That doesn't make sense; people buy Macs for their cool industrial design and software. Windows on an IBM-made G5 processor machine isn't going to be very helpful in either department.
This looks like unfair moderation to me, but since I have no mod points I can't correct the wrong:-(. It's troll-like, I suppose, but also a fair question.
That being said, from about 8b in revenues to 10b doesn't seem like that much of a stretch, and probably isn't enough to significantly impact the share price, which has remained within its normal range.
It's been a very interesting turnaround in the geek/nerd market, to the extent that even CmdrTaco has a MacOS X system. It's too bad this market doesn't seem to be a significant percentage of the whole.
However, I was just managing a virus outbreak, and finally getting the Symantec Centralized Anti-Virus solution to more or less work in my company, and I can say the value of the time it took to do this would have easily paid the price difference between the PCs we have and the eMacs we could have bought instead. Add outside consultant time and Windows TCO compared to the Mac gets even more absurd.
Most of our employees use a web-based CRM system I developed for the company that's completely platform-independent, so theoretically there should be no problem at all switching.
Unfortunately, we have a phone system that forces a Windows lock-in for a variety of reasons, but if it didn't, I would think a switch to Mac for most people wouldn't be that difficult a sell. "Look, you can still get Office, and you'll have 1% of the trouble with viruses and worms. It's a no-brainer!"
If mid-sized companies like ours could be a bit more open-minded, and if they could avoid buying a phone system like we did (it was a mistake, for a lot of other good reasons), I think more companies would find major advantages in switching.
AutoZone was, in fact, paying a maintenance fee, and did, in fact, let it expire.
However, I don't think that invalidates your claim. If I run Windows, and have a support contract with Microsoft, I can continue running it even after cancelling the support contract. Unless they had unusual contractual arrangements (which I have encountered in other situations, but would be impossible to enforce for ordinary packaged software), there are no legal obstacles to discontinuing support contracts and continuing to run software.
Of course Mr Greer's statements that the port was made without SCO-only features indicates that all of this is moot, and the case against AutoZone will collapse.
I might add that the next victim is almost certainly Target, since the same paper referenced by the parent poster also mentions them.
Based on information and belief, as the lawyers say, I don't think they have a solid claim against either company.
They highlight a "Windows Server Package" (on unknown hardware) for $89 a month on the top of their home page.
All their other packages are more expensive. For instance, "Intel Celeron 1.7ghz" is $89/month for Windows Server 2003. It's $99 a month for a Celeron 1.3ghz and Red Hat.
Looks like someone got a pretty generous discount on Windows Server 2003 licenses, doesn't it?
Does it make sense to pay protection money if they're sitting in front of you with an unloaded gun?
Frankly, I don't think he was smart to do this. Unless he really thinks SCO will prevail in the suit, the proper course is a holding action. If he gets sued, he prepares a brief citing the various cases and tells the judge that case resolution must be pending the results of said cases.
I'll bet there are a lot of people who (on Groklaw and elsewhere) would be more than happy to prepare that for free, or for a nominal cost. It's trivial to find those people.
In any event, he may be breaking his SCO license agreement. He should check his Linux deployments to make sure nobody's monkeyed with the kernel source, or has copies of the kernel source on the machines involved. If they do, the licenses won't protect him.
Oops.
D
Re:e:Minimize CPU usage, Maximize distance drivel
on
Quieting Your G5?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Considering that other people mentioned that ProTools was a bit of a CPU hog, I suspect my advice to use Final Cut Express, which is not, was sound and would solve the problem.
I know that I've had no trouble at all getting good quality recordings following my advice.
Having a separate room dedicated to recording sounds like good advice, but I don't know if it applies well to the true amateur, who might be both vocalist and sound engineer. You need access to your computer so you can start the recording at the appropriate time, and so you can monitor its status.
If you do get a good book on computer sound recording, you'll probably be $40 lighter unless you get it off Amazon.
That all being said, what's wrong with having the mic close to your face, as long as you have a good de-popper?
