" It is just the United States, which has lacked in picking up on a trend that transports hundreds of thousands of people, in favour of polluting the air with carbon monoxide gases from car exhaust."
Trains pollute the air too. Most of the world's trains run on diesel fuel, and in some places they still run on coal. Even if the train is electric, chances are that the electricity comes from coal or diesel generators, unless it happens to be somewhere that uses nuclear power, in which case there are still plenty of pollution issues. And don't forget about all of the pollution related to the power used heating and cooling train stations, maintaining the trains, etc..
Trains don't prevent pollution, they just move it somewhere else. The real upside to trains is that they cut down on automobile traffic, allowing me to take a five-minute drive in fifteen minutes, because if the train's riders really were driving, gridlock would shut the cities down.
Powerpoint does not make people, or presentations, stupid. It just makes it too easy for stupid people to put a bad presentation together. In my last job, we put together excellent presentations by doing them the old-fashioned way-a big team, lots of writing and editing, and numerous preparatory presentations. I've seen other people pull this off pretty well, and even know someone whose job mostly involves doing excellent Powerpoint presentations instead of letting someone do bad ones.
Laziness is the real problem with Powerpoint. Any idiot can toss a presentation together in five minutes, add in a nice theme, and then spend another ten minutes on effects.
Worst of all is that some colleges are now implementing department-wide Powerpoint slides to go with lectures instead of letting professors just handle it themselves. I was in a programming class that started off really well, because the projector was broken and the professor used the blackboard. A month in the projector got fixed and the slides went up, within two weeks half the class dropped.
How hard is it for Canadians to avoid these taxes by just purchasing stuff from companies in the USA and having it shipped to Canada with false/inspecific information on the customs tag? For example, "variable-location magnetic media" instead of "iPod" or "shiny decorative plastic discs" instead of "blank DVD-R disks." I know that people in the USA do this sort of stuff all the time to import illegal stuff or avoid import taxes.
I've been wanting a HUD in my car since they were first announced in the 1980s, and the damned things are still only available in a few expensive sports cars and some luxury cars. Does anyone know of a third party add-on HUD for cars? I can't imagine that it would be hard to design one, after all, people already sell all sorts of crazy aftermarket guages.
"It's strange though--even after responding to all these, I still want to get a bike..."
That makes a little sense, I mean, you know that at least if you have a horrible bike wreck you won't end up like Christopher Reeve, but without millions of dollars to pay someone to wipe your ass.
My last employer was a startup working on defense contracts. Most of our employees either came from the military or large defense contractors, and were used to doing their work on whatever cruddy old desktop systems the IT staff tossed on a desk, none had ever had a new/fast/powerful computer, and we exploited that by providing high-end laptops for every employee; literally buying the most expensive VAIO model on the market-and those things had 15-inch screens. To these government geeks, a nice laptop was like candy, a very nice extra job benefit. That changed when they realized how heavy the damned things were, but I digress...
Anyway, one guy had a long commute-45 minutes minimum, sometimes over two hours, every day. He was also a horrible driver, one of those flaming assholes who won't wear a seatbelt, disables his airbag, ignores red lights and stop signs, all at twice the speed limit in a Ford F150. While trying to find time to view all of the extra features in the nine-disk LoTR:FoTR DVD set, it occured to him that he could use his laptop to watch movies while driving. He even got an FM adapter to play the sound via the stereo system.
"Personally I don't want Winamp 3 because every version I tried was horribly unstable and I had to end up uninstalling it."
I second the motion. Winamp 3 is a cranky little bitch, performance sucks, and the sound quality of Winamp playback is terrible. Long live iTunes, xmms, mplayer, etc..
Where they can go from here is obvious: finishing the Time-Warner/AOL merger to make all of that great TW content available free to AOL users, and to everyone else at a cost.
CNN.com sells all kind of nifty video services-those should be free for AOL users. RollingStone.com sells old articles-make those free for AOL. RollingStone.com also gives away half of the RollingStone interview online each month as an enticement to buy the magazine-give AOL users the whole thing. Create high-quality radio feeds playing nothing but TW music, only for AOL users. All of those TW movies that one can download for a fee? Give AOL users a price break.
