Uh yeah, those pesky unprofitable tasks of setting up your IT infrastructure properly.
This thing is aimed at small businesses, the sort that, if they actually needed to hire a network admin, would do better to just go back to passing around floppies. For them, this is proper IT infrastructure.
Unpack, plug in, forget is a wet dream of marketing wankers. Every device on a network should be maintained.
Since there is exactly such a device sitting behind me, I'm inclined to disagree with you. The device, a Linksys router/switch/access point, is a complete Linux system. It took less than an hour to go from shrink-wrapped to deployed and now just works. Yes, it needs the occasional point-and-click, but that's a couple of minutes per month.
The reason it works that way is that it's extremely limited in what it can do. The designers traded flexibility for simplicity.
The IT100 and its ilk are basically the same idea. They do a small set of things--and only those things--so the user doesn't have to think of it as a computer. It's just an appliance.
Consider the cost of the time spent configuring the laptop or PC to work as an office server and add that to the cost. Keep in mind that most people aren't Unix experts and even the ones that are will likely have to spend several hours reading HOWTOs and man pages before they can get everything working. The advantage of one of these devices is that you plug it in, turn it on and it just works. That means, you can go back to doing profitable work sooner.
I have no doubt that if you really need an office server, $1395 is not to high a price to pay if you don't have to sink any time into it.
That being said though, it looks to me like NetWinder will do the same job at less than half the price.
The problem with that is that a lot of people will take the silence to be some kind of admission of guilt. It's tempting to treat this like a USENET flame war and just ignore the flamer in the hope that he'll get bored and go away, but the rules are drastically different here. Darl et. al. are in it for the money, not the attention. If you don't keep countering their lies, casual readers will just assume that, since that's the last word, it must be true.
That's why, when nasty rumours come out against a corporation (e.g. the one about Snapple's right-wing leanings), the right thing to do is to vigourously deny them.
It appears that Linus and the OSS community is in the position of having to do the same thing.
TechCentralStation mistakenly believes that this applies to music sharing. This position has already been rebutted in other articles, because the files that you are sharing (the MP3's) are NOT the originals. They are copies taken from the owner's CD. Therefore the owner has made the copy, not you. Also, you're making a copy of a copy, which is not permitted under Section VIII of the Copyright Act.
Since you're disputing TechCentralStation, I figured I'd point everyone to this article which has been floating around recently.
It seems that TechCentralStation is actually an astroturfing service of sorts, so it makes perfect sense to hear that they've been publishing false or misleading editorials.
The new angle won't work any better. The settlement also protects THEM from BSD suing for stolen BSD code. If they attack it, the holders of that copyright can sue
SCO right back.
IIRC, AT&T only settled after the judge turned down their request for a preliminary injunction because it was likely that their improper handling of the licensing had put the code into the public domain. If they open that can of worms again, chances are that they could lose the copyrights to much of Unix.
Freedom lets the software evolve in a more natural way.
In order to get a particular feature into a commercial
closed-source program, you need to convince the software company that
the feature is worth adding. That typically requires getting lots and
lots of customers to ask for it repeatedly until the message gets
pounded through their many layers of management.
With OSS, you just write it yourself and submit the patch to the
maintainer.
Why do you think Microsoft is only now adding popup blocking to
IE while Mozilla has had it for years? Somebody just added it to
Mozilla but it took that market pressure to convince MS to do it.
In general, I've noticed that, at the very least, when you compare
mature open- and closed-source projects, the closed-source stuff
sometimes wins in terms of the hard stuff--performance,
technology, etc--but all of the little, easily-fixed things that will
annoy you about it aren't in the OSS versions. And often, that
difference is enough to drive the improvement of the OSS version.
"Is SCO completely, utterly, apeshit and batshit, half-a-gig-short-of-a-Debian-ISO, stark, slavering, buggo?!? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck fuck [ several dozen instances of the word "fuck" deleted for brevity ] fuck?!?!"
I dunno. Remember, this is a jury trial in Utah. Bringing Stallman out in front of a bunch of extremely normal people may well be the best way to convince them that OSS is the product of loons. If IBM's counsel is any good, they'll subpoena a suit-wearing OSS company exec to explain that in fact, OSS is just good ol' American ingenuity and hard work.
