Not exactly a day of rest
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Tag Archives: windows
Progress on various fronts
Coming Soon to a Computer Near You
(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!
Household chores and other things
Second shift
Got home about 5:30 tonight. I have spent most of my time since then … working on computers. Tried to revive our oldest Windows 98 box. Eventually decided it was not worth saving. The only thing it had been doing lately was to function as a print server. I connected the printer to mia_mcdavid‘s workstation, found a driver on the internet (the original CD being lost), and we can print again.
Also checked e-mail from work. There was a SQL Server problem there on a new server. I guessed what might fix it, tried it, and it seemed to have solved the problem. This is what one of my old bosses called “Voodoo programming”–You cannot really explain why something works.
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.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 