Yeah, this lawsuit idea is all fine and great if you're a big corporation like Microsoft. The small guy, like myself who has had malicious people squat on domains (my site, for example, but.net and.org, etc for example) are fucked because we can't afford thousands and thousands of dollars to bring a lawsuit against someone on the other side of the country.
(And yes, this person squating my domains is doing so maliciously as they are a former user who continually harassed other users. Then there is also the person who put up the same site and service as mine and used the same domain name, but with one letter off - causing people to constantly confuse the two so that I frequently get complaints by email about problems on my site... that is actually on the OTHER site).
So... frankly.... I don't give a fuck about all of this. Yay corporations. Have fun running our internet.
Cable companies, broadcast companies, Sony, Hitachi and others should foot the bill. It's in their best interest. Or even better, how about the government stop treating us like pussies and not make me subsidize stupid poor people who can't afford $40, but have no problem sitting in front of a television ceaselessly, to begin with?
I bet they are going to require dated receipts, too. So if you're a lazy and uninformed moron that waits until your signal dies before buying a television, I have to subsidize it. If I had the foresight to move to HDTV six years ago when the initial deadline was looming and have continued to buy HDTV ever since, I'll probably get a fist in the ass.
Oh my god, I'm old and I didn't save any money! Someone please come save me from myself! How was I to know seventy years ago that I would need money to retire?!
and . . .
Oh my god, I don't have an HDTV and I didn't save money for one! Someone please come save me from myself! How was I to know that analog would be switching to digital, even though it was announced a decade ago!
Oh, and as far as I know, the two services will continue to exist. The law isn't that analog must be phased out by 2009. Only that content must be offered in digital. Nothing stopping them from continuing to pull in the analog signal. That is, unless things have changed and analog is actually going to be ditched entirely in the next couple of years.
And really, if they can't spend a few hundred bucks to get an HDTV or a converter for their standard TV, is going without television for a few weeks while they save money for it going to kill them?!
That's not going to be enough as far as I'm concerned. Even if it were completely DRM free and open, it's still ten bucks an album. If I'm going to buy an album for ten bucks, I might as well just go get the physical CD and rip it myself.
Also, what is the current cut that an artist gets currently? I bet it's not significantly greater than the point they get for physical media. Fucking the artist is still fucking the artist.
Does that mean xubuntu swings both ways? (That's actually the ubuntu flavor I use on all but my main ubuntu box, since xfce is what I use most on debian... well.. when I actually bother with a gui, which I don't).
That's presuming that apt-get/aptitude hasn't become corrupted (though that's usually fixable, of course) and that things were installed only using that method. And not everything installed via apt-get can be easily removed.
I've never owned a pre-built so I've never really dealt with tech support. Your description sounds pretty probable though, so I can see your point. If you only have three or four ways to fix ANYTHING, then it doesn't really matter what OS it's on.
Personally, I choose Debian for my servers and Ubuntu for my desktops. I choose Debian for my servers, so I can have the most stripped system to which I can add things on a platform I know very well. I use Ubuntu for my desktops because it has an enormous support community, frequent releases and the packages are not nearly as out of sync as straight Debian.
Fedora is too tied to RedHat for my tastes and seems to only really be the choice of corporations these days. I'm not even sure what their community is like, compared to that of Debian and Ubuntu.
Anything other than those three is currently too small and obscure. There is a lot of fractioning in the distro world right now, but the majority seem to go to Ubuntu, then Redhat and then Suse and straight Debian.
I am very curious as to how they would pick a Linux and properly provide support for it without preventing you from being able to upgrade your kernel whenever you want or adding any of the bazillion packages out there that you want. It's very easy to hork your linux system, even if you know what you're doing. As much as I love linux I remain very skeptical about the average user implementing it as a desktop solution if they like to play around or have serious needs that cant' allow for plenty of downtime and research to resolve minor problems.
I played it for a few hours when I first got it. I haven't played it since. It has been sitting in my home entertainment system, unused, for months.
I'm sure some PS3-only must-have games will eventually come out and I'll love my purchase at that point. For now, it's just a pretty conversation piece.
And what worries me is you get modded insightful for contributing nothing useful. Best way to karma whore is blame the man! (or microsoft) Oh, and what worries me is that you might get modded insightful for contributing nothing useful. Best way to get people to coddle you or share your viewpoint is to say "my daddy is a cop" or "my mommy is a teacher" or "my brother is in the military". As if having a family member in any of those fields of employment somehow validates every statement you make regarding them and nullifies those of everyone else contradicting you.
