You raised a very good point that highlights perhaps how people incorrectly view the internet.
When you post on the internet you are doing a very specific act of publishing. And not just publishing like getting a letter in a newspaper or calling a radio station, you are publishing for the whole world to see, be it a comment in slashdot, a rant on your blog, or an embarrassing video on youtube.
Before the internet, one could conceivably recover from such a career mistake (if this was one): move to a new city/state/country/industry, and start over. Consider, hypothetically, going on the Oprah show and jumping all over her couch like a crazy baboon. Where would you move to get away from that kind of publicity?
THERE IS NO UN-PUBLISH BUTTON.
Just like how you cannot undo what was broadcast or published in the mass media, so too with the internet.
As the strength of archive-bots and search-caches continues to grow it also gets easier to find what people have previously published even if they go to lengths to reform or cover their tracks. The internet never forgets.
No question. I would absolutely love to see the two of you face off in a ring. Whoever loses, the rest of us win. Nah, the rest of us wouldn't even know how the fight went because the NCAA would bust the asses of any bloggers who tried to report on the event.
Any company that puts the detonation of hundreds of pounds of explosives under the control of a windows machine is begging for a massive lawsuit. Queue Windows for Warships jokes.
To put in perspective the entry level plans have measly bandwidth quotas from 200mb to 600mb per month. Then to add further insult to injury any additional usage is charged at $150 per GB.
However don't think all Aussie internet is as bad as this, there are many competing ISPs so you would have to be a complete idiot to sign up to Bigpoo.
Turning your argument on its head, people upgraded because of the improvements and added features from each subsequent release.
Those "halcyon days of the 90's" saw the releases of Windows 3.1 through to Win 98SE, followed closely by 2K and XP in the early 00's. Most of those could be argued to be a significant step forward in stability, hardware support, and/or usability.
This DRM complaint thing - what's the deal? Vista doesn't prevent you from doing anything XP will let you do. They added the ability to play restricted formats, which simply isn't included at all in XP. Vista's DRM is not just about prevention, it is also about degrading quality of your content and has already had nasty side-effects such as slowingnetwork performance when you play music.
You'll be lucky enough if you can even play content you have bought (I know that last one is not Vista specific, but it is strongly related to the topic at hand).
You bought a car. You left it in your garage but somehow lost the keys.
So now you have a perfectly working car but you can't start it, this is where my car analogy breaks down.
In the real world, you could go to the dealer or a good locksmith and pay them a small fee to make you a replacement key.
However in this situation the manufacturer of your car (Microsoft) does not allow end users to buy or make replacement keys. In the Microsoft world if you lose your key, they insist on you re-purchasing the entire car.
So you did the next best thing and found a shady locksmith who would give you a key. Not only that, you discovered that you could keys for all sorts of cars from this shady locksmith, and if you were not careful a virus and some trojans as well.
This was all part of Apple's DRM plan that began in the 80's, to take over the music industry.
It began with removing the eject from the floppy drive so you couldn't share those aiff files with a friend. They also removed eject button from all the optical drives so you couldn't copy that audio CD.
The power and reset buttons were put in the most difficult to reach place as possible so you couldn't shutdown your computer when the Feds arrived at your door.
And finally they restricted the mouse to only one button so you couldn't right click and save MP3s from nefarious websites.
I have seen this happening as well but it only seems to affect certain drives so I wonder if it may also be the drive manufactuer's fault or possibly the motherboard design.
For example, the Pioneer DVD-Rs I have tested can hang the system (including the video and input devices!) for a few seconds after a disc is inserted. OTOH a LiteOn drive doesn't seem to have the same effect.
I visit many internets and MP3 is by far the most common format that I come across. Second up is MP3 streamed through Flash.
Fact Check: More audio is available on the Internet via WMA than any other format, in fact all other formats combined... [citation needed]
Even Vista is not as bad as the Sony CDs with rootkits. Whilst that may be true, at least Sony eventually offered a buyback scheme for their defective CDs.
it was the [entire] front page of amazon Personally I have never been to the front page of Amazon.com, and when I do visit Amazon it is always via Google searches or targeted Amazon adverts on other sites.
