What bothers me about these kinds of comments is that you have spotted a limiting factor, and announced that the whole concept is broken. There is a _lot_ of energy around us, most of which is provided to us by the sun. It doesn't rain everyday - yet we can store up energy and use hydroelectric power. A hydro dam does not have to be very efficient to meet our needs.
Likewise, wind farms can store the electricity - just not in a very efficient way right now. We can store it in the form of hydrogen - which has the extra benefit of allowing wind farms to be placed in very inhospitable locations. The small community located on island of Tristan da Cunha is located in the "roaring forties" in the south Atlantic. With constant winds and access to water - why couldn't they export hydrogen?
We don't have to be dependent on oil or coal to accomplish our goals - and I would think we would want to save nuclear for better objectives (use in space locations, like the moon).
Windows Internals has a pretty fun tool which by the click of a button will do bad things. One of the 'bad' things it can do is randomly overwrite kernel memory.
What is fun about the tool is that it is like Russian Roulette: You can click the button several times currupting memory, and eventually you will corrupt something important and bring the machine down. Or you can click the button a couple of times, and see how long you can use your machine before that memory path is hit and your system comes down.
The tool consists of two components, Notmyfault.exe, and Myfault.sys (which IIRC, is embedded within the exe, and launched into the kernel when the tool is run with admin rights). Notmyfault.exe cannot itself take down the machine, as it has not 'rights' to stomp on memory outside of its sandbox. This is why it has to request the bad deed to be done by the kernel component, myfault.sys
Related to this thread - you can corrupt memory and not see any adverse affects if nothing important is located in that memory space. This would easily explain why Windows might crash, but not Linux. It just depends on where modules are loaded, and what code/data is corrupted.
Just because I cannot build a device - doesn't mean that I can't come up with an idea that is worth something to the market.
For instance, a while ago my wife was involved in a fender bender where the other driver make an unprotected left hand turn (we drive on the right here) in front of my wife at the intersection. My wife had a green light, and the other driver claimed she had a green left hand turn arrow.
This got me thinking - wouldn't it be great to have a dashboard camera that could have recorded the accident? I have searched online, and the items I have found don't meet what I want. The biggest problem is price. So my idea is to have essentially a webcam, with an SD slot, which does a circular write of the recordings (writes the the end, and overwrites the beginning). If you get into an accident, you pull the device and offload the recording.
What you are saying is that I need to know electrical engineering to build this product, which is just wrong.
Dragons don't just lay down and die. Bears don't normally eat humans, but as Grizzly Man found out, a really hungry bear will make an exception.
It has been a while since I read Atlas Shrugged, but the mentality of the American government (both conservative and liberal) seems to match up with what was in the book. I am not saying that all of the benevolent capitalists are heading for their secret utopia; I am saying that the government is getting in the business of nationalizing or otherwise taking over private organizations. The government has no experience managing (and sticking to) a budget; how on earth do they think they are going to make these businesses better? The whole point in having private entities doing these services is that they must be competitive to stay alive.
If you want to revolt by creating your own small community, you will either: (a) Be insignificant as to have no effect, or (b) Draw attention, which will result in laws being created to force you to participate in our national economy.
One concept that has always stuck with me from Atlas Shrugged is the area of enforcement. If a court rules that the folks who received the bonuses (now taxed at essentially 100%) don't pay their taxes, what is going to happen? At the end of the day, it is the men in charge of the guns and prisons who will get their way. Remember, the folks in charge are doing what they are doing for the benefit of the group, not the individual.
If the government even had the concept of the individual, they would have realized that taxing specific individual at nearly 100% (on income over 'x' dollars) is not only illegal, but a bad precedent. Worse, they are doing this for political reasons, which never maps to reality.
The outrage exists - it is simply a matter of what we are going to do. If I put together a group of people to march on DC tomorrow, what can I expect as an outcome? You say that we are fat and lazy - that is really a harsh way of saying that most people don't find the situation bad enough to make it worse.
I am not aware of too many peaceful marches that had much of an effect. It is usually when something very bad happens during the march that things change - are you willing to die to change the circumstances today? For me, it hasn't gotten bad enough to do this (and there will be plenty of opportunity when things get worse).
The folks who are in charge also have the military and National Guard - and they will use them. Hell, the government used these resources to retrieve a cuban refugee boy under political pressure of Cuba (who we have a trade embargo with). You shouldn't be so quick to end lives.
