Negroponte and his type will never learn that you can not put anything out which can be interpreted as a threat to Microsoft AND tell them who you are selling or giving the products to.
They don't even know that this Windows-on-the-XO is all a plan to terminate the project. To run them out of funds and essentially render them insignificant. Do you really think Microsoft wanted to help the project and spread Windows while at the same time taking them over a year to get Windows XP running on the XO? It reminds me of how the developer and business community kept asking Microsoft for JDBC drivers for MS SQL Server. 3rd party options were available but you know how adverse many businesses are non-Microsoft software. Well Microsoft finally conceeded and said they'd provide a JDBC driver but it was going to take them 18 months to fully test it and release it. That's right, a JDBC driver taking 1.5 years for Microsoft to ship. This is what Microsoft is doing to the OLPC. Playing their game of killing them in slow motion.
Can you imagine if the Speak-N-Spell had Linux running on it how that product would end up once Microsoft used their influence to get the impression Windows was required for it to be acceptable? The OLPC was originally designed as a special purpose teaching tool with custom software to make it as easy to use as an appliance for these tasks. Now, it has turned into a tool to teach the way Microsoft experts decided Microsoft software should be launched and found on a computer over 15 years ago. And a very slow one at that.
Microsoft gets a point for fooling some highly educated people. The OLPC gets -1 point for being suckered into this track of putting Windows on the XO. Bender and others get 5 points for seeing this and trying to save what real work can be saved(Sugar) and 10 points go to anyone who takes the hardware design of the XO, ports it to ARM and comes out with what I would consider a better product.
but he could have come to the table with a selection of apps he found and ask about those instead of taking the lazy mans way of asking without doing any research of his own.
There's a reason that URL, justfuckinggoogleit.com, exists. People are justfuckinglazy.com. IMO.
nope, MS Office isn't on 90% of PCs sold, the Windows OS is. They do make a profit from MS Office but IMO, if they didn't have the Windows OS, MS Office would not have the market share.
Why they make it for the Mac is something only the execs at Microsoft know. As a rule, they do not build product for other platforms because Windows is what feeds them and without it, they all starve. ie without Windows, they have no leverage and that means a much much smaller marketshare. Every time they did do some version of a product for another OS it was for the purpose of protecting Windows. Sounds strange but it is true. IE for Solaris was to pay MainSoft so they didn't get an anti-trust case for ditching the Win32 for UNIX vendors. IE for Mac was to keep Netscape and Java off the Mac for 5 years and helped MS terminate the Netscape threat. MS Office for Mac was IIRC, Microsofts first real software project( Word for Mac ) or something like that so there's history there. If they dumped MS Office for Mac, they know the Mac crowd would file anti-trust charges and so they keep it going. I would bet they constantly talk about when to kill it as Apple is growing at a good pace at Windows expense.
I can't recall anything else in the last 15 years Microsoft did outside of their own OS. In 1994/95 OS/2 had over 15 million users, Bill Gates had once said if an OS got 15 million users they'd port MS Word to it but we knew they would never do an OS/2 version. But some still brought it up. Know of any apps I missed?
speaking of monopoly, is this something a convicted monopolist can do to push their OS? Paying vendors millions to put "Windows Ready" stickers or similar junk on boxes, keyboards, literature etc is bad enough but now they are paying salaries of people at the stores to push their operating system over the competitions?
And how much is the store getting because I'll volunteer 8-16 hours a week at the local retail store to explain open source and even hand out CDs for free but I'm not going to pay the store to let me do that.
Something just does not smell right about this plan IMO.
you left out the cost of benefits for each employee. IIRC, that's around 30% so roughly that's another $2 million or $8.2 million.
With Seinfeld getting $10 million, Gates is probably getting 2x that(guess) so there's another $30 million. With production costs of all the ad spots and odds/ends it's probably $50 million not including the costs of running the TV ad spots or paying the ad company.
A drop in the bucket when you need to keep Windows important since it is pretty much your only money maker and it brings in $10s of billions in profits annually. IMO.
