On Mon, 03 May 2004 12:26, Nick Rout wrote: > On Mon, 03 May 2004 12:17:39 +1200 > > Christopher Sawtell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Dick Smith Electronics are trying to in a rather half-hearted way. > > damned by faint praise ;-). I would rate them higher than that. I have yet to wander into a DSE shop to be confronted by KDE / Gnome running on one of the demo machines. Once I can do that I'll be very happy doing s/rather half-hearted/wonderfully enthusiastic/ . Unfortunately not until.
> > Don: How about the notion of getting the management of Warehouse > > Stationery to at least know that Linux exists? What would be involved in > > getting that far? It would / could well be a good sell for them, as the > > cost of Linux is $0.00 as against approximately $500+++ for Windows. > > I assume youare talking about the pc's they sell as oppose to use > themselves? Correct. Needless to say they could save themselves a lot of dough using Linux on the Terminals. After all they are only text screens. Linux could do that as easy as falling off a log. > bundling is unfortunaltely a fact of life for retailers, > especially if they sell brand name pc's and/or laptops. The Warehouse is the largest retailer in the country. They have the clout to push their suppliers around. They are into parallel importing in a big way. If they wanted to, they could get Linux machines into the stores no trouble. Just like Wal-Mart does in an other part of the world. I suspect that the real problem with the Warehouse is that a few years ago they were nearly put out of business by a terrible computer system, and, quite reasonably, are more than slightly allergic to getting involved with computers any more than they absolutely have to. This would explain the rather minimal WWW site too. > The cost of windows XP Home seems to be about $199 if the retailers who > do not bundle it are anything to go by (eg PC Practice ad in Buy Sell & > Exchange). That's the cost of the O/S alone, as soon as you try to do anything useful on a Win. PC you have to fork out yet more $$$$. OTOH a Linux PC comes with the apps. ( 3000+ of them ) for $0.00. > But if retailers are selling brand name pcs or lappies then > they pay for windows in the bundle anyway. See above. For the Warehouse I don't think that that is necessarily the case. > In that sense installing > linux is a cost to them in terms of labour, training, support etc. Indeed, but remember that that cost is one which stays in NZ, whereas the MS cost goes off the Redmond > > The current Windows worm appears to have effectively shutdown the 'Net. > > Can we make use of that fact? > > Mine is going very slowly. My AV thingy is updating from germany at 6300 > bytes/s on full speed jetstream. It's perked up slightly now. -- Sincerely etc. Christopher Sawtell NB. This PC runs Linux. If you find a virus apparently from me, it has forged the e-mail headers on someone else's machine. Please do not notify me when this occurs. Thanks.
