What exactly is so evil about a company that improves the quality of life of the general public for free?
There is always cost associated with free, because someone has to pay for it, and you can bet whoever is paying for it is benefiting from it in some way.
Now, you may or may not care that someone is benefiting from the collection of your personal data, personally I don't, but to go and say Google is out to improve the quality of life for people and other BS like they are some non-profit charity is just naive.
Credit scores may have value, but the practice mentioned before of paying off your balances on time every month will never lower your score to a point of having any sort of negative impact on your life.
I'm going to call BS on the whole "deadbeat" thing for someone who practices full balance payoffs and isn't late on payments. The credit card companies may not like they aren't getting a profit from you, but that has nothing to do with how safe of a risk you are for other lenders. The credit score is a risk evaluation, not a profit evaluation.
They have an obligation to the customer under the terms of the warranty.
As someone who works on computers under various manufacturer warranty claims, the terms of the warranty for nearly every company state that it only covers defects in materials or worksmanship and they specifically exclude damage due to misuse or abuse. Meaning if I open up a computer and find piles of ash and other foreign matter inside it, you can bet I'm going to deny the warranty claim, I don't care what brand it is.
It would be no different if I opened it up and found moisture corrosion inside because you decided this was going to be your bathroom computer. The manufacturer is liable for the quality of their parts and worksmanship, not for you deliberately placing your product in an environment which is damaging to electronics. I don't even know why this specific incident is making the news because we deny warranty claims for this kind of crap every single day.
Packaging? Have you ever seen the iPhone's packaging? Nobody would pick up that box (1G, 3G or 3GS) and assume MMS was there or not there, it's an exercise in minimalism. I don't think they've ever "advertised" MMS, although they did announce it at the iPhone event as a "coming soon" feature, and explicitly mentioned that it would show up last on AT&T, which it sure did.
Yes indeed I have seen it because I purchased a 3GS shortly after it came out. There were 3 new features touted in the pamphlet inside the iPhone box which was the same pamphlet that the Best Buy store had on display with the iPhone: compass, voice control, and MMS with an example picture of what sending an MMS looked like integrated into the text messaging screen. Needless to say one of those 3 features was missing and took jailbreaking to get it working in the few months before the update was finally released.
And that makes it okay? Advertised or not, MMS was on like every cell phone when the iPhone came out and I completely would have assumed the iPhone, being this awesome new multimedia phone/gadget/computer-thing, would have included such a basic feature that my old brick I got for free at the time included. People who still excuse Apple and AT&T for not providing such a basic feature such as sending a picture to someone on a smartphone touted to bring such a rich multimedia experience to our pockets is probably why they got away with it for so long.
In fact MMS was advertised on iPhones after 3.0 in the packaging, yet was still not capable of MMS for another few months without modding. So yes there was a period of time where it was advertised and not delivered.
Just off the top of my head, picture messaging was one of the very basic things that an unmodded iPhone couldn't do for a number of years that every other seemingly piece of crap free phone could do just fine since the beginning of the decade.
Also misleading is the fact that Verizon's coverage maps are dark red while the AT&T's coverage maps are a light blue. The brain interprets the dark colors as dominant and the light blue as less dominant. The ad would be accurate only if both maps were the same color, or at least the same level of darkness.
How the brain interprets different colors is completely irrelevant when discussing the accuracy of the coverage maps. If AT&T went with that pitiful argument in court, they would have lost a long time ago. That's like trying to sue a company for showing pornography on TV after airing a bare foot because you have some foot fetish and your brain interprets feet as sexual objects and responds the same way as viewing the same naked body parts which are not allowed to be aired.
What your brain does is your own problem, utilizing certain colors in marketing is the oldest trick in the book and is used in basically every single commercial you've ever seen. That doesn't make the message misleading or any less truthful.
Teachers make piss for money and now someone is complaining that they are actually doing something to compliment that? Teachers on average make less than $50,000/year doing one of the most publicly scrutinized, emotionally demanding jobs in the USA.
In which they only work 180 days a year, get rock solid job security after a few years, have great family health coverage, and are provided a pension plan that absolves them from having to pay the social security "tax" every paycheck like the rest of us who probably won't even get anything out of it.
It's not as bad of a deal as you would think (why do you think so many people do it?) and it's not bad pay actually if you break it down on a per day basis, and your pay is guaranteed to increase over time as well as increase even more if you further your education. You can continue working over summer if you want more money or you can go on a 3 month trip to some foreign country you've always wanted to visit like my mom does every summer because teachers get such a massive amount of time off they can do stuff like that.
So if one hand has to hold the screen how are you even going to use the keyboard? I'm completely lost on the supposed advantage of having the screen detach from the keyboard.
