Goodbye Nvidia, forever. Hello AMD/ATI! On Linux, ATI is a no brainer.

So my last computer had a massive failure that would cost more to fix than the computer was worth. It happens.
This time, when selecting a new machine, I steered clear of Intel (another story there sometime) and Nvidia. I instead settled on an AMD Phenom II X4 945 3 Ghz and an HIS ATI RadeonHD 4670 (1 GB GDDR3). Needless to say, this system blows the older Core 2 Duo and Geforce 9500GT 512MB GDDR3 system I had away, but there’s some added bonuses in here for persons who use Linux, and a few perks that seem to apply no matter what OS you use.

Nvidia has been grinding my gears for a few years and I’ve had enough:

Aside from the political activities of their Board of Directors, several of which donated $10,000 to help pass the bigoted Proposition 8 in California. (Source: Publicly available donor list), their video cards are overpriced and still manage to under-perform similarly priced RadeonHD models. (The RadeonHD 4670 outperforms the Geforce 9500GT by a factor of two to three, at about $20 cheaper).

What *really* destroyed Nvidia’s chances of selling me another card in the future though is their terrible support for Linux.

The biggest single user experience problem with Nvidia’s driver is that the installer is not user friendly, it requires you to make X shut down which is not always easy. If the installer bombs out for any of 1,000 reasons, the errors are unhelpful, and you have to redo everything each time you rebuild a kernel. Having an Nvidia card on Linux puts you on a very short leash, and sometimes stops you from building your own kernel or even using development kernels. Sometimes even final release kernels are a no-no for weeks until Nvidia catches up.

Almost everyone has heard the cliche that “It only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch”. On Linux, Nvidia is that bad apple, because it’s like, here’s 95% of your hardware that the kernel supports and you never have to think about, and here’s one device with a horribly conceived installer for an out of tree driver that doubles the work needed to run your own kernel. If that wasn’t enough, having the Nvidia driver installed invalidates all your kernel bug reports, is frequently the cause of crashes, lags months or years behind new features in X or the kernel (Like the eternal promise of RandR 1.2 support and always the excuse that it supports their crappy TwinView instead), runs a binary blob with kernel permissions that could be executing anything on your computer or causing security holes (say goodbye to being able to do a real security audit), and generally drinks the blood of puppies. (That part is a slight exaggeration)

And that’s why I’m not going to be recommending Nvidia to anyone I talk to from now on. You can run into the same number of problems that Nvidia causes your Linux distribution just by formatting Linux off and returning to Windows.

You can run a fully functional Linux system with an ATI RadeonHD without finding binary drivers. The binary ATI driver does provide faster performance on some models, but you don’t need it just to have 3d acceleration and all the features of X.

If Nvidia tried this behavior with Windows users, it would be the longest suicide note in PC history… I’m switching over to ATI’s line of cards from now on regardless of which OS I choose.

Microsoft promotes Windows 7 with a bunch of giant Whoppers

For real!

Now some Asian dude is going to drop dead from eating enough cholesterol to kill anything that’s ever lived.

I guess the lesson is, watch what you swallow.

Full story here.

“Call ‘em out” The Indiana state website is using Microsoft crap and screwing over standards-compliant browsers

As many of you know, I begrudgingly use Windows:

That doesn’t mean that I love it, and I certainly hate Microsoft Internet Explorer. Seems that some sites still don’t get that IE is a turd and that it’s not what their visitors wish to use.

Well, I had to print out a license I hold from the Indiana State Department of Health yesterday and guess what came up?

Notice the “.aspx” extension? Means they’re using Microsoft ASS.NET, errrr….. ASP.NET. No wonder it breaks when you’re using Opera.

Not every ASS.NET page breaks in Opera, but nearly every page that does break in Opera is built with ASS.NET. (On a side note, Silverblight won’t work at all, but who cares?)

Maybe now that the FCC is making a landgrab  for the internet under the veil of “network neutrality”, they can enforce real W3C standards on the assclowns that handle Indiana state websites.

