The theory is, Microsoft makes it very difficult for manufacturers to sell computers without Windows. In the past Microsoft has been proven in court to have been strong-arming OEMs into not selling computers with other OSs, or no OS, because for most OEMs their core business is computers with Windows pre-installed, and they don't want to lose their favourable volume discount from Microsoft.
I don't know if this still goes on now, but it is really difficult to buy an off-the-shelf PC with no OS. Arguably the situation is a bit different now than it was 10 years ago, Linux is very much on the radar as is Mac OSX. However, countries differ in their competition and consumer protection laws, and it may well be that, in Italy, it's possible that the current situation runs foul of those laws/regulations.
To answer some of the other posts here asking why no-one complains about OSX, well - maybe some people would like to buy a Mac without an OS. This isn't the point though - it's very difficult to force a company to sell a certain combination of their own products. The issue here is that the MS Windows / Generic PC combination is two different products from two different companies, and that could run foul of competiton and consumer protection rules.
No, in the UK if you sell a service to someone under false pretenses, that would be fraud. It doesn't matter what sort of service it is. If you sell a dial-up internet connection to someone who already has broadband (which is what this article implies), without having a good reason to suppose that they need a separate dial-up connection (a very rare need) or tell them when they try to cancel that they really do need it, again that would be fraud. It would be covered by general consumer protection laws, and also probably by various telecoms regulations as well. There's a massive difference between selling someone something that they may not use (e.g. cable TV that they don't watch) and something that they clearly could not need.
Dial-up internet is not something the majority of people need. If you don't believe that, then this is a really stupid conversation. And I'm not being "taken in" by anybody, thank you very much. In the UK, at least, these sorts of sales practices would result in legal action (which has taken place - a bunch of banks have just had to pay compensation for mis-selling investment products to older folk who didn't need them).
A screwdriver is a general-purpose tool, it's easy to imagine that most people would have use for one - if not every day, then at least on occasion. Dial-up internet is a special service, and is sold for one purpose: to get online. The vast majority of people don't need it, and telling them that they do is definitely mis-selling. It's also a service, not goods, and there is a different obligation to determine that a service is being sold correctly, compared to goods.
I have this problem too - on initial inspection, and smell from a distance, I would far rather eat most of their products. Once you get close and smell the soap, the feeling goes away. I'm thinking there's a market for a shop that sells actual foodstuffs modelled on some of the Lush products.
No, what I'm saying is, I've dropped my iPhone 4 a number of times, onto hard surfaces, and it's survived fine. There's one very slight dent to the tiny metal ring that protects the screen from scratches, you'd have to deliberately look for it to find it. 'Clipped together' phones, as most are, seem to always fall apart on impact, and usually some plastic clip or other gets broken. That's been my experience, anyway.
Indeed, and my iPhone 4 is the only phone I've owned that I've dropped on the floor multiple times without the back breaking off, or at least falling off. I'm glad that the back is screwed on, and although I'm glad that my model has the Phillips screws in case I do need to get inside it, I really wouldn't mind spending a few pounds on the right screwdriver. Much better than the spudger technique needed for iPods.
I would recommend just learning how to use the Mac. I'm not sure what you mean by "folder navigation" - in Finder? Arrow keys work fine for me, if you want to use the keyboard for that. Remember, a lot of things that you're used to on Windows were invented by Apple (like pull-down menus, and thier associated shortcut keys) so although it's a pain relearning Cmd+C insteal of Ctrl-C to copy, it's MS that changed it, not Apple.
Really, there were no Android devices on the market last summer that had anything like the spec of the iPhone 4 for half the cost. With a contract maybe, but that's not a proper comparison.
Rubbish. I would go for "every one of your tastes in consumer products is influenced by marketing". And, ouch, I wrote 'by' instead of 'buy'. Trust me, marketing alone would not entice me to spend GBP 600 on a phone. That's nearly twice what I spent on my TV, and I've seen plenty of marketing for TVs too. I've also seen plenty of adverts for Windows 7 yet have no desire to buy or use it.
Marketing is definitely relevant for all people, but claiming that's the only reason someone would buy a product in such a competitive marketplace is ridiculous. There's plenty of advertising for other smartphone products. There's plenty of advertising for other areas too: I would like to get a tablet in the medium-term, the Samsung Galaxy Tab is being marketed like crazy here in the UK, I've looked at the specs and have no desire at all. I'd buy an iPad if it was half the price or had twice the feature set - in other words, if it had the features of my iPhone 4 in that form factor - which is what the iPad 2 will probably be, and I will probably buy it (and, note, there is 0 marketing for that at the moment).