Finally, it might be better to have a complete collapse than a partial. Our country has not been living by the rules established by the constitution for generations - why spend lives fixing the financial mess, when the real investment should be an overhaul of our government.
The questions would also be relevant. In school, you learn many facts, figures, equations. For many of us, much of this information is not relevant, and will be lost over a period of time as we focus on a career. This would mean that we are trading breadth for depth - and figuring out that much of what we do is social, and less technical.
I have not used complex algebra since school ten years ago - and so I would not do as well on a test that included such questions. Nor do I recall specific dates for many historical events.
Another issue would be that folks of career age may not be of domestic origins - so interviewing somebody who hopped the border for work (and likewise would want the $100 to take a survey) might lead to skewed results.
I did not RTFA - so it may have mentioned what kinds of questions were being asked.
I love watching businesses that screw customers go bankrupt. I had a very short career at CompUSA (about 3 months) as a tech, and was appalled at what the sales guys were doing, and what management wanted.
One that really pissed me off was the phone support prepaid calling cards that CompUSA had. A purchased card would give you n minutes with a phone tech support specialist. We sold a couple of these cards from the repair shop, and soon began getting complaints. We than appropriated a card, and from our lab benches tried calling the hotline several times a day for two weeks. We were never connected to a human being, but either got stuck in menu options, or left on hold for hours on end.
We brought this to the store managers attention, who insisted we keep selling these cards - though in our case, we refused.
The next company I am eagerly waiting to disappear is Bank of America, but it looks like I will have to wait a bit longer.
Sad but true. Remember that even structures like IBM gave up on selling PCs because they couldn't make a profit on them.
I am not entirely sure it was the lack of profit in the business; but more of IBM doing very stupid things with PCs. In a former life I was a CompUSA tech, and the machines that IBM produced were just awful. They were trying to be innovative, but came up with very wonky non-standard designs for consumer PCs - all of which were a pain in the ass to work on.
I am not sure everyone is aware, but OEMs really don't build or design PCs anymore. This job is left for the ODM - who designs a machine, and pitches the sell the OEM. One of the reasons for this is that the OEM can quickly ditch a line of PCs if they suck, and not take the hit that I am assuming IBM took.
One of the other things that I appreciate about online businesses is the community reviews. I realize that there are services out there where a company can pay for tainting reviews; but for the most part I have found the reviews to be helpful. This makes the community the 'salesperson'; which I trust more than a person hired to sell me a product. The downside is that I cannot go to an Internet site completely clueless about what I want (or need).
Which is one of the top reasons I don't see movies in theaters anymore. From film quality (scratches), to intentional watermarking, the movie industry is intentionally disrupting the performance. Why are they working so hard to piss off the paying customers? Has the movie industry actually done a risk vs. reward analysis?
I really am angry that the industry won't realize that everything they do to prevent paying customers from having an optimal experience (preventing FF, HDCP, poorly implemented DRM, etc) will cost them far more than piracy ever would have.
This is not how I have understood this issue. According to the presentation by NPR on this issue, most agencies were prepared for up to 10% foreclosure rate.
As I understand this, the problems we are facing now is due to investors realizing what is _about_ to happen, based on what has already happened. Essentially it is a cross between you post, and the GP post.
When 5% of houses foreclose, this drives the cost of housing down as folks can get a good deal on a house from the courthouse. The cost going down means that additional home owners will begin to fail on mortgages as they overextended with anticipation that the housing value would always go up. Most investors know that the housing cost equilibrium is well down below where costs are today - and now a bunch of AAA rated investments are going to lose a bunch of money as the mortgages they back are not going to return at the anticipated rate.
Our current problems are due to investors having sold higher, and waiting for the market to correct before putting the money back in. Unfortunately, the government is doing everything they can to prevent the correction.
Which is again, why the movie industry is going to suffer due to DRM. They are not stopping the very few it takes to create an unprotected copy of a movie and post said movie on P2P.
They folks who *are* paying for the content have to deal with headaches associated with DRM. Hmmm, get the movie for free in an unprotected copy off the web, or buy a video that may not play or can stop playing at anytime the content provider chooses. Tough choice here.
Also, the "inbox" drivers shipping with Windows were all built and locked down at least 6 months before the version of Windows went RTM. I am not sure I would want storage controller drivers that weren't extensively tested against the released OS on my server - especially since server storage devices tend to have a wide range of features and implentation variations.
