From the article, it sounds like this process would also work on yard waste. In places like Portland, OR, a house with a moderate sized yard could easily produce 30-50 Lbs of grass clippings per week during the 9 month growing season. That would likely be enough to keep a conversion facility busy, especially when combined with waste output from the Camas paper plant.
This looks to be a promising way of disposing of waste material. Even if the efficiency isn't as great as bio-diesel, as long as it produces a net gain it's a good avenue of research.
Don't forget that most cameras have a two stage shutter button. On an AF point and shoot, the first stage will adjust focus and light levels. The second stage actually shoots the picture.
Most point and shoots that I've seen will snap the picture almost instantly if you allow it to compose the shot in the first stage first. Going straight to the second stage the camera has to figure out what you're shooting, how far away it is, how much light is present and then adjust accordingly before it will actually take the shot.
DSLRs have to go through the same process though almost all of the adjustments are in the lens body and can often be switched to manual. I'd recommend getting very forgiving lenses if you want to go DSLR for speed.
In the end, it's your call. You can have a blurry thing that might be your daughter sitting on a fuzzy thing that might be your couch, or you can have a crisp, well composed portrait of your couch.
The reason a higher pixel count is always going to result in larger compressed image (assuming the same subject, lighting, etc.) even when you're well past the limits of human perception is that there is still noise in the image that must be dealt with. Image compression simply tries to remove redundant information with acceptable losses or compromises. Removing redundant information depends on predictability and detectable patterns. Higher resolution images with more detail or noise become more random from the perspective of the compression algorithm.
And before you say, "let's just work on detecting noise and allow the compressor to eliminate it." The only real way to detect noise from subject is to compare multiple exposures. This process is much too compute intensive for a handheld device that must return results in a fraction of a second and sip batteries slow enough to be useful for more than a dozen shots. Trying to do it in one pass would be brutal on images where the subject is indistinguishable from random noise (i.e. a shot of the night time sky).
I see $111.60 for ten packs of film (8-10 shots per pack) with a disclaimer regarding pending discontinuation. Yeah they still sell them, but only until stock runs out.
I suppose I should say something nice about travel downtown while I'm here. If you park at a MAX station in one of the less crowded sectors of the city then you can pretty easily hit a lot of the more interesting areas via lightrail and foot. That's what I usually do whenever I head downtown.
Yes, the one-way streets downtown are laid out in a manner that ensures that you'll never be able to make a left hand turn where you need to. And the surface streets are confusing enough that it takes several hours of exploration in order to get back on the interstate traveling towards wherever you came from. Often times it's best to just travel north until you can turn around at Jantzen Beach if you intend to go south or south until you get to the Lake Oswego area if you intend to go north.
I've had a few USB thumb drives survive the wash as well. Though admittedly they did always escape from their pocket in the wash so that they never made it to the dryer. I just set them on the exhaust fan on top of my PC case for a day or so before I try using it again and everything has worked out fine so far.
GNU/Linux is the kernel, everything else is just userland apps that run on top of the kernel.
The reason why Linux is so scalable is because there is a distinction between the kernel and everything else. Furthermore the kernel is designed to be modular so that you don't need to compile in support for everything from all and sundry different file systems to PCI plug and play support if you're just going to install the thing in a router or wristwatch.
What would you consider to be "full blown" anyway? I would argue that Linux starts at a very basic kernel and builds up from there. However, it would seem that your argument is that Linux starts at a much higher level and then gets stripped down to fit into embedded environments. What exactly is the default level that you seem to be referring to? What is the least that you can have and still be "full blown"?
The answer is simple. The people that ultimately decide what gets purchased are businessmen and not engineers. As such they will try to exactly hit the minimum required amount of equipment to handle the situation. Unfortunately they will also use a naive method of determining that minimum, i.e. they may look at the number of sales transactions for the last couple years on that day and then use that information to project a number of 'visitors' to have the IT department prepare for.