Wow, I think you might win the award for the most balanced reply to an iPhone-related post in the past 18 months on Slashdot:).
I like your reasoning, I guess the big challenge for Android is that companies will inevitably see it as a free ride to adopt, customise and close down, like the numerous busybox-based broadband routers over the past years, but on a much larger scale. Ultimately I think the market will decide, a lot of the old school phone manufacturers just don't get it. Plenty probably never will: look at how many companies released a crippled PC-not-quite-compatible over the past 25 years, until the market settled down.
How about a third type - people who understand all of this but just don't care. I like my iPhone. If I was buying an Android phone for some reason, I'd look at all the available models and try them out and buy the one that worked best. I wouldn't care if the kernel was locked down or whatever, even though I completely understand what that means.
Has it occured to you that people might by products because they like them? I spent GBP 600 last year buying my iPhone 4 outright. It wasn't becuase I was 'deceived', it's because it helps me manage my life, stops me missing meetings, keeps me connected and entertained. Since I first bought a Palm m100 10 years ago, I've always invested in technology that will do those things. Right now, nothing has been released that gives me a compelling reason to switch away from my iPhone, and my iPhone does everything I want it to do, never crashes and never gets in the way. You might have reasons why you care about how 'open' your phone is, but the vast majority of people are no more bothered about that than they are about how 'open' their microwave oven is.
I only play in places that have their own PPL. It's not a business, usually I'm just playing for friends, I make them aware that a license is required and leave it to them to sort it out with the venue.
That's changed though, because of Amazon, iTunes and the like. Now most charts (at least in the UK) reflect downloads and in-store purchases as well as airplay, so they often do reflect what is really popular. It's quite interesting to look at the charts just after a major holiday/celebration (e.g. New Year's Eve) and see how purchases for parties have pushed older but popular songs nearer to the top. What would be really interesting would be a chart of popularity based on actual plays collected from iTunes, Spotify etc.. I suspect that would look very different to the purchase/download/airplay chart.
Online sales of singles has got me interested in throw-away music again. When I was a teenager I used to DJ a lot - nothing 'creative', just parties, 21st, weddings etc.. You could get a newly released single on 7" for 99p (UK) so before a gig I would go and spend 5-10 pounds and enjoy turning up with a handful of new records. For years CD singles have been 2.99 - 3.99, so I've waited until compilation albums came out (like the NOW! series) to get 40 songs for 15.99, of which perhaps 10 I really want to play.
Just recently I've done a few weddings and parties, and I've been able to go to Amazon and buy singles for 69-99p, and the prices don't go up after two weeks. I'm suddenly really enjoying DJing again because I can turn up with the tunes that everyone wants to hear, and I don't care if I will never play them again after 6 months. Plus if I've forgotten to buy a track that everyone's requesting, I can fire up my broadband dongle and buy it there and then.
For me, being able to buy the music that everyone's listening to on the radio will be a major step forward. Of course, I'll keep buying albums of the bands that I really like (NOT dance music!!), but I'm really glad I don't have to have piles of compilation CDs just to have a reasonable mix of music most people will dance to.
Well, the idea of this is to save money. One of the ways of decreasing poverty is to increase opportunity. The idea is that it initially costs money, but they then have greater access to jobs and training and ways of saving money e.g. online quotes for essentials like home insurance and utilities. My experience of "chavs" (I totally hate that word) is that the stereotype person wouldn't fit this profile anyway: most have access to the Internet and have games consoles, smartphones etc. anyway. This initiative seems to be aimed at the "make do and mend" genuinely poor, who don't have Internet access because it's a [false] economy.
Are you suggesting we should replace jobs with machines for the sake of it? I'm as much a tech geek as anyone else on this site, but I don't see in what way these robots do the job better than humans. There's always been a bit of an act of faith in early implementations of technology, but most tech has some obvious advantages early on - the first computers did calculations faster and more consistently than the human calculators they replaced, so it was worth pursuing that technology. These robots might be less likely to disappear outside for a cigarette break or steal company property, but they are also more likely to randomly fall down the stairs, run out of batteries or fail in any number of ways. It also seems like a sledgehammer to crack a nut - I'm sure most companies could give everyone dual 24" monitors for paperless working, and put a bean-to-cup automated coffee machine every 12 feet along the office and still not come close to the cost of buying these robots, providing the infrastructure, technical support, repairs and maintenance etc. that they would require.
