That's laughably false, at least with real contracts. If someone brings you a stack of papers, says "Sign here", and you sign without reading it, and then they demand (in court) that you hand over all your personal property according to the contract, you're hosed.
Don't sign things without reading them. Ideally, this should extend to EULAs as well.
This is Slashdot. Anything in any language (especially English) has a 92% chance of being misunderstood by 57% of the local population... Unless you bash on America and/or religion, of course, and then you get modded +1 Insightful no matter what you say.
It is quite possible that all 5 of those points are true, however none of them even remotely resemble your earlier remark, which I requote here for your convenience:
they'll compel you into their courtroom in the sponsership of their judge to rule how odd your fantasyland activities of Goatse Taco-Felcher Daggonmut (clvl 69 ass-grabber) is evidence that you are not to be within 50' of a minor and conditional release from the Court as to be a registered "public offender."
In any case, it looks like most of your complaints are applicable to virtually every software company in the world so I don't know what you're so worked up about Blizzard for.
He didn't say #4 was "remove some of their blood through a new orifice." He said #4 was "offer to remove some of their blood through a new orifice." There's a HUGE difference.
Precisely. This will probably get thrown out of court for insufficient evidence on either side (he-said-she-said debates are worthless) but it will have wasted everyone's time... and screwed the woman out of internet service in the meantime (assuming one of the techs actually fixed it).
My dad got Comcast (ugh) to replace his discontinued Sprint Wireless Broadband service. The tech came out to install the service, but left before it was working, saying "wait until tomorrow, it should work." I came over a few days later, to find that it still wasn't working. My dad decided to call them yet AGAIN, with me in the room, to get them to fix it.
While listening to the call, and watching what was happening (everything redirected him to Comcast's Welcome page, even after registering), I finally got fed up and nudged my dad off the computer. I manually set the DNS server and it worked fine. Comcast's DNS server apparently didn't want to update its records to show that my dad had registered. The tech rep on the phone gave us some national Comcast DNS servers to use (they worked) and made a note in their systems to fix the errant server... supposedly.
It's sad that an installer, five phone tech reps and a manager couldn't figure this out.
Your advice, while appearing sound at first glance, has one fatal flaw - women are far from logical about these things. Yes, I'm married. No, your advice does not work.
they'll compel you into their courtroom in the sponsership of their judge to rule how odd your fantasyland activities of Goatse Taco-Felcher Daggonmut (clvl 69 ass-grabber) is evidence that you are not to be within 50' of a minor and conditional release from the Court as to be a registered "public offender."
Perhaps this is just feeding the troll... but do you have any evidence that Blizzard has done anything of the sort? I'm quite sure that if there were such an occurrence, the news would have been all over Slashdot, and yet I can recall nothing...
I hope you mean 800x600. Or do you play with your monitor sideways?
Seriously though, I've always been confused why they don't issue a quick patch to Diablo II to let us play it at a higher resolution. I can't think it would take very many changes...
Agreed. I don't like Diablo II online because it's too laggy (even though I'm on 15Mbps fiber). If I want to play with my friends I start a LAN game and we play over Hamachi. I'm quite saddened that Diablo III won't be able to do that.
But that's not patent number 666. It's 7,415,666. The passage you quote would have to say "and his number is Seven million four hundred fifteen thousand six hundred threescore and six" for it to apply.
Yeah, I said "ideally" for a reason... I think it would be awesome if they took Vista's prefetch idea and made it actually work well. I definitely wouldn't mind ~75% RAM usage if it were preloading things I actually need without killing my system in the meantime...
Considering that Apple has historically targeted relatively intelligent people with their marketing (image and video editors especially) and only now are they targeting a wider audience, yes, I would say that the current group of Mac users are more intelligent than the average Windows user.
You may not like thinking that the average Windows user is a moron, but one thing I've learned from my relatively short time as my company's IT guy is this: People are stupid. And as the saying goes, if you make something idiot-proof, nature just makes a better idiot.
They're not likely to do that, because that means to do considerable work.
Are you implying that it's trivial to write and coordinate a botnet that is difficult to remove and difficult to spot? That it's easy to discover a new, obscure flaw and then write software that can effectively exploit it? I think you underestimate both the work required and the money they can earn doing it...
Spammers, on the other hand, aren't targeting a particular platform (phishing scams, pump & dump, fake viagra sales, etc, are all internet-based and do not depend on Windows), so they don't count in the context of this discussion.