D
Minimize CPU usage, Maximize distance from the G5
on
Quieting Your G5?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This is an odd question. I've never used ProTools, but I have had no problem at all with fan noise while recording voice overs in Final Cut Pro.
That being said, here are a few notes that should help you.
The G5's fans are very nicely fine-tuned to CPU usage and temperature. The more heavily you use your G5, the louder they are.
So you might be able to solve this problem by minimizing usage. Quit your email program, your web browser, and any other programs you have open. Many of them burn CPU cycles even when they appear to be doing nothing. Quit every program other than Protools.
I don't know much about ProTools itself - I use Final Cut Pro and After Effects - so this is just general advice. If you're playing tracks through your headphones that you don't need for the voiceover, turn them off. If ProTools has a draft playback mode to minimize CPU usage, turn it on.
If you don't already have it there, put your PowerMac G5 under your desk. It sure looks pretty on top of it, but it will make a lot less noise if it's even a little further from your microphone. In an extreme case, you might want to run long cables to it and store it in a more distant part of the room.
If you are running a lot of programs on your system, quit everything but ProTools while doing the voice over, and tell it to play a bare minimum of tracks through the headset.
Put your microphone on a stand and make sure it's close to your face. Get one of those absurd looking anti-poppers (someone at Guitar Center or similar stores can find one for you). Then make sure you're using the bare minimum recorrding volume needed to get a strong signal from your voice.
Put your PowerMac G5 in back of your microphone. Most microphones are pretty directional. If yours is not, get a shotgun mic designed to pick up mainly what's in front of it.
I've never had any trouble recording from Final Cut Pro's voice over tool, but it's possible that is less CPU intensive than Protools. If ProTools is the CPU hog, you might want to use your copy of Final Cut (Final Cut Express is just $299) to record the song and then transfer the audio track to Protools. Final Cut is not the be all and end all of audio, but you can certainly lay out other audio tracks and play them into your headphones.
Why such resentment of someone you don't even know?
For all either of us know, he could be a thin, trim, motorcycle maniac who was killed in an unfortunate encounter with a semi.
Or he could have been a fat guy.
Quite honestly, if he was bringing us a cool project we could all use, who cares?
I gather he died before he could bring the project to frutition, and that's a darn shame for those of us who could use it, no matter what he looked like, and no matter what his habits may be.
Mark Andreesen was the original programmer for Netscape. Netscape changed from a simple display platform to a programming environment that did dynamic adjustments on the content.
In my experience, most programs that undergo such radical change become huge messes, particularly when they have to handle so many platforms and special conditions.
I believe it was JWZ who recognized this and became the primary developer for Mozilla. It's possible, indeed probable, that he bit off more than he could chew and underestimated the difficulty of both coding and managing a major open source project.
So I would defend him against the 'has-been' charge. I have no serious doubt that he was, and is, highly capable.
But he's rich now, and he can do whatever he wants. He'd rather run a nightclub and hang out with cute girls and other hip people.
The percentage may be about to get a lot higher, with the Color LaserJet 3500N (link is to my review), which for some reason is unavailable at retail in the non-networked version.
I bought the network version with JetDirect and am extremely happy with it. Of course part of the reason is that my home network is MacOS X-based, so setup is dead easy.
You could blame Samsung. I bought one of their printers (I think it was the ML-6060) because of its MacOS X and Linux support, but the MacOS X driver was a horrid beta thing I couldn't get to work despite spending hours trying to get it to work.
A few months later I was able to find and download a working driver, but it was still a royal pain, and the output was still not quite right.
Eric has some excellent points, but just to muddy the waters a bit, Windows often isn't any better.
For example, I have to set up printing to JetDirect network printers at work under Windows, and it's horribly unintuitive.
1 Run the printer setup wizard 2 Say you're setting up a LOCAL printer, not a network printer 3 Un-click "Detect automatically" and press Next 4 Say you want to create a new port. Selecct TCP/IP port from the dropdown. A new TCP/IP port wizard pops up. Type in the IP address of your printer 5 Select the printer make and model.
