Not only that, but in most areas the tax laws stipulate that you can't recover the taxes from a car loan. Vis;

• Original purchase price: $20000.
• Freight, fees, tarrifs: $2000.
• Sub-Total: $22000.
• PST + GST (Ontario, Canada) @ 13% combined: $2860
• Total to be financed: $24860.

To make things simple I'll use 0% APR financing on the loan. Supposing on this loan, let's make it a 60 month term, you're making payments of $414.34/month and you make the first 12 payments before your loan enters default status. So you've now paid $4972.08 towards your loan, leaving an outstanding balance of $19887.92 remaining. So now the financial institution repossesses the vehicle and needs to recover that amount of money. Using the 30% depreciation "rule of thumb" let's say the car is now worth $14000. That leaves the loan upside-down by $5887.92 that has to be collected somehow.

The beauty of the tax laws is that taxes will be paid once again by the new buyer so all in all the government wins, but we the consumers lose out because the financial institution has to jack up interest rates and service charges to make up for the shortfall of $6k that the original buyer is almost certainly not going to repay.

With the trend of ever increasing personal debt load on typical North American consumers, the trend towards longer terms, lower payments and less (or no) down payment, people are finding themselves in a negative equity situation on their car loans for longer and longer as they're paying the principal balances significantly slower than the depreciation curve of their vehicles. When financing first became commonplace it was normal to put upwards of 20-50% down and take a financing term that did not exceed 36 months. Granted, interest rates were often in the double digits, but with that much down and terms so short it wasn't really an issue. It was also quite common to pay off one's car loan before the end of the term and then {gasp!} drive it for several more years before trading it or making another purchase.

This allowed people to walk into their next loan with, again, 20-50% cash down plus equity in their trade resulting in upwards of 30-80% down on their next vehicle.

Alas, 84 month finance terms are becoming the norm, 96 month terms aren't as outrageous as they once were and consumers and banks keep talking seriously about 108 and 120 month terms. Welcome to the society where once you're in debt, you're always in debt. Buy now, pay later.

I, for one, am not on the debt treadmill, but I do take advantage of 0% finance offers wherever possible so the money I have in my savings account can earn between 3-8% while the store foots the cost of borrowing. Go on you debt whores; continue paying my way with your high interest payments.

But I digress...

If you could convince consumers to pay 90% of the original retail price for a 1 year old car, it wouldn't depreciate so heavily now, would it?

The price and depreciation of cars is driven primarily by the consumers that purchase them second hand. When a consumer walks onto the lot and expects to pay 30-40% less for a 1 year old car than its original asking price, the car has thusly depreciated by 30-40%.

If the price of the car is reduced at source it causes accelerated depreciation, resulting in a further drop in resale value of the pre-owned vehicle.

A small 25 user company would best take advantage of Windows 2008 Small Business, which allows for up to 75 users and includes both Exchange and SharePoint. After that you only deal with OEM licenses of Windows. Outlook is optional, as Exchange provides capable webmail services, but again, Office Small business edition provides reasonable pricing for a small shop.

Remote desktops is a possibility, but the real loss that will stem from the tide of cloud computing is the atrophy of the personal computer down to a set top box whose usage is supported by ads. An iPad or iPhone is an apt example - when the personal computer no longer exists, where will an end-user's freedom to explore go?

The Tinkerer's Sunset is a good example of what bothers me about the current widespread embrace of cloud computing.

Why does't slashdot have a like button

It takes Microsoft Excel approximately 1.5 seconds to load on a moderately old PC running Windows XP; this with many more features available to it...

That was an odd way of agreeing with him. :-)

Hear hear! That's basically the upshot yes. You're foisting your personal documents onto a public server, you're allowing a company to index it and show you ads based on the resulting content you save/create, and people do it because they know only that they dislike Microsoft and don't want to pay money for goods and services.

It'll be interesting to see the advertising bubble burst when everyone realises those little sidebar ads don't generate nearly enough revenue in the real world.

Crap. I misread the post to which I replied. I thought they were referring to Internet Explorer and not just version 6 :[

Rich client software connecting to network servers is a long-standing formula that everyone has employed until the cloud buzzword bandwagon rolled into town. In most cases software applications running on the local computer will remain much more feature-rich and contain much more functionality than a web based application.

The day web based applications overtake desktop applications is the day the web browser weighs in at over a gigabyte in size, accounting for all the API's and associated background services that will be required to deliver them.

This is just another attempt at offering 'software as a service', rental software which is something slashdotters moaned loudly about when Microsoft promoted the concept in the early 2000's. Now that Google is planning on it, it's being hailed as heroism.

~65% of users in America and Europe actually. Let's not declare IE dead before its time.

Ok, I suppose you're free to have your beliefs but it happened about 2 months ago.

See, the keyboard isn't the problem, the configuration architecture and modular nature of the new X Windows System is the problem. Apparently you have to take steps(!!!) to ensure you have the proper support for basic input devices compiled into the system and configured in the config section in order to make it work.

My mouse worked, my keyboard and mouse both work at the console, however my keyboard does not work under X Windows.

{sigh} Denial of a long standing problem does not make the problem go away.

I used to scoff at people who would make these claims myself. Then I started working full time in a non-IT environment where suddenly the computer was a means to and end rather than the end itself. I no longer have the time to tinker, re-configure, re-compile, re-install or scour forums, FAQs, info pages and IRC channels to find the solutions to problems I encounter. In my day to day life I need my computers to Just Work and Linux does not accomplish this goal. The development is too scattered, dependencies change and it still happens far too often that a system will depend on multiple versions of a given dependency.

I'm sorry to say it but Linux will never grow or develop to take over in the corporate world. It's just spinning its wheels towards niche status.

I know you're going to catch even more flak for that comment than you already have, but I'll throw my $0.02CDN into the hat.

I've been a Linux user for well over a decade. I used to run/administer it on more machines than I could likely count today. My personal laptop, desktop(s) both at home and at work all ran Linux. I still have a server at home hosting my personal vanity domain that runs a Linux installation.

That being said, I'm no simpleton when it comes to Linux. I've rolled my own distro from the kernel, glibc and gcc on up, I've used half a dozen distributions, various package management systems including pre-compiled and those that require me to compile my individual apps and everything in between. I've gotten away from Linux on the desktop over the last few years (my new job is a Windows only environment and uses computers merely as tools) so I decided to try to awaken the Linux installation on my desktop at home.

Would you believe I spent hours getting it all up to date only to discover that my keyboard would not work under X Windows! I tried a PS/2 keyboard, a USB keyboard, a wireless USB keyboard; nothing. Best I ever got was to get the number pad at the right working, but that does not a usable environment make.

So I gave up. I banged my head against a wall long enough before I decided that if they can screw up a simple human interface, it's no longer fun.

BTW, even with a package management system I still had to fight dependancies and their collisions along the way. So you're 100% correct; Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing.

Hah! My personal favourite is the Windows XP method whereby it pops up a dialog box saying "Windows has sucessfully installed updates. Your computer needs to be restarted for these updates to take effect. Reboot Now, Reboot Later" with "Reboot Now" as the default option. If you're in the middle of, say, typing something when that nuisance of a dialog pops up and you hit space or enter you'll suddenly find yourself in the middle of a reboot cycle when it's least opportune; like in the middle of a sentence.

Windows 7 preserves almost all the metaphors and usage traits people are used to from XP, and introduces new convenience features. I think a transition to Windows 7 from XP would be a much smoother process than an introduction to a new platform.

Is there a good reason to switch the family to Linux, other than for ideological reasons?