This was what the AOL/TW merger was supposed to be, but for the two companies had very different personalities, and never meshed well. Rather than just break out the iron fist and get people working, the executives decided that they would be better off to just be nice about it and hope that things will just work out somehow. What AOL needs now is a guy like Steve Jobs, who isn't afraid to be an asshole, to come in, kick some asses, fire anyone who can't get this done, and they might just have enough time left to make it work. If they had done so two years ago, AOL would be on top of the world right now.
Agreed, especially now that iTunes is available on Windows. AOL need no longer spend money providing an alternative music player when Apple is doing a better job of it.
Disclaimer: I realize that that Winamp can play things other than music, but does anyone realy use it for that? Aside from when one forgets to not let Winamp associate with *everything* during the install?
If it looks like an open-relay to a spammer, why won't it look like one to an ISP? I really don't want to risk getting my company tossed off of the net because some nerd at my ISP refuses to believe that I'm not running an open relay...
I agree wholeheartedly, which is why I bought a Nomad. It costs less, I like the interface more, and the software it comes with is buggy as hell. But I saved about $200.
Apple hardware prices are damned-near set in stone. This is because, unlike most manufacturers, Apple does not head out looking for the best price on manufacturing, design, support, etc.. Apple picks better business partners, who pay higher wages to employees. So to keep profit margins high, Apple locks its prices pretty high.
Also, don't forget that Apple has its own retail and online stores, because very few retailers have ever done a good job at selling Apple hardware. Keeping those stores profitable is key to keeping the company aflot. The last thing Apple wants is for everyone with an Apple store and a Best Buy near home to go get Apple hardware at Best Buy at a discount.
Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer in the world. Wal-Mart alone could make low-cost, vendor-supported Linux computers available to almost everyone living in the continental United States. This still seems sort of hopeless-after all, consumers will still want Windows to run, well, almost all of the popular commercial software out there. After all, there isn't much commercial software, or hardware, support for Linux, right?
But that will change pretty fast once the largest retailer in the world is making Linux available to its customers. It would be a hell of a lot easier to make money from Linux software by slapping a "Wal-Mart PC Compatible" lable on the box and getting ten copies in every Wal-Mart in the USA. If Wal-Mart can succeed at selling PCs, it could even demand that software and hardware vendors support Linux to get a product onto Wal-Mart's shelves. Colleges that go all Microsoft in exchange for software discounts might have to stop requiring that students bring Windows PCs to school and use MS-Office formats for electronic submissions if half of their students realized how much money they could save by buying a Wal-Mart PC with the Java Desktop instead of a Windows PC and MS-Office.
Wal-Mart could be the catalyst for an Open-Source renaissance of sorts, bringing a shell prompts and compilers to the masses. If this report is true, and Sun can get Linux PCs on the shelves at Wal-Mart, a lot of people in Redmond are going to be really, REALLY scared.
This is another great reason we need term limits for Congress. Those people are supposed to be running the country-not rearranging voting districts to ensure that they'll get relected so they can be there to waste more time redistricting the next time around.
Think about it-how many problems could be solved if elected officials were more concerned with getting work done instead of getting re-elected! Do you really think that Fritz Hollings would have spent so much time passing bills for Disney if he hadn't needed their bribes, er, campaign donations, to get re-elected? Would we actually have a budget that could be passed if politicians worried about re-election weren't stuffing it with more pork than the country can afford?
Let's all stop wasting time fighting all of the problems caused by these corrupt scum, and just get laws passed to keep them from coming back!
Re:If this shipped with Lindows instead...
on
AOL's $299 PC
·
· Score: 1
More like $209- the OEM cost of Windows XP home is $90.
I am surprised that AOL doesn't push a discount Linux PC. That company has sunk billions of dollars into Linux, Open-Source software, a close relationship with Red hat, and yet, aside from their Linux backend (AOL runs thousands of Linux servers.), AOL isn't even *trying* to get anything out of that investment. Unless you count giving a Gecko browser to those few remaining Compuserve users, who were probably all just using IE and ignoring the special Compuserve software anyway.
Maybe that's how AOL works now, tho. It's just like the Time-Warner merger. Spend billions of dollars on what could create an incredible business, and then fuck it all up...
