TomTom are *really* bad though. They're riding high as the most common GPS in the UK.
Unfortunately their maps are filled with obvious errors, and they ignore people who correct them (it's not uncommon for roads to be 10 years out of date on their maps... they've been told - repeatedly - about these errors but each time a map upgrade comes out no fixes have been done. Add to that the fact the map upgrades are not free and TT are ripe for being murdered by the competition..)
My satnav is keeps telling me to make uturns despite the fact that I'm going the fastest and shortest route to me destination. Plus the fact that uturns are illegal on that road...
Basically they're a bit naff for short distances. Going between cities is OK but I always switch mine off for the last few miles.
You forget we have *nothing* with tivo functionality here.
Freeview DVRs? No season passes at all. Manual record only.
Sky+? Limited season passes to certain channels only. No ability to handle conflicts (it simply deletes the season pass if there's a conflict). EPG only 7 days ahead, and if a series doesn't occur that week it again deletes the season pass. Not able to watch programmes unless you're a *current* subscriber. No suggestions, No wishlists. Automatically deletes box office movies.. I could go on.
I may have to get Sky+ since Tivo don't look like producing an HD version this century (or indeed updating their UK version at all). I'm not looking forward to it *at all*.
Who the hell would make an MP3 CD? Make a damned ordinary CD... MP3 sounds bloody awful on a decent hifi (and I keep hearing about these 'blind tests' that say it's better than ATRAC.. well they must have been deaf too since I've never heard an mp3 player that could hold a candle to a minisisc).
Most of the later minidiscs support PCM lossless encoding.
OTOH Atrac sounds *way* better than MP3 to my ears. I've never got over the fact that the ipod sounds so dead. Possibly it's just apple can't make amplifiers for shit.. dunno..
Some low end HiMD players could only be used with a PC.
Plus SonicStage was artificially limited so you couldn't record PCM.. to stop direct digital copying.
SonicStage single handedly killed MD. It was an awesome format - not tied constantly to a PC like ipods are.. the sound quality was a notch above the ipod and still is. Optical in, so you could do direct digital copies from CD.. awesome battery life (my MD player lasted 6 *months* on a single AA battery).
The software... was a steaming pile of poo. Someone at Sony should be shot.
U3 drives even automatically run appplications that are stored on the drive when you execute it (and the code to do that is just unprotected XML files) - it would be perfectly possible to make a virus that replicated via U3.. just that nobody uses it yet so the virus writers haven't bothered.
What makes Steve think that Microsoft, a company with billions of dollars in the bank, will be unable to afford to hire all the people needed to give the problem adequate attention?
I dunno... how about the experience of the last 15 years?
When they tried that at one place I worked I immediately switched it off - compiles were taking 5* longer which directly hit productivity. They bitched, but saw the point. You just have to explain to them that it's costing them money *now* to have that crapware on your machine, rather than the very small risk of something getting onto your machine without you knowing about it.
There's still a significant amount of NT4 out there too, but it's slowly being phased out (still get the occasional person who's IT people haven't certified SP6a yet and they're on SP3! Luckily this is getting rarer... IT moves slow in large companies).
W2k is still in the heart of IT running the domain controllers in many (possibly most) companies... W2k3 is gaining ground but is still not in the majority even 3 years after its release (based on our own marketing surveys, which cover a lot of companies in europe).
Vista isn't even in the planning stages yet. Not heard anyone even mention it or ask for support.
New OSs take time to gain ground in business. We had our first enquiry about Solaris 10 2 weeks ago.. and that was relased, what, about a year ago? That's against several thousand Solaris 9 installs.
Got it in one. Spammers are far more likely to pay for this than legitimate businesses.
And spammers can hide behind legitimacy real easily... I've seen some that had all the (fake) references, 'opt in' policies, the works... and they still spammed mercilessly.
It's not just an assertion it's an observation - hotmail is doing just fine.
A lot of the time legitimate email is unexpected.. sales and support queries for example. And their replies... if an aol customer sends you a sales query and aol blocks the reply it has cost *you* money as you have lost a customer. AOL user thinks you didn't bother replying and buys from someone else. It's worse with support - AOL user things you can't be bothered replying, tells all is friends that you suck because you never reply to support queries and you lose multiple potential customers. None of this hurts AOL - the market does *not* kill it off.
They're still marketing it as 'super brain food' based on one study that found if you fed children decent food in the morning instead of crap they did slightly better at school.
If you were to believe the marketing the only thing this stuff doesn't do is raise the dead... and I suspect they're working on that.
True story: I worked for a tech company with a website created in notepad in 10 minutes because someone was bored one day. Most of the information on it was obsolete.