The network manager, if they're any good, will, however, think in terms of peak page requests and database transactions per minute, how to minimize cross-server requests and how to tweak site assets to minimize bandwidth requirements. Unfortunately the data that he presents to the people that control the spending accounts will not be in line with what they already presume to know based on the last 5 years of sales data. At this point, either the network manager needs to know how to be a salesman or the VP that he reports to needs to trust his people to know what they were hired to know. If both conditions fail then the site is doomed on Black Friday. If either condition holds true then either the web site will be prepared to the network manager's recommendation or, and this is more likely, the following decision process will be followed.
Where X = Money spent on preparation And Y(X) = Margin dollars earned in sales after spending X on preparation Maximize Y(X)-X
Like I said, simple.
Of course every company has a sort of corporate personality. Many of which will tend to throw more people at a problem rather than invest in equipment for the existing people to use. If you can see this happening in their stores then you can be sure that they're doing it in their web department as well. Unfortunately the best that such a practice can hope to accomplish is speeding up recovery time from equipment failures. Many companies are also completely clueless in terms of technology so they may just be doomed from the start. As an anecdotal example for the latter case, I work for a company whose website uses several cross server assets per page. This works fine from an external browser but causes several firewall password prompts per page from any of our in store terminals.
Besides, 65535 is at the top end of the unsigned 16-bit int range, which seems an odd type to be using for spreadsheet calculations (where negative values are as likely as positive). This depends on the type of data that is being worked on. A financial ledger may have numbers that are positive, negative or some scalar of i. Census or poll data, mileage charts, employee time-sheets or transactions/time (to name a few),however, will seldom have negative numbers.
A large number of x86/x64 systems now have support for SSE and MMX instructions which, if done right, could provide a significant speed increase when working with a large set of small numbers. However, many instructions in these extensions behave in an data destructive manner when an overflow condition is encountered. For example, when working with saturation arithmetic instructions you may compare the result with $FFFF and, on a match, branch to code that handles a saturation condition on the assumption that the real result is greater than $FFFF. Such an approach works fine until you encounter a situation where $FFFF is the correct result but the program flow jumps to the saturation handler anyway, possibly with garbage data stuffed in registers that would normally be used to pass values to the handler.
Of course it's just speculation that they attempted to optimize the offending function in assembly; and it's further speculation that they chose to optimize it with SIMD instructions. However the fact that this bug appears right at the edge of the unsigned 16-bit integer range really does suggest that somebody was trying to do something clever in assembly and failed to account for all possible conditions.
If anyone out there is bored and has read this far, try timing a few operations on a large set of small integers in Excel 2007 and then toggle off SSE/SSE2 in BIOS and time the same set again. I'm curious as to whether or not MS did do this sort of optimization but I'm not curious enough to borrow a copy of Excel from The Pirate Bay just for this test.
We met nearly 3 years ago and for a while we just sorta hung out together as friends. Over the course of the past year, though, we started getting serious about being more than just buddies. We were spending every available waking moment talking to each other online.
Here's the twist though. I'm 26 and I thought she was 20. It turns out that she misrepresented her age by about 7 years. So in reality she is a 13 year old girl still in Jr. High. She told me the truth not long ago and backed it up with more than enough proof to show that she was now being honest with me. Shortly after that, about 2 weeks, her dad figured out why she was spending so much time online and revoked her online privileges.
So here I am trying to reconcile the thoughts in my head. I worry about how much damage I might have unknowingly done to her emotionally. But I also know that I enjoyed the time I spent talking with her and at present I miss her terribly. I was depressed to the point of not being able to function for the first couple weeks after her dad let her say goodbye. Currently I'm still depressed and lonely but I've at least recovered enough to put on a false face at work.
Now I'm trying to decide between waiting for her or trying to move on. Neither option is appealing. And yes I probably do need real therapy but you guys are way cheaper.
For all the suggestions that eating their toner is a nice way to retaliate.
I seriously doubt it. They are most likely using an auto-dialing script on a PC fax-modem so that they can cut out the cost and hassle associated with having a live person man the fax machine feeding it junk all day. And if you can actually get through to send a fax in the 1/2 second between numbers on the script, your fax will either be deleted, ignored or treated as a confirmation that your number works without ever going to paper.