I'm learning to hate the damned things as much as I used to love them. Sure they increase productive, allow incredible scientific breakthroughs, blah blah blah... But in the long run all it seems to be good for is generating more stuff I don't need to overcomplicate my life!
Here's an idea-instead of using slot machines as models for the voting machines that will eventually be bought from Diebold, why not just hire the slot manufacturers to design and manufacturer secure, audited voting machines?
Oh, thats right-the slot machine makers aren't out there buying off politicians like Diebold. Oh well...
Does anyone else think that this could just be more hype from the Bush administration? Another program that won't get any support a few months after it is announced? Because that's what I'm hearing. It's like "No Child Left Behind," Bush stands up, talks a lot, distracts people from his horrible leadership, passes a few bills, and then won't fund it later.
Maybe this is more like the reconstruction of Afghanistan-you remember, that country that where we bombed the hell out of infrastructure until the government collapsed, and then, after he promised to help them rebuild, Bush all but abandoned the Afghani people so that he could focus on starting a war in Iraq?
And don't forget the war in Iraq, where reconstruction efforts are stuck in a quagmire of political games and beauracracy because Bush still hasn't put together any credible strategy for rebuilding the country and ending the US occupation.
Worst of all, how the hell are we going to pay for this? Public schools are going broke, class sizes are exploding, and our educational system is going down the toilet. Public college tuition is skyrocketing. States and munincipalities are suffering huge budget shortfalls, and can't afford to pay for disaster-preparation programs required after 9/11, because the feds refuse to fund them!
This is just more lies and hype from one of the worst leaders this nation has ever had-and anyone who gets excited about it needs to stop and think about all of the horrible problems this nation is facing before we start charging off toward the moon again.
"Mars probably has enough resources that a viable, self sustaining colony can be placed there and it will be a nicer place to live than the moon, especially if you start terraforming."
We cannot do that without a better understanding of the long-term affects of space travel on the human body. Astronauts who spent a lot of time at the ISS suffer horrible physical atrophy, and a trip to Mars would have similar effects, and then at the end, the humans would not be returning to the Earth that their bodies are meant for, so the atrophy would continue in Mars' lower gravity. The long term effects could very well be deadly, and even if not, the people on Mars would never be able to return to Earth. The effects on children born there are entirely unknown.
This is why we need to start with the moon. We have to learn somewhere close to home.
Plenty of people will say that molecular/atomic assemblers are impossible right up until the big breakthrough that makes it possible. That's how science works. People said that all sorts of computing stuff was impossible because vacuum tubes were too big, and then, all of a sudden, somebody figured out how to make transistors. All kinds of important stuff was impossible to figure out because the aether complicated it all and could not be measured, and then Einstein pointed out that it did not matter because the aether did not exist. Right now people are insisting that we will hit computing speed limits due to the limits of CMOS-but does anyone really think that there won't be a replacement?
Anything can happen with science. Magic is just what science cannot explain, because we have not figured out how to do it yet. But eventually, given enough time and resources, anything is possible.
This makes sense to me. Dell provides OEM support for the hardware and software they sell you pre-loaded on the computer, and nothing else. There is no reason, aside from just being nice, for Dell to waste resources helping people fix problems caused by third party software. Doing so will drastically increase the cost of Dell's systems-after all, walking a cluless luser through removing multiple adware programs can easily eat up fifteen minutes or more of time in uninstall routines, reboots, and checking to see if it worked. After a few tens-of-thousands of support calls from people like my mom, the costs will really add up-especially now that the phone techs are Americans (Yay!).
To make it really obvious, change the type of software causing the problem from spyware to Adobe Photoshop (I'm not insulting Photoship, this is *hypothetical*). Would you expect Dell to support problems caused by a Photoshop installation?
If Dell customers want support for this sort of thing, they should either pay Dell more money for extended support, or just hire a local computer support service to do the work.
One thing to keep in mind about those quaint old books in libraries is that many of them are older reference books full of incorrect or nearly-useless information. Much of this stuff is just wasting shelf space and rotting away, and the books would be better off in a private collection or a museum. The way I see it, better the library sell off old encyclopedias full of outdated geopolictical and scientic information and buy current, useful books, than for a kid researching data-storage technology to go to the library and not be able to find a book on the subject among endless shelves of twentieth-century remnants.
