In article <6Udfj.37151$Mu4.1940@bignews7.bellsouth.net>,
Linonut wrote:
> What's the regular price of the current Zune? What is the fire-sale
> price of the previous Zune? What was regular price of the previous
> Zune?

The old 30 gig listed for $200 (I'm not going to do "to the cents"
pricing...$199.99 will be $200 in this post), and goes for $160 at
Amazon. I think it has been down to around $130.

The new 80 gig lists for $249. The new 8 gig flash model lists for
$200, and the 4 gig for $149.

The iPod classic lists for $249 for 80 gig, and $349 for 160 gig. (The
later seems to be the best deal in MP3 players at the moment, for those
looking for large capacity. There are a couple other companies with 160
gig players, but they are targeted more toward video, add some features
the iPod lacks, and cost quite a bit more).

Hardware features and capabilities of the 80 gig Zune seem comparable to
the iPod classic, except the Zune adds FM radio, and I think a couple
other things. I haven't seen their software, but I seem to recall
reviews saying it was OK, but Apple had better.

The new iPod nano lists for $149 for 4 gig, $199 for 8 gig.

Apple also has the tiny iPod shuffle, at $79 (1 gig), and the iPod
touch, which lists for $299 for 8 GB and $399 for 16 GB. Think iPhone
without the phone.

So, while they have not yet seriously challenged Apple, they seem to be
the only one that is at least moving in that direction. Of course,
Apple isn't standing still.


--
--Tim Smith

Tim Smith wrote:

> The old 30 gig listed for $200 (I'm not going to do "to the cents"
> pricing...$199.99 will be $200 in this post),

I insist you do so, Mr. Pedantic. $200.00 is NOT $199.99. Quit
exaggerating the cost.

____/ nessuno@wigner.berkeley.edu on Thursday 03 January 2008 22:22 : \____

> On Jan 3, 9:26 am, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>> ____/ ness...@wigner.berkeley.edu on Thursday 03 January 2008 15:55 : \____
>>
>>
>>
>> > On Jan 2, 4:56 pm, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>> >> ____/ ness...@wigner.berkeley.edu on Wednesday 02 January 2008 23:22 :
>> >> \____
>>
>> >> > Microsoft up 15%
>> >> > Google up 50%
>> >> > Apple up 133%
>>
>> >> > I think if you look over the last 5 years the comparison is even more
>> >> > dramatic.
>>
>> >> It means very little. Microsoft is pumping cash into the stock. In
>> >> general, stock price does not indicate much because it doesn't just gauge
>> >> actual wealth. IBM and Dell, IIRC, are in heavy buyback mode as well.
>> >> Novell will inevitably end up this way as well.
>>
>> > Yes, I've read how many large corporations in the US are buying back
>> > stock. But to the extent that is true of Microsoft, it means that
>> > their 15% gain means less than it seems. I don't know if Apple has
>> > been buying back stock, but surely their 133% gain is related to the
>> > success of iPod, iPhone and OS/X.
>>
>> I don't watch Apple to be honest (I closely track RHT/RHAT, NOVL, INTC, AMD,
>> IBM, MSFT, ^FTSE and SCOX in the finance feeds), but all that I know based
>> on bankers' word is that Novell is *advised* to buy back stock (many layoffs
>> coming next year and jobs continue to move east-wards). It's not looking
>> great for the US economy in general and I suppose you've heard about the
>> price of oil (a Benjamin per barrel).
>
> The Sibold troll is posting an item on how great Apple has been doing,
> and taunting Linux advocates. I think he's a Wintroll not an Apple
> troll, which is odd since the news is mostly bad for Microsoft, not
> Linux. Also, even according to NetApplications, Linux is up from
> about 0.35% in Jan 07 to 0.66% now. I don't know what their
> methodology is, I couldn't find out, for example, these are OS
> statistics as reported by browser hits? In the US only?

You can't get absolute numbers, but you can spot trends. Surveys indicate that,
given the samples at hand, Linux usage on the desktop (not necessarily
connected to the Web), has doubled in the past year. Think of this as a
subsample of a sample. Sites like Groklaw and other popular 'congregation'
areas for Linux users (there are characteristic attached) honour privacy, so
their logs are not included in these Web stat-based surveys. It's a shame in
a sense because by compromising privacy they could help the image of Linux,
namely by showing its popularity.