It would probably be easier to set up CUPS on a JetDirect printer than Windows, based on the menus Eric cites. Too bad that wasn't what he had.
I don't think he's a has-been. Judging by his nightclub web site, I'm going to guess he's having a lot of fun, meeting a lot of people, and having some kind of love life, all traditional failings for geeks.
That being said, I wonder why he doesn't port xemacs himself.
He surely has the ability, if anyone does.
Unfortunately, I suppose he doesn't have the free time, considering his dedication to his nightclub -- but maybe if he took the time he was spending trying to get Linux to work and put it into the port, we'd all be a lot better off.
I know I would. I use MacOS X and sure would love an xemacs port. Sadly I simply don't have the knowledge or ability needed to do it, but I sure would love to have it:-(.
I bought the iPod as a personal stereo and as a backup device, so that it would be easy and painless for me to do backups, to a device I was unlikely to forget to take with me.
It's a great backup device, and it's a great personal stereo.
I stopped using my iPod outside of the car when I realized that I was feeling a lot less grounded in the real world than I'd been before. I realized that I was closing myself out from interactions with other people. As a nerd, I have too few of those in any event, so I recognized the unit as a gant step backwards.
However, it's great in the car, and I can't wait until I get an iPod compatible car stereo so I don't need to wear those awful earbuds.
Oddly enough, until that time, I've actually wound up using it more as an audio source for my home stereo. It works great there too, and I don't have to bother with earbuds. I suspect that will be its primary use until I get a car stereo compatible with it.
Leaving it at home ruins it as a disaster recovery backup, though, which is a bummer...
Correct. You are expressly not authorized to view or modify the Linux source code if you agree to the license. I think this means you can't even compile the kernel to add/remove device drivers.
When I tried to get through the ordering process, I got:
Safari can't open the page "http://shop.sco.com/" because it could not connect to the server "shop.sco.com".
at about the time it would have started getting serious and telling me pricing and other details.
So I tried again. Got:
Internal Server Error
Geez, you'd think an operating system vendor would know how to run, well, an operating system.
Now isn't that an interesting coincidence! I wonder if that's how Douglas decided on the answer of 42? That it's the length of the string? He always said it stood for nothing, of course.
But it may be meaningless in Google terms, since when I search for 5+foo, it doesn't even try running Calculator.
I was amused by the fact that Calculator answered that query, so I did a little experimentation.
Turns out that it's a numeric variable built into Calculator! Search for:
10 * answer to life the universe and everything + 5
and you'll get back:
(10 * answer to life the universe and everything) + 5 = 425
The Ghost of Douglas Adams would smile at that one. Or he'd be sick of hearing about 42 and slam the door in their face. Who knows which? I guess we'll never know:-(.
It sure brightened up my morning, on a chill rainy day, and that must count for something.
You might want to look at this another way: They may not mind the cheating at all.
What they want to do is convert Coca-Cola addicts (like me) to Pepsi addicts. This is a back-handed bribe for me to switch from Coke to Pepsi for a month. The economics actually aren't bad, since as well as shifting my brand, they want me to buy more expensive single bottles at over $1 each, as opposed to my usual 6 and 12 packs at under $ 0.50 each.
The actual sugar water component of a soda costs around $ 0.10. The wholesale value of a song on iTunes is probably around $ 0.50. If they have about a 100% markup at retail, the $1.20 pepsi bottle is giving them $0.60, so they are roughly breaking even on my sodas which are a guaranteed win.
What they're counting on, of course, is that I switch to Pepsi and continue drinking it after the promotion. This is surely not impossible, as long as I decide I like the taste better. If they wind up doing that, they may not care that I'm only picking winning bottles, and they might have even made it deliberately trivial to cheat. They won't tell us that; it ruins the fun. But they may well have done it. Of course that's also why there's a 200 song limit for each email address. They'll let me have $100 wholesale, no matter how I get it.
The majority of Pepsi drinkers probably don't care about the promotion.
Those who do will win. Those who don't care won't win and won't care that they didn't win.
The tunes go to the people who want them, and more or less everyone is happy.