Something is only wrong with the Open Source community if you are an outsider trying to use it to make money or save money using Open Source code. Otherwise the Open Source community is just what it is-a bunch of programmers who share their work, and often collaborate, simply because they want to. It's very self-serving, but that's ok, because for the most part, the Open-Source community isn't pushing the rest of the world to give Open-Source any special privilige.
I think that the original author meant *legal* precedent. Because the GPL has not been held up in a court case, there is not much reason for companies to think about compliance. Companies just think "free," ignore the GPL, and get away with it until enough crabby Linux geeks complain or the FSF sends lawyers, and then they post the source.
The problem here is that the only people who really notice are Linux geeks, journalists, and Microsoft's PR people. Until the GPL is held up in court and a company is *forced* to put up the source, companies will continue to use GPL software and not share the source code.
I used to have a room full of computers. My apartment could handle it, at least after I ran CAT 5 along the walls to each of the desks, but after a while it all just got sort of silly, and I decided to start cutting back on the computer lab that was my life.
First, when a previous employer laid me off, I gave their extra computers that I had been storing (Really, we were storing equipment because the company couldn't afford storage space.) back. When I showed up with the stuff they all thought that I was nuts.
Then, I stopped doing contract work on weekends. Now I don't ever have tables covered with Sun systems laying around.
After that, I got sick of dealing with hard disk issues on the Ultra-60 I never used and sold it.
When my college-student sisters desktop started croaking, I gave her my old 700mhz Athlon machine.
After I finally gave up on trying to keep driver and Direct X versions compatible with my games, I stopped using my Windows box for anything but the occasional blackboad.com login, so it sits cold all day.
Most recently, a storm finally wiped out my poor little firewall, after four years of R2D2-like service, and I haven't fixed or replaced her yet.
So now I'm down to just using my iBook most of the time. Makes life nice and simple, and honestly, I don't really mind the silence that comes with all of those other computers being turned OFF.
Slashdot Mirror
" It is just the United States, which has lacked in picking up on a trend that transports hundreds of thousands of people, in favour of polluting the air with carbon monoxide gases from car exhaust."
Trains pollute the air too. Most of the world's trains run on diesel fuel, and in some places they still run on coal. Even if the train is electric, chances are that the electricity comes from coal or diesel generators, unless it happens to be somewhere that uses nuclear power, in which case there are still plenty of pollution issues. And don't forget about all of the pollution related to the power used heating and cooling train stations, maintaining the trains, etc..
Trains don't prevent pollution, they just move it somewhere else. The real upside to trains is that they cut down on automobile traffic, allowing me to take a five-minute drive in fifteen minutes, because if the train's riders really were driving, gridlock would shut the cities down.
Powerpoint does not make people, or presentations, stupid. It just makes it too easy for stupid people to put a bad presentation together. In my last job, we put together excellent presentations by doing them the old-fashioned way-a big team, lots of writing and editing, and numerous preparatory presentations. I've seen other people pull this off pretty well, and even know someone whose job mostly involves doing excellent Powerpoint presentations instead of letting someone do bad ones.
Laziness is the real problem with Powerpoint. Any idiot can toss a presentation together in five minutes, add in a nice theme, and then spend another ten minutes on effects.
Worst of all is that some colleges are now implementing department-wide Powerpoint slides to go with lectures instead of letting professors just handle it themselves. I was in a programming class that started off really well, because the projector was broken and the professor used the blackboard. A month in the projector got fixed and the slides went up, within two weeks half the class dropped.
How hard is it for Canadians to avoid these taxes by just purchasing stuff from companies in the USA and having it shipped to Canada with false/inspecific information on the customs tag? For example, "variable-location magnetic media" instead of "iPod" or "shiny decorative plastic discs" instead of "blank DVD-R disks." I know that people in the USA do this sort of stuff all the time to import illegal stuff or avoid import taxes.