I'm kinda pissed that the HP setup is getting good press since as you mention, a battery on a cart can get you plenty of hours of use. Dell had embedded a small ARM processor on one of their laptops and by booting Linux on that instead of the Intel x86 CPU, they were posting like 12 hours or something like that. I had hopes that others would follow the lead but now we see that jokes like adding a 3lb battery is what others are doing to dilute value of the concept Dell started.
really, that's the first I had heard of that defense. I don't quite buy it since NiMH batteries are in every Prius on the street today and have been since 1997. The Prius was released to the Japanese market in 1997, 2000 in the US.
Toyota thought NiMH batteries were good enough to put in their Rav4-EV and Toyota sold the car instead of leasing it. It was also GM and their buddies who hired "experts" to tell the CARB board that their research shows the US Auto industry would have to not only give Americans the car but also pay them $15,0000 if the car was and EV.
IMO, there is far more evidence pointing to the EV-1 being destroyed to prevent EV growth or acceptance in the market. If you look at GM's business model of profiting from large vehicles, profiting from dealerships doing the massive amounts of maintenance an ICE based system requires it looks pretty clear why they not only would not sell the EV-1 but collected them and crushed them along with the equipment to make them. It was also very kind of GM to sell the majority stake in the NiMH patent to Texico(IIRC), you know them as a big oil company. Big surprise that NiMH batteries can not be made larger than 10Ah and used in EVs under restrictions from the patent holder.
IMO, in 2003, the EV-1 was a very viable car and with a 120 mile range on the NiMH batteries, it was too viable.
the GM Volt can go to freeway speeds in EV-only mode while the Prius can only go to 40-something in EV-only mode. There was a hybrid of the sort the GM Volt is in the let 90s by a company called Rosen Motors but Detroit would not invest and they closed shop.
Also, the GM Volt is an EV but with a tiny battery pack for 40 miles of EV-only driving. Anything after that it requires a motor-generator unit to burn fuel to provide electric power. I'm not sure if it will put 'extra' power in the batteries or how the batteries get back up to a full charge. So it might be that after the first 40 miles, the fuel powered engine might have to run any time the car is moving. With the Toyota hybrid system plugin conversion, at light loading, it would still run in EV-only mode even when the extra battery capacity was depleted.
When you look at the GM Volt, it's kinda like the EV-1 but with a much smaller battery pack and a motor-generator in the trunk for when the battery gets used up. Still amazing to see GM doing this after just recently crushing the EV-1's and spending so many years saying that hybrids were wrong and bad for the US. But then again, they were paid to promote hydrogen for the last 7 years so who knows what they REALLY want to do.
Didn't GM make the EV1 and pull it off the market in 2003? We'll see what they do with this Volt thing since they hyped this up the wazzo and the latest pictures look nothing like what they claimed was the Volt. And the GM Volt design is only good for 40 miles in electric mode and must rely on a gas engine after that. The EV1 got 120 miles on a charge when they used NiMH batteries. And GM once owned the majority share of the NiMH patent but sold it to the oil industry which does not allow large NiMH batteries for use in electric cars. GM sucks in many ways. IMO.
And FYI, the Toyota hybrid system will run on electric power only, ie no gas engine running. It is because of their design that people are putting in extra batteries, charging them at home, and then are getting over 100 MPG since they can and do run only in EV-only mode.
the guy was probably more worried about electric cars and not so much hybrids. Just think about all the standard replacement parts needed on a regular gasoline engine. hint:oil filter, air filter, fuel filters, fuel pumps, exhaust system, engine oil, transmission oil, transmission filter, radiator fluid. Get the picture?
An electric car does not even need a transmission. Could be a reason why the US auto industry has no plans for a 100% electric vehicle for over 10 years and many of the EV clubs are telling their members to convert convert convert and show them EVs are practical.
from what I saw, they were mentioning "hacking" powering the device when the batteries go dead. And with such large segments, there's just so much you can do with it. Can't even do a power bar unless 1/3, 2/3, 3/3 is of interest.