I'd say this would hold true if anywhere under 10% of Pepsi drinkers wanted the iTunes songs. Once you get past that, you wind up having massive inventories of losing bottles nobody wants and things turn ugly fast.
But if that's the case, it's Pepsi that loses, not Apple. Apple has no liability for Pepsi's inventory problems or lack of same.
It's amusing. I laughed several times. It's definitely different. Obnoxious, sometimes, but different in a cool sort of way.
Ruby seems like Perl, written to be a lot less obscure and much more object-oriented. Cool. And the style reminds me a bit of Mr Bunny's Guide to ActiveX. If you liked his book, you should read that too, whether you're interested in ActiveX or not.
But the non-existance of Chapter 4, just after the book started to get into the meat of things, was a bit of a non-starter.
I guess it will be ready for Slashdot in, well, six months.
Or twelve?
Or... ?
I guess it's up to the LuckyStiff. Maybe he's doing luckier stuff nowadays.
My government's services are so crummy I don't think the state deserves a penny for them. My prescription would be to figure out how to spend more wisely instead of increasing revenue.
Whatever the Los Angeles and California governments are doing, they're wasting money on it, since it sure doesn't wind up in my schools, my streets or in the pocket of the cop on the beat.
There's also a comet wrasse and a comet grouper. I think the creature I've seen is a comet wrasse.
I guess we'll just have to wait for the original poster to find out what was really meant. In your case, there would be no problem with the gift and it would have been genuinely sweet. I doubt that's the situation considering the context.
I'm not sure everyone got the joke, or I did, but I believe the Comet is a tropical salt water fish and the Goldfish are cold fresh water. If the goldfish were put in the same tank, they would die instantly, if the Comet didn't eat the goldfish first:-(.
I can't help but wonder what the guy did about this; perhaps he can tell us the ending of the story.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't make sense; people buy Macs for their cool industrial design and software. Windows on an IBM-made G5 processor machine isn't going to be very helpful in either department.
D
This looks like unfair moderation to me, but since I have no mod points I can't correct the wrong :-(. It's troll-like, I suppose, but also a fair question.
That being said, from about 8b in revenues to 10b doesn't seem like that much of a stretch, and probably isn't enough to significantly impact the share price, which has remained within its normal range.
D
It's been a very interesting turnaround in the geek/nerd market, to the extent that even CmdrTaco has a MacOS X system. It's too bad this market doesn't seem to be a significant percentage of the whole.
However, I was just managing a virus outbreak, and finally getting the Symantec Centralized Anti-Virus solution to more or less work in my company, and I can say the value of the time it took to do this would have easily paid the price difference between the PCs we have and the eMacs we could have bought instead. Add outside consultant time and Windows TCO compared to the Mac gets even more absurd.
Most of our employees use a web-based CRM system I developed for the company that's completely platform-independent, so theoretically there should be no problem at all switching.
Unfortunately, we have a phone system that forces a Windows lock-in for a variety of reasons, but if it didn't, I would think a switch to Mac for most people wouldn't be that difficult a sell. "Look, you can still get Office, and you'll have 1% of the trouble with viruses and worms. It's a no-brainer!"
If mid-sized companies like ours could be a bit more open-minded, and if they could avoid buying a phone system like we did (it was a mistake, for a lot of other good reasons), I think more companies would find major advantages in switching.
D
AutoZone was, in fact, paying a maintenance fee, and did, in fact, let it expire.
However, I don't think that invalidates your claim. If I run Windows, and have a support contract with Microsoft, I can continue running it even after cancelling the support contract. Unless they had unusual contractual arrangements (which I have encountered in other situations, but would be impossible to enforce for ordinary packaged software), there are no legal obstacles to discontinuing support contracts and continuing to run software.
Of course Mr Greer's statements that the port was made without SCO-only features indicates that all of this is moot, and the case against AutoZone will collapse.
I might add that the next victim is almost certainly Target, since the same paper referenced by the parent poster also mentions them.
Based on information and belief, as the lawyers say, I don't think they have a solid claim against either company.
