How would you explain my 15-20 second boot times under Vista with very average hardware then? (By average I mean low-wattage Athlon X2, 2 GB of memory).
I still blame boot times on the end user loading up their computer with a bunch of crap (or the PC maker-- which of course is the reason I never buy a brand name PC and always build my own).
It takes my Vista PC, with very average hardware, approximately 15-20 seconds to fully boot. I also find with Vista that I can actually start "doing stuff" as soon as the desktop appears. Where-as on my work PC (which runs Win XP Pro), It still boots around the same length of time, but XP doesn't allow me to launch programs or anything for at least 10+ seconds after the desktop appears.
Anyway, my point is that it seems a lot of these people with extremely long boot times maybe need to clean up their PC's. My girlfriend's laptop takes almost a minute to boot because of all the shit she has loaded on there.
I managed to receive a full refund from EA on my purchase of Spore, so I'm happy.
And to top it off, the Canadian dollar has plummeted lately so my refund amount actually worked out a few dollars higher than the original purchase, so it's almost as if I made money playing the game for a month.
Not sure how many people are following this story as it's a bit old, but I have successfully received a full refund for my purchase of Spore. I had purchased it direct from EA via digital download.
All I did was send them a support ticket expressing my concern for the background software such as Securom and how I was disappointed that before purchasing the game that this software would be installed on my PC.
Interesting read. There is no question the Great Depression and the current crisis are not one in the same. Although, if unemployment rates hit 20%, many people are going to automatically assume they are identical circumstances.
First let me be clear, the way EA is handling DRM with Spore and various other titles coming out soon, is absolute crap. That being said, let me offer my two cents. Even though I follow sites like Slashdot with a fair bit of regularity, I had never even heard of Spore's overkill DRM until after I installed the game.
My point is, you're all looking at it from the standpoint of well-educated, technical people. Everyone is saying this is a big deal and the world is going to end, when in reality, the average person probably has absolutely no clue of what's happening behind the scenes. The vast majority are going to purchase Spore, or Red Alert 3 and they will never have a negative thing to say about the whole process, or EA themselves.
At the end of the day I doubt EA is overly concerned with the number of people threatening to no longer purchase their products. Their moves here were probably more about trying to fix a bit of bad PR than anything else. That definitely doesn't make their actions right, but that's the way it is currently.
Of course, now that I've learned about the DRM "features" in Spore, I'm pretty much convinced that buying *any* PC games these days is simply a bad idea. I doubt I'll be buying a PC game from any supplier in the near future.
This was one of the games I've been waiting to play for quite some time, so I wasn't too concerned with what type of DRM this game employed, if any. I bought it yesterday and have played about 8-10 hours thus far (day off, good timing).
All I know is that I'm having an extremely fun time playing now that I'm in the space-race portion of the game. If I were someone on the fence about this game, I wouldn't let EA's shitty DRM practices deter me from enjoying this game.
Telus is a joke, no way I'd ever do business with them again.
OTOH, a friend of mine lost his cell phone so I suggest calling up Telus with the intent to leave because they don't offer the iPhone to see what they might do(let's be clear, he doesn't want an iPhone, but we know this particular phone is going to receive some sort of response from the Telus rep.). Not mentioning the lost phone to them at this point, he proceeds to tell them that he would like one of them new-fangled iPhones that everyone is talking about. Telus rep says sorry we don't have that phone. So he says oh okay, I'd like to cancel my service then. They proceed to go through the big laminated list of reasons the iPhone is crap, and he just simply says yeah, that's fine, I'll just cancel, how much is it to buy out my contract?
At this point they go ahead and offer him a new Blackberry Pearl at no charge, and he informs them that this wouldn't be sufficient and he'd still like to proceed with canceling his services. They step up to the plate again and offer him an unlimited data plan in addition to his current Telus package at no charge, for the balance of his contract (2 1/2 years).
Of course, he accepts this offer. So, although I hate Telus, sometimes they serve their purpose, such as situations like the one above.
Of course after he finishes talking with the Telus rep he proceeds to call them back immediately to report his lost phone so that it is deactivated.
This was approximately a month and a half ago and so far so good, Telus is honouring their offer of unlimited data, and he's still paying the same $48.xx a month he was paying prior to this escapade, and enjoying his new Blackberry phone.