The first sign of inventing an issue is not having a lot to work with.
From your perspective there is no issue (or that is was invented). For a person trying to preserve an industry from change, the issue is not simply "invented". The issue exists, and is going to affect members of the guild.
Do not mistake my words as support for the guild - I am just pointing out that this issue is real.
The problem here is that we don't really know all of the facts on this case. What is current job role of the OP?
I have been in many roles where I was not simply the cog, but a critical component to a project. To leave in the middle of the project without at least a one month notice would have been leaving on 'bad terms'. If you want to be treated like a replaceable component of the company, then act like two weeks is sufficient for any role you employ for.
If you are critical to the success of a project - you need to behave as such. This does not mean giving into unreasonable demands by your employer; it just means that without all of the facts in this case, we don't know if the OP is telling us the full story here.
I don't think they are inventing an issue here. The issue is that this technology has potential to very much hurt the audio book business. This guy is just doing whatever he can to advocate protectionism (which is his job). It is simply unfortunate that he has little to work with here.
I hardly read print books anymore - I very much enjoy listening to audio books while doing something else (working out, driving, walking, etc). What I can tell you is that there is a huge gap between well read audio books, and the crap books that many authors decided to read themselves. I am very skeptical that the Kindle can even match the quality of current human read books of poor quality. Tone inflection, multiple character voices, etc all make up a quality audio book. I don't see a machine being capable of replicating a good reader for at least the next ten years.
You joke, but this is a good way to get rid of pack rats (and coyotes, apparently).
If a pack rat comes into an area and finds a dead pack rat, they will move on and go somewhere else (though they may take the cheese before they leave).
Well, jot down these notes. When our economy collapses, we can rebuild with parts of the framework that *did* work before, as well as changes to prevent us from getting back into this situation.
I personally think we should implement a voting system where you can check the box next as many candidates you like, and each would get one vote from you. This would break the "two party" system, as a voter would feel confident that they are not throwing a vote away on a 3rd party candidate. Candidate with majority of votes wins.
I personally 'threw' my vote away by writing in Ron Paul for this last election, but I did this knowing full well my state is not a swing state, and therefore my vote didn't really matter.
This voting system is used by Fark.com for the photoshop contests, etc. It seems to work well at 'electing' the best photoshoped picture.
It is called competition, and there are multiple things to consider here.
If the jobs are moved overseas, then we are raising the world economy and have leverage on other regions. This is one of the reasons that Microsoft has created so many job openings in China - Microsoft can now negotiate with the Chinese government regarding software license enforcement.
IBM is in competition with other software and hardware vendors. They need to compete on price as well as product features. Competition generally means that they need to be concerned with what their expenses are. In terms of intellectual companies, most of the operating expense is attributed to employee wages (they don't have raw material concerns).
So let's summarize: By moving jobs elsewhere, they are:
+Increasing the living conditions of the region where the jobs are moved
++This in turn increases the likelihood that said regions will buy a product instead of pirating
+Increasing the influence on foreign governments - which is an issue when it comes to copyright enforcement
+Decreasing the "US centric" software design. By living international, more exposure is introduced to product teams regarding what other regions of the world need
+Staying competitive.
The cool thing about the United States is that you are free to go start your own company, and run it with higher ideals.
The downside is that you cannot simply demand that a company create jobs or bow to your demands that they pay for your society.
I do not know who to attribute this to, but I read this quote recently:
10,000 distros of Linux = OK; 1 Version of OSX = OK; 6 Versions of Windows = NOT OK.
What really annoys me is that people would be bitching if they didn't do this. Why would I want to pay for features like 3rd party codecs or things like Active directory on my ultra mobile PC? How about a discount for me if there are big chuncks of Windows I am *not* using?
As president of the Procrastinating Luddites of America, I say that I care! And so do hundreds or thousands of others! Maybe even more...(we haven't gotten around to compiling the membership list).
Slashdot Mirror
What bothers me about these kinds of comments is that you have spotted a limiting factor, and announced that the whole concept is broken. There is a _lot_ of energy around us, most of which is provided to us by the sun. It doesn't rain everyday - yet we can store up energy and use hydroelectric power. A hydro dam does not have to be very efficient to meet our needs.