I've been wanting a HUD in my car since they were first announced in the 1980s, and the damned things are still only available in a few expensive sports cars and some luxury cars. Does anyone know of a third party add-on HUD for cars? I can't imagine that it would be hard to design one, after all, people already sell all sorts of crazy aftermarket guages.
"It's strange though--even after responding to all these, I still want to get a bike..."
That makes a little sense, I mean, you know that at least if you have a horrible bike wreck you won't end up like Christopher Reeve, but without millions of dollars to pay someone to wipe your ass.
My last employer was a startup working on defense contracts. Most of our employees either came from the military or large defense contractors, and were used to doing their work on whatever cruddy old desktop systems the IT staff tossed on a desk, none had ever had a new/fast/powerful computer, and we exploited that by providing high-end laptops for every employee; literally buying the most expensive VAIO model on the market-and those things had 15-inch screens. To these government geeks, a nice laptop was like candy, a very nice extra job benefit. That changed when they realized how heavy the damned things were, but I digress...
Anyway, one guy had a long commute-45 minutes minimum, sometimes over two hours, every day. He was also a horrible driver, one of those flaming assholes who won't wear a seatbelt, disables his airbag, ignores red lights and stop signs, all at twice the speed limit in a Ford F150. While trying to find time to view all of the extra features in the nine-disk LoTR:FoTR DVD set, it occured to him that he could use his laptop to watch movies while driving. He even got an FM adapter to play the sound via the stereo system.
"Personally I don't want Winamp 3 because every version I tried was horribly unstable and I had to end up uninstalling it."
I second the motion. Winamp 3 is a cranky little bitch, performance sucks, and the sound quality of Winamp playback is terrible. Long live iTunes, xmms, mplayer, etc..
Where they can go from here is obvious: finishing the Time-Warner/AOL merger to make all of that great TW content available free to AOL users, and to everyone else at a cost.
CNN.com sells all kind of nifty video services-those should be free for AOL users. RollingStone.com sells old articles-make those free for AOL. RollingStone.com also gives away half of the RollingStone interview online each month as an enticement to buy the magazine-give AOL users the whole thing. Create high-quality radio feeds playing nothing but TW music, only for AOL users. All of those TW movies that one can download for a fee? Give AOL users a price break.
This was what the AOL/TW merger was supposed to be, but for the two companies had very different personalities, and never meshed well. Rather than just break out the iron fist and get people working, the executives decided that they would be better off to just be nice about it and hope that things will just work out somehow. What AOL needs now is a guy like Steve Jobs, who isn't afraid to be an asshole, to come in, kick some asses, fire anyone who can't get this done, and they might just have enough time left to make it work. If they had done so two years ago, AOL would be on top of the world right now.
Agreed, especially now that iTunes is available on Windows. AOL need no longer spend money providing an alternative music player when Apple is doing a better job of it.
Disclaimer: I realize that that Winamp can play things other than music, but does anyone realy use it for that? Aside from when one forgets to not let Winamp associate with *everything* during the install?
If it looks like an open-relay to a spammer, why won't it look like one to an ISP? I really don't want to risk getting my company tossed off of the net because some nerd at my ISP refuses to believe that I'm not running an open relay...
I agree wholeheartedly, which is why I bought a Nomad. It costs less, I like the interface more, and the software it comes with is buggy as hell. But I saved about $200.
Apple hardware prices are damned-near set in stone. This is because, unlike most manufacturers, Apple does not head out looking for the best price on manufacturing, design, support, etc.. Apple picks better business partners, who pay higher wages to employees. So to keep profit margins high, Apple locks its prices pretty high.
Also, don't forget that Apple has its own retail and online stores, because very few retailers have ever done a good job at selling Apple hardware. Keeping those stores profitable is key to keeping the company aflot. The last thing Apple wants is for everyone with an Apple store and a Best Buy near home to go get Apple hardware at Best Buy at a discount.
Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer in the world. Wal-Mart alone could make low-cost, vendor-supported Linux computers available to almost everyone living in the continental United States. This still seems sort of hopeless-after all, consumers will still want Windows to run, well, almost all of the popular commercial software out there. After all, there isn't much commercial software, or hardware, support for Linux, right?