Disadvantages: no playlists, so you end up swapping CDRs quite often. It's also a major pain to organize your CDRs: if you've ripped 12 CDs in one CDR it's already
hard to list them all on the disk, but if you have to burn hundreds of individual songs (from the ol'napster days) on one CDR, you gotta keep some sort of separate catalog
to be able to find what you want to listen.
My own preferred player at work is a Windows PC running WinAmp with my MP3 directory NFS mounted to my real (Unix) computer. This gives me playlists, easy file navigation, Internet radio and the ability to scp MP3's from home.
The only downside is that they sometimes expect me to pre-empt my music listening just because some work-related program or other needs to be run on it.
Now now, be nice. According to The Register's article on the subject:
The natural, cheap-shot 'have you stopped beating your wife yet' question for Szulik was:
'You're saying all these people who go down to the store looking for an alternative should buy Windows?' So we asked it, largely for the personal entertainment value of watching him
desperately swimming for the shore. We certainly didn't intend to use it to construct an
entirely unfair hit-magnet Linux-screamer story.
In other words, they deliberately asked him a loaded question just to see what would happen and his answer got quoted out of context by, among others, the author of the linked article.
The real story is nothing new. RedHat's people have maintained that Linux isn't a desktop OS for years.
(I sort of see their point but, I don't buy it. IMHO, Linux will get onto the desktop eventually but it'll be a slow process.)
There's that, but there's also an implied statement of intent. With a 2.5.XX kernel, they're saying "this is a work in progress" while with a 2.6-test version number, the message is, "this is now supposed to work correctly."
At that point, you know it wasn't just a bunch of patches thrown together to see if they work.
I can't really dispute the validity of the glider logo since, even if I never really got into the whole Game Of Life thing (my personal early-hacker obsession was fractals) but I don't really like the logo itself.
I'd go with a design that replaces the circles-in-squares with rectangles, about twice as wide as high and with the "dead" sectors completely empty. Something like this.
For black-and-white media, the red squares become whatever the foreground colour is supposed to be and if there are lots of colours available, the brightness of each rectangle could be adjusted to indicate the "aliveness" of that rectangle during some stage of the glider's life cycle.
The author of the piece, one Rob Enderle, is developing something of a reputation as a quote whore amongst the bloggers. Google will reveal more and there's a page of Enderle-watching here.
Flamebait is the right word for this sort of thing.
I'd really like to have an interface to the video system
that is both fast and safe. At the moment, it's one or the other.
Either I use straight X11 or I let the program bang on the hardware
directly via DRI, SVGALib or the like.
I'd like to see video drivers in the kernel. Not necessarily
full-featured OpenGL drivers, but something that:
Sets where in memory the card is allowed to read and write so that
usermode programs can't trash system memory.
Provides a reliable way to reset the video state so that we can
easily get the display back to a sane state after something crashes.
Provides fast, well-defined access to common (i.e. not
cutting-edge) video functionality, possibly by letting the user
program memory-map the frame buffer, so that simple graphics stuff is
easy to do and doesn't need
Provides a mechanism for applications to use the cards' advanced
features (e.g. 3D hardware) so that binary-only device drivers are
still possible, although not as part of the kernel. (This isn't
strictly necessary from a technical point of view but I don't think
most of the video card makers will release GPL'd drivers for their
crown jewels. They might allow them for the basic stuff, though.)
Associates video state with virtual consoles so that I can switch
between graphical applications by hitting ALT+Fn. (Okay, this one
isn't strictly necessary but it's really cool.)
Of these, #4 may not be possible to do safely, or may only be possible
for some cards. If so, it would still be a win because a lot of
applications will do fine with only the basic functionality and over
time, as the bleeding-edge stuff becomes mundane, it will slowly
trickle into the #3 category.
I like it. It's multi-coloured but still tasteful.
My only complaint is about the website itself. The pictures are too small. It'd be really nice if they'd put up a larger, clearer picture. Something around 1200DPI with 32-bit colour and detailed descriptions of the inks and paper used.
You'd think this would be an obvious thing for Linux game distributors to do. That way, non-Linux users can still play the game just by booting off the CD.
(Plans for leveraging this strategy into Console World Domination!!!!! are beyond the scope of this post.)
I haven't listened to anything yet so I can't comment on the quality
of their music, but I wouldn't be surprised if you're right. I get
the impression from their website that they're more interested in the
marketing aspect than in the music itself. Creative Commons licensing
and free downloads are all well and good but ultimately, it has to be
about the music.