You can bet these spammers have put more thought into what you can do to them than you have and have even experienced attempts at retaliation from other persons like minded to yourself. As such don't expect them to be vulnerable to such naive attempts at breaking their system. The best recourse is going to be either changing your number, setting up electronic reception of faxes or contacting relevant and credible legal authorities.
Then consider that likely a good chunk of the law student's are planning to be Nth generation lawyers. This means that you get to bring in parents, siblings and possibly grandparents that may be in firms that would like to be precedent setters in **AA style cases.
Yeah real smart for the **AA's to go marching into a den of hundreds (if not over a thousand) highly vicious (Type-A personality) lions (Lawyers). (parenthetical commentary FTW)
Think of all the things that we do and use that allows us to make up for physical deficiencies. Our digestive tracts are susceptible to a large variety of very harmful parasites and micro-organisms, so we cook our food prior to eating it. Many highly, human, populated areas have climates where we would have a high mortality rate from exposure if we didn't wear clothing and warm ourselves with artificial heat sources. We have various forms of medical treatment for different injuries and illnesses, ones that would disable or kill us in the wild. And we have weapons that make up for our natural lack of strength and speed.
Basically once we took the path for intelligence all other evolutionary paths were either suspended or put in regression. Whereas other primates still needed to develop natural ways to cope with environmental challenges since they did not develop the intellectual ability to solve problems that they were ill fitted to survive against.
The 400W rating on your power supply really means 400W Maximum output if you pull the maximum rated amperage for each rail in the power supply.
Next, the power consumption of your system fluctuates quite a bit from moment to moment. Just idling about with a SSH server and mail server waiting for a connection, you are pulling much less power than if you have your CPU maxed (all cores where applicable), your GPU rendering a complex scene with lots of pixel/vertex shaders, large blocks of RAM getting swapped in and out, all of your CD/DVD burners burning, all of your hard disks thrashing about on a defrag and a George Foreman's Grill attached to a USB line.
And if doing all that you even come close (within 100W) to your power supplies rated maximum then it's time to get a bigger power supply if you don't want to see your hardware die a silent death from dirty power.
Actually I think the approach of his company is reasonable and beneficial to his target customers. Going line by line through his list
Windows updates - If any of his customers are on dial-up, this saves them hours of connection time right out of the box. And if you say dial-up is dying then you haven't met the families and coworkers of either myself or my friends.
Sun Java - Many applets that the user might encounter later require java. The Sun implementation is stable and should be considered to be the reference for that platform. Furthermore it is a lengthy download for anyone on a dial-up connection should they choose to install it later in order to make something else work.
Firefox - Many like it, some do not. If you prefer IE or if you paid for Opera then feel free to uninstall. AFIK it does not create any permanent scarring that remains after removal. (possible exception of the mozilla folder remaining in the users application settings folder and consuming precious KBs unless deleted)
AD-Aware - Many like it as a tool for maintaining system health. If you do not or if you already have another solution feel free to uninstall.
Spybot - See AD-Aware
Nero - This or a similar program is necessary in order to use the included DVD-Burner for anything not covered by XPs built in burning capability. As such the likelihood of a customer becoming upset because they have to spend more money to buy software to use the hardware they just spent good money on is greater than the likelihood of a customer becoming upset because they had to uninstall a piece of software so that they could replace it with the program they prefer. Besides the OEM in this case may get Nero licenses for little to no additional cost from the manufacturer of the DVD drives they use.
While all of these items, with the exception of the Windows updates, could easily be included on a separate disc, it is easier and more transparent to the customer to simply install them to begin with. Your title is correct in stating that first impressions mean a lot, however for the majority of PC users, those who'd have an easier time understanding Latin spoken by a drunken discen with a heavy accent than your final paragraph, the first impression of the described setup is a system that works correctly and runs at a responsive pace. For those users that do understand what that paragraph meant, the aforementioned list of software would not provide an unreasonable challenge to removal should the user elect to do so.