There’s nothing worse than a Republican -or- Fear and Loathing on the American No Insurance Trail

In case anyone was wondering why I disappeared last month…

No, I didn’t die, but I may well have thanks to our broken healthcare system and the Republican politicians who are more or less paid employees of the pharmaceutical and insurance cartels.

Rather than re-type the entire thing, I’ll paste the letter I sent to the editor of the local newspaper, the Huntington Herald Press.

Before I quote myself, let me say one more thing. You know what really pisses me off? That the Republicans, and the cartels who sponsor their high treason get to run libellous and patently false TV ads accusing the Democrats of trying to make a smash and grab government takeover of healthcare. They cite the pending failure of Medicare that the Republicans caused in 2006 with the pharmaceutical cartel written Medicare Part D law which forbids Medicare from negotiating for better drug prices. If the bottle of pills that costs Eli Lilly $1 to make retails for $400, Medicare must pay that even if the same bottle of pills in Canada is $80.

Their fraudulent astroturfing TV ad ends with something like “Don’t let bureaucrats stand between you and your healthcare”. Well, not having $400 a month for pills, $50,000 for major surgery, or $70 for an office visit to your doctor won’t get in the way any will it? Geez, give me a break! These idiots are just so far over the damned top, they’re in low earth orbit.

Dear Editor,

With the Republican Party continuing to be an obstruction to quality healthcare, I recently had my own ordeal.

On Sept. 27, I had two Grand Mal seizures. One was in my shower, and when I woke up, my arms were damaged and later bruised, and I had to pull myself screaming out of my shower. I called my mother at work who came to my apartment and took me to the Parkview Emergency Room, where I proceeded to have another one. The ER did the very minimal stabilizing treatment they were legally obligated to do and sent me on my way, barely able to move, since I am not rich and don’t have tons of insurance (in the same boat as 48 million other Americans). For two days I was bed ridden and could barely move, and I still have major bruising on both arms and am in considerable pain, two weeks later.

The bill for the ER arrived and is $2,851.10 after a so-called $900 “No-insurance discount” plus other expenses that haven’t arrived yet for a required EEG. (Most likely another several hundred dollars or more)

I am on Disability income and have no access to Medicare til May, many Americans don’t even have that to look forward to, and these Republicans need to stop being the “Party of No” and do something, because every minute they delay, more people die or go bankrupt due to refusal of treatment or crushing medical expenses they cannot afford.

In closing, I would like to thank the Huntington Free Clinic for helping me so much, and without their help this situation would be far worse than it is.

Sincerely,

Ryan F.

Tune in next time for “Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Bankruptcy Court”.

Maybe Florida Representative Alan Grayson says what the Republicans are up to best:

Huntington North High School gun threat keeps many kids at home.

The local high school had a gun threat etched on a bathroom wall at a Big Lots retail store:

The school responded by having extra cops there today and by trying to downplay the situation as a bunch of “rumors” in a letter addressed to parents on the school’s website.

The problem in this case is that the Republicans who hold their own single party system in local politics were/are willing to plunge Huntington County into massive debt (millions of dollars) constructing new school buildings that are of questionable need, but they also spent over $50,000 in taxpayer money  trying to defend an unconstitutional “bible trailer”. The perpetrator’s of that particular bullshit were the local churches of course, but the taxpayers get stuck paying for the mess they have made, as usual.

Not that the school or police are owning up to this, but I have it on good authority that the police found four firearms during their search of the school.

Here’ a message to the idiots running Huntington and the morons running the schools. That $50,000 could have bought metal detectors for the high school so the guns wouldn’t have even gotten into the building in the first place. Paying some cops to walk around and act important to assuage the fear of parents of children whose life has been threatened and make it look like you have the situation under control TODAY does not make my teenage brother any safer when he comes back to school on Monday, does it?

This is yet another glaring example of how the Republicans are a party of frivolous and unconstitutional taxation and spending and how the mayor of Huntington, Steve Updike, known for such gems as calling his political opponents “the Taliban” and stating that anyone who disagrees with him should leave town, along with the Republican city council, have failed the voters yet again.

