that I can break even by getting the add-on drive (assuming even that my time meddling with setting it up is free), I don't like this angle.
Convergence is, by and large, a good thing. It means fewer devices to pack, learn, and keep fed. The CPU power and memory is already paid for, and the system is presumably designed to remain running fairly continuously, so why not only require users to carry one box and keep one set of batteries charged?
I'd actually be interested to see how far yesterday's chips go with today's OC techniques.
I recall the legend that "with a really big heatsink/fan", you could run a 5x86/133 at 200MHz. With the aid of an Athlon-designed HS/Fan, I was able to boot my K6/233 at 3.5x83=292. From there, I guess the next step is to grab a Super Socket 7 board and crank it to 3.5x95.
Actually, FreeDOS (www.freedos.org) is excellent. It has an enhanced shell and many nice utilities, is available with FAT32 support, and features fairly wide compatibility. Windows 3.1 is the main stumbling block.
I'd much rather use FreeDOS on, for example, one of the hundreds of cheap-as-to-be-disposable 486/33 or/40 laptops out there, than to try to wedge GNU/Linux on it.
It does do things to your machine, in some respects.
1. DRM may "lock down" the machine to prevent access to the data. Example being the systems that disable taking a screenshot. On a multi-tasking and/or multi-user system, that is quite crippling. I've envisioned sending my loud, large K7 boxes into the garage and putting some quiet and cool C3-based X terminals for them around the house. Do I want my apps suddenly weirding out because another user decided to run DRMPlayer 6000?
2. Does everyone forget the DRM-CD-style-thing that wrecked people's iMacs?
1. Isn't it desirable (from the user's perspective) to keep the battery trickle-charging to make up for when you suspend it and let the battery keep the RAM fresh and crispy?
2. Many laptops lack a "modesty panel". To take my laptop without a battery risks introducing nasties to the battery slot. I don't want that.
3. They've been doing battery-powered portable computers since at least the late 1980s. By now, shouldn't we be able to expect a better answer than "Don't do that... we know it's a problem?"
>Why isn't there an option that says, "NEVER trust content from Foo inc.?
I've wondered that for ages, and not just for spyware issues. I've visited some sites (hardware-review ones seem especially bad) where they'll request 4, 5, 6 times "Do I want to install Flash ?" No. I don't. The page displays just fine without Flash (I assume it's actually being demanded by the ads), so you're asking me to spend 15 minutes sucking a plugin back over a slow line to NOT particularly improve my experience? Where do I sign up?
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Solution: an all-in-one package. Take a trusted-quality emulator, stick it on the CD with the games, and sell the package for $4.99 as an impulse item. Make it autorun on Win95.
AC, you obviously have no experience with computers. Even with a nice hard laptop, you have to pound and pummel quite a lot (especially if you're being 'gentle' because you don't want to damage that expensive screen) before you can get that accursed central nervous system to hand in its papers. This is just bio-goop! It won't pound. It will slosh and splatter. It's useless for murdering Palestinians.
OTOH, I can see a marketing campaign here: "It smashes! It eviscerates! It runs GNU/Linux!"
1. 802.11 cards are quite cheap. $40 is quite plausible, esp. with rebate. 2. A one-time $40 or $60 committment may be easier for some to swing than trying to set aside a fiver every month. Especially if your income source is variable, and payment methods are inconvinent/unavailable. 3. Where does dialup go for 5.00 a month? Cheapest locally is 10-12.00 per month.
I wouldn't mind a C3 notebook. I use a PII/266 now, and it has adequate performance for the Web browsing and wordprocessing I throw at it. A C3, in theory, should deliver better performance, and be cool and battery-efficient (I want 4 hours of battery life! Is this so hard?!) and affordable.
Aside from the dimensions, a possible price competitor is the Elitegroup Desknote. I've seen them at about USD 700, but you lose a LOT of mobility.
It is similar. People have certain expectations for what a content-playing device should do. Among these functionalities are reliable playing and *facilitation of copying*. When the functionality is lost, wether it's by smashing the device with a large mallet, or by deliberately neutering the design to appease the RIAA, this is important and worth reporting to the consumer.
>Nobody expects a Yugo, the zenith of Communist >cosumer goods, to be able to keep up with a tricked >out CJ-7 in a hill climb
However, when you offer the Yugo as the next-generation replacement to said CJ-7 (equivalent strategy: let's replace your perfectly good CD player with our NeuteredDisc(tm) players!), and your target market wouldn't be able to tell a Yugo from a CJ-7 at the dealership without two tries (the discs and players look, are packaged and priced similarly, and advertising rarely mentions crippling), you need to make it abundantly clear that you're not selling the same set of expectations.