Besides, if you ask the guy what gets installed with a system build and request that certain items be omitted at the time of purchase, I'm certain that he'd be happy to simply burn a disc for you so that you can install it yourself later if you should so chose.
Unfortunately alot of bloatware, adware and spyware programs are notoriously unstable. Some of the stuff out there is written so badly that it makes Zango products look good.
Also unfortunate is that when some poorly written craplet tries to dereference a pointer that no longer holds an address to a valid memory location and subsequently crashes, the novice end user (read "most of them") will not stop to appreciate the importance of the operating system halting a wayward process, rather, they will hear the abrupt warning tone, see the scary looking error message and think to themselves "crap, my computer just broke."
The concern of this Microsoft exec is not that the OS will crash because of these programs, it is that they will attribute the unreliable nature of bloatware to them rather than to the authors of said bloatware.
If a car dealership started installing glue on cupholders, funky Wal-Mart CD decks, giant pink steering wheel covers and coffee can exhaust tips on it's brand new BMW's would you think less of that make of car because it allowed such aftermarket components to ruin it? Or would you think less of the dealership for choosing to force those things on you?
If you chose to do so, you could load up a Mac OSX, or even a Linux system with buggy, unstable "craplets" that will slow down the system, confuse the end user and potentially cause data loss or break the functionality of other applications. If those programs were installed before the end user gets their hands on the system then you could also see situations of crapware being installed with root permissions and direct ties to the system kernel.
Apple prevents this by flat out refusing anyone else from building a system with their OS. But you'd have to try a little to convince me that it is not possible to create a custom Linux distro that starts out tainted upon install.
Fortunately for both Linux and OSX the majority of crapware producers focus on Windows simply because of it's majority market share.
If she continues writing, I wonder if she'll continue to use the HP universe for future story lines. She has put a lot of effort into building it and it seems to be as cohesive as Tolkien's Middle Earth (though perhaps not as expansive).
Of course if she isn't completely idiotic with her money, the work that she has done on Harry Potter will have her and her children set for life financially if she should choose to retire once the last three movies are complete.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article, it sounds like this process would also work on yard waste. In places like Portland, OR, a house with a moderate sized yard could easily produce 30-50 Lbs of grass clippings per week during the 9 month growing season. That would likely be enough to keep a conversion facility busy, especially when combined with waste output from the Camas paper plant.
This looks to be a promising way of disposing of waste material. Even if the efficiency isn't as great as bio-diesel, as long as it produces a net gain it's a good avenue of research.
Don't forget that most cameras have a two stage shutter button. On an AF point and shoot, the first stage will adjust focus and light levels. The second stage actually shoots the picture.
Most point and shoots that I've seen will snap the picture almost instantly if you allow it to compose the shot in the first stage first. Going straight to the second stage the camera has to figure out what you're shooting, how far away it is, how much light is present and then adjust accordingly before it will actually take the shot.
DSLRs have to go through the same process though almost all of the adjustments are in the lens body and can often be switched to manual. I'd recommend getting very forgiving lenses if you want to go DSLR for speed.
In the end, it's your call. You can have a blurry thing that might be your daughter sitting on a fuzzy thing that might be your couch, or you can have a crisp, well composed portrait of your couch.
The reason a higher pixel count is always going to result in larger compressed image (assuming the same subject, lighting, etc.) even when you're well past the limits of human perception is that there is still noise in the image that must be dealt with. Image compression simply tries to remove redundant information with acceptable losses or compromises. Removing redundant information depends on predictability and detectable patterns. Higher resolution images with more detail or noise become more random from the perspective of the compression algorithm.
And before you say, "let's just work on detecting noise and allow the compressor to eliminate it." The only real way to detect noise from subject is to compare multiple exposures. This process is much too compute intensive for a handheld device that must return results in a fraction of a second and sip batteries slow enough to be useful for more than a dozen shots. Trying to do it in one pass would be brutal on images where the subject is indistinguishable from random noise (i.e. a shot of the night time sky).
Follow the link given in the Summary and then read what was written by the original author of the game.
Seriously RTFA.
I see $111.60 for ten packs of film (8-10 shots per pack) with a disclaimer regarding pending discontinuation.