What would be interesting is if you could put a homemade backing on it to energize the e-ink and draw custom things inside those segment areas.
in the last thread on Xbox stuff, someone mentioned Microsoft was poised to get back into the PC gaming market and with the obvious failure of the Xbox at stopping the PlayStation market growth, it would seem the logical thing for them to do. If they don't, they would have destroyed their own user base with the Xbox since the whole purpose of the Xbox was to protect the Windows marketshare. By moving people from the PC for games to the console, they've probably moved them to the PS and off of Windows and they'll probably stay on the console. IMO.
this same kind of thing( replace *nix with Windows ) is what took out the LAX comm system a few years ago and left dozens and dozens of airplanes in the air and on the ground at/over LAX without communications.
What blows me away is that for years, UNIX systems were one of the defacto standards for mission critical OSs. Along comes a marketing company, Microsoft, and people are saying it is capable of mission critical use even when there are constant disruptions from virus attacks, Ctl-Alt-Del and BSoD are a well known features, and any of a hundred other reasons it is NOT ready for mission critical systems.
What kinds of morons are running the show anyways? And it is about time people start getting fired for this junk. From my experience on operating systems, UNIX was the one OS where when you wrote code, you dealt with the business logic/code and not OS issues. Only once in a blue moon did an OS patch or structure tweak get in the way of coding the application(s). OS/2 was pretty good but not as good as UNIX and Windows was the worst. Gawd, I still hear people complaining about that little Windows Mobile OS crashing. They can't even get a small chunk of code working properly let alone the behemoth that is the Windows desktop and server OS.
you should have pointed him to the Hannaford guy and his comments on how good Microsoft software is and how easy it is to keep those systems secure and running.
The more and more it gets out that these security and reliability failures are due to the poor foundation that is the Microsoft OS and middleware, the harder it will be to say, nobody gets fired for choosing Microsoft. IMO
they are losing billions and a huge portion of the population doesn't even know what RRoD is. They have seen it but don't know it has a name. They wrote off billions last year to try and make this year look good but they will probably never make a profit on the product.
And really, the Xbox has been a failure for what it was intended to do and that is hold off Sony's PlayStation. The PS2 is out selling Microsofts Xbox360 in a big way and the PS3 is now at or around even with Xbox360 quarterly numbers. There are hundreds of millions of PS2s on the market and the PS3 is still moving up that ladder.
No wonder Microsoft is going to try and go back to building the PC gaming market. Once again, they'll use the marketshare of Windows because they can't compete AND MAKE A PROFIT with out it.
didn't they go out and buy up a number of big game development houses? I know in the high end graphics market, they purchased SoftImage to get a Windows version. They forced them to do a port to Windows and tried to kill the UNIX version. Fortunately, those using SoftImage knew what a piece of crap Windows was and so the UNIX base would not purchase the Windows version and if the company wanted to not totally fail, they couldn't end the UNIX version. Microsoft eventually sold off SoftImage. Could be bull but that's what it sounded like happened.
Most likely the only reason a developer would do an exclusive on Xbox is because they were either owned by Microsoft or paid by Microsoft for that. The market for the PS2 and PS3 users dwarfs Microsofts Xbox market.
The ad was about the PC users being able to go out and you can get have your cake and eat it too. Granted, they think Windows gives you that but as you really know, GNU and Linux get you that in spades. It's all about choice and what YOU want.
Is that really their pitch? It would make sense if Microsoft hadn't pretty much stopped much of the OEM customization and product differentiation when Windows 95 shipped some 13 years ago. So, although one can go to any number of stores and see a number of products from different hardware vendors, you are stuck with the same human interface system on all of them. And what is worst, it is Windows Vista.
Last I checked, there weren't too many complaints about Apple hardware nor the interface which is Mac OS-X.
So is a Microsoft ad about choice really any kind of shot at Apple or really going to make people feel all warm and fuzzy? I doubt it.
what else could explain how this could be accepted as worth $10 to Seinfeld, how many millions to Gates and all that on top of what the ad agency is being paid.