I say to Steve Updike and the Republican city council that YOU are more like the Taliban of Huntington, Indiana than anyone else. The Taliban were theocratic and there was no other party opposing them, they were usurpers. Many of the Republican petty criminals and nincompoops running this town were “elected” after running unopposed like Judge Jeffrey R. Heffelfinger.

Come to think of it Mr. Updike, I hear that the Taliban are still hiring after 8 years of the half-assed Republican “war” in Afghanistan, which is more than I can say for any decent place to work in Huntington thanks to your policies and the Republican Party’s national platform, including the favoring of NAFTA. Where did Stride Rite’s warehouse go? Ohio? Where is Hayes-Lemmerz? Canada you say?  You are the tyrants, Mr. Updike. The _only_ service you Republicans offer to the American people. time after time, is lip service.

Hell, even Marion’s mayor Wayne Seybold, and I grit my teeth to mention that he’s a Republican (although his policies aren’t typical of your party), has attracted thousands of living wage jobs to Marion in spite of this recession.

Back on topic. I’d like to take this opportunity to speak to the many parents who took their kids out of school today due to the incompetent Republicans. First, you should call the Mayor’s Office at 260-356-1400 x212 and demand metal detectors that all students are to walk through upon entering the building. If he doesn’t do it, throw his worthless ass out in the next election.

While I’m at it, how much do you want to bet those incompetent pencil pushers at the Huntington police department never even catch this/these asshole(s)? If it comes to anything more complicated than a domestic disturbance or a speeding ticket, it’s my firm belief that these local cops are out of their league, and that they’ll likely spend more effort investigating the supply of doughnuts down at the Huggy Bear than on solving this case.

Steve Updike, AKA "fucking idiot", Mayor of Huntington

More Comcast kerfuffle; The return of the DNS hijacker; Random dropped connections; no HD channels

Update: Apparently one of their techs knows what he is doing and swapped out my modem for a DOCSIS 3.0 modem yesterday, which has stabilized my connection. It’s unfortunate that Comcast makes you go through so much trouble when I’d bet anything that they know the problem was their ancient modems all along. I wonder how many other people are having random signal drops and don’t know it’s because the Comcast reps on the phone either don’t know or aren’t telling. I also got one of their support reps (after about 20 minutes in the support chat) to get me a Customer Central login so I could disable the DNS hijacker

Where do I even begin?

First, let me say that I hate Comcast. Their mediocre service is expensive and bundled with other products you may not even want (should be illegal), and that’s when it does somehow manage to work.

Over the last week I’ve been experiencing dropped connections and bizarre modem resets, a LOT of them. The problem is at least 100 times worse when I’m (god forbid) actually using the bandwidth I paid for with something like Bittorrent, which makes me wonder if they aren’t foisting more Sandvine-ish crap designed to frustrate/infuriate people who want to use their expensive broadband connection to do more than they could with a dial up modem and America Online. If America Online did their own broadband networks instead of slowly dying off like the dinosaurs they are, you’d get Comcast , I’m sure of it. In fact, anyone who remembers what AOL was like in 1998 (busy signals, disconnects, apathetic support drones) would be hard pressed not to notice the similarities.

I’ve called their support line so many times over the past week or so that I’m practically on a first name basis with everyone on the other end. They’re not rude, they’re mostly just clueless. In fact, this problem has been ongoing for months now but it was maybe one reset per day, perhaps two. Now anybody that sees me just magically fall off the face of the Earth on IRC to reconnect whenever the modem decides to can attest to the fact that Comcast is dropping me sometimes 6-8 times an hour or more.

Today I had another service call scheduled, third one in a week after the other two techs came out and couldn’t find anything wrong (or at least weren’t giving me the truth if they really did know. Anyway, this guy calls me and explains that the cable line has three channels that the modem can use and that if I use all of my bandwidth, it may cause a congestion on that channel and the modem resets and finds a different channel. I suppose I can take that as “We oversold our lines and we’re screwing you over, but who are you gonna leave us for? AT&T? BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!!!”.