Yeah they still sell them, but only until stock runs out.
I suppose I should say something nice about travel downtown while I'm here. If you park at a MAX station in one of the less crowded sectors of the city then you can pretty easily hit a lot of the more interesting areas via lightrail and foot. That's what I usually do whenever I head downtown.
Yes, the one-way streets downtown are laid out in a manner that ensures that you'll never be able to make a left hand turn where you need to. And the surface streets are confusing enough that it takes several hours of exploration in order to get back on the interstate traveling towards wherever you came from. Often times it's best to just travel north until you can turn around at Jantzen Beach if you intend to go south or south until you get to the Lake Oswego area if you intend to go north.
I've had a few USB thumb drives survive the wash as well. Though admittedly they did always escape from their pocket in the wash so that they never made it to the dryer. I just set them on the exhaust fan on top of my PC case for a day or so before I try using it again and everything has worked out fine so far.
Without his ability to practice law, I can imagine him running the talk-show circles for whatever he can get.
"Free buffet lunch and airfare, count me in." -- Jack Thompson in the near future.
GNU/Linux is the kernel, everything else is just userland apps that run on top of the kernel.
The reason why Linux is so scalable is because there is a distinction between the kernel and everything else. Furthermore the kernel is designed to be modular so that you don't need to compile in support for everything from all and sundry different file systems to PCI plug and play support if you're just going to install the thing in a router or wristwatch.
What would you consider to be "full blown" anyway? I would argue that Linux starts at a very basic kernel and builds up from there. However, it would seem that your argument is that Linux starts at a much higher level and then gets stripped down to fit into embedded environments. What exactly is the default level that you seem to be referring to? What is the least that you can have and still be "full blown"?
The network manager, if they're any good, will, however, think in terms of peak page requests and database transactions per minute, how to minimize cross-server requests and how to tweak site assets to minimize bandwidth requirements. Unfortunately the data that he presents to the people that control the spending accounts will not be in line with what they already presume to know based on the last 5 years of sales data. At this point, either the network manager needs to know how to be a salesman or the VP that he reports to needs to trust his people to know what they were hired to know. If both conditions fail then the site is doomed on Black Friday. If either condition holds true then either the web site will be prepared to the network manager's recommendation or, and this is more likely, the following decision process will be followed. Like I said, simple.
Of course every company has a sort of corporate personality. Many of which will tend to throw more people at a problem rather than invest in equipment for the existing people to use. If you can see this happening in their stores then you can be sure that they're doing it in their web department as well. Unfortunately the best that such a practice can hope to accomplish is speeding up recovery time from equipment failures. Many companies are also completely clueless in terms of technology so they may just be doomed from the start. As an anecdotal example for the latter case, I work for a company whose website uses several cross server assets per page. This works fine from an external browser but causes several firewall password prompts per page from any of our in store terminals.
Why does this reply make me think of lolcats?
Besides, 65535 is at the top end of the unsigned 16-bit int range, which seems an odd type to be using for spreadsheet calculations (where negative values are as likely as positive).
This depends on the type of data that is being worked on. A financial ledger may have numbers that are positive, negative or some scalar of i . Census or poll data, mileage charts, employee time-sheets or transactions/time (to name a few),however, will seldom have negative numbers.
A large number of x86/x64 systems now have support for SSE and MMX instructions which, if done right, could provide a significant speed increase when working with a large set of small numbers. However, many instructions in these extensions behave in an data destructive manner when an overflow condition is encountered. For example, when working with saturation arithmetic instructions you may compare the result with $FFFF and, on a match, branch to code that handles a saturation condition on the assumption that the real result is greater than $FFFF. Such an approach works fine until you encounter a situation where $FFFF is the correct result but the program flow jumps to the saturation handler anyway, possibly with garbage data stuffed in registers that would normally be used to pass values to the handler.
Of course it's just speculation that they attempted to optimize the offending function in assembly; and it's further speculation that they chose to optimize it with SIMD instructions. However the fact that this bug appears right at the edge of the unsigned 16-bit integer range really does suggest that somebody was trying to do something clever in assembly and failed to account for all possible conditions.