One day the CEO emailed excitedly to say he'd updated it... turns out he'd joined AOL and got some kind of web site design package - he'd produced a single text page with blue text on an orange background.
And spelled the name of the company wrong.
We left it a week before quietly correcting some of the more horrendous faults (it wasn't even standard HTML.. heck I'm not sure what it was to this day).
It took another 2 years before that company got somewhat of a clue... true, their new site is a Flash/ActiveX monster, but it's progress at least.
They brought the HD thing on themselves though. The only way to get HD content in this country is to rip it from usenet (no the Microsoft HD demos are *not* sufficient). We're still looking at another 2-3 months before the first HD broadcasts start, with limited times/channels, for a premium price.
If that hadn't spend the last year squabbling over who has them most restrictive DRM and release bluray or HD DVD they'd have made millions in sales of HD movies over here.
The worst case I found was a webcam... cheapest price $70. Or in UK money £170. No, I don't know how they figured that one out either... I could have made a profit by flying to the US, buy a few, then ebay the spares for less than UK RRP.
If it's not the eye candy it'll be all the 'essential' system services. 2000->XP required an upgrade, XP->Vista will need an upgrade. It's just the way things work.
The average user would never find expose... you have to set it up in the control panel before you can use it anyway (and newbies would take one look at that screen, go 'ooo scary' and forget about it. For anyone who really needed that level of feedback it's wasted.
The fast user switching thing is nice though.
(personally I just wish they'd spend that amount of care with finder - when you close an OSX app it doesn't close.. you have to right click on the taskbar and select 'close'. The visual feedback for this is abysmal - an easily missed black mark on the icon. I've often seen OSX machines of friends with nearly every application still running & them complaining it's slow...)
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TomTom are *really* bad though. They're riding high as the most common GPS in the UK.
Unfortunately their maps are filled with obvious errors, and they ignore people who correct them (it's not uncommon for roads to be 10 years out of date on their maps... they've been told - repeatedly - about these errors but each time a map upgrade comes out no fixes have been done. Add to that the fact the map upgrades are not free and TT are ripe for being murdered by the competition..)
They're probably going somewhere completely different..
My satnav is keeps telling me to make uturns despite the fact that I'm going the fastest and shortest route to me destination. Plus the fact that uturns are illegal on that road...
Basically they're a bit naff for short distances. Going between cities is OK but I always switch mine off for the last few miles.
You forget we have *nothing* with tivo functionality here.
Freeview DVRs? No season passes at all. Manual record only.
Sky+? Limited season passes to certain channels only. No ability to handle conflicts (it simply deletes the season pass if there's a conflict). EPG only 7 days ahead, and if a series doesn't occur that week it again deletes the season pass. Not able to watch programmes unless you're a *current* subscriber. No suggestions, No wishlists. Automatically deletes box office movies.. I could go on.
I may have to get Sky+ since Tivo don't look like producing an HD version this century (or indeed updating their UK version at all). I'm not looking forward to it *at all*.
Who the hell would make an MP3 CD? Make a damned ordinary CD... MP3 sounds bloody awful on a decent hifi (and I keep hearing about these 'blind tests' that say it's better than ATRAC.. well they must have been deaf too since I've never heard an mp3 player that could hold a candle to a minisisc).
Most of the later minidiscs support PCM lossless encoding.
OTOH Atrac sounds *way* better than MP3 to my ears. I've never got over the fact that the ipod sounds so dead. Possibly it's just apple can't make amplifiers for shit.. dunno..
If Sony released an MD player that didn't need that crappy software I'd go back to it in a heartbeat, TBH.
SonicStage must die.
All MD players had that kind of battery life. Some advertised double that (not sure if they ever reached it).
In practice it meant that you rarely needed to change the battery.
Some low end HiMD players could only be used with a PC.
Plus SonicStage was artificially limited so you couldn't record PCM.. to stop direct digital copying.
SonicStage single handedly killed MD. It was an awesome format - not tied constantly to a PC like ipods are.. the sound quality was a notch above the ipod and still is. Optical in, so you could do direct digital copies from CD.. awesome battery life (my MD player lasted 6 *months* on a single AA battery).
The software... was a steaming pile of poo. Someone at Sony should be shot.
It's 12:05AM. Last year *every single story* for about 24 hours was a lame joke.. how am I to believe this one?
Probably will avoid slashdot for about 36 hours just in case.
Yes they do... just create an autorun.inf
U3 drives even automatically run appplications that are stored on the drive when you execute it (and the code to do that is just unprotected XML files) - it would be perfectly possible to make a virus that replicated via U3.. just that nobody uses it yet so the virus writers haven't bothered.