> I'm guessing
> that this represents desktop usage in the US. But the point is that
> both Apple and Linux are up in the last year, Windows is down, getting
> nibbled from both directions. At this point Apple and Linux are not
> competing much with each other. But the report on Apple in the last
> few days really is impressive. Looks like half the universe got a Mac
> and an iPhone for Christmas. My father-in-law was one (Mac last fall,
> iPhone for xmas). I hadn't seen an iPhone before. It's really
> beautiful, I've got to say. My father-in-law is deaf, so he doesn't
> use the phone part, but he does do a lot of internet from hand-held
> devices (his main way of communicating), and he's a technology nut.
> He also loves his new Mac and vows never to go back to Windows, which
> he used for 10 years. Anyway, I'd love to see Ballmer's face when he
> sees these statistics. I won't feed the Sibold troll, but this is
> an interesting story. All the curves I've seen on Apple are aiming
> for the stars, so it's got to give Billy and company bad dreams.
>
> 2007 has been a bad year for Microsoft. I can't wait to see what 2008
> will bring.

Apple's growth is definitely symbiotic as far as Linux goes. It's UNIX, it uses
Samba, it runs open source apps without performance penalties, and so forth.
Some Apple Mac users move to Linux or mix the two (desktop and server or
desktop and desktop).

--
~~ Best of wishes

Roy S. Schestowitz | Useless fact: Florida is bigger than England
http://Schestowitz.com | Free as in Free Beer | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
Cpu(s): 24.7%us, 4.0%sy, 1.0%ni, 66.2%id, 3.7%wa, 0.3%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st
http://iuron.com - semantic engine to gather information

____/ Mark Kent on Thursday 03 January 2008 18:41 : \____

> nessuno@wigner.berkeley.edu espoused:
>> On Jan 2, 4:56 pm, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>> ____/ ness...@wigner.berkeley.edu on Wednesday 02 January 2008 23:22 :
>>> \____
>>>
>>> > Microsoft up 15%
>>> > Google up 50%
>>> > Apple up 133%
>>>
>>> > I think if you look over the last 5 years the comparison is even more
>>> > dramatic.
>>>
>>> It means very little. Microsoft is pumping cash into the stock. In general,
>>> stock price does not indicate much because it doesn't just gauge actual
>>> wealth. IBM and Dell, IIRC, are in heavy buyback mode as well. Novell will
>>> inevitably end up this way as well.
>>
>> Yes, I've read how many large corporations in the US are buying back
>> stock. But to the extent that is true of Microsoft, it means that
>> their 15% gain means less than it seems. I don't know if Apple has
>> been buying back stock, but surely their 133% gain is related to the
>> success of iPod, iPhone and OS/X.
>
> The actual share price is meaningless unless you multiply it by the
> number of shares in order to get the actual market cap.
>
> As Microsoft have been buying back shares, they have been reducing their
> market cap by the value of each of these shares which they bought back,
> although that is ameliorated by the rise in value which went on at the
> same time.

Google isn't far now from Microsoft's market cap. It recently surpassed IBM's,
IIRC, which isn't bad for a 9-year-old company, My worry is that Google
absorbs some ex-Softies, many of whom are vain, unethical, and inherently
anti-Google. They could poison Google from the inside and drop the "Do No
Evil" mantra in the sink. Watch Google closely and ensure it doesn't become a
bunch of geeks on a high throne. Apple is already suffering from that
syndrome, especially with recent growth.

> You then need to take into account the indices of the market for the
> same period, and as far as possible look at how the overall market
> moved. If they overall market moved up by, say, 10%, then Microsoft's
> 15% is really a 5% increase above the market, which might be almost
> entirely funded by share buy-back, thus reducing their market cap by the
> value of those shares.
>
> Of course, analysts look at this stuff all the time, but as many of them
> are non-technical, they often get things wrong, as they are as much
> driven by mathematical analysis of reported financial performance plus
> ongoing trading as they are by a deep understanding of the actual market
> in which the company operates.