If anyone out there is bored and has read this far, try timing a few operations on a large set of small integers in Excel 2007 and then toggle off SSE/SSE2 in BIOS and time the same set again. I'm curious as to whether or not MS did do this sort of optimization but I'm not curious enough to borrow a copy of Excel from The Pirate Bay just for this test.
I fell in love with a girl I met on EQ2.
We met nearly 3 years ago and for a while we just sorta hung out together as friends. Over the course of the past year, though, we started getting serious about being more than just buddies. We were spending every available waking moment talking to each other online.
Here's the twist though. I'm 26 and I thought she was 20. It turns out that she misrepresented her age by about 7 years. So in reality she is a 13 year old girl still in Jr. High. She told me the truth not long ago and backed it up with more than enough proof to show that she was now being honest with me. Shortly after that, about 2 weeks, her dad figured out why she was spending so much time online and revoked her online privileges.
So here I am trying to reconcile the thoughts in my head. I worry about how much damage I might have unknowingly done to her emotionally. But I also know that I enjoyed the time I spent talking with her and at present I miss her terribly. I was depressed to the point of not being able to function for the first couple weeks after her dad let her say goodbye. Currently I'm still depressed and lonely but I've at least recovered enough to put on a false face at work.
Now I'm trying to decide between waiting for her or trying to move on. Neither option is appealing. And yes I probably do need real therapy but you guys are way cheaper.
True enough. Voice lines are a bit more vulnerable to DoS attacks.
For all the suggestions that eating their toner is a nice way to retaliate.
I seriously doubt it. They are most likely using an auto-dialing script on a PC fax-modem so that they can cut out the cost and hassle associated with having a live person man the fax machine feeding it junk all day. And if you can actually get through to send a fax in the 1/2 second between numbers on the script, your fax will either be deleted, ignored or treated as a confirmation that your number works without ever going to paper.
You can bet these spammers have put more thought into what you can do to them than you have and have even experienced attempts at retaliation from other persons like minded to yourself. As such don't expect them to be vulnerable to such naive attempts at breaking their system. The best recourse is going to be either changing your number, setting up electronic reception of faxes or contacting relevant and credible legal authorities.
Too much jitter. Wi-Fi latency is known to fluctuate every time a large organic mass with a high iron content moves across the room.
Then consider that likely a good chunk of the law student's are planning to be Nth generation lawyers. This means that you get to bring in parents, siblings and possibly grandparents that may be in firms that would like to be precedent setters in **AA style cases.
Yeah real smart for the **AA's to go marching into a den of hundreds (if not over a thousand) highly vicious (Type-A personality) lions (Lawyers). (parenthetical commentary FTW)
Think of all the things that we do and use that allows us to make up for physical deficiencies. Our digestive tracts are susceptible to a large variety of very harmful parasites and micro-organisms, so we cook our food prior to eating it. Many highly, human, populated areas have climates where we would have a high mortality rate from exposure if we didn't wear clothing and warm ourselves with artificial heat sources. We have various forms of medical treatment for different injuries and illnesses, ones that would disable or kill us in the wild. And we have weapons that make up for our natural lack of strength and speed.
Basically once we took the path for intelligence all other evolutionary paths were either suspended or put in regression. Whereas other primates still needed to develop natural ways to cope with environmental challenges since they did not develop the intellectual ability to solve problems that they were ill fitted to survive against.
The 400W rating on your power supply really means 400W Maximum output if you pull the maximum rated amperage for each rail in the power supply.
Next, the power consumption of your system fluctuates quite a bit from moment to moment. Just idling about with a SSH server and mail server waiting for a connection, you are pulling much less power than if you have your CPU maxed (all cores where applicable), your GPU rendering a complex scene with lots of pixel/vertex shaders, large blocks of RAM getting swapped in and out, all of your CD/DVD burners burning, all of your hard disks thrashing about on a defrag and a George Foreman's Grill attached to a USB line.