Quick, put GPS tracking systems on them because they've totally lost it. Surely they are bound to just start wandering the halls.
We laughed quite loudly after the disgusting Gates butt shot.
I was referring to the oppressive government and thinking more about human rights. And I know the US has gone backwards some in the last 8 years also.
As far as Georgia goes, they were nuts to move on that region knowing that the Russian military was right over the hill. But Russia showed that they were not just trying to protect the people of South Ossetia but wanted to really whack Georgia for being so buddy buddy with the US and NATO.
There was Putin and his public dislike of all things US. The radioactive poisoning. Some FBI link to a SPAMMER inside of Russia but Putins government would not let US prosecutors go after them. The election where Putin creates a seat so he's still on top. More anti-US rhetoric. And more recently the Georgia incident where Putin is the one in the press on the first and second day. After that it is the acting President but it was pretty obvious Putin is da man.
Now a hole in the head of a webmaster while INSIDE a Police car. It all sounds like the old USSR and KGB era tactics to me. Well, it was good for some while it lasted. IMO
the PC has become a revenue stream much like the store shelves at you local retail outlet. Very much of what is on the shelf and where it is on the shelf is paid to the retailer to get the product there. Customer product demands didn't do it, money did. The Windows PC is that way and has been for over 10 years. IMO, this is why you have not seen Open Office loaded on any of these Windows PCs. There is nobody paying to put it there and there is someone paying to put other applications there.
Good for Best Buy for making a business model from removing the junk customers don't want. After all, they are Best Buy customers first and HP then Microsoft,X,Y,Z customers next.
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Negroponte and his type will never learn that you can not put anything out which can be interpreted as a threat to Microsoft AND tell them who you are selling or giving the products to.
They don't even know that this Windows-on-the-XO is all a plan to terminate the project. To run them out of funds and essentially render them insignificant. Do you really think Microsoft wanted to help the project and spread Windows while at the same time taking them over a year to get Windows XP running on the XO? It reminds me of how the developer and business community kept asking Microsoft for JDBC drivers for MS SQL Server. 3rd party options were available but you know how adverse many businesses are non-Microsoft software. Well Microsoft finally conceeded and said they'd provide a JDBC driver but it was going to take them 18 months to fully test it and release it. That's right, a JDBC driver taking 1.5 years for Microsoft to ship. This is what Microsoft is doing to the OLPC. Playing their game of killing them in slow motion.
Can you imagine if the Speak-N-Spell had Linux running on it how that product would end up once Microsoft used their influence to get the impression Windows was required for it to be acceptable? The OLPC was originally designed as a special purpose teaching tool with custom software to make it as easy to use as an appliance for these tasks. Now, it has turned into a tool to teach the way Microsoft experts decided Microsoft software should be launched and found on a computer over 15 years ago. And a very slow one at that.
Microsoft gets a point for fooling some highly educated people. The OLPC gets -1 point for being suckered into this track of putting Windows on the XO. Bender and others get 5 points for seeing this and trying to save what real work can be saved(Sugar) and 10 points go to anyone who takes the hardware design of the XO, ports it to ARM and comes out with what I would consider a better product.
LoB
but he could have come to the table with a selection of apps he found and ask about those instead of taking the lazy mans way of asking without doing any research of his own.
There's a reason that URL, justfuckinggoogleit.com, exists. People are justfuckinglazy.com. IMO.
LoB
nope, MS Office isn't on 90% of PCs sold, the Windows OS is. They do make a profit from MS Office but IMO, if they didn't have the Windows OS, MS Office would not have the market share.