So as this particular mess is ongoing:

I mistyped a URL today and got search hijacked by that damned DNS hijacker crap again, and landed on a nice big Comcast/Yahoo page full of advertisements. This is *AFTER* I EXPLICITLY opted out of their bullshit a few weeks ago. Apparently Comcast has cooked up a new customer torture device called “Customer Central” which is not letting me log in to turn the triple-damned thing off.

Not only have they opted everyone into their disreputable business practice(s) by default, but then they set up a fake opt out system that goes in behind your back later on and flips the ******* thing back on again.

Thanks to Comcast for pissing all over my preferences, violating my privacy, and not letting me turn off your whoring hijacking/advertising pages.

If you can’t turn it off, Adblock Plus will at least kill the advertisements.

Another thing, Where in the HELL is my HD?

To rub salt in the wound some more, it doesn’t do you any good to have an HDTV if you use Comcast and don’t live in a major city, their entire package is non-HD here and pretty much all channels are still analog too. Their entire setup in Huntington, Indiana could have been ripped right out of 1995 and I pretty much guarantee you wouldn’t notice any differences.

So what can I do?

FIOS is still not an option around here and there’s no ETA on when to expect it, the only other choice is AT&T which is as bad or worse.

I guess that thanks to the duopoly of old cable and ma bell, all I have left to do is, in the words of Jim Carey from liar liar, “Bitch and moan like an impotent jerk, then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!”

Thanks for nothing Comcast! (Bunch of shysters!)

PS: My connection just died as I was trying to submit this page, so I guess I’ll sit here with my thumb up my ass til it decides to come back up.

Another Microsoft horror story, the Huntington Indiana public library

I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while but just never did until now.

If you want a prime example of how reliance on Microsoft software damages the community and betrays the public interest, look no further than the Huntington, Indiana public library.

To say nothing about the potentially tens of thousands dollars their reliance on Microsoft software has cost taxpayers in Huntington County directly, their reliance on it also conflicts with the budgeting they’re allocated to the point where they paradoxically  almost never upgrade anything because it will cost money.

Case in point: Their website. If you look at the source, you’ll see meta name=”GENERATOR” content=”Microsoft FrontPage 4.0″.

When was Microsoft Frontpage 4.0 out?

2000. Now I’m no mathematician, but 2009 minus 2000 means that their web page generator is 9 years old and still targeting Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 (which was still in wide use back then).

Why bother having real bona fide web standards if public institutions entrusted with public money squander and abuse their budget?

Now, judging from the image on the top right of the page which is a 1.3 Megabyte JPEG at a resolution of 2204 x 1364 pixels which someone tried laughably to turn into a thumbnail, when any semi-competent Windows user would know that even paint.exe can resize an image, I am kind of left to deduce that some fucking idiot without even the slightest skillset produced these pages.

With their caveman wit, they chose 10 year old standards-violating Microsoft products and couldn’t even figure out how to resize an image with some bundled freeware.

People like this are a disease.

The IT department

Moving on… Someone thought audio books in DRM’d WMA would be a good idea:

This means that if you’re not using Windows XP or Windows Vista, you can’t check out an audio book, so suddenly the library isn’t just abusing your tax money, they’re practically ripping money straight out of your wallet. I’d liken the Huntington Library using DRM’d WMA to a daylight theft by a pick pocket that the police wouldn’t do anything about.

That means that since I have Kubuntu Linux on my main system right now, that I can’t just load the audio file into my media player and hit play because it won’t work. It also won’t play for Mac users.

The library could use Speex, which is a codec in the public domain with no royalties and broad cross platform support, but the Imaginary Property pushers at the book publishing companies wouldn’t go for that. Who made the law that says that knowledge has to be bottled up to protect the profits of a few corporations, at the expense of the entire public?

Federal lawmakers who have been bought by lobbyists and other special interest groups of course. This one isn’t to be squarely blamed on the incompetence of the Huntington Public Library, but also on state and federal lawmakers betraying their duty to the American people.

