(If you let this monster in, you really cannot call it your computer any more)
Microsoft patents the mother of all adware systems. Via Slashdot.
A great argument for open-source software!
Coming Soon to a Computer Near You
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Tag Archives: business
I Love a Good Hoax!
Real Sweatshops and Virtual Reality
The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer.
“Min leaned back and stretched, then set about the tedious business of resurrecting his character, a drawn-out sequence of operations that can put a player out of action for as long as 10 minutes. In farms with daily production quotas, too much time spent dead instead of farming gold can put the worker’s job at risk. And in shops where daily wages are tied to daily harvests, every minute lost to death is money taken from the farmer’s pocket. But there are times when death is more than just an economic setback for a gold farmer, and this was one of them.”
Via Slashdot.
Times have changed!
From a computer class
I spend the last three days at an excellent class on SQL Server 2005 (Microsoft’s latest and greatest database system). I am not an enthusiastic M’soft fan, but it is what we use at work, and I have enough battles to fight there already.
Anyway, a couple side notes: Continue reading
The Microsoft Tax
The last couple days I was shopping for computer parts and visited two local stores that have used/reconditioned computers for sale. At the low end of the price ranges in both stores I saw the same model Pentium III Compaq DeskPro for sale. One store wanted $59 for it. The other was asking $149. Is the second just being greedy? They had more memory on the box. At current retail prices that would account for $20. It may have had a bigger hard disk–perhaps another $10-20 at current prices for old hard disks (I did a little checking). That still leaves $50-60. Pure profit? No–the more expensive store was selling a functional system with Windows 2000. The cheaper store was selling a nearly naked box. It had just enough pieces of DOS to boot. Looking at the current price of Windows, that is not unreasonable. So I really cannot fault the second store.
But, don’t you need Windows? No, you don’t. Linux is free. That $50-60 goes straight to Bill Gates.
Books
I bought a few books at Penguicon, mainly because it was a chance to buy from an independent book dealer, and in fact a dealer I remembered from Chicagoland cons. Since the demise of Irish Books and Media I have become even more conscious of how small book sellers are threatened by the chains, and by you-know-who on the Internet.
Of course, this is not easy. Even with my rather odd interests, you-know-who has some books with a better price than I can find elsewhere. So I have to think about how much extra I am willing to pay to help the independents.
Today haddayr got me off the hook on one such case: She showed me where the book in question (or at least the text thereof) was available free on the Internet. But I cannot really count on that happening very often.
The Global Economy
Scotty’s ashes
They are to be launched into space, but what then? Celestis, the company that arranges for handling the cremation ashes, suggests that they are going into orbit. However, the firm that is providing the rocket clearly states that their vehicles are only capable of suborbital flights. More at Bad Astronomy.
Orbital or suborbital? James Doohan and Gordon Cooper certainly understood the difference, and I think it would matter to them.
Star Wars in the News
$100k For Kenobi’s Cloak. OTOH Chess Enlightenment is not so enthusiastic about the same character.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 