Finally, the louder and more obnoxious the warning label is, the stronger its impact on discouraging manufacturers to adopt an unpopular technology. Would you put a big "We Screw Our Customers" label on every box, assuming you didn't work at MSFT? The principle here is somewhat similar, I suppose, to the stigma against NC/17-rated films shaping the supply side of the market: you can make them if you want, but good luck getting the consumer to look behind the scarlet letters.
>And the similarity is that Communists/Fascists, or >any other shade of totalitarian the Political >Science Departmet can classify, employ this labelig >tactic to force speech on others, just as this >fellow is trying to pull.
Take off the tin-foil hat!
This is more of a consumer-protection law than anything else. It's reasonable to expect the dealer/manufacturer notify you (and discount appropriately) when he tries to sell you known broken goods. Wouldn't you be a bit ticked if the CD burner you bought was used as a hammer by the store manager's kid, without any notice about it?
Copy-protection is making a product broken the moment it comes out of the factory. Note it as damage.
Why not just use a stored-value account shared between a wide group of (potentially) related merchants? I may only want one 50-cent transaction from one site, but if you link together 20 related sites, I might easily spend a $10 minimum transaction. When the payment comes in, hold it in a shared account and retain records of who owns what nickels. No probability games. I can even see this working for some of the major e-commerce service providers as a marketable feature. Of course, it doesn't get back to the non-technical problem with micropayments: users don't want to stop every few minutes to authorize another payment.
Depends on your needs.
I have an 800x600 screen on my laptop (IBM 385XD, used, about $300, pretty darn GNU/Linux compatible, but about 3.5-4kg), and stretch it to 1024x768 virtual at 16-bit colour with XFree86. It works well for my needs, which are just very light wordprocessing and web surfing. If I want a 1280x1024, I'll go home and use my desktop.
Seriously, you might check a used laptop seller. The one I visited was willing to unload (perhaps never reload after a wipe?) Windows on some models for a discount.
I seem to recall that this was actually done for a while... either with Win31 and Win95, or possibly Win31 or Win95 versus OS/2. Pick one, lose the rest at first boot. I bet it was great fun to ruin the floor model machines by picking the 'wrong' choice and explaining that the 'right' one wasn't available anymore to show.
Hmm... computing platform heavily dependent on runtime-configurable FPGAs. Doesn't that sound like the Commodore-One (MSRP 250 Euros)?
Kudos to the Opera team for handling this situation with humour and grace, while still managing to make a valuable message in a manner where it will grab attention. It's nice to see fights addressed with humour and rhetoric rather than lawsuits.
Actually, don't knock the 9440. I had a VLB 9440 in my first serious GNU/Linux box (a 486/66 overclocked to 80). It performed surprisingly well in X11 for a system with only 20Mb of memory, although the combination of 256k cache, a 2.0.x level kernel, and the high bus speed didn't hurt.
:)
There are definitely worse choices. I have an old Realtek 3106 card somewhere. ISA, 16-bit, but it can be jumpered to work in an 8-bit slot. It only does =256 colour modes. It's substantially brighter than any modern card (I believe old VGA cards output 1.0v on each signal line, and new ones do 0.7v), but that doesn't make up for the lack of speed. It dates from *1991*. I never even tried it under XF86, although I guess someone needs to check if the driver works.
It already exists... the problem is that it's pretty expensive. IIRC, they're much like the prepaid cellular cards... priced by the minute (or possibly some small number of hours). I recall them being pretty expensive-- ~USD 2.50 per hour IIRC.
1. Agree (perhaps with legal force) on a list of standard licence clauses.
2. Use only those clauses (again potentially through legal force)
3. Just write "Licence terms are 5, 8, 37, and 40." on the box. 5 square inches in a huge font.
4. Consumers can pick up a leaflet at the front desk explaining what 5, 8, 37, and 40 are. May also be included in system manuals, and other places software may be available.
It would be easy to understand because the terms would be predictable. People would research once, *know* that terms 8 and 21 are not suitable for their application, and wouldn't have to worry about sixty slight permutations of it that may or may not be suitable appearing.
>I have to goto the main building to fill the card >w/cash (but it does take credit card and debit).