And lastly, the internet computers at the Huntington Public Library all run Windows XP:

This falls back under the categories of incompetence of staff and the misappropriation of public tax money.

Not only that, but Windows is so susceptible to viruses and worms and spyware that would never affect any operating system where security was one of the design concepts from day one, that the Huntington Public Library has locked all of them down in the mistaken belief that this will protect them.

They’ve locked the systems down so tightly that you can’t even use sites that have been designed with Flash or use thumb drives you brought from home. Whoever did the locking down also missed one giant problem, they all use Internet Explorer 6. The least secure web browser ever.

What is the alternative?

The library in Marion, Indiana, just 15 miles or so south of me, uses Linux. Not only do they use Linux, they use a distribution based on the free Fedora Linux called Userful Discoverstation which uses terminal multiplexing. This allows one tower to power 10 workstations with their own monitors, keyboards, and mice. This is not only much better for the environment than having 10 boxes running their own copy of the OS, it saves on the electric bill, and they don’t have to buy licenses from Microsoft. (You could set up a free Linux distro to get the same effect, Userful just makes it easier).

Userful creates an account that is deleted when the user logs out, and times the session to last however long the library allows. So instead of the librarian having to get up and tell someone who is hogging the computer that their time was up 30 minutes ago and others are waiting, the system gives them a warning 10 minutes before they’re logged out to get their shit together and get lost. (In more diplomatic terms obviously).

The systems are secure with the normal permissions of a Linux user account plus the standard SELinux targeted policy inherited by Fedora which helps keep malicious remote attackers out. Since there are very few security concerns on Linux and because the user is literally incapable of any lasting damage to the system, you can do anything on one of these boxes that you could do as a user on your PC at home. (except for clearly Administrative tasks). Where the Huntington library Windows XP systems are useless, I was using the Linux system at the Marion library to log into Pidgin instant messenger, browse with Firefox, plug in a thumbdrive with documents saved on it from home, and EVERYONE is allowed to do this because the system is in no danger.

So I guess the thing to take from this if you’re the Huntington Library or are in a position of trust to use taxpayer money in a non-frivolous manner and to not discriminate against users with disabilities or with non-Windows systems (or browsers other than IE), is that you should never use Microsoft products in this setting.

They are wholly inappropriate with no merit whatsoever in this use case.

I emailed the Huntington library with my concerns about six months ago and they never bothered to reply.

It’s Back To School time. This year your kids get taught a lesson by “Professor RIAA”

The RIAA is at it again…

After the music indsutry has tried such brass-knuckle tactics in the past as selling fake CDs brimming with malicious software designed to disable your hardware, and violating the GNU GPL license by misappropriating a copy of Xubuntu Linux to turn into a “University Tookit” which backdoored university networks (the bastards were on the receiving end of that DMCA Take Down Notice for a change), they’re now moving on with a full frontal assault on your child’s education.

In a stunning and disturbingly stupid batch of handouts being sent to teachers, that practically begs parody, your kids may be on the receiving end of a taxpayer-funded brainwashing to benefit the RIAA monopolists.

—————————–

PARODY (by me):

This part of the activity should help students recognize how sharing with their friends songlifting, though it is harmless might seem harmless at first, can quickly become a largescale problem for Lars Ulrich. Force students Have students complete the calculations on the worksheet using spreadsheet software or a calculator properly licensed from our friends at Microsoft. If taxpayer-subsidized school time permits, repeat the first calculation by having students choose a realistic number of songs they probably already took would take since they can if they could get them all for free. Adding desire to the equation in this way can further dramatize why words made up to incite panic songlifting can put a serious crimp on the number of $100 bills we have to light cigars and snort cocaine with have an enormous economic impact.

Answers
Total number of songs lifted = 7,800,000;
Total cost of songs lifted = $7,722,000.
$926,640,000 (i.e., nearly a billion dollars).

(After you’ve pointed out that we could have made a billion dollars selling data that didn’t cost anything to duplicate, the children in your class will undoubtedly see the error of their ways.)