But that will change pretty fast once the largest retailer in the world is making Linux available to its customers. It would be a hell of a lot easier to make money from Linux software by slapping a "Wal-Mart PC Compatible" lable on the box and getting ten copies in every Wal-Mart in the USA. If Wal-Mart can succeed at selling PCs, it could even demand that software and hardware vendors support Linux to get a product onto Wal-Mart's shelves. Colleges that go all Microsoft in exchange for software discounts might have to stop requiring that students bring Windows PCs to school and use MS-Office formats for electronic submissions if half of their students realized how much money they could save by buying a Wal-Mart PC with the Java Desktop instead of a Windows PC and MS-Office.
Wal-Mart could be the catalyst for an Open-Source renaissance of sorts, bringing a shell prompts and compilers to the masses. If this report is true, and Sun can get Linux PCs on the shelves at Wal-Mart, a lot of people in Redmond are going to be really, REALLY scared.
This is another great reason we need term limits for Congress. Those people are supposed to be running the country-not rearranging voting districts to ensure that they'll get relected so they can be there to waste more time redistricting the next time around.
Think about it-how many problems could be solved if elected officials were more concerned with getting work done instead of getting re-elected! Do you really think that Fritz Hollings would have spent so much time passing bills for Disney if he hadn't needed their bribes, er, campaign donations, to get re-elected? Would we actually have a budget that could be passed if politicians worried about re-election weren't stuffing it with more pork than the country can afford?
Let's all stop wasting time fighting all of the problems caused by these corrupt scum, and just get laws passed to keep them from coming back!
More like $209- the OEM cost of Windows XP home is $90.
I am surprised that AOL doesn't push a discount Linux PC. That company has sunk billions of dollars into Linux, Open-Source software, a close relationship with Red hat, and yet, aside from their Linux backend (AOL runs thousands of Linux servers.), AOL isn't even *trying* to get anything out of that investment. Unless you count giving a Gecko browser to those few remaining Compuserve users, who were probably all just using IE and ignoring the special Compuserve software anyway.
Maybe that's how AOL works now, tho. It's just like the Time-Warner merger. Spend billions of dollars on what could create an incredible business, and then fuck it all up...
I'm learning to hate the damned things as much as I used to love them. Sure they increase productive, allow incredible scientific breakthroughs, blah blah blah... But in the long run all it seems to be good for is generating more stuff I don't need to overcomplicate my life!
Here's an idea-instead of using slot machines as models for the voting machines that will eventually be bought from Diebold, why not just hire the slot manufacturers to design and manufacturer secure, audited voting machines?
Oh, thats right-the slot machine makers aren't out there buying off politicians like Diebold. Oh well...
Does anyone else think that this could just be more hype from the Bush administration? Another program that won't get any support a few months after it is announced? Because that's what I'm hearing. It's like "No Child Left Behind," Bush stands up, talks a lot, distracts people from his horrible leadership, passes a few bills, and then won't fund it later.
Maybe this is more like the reconstruction of Afghanistan-you remember, that country that where we bombed the hell out of infrastructure until the government collapsed, and then, after he promised to help them rebuild, Bush all but abandoned the Afghani people so that he could focus on starting a war in Iraq?
And don't forget the war in Iraq, where reconstruction efforts are stuck in a quagmire of political games and beauracracy because Bush still hasn't put together any credible strategy for rebuilding the country and ending the US occupation.
Worst of all, how the hell are we going to pay for this? Public schools are going broke, class sizes are exploding, and our educational system is going down the toilet. Public college tuition is skyrocketing. States and munincipalities are suffering huge budget shortfalls, and can't afford to pay for disaster-preparation programs required after 9/11, because the feds refuse to fund them!
This is just more lies and hype from one of the worst leaders this nation has ever had-and anyone who gets excited about it needs to stop and think about all of the horrible problems this nation is facing before we start charging off toward the moon again.
"Mars probably has enough resources that a viable, self sustaining colony can be placed there and it will be a nicer place to live than the moon, especially if you start terraforming."