--
~~ Best of wishes

Roy S. Schestowitz | Useless fact: ~70% of organisms are bacteria
http://Schestowitz.com | RHAT Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
04:20:01 up 24 days, 17:08, 4 users, load average: 1.55, 1.13, 1.16
http://iuron.com - Open Source knowledge engine project

DFS wrote:
>>
>> PC unit volumes are down, prices have eroded to pre-XP prices, even
>> though they now have twice as much memory, storage, and CPU power.
>
> Nice! For that you can thank Microsoft: enormous worldwide adoption of
> Windows PCs drove down hardware costs due to economies of scale.

The idea that Microsoft is responsible for the rapid adoption of
personal computers is just plain silly. Bill Gates was very
smart in recognizing the opportunity presented with the emerging
PC market and very shrewed in the deals he cut with IBM and other
vendors to make sure MS was the one riding the coattails of the
PC market expansion... but face it, if MS had not been the vendor
supplying the software, some other company would have stepped
into the gap. The software we use today would look a bit
different, but all the basic capabilities would still be their
as nearly every major feature decision made by MS was driven
by market forces that would have driven another software vendor
to similar choices.

Or are you so sort of MS cultist who thinks we would be using
or PCs as doorstops if Bill Gates had never been born?

>> There seems to be a dearth of market statistics.
>> How many OpenGL compatible adapters were sold?
>
> Nobody cares. We want DirectX 10 cards.

Isn't DX10 for Vista only? All the gamers I know are sticking
with XP. Actually, one of them has switched to Linux, but I
guess that by definition makes him no longer a gamer since
we've been told repeatedly you can't game on Linux. Of course
for this guy, WoW and Eve Online have become less like games and
something more like a lifestyle choice, so perhaps its true.

In related news, I'm seeing a serious increase in OpenGL
gaming development out in the consulting space. It seems the
increase in mobile computing and handheld gaming systems is
driving it. Windows is not what these systems are running,
so DirectX is not even an option. This is having positive
side effects for Linux as vendors improve video drivers and
related software for these various mobile and embedded
systems. Those improvements flow back to the desktop
community.

Cheers.

Thad
--
Yeah, I drank the Open Source cool-aid... Unlike the other brand, it had
all the ingredients on the label.

Roy Schestowitz espoused:
> ____/ nessuno@wigner.berkeley.edu on Thursday 03 January 2008 22:22 : \____
>
>> On Jan 3, 9:26 am, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>> ____/ ness...@wigner.berkeley.edu on Thursday 03 January 2008 15:55 : \____
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> > On Jan 2, 4:56 pm, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>> >> ____/ ness...@wigner.berkeley.edu on Wednesday 02 January 2008 23:22 :
>>> >> \____
>>>
>>> >> > Microsoft up 15%
>>> >> > Google up 50%
>>> >> > Apple up 133%
>>>
>>> >> > I think if you look over the last 5 years the comparison is even more
>>> >> > dramatic.
>>>
>>> >> It means very little. Microsoft is pumping cash into the stock. In
>>> >> general, stock price does not indicate much because it doesn't just gauge
>>> >> actual wealth. IBM and Dell, IIRC, are in heavy buyback mode as well.
>>> >> Novell will inevitably end up this way as well.
>>>
>>> > Yes, I've read how many large corporations in the US are buying back
>>> > stock. But to the extent that is true of Microsoft, it means that
>>> > their 15% gain means less than it seems. I don't know if Apple has
>>> > been buying back stock, but surely their 133% gain is related to the
>>> > success of iPod, iPhone and OS/X.
>>>
>>> I don't watch Apple to be honest (I closely track RHT/RHAT, NOVL, INTC, AMD,
>>> IBM, MSFT, ^FTSE and SCOX in the finance feeds), but all that I know based
>>> on bankers' word is that Novell is *advised* to buy back stock (many layoffs
>>> coming next year and jobs continue to move east-wards). It's not looking
>>> great for the US economy in general and I suppose you've heard about the
>>> price of oil (a Benjamin per barrel).
>>
>> The Sibold troll is posting an item on how great Apple has been doing,
>> and taunting Linux advocates. I think he's a Wintroll not an Apple
>> troll, which is odd since the news is mostly bad for Microsoft, not
>> Linux. Also, even according to NetApplications, Linux is up from
>> about 0.35% in Jan 07 to 0.66% now. I don't know what their
>> methodology is, I couldn't find out, for example, these are OS
>> statistics as reported by browser hits? In the US only?
>
> You can't get absolute numbers, but you can spot trends. Surveys indicate that,
> given the samples at hand, Linux usage on the desktop (not necessarily
> connected to the Web), has doubled in the past year. Think of this as a
> subsample of a sample. Sites like Groklaw and other popular 'congregation'
> areas for Linux users (there are characteristic attached) honour privacy, so
> their logs are not included in these Web stat-based surveys. It's a shame in
> a sense because by compromising privacy they could help the image of Linux,
> namely by showing its popularity.