Why they make it for the Mac is something only the execs at Microsoft know. As a rule, they do not build product for other platforms because Windows is what feeds them and without it, they all starve. ie without Windows, they have no leverage and that means a much much smaller marketshare. Every time they did do some version of a product for another OS it was for the purpose of protecting Windows. Sounds strange but it is true. IE for Solaris was to pay MainSoft so they didn't get an anti-trust case for ditching the Win32 for UNIX vendors. IE for Mac was to keep Netscape and Java off the Mac for 5 years and helped MS terminate the Netscape threat. MS Office for Mac was IIRC, Microsofts first real software project( Word for Mac ) or something like that so there's history there. If they dumped MS Office for Mac, they know the Mac crowd would file anti-trust charges and so they keep it going. I would bet they constantly talk about when to kill it as Apple is growing at a good pace at Windows expense.
I can't recall anything else in the last 15 years Microsoft did outside of their own OS. In 1994/95 OS/2 had over 15 million users, Bill Gates had once said if an OS got 15 million users they'd port MS Word to it but we knew they would never do an OS/2 version. But some still brought it up. Know of any apps I missed?
LoB
speaking of monopoly, is this something a convicted monopolist can do to push their OS? Paying vendors millions to put "Windows Ready" stickers or similar junk on boxes, keyboards, literature etc is bad enough but now they are paying salaries of people at the stores to push their operating system over the competitions?
And how much is the store getting because I'll volunteer 8-16 hours a week at the local retail store to explain open source and even hand out CDs for free but I'm not going to pay the store to let me do that.
Something just does not smell right about this plan IMO.
LoB
you left out the cost of benefits for each employee. IIRC, that's around 30% so roughly that's another $2 million or $8.2 million.
With Seinfeld getting $10 million, Gates is probably getting 2x that(guess) so there's another $30 million. With production costs of all the ad spots and odds/ends it's probably $50 million not including the costs of running the TV ad spots or paying the ad company.
A drop in the bucket when you need to keep Windows important since it is pretty much your only money maker and it brings in $10s of billions in profits annually. IMO.
LoB
I'm kinda pissed that the HP setup is getting good press since as you mention, a battery on a cart can get you plenty of hours of use. Dell had embedded a small ARM processor on one of their laptops and by booting Linux on that instead of the Intel x86 CPU, they were posting like 12 hours or something like that. I had hopes that others would follow the lead but now we see that jokes like adding a 3lb battery is what others are doing to dilute value of the concept Dell started.
LoB
really, that's the first I had heard of that defense. I don't quite buy it since NiMH batteries are in every Prius on the street today and have been since 1997. The Prius was released to the Japanese market in 1997, 2000 in the US.
Toyota thought NiMH batteries were good enough to put in their Rav4-EV and Toyota sold the car instead of leasing it. It was also GM and their buddies who hired "experts" to tell the CARB board that their research shows the US Auto industry would have to not only give Americans the car but also pay them $15,0000 if the car was and EV.
IMO, there is far more evidence pointing to the EV-1 being destroyed to prevent EV growth or acceptance in the market. If you look at GM's business model of profiting from large vehicles, profiting from dealerships doing the massive amounts of maintenance an ICE based system requires it looks pretty clear why they not only would not sell the EV-1 but collected them and crushed them along with the equipment to make them. It was also very kind of GM to sell the majority stake in the NiMH patent to Texico(IIRC), you know them as a big oil company. Big surprise that NiMH batteries can not be made larger than 10Ah and used in EVs under restrictions from the patent holder.
IMO, in 2003, the EV-1 was a very viable car and with a 120 mile range on the NiMH batteries, it was too viable.
LoB
the GM Volt can go to freeway speeds in EV-only mode while the Prius can only go to 40-something in EV-only mode. There was a hybrid of the sort the GM Volt is in the let 90s by a company called Rosen Motors but Detroit would not invest and they closed shop.
Also, the GM Volt is an EV but with a tiny battery pack for 40 miles of EV-only driving. Anything after that it requires a motor-generator unit to burn fuel to provide electric power. I'm not sure if it will put 'extra' power in the batteries or how the batteries get back up to a full charge. So it might be that after the first 40 miles, the fuel powered engine might have to run any time the car is moving. With the Toyota hybrid system plugin conversion, at light loading, it would still run in EV-only mode even when the extra battery capacity was depleted.