Thus I'd go as far as saying the best advertising *anything* could have would be via Google. I don't have the prices to advertise on the Google front page, but I'm guessing it would be worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
When you post on the internet you are doing a very specific act of publishing. And not just publishing like getting a letter in a newspaper or calling a radio station, you are publishing for the whole world to see, be it a comment in slashdot, a rant on your blog, or an embarrassing video on youtube. Before the internet, one could conceivably recover from such a career mistake (if this was one): move to a new city/state/country/industry, and start over. Consider, hypothetically, going on the Oprah show and jumping all over her couch like a crazy baboon. Where would you move to get away from that kind of publicity?
THERE IS NO UN-PUBLISH BUTTON.
Just like how you cannot undo what was broadcast or published in the mass media, so too with the internet.
As the strength of archive-bots and search-caches continues to grow it also gets easier to find what people have previously published even if they go to lengths to reform or cover their tracks. The internet never forgets.
With the growing ubiquity of "HD" monitors it seems we can resolve to start arguing about portrait vs landscape resolutions.
yay.
Ironically if you see the imaginary figure that everyone believes in but can't see or hear you then become a saint.
To put in perspective the entry level plans have measly bandwidth quotas from 200mb to 600mb per month. Then to add further insult to injury any additional usage is charged at $150 per GB.
However don't think all Aussie internet is as bad as this, there are many competing ISPs so you would have to be a complete idiot to sign up to Bigpoo.
Turning your argument on its head, people upgraded because of the improvements and added features from each subsequent release.
Those "halcyon days of the 90's" saw the releases of Windows 3.1 through to Win 98SE, followed closely by 2K and XP in the early 00's. Most of those could be argued to be a significant step forward in stability, hardware support, and/or usability.
You'll be lucky enough if you can even play content you have bought (I know that last one is not Vista specific, but it is strongly related to the topic at hand).
Earlier this year Dell reneged on Vista and allowed customers to choose XP to be pre-installed on some of their machines.
Don't stop there, he might have meant "ex-daughter-in-law-now-my-wife"
Woody Allen, is that you?
You bought a car. You left it in your garage but somehow lost the keys.
So now you have a perfectly working car but you can't start it, this is where my car analogy breaks down.
In the real world, you could go to the dealer or a good locksmith and pay them a small fee to make you a replacement key.
However in this situation the manufacturer of your car (Microsoft) does not allow end users to buy or make replacement keys. In the Microsoft world if you lose your key, they insist on you re-purchasing the entire car.
So you did the next best thing and found a shady locksmith who would give you a key. Not only that, you discovered that you could keys for all sorts of cars from this shady locksmith, and if you were not careful a virus and some trojans as well.
I think "slanty eyes" is the wrong racist stereotype for this story, you hairy-tea-towel-wearing-goathugger.
It's a puck
.MKV and .FLAC are not listed on that site, and neither is .ISO
Kinda looks like WD is doing you a favour by only letting people share media of the highest quality.
This was all part of Apple's DRM plan that began in the 80's, to take over the music industry.
It began with removing the eject from the floppy drive so you couldn't share those aiff files with a friend. They also removed eject button from all the optical drives so you couldn't copy that audio CD.
The power and reset buttons were put in the most difficult to reach place as possible so you couldn't shutdown your computer when the Feds arrived at your door.
And finally they restricted the mouse to only one button so you couldn't right click and save MP3s from nefarious websites.
I have seen this happening as well but it only seems to affect certain drives so I wonder if it may also be the drive manufactuer's fault or possibly the motherboard design.
For example, the Pioneer DVD-Rs I have tested can hang the system (including the video and input devices!) for a few seconds after a disc is inserted. OTOH a LiteOn drive doesn't seem to have the same effect.
Fact Check: WMA has better audio quality by a factor of 2 times?
Perhaps parent was referring to Flash in a 64bit Linux OS, or maybe I just dreamed that up.
Either way, the last I heard was the only way to get Flash on Linux was to use 32bit Firefox - please correct me if I am mistaken.
1. send takedown notice to MPAA
2. LiveJournal servers slashdotted to hell
3. ???
4. geekocalypse!
No doubt using some version of Word for Dos, if the resulting code is any indication.
I they are not capturing the fingerprints and facial portrait for every person entering, then they are not really trying.
/sarcasm
C'mon USA, Japan is beating you in the War of Terror!
Why bother digging up all those trenches when you can keep the copper and get your 10G, so they say.
Vista is defective by design, and proud of it.
You cannot have PROFIT!!! without first having ??????.
Thus I'd go as far as saying the best advertising *anything* could have would be via Google. I don't have the prices to advertise on the Google front page, but I'm guessing it would be worth it.