We're well past the tipping point for linux now. All we need to do is
wait.

>
>> I'm guessing
>> that this represents desktop usage in the US. But the point is that
>> both Apple and Linux are up in the last year, Windows is down, getting
>> nibbled from both directions. At this point Apple and Linux are not
>> competing much with each other. But the report on Apple in the last
>> few days really is impressive. Looks like half the universe got a Mac
>> and an iPhone for Christmas. My father-in-law was one (Mac last fall,
>> iPhone for xmas). I hadn't seen an iPhone before. It's really
>> beautiful, I've got to say. My father-in-law is deaf, so he doesn't
>> use the phone part, but he does do a lot of internet from hand-held
>> devices (his main way of communicating), and he's a technology nut.
>> He also loves his new Mac and vows never to go back to Windows, which
>> he used for 10 years. Anyway, I'd love to see Ballmer's face when he
>> sees these statistics. I won't feed the Sibold troll, but this is
>> an interesting story. All the curves I've seen on Apple are aiming
>> for the stars, so it's got to give Billy and company bad dreams.
>>
>> 2007 has been a bad year for Microsoft. I can't wait to see what 2008
>> will bring.
>
> Apple's growth is definitely symbiotic as far as Linux goes. It's UNIX, it uses
> Samba, it runs open source apps without performance penalties, and so forth.
> Some Apple Mac users move to Linux or mix the two (desktop and server or
> desktop and desktop).
>

Apple's hardware is, in the main, very good quality, and their products
overall tend to be well engineered, and typically do "what they say on
the tin". We've a dual-PPC mac and a mac mini here, and I had a really
old colour mac which recently had to be disposed of due to water damage,
all of which are well-built and well-conceived devices.

For me, the iPhone is the exception, though - it's data performance is
always going to be awful compared with 3G devices; why Apple would
release something based on 10 year old technology is hard to understand,
but perhaps the lack of 3G penetration in the US, and a very strong
US-market focus explain this. For the rest of the world, it's a
dinosaur machine, though.

--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
| Cola faq: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/ |
| Cola trolls: http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/ |
| My (new) blog: http://www.thereisnomagic.org |

Roy Schestowitz espoused:
> ____/ Mark Kent on Thursday 03 January 2008 18:41 : \____
>
>> nessuno@wigner.berkeley.edu espoused:
>>> On Jan 2, 4:56 pm, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>>> ____/ ness...@wigner.berkeley.edu on Wednesday 02 January 2008 23:22 :
>>>> \____
>>>>
>>>> > Microsoft up 15%
>>>> > Google up 50%
>>>> > Apple up 133%
>>>>
>>>> > I think if you look over the last 5 years the comparison is even more
>>>> > dramatic.
>>>>
>>>> It means very little. Microsoft is pumping cash into the stock. In general,
>>>> stock price does not indicate much because it doesn't just gauge actual
>>>> wealth. IBM and Dell, IIRC, are in heavy buyback mode as well. Novell will
>>>> inevitably end up this way as well.
>>>
>>> Yes, I've read how many large corporations in the US are buying back
>>> stock. But to the extent that is true of Microsoft, it means that
>>> their 15% gain means less than it seems. I don't know if Apple has
>>> been buying back stock, but surely their 133% gain is related to the
>>> success of iPod, iPhone and OS/X.
>>
>> The actual share price is meaningless unless you multiply it by the
>> number of shares in order to get the actual market cap.
>>
>> As Microsoft have been buying back shares, they have been reducing their
>> market cap by the value of each of these shares which they bought back,
>> although that is ameliorated by the rise in value which went on at the
>> same time.
>
> Google isn't far now from Microsoft's market cap. It recently surpassed IBM's,
> IIRC, which isn't bad for a 9-year-old company, My worry is that Google
> absorbs some ex-Softies, many of whom are vain, unethical, and inherently
> anti-Google. They could poison Google from the inside and drop the "Do No
> Evil" mantra in the sink. Watch Google closely and ensure it doesn't become a
> bunch of geeks on a high throne. Apple is already suffering from that
> syndrome, especially with recent growth.