Exactly. The summary poses a problem that this new program is supposed to fix, then says the new program works just as well as the old one. If it isn't better than what I have installed already, what is the point?
I believe the summary is just worded poorly. What it means to say is that the automatic recommendations will be as accurate for categorizing and recommending undiscovered music as Genius is for popular music.
The only thing I remember about Albatross is from Super Mario Bros. 2 and them dropping bobombs all over the place and me jumping on their backs to ride them to different areas of the level.
I have no idea how that relates to the Vista release though.
Honest question: how often does this happen for other people that you have three other people over and you say "Hey, let's play mario kart" and they say "sure?" One of the 3 people for me is invariably my wife who has made it clear she doesn't enjoy playing videogames even "casual" games in a group
It happens pretty often for those in which one of those 3 people is not a wife. You've either become really disconnected from your younger years or video games just wasn't part of what you and your friends used to do in your childhood if you seriously think this very common situation is so odd.
And next console generation, can we establish before hand which consoles are going to have libraries that are mostly group games and which consoles have more games that you can play online or by yourself? I got a wii early. I think Muramasa, demon blade is the only game I've played on it this year.
If there was any console in which it was blatantly obvious about what type of games were going to be on the system, it was the Wii. It was dubbed the party/casual game system from the get-go and if you even looked into any of the titles coming out for it around launch time that was quite clear. I mean the controller by itself should have made that clear enough, did you think you were going to be standing there by yourself swinging your arms around for 4+ hour long sessions of in-depth solitary gameplay? Not that the Wii doesn't have some good in-depth games you can sink your teeth into and spend long game sessions with, but seriously it was very clear that was going to be more the exception rather than the norm.
Gawd that's ugly. Why not integrate the buttons into the main body. It seriously looks like a maxi pad. I hope this is just the rumor mill at work.
While probably not a reliable concept picture of the new device, the reason for the buttons being separated from the screen body is because this is supposed to show us slide/twist design where the screen can be turned to portrait mode for DS games and then turned to landscape mode and slid upwards like a typical cell phone design for TS games.
Although for that design to work the buttons would have to be nearly flush to the device to not interfere with the sliding screen. While that's fine for the ABXY buttons, a flush D-pad would be kind of ridiculous. Again, probably not real.
The crew of the airship has been made available to the public, the Army has recruited a rag-tag group of unlikely heroes brought together under impossible circumstances from completely different backgrounds and cultures including:
-Guy with tough exterior yet internally continues on a never ending journey of soul searching
-Hot chick who uses her hotness to tame the tough exterior of soul searching boy
-Underage girl with mysterious supernatural abilities
-Relatively hot chick who doesn't know she's hot and hangs out with guys that have obvious emotional problems
-Overly cool guy who is infatuated with himself to hook up with any of these girls on the ship
-Random tough guy who is there to do man tasks like open jars and move furniture for all these emo boys and girls
-Some non-human creature that nobody really knows why is even there in the first place
-Pilot, named Cid, reportedly just completed rehab for alcoholism and a gambling addiction.
The ribbon actually IS a much better menu system once you get used to it. All the normal things that most users generally use are pretty easy to find, and many of the mid-level and intermediate things they weren't already aware of are presented more easily.
If a UI isn't immediately perceived as more functional and accessible, then it has already failed over the previous version. Saying it is better "once you get used to it" is just bullshit to cover how terrible it is because you can "get used to" any crappy UI so long as the functions you need are still there somewhere.The real test of a UI is throwing a random person in front of it and watching how effective they are without any prior knowledge on the UI itself.
Is there really a complete lack of college graduates with scientific majors seeking scientific jobs? Are brilliant scientifically-oriented minds really being drawn completely away from anything scientific related? I really don't think so. As long as there are always enough people with the capacity to perform the available scientific jobs out there, and their minds are being educated and nurtured appropriately to inspire them to push the limits of our current understanding while having the associated technical knowledge to do so, then I don't really see what the problem is.
The science police should be caring less about breaking in to mainstream media and more about how they are educating their future prospects. If there's anything science doesn't need, its more prospective candidates coming from the mainstream MTV crowd.
I had mandatory touch-typing in middle school (6th-8th grades) and it was worthless. I didn't learn a thing - I typed slowly and uncomfortably.
Then one day, I decided I wanted to learn to program computers. I taught myself C, and halfway through the project discovered that I had become a pretty good touch typist. Typing is a skill like riding a bike - you'll learn it by doing it. Forcing it on kids (who would rather be taking another, more meaningful course but can't because their schedule is full of crap) is only going to make them resent it.