When you look at the GM Volt, it's kinda like the EV-1 but with a much smaller battery pack and a motor-generator in the trunk for when the battery gets used up. Still amazing to see GM doing this after just recently crushing the EV-1's and spending so many years saying that hybrids were wrong and bad for the US. But then again, they were paid to promote hydrogen for the last 7 years so who knows what they REALLY want to do.
LoB
Didn't GM make the EV1 and pull it off the market in 2003? We'll see what they do with this Volt thing since they hyped this up the wazzo and the latest pictures look nothing like what they claimed was the Volt. And the GM Volt design is only good for 40 miles in electric mode and must rely on a gas engine after that. The EV1 got 120 miles on a charge when they used NiMH batteries. And GM once owned the majority share of the NiMH patent but sold it to the oil industry which does not allow large NiMH batteries for use in electric cars. GM sucks in many ways. IMO.
And FYI, the Toyota hybrid system will run on electric power only, ie no gas engine running. It is because of their design that people are putting in extra batteries, charging them at home, and then are getting over 100 MPG since they can and do run only in EV-only mode.
LoB
the guy was probably more worried about electric cars and not so much hybrids. Just think about all the standard replacement parts needed on a regular gasoline engine. hint:oil filter, air filter, fuel filters, fuel pumps, exhaust system, engine oil, transmission oil, transmission filter, radiator fluid. Get the picture?
An electric car does not even need a transmission. Could be a reason why the US auto industry has no plans for a 100% electric vehicle for over 10 years and many of the EV clubs are telling their members to convert convert convert and show them EVs are practical.
LoB
NiMH pack more power than comparable sized NiCAD batteries. Maybe the OP was thinking lithium.
There are differences in how fast you can get energy out of the batteries but the OP stated "capacity".
LoB
from what I saw, they were mentioning "hacking" powering the device when the batteries go dead. And with such large segments, there's just so much you can do with it. Can't even do a power bar unless 1/3, 2/3, 3/3 is of interest.
What would be interesting is if you could put a homemade backing on it to energize the e-ink and draw custom things inside those segment areas.
LoB
in the last thread on Xbox stuff, someone mentioned Microsoft was poised to get back into the PC gaming market and with the obvious failure of the Xbox at stopping the PlayStation market growth, it would seem the logical thing for them to do. If they don't, they would have destroyed their own user base with the Xbox since the whole purpose of the Xbox was to protect the Windows marketshare. By moving people from the PC for games to the console, they've probably moved them to the PS and off of Windows and they'll probably stay on the console. IMO.
LoB
this same kind of thing( replace *nix with Windows ) is what took out the LAX comm system a few years ago and left dozens and dozens of airplanes in the air and on the ground at/over LAX without communications.
What blows me away is that for years, UNIX systems were one of the defacto standards for mission critical OSs. Along comes a marketing company, Microsoft, and people are saying it is capable of mission critical use even when there are constant disruptions from virus attacks, Ctl-Alt-Del and BSoD are a well known features, and any of a hundred other reasons it is NOT ready for mission critical systems.
What kinds of morons are running the show anyways? And it is about time people start getting fired for this junk. From my experience on operating systems, UNIX was the one OS where when you wrote code, you dealt with the business logic/code and not OS issues. Only once in a blue moon did an OS patch or structure tweak get in the way of coding the application(s). OS/2 was pretty good but not as good as UNIX and Windows was the worst. Gawd, I still hear people complaining about that little Windows Mobile OS crashing. They can't even get a small chunk of code working properly let alone the behemoth that is the Windows desktop and server OS.
LoB
you should have pointed him to the Hannaford guy and his comments on how good Microsoft software is and how easy it is to keep those systems secure and running.
The more and more it gets out that these security and reliability failures are due to the poor foundation that is the Microsoft OS and middleware, the harder it will be to say, nobody gets fired for choosing Microsoft. IMO
LoB
they are losing billions and a huge portion of the population doesn't even know what RRoD is. They have seen it but don't know it has a name. They wrote off billions last year to try and make this year look good but they will probably never make a profit on the product.