And if doing all that you even come close (within 100W) to your power supplies rated maximum then it's time to get a bigger power supply if you don't want to see your hardware die a silent death from dirty power.
And that just made the intro to Idiocracy flash into my head.
Actually I think the approach of his company is reasonable and beneficial to his target customers.
Going line by line through his list
Windows updates - If any of his customers are on dial-up, this saves them hours of connection time right out of the box. And if you say dial-up is dying then you haven't met the families and coworkers of either myself or my friends.
Sun Java - Many applets that the user might encounter later require java. The Sun implementation is stable and should be considered to be the reference for that platform. Furthermore it is a lengthy download for anyone on a dial-up connection should they choose to install it later in order to make something else work.
Firefox - Many like it, some do not. If you prefer IE or if you paid for Opera then feel free to uninstall. AFIK it does not create any permanent scarring that remains after removal. (possible exception of the mozilla folder remaining in the users application settings folder and consuming precious KBs unless deleted)
AD-Aware - Many like it as a tool for maintaining system health. If you do not or if you already have another solution feel free to uninstall.
Spybot - See AD-Aware
Nero - This or a similar program is necessary in order to use the included DVD-Burner for anything not covered by XPs built in burning capability. As such the likelihood of a customer becoming upset because they have to spend more money to buy software to use the hardware they just spent good money on is greater than the likelihood of a customer becoming upset because they had to uninstall a piece of software so that they could replace it with the program they prefer. Besides the OEM in this case may get Nero licenses for little to no additional cost from the manufacturer of the DVD drives they use.
While all of these items, with the exception of the Windows updates, could easily be included on a separate disc, it is easier and more transparent to the customer to simply install them to begin with. Your title is correct in stating that first impressions mean a lot, however for the majority of PC users, those who'd have an easier time understanding Latin spoken by a drunken discen with a heavy accent than your final paragraph, the first impression of the described setup is a system that works correctly and runs at a responsive pace. For those users that do understand what that paragraph meant, the aforementioned list of software would not provide an unreasonable challenge to removal should the user elect to do so.
Besides, if you ask the guy what gets installed with a system build and request that certain items be omitted at the time of purchase, I'm certain that he'd be happy to simply burn a disc for you so that you can install it yourself later if you should so chose.
Unfortunately alot of bloatware, adware and spyware programs are notoriously unstable. Some of the stuff out there is written so badly that it makes Zango products look good.
Also unfortunate is that when some poorly written craplet tries to dereference a pointer that no longer holds an address to a valid memory location and subsequently crashes, the novice end user (read "most of them") will not stop to appreciate the importance of the operating system halting a wayward process, rather, they will hear the abrupt warning tone, see the scary looking error message and think to themselves "crap, my computer just broke."
The concern of this Microsoft exec is not that the OS will crash because of these programs, it is that they will attribute the unreliable nature of bloatware to them rather than to the authors of said bloatware.
If a car dealership started installing glue on cupholders, funky Wal-Mart CD decks, giant pink steering wheel covers and coffee can exhaust tips on it's brand new BMW's would you think less of that make of car because it allowed such aftermarket components to ruin it? Or would you think less of the dealership for choosing to force those things on you?
If you chose to do so, you could load up a Mac OSX, or even a Linux system with buggy, unstable "craplets" that will slow down the system, confuse the end user and potentially cause data loss or break the functionality of other applications. If those programs were installed before the end user gets their hands on the system then you could also see situations of crapware being installed with root permissions and direct ties to the system kernel.
Apple prevents this by flat out refusing anyone else from building a system with their OS. But you'd have to try a little to convince me that it is not possible to create a custom Linux distro that starts out tainted upon install.
Fortunately for both Linux and OSX the majority of crapware producers focus on Windows simply because of it's majority market share.
If she continues writing, I wonder if she'll continue to use the HP universe for future story lines. She has put a lot of effort into building it and it seems to be as cohesive as Tolkien's Middle Earth (though perhaps not as expansive).
Of course if she isn't completely idiotic with her money, the work that she has done on Harry Potter will have her and her children set for life financially if she should choose to retire once the last three movies are complete.