This isn't about your dad or television news. A cop's job is to arrest people. Their job isn't to be concerned with their civil liberties and they are not typically educated (as part of the job, at least) in civil liberties and privacy rights. This is why when your rights are violated, you just eat it and deal with it later via a lawyer.
Your response is like saying that because one person is good at their job that everyone is. Further, whether people write your father letters about what a great job he does has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not he has ever violated someone's civil liberties. A lot of people don't even know when their own rights are being violated and when they do, there's often not a lot they can do about it.
For what anecdotal evidence is or isn't worth, I have had the experience as fifteen many years ago of being wrongly arrested because I matched the "white male with dark hair" description they had of some little bastard in the area. After they arrested me, and on the drive to the jail, they kept asking me a bunch of questions and they had a very snarky attitude. I very politely said "I don't mean any offense, but I don't wish to speak with anyone unless I have a lawyer or my parents with me". Those were the extent of all words I spoke with them after the arrest.
However, what they put on the police report was complete garbage. They wrote that I confessed to breaking into a house and damaging two car tires. That I bragged about it to them on the drive to the jail. And then that I threatened I would "do it all over again" and called them a bunch of names.
Sorry, but as nice as you feel your dad is, I have had personal experiences with cops and how they lie about the simplest of things for absolutely no reason. I mean, honestly, if they're willing to do that over some goofy teenage kid then what do you think they do when they believe they have the right person regarding a serious offense?!
And guess what happened to the cops, even after the very next morning when I was released and the charges were dropped and it was noted on the record that it was a case of mistaken identification? Nothing.
It is commonly known that the majority of police officers know absolutely nothing about civil liberties, right to privacy or any other constitutional or legal rights. This is why you are never supposed to argue with an officer. Their job is to arrest you when they think you're doing something wrong and let the law sort you out. This is also why they frequently infringe on a number of your rights. Either out of lack of concern or simple ignorance.
Likewise, one should be incredibly frightened at the concept of an officer who is equally ignorant or unconcerned about your rights being capable of investigating your most vital and private of information and communication.
Not to mention, you know, the whole history of commonly fabricating evidence.
There was a lot of progress made in the world when we had Soviet Russia to rally against during the cold war. Get rid of Microsoft and much of software and the open-source movement will stagnate. Not necessarily because of any direct improvements, contributions or achievements by Microsoft, but because they are the central evil empire around which all opposing viewpoints, practices and communities can clearly see as the colossal against which they're flinging the rocks of their own progress and movements.
It's pretty hard to speak with your dollars in America. For instance, let's say you don't like what Colgate-Palmolive does in some aspect of their business. Now, go to the store with a list of products and brands that they own you'll find about 65% of the shelves are off limits to you.
The market continues to become increasingly monolithic and it's almost impossible to buy any product that isn't somehow contributing to the production of or parent company for another product on the market.
Also, people are lazy. McDonald's could sacrifice children over an open flame while BurgerKing could give newborn baby girls a free pony and people would go to McDonald's as long as it was a mile closer and a dollar cheaper.
I heard a statistic on CNN the other day citing that American female high school students first desire is to be famous. More than 50% of female American students were found to have an ambition to be a personal assistant to a celebrity.
So, apparently, computer science is failing to the desire to kiss celebrity ass.
American corporations are - at the absolute best - ambivalent about the privacy and well-being of the American worker, consumer and citizen. Why would you expect them to treat people in other countries any better?
You're not even making sense. Of course you can buy a crappy low-end pre-built or build a high end and more expensive machine. What does that have to do with anything? Why are you comparing apples to moon rocks?! My current system ran me around $2,000 and I guarantee you would be hard pressed to find the same system.
So yes, prebuilts are much cheaper than what you can build yourself, as long as you don't care about quality, performance, functionality, features or capability. Was that not already obvious to all of us?
I can't speak for what it's like in the UK. But I can tell you that if you're comfortable with building your own machine, there's no reason not to. Even if it was cheaper to buy a pre-built than components, it wouldn't be worth it unless the pre-built was significantly cheaper.
I built at least one new top of the line machine every eight to twelve months and have done so for the last decade and I've been building my own machines since... well, forever. The last pre-built I owned was a VIC-20 when I was seven years old, in 1984.