I'm not sure that's a genuine stored-program computer. From what I recall, it was a very clever adding machine. Either way, it was a prototype rather than a fully complete, reliable machine that was used for research or commerce.
Yup, although Chrome seems particularly adept at getting round any corporate restrictions. At the [government institution] where I work, Chrome seems to be on about half the machines, usually installed by users. I'm always grateful to see it as lots of machines seems to still have IE 6 which is getting close to unusable on many web pages.
OK, here goes (can't decide whether you're trolling so I'll bite)
One question is... why is this a "pharma business scam" ? This guy was a government employee when he committed his scam.
He was involved in a number of companies selling vaccines, and had pending patents on single vaccines, and was apparently involved in companies to sell those single vaccines. He was also on the payroll of a group set up to litigate in the context of multiple (MMR) vaccines. So it wasn't "big pharma", but definitely he was involve in pharma.
This guy had all the titles on could possibly ask for.
Wakefield was an [adult] gastroenterologist doing research in paediatrics and autism, both fields in which he had no titles.
The fraudulent research, for 12 years(1993-2005) , was about as evidence-based as you can get. It had been researched, published, peer-reviewed, re-published.
Very few people took Wakefield's evidence seriously at the time, it was always contentious. Subsequent studies were not done to replicate Wakefield's findings, they were done to lend weight to the mainstream, orthodox view that his research was bunkum.
Really, no. It's been known for years that the 'science' was utter rubbish. Previously Wakefield was known to be wrong, now he's known to be a fraudster.
I know! You're so right. I'm ditching all my Apple products. I've also looked into my other equipment around the home, and it turns out that my Ford car only runs Ford software so I'm ditching that. Also I can only get upgrades to my Sony TV firmware from Sony - how closed is that!! - so that's in the bin too. And it turns out my dishwasher is closed! Damn! And my PS3, Wii and Xbox are all out too. Man, freedom is inconvenient.
Slashdot Mirror
The theory is, Microsoft makes it very difficult for manufacturers to sell computers without Windows. In the past Microsoft has been proven in court to have been strong-arming OEMs into not selling computers with other OSs, or no OS, because for most OEMs their core business is computers with Windows pre-installed, and they don't want to lose their favourable volume discount from Microsoft.
I don't know if this still goes on now, but it is really difficult to buy an off-the-shelf PC with no OS. Arguably the situation is a bit different now than it was 10 years ago, Linux is very much on the radar as is Mac OSX. However, countries differ in their competition and consumer protection laws, and it may well be that, in Italy, it's possible that the current situation runs foul of those laws/regulations.
To answer some of the other posts here asking why no-one complains about OSX, well - maybe some people would like to buy a Mac without an OS. This isn't the point though - it's very difficult to force a company to sell a certain combination of their own products. The issue here is that the MS Windows / Generic PC combination is two different products from two different companies, and that could run foul of competiton and consumer protection rules.
No, in the UK if you sell a service to someone under false pretenses, that would be fraud. It doesn't matter what sort of service it is. If you sell a dial-up internet connection to someone who already has broadband (which is what this article implies), without having a good reason to suppose that they need a separate dial-up connection (a very rare need) or tell them when they try to cancel that they really do need it, again that would be fraud. It would be covered by general consumer protection laws, and also probably by various telecoms regulations as well. There's a massive difference between selling someone something that they may not use (e.g. cable TV that they don't watch) and something that they clearly could not need.
Dial-up internet is not something the majority of people need. If you don't believe that, then this is a really stupid conversation. And I'm not being "taken in" by anybody, thank you very much. In the UK, at least, these sorts of sales practices would result in legal action (which has taken place - a bunch of banks have just had to pay compensation for mis-selling investment products to older folk who didn't need them).
A screwdriver is a general-purpose tool, it's easy to imagine that most people would have use for one - if not every day, then at least on occasion. Dial-up internet is a special service, and is sold for one purpose: to get online. The vast majority of people don't need it, and telling them that they do is definitely mis-selling. It's also a service, not goods, and there is a different obligation to determine that a service is being sold correctly, compared to goods.