And really, the Xbox has been a failure for what it was intended to do and that is hold off Sony's PlayStation. The PS2 is out selling Microsofts Xbox360 in a big way and the PS3 is now at or around even with Xbox360 quarterly numbers. There are hundreds of millions of PS2s on the market and the PS3 is still moving up that ladder.
No wonder Microsoft is going to try and go back to building the PC gaming market. Once again, they'll use the marketshare of Windows because they can't compete AND MAKE A PROFIT with out it.
LoB
didn't they go out and buy up a number of big game development houses? I know in the high end graphics market, they purchased SoftImage to get a Windows version. They forced them to do a port to Windows and tried to kill the UNIX version. Fortunately, those using SoftImage knew what a piece of crap Windows was and so the UNIX base would not purchase the Windows version and if the company wanted to not totally fail, they couldn't end the UNIX version. Microsoft eventually sold off SoftImage. Could be bull but that's what it sounded like happened.
Most likely the only reason a developer would do an exclusive on Xbox is because they were either owned by Microsoft or paid by Microsoft for that. The market for the PS2 and PS3 users dwarfs Microsofts Xbox market.
LoB
The ad was about the PC users being able to go out and you can get have your cake and eat it too. Granted, they think Windows gives you that but as you really know, GNU and Linux get you that in spades. It's all about choice and what YOU want.
Sorry Bill, Jerry, that ad just didn't work IMO.
LoB
Is that really their pitch? It would make sense if Microsoft hadn't pretty much stopped much of the OEM customization and product differentiation when Windows 95 shipped some 13 years ago. So, although one can go to any number of stores and see a number of products from different hardware vendors, you are stuck with the same human interface system on all of them. And what is worst, it is Windows Vista.
Last I checked, there weren't too many complaints about Apple hardware nor the interface which is Mac OS-X.
So is a Microsoft ad about choice really any kind of shot at Apple or really going to make people feel all warm and fuzzy? I doubt it.
LoB
what else could explain how this could be accepted as worth $10 to Seinfeld, how many millions to Gates and all that on top of what the ad agency is being paid.
Quick, put GPS tracking systems on them because they've totally lost it. Surely they are bound to just start wandering the halls.
We laughed quite loudly after the disgusting Gates butt shot.
LoB
Don't forget the 1200 new batteries they would need. The cost of those would likely come close to the cost of these laptops.
LoB
I was referring to the oppressive government and thinking more about human rights. And I know the US has gone backwards some in the last 8 years also.
As far as Georgia goes, they were nuts to move on that region knowing that the Russian military was right over the hill. But Russia showed that they were not just trying to protect the people of South Ossetia but wanted to really whack Georgia for being so buddy buddy with the US and NATO.
LoB
There was Putin and his public dislike of all things US. The radioactive poisoning. Some FBI link to a SPAMMER inside of Russia but Putins government would not let US prosecutors go after them. The election where Putin creates a seat so he's still on top. More anti-US rhetoric. And more recently the Georgia incident where Putin is the one in the press on the first and second day. After that it is the acting President but it was pretty obvious Putin is da man.
Now a hole in the head of a webmaster while INSIDE a Police car. It all sounds like the old USSR and KGB era tactics to me. Well, it was good for some while it lasted. IMO
LoB
the PC has become a revenue stream much like the store shelves at you local retail outlet. Very much of what is on the shelf and where it is on the shelf is paid to the retailer to get the product there. Customer product demands didn't do it, money did. The Windows PC is that way and has been for over 10 years. IMO, this is why you have not seen Open Office loaded on any of these Windows PCs. There is nobody paying to put it there and there is someone paying to put other applications there.
Good for Best Buy for making a business model from removing the junk customers don't want. After all, they are Best Buy customers first and HP then Microsoft,X,Y,Z customers next.
LoB
great, replying to a feak'n dumb-ass AC....
LoB