When you buy a pre-built, you are almost always also paying for things like support contracts and bundled software. When you build it yourself, you get exactly what you want the way you want it and nothing else. Further, unless you're buying your parts from retail stores like CompUSA and Best Buy, you're going to have a very difficult time finding a pre-built that is even in the same ball-park as a home-built. (In the United States, at least).
There's nothing wrong with buying a pre-built as long as you know what you're getting yourself into and exactly why you're buying it. But if you think you're getting a deal by not building it yourself, I'd suggest double-checking the numbers.
And really, if nothing else, look at the time involved. I can run out and pick up the parts, go home, build the machine and install my OS and be running smoothly before whatever company I've bought my overpriced pre-built with discount parts from even gets the shipping order to UPS.
Aside from that, I don't even know that you could find a pre-built with my specific configuration that I just built a couple weeks ago to replace last year's machine.
Yes, you're completely right. After all stealing an item that can't be replicated is exactly the same as making a copy of an item. By your logic, the kid who makes a mix tape for his girlfriend is a criminal, just as the guy who burns out a thousand copies of a CD and sells it on ebay is. You know, because damn that whole fair use thing!
Mind you, I spend thousands of dollars on videogames every year and probably only bit torrent two or three of them (which I often go out and buy afterward if they're really great games). but really, stop lumping some kid who downloads a game for himself with massive distribution networks making millions of dollars stealing and profiting from some guy's intellectual property.
Then again, I'm sure you're just the kind of honest guy who claims found-change on his tax forms so congrats.
No, my logic is that piracy is not making a copy of a buddy's game for personal use. Piracy is manufacturing and distributing someone else's material for personal profit. Regardless of whether someone feels the activities are justifiable or not, the word piracy does not apply to some kid making a copy for personal use. It applies to the guy in new york making copies of movies and selling them on the streets or the guys blasting out a million fake copies of Vista and selling them.
So let's call them:
Someone playing a game they haven't paid for.
Someone duplicating a product and profiting from it by selling it in the marketplace.
You know, kind of like recording the superbowl on your VCR and watching it at home later is not the same thing as turning the television on and changing it to the Superbowl in your bar or restaurant for all the patrons to watch (this is not legal).
I probably should have said in recent years. I mean, obviously there are gerat id games in my memory, going back to Commander Keen. However, it's been quite a few years since a truly remarkable id game has been out. Doom III was fun. Quake IV was okay. But really, I didn't find either worth spending $50 or $60 on. And that's for the PC. I can't imagine how badly the gameplay would have sucked on a console.
I don't know that console players are necessarily less discerning, but they certainly seem less hardcore about their gaming and less serious about it. Or maybe that's just my perception of them. It's hard for me to see someone who plays an unoriginal FPS - that uses auto-aiming assistance at that! - as a serious gamer.
Note that I'm not a serious gamer myself. In fact, I buy thousands of dollars in games every year and almost never play a game all the way through. I am one of the worst gamers on earth. I love gaming, but even my college aged little sister can kick my ass in most videogames.
If id wants to rake in the cash and not worry about piracy, they need to develop something revolutionary and (as others have mentioned) tie it in to online play. Problem solved. But simply jumping to the console won't solve it. If anything, the only way that helps is that now you have far more people playing your game since it's for PC and consoles both. But with that comes more piracy, too.
You mean one at a time? You can get single OEM parts everywhere. If you have a non-chain computer store in your town (like Enu, in Portland) you can usually get them there. Or via newegg. Or through outlets on pricewatch.
Not every part is going to be available as an OEM, but it's certainly possible to get drives, RAM, CPUs, video cards and audio cards. Not to mention, you simply don't get exactly what you want from a pre-built. I put my latest system into a rather awesome Cooler Master 832 chassis. Granted, it was pretty expensive, but at least I had the option instead of going with whatever plastic piece of crap Dell decided was good for me.
Now, if you are just looking for a simple home office PC for your mom to use for the web, MP3s, solitaire and spreadsheets, then going with a pre-built is potentially a good solution since that takes the trouble of having to provide support out of your hands. But for anything specific like server hardware or gaming rigs, I would be hard pressed to buy something prebuilt.
I have often considered a good Falcon Northwest rig, but as great as they are I just can't justify spending $5,000 for something I can build myself for around $3,000 or less.