That's why most of the other independant labels do only one or two
related genres. It's because that's what they care about.
What these folks should be doing (IMHO) is selling their
services as a promoter and distributer to other independant labels.
They could still make sure the artists are treated in a non-evil
manner through their contract with the label but they'd focus on what
they're interested in--effectively using the net as a promotional
tool--while the artist and label worry about making good music.
Rather than using the contact information they had, they chose to complain to our mutual customers instead.
See, what you should have done at this point was to notify your customers first that you were blocking this company. That way, you can explain to them in advance that it's the monitoring company's fault and not yours.
As it is, I see your best option is to 1) keep blocking them until they shape up and 2) give your customers your side of the story. If this company is as sleazy as they sound, their sales drones have already sold the situation as something that's completely your fault and possibly dishonest too. (E.g. you're blocking them because they compete with your own monitoring service.) You need to make sure that your customers--all of them, not just your mutual customers--know that it's the monitoring company's fault. Reduce it down to "they cost you $BIGNUM per month in bandwidth due to their incompentence and they ignored us when we tried to talk to them about it."
This isn't a tech issue so much as a business issue. These assholes are playing hardball and you need to defend yourself.
As a Canadian I definitely disagree with that statement. I don't want to pay $0.77 extra for every CDR that I buy. This almost quadruples the price I would pay for CDRs!
Two points:
Firstly, the levy is on blank audio CD-Rs, not data CDRs. They're different in that the packages are labeled differently. Really. (Although I think they're in the process of changing that distinction.)
Secondly, I'd rather have the levy than DMCA-style heavy-handedness. The levy, at least, doesn't restrict what I can do to my own equipment or what software I can write. And yes, I know, the two are not mutually exclusive but as long as the levy makes some kinds of copying legal, it becomes that much harder for the industry bodies to insist on the more intrusive forms of legal protection.
Involuntarily supporting Celine Dion's career with each Knoppix CD is a small price to pay for freedom!
If you take a look at SourceForge and Freshmeat, you'll see
thousands of projects that a) aren't anything new and/or b) don't work
and/or c) were abandoned after release 0.000001. I suspect that a lot
of the people who started those projects would, were they Windows
users, be writing virusses and worms instead.
Getting industrial-strength development tools for Windows is hard.
They're expensive, the documentation is bad, the APIs are horribly
complicated and the beginner-oriented tools (e.g. Visual Basic) hide
the underlying workings from you. With Linux, though, you get
everything for free. The APIs are small and well-documented and there
are dozens of industry-standard programming languages just there for you to use.
For a geeky fifteen-year-old, the coolest thing he can do under a
typical Windows installation is to write a Word macro virus. Under
Linux, he could, if he wanted to, reimplement his entire operating
system piece by piece. And that's a lot cooler than writing a
worm.
Then, there's the open-source culture. Linus managed to become
rich and famous by writing free software, all while sticking it to a
giant evil corporation. I think a lot of open-source coders secretly
dream of becoming as famous as Linus someday.
So my theory is that, because of the wide availability of
development tools and the geek culture surrounding OSS, lots of
potential virus writers get diverted into less harmful things.
(Obviously, there are other factors as well but I thought I'd bring
this up.)
This is also what Canada does. Then, after the polls close, the votes are counted by hand by the poll workers. (I believe it's actually done twice by different groups of workers and recounted until they match, but I'm not sure.) There is still the possibility of fraud, but you'd need a huge conspiracy to get away with anything but a small shift in votes.
With purely computerized voting machines, one programmer could chose the new President, and even get away with it if he's caught by disguising his hack as a bug.
Elections need to be treated as safety-critical processes, just like airplane flights. If they go wrong, people will die.
Aviation software is painstakingly debugged and there's always a professional pilot on board the plane ready to take over if something goes wrong. If Diebold (or whoever) went to those extremes to make sure the e-voting systems worked correctly, I'd probably feel better about them, but I'm pretty sure they didn't. For one thing, if they did, the whole system would cost more than just doing it all by hand.
Personally, I don't get the whole rush to automate vote counting. Yes, it costs more to do it by hand, but given what could go wrong, it strikes me as a no-brainer.
These same people decide when their PC is two years old that it's just "too screwed up" and go buy and brand-spanking-new one with the same flaws which they will proceed to
bugger up in a month in a half.