Ok, Dwight. If you say so - but the only proof you have of this is that most malware and viruses are written for Windows. In time, once virus creators actually spend time to find holes in OSX and Linux, there will be just as much malware for those OSes. Again, malware is most abundant for Windows simply because Windows is the most abundant OS. If Linux were most abundant, and Windows were simply some side curiousity, nobody would bother writing viruses for it no matter how insecure it is. (Incidentally, that's almost exactly the position OSX and Linux find themselves in right now.)
Any computer can break, but Macs need far less skilled babysitting than Windows.
Windows doesn't need babysitting, it needs users who aren't idiots. Once the Mac userbase encompasses the complete morons who use Windows now (you know, the ones falling for the Nigerian Bank Transfer spam schemes), we'll see who needs babysitting.
Apple doesn't load them up with all sorts of garbage "trial" ware.
You obviously didn't read the blog post I linked you to, because trialware was the first thing I talked about. Allow me to quote, so you don't have to scroll back up and click on the link:
Stuffed: In this scene, PC is wearing a giant ball. He's stuffed with trialware. Mac proceeds to tell him that he doesn't know what that's like because he only has stuff people need - and then he spits out this list of stuff: "iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb, it's all part of iLife."
(Update: iWork, their MS Office equivalent, comes with the system but is just a 30-day trial. So that too is bloated trialware.)
What if you don't want iTunes? iMovie? iPhoto? iWeb? Then that too would be considered "stuffing". The difference is that some vendors - not Windows itself - bundle trial versions of various programs. The only really annoying ones are the bad antivirus programs and the dialup internet providers.
Take my Dell laptop, for example. It came with a Roxio CD Creator program. That's about it. There may have been a dialup offer, I don't recall - if there was, I deleted it. It wasn't hard. "Stuffed" is not a word I would use to describe my Dell when it arrived. I even opted out of the MS Office trial when I ordered the laptop - I use OpenOffice. Comparatively speaking, the Mac comes with lots of extra software - "Stuffed" certianly applies there (whether they're useful or not is a topic for later on).
I purchased my laptop in April 2007. It has a 2 GHz C2D T7200, 2 GB RAM, and a Geforce Go 7300 (128 dedicated, 128 shared). If Windows' performance were poor, I'd suspect the video card as the culprit, but my Windows performance is fine.
I tried this on a system running Gnome on Gentoo Linux 2.6.24 with CFLAGS="-O2 -march=nocona -fomit-frame-pointer". I suppose it's possible I had some video driver setting somewhere set wrong, and one particular version of nvidia-drivers crashed my computer constantly... but who knows. I know in Windows, nVidia's drivers don't work, I have to use Dell's. Oh well. I'll try wine again when I build my desktop after I graduate and become (to quote a friend) a "highly paid software developer with moolah to spare".
Odd. I had my pagefile set to 2GB for over a year and never saw that issue, and reducing the pagefile to 512MB has had no adverse effect. Perhaps it's caused by having the pagefile set to "let windows decide the size"?
Most computer failure, both Mac and PC, is due to software, not hardware.
I said that Macs aren't any more reliable than Windows or Linux machines, especially now that the hardware is effectively the same. Thanks for repeating my point, though.
Yes, you get what you pay for. Usually. But I find it extremely difficult to believe that Apple uses so much higher quality hardware that it costs $600 more for an equivalently spec'ed machine. I've belabored the $600 more point a dozen times or more, and if you don't believe me I'll do it again.
Most PC failure is due to problems with Windows.
That's only because most PCs run Windows. If most PCs ran Linux, it would be just as valid to say "Most PC failure is due to problems with Linux"; if most PCs ran OSX, it would be just as valid to say "Most PC failure is due to problems with OSX." That's not really an insult to windows.
Why do programs like registry cleaners and other software "tuneup" programs, as well as a plethora of anti-virus programs exists for Windows?
You want the Apple answer or the real answer? Apple would have you believe Windows is inherently more insecure. While this may be true to some degree, the *real* answer is twofold: first, malware authors target Windows because it is so abundant (see above); second, the great majority of computer users (not just Windows users) are complete idiots with regard to taking care of their machine. Update Windows regularly, stay away from warez and porn sites, avoid downloading illegal software over p2p, and don't click links in spam e-mails, and you'll practically never have a virus or malware problem. It works for me.
Anti-virus programs exist for Linux as well, and it won't be long before the big anti-virus vendors start selling anti-virus programs for OSX.