D
One might note that:
- Their home page runs on a Windows server
- They highlight a "Windows Server Package" (on unknown hardware) for $89 a month on the top of their home page.
- All their other packages are more expensive. For instance, "Intel Celeron 1.7ghz" is $89/month for Windows Server 2003. It's $99 a month for a Celeron 1.3ghz and Red Hat.
Looks like someone got a pretty generous discount on Windows Server 2003 licenses, doesn't it?So much for being a friend of Linux!
D
Does it make sense to pay protection money if they're sitting in front of you with an unloaded gun?
Frankly, I don't think he was smart to do this. Unless he really thinks SCO will prevail in the suit, the proper course is a holding action. If he gets sued, he prepares a brief citing the various cases and tells the judge that case resolution must be pending the results of said cases.
I'll bet there are a lot of people who (on Groklaw and elsewhere) would be more than happy to prepare that for free, or for a nominal cost. It's trivial to find those people.
In any event, he may be breaking his SCO license agreement. He should check his Linux deployments to make sure nobody's monkeyed with the kernel source, or has copies of the kernel source on the machines involved. If they do, the licenses won't protect him.
Oops.
D
Considering that other people mentioned that ProTools was a bit of a CPU hog, I suspect my advice to use Final Cut Express, which is not, was sound and would solve the problem.
I know that I've had no trouble at all getting good quality recordings following my advice.
Having a separate room dedicated to recording sounds like good advice, but I don't know if it applies well to the true amateur, who might be both vocalist and sound engineer. You need access to your computer so you can start the recording at the appropriate time, and so you can monitor its status.
If you do get a good book on computer sound recording, you'll probably be $40 lighter unless you get it off Amazon.
That all being said, what's wrong with having the mic close to your face, as long as you have a good de-popper?
D
This is an odd question. I've never used ProTools, but I have had no problem at all with fan noise while recording voice overs in Final Cut Pro.
That being said, here are a few notes that should help you.
The G5's fans are very nicely fine-tuned to CPU usage and temperature. The more heavily you use your G5, the louder they are.
So you might be able to solve this problem by minimizing usage. Quit your email program, your web browser, and any other programs you have open. Many of them burn CPU cycles even when they appear to be doing nothing. Quit every program other than Protools.
I don't know much about ProTools itself - I use Final Cut Pro and After Effects - so this is just general advice. If you're playing tracks through your headphones that you don't need for the voiceover, turn them off. If ProTools has a draft playback mode to minimize CPU usage, turn it on.
If you don't already have it there, put your PowerMac G5 under your desk. It sure looks pretty on top of it, but it will make a lot less noise if it's even a little further from your microphone. In an extreme case, you might want to run long cables to it and store it in a more distant part of the room.
If you are running a lot of programs on your system, quit everything but ProTools while doing the voice over, and tell it to play a bare minimum of tracks through the headset.
Put your microphone on a stand and make sure it's close to your face. Get one of those absurd looking anti-poppers (someone at Guitar Center or similar stores can find one for you). Then make sure you're using the bare minimum recorrding volume needed to get a strong signal from your voice.
Put your PowerMac G5 in back of your microphone. Most microphones are pretty directional. If yours is not, get a shotgun mic designed to pick up mainly what's in front of it.
I've never had any trouble recording from Final Cut Pro's voice over tool, but it's possible that is less CPU intensive than Protools. If ProTools is the CPU hog, you might want to use your copy of Final Cut (Final Cut Express is just $299) to record the song and then transfer the audio track to Protools. Final Cut is not the be all and end all of audio, but you can certainly lay out other audio tracks and play them into your headphones.
Hope this helps.
D
Why such resentment of someone you don't even know?
For all either of us know, he could be a thin, trim, motorcycle maniac who was killed in an unfortunate encounter with a semi.
Or he could have been a fat guy.
Quite honestly, if he was bringing us a cool project we could all use, who cares?
I gather he died before he could bring the project to frutition, and that's a darn shame for those of us who could use it, no matter what he looked like, and no matter what his habits may be.