Likewise, wind farms can store the electricity - just not in a very efficient way right now. We can store it in the form of hydrogen - which has the extra benefit of allowing wind farms to be placed in very inhospitable locations. The small community located on island of Tristan da Cunha is located in the "roaring forties" in the south Atlantic. With constant winds and access to water - why couldn't they export hydrogen?
We don't have to be dependent on oil or coal to accomplish our goals - and I would think we would want to save nuclear for better objectives (use in space locations, like the moon).
Windows Internals has a pretty fun tool which by the click of a button will do bad things. One of the 'bad' things it can do is randomly overwrite kernel memory.
What is fun about the tool is that it is like Russian Roulette: You can click the button several times currupting memory, and eventually you will corrupt something important and bring the machine down. Or you can click the button a couple of times, and see how long you can use your machine before that memory path is hit and your system comes down.
The tool consists of two components, Notmyfault.exe, and Myfault.sys (which IIRC, is embedded within the exe, and launched into the kernel when the tool is run with admin rights). Notmyfault.exe cannot itself take down the machine, as it has not 'rights' to stomp on memory outside of its sandbox. This is why it has to request the bad deed to be done by the kernel component, myfault.sys
You can find a link to the tool below:
http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/Notmyfault.zip
Related to this thread - you can corrupt memory and not see any adverse affects if nothing important is located in that memory space. This would easily explain why Windows might crash, but not Linux. It just depends on where modules are loaded, and what code/data is corrupted.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Just because I cannot build a device - doesn't mean that I can't come up with an idea that is worth something to the market.
For instance, a while ago my wife was involved in a fender bender where the other driver make an unprotected left hand turn (we drive on the right here) in front of my wife at the intersection. My wife had a green light, and the other driver claimed she had a green left hand turn arrow.
This got me thinking - wouldn't it be great to have a dashboard camera that could have recorded the accident? I have searched online, and the items I have found don't meet what I want. The biggest problem is price. So my idea is to have essentially a webcam, with an SD slot, which does a circular write of the recordings (writes the the end, and overwrites the beginning). If you get into an accident, you pull the device and offload the recording.
What you are saying is that I need to know electrical engineering to build this product, which is just wrong.
Dragons don't just lay down and die. Bears don't normally eat humans, but as Grizzly Man found out, a really hungry bear will make an exception.
It has been a while since I read Atlas Shrugged, but the mentality of the American government (both conservative and liberal) seems to match up with what was in the book. I am not saying that all of the benevolent capitalists are heading for their secret utopia; I am saying that the government is getting in the business of nationalizing or otherwise taking over private organizations. The government has no experience managing (and sticking to) a budget; how on earth do they think they are going to make these businesses better? The whole point in having private entities doing these services is that they must be competitive to stay alive.
If you want to revolt by creating your own small community, you will either: (a) Be insignificant as to have no effect, or (b) Draw attention, which will result in laws being created to force you to participate in our national economy.
One concept that has always stuck with me from Atlas Shrugged is the area of enforcement. If a court rules that the folks who received the bonuses (now taxed at essentially 100%) don't pay their taxes, what is going to happen? At the end of the day, it is the men in charge of the guns and prisons who will get their way. Remember, the folks in charge are doing what they are doing for the benefit of the group, not the individual.
If the government even had the concept of the individual, they would have realized that taxing specific individual at nearly 100% (on income over 'x' dollars) is not only illegal, but a bad precedent. Worse, they are doing this for political reasons, which never maps to reality.
The outrage exists - it is simply a matter of what we are going to do. If I put together a group of people to march on DC tomorrow, what can I expect as an outcome? You say that we are fat and lazy - that is really a harsh way of saying that most people don't find the situation bad enough to make it worse.
I am not aware of too many peaceful marches that had much of an effect. It is usually when something very bad happens during the march that things change - are you willing to die to change the circumstances today? For me, it hasn't gotten bad enough to do this (and there will be plenty of opportunity when things get worse).
The folks who are in charge also have the military and National Guard - and they will use them. Hell, the government used these resources to retrieve a cuban refugee boy under political pressure of Cuba (who we have a trade embargo with). You shouldn't be so quick to end lives.
Finally, it might be better to have a complete collapse than a partial. Our country has not been living by the rules established by the constitution for generations - why spend lives fixing the financial mess, when the real investment should be an overhaul of our government.