I have 2 GB of memory on my system running Vista. I run dual displays and typically have anywhere from 4-10 Firefox windows open, Photoshop CS3, Live messenger, Word, Excel, and sometimes a PC game minimized in the background that I might play a bit when I take a quick break (which I can play without needing to shut down all of the aforementioned programs)
Seems fine to me.
Granted, Vista isn't without it's issues, but neither is XP (I use XP at work on a daily basis and Vista at home, so I constantly go back and forth between them). I prefer the way Vista works over XP. That being said, it's not like there are drastic differences at the end of the day.
Admittedly I reformatted last week with a slimmed down version of Vista using vlite (where-as before I was running whatever crap Home Premium comes with out of the box), but I'm sure any of the "performance gains" I'm noticing are probably all in my head.
I've witnessed more than a few websites where once you successfully answer the security question they reset the login directly in the browser, freeing you to choose a new password then and there. This is where I'd be concerned.
This is what I'm wondering. I was just in Japan for the last 2 weeks and even on my rented cell phone it was "only" 70 cents a minute to call back to Canada.
I suppose Visa/MC/Amex should all lower their rates from the traditional 1.7%-3.5% down to 0.1% as well then. A lot of the reason behind the fee's is that it's a way to mitigate their losses on chargebacks and fraud.
I'm not saying I support PayPal's particular practises, I choose to avoid them if at all possible, but their fee's are on par with everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
IE is only down about 2% for us over last year. It represents about 62% of our visitors.
Firefox is up to about 26% now, and Safari is nearly 9%.
This could be the best post I've read on here in a long time. Bravo, if you actually wrote it.
I would have preferred how much money it's worth in regards to Libraries of Congress but I suppose beggars can't be choosers.
The worst part is that TFA even has it spelled correctly, only Slashdot chose to ruin it.
What I really want to know is how much data that is, but please reference the amount of data in relation to library's of Congress.
Tempur-Pedic as well (yes I know they say "swedish mattresses and pillows" but their european factory is in Denmark.
Nothing I'm aware of, I just put on whatever is on the OEM Vista Home Premium disc.
How would you explain my 15-20 second boot times under Vista with very average hardware then? (By average I mean low-wattage Athlon X2, 2 GB of memory).
I still blame boot times on the end user loading up their computer with a bunch of crap (or the PC maker-- which of course is the reason I never buy a brand name PC and always build my own).
It takes my Vista PC, with very average hardware, approximately 15-20 seconds to fully boot. I also find with Vista that I can actually start "doing stuff" as soon as the desktop appears. Where-as on my work PC (which runs Win XP Pro), It still boots around the same length of time, but XP doesn't allow me to launch programs or anything for at least 10+ seconds after the desktop appears.
Anyway, my point is that it seems a lot of these people with extremely long boot times maybe need to clean up their PC's. My girlfriend's laptop takes almost a minute to boot because of all the shit she has loaded on there.
I managed to receive a full refund from EA on my purchase of Spore, so I'm happy.
And to top it off, the Canadian dollar has plummeted lately so my refund amount actually worked out a few dollars higher than the original purchase, so it's almost as if I made money playing the game for a month.
Not sure how many people are following this story as it's a bit old, but I have successfully received a full refund for my purchase of Spore. I had purchased it direct from EA via digital download.
All I did was send them a support ticket expressing my concern for the background software such as Securom and how I was disappointed that before purchasing the game that this software would be installed on my PC.
Interesting read. There is no question the Great Depression and the current crisis are not one in the same. Although, if unemployment rates hit 20%, many people are going to automatically assume they are identical circumstances.
People like you (quoting grossly inaccurate numbers) are the reason these things get blown out of proportion.
Their gross margin on major-label songs is around 28-30%, and obviously slightly higher on independents.
Definitely McLaren-Mercedes. Can't expect too many nerds to have their facts straight on the sporting world.
Yeah, they have the same policies in Formula 1, look at the debacle between McLaren-Mercedes and Ferrari last year.
As much as companies certainly have these policies, that doesn't mean they're always 100% honest about enforcing them.
First let me be clear, the way EA is handling DRM with Spore and various other titles coming out soon, is absolute crap. That being said, let me offer my two cents. Even though I follow sites like Slashdot with a fair bit of regularity, I had never even heard of Spore's overkill DRM until after I installed the game.