The problem I see is that it's probably easier to get the money in than to take it back out of such a 'stored value' system again.
If you're lucky, it's something like laundry, where you'll use the services later. Even then, though, the firm offering the account service gets to use your money for free until you request it be applied to some goods or services.
You want an easier laundry day? Ask them to set the machines to accept $1 coins.
Based on the British TV we get here, a letter to them must have the right tone. Does this sound about right?
Dear Sirs:
While I live several thousand kilometres out of the market you're targeting, I always found your operating system fascinating based on third-hand accounts and freely-available workalikes. At times, I had even considered purchasing one of your machines via mail-order.
However, unfortunately, I am a GNU/Linux user FIRST, and a potential customer of yours SECOND. Your clumsy attempts to violate the GNU General Public Licence have been just the kick in the face I needed to make my purchase decision. See the pretty green American money I'm holding up? It's going for an Athlon.
In conclusion, get stuffed.
Thank you.
The sad thing is that I had really heard nice things about RISCOS... if it were possible to get an old machine inexpensively in the US, I would have tried it.
I'm a little worried myself. The 40-50mm screens they have now on the phones are too small for games, so do they really think a 9mm* screen will be usable?
*N gauge is so named because the rails are 9mm apart
Great. I should pay GBP30 (~USD 45), and enjoy having another external cable strewn around waiting to tangle with everything else, so the OEM can save USD 10 (GBP 7) by not sticking a floppy drive in.
Will the floppy-free box be cheaper? How much? Unless it's discounted enough that I can break even by getting the add-on drive (assuming even that my time meddling with setting it up is free), I don't like this angle.
Convergence is, by and large, a good thing. It means fewer devices to pack, learn, and keep fed. The CPU power and memory is already paid for, and the system is presumably designed to remain running fairly continuously, so why not only require users to carry one box and keep one set of batteries charged?
And is there something wrong with that?
I'd actually be interested to see how far yesterday's chips go with today's OC techniques.
I recall the legend that "with a really big heatsink/fan", you could run a 5x86/133 at 200MHz. With the aid of an Athlon-designed HS/Fan, I was able to boot my K6/233 at 3.5x83=292. From there, I guess the next step is to grab a Super Socket 7 board and crank it to 3.5x95.
> Yes, but this is Slashdot, where everybody thinks >the computing world is centered on ATX motherboards >and framerates in 3D games.
No way! Baby-AT and 2D image quality. If you'll excuse me, I must order a FIC VA-503+ and a Matrox G400.
BTW, the case has a silver stripe, and an etching on the side.
Actually, FreeDOS (www.freedos.org) is excellent. It has an enhanced shell and many nice utilities, is available with FAT32 support, and features fairly wide compatibility. Windows 3.1 is the main stumbling block.
/40 laptops out there, than to try to wedge GNU/Linux on it.
I'd much rather use FreeDOS on, for example, one of the hundreds of cheap-as-to-be-disposable 486/33 or
It does do things to your machine, in some respects. 1. DRM may "lock down" the machine to prevent access to the data. Example being the systems that disable taking a screenshot. On a multi-tasking and/or multi-user system, that is quite crippling. I've envisioned sending my loud, large K7 boxes into the garage and putting some quiet and cool C3-based X terminals for them around the house. Do I want my apps suddenly weirding out because another user decided to run DRMPlayer 6000? 2. Does everyone forget the DRM-CD-style-thing that wrecked people's iMacs?
I'm sorry, but this is a bit unfeasible.
1. Isn't it desirable (from the user's perspective) to keep the battery trickle-charging to make up for when you suspend it and let the battery keep the RAM fresh and crispy?
2. Many laptops lack a "modesty panel". To take my laptop without a battery risks introducing nasties to the battery slot. I don't want that.
3. They've been doing battery-powered portable computers since at least the late 1980s. By now, shouldn't we be able to expect a better answer than "Don't do that... we know it's a problem?"
>Why isn't there an option that says, "NEVER trust content from Foo inc.?
I've wondered that for ages, and not just for spyware issues. I've visited some sites (hardware-review ones seem especially bad) where they'll request 4, 5, 6 times "Do I want to install Flash ?" No. I don't. The page displays just fine without Flash (I assume it's actually being demanded by the ads), so you're asking me to spend 15 minutes sucking a plugin back over a slow line to NOT particularly improve my experience? Where do I sign up?