The questions would also be relevant. In school, you learn many facts, figures, equations. For many of us, much of this information is not relevant, and will be lost over a period of time as we focus on a career. This would mean that we are trading breadth for depth - and figuring out that much of what we do is social, and less technical.
I have not used complex algebra since school ten years ago - and so I would not do as well on a test that included such questions. Nor do I recall specific dates for many historical events.
Another issue would be that folks of career age may not be of domestic origins - so interviewing somebody who hopped the border for work (and likewise would want the $100 to take a survey) might lead to skewed results.
I did not RTFA - so it may have mentioned what kinds of questions were being asked.
I love watching businesses that screw customers go bankrupt. I had a very short career at CompUSA (about 3 months) as a tech, and was appalled at what the sales guys were doing, and what management wanted.
One that really pissed me off was the phone support prepaid calling cards that CompUSA had. A purchased card would give you n minutes with a phone tech support specialist. We sold a couple of these cards from the repair shop, and soon began getting complaints. We than appropriated a card, and from our lab benches tried calling the hotline several times a day for two weeks. We were never connected to a human being, but either got stuck in menu options, or left on hold for hours on end.
We brought this to the store managers attention, who insisted we keep selling these cards - though in our case, we refused.
The next company I am eagerly waiting to disappear is Bank of America, but it looks like I will have to wait a bit longer.
Sad but true. Remember that even structures like IBM gave up on selling PCs because they couldn't make a profit on them.
I am not entirely sure it was the lack of profit in the business; but more of IBM doing very stupid things with PCs. In a former life I was a CompUSA tech, and the machines that IBM produced were just awful. They were trying to be innovative, but came up with very wonky non-standard designs for consumer PCs - all of which were a pain in the ass to work on.
I am not sure everyone is aware, but OEMs really don't build or design PCs anymore. This job is left for the ODM - who designs a machine, and pitches the sell the OEM. One of the reasons for this is that the OEM can quickly ditch a line of PCs if they suck, and not take the hit that I am assuming IBM took.
Intel has a lot more to loose then AMD and that's why....
If Intel wins the consumer will lose, if AMD holds its ground....
....make major cutbacks and Intel will loose all sorts of momentum just to save....
At least you got one of them right. 33% is still a failing grade, though.
Not even Evel Knievel could make this jump.
Is that because he is dead? Or because the gap is too far?
One of the other things that I appreciate about online businesses is the community reviews. I realize that there are services out there where a company can pay for tainting reviews; but for the most part I have found the reviews to be helpful. This makes the community the 'salesperson'; which I trust more than a person hired to sell me a product. The downside is that I cannot go to an Internet site completely clueless about what I want (or need).
Which is one of the top reasons I don't see movies in theaters anymore. From film quality (scratches), to intentional watermarking, the movie industry is intentionally disrupting the performance. Why are they working so hard to piss off the paying customers? Has the movie industry actually done a risk vs. reward analysis?
I really am angry that the industry won't realize that everything they do to prevent paying customers from having an optimal experience (preventing FF, HDCP, poorly implemented DRM, etc) will cost them far more than piracy ever would have.
Less than 5% of the mortages failed
This is not how I have understood this issue. According to the presentation by NPR on this issue, most agencies were prepared for up to 10% foreclosure rate.
As I understand this, the problems we are facing now is due to investors realizing what is _about_ to happen, based on what has already happened. Essentially it is a cross between you post, and the GP post.
When 5% of houses foreclose, this drives the cost of housing down as folks can get a good deal on a house from the courthouse. The cost going down means that additional home owners will begin to fail on mortgages as they overextended with anticipation that the housing value would always go up. Most investors know that the housing cost equilibrium is well down below where costs are today - and now a bunch of AAA rated investments are going to lose a bunch of money as the mortgages they back are not going to return at the anticipated rate.
Our current problems are due to investors having sold higher, and waiting for the market to correct before putting the money back in. Unfortunately, the government is doing everything they can to prevent the correction.
Which is again, why the movie industry is going to suffer due to DRM. They are not stopping the very few it takes to create an unprotected copy of a movie and post said movie on P2P.
They folks who *are* paying for the content have to deal with headaches associated with DRM. Hmmm, get the movie for free in an unprotected copy off the web, or buy a video that may not play or can stop playing at anytime the content provider chooses. Tough choice here.