Google will inevitably change culture as it grows. Politics is surely
already rife, and the lead of the technology people will be eroded as
the politicians gradually rise to the top and stagnate the business. To
be honest, this is a good thing as it's the only way some businesses
could be stopped. Just look at Microsoft, had it not been for their
inept senior management, they could've destroyed the free software
movement long ago, or at least put it back a decade or two.

>
>> You then need to take into account the indices of the market for the
>> same period, and as far as possible look at how the overall market
>> moved. If they overall market moved up by, say, 10%, then Microsoft's
>> 15% is really a 5% increase above the market, which might be almost
>> entirely funded by share buy-back, thus reducing their market cap by the
>> value of those shares.
>>
>> Of course, analysts look at this stuff all the time, but as many of them
>> are non-technical, they often get things wrong, as they are as much
>> driven by mathematical analysis of reported financial performance plus
>> ongoing trading as they are by a deep understanding of the actual market
>> in which the company operates.
>
>


--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
| Cola faq: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/ |
| Cola trolls: http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/ |
| My (new) blog: http://www.thereisnomagic.org |

* DFS fired off this tart reply:

> Rex Ballard wrote:



You go Rex! Keep DFS busy while GNU/Linux keeps moving forward.

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Linonut wrote:
> * DFS fired off this tart reply:
>
>> Rex Ballard wrote:
>
>

Lazy bastuhd.


> You go Rex! Keep DFS busy while GNU/Linux keeps moving forward.

You may be right. In the time it took me answer Rex's post, OSS wacko
developers took the opportunity to [again] put off writing documentation.

Mark Kent wrote:
>
> We're well past the tipping point for linux now. All we need to do is
> wait.

Agreed, if you define 'tipping point' as the point at which a trend
becomes irreversible, we are well past it. The visible numbers on the
desktop are still small, but undeniably trending upward. Even the
more controversial low-ball web stats show this. They likely
undercount the presence of desktop Linux because it is currently
being deployed as an engineering workstation more often than the
typical consumer web surfing station, but web stats show the growth
is happening in the consumer space also.

The really interesting numbers are coming from the repository
servers and the like. They give us counts of active, unique
systems in the tens of millions, and that is not even counting
those that are not updating or updating from caching proxies.
There is likely some bluring between the server and desktop
in those numbers, but just looking at Ubuntu, the current leading
desktop oriented distro, we have more than 12 million systems
downloading updates. Given global PC deployment estimates of
about 1.1 billion, that puts just the Ubuntu share of the desktop
at around 1%... so web estimates that put all of Linux around 0.5
are almost certainly bunk.

>
> Apple's hardware is, in the main, very good quality, and their products
> overall tend to be well engineered, and typically do "what they say on
> the tin". We've a dual-PPC mac and a mac mini here, and I had a really
> old colour mac which recently had to be disposed of due to water damage,
> all of which are well-built and well-conceived devices.

We've a couple of Macs here also, an older tower and a Mac mini,
both used mainly for video/audio editing. They might get less
use as Ubuntu Studio matures.

Thad
--
Yeah, I drank the Open Source cool-aid... Unlike the other brand, it had
all the ingredients on the label.

In article ,
thad05@tux.glaci.delete-this.com wrote:
> The idea that Microsoft is responsible for the rapid adoption of
> personal computers is just plain silly. Bill Gates was very
> smart in recognizing the opportunity presented with the emerging
> PC market and very shrewed in the deals he cut with IBM and other
> vendors to make sure MS was the one riding the coattails of the
> PC market expansion... but face it, if MS had not been the vendor
> supplying the software, some other company would have stepped
> into the gap. The software we use today would look a bit

It's interesting to speculate what might have been had MS not supplied
the OS. Remember, Bill Gates thought that the road to success was as an
application and development tools vendor. His prediction was that the
personal computer world would have many different successful,
incompatible, architectures, all sharing the market. Intel, Zilog,
National Semiconductor, Motorola--they all had 16-bit and 32-bit chips
upcoming.