I have never yet seen a Windows system that doesn't get slower and more constipated with time, so as to eventually need a re-install laxative.
Then you've never seen a Windows system owned by someone who actually takes care of their operating system. The only reason I reinstalled windows this week was because SP3 screwed up my system - but before you gloat, keep in mind that Tiger and Leopard each in turn caused quite a few problems themselves. My system still ran quick as ever, though, despite the occasional SP3-induced crash;) I didn't get BSODs, mind you, just some apps would occasionally crash (iTunes and Source-engine games, in particular).
That NEVER happens with OSX or Linux. OSX is based on a proven UNIX heritage, as is Linux.
It is not difficult to imagine loading OSX or Linux down with cruft to the point of unusability. Another straw-man argument.
The main problem with Linux for consumers is, there is no central support, like there is for Apple systems or even Windows.
Canonical supports Ubuntu, which is arguably the most common Linux distro that new users are familiar with.
How many/.ers, having recommended or even installed Linux for others, are now the support department for their non-geeky relatives and friends?
How many/.ers are currently the support department for their Windows-using relatives? For their Mac-using relatives? (I am, on both counts.) How many/.ers have recommended Ubuntu to their relatives so they could spend less time on support? That's not really a valid argument...
So yes, over all, the commercials are a fact.
I'll refer you to my blog post here regarding various half-truths and outright lies in Apple's commercials. Keep in mind that the post is just over a year old, so it does not deal with commercials newer
Volume Licenses don't require activation through Microsoft's servers, no. They do, however, have an EULA attached to them. I never said they required activation, nor did I say volume licenses aren't legitimate. I use VLKs practically every day here at work.
Activation is a completely separate issue from the EULA.
It really wasn't necessary to call me ignorant, especially when you just completely missed my point, which was this: just because YOU don't have the EULA doesn't mean the license you're using didn't come with an EULA bundled with it. (You're stealing a VLK from work or school, I take it?)
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Perhaps. I don't have cable so I never remember the specifics about those two.
That's laughably false, at least with real contracts. If someone brings you a stack of papers, says "Sign here", and you sign without reading it, and then they demand (in court) that you hand over all your personal property according to the contract, you're hosed.
Don't sign things without reading them. Ideally, this should extend to EULAs as well.
Yeah, it was MTV, if memory serves.
I didn't say it's not a problem to threaten someone. I was just making a distinction between an attack and a threat.
This is Slashdot. Anything in any language (especially English) has a 92% chance of being misunderstood by 57% of the local population... Unless you bash on America and/or religion, of course, and then you get modded +1 Insightful no matter what you say.
It is quite possible that all 5 of those points are true, however none of them even remotely resemble your earlier remark, which I requote here for your convenience:
they'll compel you into their courtroom in the sponsership of their judge to rule how odd your fantasyland activities of Goatse Taco-Felcher Daggonmut (clvl 69 ass-grabber) is evidence that you are not to be within 50' of a minor and conditional release from the Court as to be a registered "public offender."
In any case, it looks like most of your complaints are applicable to virtually every software company in the world so I don't know what you're so worked up about Blizzard for.
I'd mod you +1 Insightful if I had mod points and hadn't already posted... This is quite true.
He didn't say #4 was "remove some of their blood through a new orifice." He said #4 was "offer to remove some of their blood through a new orifice." There's a HUGE difference.
Precisely. This will probably get thrown out of court for insufficient evidence on either side (he-said-she-said debates are worthless) but it will have wasted everyone's time... and screwed the woman out of internet service in the meantime (assuming one of the techs actually fixed it).
My dad got Comcast (ugh) to replace his discontinued Sprint Wireless Broadband service. The tech came out to install the service, but left before it was working, saying "wait until tomorrow, it should work." I came over a few days later, to find that it still wasn't working. My dad decided to call them yet AGAIN, with me in the room, to get them to fix it.
While listening to the call, and watching what was happening (everything redirected him to Comcast's Welcome page, even after registering), I finally got fed up and nudged my dad off the computer. I manually set the DNS server and it worked fine. Comcast's DNS server apparently didn't want to update its records to show that my dad had registered. The tech rep on the phone gave us some national Comcast DNS servers to use (they worked) and made a note in their systems to fix the errant server... supposedly.
It's sad that an installer, five phone tech reps and a manager couldn't figure this out.