What makes Steve think that Microsoft, a company with billions of dollars in the bank, will be unable to afford to hire all the people needed to give the problem adequate attention?
I dunno... how about the experience of the last 15 years?
When they tried that at one place I worked I immediately switched it off - compiles were taking 5* longer which directly hit productivity. They bitched, but saw the point. You just have to explain to them that it's costing them money *now* to have that crapware on your machine, rather than the very small risk of something getting onto your machine without you knowing about it.
I for one won't be crying if Norton goes bust. I've had to work around their crapware too often.
There's still a significant amount of NT4 out there too, but it's slowly being phased out (still get the occasional person who's IT people haven't certified SP6a yet and they're on SP3! Luckily this is getting rarer... IT moves slow in large companies).
W2k is still in the heart of IT running the domain controllers in many (possibly most) companies... W2k3 is gaining ground but is still not in the majority even 3 years after its release (based on our own marketing surveys, which cover a lot of companies in europe).
Vista isn't even in the planning stages yet. Not heard anyone even mention it or ask for support.
New OSs take time to gain ground in business. We had our first enquiry about Solaris 10 2 weeks ago.. and that was relased, what, about a year ago? That's against several thousand Solaris 9 installs.
Got it in one. Spammers are far more likely to pay for this than legitimate businesses.
And spammers can hide behind legitimacy real easily... I've seen some that had all the (fake) references, 'opt in' policies, the works... and they still spammed mercilessly.
It's not just an assertion it's an observation - hotmail is doing just fine.
A lot of the time legitimate email is unexpected.. sales and support queries for example. And their replies... if an aol customer sends you a sales query and aol blocks the reply it has cost *you* money as you have lost a customer. AOL user thinks you didn't bother replying and buys from someone else. It's worse with support - AOL user things you can't be bothered replying, tells all is friends that you suck because you never reply to support queries and you lose multiple potential customers. None of this hurts AOL - the market does *not* kill it off.
That won't stop them.
They're still marketing it as 'super brain food' based on one study that found if you fed children decent food in the morning instead of crap they did slightly better at school.
If you were to believe the marketing the only thing this stuff doesn't do is raise the dead... and I suspect they're working on that.
You could fuck up that definition *so* easily.
I want to kill someone just because I'm evil. So I have a reason. Which means I'm not evil by definition.
My head asplode.
Maybe they are.
True story: I worked for a tech company with a website created in notepad in 10 minutes because someone was bored one day. Most of the information on it was obsolete.
One day the CEO emailed excitedly to say he'd updated it... turns out he'd joined AOL and got some kind of web site design package - he'd produced a single text page with blue text on an orange background.
And spelled the name of the company wrong.
We left it a week before quietly correcting some of the more horrendous faults (it wasn't even standard HTML.. heck I'm not sure what it was to this day).
It took another 2 years before that company got somewhat of a clue... true, their new site is a Flash/ActiveX monster, but it's progress at least.
They brought the HD thing on themselves though. The only way to get HD content in this country is to rip it from usenet (no the Microsoft HD demos are *not* sufficient). We're still looking at another 2-3 months before the first HD broadcasts start, with limited times/channels, for a premium price.
If that hadn't spend the last year squabbling over who has them most restrictive DRM and release bluray or HD DVD they'd have made millions in sales of HD movies over here.
That is what you do get according to the guy on TV this morning - you download the movie, and they send you the DVD through the post.
He actually said you get 3 copies for the price but I can't recall what the third one was - maybe they let you download it twice or something?
The worst case I found was a webcam... cheapest price $70. Or in UK money £170. No, I don't know how they figured that one out either... I could have made a profit by flying to the US, buy a few, then ebay the spares for less than UK RRP.
You can bet they will.
If it's not the eye candy it'll be all the 'essential' system services. 2000->XP required an upgrade, XP->Vista will need an upgrade. It's just the way things work.
Considering I've been using Windows for over 10 years and had never heard of that shortcut... I don't think many people use that.
It's nice to know the pause key has a use again. It was great for stopping scrolling under DOS... kinda been wasted ever since.
The average user would never find expose... you have to set it up in the control panel before you can use it anyway (and newbies would take one look at that screen, go 'ooo scary' and forget about it. For anyone who really needed that level of feedback it's wasted.
The fast user switching thing is nice though.
(personally I just wish they'd spend that amount of care with finder - when you close an OSX app it doesn't close.. you have to right click on the taskbar and select 'close'. The visual feedback for this is abysmal - an easily missed black mark on the icon. I've often seen OSX machines of friends with nearly every application still running & them complaining it's slow...)