I have this problem too - on initial inspection, and smell from a distance, I would far rather eat most of their products. Once you get close and smell the soap, the feeling goes away. I'm thinking there's a market for a shop that sells actual foodstuffs modelled on some of the Lush products.
No, what I'm saying is, I've dropped my iPhone 4 a number of times, onto hard surfaces, and it's survived fine. There's one very slight dent to the tiny metal ring that protects the screen from scratches, you'd have to deliberately look for it to find it. 'Clipped together' phones, as most are, seem to always fall apart on impact, and usually some plastic clip or other gets broken. That's been my experience, anyway.
Indeed, and my iPhone 4 is the only phone I've owned that I've dropped on the floor multiple times without the back breaking off, or at least falling off. I'm glad that the back is screwed on, and although I'm glad that my model has the Phillips screws in case I do need to get inside it, I really wouldn't mind spending a few pounds on the right screwdriver. Much better than the spudger technique needed for iPods.
I would recommend just learning how to use the Mac. I'm not sure what you mean by "folder navigation" - in Finder? Arrow keys work fine for me, if you want to use the keyboard for that. Remember, a lot of things that you're used to on Windows were invented by Apple (like pull-down menus, and thier associated shortcut keys) so although it's a pain relearning Cmd+C insteal of Ctrl-C to copy, it's MS that changed it, not Apple.
Really, there were no Android devices on the market last summer that had anything like the spec of the iPhone 4 for half the cost. With a contract maybe, but that's not a proper comparison.
Rubbish. I would go for "every one of your tastes in consumer products is influenced by marketing". And, ouch, I wrote 'by' instead of 'buy'. Trust me, marketing alone would not entice me to spend GBP 600 on a phone. That's nearly twice what I spent on my TV, and I've seen plenty of marketing for TVs too. I've also seen plenty of adverts for Windows 7 yet have no desire to buy or use it.
Marketing is definitely relevant for all people, but claiming that's the only reason someone would buy a product in such a competitive marketplace is ridiculous. There's plenty of advertising for other smartphone products. There's plenty of advertising for other areas too: I would like to get a tablet in the medium-term, the Samsung Galaxy Tab is being marketed like crazy here in the UK, I've looked at the specs and have no desire at all. I'd buy an iPad if it was half the price or had twice the feature set - in other words, if it had the features of my iPhone 4 in that form factor - which is what the iPad 2 will probably be, and I will probably buy it (and, note, there is 0 marketing for that at the moment).
Wow, I think you might win the award for the most balanced reply to an iPhone-related post in the past 18 months on Slashdot :).
I like your reasoning, I guess the big challenge for Android is that companies will inevitably see it as a free ride to adopt, customise and close down, like the numerous busybox-based broadband routers over the past years, but on a much larger scale. Ultimately I think the market will decide, a lot of the old school phone manufacturers just don't get it. Plenty probably never will: look at how many companies released a crippled PC-not-quite-compatible over the past 25 years, until the market settled down.
How about a third type - people who understand all of this but just don't care. I like my iPhone. If I was buying an Android phone for some reason, I'd look at all the available models and try them out and buy the one that worked best. I wouldn't care if the kernel was locked down or whatever, even though I completely understand what that means.
Has it occured to you that people might by products because they like them? I spent GBP 600 last year buying my iPhone 4 outright. It wasn't becuase I was 'deceived', it's because it helps me manage my life, stops me missing meetings, keeps me connected and entertained. Since I first bought a Palm m100 10 years ago, I've always invested in technology that will do those things. Right now, nothing has been released that gives me a compelling reason to switch away from my iPhone, and my iPhone does everything I want it to do, never crashes and never gets in the way. You might have reasons why you care about how 'open' your phone is, but the vast majority of people are no more bothered about that than they are about how 'open' their microwave oven is.
I only play in places that have their own PPL. It's not a business, usually I'm just playing for friends, I make them aware that a license is required and leave it to them to sort it out with the venue.
That's changed though, because of Amazon, iTunes and the like. Now most charts (at least in the UK) reflect downloads and in-store purchases as well as airplay, so they often do reflect what is really popular. It's quite interesting to look at the charts just after a major holiday/celebration (e.g. New Year's Eve) and see how purchases for parties have pushed older but popular songs nearer to the top. What would be really interesting would be a chart of popularity based on actual plays collected from iTunes, Spotify etc.. I suspect that would look very different to the purchase/download/airplay chart.