Don't complain. Buy their old computers for twenty bucks each, then sell them to other such people as "reconditioned" systems for a couple of hundred (plus the old system as a trade-in.)
I mean, if these people are going to throw their money away, they may as well send some of it your way.
As an aside, a nearby computer store was, sometime back, charging CDN$50 a pop for virus removal.
Remember kids: strings is your friend.
If you happen to get a job offer in the form of a Word document and the HR drone who sent it to you wasn't careful, you can often see the version that got sent to other candidates and, more importantly, how much money they were offered. It can do wonders for your bargaining position.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh yeah, those pesky unprofitable tasks of setting up your IT infrastructure properly.
This thing is aimed at small businesses, the sort that, if they actually needed to hire a network admin, would do better to just go back to passing around floppies. For them, this is proper IT infrastructure.
Unpack, plug in, forget is a wet dream of marketing wankers. Every device on a network should be maintained.
Since there is exactly such a device sitting behind me, I'm inclined to disagree with you. The device, a Linksys router/switch/access point, is a complete Linux system. It took less than an hour to go from shrink-wrapped to deployed and now just works. Yes, it needs the occasional point-and-click, but that's a couple of minutes per month.
The reason it works that way is that it's extremely limited in what it can do. The designers traded flexibility for simplicity.
The IT100 and its ilk are basically the same idea. They do a small set of things--and only those things--so the user doesn't have to think of it as a computer. It's just an appliance.
$1395?! Why not just buy a laptop?
Consider the cost of the time spent configuring the laptop or PC to work as an office server and add that to the cost. Keep in mind that most people aren't Unix experts and even the ones that are will likely have to spend several hours reading HOWTOs and man pages before they can get everything working. The advantage of one of these devices is that you plug it in, turn it on and it just works. That means, you can go back to doing profitable work sooner.
I have no doubt that if you really need an office server, $1395 is not to high a price to pay if you don't have to sink any time into it.
That being said though, it looks to me like NetWinder will do the same job at less than half the price.
The problem with that is that a lot of people will take the silence to be some kind of admission of guilt. It's tempting to treat this like a USENET flame war and just ignore the flamer in the hope that he'll get bored and go away, but the rules are drastically different here. Darl et. al. are in it for the money, not the attention. If you don't keep countering their lies, casual readers will just assume that, since that's the last word, it must be true.
That's why, when nasty rumours come out against a corporation (e.g. the one about Snapple's right-wing leanings), the right thing to do is to vigourously deny them.
It appears that Linus and the OSS community is in the position of having to do the same thing.
TechCentralStation mistakenly believes that this applies to music sharing. This position has already been rebutted in other articles, because the files that you are sharing (the MP3's) are NOT the originals. They are copies taken from the owner's CD. Therefore the owner has made the copy, not you. Also, you're making a copy of a copy, which is not permitted under Section VIII of the Copyright Act.
Since you're disputing TechCentralStation, I figured I'd point everyone to this article which has been floating around recently. It seems that TechCentralStation is actually an astroturfing service of sorts, so it makes perfect sense to hear that they've been publishing false or misleading editorials.
The new angle won't work any better. The settlement also protects THEM from BSD suing for stolen BSD code. If they attack it, the holders of that copyright can sue SCO right back.
IIRC, AT&T only settled after the judge turned down their request for a preliminary injunction because it was likely that their improper handling of the licensing had put the code into the public domain. If they open that can of worms again, chances are that they could lose the copyrights to much of Unix.
And wouldn't that be ironic.
Exactly how does free(dom) make it WORK better -
Freedom lets the software evolve in a more natural way.
In order to get a particular feature into a commercial closed-source program, you need to convince the software company that the feature is worth adding. That typically requires getting lots and lots of customers to ask for it repeatedly until the message gets pounded through their many layers of management.
With OSS, you just write it yourself and submit the patch to the maintainer.
Why do you think Microsoft is only now adding popup blocking to IE while Mozilla has had it for years? Somebody just added it to Mozilla but it took that market pressure to convince MS to do it.
In general, I've noticed that, at the very least, when you compare mature open- and closed-source projects, the closed-source stuff sometimes wins in terms of the hard stuff--performance, technology, etc--but all of the little, easily-fixed things that will annoy you about it aren't in the OSS versions. And often, that difference is enough to drive the improvement of the OSS version.