Try watching a DVD over component output. Both ATI amd NVIDIA diplay cards fail with a note that the video cannot be decrypted for analog output.
I can use component output on a DVD player, or component output on an XBox - but not from my Vista or Win7 machine.
Also, the "inbox" drivers shipping with Windows were all built and locked down at least 6 months before the version of Windows went RTM. I am not sure I would want storage controller drivers that weren't extensively tested against the released OS on my server - especially since server storage devices tend to have a wide range of features and implentation variations.
The first sign of inventing an issue is not having a lot to work with.
From your perspective there is no issue (or that is was invented). For a person trying to preserve an industry from change, the issue is not simply "invented". The issue exists, and is going to affect members of the guild.
Do not mistake my words as support for the guild - I am just pointing out that this issue is real.
The problem here is that we don't really know all of the facts on this case. What is current job role of the OP?
I have been in many roles where I was not simply the cog, but a critical component to a project. To leave in the middle of the project without at least a one month notice would have been leaving on 'bad terms'. If you want to be treated like a replaceable component of the company, then act like two weeks is sufficient for any role you employ for.
If you are critical to the success of a project - you need to behave as such. This does not mean giving into unreasonable demands by your employer; it just means that without all of the facts in this case, we don't know if the OP is telling us the full story here.
I don't think they are inventing an issue here. The issue is that this technology has potential to very much hurt the audio book business. This guy is just doing whatever he can to advocate protectionism (which is his job). It is simply unfortunate that he has little to work with here.
I hardly read print books anymore - I very much enjoy listening to audio books while doing something else (working out, driving, walking, etc). What I can tell you is that there is a huge gap between well read audio books, and the crap books that many authors decided to read themselves. I am very skeptical that the Kindle can even match the quality of current human read books of poor quality. Tone inflection, multiple character voices, etc all make up a quality audio book. I don't see a machine being capable of replicating a good reader for at least the next ten years.
And risk the Wife/Children? Fuck no.
Throw that son of a bitch on moving garbage truck.
You joke, but this is a good way to get rid of pack rats (and coyotes, apparently).
If a pack rat comes into an area and finds a dead pack rat, they will move on and go somewhere else (though they may take the cheese before they leave).
Well, jot down these notes. When our economy collapses, we can rebuild with parts of the framework that *did* work before, as well as changes to prevent us from getting back into this situation.
I personally think we should implement a voting system where you can check the box next as many candidates you like, and each would get one vote from you. This would break the "two party" system, as a voter would feel confident that they are not throwing a vote away on a 3rd party candidate. Candidate with majority of votes wins.
I personally 'threw' my vote away by writing in Ron Paul for this last election, but I did this knowing full well my state is not a swing state, and therefore my vote didn't really matter.
This voting system is used by Fark.com for the photoshop contests, etc. It seems to work well at 'electing' the best photoshoped picture.
It is called competition, and there are multiple things to consider here. If the jobs are moved overseas, then we are raising the world economy and have leverage on other regions. This is one of the reasons that Microsoft has created so many job openings in China - Microsoft can now negotiate with the Chinese government regarding software license enforcement. IBM is in competition with other software and hardware vendors. They need to compete on price as well as product features. Competition generally means that they need to be concerned with what their expenses are. In terms of intellectual companies, most of the operating expense is attributed to employee wages (they don't have raw material concerns). So let's summarize: By moving jobs elsewhere, they are: +Increasing the living conditions of the region where the jobs are moved ++This in turn increases the likelihood that said regions will buy a product instead of pirating +Increasing the influence on foreign governments - which is an issue when it comes to copyright enforcement +Decreasing the "US centric" software design. By living international, more exposure is introduced to product teams regarding what other regions of the world need +Staying competitive. The cool thing about the United States is that you are free to go start your own company, and run it with higher ideals. The downside is that you cannot simply demand that a company create jobs or bow to your demands that they pay for your society.
10,000 distros of Linux = OK; 1 Version of OSX = OK; 6 Versions of Windows = NOT OK.
What really annoys me is that people would be bitching if they didn't do this. Why would I want to pay for features like 3rd party codecs or things like Active directory on my ultra mobile PC? How about a discount for me if there are big chuncks of Windows I am *not* using?
As president of the Procrastinating Luddites of America, I say that I care! And so do hundreds or thousands of others! Maybe even more...(we haven't gotten around to compiling the membership list).