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Yeah, this lawsuit idea is all fine and great if you're a big corporation like Microsoft. The small guy, like myself who has had malicious people squat on domains (my site, for example, but .net and .org, etc for example) are fucked because we can't afford thousands and thousands of dollars to bring a lawsuit against someone on the other side of the country.
(And yes, this person squating my domains is doing so maliciously as they are a former user who continually harassed other users. Then there is also the person who put up the same site and service as mine and used the same domain name, but with one letter off - causing people to constantly confuse the two so that I frequently get complaints by email about problems on my site... that is actually on the OTHER site).
So... frankly.... I don't give a fuck about all of this. Yay corporations. Have fun running our internet.
Cable companies, broadcast companies, Sony, Hitachi and others should foot the bill. It's in their best interest. Or even better, how about the government stop treating us like pussies and not make me subsidize stupid poor people who can't afford $40, but have no problem sitting in front of a television ceaselessly, to begin with?
I bet they are going to require dated receipts, too. So if you're a lazy and uninformed moron that waits until your signal dies before buying a television, I have to subsidize it. If I had the foresight to move to HDTV six years ago when the initial deadline was looming and have continued to buy HDTV ever since, I'll probably get a fist in the ass.
Why does this remind me of social security?!
Oh my god, I'm old and I didn't save any money! Someone please come save me from myself! How was I to know seventy years ago that I would need money to retire?!
and . . .
Oh my god, I don't have an HDTV and I didn't save money for one! Someone please come save me from myself! How was I to know that analog would be switching to digital, even though it was announced a decade ago!
Oh, and as far as I know, the two services will continue to exist. The law isn't that analog must be phased out by 2009. Only that content must be offered in digital. Nothing stopping them from continuing to pull in the analog signal. That is, unless things have changed and analog is actually going to be ditched entirely in the next couple of years.
And really, if they can't spend a few hundred bucks to get an HDTV or a converter for their standard TV, is going without television for a few weeks while they save money for it going to kill them?!
That's not going to be enough as far as I'm concerned. Even if it were completely DRM free and open, it's still ten bucks an album. If I'm going to buy an album for ten bucks, I might as well just go get the physical CD and rip it myself.
Also, what is the current cut that an artist gets currently? I bet it's not significantly greater than the point they get for physical media. Fucking the artist is still fucking the artist.
Gamasutra: I quit.
MMORPG Player Dude: Can I have your stuff?
Does that mean xubuntu swings both ways? (That's actually the ubuntu flavor I use on all but my main ubuntu box, since xfce is what I use most on debian... well.. when I actually bother with a gui, which I don't).
That's presuming that apt-get/aptitude hasn't become corrupted (though that's usually fixable, of course) and that things were installed only using that method. And not everything installed via apt-get can be easily removed.
I've never owned a pre-built so I've never really dealt with tech support. Your description sounds pretty probable though, so I can see your point. If you only have three or four ways to fix ANYTHING, then it doesn't really matter what OS it's on.
Come on, people. Were you educated by chimpanzees? "Forward progress"?! Is that like a backward retreat?
Personally, I choose Debian for my servers and Ubuntu for my desktops. I choose Debian for my servers, so I can have the most stripped system to which I can add things on a platform I know very well. I use Ubuntu for my desktops because it has an enormous support community, frequent releases and the packages are not nearly as out of sync as straight Debian.
Fedora is too tied to RedHat for my tastes and seems to only really be the choice of corporations these days. I'm not even sure what their community is like, compared to that of Debian and Ubuntu.
Anything other than those three is currently too small and obscure. There is a lot of fractioning in the distro world right now, but the majority seem to go to Ubuntu, then Redhat and then Suse and straight Debian.
I am very curious as to how they would pick a Linux and properly provide support for it without preventing you from being able to upgrade your kernel whenever you want or adding any of the bazillion packages out there that you want. It's very easy to hork your linux system, even if you know what you're doing. As much as I love linux I remain very skeptical about the average user implementing it as a desktop solution if they like to play around or have serious needs that cant' allow for plenty of downtime and research to resolve minor problems.
I wanted a PS3 for the blueray player.
I played it for a few hours when I first got it. I haven't played it since. It has been sitting in my home entertainment system, unused, for months.
I'm sure some PS3-only must-have games will eventually come out and I'll love my purchase at that point. For now, it's just a pretty conversation piece.