"Is SCO completely, utterly, apeshit and batshit, half-a-gig-short-of-a-Debian-ISO, stark, slavering, buggo?!? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck fuck [ several dozen instances of the word "fuck" deleted for brevity ] fuck?!?!"
I dunno. Remember, this is a jury trial in Utah. Bringing Stallman out in front of a bunch of extremely normal people may well be the best way to convince them that OSS is the product of loons. If IBM's counsel is any good, they'll subpoena a suit-wearing OSS company exec to explain that in fact, OSS is just good ol' American ingenuity and hard work.
Disadvantages: no playlists, so you end up swapping CDRs quite often. It's also a major pain to organize your CDRs: if you've ripped 12 CDs in one CDR it's already hard to list them all on the disk, but if you have to burn hundreds of individual songs (from the ol'napster days) on one CDR, you gotta keep some sort of separate catalog to be able to find what you want to listen.
My own preferred player at work is a Windows PC running WinAmp with my MP3 directory NFS mounted to my real (Unix) computer. This gives me playlists, easy file navigation, Internet radio and the ability to scp MP3's from home.
The only downside is that they sometimes expect me to pre-empt my music listening just because some work-related program or other needs to be run on it.
What the hell is this idiot thinking?
Now now, be nice. According to The Register's article on the subject:
In other words, they deliberately asked him a loaded question just to see what would happen and his answer got quoted out of context by, among others, the author of the linked article.
The real story is nothing new. RedHat's people have maintained that Linux isn't a desktop OS for years.
(I sort of see their point but, I don't buy it. IMHO, Linux will get onto the desktop eventually but it'll be a slow process.)
There's that, but there's also an implied statement of intent. With a 2.5.XX kernel, they're saying "this is a work in progress" while with a 2.6-test version number, the message is, "this is now supposed to work correctly."
At that point, you know it wasn't just a bunch of patches thrown together to see if they work.
They'd better stop doing that now. Otherwise, they'll really piss off the open-source community.
Uh, Rackspace?
I was thinking more along the lines of the old X11 screensaver. But it does look a bit like their logo, doesn't it?
I can't really dispute the validity of the glider logo since, even if I never really got into the whole Game Of Life thing (my personal early-hacker obsession was fractals) but I don't really like the logo itself.
I'd go with a design that replaces the circles-in-squares with rectangles, about twice as wide as high and with the "dead" sectors completely empty. Something like this.
For black-and-white media, the red squares become whatever the foreground colour is supposed to be and if there are lots of colours available, the brightness of each rectangle could be adjusted to indicate the "aliveness" of that rectangle during some stage of the glider's life cycle.
The author of the piece, one Rob Enderle, is developing something of a reputation as a quote whore amongst the bloggers. Google will reveal more and there's a page of Enderle-watching here.
Flamebait is the right word for this sort of thing.
I'd really like to have an interface to the video system that is both fast and safe. At the moment, it's one or the other. Either I use straight X11 or I let the program bang on the hardware directly via DRI, SVGALib or the like.
I'd like to see video drivers in the kernel. Not necessarily full-featured OpenGL drivers, but something that:
Of these, #4 may not be possible to do safely, or may only be possible for some cards. If so, it would still be a win because a lot of applications will do fine with only the basic functionality and over time, as the bleeding-edge stuff becomes mundane, it will slowly trickle into the #3 category.
Looks like there's a bug in M-x stuff-ballot.
I like it. It's multi-coloured but still tasteful.
My only complaint is about the website itself. The pictures are too small. It'd be really nice if they'd put up a larger, clearer picture. Something around 1200DPI with 32-bit colour and detailed descriptions of the inks and paper used.
That'd be a big help.
You'd think this would be an obvious thing for Linux game distributors to do. That way, non-Linux users can still play the game just by booting off the CD.
(Plans for leveraging this strategy into Console World Domination!!!!! are beyond the scope of this post.)
I haven't listened to anything yet so I can't comment on the quality of their music, but I wouldn't be surprised if you're right. I get the impression from their website that they're more interested in the marketing aspect than in the music itself. Creative Commons licensing and free downloads are all well and good but ultimately, it has to be about the music.
That's why most of the other independant labels do only one or two related genres. It's because that's what they care about.
What these folks should be doing (IMHO) is selling their services as a promoter and distributer to other independant labels. They could still make sure the artists are treated in a non-evil manner through their contract with the label but they'd focus on what they're interested in--effectively using the net as a promotional tool--while the artist and label worry about making good music.