Gates' vision was that Microsoft would do its applications for them all,
and its tools for them all. And to make that easier on Microsoft, there
should be one OS that would run on them all. And that OS was Unix.
That's why they were one of the earliest promotors of Unix on
microprocessors, in the form of Xenix.

When IBM asked Microsoft to supply the OS for the PC, MS didn't want to.
They sent IBM to DR. When that didn't work out, MS still didn't want
to. It was only after they were unofficially told that if MS didn't add
supplying the OS to their software proposal, IBM would probably cancel
the project, that MS agreed to come up with an OS somehow.

If only they had held out a little longer, and stuck to Gates' vision,
IBM might have cancelled the PC, and Unix would be the dominant desktop
OS, on a dozen different processor architectures, with full commercial
software support.

--
--Tim Smith

* Tim Smith fired off this tart reply:

> When IBM asked Microsoft to supply the OS for the PC, MS didn't want to.
> They sent IBM to DR. When that didn't work out, MS still didn't want
> to. It was only after they were unofficially told that if MS didn't add
> supplying the OS to their software proposal, IBM would probably cancel
> the project, that MS agreed to come up with an OS somehow.
>
> If only they had held out a little longer, and stuck to Gates' vision,
> IBM might have cancelled the PC, and Unix would be the dominant desktop
> OS, on a dozen different processor architectures, with full commercial
> software support.

An interesting speculation. One preventer for it, though, was the PC
hardware itself. PC's were still using DOS memory extenders when UNIX
machines were handling 32+ Mb.

And the processor speeds!

Apart from the openness of the project and the growing availability of
broadband, the other thing that's let Linux into so many homes is the
capacious hardware. Would you say that PC hardware lags "mini" hardware
by about 10 years?

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* Rex Ballard fired off this tart reply:

> Bill wanted to get into the PC market, and saw the MITS Altair as his
> ticket in. He had worked for a time-share company in high school, and
> managed to get his hands on DEC BASIC (binary or source?) by
> convincing the company to sell backup tapes to his computer club. He
> knew which tapes had the BASIC on it, and pulled it aside for
> himself. Many years later, Bill admitted that he did this, and cut a
> settlement deal to make restitution to DEC.

I thought he (also?) did some dumpster diving at DEC when he was at
Harvard, using Harvard computer time to run his business.

> Keep in mind that Microsoft did have an Operating System, but it was
> Xenix, and it ran on the 68000 processor, not the 8086.

I think you may be getting the chronology mixed up.

Although it is amusing that Microsoft used a form of UNIX to write their
software for some time, until their own stuff was useable enough that
they could "eat their own dog food".

> Gates had
> bluffed IBM into buying an operating system from Microsoft that
> Microsoft didn't even own yet. It wasn't the first time Microsoft had
> engaged in a fraudulent contract, and it wouldn't be the last.

No sheet!

> Shrewd is one word for it. Many of his dealings, even in the earliest
> days bordered on the verge of fraud, extortion, and blackmail. Much
> of this may have been because there were two Bill Gates' involved.
> One was the 22 year old nerd with the squeaky voice and birth control
> glasses (Trey), but the other was a brilliant corporate lawyer, with a
> reputation for writing one-sided contracts that were loaded with
> loopholes to make it look like a fair deal, and a pechant for voiding
> the contracts the minute a perceived violation had been detected
> (Deuce).

What is this, a James Patterson novel?

I think Trey and Deuce were later reborn as Pearly and Emballmer.

Anyway, Rex, if you could write this stuff up, get it vetted and cleaned
up and verified, with a nice index and a full bibliography, you might
have a minor muck-racking best-seller on your hands.

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alt writes:

> On Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:00:49 -0500, Linonut wrote:
>
>> Their keyboards aren't too bad though.
>
> As a matter of principle, I won't purchase or recommend for purchase
> anything branded with the Microsoft label unless absolutely necessary.
>

You are SO tough.