This isn't about your dad or television news. A cop's job is to arrest people. Their job isn't to be concerned with their civil liberties and they are not typically educated (as part of the job, at least) in civil liberties and privacy rights. This is why when your rights are violated, you just eat it and deal with it later via a lawyer.
Your response is like saying that because one person is good at their job that everyone is. Further, whether people write your father letters about what a great job he does has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not he has ever violated someone's civil liberties. A lot of people don't even know when their own rights are being violated and when they do, there's often not a lot they can do about it.
For what anecdotal evidence is or isn't worth, I have had the experience as fifteen many years ago of being wrongly arrested because I matched the "white male with dark hair" description they had of some little bastard in the area. After they arrested me, and on the drive to the jail, they kept asking me a bunch of questions and they had a very snarky attitude. I very politely said "I don't mean any offense, but I don't wish to speak with anyone unless I have a lawyer or my parents with me". Those were the extent of all words I spoke with them after the arrest.
However, what they put on the police report was complete garbage. They wrote that I confessed to breaking into a house and damaging two car tires. That I bragged about it to them on the drive to the jail. And then that I threatened I would "do it all over again" and called them a bunch of names.
Sorry, but as nice as you feel your dad is, I have had personal experiences with cops and how they lie about the simplest of things for absolutely no reason. I mean, honestly, if they're willing to do that over some goofy teenage kid then what do you think they do when they believe they have the right person regarding a serious offense?!
And guess what happened to the cops, even after the very next morning when I was released and the charges were dropped and it was noted on the record that it was a case of mistaken identification? Nothing.
It is commonly known that the majority of police officers know absolutely nothing about civil liberties, right to privacy or any other constitutional or legal rights. This is why you are never supposed to argue with an officer. Their job is to arrest you when they think you're doing something wrong and let the law sort you out. This is also why they frequently infringe on a number of your rights. Either out of lack of concern or simple ignorance.
Likewise, one should be incredibly frightened at the concept of an officer who is equally ignorant or unconcerned about your rights being capable of investigating your most vital and private of information and communication.
Not to mention, you know, the whole history of commonly fabricating evidence.
There was a lot of progress made in the world when we had Soviet Russia to rally against during the cold war. Get rid of Microsoft and much of software and the open-source movement will stagnate. Not necessarily because of any direct improvements, contributions or achievements by Microsoft, but because they are the central evil empire around which all opposing viewpoints, practices and communities can clearly see as the colossal against which they're flinging the rocks of their own progress and movements.
It's pretty hard to speak with your dollars in America. For instance, let's say you don't like what Colgate-Palmolive does in some aspect of their business. Now, go to the store with a list of products and brands that they own you'll find about 65% of the shelves are off limits to you.
The market continues to become increasingly monolithic and it's almost impossible to buy any product that isn't somehow contributing to the production of or parent company for another product on the market.
Also, people are lazy. McDonald's could sacrifice children over an open flame while BurgerKing could give newborn baby girls a free pony and people would go to McDonald's as long as it was a mile closer and a dollar cheaper.
I heard a statistic on CNN the other day citing that American female high school students first desire is to be famous. More than 50% of female American students were found to have an ambition to be a personal assistant to a celebrity.
So, apparently, computer science is failing to the desire to kiss celebrity ass.
America. What a country!
I'd presume it's the same in the UK, huh?
American corporations are - at the absolute best - ambivalent about the privacy and well-being of the American worker, consumer and citizen. Why would you expect them to treat people in other countries any better?
Hey, anything that helps them avoid having to pay American wages for American employees is good, right?
You're not even making sense. Of course you can buy a crappy low-end pre-built or build a high end and more expensive machine. What does that have to do with anything? Why are you comparing apples to moon rocks?! My current system ran me around $2,000 and I guarantee you would be hard pressed to find the same system.
So yes, prebuilts are much cheaper than what you can build yourself, as long as you don't care about quality, performance, functionality, features or capability. Was that not already obvious to all of us?
I can't speak for what it's like in the UK. But I can tell you that if you're comfortable with building your own machine, there's no reason not to. Even if it was cheaper to buy a pre-built than components, it wouldn't be worth it unless the pre-built was significantly cheaper.
I built at least one new top of the line machine every eight to twelve months and have done so for the last decade and I've been building my own machines since... well, forever. The last pre-built I owned was a VIC-20 when I was seven years old, in 1984.