My point is, you're all looking at it from the standpoint of well-educated, technical people. Everyone is saying this is a big deal and the world is going to end, when in reality, the average person probably has absolutely no clue of what's happening behind the scenes. The vast majority are going to purchase Spore, or Red Alert 3 and they will never have a negative thing to say about the whole process, or EA themselves.
At the end of the day I doubt EA is overly concerned with the number of people threatening to no longer purchase their products. Their moves here were probably more about trying to fix a bit of bad PR than anything else. That definitely doesn't make their actions right, but that's the way it is currently.
Of course, now that I've learned about the DRM "features" in Spore, I'm pretty much convinced that buying *any* PC games these days is simply a bad idea. I doubt I'll be buying a PC game from any supplier in the near future.
This was one of the games I've been waiting to play for quite some time, so I wasn't too concerned with what type of DRM this game employed, if any. I bought it yesterday and have played about 8-10 hours thus far (day off, good timing).
All I know is that I'm having an extremely fun time playing now that I'm in the space-race portion of the game. If I were someone on the fence about this game, I wouldn't let EA's shitty DRM practices deter me from enjoying this game.
I've dealt pretty much exclusively with ncix.com for the last 4 years. Very happy with them... easy price match engine, good service, quick shipping.
Telus is a joke, no way I'd ever do business with them again.
OTOH, a friend of mine lost his cell phone so I suggest calling up Telus with the intent to leave because they don't offer the iPhone to see what they might do(let's be clear, he doesn't want an iPhone, but we know this particular phone is going to receive some sort of response from the Telus rep.). Not mentioning the lost phone to them at this point, he proceeds to tell them that he would like one of them new-fangled iPhones that everyone is talking about. Telus rep says sorry we don't have that phone. So he says oh okay, I'd like to cancel my service then. They proceed to go through the big laminated list of reasons the iPhone is crap, and he just simply says yeah, that's fine, I'll just cancel, how much is it to buy out my contract?
At this point they go ahead and offer him a new Blackberry Pearl at no charge, and he informs them that this wouldn't be sufficient and he'd still like to proceed with canceling his services. They step up to the plate again and offer him an unlimited data plan in addition to his current Telus package at no charge, for the balance of his contract (2 1/2 years).
Of course, he accepts this offer. So, although I hate Telus, sometimes they serve their purpose, such as situations like the one above.
Of course after he finishes talking with the Telus rep he proceeds to call them back immediately to report his lost phone so that it is deactivated.
This was approximately a month and a half ago and so far so good, Telus is honouring their offer of unlimited data, and he's still paying the same $48.xx a month he was paying prior to this escapade, and enjoying his new Blackberry phone.
I have 2 GB of memory on my system running Vista. I run dual displays and typically have anywhere from 4-10 Firefox windows open, Photoshop CS3, Live messenger, Word, Excel, and sometimes a PC game minimized in the background that I might play a bit when I take a quick break (which I can play without needing to shut down all of the aforementioned programs)
Seems fine to me.
Granted, Vista isn't without it's issues, but neither is XP (I use XP at work on a daily basis and Vista at home, so I constantly go back and forth between them). I prefer the way Vista works over XP. That being said, it's not like there are drastic differences at the end of the day.
Admittedly I reformatted last week with a slimmed down version of Vista using vlite (where-as before I was running whatever crap Home Premium comes with out of the box), but I'm sure any of the "performance gains" I'm noticing are probably all in my head.
I've witnessed more than a few websites where once you successfully answer the security question they reset the login directly in the browser, freeing you to choose a new password then and there. This is where I'd be concerned.
Time for a bunch of these wacko's to be shot up in a rocket so that they might see for themselves what is so logical to the rest of us.
This is what I'm wondering. I was just in Japan for the last 2 weeks and even on my rented cell phone it was "only" 70 cents a minute to call back to Canada.
I suppose Visa/MC/Amex should all lower their rates from the traditional 1.7%-3.5% down to 0.1% as well then. A lot of the reason behind the fee's is that it's a way to mitigate their losses on chargebacks and fraud.
I'm not saying I support PayPal's particular practises, I choose to avoid them if at all possible, but their fee's are on par with everyone else.
Indeed. Takes my PC less than 20 seconds to boot into Vista, and the hardware isn't anything special.