Online sales of singles has got me interested in throw-away music again. When I was a teenager I used to DJ a lot - nothing 'creative', just parties, 21st, weddings etc.. You could get a newly released single on 7" for 99p (UK) so before a gig I would go and spend 5-10 pounds and enjoy turning up with a handful of new records. For years CD singles have been 2.99 - 3.99, so I've waited until compilation albums came out (like the NOW! series) to get 40 songs for 15.99, of which perhaps 10 I really want to play.
Just recently I've done a few weddings and parties, and I've been able to go to Amazon and buy singles for 69-99p, and the prices don't go up after two weeks. I'm suddenly really enjoying DJing again because I can turn up with the tunes that everyone wants to hear, and I don't care if I will never play them again after 6 months. Plus if I've forgotten to buy a track that everyone's requesting, I can fire up my broadband dongle and buy it there and then.
For me, being able to buy the music that everyone's listening to on the radio will be a major step forward. Of course, I'll keep buying albums of the bands that I really like (NOT dance music!!), but I'm really glad I don't have to have piles of compilation CDs just to have a reasonable mix of music most people will dance to.
Well, the idea of this is to save money. One of the ways of decreasing poverty is to increase opportunity. The idea is that it initially costs money, but they then have greater access to jobs and training and ways of saving money e.g. online quotes for essentials like home insurance and utilities. My experience of "chavs" (I totally hate that word) is that the stereotype person wouldn't fit this profile anyway: most have access to the Internet and have games consoles, smartphones etc. anyway. This initiative seems to be aimed at the "make do and mend" genuinely poor, who don't have Internet access because it's a [false] economy.
Are you suggesting we should replace jobs with machines for the sake of it? I'm as much a tech geek as anyone else on this site, but I don't see in what way these robots do the job better than humans. There's always been a bit of an act of faith in early implementations of technology, but most tech has some obvious advantages early on - the first computers did calculations faster and more consistently than the human calculators they replaced, so it was worth pursuing that technology. These robots might be less likely to disappear outside for a cigarette break or steal company property, but they are also more likely to randomly fall down the stairs, run out of batteries or fail in any number of ways. It also seems like a sledgehammer to crack a nut - I'm sure most companies could give everyone dual 24" monitors for paperless working, and put a bean-to-cup automated coffee machine every 12 feet along the office and still not come close to the cost of buying these robots, providing the infrastructure, technical support, repairs and maintenance etc. that they would require.
I'm not sure that's a genuine stored-program computer. From what I recall, it was a very clever adding machine. Either way, it was a prototype rather than a fully complete, reliable machine that was used for research or commerce.
Yup, although Chrome seems particularly adept at getting round any corporate restrictions. At the [government institution] where I work, Chrome seems to be on about half the machines, usually installed by users. I'm always grateful to see it as lots of machines seems to still have IE 6 which is getting close to unusable on many web pages.
You don't HAVE to buy from Dell, you know.
OK, here goes (can't decide whether you're trolling so I'll bite)
One question is ... why is this a "pharma business scam" ? This guy was a government employee when he committed his scam.
He was involved in a number of companies selling vaccines, and had pending patents on single vaccines, and was apparently involved in companies to sell those single vaccines. He was also on the payroll of a group set up to litigate in the context of multiple (MMR) vaccines. So it wasn't "big pharma", but definitely he was involve in pharma.
This guy had all the titles on could possibly ask for.
Wakefield was an [adult] gastroenterologist doing research in paediatrics and autism, both fields in which he had no titles.
The fraudulent research, for 12 years(1993-2005) , was about as evidence-based as you can get. It had been researched, published, peer-reviewed, re-published.
Very few people took Wakefield's evidence seriously at the time, it was always contentious. Subsequent studies were not done to replicate Wakefield's findings, they were done to lend weight to the mainstream, orthodox view that his research was bunkum.
Really, no. It's been known for years that the 'science' was utter rubbish. Previously Wakefield was known to be wrong, now he's known to be a fraudster.
What on earth are you drivelling about?!
I know! You're so right. I'm ditching all my Apple products. I've also looked into my other equipment around the home, and it turns out that my Ford car only runs Ford software so I'm ditching that. Also I can only get upgrades to my Sony TV firmware from Sony - how closed is that!! - so that's in the bin too. And it turns out my dishwasher is closed! Damn! And my PS3, Wii and Xbox are all out too. Man, freedom is inconvenient.