Just because you didn't bother to utilize the skills you learned in middle school, doesn't mean you didn't learn it. Programming C doesn't magically enable everyone to touch type, you brain fell back on your middle school training without realizing and sharpened those skills when you finally started having to type in larger volumes and needed to do so with moderate efficiency.
I took this course to get my Win7 Ultimate for $10, I did not take it to learn anything. Seriously, those of us in retail take courses like these all the times where different vendors feed us their propaganda and we answer correctly based on what they want us to answer to get free stuff. None of us really care.
Why don't you post news stories on Slashdot for every manufacturer that says something negative about another in these courses? Oh you know what, because you'd be posting something every day. But oh no, God forbid Linux gets mentioned by Microsoft in one the thousands of courses we can take to get free crap and its time to take screen shots and call the evening news.
If there was really a 54% failure rate of the Xbox 360 you would have heard about it from retailers long before this unscientific, selection-biased poll came out.
Retailers did in fact take action on the Xbox 360 problems. Best Buy, for example, stopped exchanging defective Xbox 360 consoles that were covered under their extended warranty and is now sending Xbox 360s to their service center. You will get a different refurbished console in a week or so, which originated as someone else's broken console that got sent in weeks before. On the other hand if you have any other gaming console that is broken which you had an extended warranty for like a PS3, PS2, or Wii, you walk in to the store and get a new one right there.
With the 20-somethings, they'll get annoyed if you try to engage them in a long phone conversation because they're more comfortable with IM.
I just don't get that. It's so ass-backwards it's ridiculous. It's like calling sending someone an email and getting an irritated reply asking you to send all future correspondence by Western Union Telegram.
No it's not really that backwards and your comparison is not valid at all.
You have to understand that multi-tasking is simply how we have been raised and taught how to live our lives. Those of us in younger generation are pushed into involving ourselves into a ridiculous number of different things that doing something that limits our ability to multi-task needs to be done sparingly. Text messaging/IM'ing are very conducive to multi-tasking , while a phone conversation more or less locks you in and keeps you from conversing with anyone else at the time and may inhibit another task you might need to perform to a certain degree. Not to say you can't do other things while on a phone, but if given the choice we would rather not want to lock ourselves into a phone conversation unless it is seriously that important which requires actual dialogue, or we are completely 100% doing nothing and bored at the time.
Funnily enough I can still play console games without any problems, they are not the same at all. Perhaps it's just pseudo social aspect, or the feeling while playing WoW that you are forced to grind (e.g. it's out of your control). An interesting thing that will probably be studied by psychologists for years to come.
The key difference with a game like WoW is that you are playing with other people who depend on you for something. Like they need you to help them on a raid, gather items/materials, make your character stronger so you can perform better for the group, etc. This satisfies that fundamental human need to feel wanted by somebody that may not be getting fulfilled in the real world and is what causes that level of addiction in most people. With single-player games, you are just playing in a sandbox by yourself and will be amused in the same way. Not to say that some can't get addicted to that, chemical imbalances in the brain can predispose someone to addictions in general, but it is not as common as an addiction formed by something fulfilling a fundamental human need that was not being fulfilled before.
Also, MMOG's in particular can seem way more addictive than they actually are from the outside because you literally can not get out of your seat at times when you are playing. Those who have not played an MMOG at length will not be accustomed to the "live" nature of an MMOG. Someone who is not addicted at all and just playing for fun can seem completely obsessive about the game from an outsider (like family or the media) who doesn't understand the immediate attention that can be necessary to play the game and how there is no pause button.
Well Blizzard, I think you just died. It's amazing. As a kid on a Mac there was a heyday when in a few short years Blizzard put out Warcraft, Warcraft II, Starcraft, Diablo, Diablo II. When Bungie put out the Marathon series, the Myth series, and then Oni. When Sid Meyer put out SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000. And then they all shuttered up, sold-out, and then died of money-poisoning,
You can't really blame the video game developers for this. Back then, quality games that could appeal to large audiences did not require movie-like multi-million dollar budgets like they do today. Small game companies could thrive on their own and still make an A-list game that could sell to the masses as the risk wasn't so great. Nowadays all the production that needs to be involved in making video games for our current generation of consoles and computer hardware is just not even remotely comparable to how it was when games like Warcraft and SimCity first popped up. That's why so many game companies have merged, why we don't see as many fresh new titles with innovative gameplay, and why we keep seeing a stream of sequels and clones of already established and successful franchises.
It's not because the game developers have all turned to suck, or are greedy, or some other evil reason we'd like to think of, but our standards for what makes a good video game continually get higher and higher as technology improves and meeting these expectations means more of a financial risk. Taking on this financial risk means looking to "the man" who has the money, and accepting that having someone foot the bill for you means you are going to have to deal having to give them what they want in addition to doing what you want.