We cannot do that without a better understanding of the long-term affects of space travel on the human body. Astronauts who spent a lot of time at the ISS suffer horrible physical atrophy, and a trip to Mars would have similar effects, and then at the end, the humans would not be returning to the Earth that their bodies are meant for, so the atrophy would continue in Mars' lower gravity. The long term effects could very well be deadly, and even if not, the people on Mars would never be able to return to Earth. The effects on children born there are entirely unknown.
This is why we need to start with the moon. We have to learn somewhere close to home.
Plenty of people will say that molecular/atomic assemblers are impossible right up until the big breakthrough that makes it possible. That's how science works. People said that all sorts of computing stuff was impossible because vacuum tubes were too big, and then, all of a sudden, somebody figured out how to make transistors. All kinds of important stuff was impossible to figure out because the aether complicated it all and could not be measured, and then Einstein pointed out that it did not matter because the aether did not exist. Right now people are insisting that we will hit computing speed limits due to the limits of CMOS-but does anyone really think that there won't be a replacement?
Anything can happen with science. Magic is just what science cannot explain, because we have not figured out how to do it yet. But eventually, given enough time and resources, anything is possible.
This makes sense to me. Dell provides OEM support for the hardware and software they sell you pre-loaded on the computer, and nothing else. There is no reason, aside from just being nice, for Dell to waste resources helping people fix problems caused by third party software. Doing so will drastically increase the cost of Dell's systems-after all, walking a cluless luser through removing multiple adware programs can easily eat up fifteen minutes or more of time in uninstall routines, reboots, and checking to see if it worked. After a few tens-of-thousands of support calls from people like my mom, the costs will really add up-especially now that the phone techs are Americans (Yay!).
To make it really obvious, change the type of software causing the problem from spyware to Adobe Photoshop (I'm not insulting Photoship, this is *hypothetical*). Would you expect Dell to support problems caused by a Photoshop installation?
If Dell customers want support for this sort of thing, they should either pay Dell more money for extended support, or just hire a local computer support service to do the work.
One thing to keep in mind about those quaint old books in libraries is that many of them are older reference books full of incorrect or nearly-useless information. Much of this stuff is just wasting shelf space and rotting away, and the books would be better off in a private collection or a museum. The way I see it, better the library sell off old encyclopedias full of outdated geopolictical and scientic information and buy current, useful books, than for a kid researching data-storage technology to go to the library and not be able to find a book on the subject among endless shelves of twentieth-century remnants.
Something is only wrong with the Open Source community if you are an outsider trying to use it to make money or save money using Open Source code. Otherwise the Open Source community is just what it is-a bunch of programmers who share their work, and often collaborate, simply because they want to. It's very self-serving, but that's ok, because for the most part, the Open-Source community isn't pushing the rest of the world to give Open-Source any special privilige.
I think that the original author meant *legal* precedent. Because the GPL has not been held up in a court case, there is not much reason for companies to think about compliance. Companies just think "free," ignore the GPL, and get away with it until enough crabby Linux geeks complain or the FSF sends lawyers, and then they post the source.
The problem here is that the only people who really notice are Linux geeks, journalists, and Microsoft's PR people. Until the GPL is held up in court and a company is *forced* to put up the source, companies will continue to use GPL software and not share the source code.
I used to have a room full of computers. My apartment could handle it, at least after I ran CAT 5 along the walls to each of the desks, but after a while it all just got sort of silly, and I decided to start cutting back on the computer lab that was my life.
First, when a previous employer laid me off, I gave their extra computers that I had been storing (Really, we were storing equipment because the company couldn't afford storage space.) back. When I showed up with the stuff they all thought that I was nuts.
Then, I stopped doing contract work on weekends. Now I don't ever have tables covered with Sun systems laying around.
After that, I got sick of dealing with hard disk issues on the Ultra-60 I never used and sold it.
When my college-student sisters desktop started croaking, I gave her my old 700mhz Athlon machine.
After I finally gave up on trying to keep driver and Direct X versions compatible with my games, I stopped using my Windows box for anything but the occasional blackboad.com login, so it sits cold all day.
Most recently, a storm finally wiped out my poor little firewall, after four years of R2D2-like service, and I haven't fixed or replaced her yet.
So now I'm down to just using my iBook most of the time. Makes life nice and simple, and honestly, I don't really mind the silence that comes with all of those other computers being turned OFF.