Your advice, while appearing sound at first glance, has one fatal flaw - women are far from logical about these things. Yes, I'm married. No, your advice does not work.
they'll compel you into their courtroom in the sponsership of their judge to rule how odd your fantasyland activities of Goatse Taco-Felcher Daggonmut (clvl 69 ass-grabber) is evidence that you are not to be within 50' of a minor and conditional release from the Court as to be a registered "public offender."
Perhaps this is just feeding the troll... but do you have any evidence that Blizzard has done anything of the sort? I'm quite sure that if there were such an occurrence, the news would have been all over Slashdot, and yet I can recall nothing...
I hope you mean 800x600. Or do you play with your monitor sideways?
Seriously though, I've always been confused why they don't issue a quick patch to Diablo II to let us play it at a higher resolution. I can't think it would take very many changes...
Agreed. I don't like Diablo II online because it's too laggy (even though I'm on 15Mbps fiber). If I want to play with my friends I start a LAN game and we play over Hamachi. I'm quite saddened that Diablo III won't be able to do that.
It's expensive to buy beer for everyone in the whole world...
But that's not patent number 666. It's 7,415,666. The passage you quote would have to say "and his number is Seven million four hundred fifteen thousand six hundred threescore and six" for it to apply.
Just saying.
If memory serves, Microsoft is helping the Mono project. Can anyone corroborate? Or is my brain broken?
My only point that saying "they write viruses to avoid work" is ridiculous.
And, before you get all high-and-mighty about Mac security, there have been viruses for OSX, they're just few and far between at the moment.
Yeah, I said "ideally" for a reason... I think it would be awesome if they took Vista's prefetch idea and made it actually work well. I definitely wouldn't mind ~75% RAM usage if it were preloading things I actually need without killing my system in the meantime...
Considering that Apple has historically targeted relatively intelligent people with their marketing (image and video editors especially) and only now are they targeting a wider audience, yes, I would say that the current group of Mac users are more intelligent than the average Windows user.
You may not like thinking that the average Windows user is a moron, but one thing I've learned from my relatively short time as my company's IT guy is this: People are stupid. And as the saying goes, if you make something idiot-proof, nature just makes a better idiot.
They're not likely to do that, because that means to do considerable work.
Are you implying that it's trivial to write and coordinate a botnet that is difficult to remove and difficult to spot? That it's easy to discover a new, obscure flaw and then write software that can effectively exploit it? I think you underestimate both the work required and the money they can earn doing it...
Spammers, on the other hand, aren't targeting a particular platform (phishing scams, pump & dump, fake viagra sales, etc, are all internet-based and do not depend on Windows), so they don't count in the context of this discussion.
False. Windows is an easier target.
Ok, Dwight. If you say so - but the only proof you have of this is that most malware and viruses are written for Windows. In time, once virus creators actually spend time to find holes in OSX and Linux, there will be just as much malware for those OSes. Again, malware is most abundant for Windows simply because Windows is the most abundant OS. If Linux were most abundant, and Windows were simply some side curiousity, nobody would bother writing viruses for it no matter how insecure it is. (Incidentally, that's almost exactly the position OSX and Linux find themselves in right now.)
Any computer can break, but Macs need far less skilled babysitting than Windows.
Windows doesn't need babysitting, it needs users who aren't idiots. Once the Mac userbase encompasses the complete morons who use Windows now (you know, the ones falling for the Nigerian Bank Transfer spam schemes), we'll see who needs babysitting.
Apple doesn't load them up with all sorts of garbage "trial" ware.
You obviously didn't read the blog post I linked you to, because trialware was the first thing I talked about. Allow me to quote, so you don't have to scroll back up and click on the link:
Stuffed: In this scene, PC is wearing a giant ball. He's stuffed with trialware. Mac proceeds to tell him that he doesn't know what that's like because he only has stuff people need - and then he spits out this list of stuff: "iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb, it's all part of iLife."
(Update: iWork, their MS Office equivalent, comes with the system but is just a 30-day trial. So that too is bloated trialware.)
What if you don't want iTunes? iMovie? iPhoto? iWeb? Then that too would be considered "stuffing". The difference is that some vendors - not Windows itself - bundle trial versions of various programs. The only really annoying ones are the bad antivirus programs and the dialup internet providers.
Take my Dell laptop, for example. It came with a Roxio CD Creator program. That's about it. There may have been a dialup offer, I don't recall - if there was, I deleted it. It wasn't hard. "Stuffed" is not a word I would use to describe my Dell when it arrived. I even opted out of the MS Office trial when I ordered the laptop - I use OpenOffice. Comparatively speaking, the Mac comes with lots of extra software - "Stuffed" certianly applies there (whether they're useful or not is a topic for later on).