See, what you should have done at this point was to notify your customers first that you were blocking this company. That way, you can explain to them in advance that it's the monitoring company's fault and not yours.
As it is, I see your best option is to 1) keep blocking them until they shape up and 2) give your customers your side of the story. If this company is as sleazy as they sound, their sales drones have already sold the situation as something that's completely your fault and possibly dishonest too. (E.g. you're blocking them because they compete with your own monitoring service.) You need to make sure that your customers--all of them, not just your mutual customers--know that it's the monitoring company's fault. Reduce it down to "they cost you $BIGNUM per month in bandwidth due to their incompentence and they ignored us when we tried to talk to them about it."
This isn't a tech issue so much as a business issue. These assholes are playing hardball and you need to defend yourself.
Two points:
Firstly, the levy is on blank audio CD-Rs, not data CDRs. They're different in that the packages are labeled differently. Really. (Although I think they're in the process of changing that distinction.)
Secondly, I'd rather have the levy than DMCA-style heavy-handedness. The levy, at least, doesn't restrict what I can do to my own equipment or what software I can write. And yes, I know, the two are not mutually exclusive but as long as the levy makes some kinds of copying legal, it becomes that much harder for the industry bodies to insist on the more intrusive forms of legal protection.
Involuntarily supporting Celine Dion's career with each Knoppix CD is a small price to pay for freedom!
(Disclaimer: I'm Canadian but not a lawyer.)
I have a theory.
If you take a look at SourceForge and Freshmeat, you'll see thousands of projects that a) aren't anything new and/or b) don't work and/or c) were abandoned after release 0.000001. I suspect that a lot of the people who started those projects would, were they Windows users, be writing virusses and worms instead.
Getting industrial-strength development tools for Windows is hard. They're expensive, the documentation is bad, the APIs are horribly complicated and the beginner-oriented tools (e.g. Visual Basic) hide the underlying workings from you. With Linux, though, you get everything for free. The APIs are small and well-documented and there are dozens of industry-standard programming languages just there for you to use.
For a geeky fifteen-year-old, the coolest thing he can do under a typical Windows installation is to write a Word macro virus. Under Linux, he could, if he wanted to, reimplement his entire operating system piece by piece. And that's a lot cooler than writing a worm.
Then, there's the open-source culture. Linus managed to become rich and famous by writing free software, all while sticking it to a giant evil corporation. I think a lot of open-source coders secretly dream of becoming as famous as Linus someday.
So my theory is that, because of the wide availability of development tools and the geek culture surrounding OSS, lots of potential virus writers get diverted into less harmful things.
(Obviously, there are other factors as well but I thought I'd bring this up.)
This is also what Canada does. Then, after the polls close, the votes are counted by hand by the poll workers. (I believe it's actually done twice by different groups of workers and recounted until they match, but I'm not sure.) There is still the possibility of fraud, but you'd need a huge conspiracy to get away with anything but a small shift in votes.
With purely computerized voting machines, one programmer could chose the new President, and even get away with it if he's caught by disguising his hack as a bug.
Elections need to be treated as safety-critical processes, just like airplane flights. If they go wrong, people will die.
Aviation software is painstakingly debugged and there's always a professional pilot on board the plane ready to take over if something goes wrong. If Diebold (or whoever) went to those extremes to make sure the e-voting systems worked correctly, I'd probably feel better about them, but I'm pretty sure they didn't. For one thing, if they did, the whole system would cost more than just doing it all by hand.
Personally, I don't get the whole rush to automate vote counting. Yes, it costs more to do it by hand, but given what could go wrong, it strikes me as a no-brainer.
Freedom isn't efficient.
These same people decide when their PC is two years old that it's just "too screwed up" and go buy and brand-spanking-new one with the same flaws which they will proceed to bugger up in a month in a half.
Don't complain. Buy their old computers for twenty bucks each, then sell them to other such people as "reconditioned" systems for a couple of hundred (plus the old system as a trade-in.)
I mean, if these people are going to throw their money away, they may as well send some of it your way.
As an aside, a nearby computer store was, sometime back, charging CDN$50 a pop for virus removal.
Really.
Remember kids: strings is your friend. If you happen to get a job offer in the form of a Word document and the HR drone who sent it to you wasn't careful, you can often see the version that got sent to other candidates and, more importantly, how much money they were offered. It can do wonders for your bargaining position.