BONUS: Assume that a teenager works part time flipping burgers throughout the summer for minimum wage ($7.25 /hr), that taxes bring his wage down to roughly $5 an hour,  the average album has 12 songs,  each track download is $1, and the average teenager buys three albums at that price per week. It comes out to $432, meaning they get to scrub the McFat Vat for 86.4 hours over their three month summer break to purchase licenses for data we conjured up out of thin air.

The more you know!

Hey, kid! I think you missed some spit wads on the drive through window, go take a really fun squeegee and rack up some licensed download sales from the MafiAA, why don’t you?

KDE starts enforcing Last.FM’s paywall in Amarok 2.1.80

Just a quick heads up to any KDE users. You may want to blacklist the Amarok 2.1.80 “upgrade” if you listen to Last.FM

Users who “upgrade” to this version will be locked out of Last.FM streams until they pay Last.FM for a “premium” account.

As near as I can tell, KDE wasn’t forced to do this, they must have went along willingly as the last version of Amarok continues to work just fine if you still have it installed, I’m typing this as I’m listening to a Last.FM stream on my laptop which didn’t get the “upgraded” package.

It’s sad that KDE is continuing to support a service which is now coated in server side paywalls and DRM. It would be nice if they could have just stuck to free software ideals and chose to remove the Last.FM plugin and salt the Earth of these parasites. Oh well.

I could have understood if Last.FM said “Third parties can keep using our service provided that they place the same ‘Buy this track’ link that our client has”. Near as I can figure, Last.FM’s only gripe was that they are losing those click pennies when you use other clients.

Best Buy gives in to Microsoft anti-Linux FUD, has seen it’s last dollar from me already though.

I’ve been in retail and retail management before and have some idea of what goes on there:

I’ve worked for two retail companies spanning a total of five years, and have a total of just over half of those in management. The first company was a major superstore, the second was when I had some experience behind me and left for a job at a predominate rent-to-own chain which offered me a better salary and more benefits.

I mention this because of a computerized training module that has surfaced at a Best Buy store detailing not only the usual marketing spiel of whoever happens to be selling widgets on your shelves, but rather, defaming the competition at the same time. This training module is for their sales associate level employees and details the “ease” of Windows and the “strife” of Linux.

Most of the module went on quite a stretch, relying heavily on studies paid for by Microsoft, and using a collection of half-truths and total lies to besmirch Linux. As is typical, there’s a quiz at the end to make sure you don’t just say “fuck this shit” and skip through the module.

The quiz of course, being paid for by Microsoft, fails you if you say that Linux is secure, easy to use, or works with most peripherals. This isn’t just something you can refuse to do either. The store management gets a printout of who has taken these modules and passed them, and if you leave them unfinished (at least in the retail chains I’ve worked at), it often starts the write up process which eventually will lead to being fired.

I can’t say for sure that Best Buy would fire you for refusing to complete a training module which involves cashing in your integrity and submitting to bold faced lies and propaganda, but I know that the retail chains I worked at sure would have. So if you want to keep your just over minimum wage, part time, no benefit retail job which stands between you and starvation while you put yourself through college, you’re just going to have to suck this one up and tell some whoppers about Linux.

Low end retail is all about cashing in your dignity for minimum wage or mediocre salary anyway, isn’t it? Abusive customers trashing the store and cursing at you, evil pointy haired bosses that want you to work unpaid overtime, impossible quotas and policies that they overlook most of the time, but gives them a reason to fire any of you at any time, for cause or for made-up cause… I’ve been on the receiving and giving end of that, and in many ways, it’s like a fraternity hazing process where the salaried management is the guy with the paddle and the hourly employees are the ones shouting “Thank you sir, may I have another?” In short, anyone who intends to go no further will have to put up with the shit every day for the rest of their life. You won’t find better advertisement for a college education or management ambitions.