I purchased my laptop in April 2007. It has a 2 GHz C2D T7200, 2 GB RAM, and a Geforce Go 7300 (128 dedicated, 128 shared). If Windows' performance were poor, I'd suspect the video card as the culprit, but my Windows performance is fine.
I tried this on a system running Gnome on Gentoo Linux 2.6.24 with CFLAGS="-O2 -march=nocona -fomit-frame-pointer". I suppose it's possible I had some video driver setting somewhere set wrong, and one particular version of nvidia-drivers crashed my computer constantly... but who knows. I know in Windows, nVidia's drivers don't work, I have to use Dell's. Oh well. I'll try wine again when I build my desktop after I graduate and become (to quote a friend) a "highly paid software developer with moolah to spare".
Odd. I had my pagefile set to 2GB for over a year and never saw that issue, and reducing the pagefile to 512MB has had no adverse effect. Perhaps it's caused by having the pagefile set to "let windows decide the size"?
Most computer failure, both Mac and PC, is due to software, not hardware.
I said that Macs aren't any more reliable than Windows or Linux machines, especially now that the hardware is effectively the same. Thanks for repeating my point, though.
Yes, you get what you pay for. Usually. But I find it extremely difficult to believe that Apple uses so much higher quality hardware that it costs $600 more for an equivalently spec'ed machine. I've belabored the $600 more point a dozen times or more, and if you don't believe me I'll do it again.
Most PC failure is due to problems with Windows.
That's only because most PCs run Windows. If most PCs ran Linux, it would be just as valid to say "Most PC failure is due to problems with Linux"; if most PCs ran OSX, it would be just as valid to say "Most PC failure is due to problems with OSX." That's not really an insult to windows.
Why do programs like registry cleaners and other software "tuneup" programs, as well as a plethora of anti-virus programs exists for Windows?
You want the Apple answer or the real answer? Apple would have you believe Windows is inherently more insecure. While this may be true to some degree, the *real* answer is twofold: first, malware authors target Windows because it is so abundant (see above); second, the great majority of computer users (not just Windows users) are complete idiots with regard to taking care of their machine. Update Windows regularly, stay away from warez and porn sites, avoid downloading illegal software over p2p, and don't click links in spam e-mails, and you'll practically never have a virus or malware problem. It works for me.
Anti-virus programs exist for Linux as well, and it won't be long before the big anti-virus vendors start selling anti-virus programs for OSX.
I have never yet seen a Windows system that doesn't get slower and more constipated with time, so as to eventually need a re-install laxative.
Then you've never seen a Windows system owned by someone who actually takes care of their operating system. The only reason I reinstalled windows this week was because SP3 screwed up my system - but before you gloat, keep in mind that Tiger and Leopard each in turn caused quite a few problems themselves. My system still ran quick as ever, though, despite the occasional SP3-induced crash ;) I didn't get BSODs, mind you, just some apps would occasionally crash (iTunes and Source-engine games, in particular).
That NEVER happens with OSX or Linux. OSX is based on a proven UNIX heritage, as is Linux.
It is not difficult to imagine loading OSX or Linux down with cruft to the point of unusability. Another straw-man argument.
The main problem with Linux for consumers is, there is no central support, like there is for Apple systems or even Windows.
Canonical supports Ubuntu, which is arguably the most common Linux distro that new users are familiar with.
How many /.ers, having recommended or even installed Linux for others, are now the support department for their non-geeky relatives and friends?
How many /.ers are currently the support department for their Windows-using relatives? For their Mac-using relatives? (I am, on both counts.) How many /.ers have recommended Ubuntu to their relatives so they could spend less time on support? That's not really a valid argument...
So yes, over all, the commercials are a fact.
I'll refer you to my blog post here regarding various half-truths and outright lies in Apple's commercials. Keep in mind that the post is just over a year old, so it does not deal with commercials newer
Volume Licenses don't require activation through Microsoft's servers, no. They do, however, have an EULA attached to them. I never said they required activation, nor did I say volume licenses aren't legitimate. I use VLKs practically every day here at work.
Activation is a completely separate issue from the EULA.
It really wasn't necessary to call me ignorant, especially when you just completely missed my point, which was this: just because YOU don't have the EULA doesn't mean the license you're using didn't come with an EULA bundled with it. (You're stealing a VLK from work or school, I take it?)