When you buy a pre-built, you are almost always also paying for things like support contracts and bundled software. When you build it yourself, you get exactly what you want the way you want it and nothing else. Further, unless you're buying your parts from retail stores like CompUSA and Best Buy, you're going to have a very difficult time finding a pre-built that is even in the same ball-park as a home-built. (In the United States, at least).
There's nothing wrong with buying a pre-built as long as you know what you're getting yourself into and exactly why you're buying it. But if you think you're getting a deal by not building it yourself, I'd suggest double-checking the numbers.
And really, if nothing else, look at the time involved. I can run out and pick up the parts, go home, build the machine and install my OS and be running smoothly before whatever company I've bought my overpriced pre-built with discount parts from even gets the shipping order to UPS.
Aside from that, I don't even know that you could find a pre-built with my specific configuration that I just built a couple weeks ago to replace last year's machine.
Yes, you're completely right. After all stealing an item that can't be replicated is exactly the same as making a copy of an item. By your logic, the kid who makes a mix tape for his girlfriend is a criminal, just as the guy who burns out a thousand copies of a CD and sells it on ebay is. You know, because damn that whole fair use thing!
Mind you, I spend thousands of dollars on videogames every year and probably only bit torrent two or three of them (which I often go out and buy afterward if they're really great games). but really, stop lumping some kid who downloads a game for himself with massive distribution networks making millions of dollars stealing and profiting from some guy's intellectual property.
Then again, I'm sure you're just the kind of honest guy who claims found-change on his tax forms so congrats.
No, my logic is that piracy is not making a copy of a buddy's game for personal use. Piracy is manufacturing and distributing someone else's material for personal profit. Regardless of whether someone feels the activities are justifiable or not, the word piracy does not apply to some kid making a copy for personal use. It applies to the guy in new york making copies of movies and selling them on the streets or the guys blasting out a million fake copies of Vista and selling them.
So let's call them:
Someone playing a game they haven't paid for.
Someone duplicating a product and profiting from it by selling it in the marketplace.
You know, kind of like recording the superbowl on your VCR and watching it at home later is not the same thing as turning the television on and changing it to the Superbowl in your bar or restaurant for all the patrons to watch (this is not legal).
Like book publishers and authors, game publishers see buying a used game as detestable an act as piracy.
I probably should have said in recent years. I mean, obviously there are gerat id games in my memory, going back to Commander Keen. However, it's been quite a few years since a truly remarkable id game has been out. Doom III was fun. Quake IV was okay. But really, I didn't find either worth spending $50 or $60 on. And that's for the PC. I can't imagine how badly the gameplay would have sucked on a console.
I don't know that console players are necessarily less discerning, but they certainly seem less hardcore about their gaming and less serious about it. Or maybe that's just my perception of them. It's hard for me to see someone who plays an unoriginal FPS - that uses auto-aiming assistance at that! - as a serious gamer.
Note that I'm not a serious gamer myself. In fact, I buy thousands of dollars in games every year and almost never play a game all the way through. I am one of the worst gamers on earth. I love gaming, but even my college aged little sister can kick my ass in most videogames.
If id wants to rake in the cash and not worry about piracy, they need to develop something revolutionary and (as others have mentioned) tie it in to online play. Problem solved. But simply jumping to the console won't solve it. If anything, the only way that helps is that now you have far more people playing your game since it's for PC and consoles both. But with that comes more piracy, too.
You mean one at a time? You can get single OEM parts everywhere. If you have a non-chain computer store in your town (like Enu, in Portland) you can usually get them there. Or via newegg. Or through outlets on pricewatch.
Not every part is going to be available as an OEM, but it's certainly possible to get drives, RAM, CPUs, video cards and audio cards. Not to mention, you simply don't get exactly what you want from a pre-built. I put my latest system into a rather awesome Cooler Master 832 chassis. Granted, it was pretty expensive, but at least I had the option instead of going with whatever plastic piece of crap Dell decided was good for me.
Now, if you are just looking for a simple home office PC for your mom to use for the web, MP3s, solitaire and spreadsheets, then going with a pre-built is potentially a good solution since that takes the trouble of having to provide support out of your hands. But for anything specific like server hardware or gaming rigs, I would be hard pressed to buy something prebuilt.
I have often considered a good Falcon Northwest rig, but as great as they are I just can't justify spending $5,000 for something I can build myself for around $3,000 or less.