D
Mark Andreesen was the original programmer for Netscape. Netscape changed from a simple display platform to a programming environment that did dynamic adjustments on the content.
In my experience, most programs that undergo such radical change become huge messes, particularly when they have to handle so many platforms and special conditions.
I believe it was JWZ who recognized this and became the primary developer for Mozilla. It's possible, indeed probable, that he bit off more than he could chew and underestimated the difficulty of both coding and managing a major open source project.
So I would defend him against the 'has-been' charge. I have no serious doubt that he was, and is, highly capable.
But he's rich now, and he can do whatever he wants. He'd rather run a nightclub and hang out with cute girls and other hip people.
Strange definition of a 'has-been', no?
D
The percentage may be about to get a lot higher, with the Color LaserJet 3500N (link is to my review), which for some reason is unavailable at retail in the non-networked version.
I bought the network version with JetDirect and am extremely happy with it. Of course part of the reason is that my home network is MacOS X-based, so setup is dead easy.
D
You could blame Samsung. I bought one of their printers (I think it was the ML-6060) because of its MacOS X and Linux support, but the MacOS X driver was a horrid beta thing I couldn't get to work despite spending hours trying to get it to work.
A few months later I was able to find and download a working driver, but it was still a royal pain, and the output was still not quite right.
So I'm back to HP and happy as a clam.
D
Eric has some excellent points, but just to muddy the waters a bit, Windows often isn't any better.
For example, I have to set up printing to JetDirect network printers at work under Windows, and it's horribly unintuitive.
1 Run the printer setup wizard
2 Say you're setting up a LOCAL printer, not a network printer
3 Un-click "Detect automatically" and press Next
4 Say you want to create a new port. Selecct TCP/IP port from the dropdown. A new TCP/IP port wizard pops up. Type in the IP address of your printer
5 Select the printer make and model.
It would probably be easier to set up CUPS on a JetDirect printer than Windows, based on the menus Eric cites. Too bad that wasn't what he had.
D
I don't think he's a has-been. Judging by his nightclub web site, I'm going to guess he's having a lot of fun, meeting a lot of people, and having some kind of love life, all traditional failings for geeks.
:-(.
That being said, I wonder why he doesn't port xemacs himself.
He surely has the ability, if anyone does.
Unfortunately, I suppose he doesn't have the free time, considering his dedication to his nightclub -- but maybe if he took the time he was spending trying to get Linux to work and put it into the port, we'd all be a lot better off.
I know I would. I use MacOS X and sure would love an xemacs port. Sadly I simply don't have the knowledge or ability needed to do it, but I sure would love to have it
D
I bought the iPod as a personal stereo and as a backup device, so that it would be easy and painless for me to do backups, to a device I was unlikely to forget to take with me.
...
It's a great backup device, and it's a great personal stereo.
I stopped using my iPod outside of the car when I realized that I was feeling a lot less grounded in the real world than I'd been before. I realized that I was closing myself out from interactions with other people. As a nerd, I have too few of those in any event, so I recognized the unit as a gant step backwards.
However, it's great in the car, and I can't wait until I get an iPod compatible car stereo so I don't need to wear those awful earbuds.
Oddly enough, until that time, I've actually wound up using it more as an audio source for my home stereo. It works great there too, and I don't have to bother with earbuds. I suspect that will be its primary use until I get a car stereo compatible with it.
Leaving it at home ruins it as a disaster recovery backup, though, which is a bummer
D
True, but keeping a web server up, running and stable is not a bad test for an OS vendor. They should be able to do it, using their own systems.
And they can't, actually; their web server runs Linux.
Bizarre.
D
Correct. You are expressly not authorized to view or modify the Linux source code if you agree to the license. I think this means you can't even compile the kernel to add/remove device drivers.
When I tried to get through the ordering process, I got:
Safari can't open the page "http://shop.sco.com/" because it could not connect to the server "shop.sco.com".
at about the time it would have started getting serious and telling me pricing and other details.
So I tried again. Got:
Internal Server Error
Geez, you'd think an operating system vendor would know how to run, well, an operating system.