Of course management ambitions are only something you want to get if you’re part of a company that has a future, and I would venture a guess that Best Buy doesn’t have one. They’re trying to figure out how to load down more of the the ignorant and imbeciles with more Windows-based computers, more Windows-based hardware, a Zune or three, an XBOX 360, Microsoft Office, and an antivirus product. If they can just figure out a way to get you to keep paying thousands of dollars for a temporary license to their software that allows you to purchase more temporary licenses to run binary software from them, and hardware that only works with the software you have licensed from them and will only keep working if you buy more licenses for more of their software in the future, they may have a shot at this. It’s not just about the cost of Windows, because with “only” your $320 copy of Windows Ultimate, you still can’t really do anything with it.

There’s a certain demographic that will pay any price because they have lots of money to set on fire. These same people buy Hummer H2’s. The rest spend about a month’s salary every year or two on Microsoft software and partner products under the mistaken impression that they simply have to. They don’t want to, they’re not evil people, they’ve simply been led astray by the sales associate, the lowly peon making $8 an hour at the Best Buy store, the unwitting foot soldier in Microsoft’s propaganda battle. Exactly what’s in it for the sales associate if people continue maxing out their credit cards on shit they don’t need? They may be able to come back to work next Monday, or Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or whenever they’re expected to show up for their 4-8 hours shift so they can continue making the $8 an hour. It’s how retail treats people.

ASUS  launched a site called “It’s Better With Windows” a few months back. With sales down and increasing competition, the profit for computer sales is marginal at best, sometimes they have to sell them at or below cost to simply out-cheap their competitors. That $50-$80 kickback for loading down the hard disk with crapware may not sound like much, but chances are it’s most or maybe even all of what they make on the sale. If they sell a system with Linux, they are no longer in a position to load you down with crapware that doesn’t do anything til you buy it.

Benjamin Mako Hill wrote an excellent essay a while back that describes the trial crapware bundled on new Windows PCs perfectly, he would call something like a crippled 60 day demo of Office or a 30 day trial of Norton antivirus that times out an “Anti-Feature”. An anti-feature is something that a software maker does to limit your use of the program that no customer would have asked for. The cheaper “Home” versions of Windows without the “Professional” or “Ultimate” features are an anti-feature of themselves, because nobody would have asked Microsoft to turn off functionality that may have been helpful to them.

Best Buy is in the same position. If they don’t sell you a computer, somebody will, and if they aren’t making a profit on the computer itself, they need to sell you additional products and services to go along with it. They see the computer as a foot in the door to sell you bogus “extended warranties” you likely won’t need, antivirus software suites, video games, printers, Windows-only subscription music accounts, and when Windows breaks down, it’s even more money for them because you get to haul it back in and pay hundreds of dollars for their “Geek Squad” to try to disinfect all the malware and salvage whatever data the malware didn’t eat. The more Windows breaks down, the more money they make fixing it. The more Windows doesn’t do, the more money they make selling you software that enables it to do what you’re trying to get done.

It seems stupid when you look at it this way. You wouldn’t buy a car at full sticker price if the horn, air bags, brakes, radio, and upholstery were sold as “add-ons”. If a line of cars has a faulty gas tank that explodes, there will be a lawsuit. Yet this is how Microsoft and retail stores like Best Buy get you to part ways with more of your cash. If the $500 Windows PC cost the full $2,000 up front, nobody would buy them. Better to just suck the rest of your blood out later, as you go.

The tighter the market gets, and the less that Best Buy is able to compete with sites that sell hardware at just over wholesale, and systems that come without operating systems, the more of this kind of thing you’ll see. It’s taking less and less bribes, threats, and coercion from Microsoft to get them to play ball. Their entire remaining customer “base” are zombies that are there to be victimized repeatedly. Best Buy has no future as a company, the very most they should expect is to not go bankrupt immediately.

Five to ten years from now, I don’t even think Best Buy will even be around, but Microsoft can use them in the remaining time they have left to help sell people on Windows. Consumer electronics stores have painted themselves into a corner where they need Microsoft far more than Microsoft needs them. The phoney baloney “education” that customers receive at Best Buy will, Microsoft is hoping, carry on when Best Buy is gone and the customer is buying their next Windows system at Walmart.

Also, just before going through with this, Best Buy silently disappears the Ubuntu boxed set. Hmmmm.