On 17/05/11 23:30, Martin Houston wrote:
The under £100 cheap PCs for the disadvantaged go on sale today.
See
http://www.ecycleonline.co.uk/choose-your-computer---from-9200-8-c.asp
<http://www.ecycleonline.co.uk/choose-your-computer---from-9200-8-c.asp>
Ubuntu 10.10 is there as a solid and no strings attached choice.
But for only £3 more so is Windows XP and Office!
This is very bad news for the disadvantaged, for the rest of the
Internet community who are going to have to put up with millions of new
potential malware filled zombie computers to deal with.
The users also have to agree to special licensing terms as Microsoft is
doing them such a BIG favour (not).
Why would Microsoft do such a thing? Is it not trying to end of life XP?
It seems that keeping several million new computer users away from the
freedom of running and learning about the free software that the
Internet itself tends to run on.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. Users are probably going to
say "Ubuntu? Never heard of it, Windows? Oh yeah I'll pay the extra 3
quid".
We in the free software community should not take this clumsy piece of
vote buying lying down. Make a fuss.
<snip>
Five year old PCs are just fine for running Linux for most peoples use.
They really don't need to be distracted by XP and weasel worded licences.
Not to mention, have you seen the spec?
256MB Ram on the XP machine, that's going to run like a dog.
512MB Ram on the Windows 7 machine, erm... according to the Windows 7
official training material I have for work, the minimum requirement is
1GB Ram (although I believe Windows 7 Starter will work on 512MB Ram).
So these machines are horribly under specced for Windows. I wouldn't
want to run Ubuntu on 256MB either really, maybe Xubuntu but not Ubuntu.
Since they are recycling machines I'm sure they could have upped the
spec a slight bit and doubled the memory on the machines.
Not to mention I've seen ex-corporate notebooks with Dual Core CPUs and
1GB Ram for around the £170 mark with netbooks being slightly cheaper
(from Tier1Online.co.uk).
To be honest, I'm not shocked about it all, just bitterly disapointed.
Rob
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