Right?
Um.
Right?
D
Now isn't that an interesting coincidence! I wonder if that's how Douglas decided on the answer of 42? That it's the length of the string? He always said it stood for nothing, of course.
But it may be meaningless in Google terms, since when I search for 5+foo, it doesn't even try running Calculator.
It must be recognizing the actual phrase.
D
I was amused by the fact that Calculator answered that query, so I did a little experimentation.
:-(.
Turns out that it's a numeric variable built into Calculator! Search for:
10 * answer to life the universe and everything + 5
and you'll get back:
(10 * answer to life the universe and everything) + 5 = 425
The Ghost of Douglas Adams would smile at that one. Or he'd be sick of hearing about 42 and slam the door in their face. Who knows which? I guess we'll never know
It sure brightened up my morning, on a chill rainy day, and that must count for something.
D
You might want to look at this another way: They may not mind the cheating at all.
What they want to do is convert Coca-Cola addicts (like me) to Pepsi addicts. This is a back-handed bribe for me to switch from Coke to Pepsi for a month. The economics actually aren't bad, since as well as shifting my brand, they want me to buy more expensive single bottles at over $1 each, as opposed to my usual 6 and 12 packs at under $ 0.50 each.
The actual sugar water component of a soda costs around $ 0.10. The wholesale value of a song on iTunes is probably around $ 0.50. If they have about a 100% markup at retail, the $1.20 pepsi bottle is giving them $0.60, so they are roughly breaking even on my sodas which are a guaranteed win.
What they're counting on, of course, is that I switch to Pepsi and continue drinking it after the promotion. This is surely not impossible, as long as I decide I like the taste better. If they wind up doing that, they may not care that I'm only picking winning bottles, and they might have even made it deliberately trivial to cheat. They won't tell us that; it ruins the fun. But they may well have done it. Of course that's also why there's a 200 song limit for each email address. They'll let me have $100 wholesale, no matter how I get it.
Interesting, no?
D
Most likely, no.
The majority of Pepsi drinkers probably don't care about the promotion.
Those who do will win. Those who don't care won't win and won't care that they didn't win.
The tunes go to the people who want them, and more or less everyone is happy.
I'd say this would hold true if anywhere under 10% of Pepsi drinkers wanted the iTunes songs. Once you get past that, you wind up having massive inventories of losing bottles nobody wants and things turn ugly fast.
But if that's the case, it's Pepsi that loses, not Apple. Apple has no liability for Pepsi's inventory problems or lack of same.
D
It's amusing. I laughed several times. It's definitely different. Obnoxious, sometimes, but different in a cool sort of way.
... ?
Ruby seems like Perl, written to be a lot less obscure and much more object-oriented. Cool. And the style reminds me a bit of Mr Bunny's Guide to ActiveX. If you liked his book, you should read that too, whether you're interested in ActiveX or not.
But the non-existance of Chapter 4, just after the book started to get into the meat of things, was a bit of a non-starter.
I guess it will be ready for Slashdot in, well, six months.
Or twelve?
Or
I guess it's up to the LuckyStiff. Maybe he's doing luckier stuff nowadays.
D
My government's services are so crummy I don't think the state deserves a penny for them. My prescription would be to figure out how to spend more wisely instead of increasing revenue.
Whatever the Los Angeles and California governments are doing, they're wasting money on it, since it sure doesn't wind up in my schools, my streets or in the pocket of the cop on the beat.
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There's also a comet wrasse and a comet grouper. I think the creature I've seen is a comet wrasse.
I guess we'll just have to wait for the original poster to find out what was really meant. In your case, there would be no problem with the gift and it would have been genuinely sweet. I doubt that's the situation considering the context.
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I'm not sure everyone got the joke, or I did, but I believe the Comet is a tropical salt water fish and the Goldfish are cold fresh water. If the goldfish were put in the same tank, they would die instantly, if the Comet didn't eat the goldfish first :-(.
I can't help but wonder what the guy did about this; perhaps he can tell us the ending of the story.
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