I didn't realize that Mission Viejo was such a hot market...
No one goes to The Shops except for locals. If MS really wanted to 'showcase' their products they could have chosen a much more high profile-venue. And there are plenty in OC: The Spectrum, South Coast, Fashion Island, or even The Block.
The Shops being more of a locals mall is exactly why it is a good place. It is deep in south Orange County and surrounded by large amounts of high class residential neighborhoods who are in the perfect position to give the mall repeat business. You also have to realize what "locals" means to The Shops, as there are no other malls or major shopping centers from Laguna Hills mall (which sucks and I don't even go there despite it being my closest mall) to all the way down past San Clemente. It's where most of south Orange County shops, plain and simple, and is a perfect market to break into.
The Spectrum and The Block are both outdoor malls with movie theaters, entertainment, and hangout destinations. You really need instant gratification and that gee-whiz factor to keep people's attention in those types of entertainment malls, something Microsoft totally does not have. South Coast, while very high class in its selection of stores, is more of a tourist/destination mall, and the Costa Mesa/Santa Ana area is really not the best market for local repeat business. Fashion Island would probably be a good alternative, and was one of the first places I remember there being an Apple Store around here, but The Shops still has the better location due to its lack of competition of other nearby shopping centers while Fashion Island has the equally classy South Coast mall less than 10 miles away to compete with.
Anyway I used to work at The Shops and the majority of the clientele were MILFs/trophy wives or the equally well-funded affluent teenage children of said MILF/trophy wives. These people are prime pickings for computer products and services as they love technology but have no idea what they are doing, are easily influenced, and will believe anything you show/tell them. The place I work at in the area charges over a hundred dollars to go plug in a wireless router to your cable modem and connect your laptop to it and these people will seriously pay it. If Microsoft wants a place to dispense its own flavor of kool-aid, The Shops would be it.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly is so evil about a company that improves the quality of life of the general public for free?
There is always cost associated with free, because someone has to pay for it, and you can bet whoever is paying for it is benefiting from it in some way.
Now, you may or may not care that someone is benefiting from the collection of your personal data, personally I don't, but to go and say Google is out to improve the quality of life for people and other BS like they are some non-profit charity is just naive.
Credit scores may have value, but the practice mentioned before of paying off your balances on time every month will never lower your score to a point of having any sort of negative impact on your life.
I'm going to call BS on the whole "deadbeat" thing for someone who practices full balance payoffs and isn't late on payments. The credit card companies may not like they aren't getting a profit from you, but that has nothing to do with how safe of a risk you are for other lenders. The credit score is a risk evaluation, not a profit evaluation.
They have an obligation to the customer under the terms of the warranty.
As someone who works on computers under various manufacturer warranty claims, the terms of the warranty for nearly every company state that it only covers defects in materials or worksmanship and they specifically exclude damage due to misuse or abuse. Meaning if I open up a computer and find piles of ash and other foreign matter inside it, you can bet I'm going to deny the warranty claim, I don't care what brand it is.
It would be no different if I opened it up and found moisture corrosion inside because you decided this was going to be your bathroom computer. The manufacturer is liable for the quality of their parts and worksmanship, not for you deliberately placing your product in an environment which is damaging to electronics. I don't even know why this specific incident is making the news because we deny warranty claims for this kind of crap every single day.
Packaging? Have you ever seen the iPhone's packaging? Nobody would pick up that box (1G, 3G or 3GS) and assume MMS was there or not there, it's an exercise in minimalism. I don't think they've ever "advertised" MMS, although they did announce it at the iPhone event as a "coming soon" feature, and explicitly mentioned that it would show up last on AT&T, which it sure did.
Yes indeed I have seen it because I purchased a 3GS shortly after it came out. There were 3 new features touted in the pamphlet inside the iPhone box which was the same pamphlet that the Best Buy store had on display with the iPhone: compass, voice control, and MMS with an example picture of what sending an MMS looked like integrated into the text messaging screen. Needless to say one of those 3 features was missing and took jailbreaking to get it working in the few months before the update was finally released.
And that makes it okay? Advertised or not, MMS was on like every cell phone when the iPhone came out and I completely would have assumed the iPhone, being this awesome new multimedia phone/gadget/computer-thing, would have included such a basic feature that my old brick I got for free at the time included. People who still excuse Apple and AT&T for not providing such a basic feature such as sending a picture to someone on a smartphone touted to bring such a rich multimedia experience to our pockets is probably why they got away with it for so long.
In fact MMS was advertised on iPhones after 3.0 in the packaging, yet was still not capable of MMS for another few months without modding. So yes there was a period of time where it was advertised and not delivered.
Just off the top of my head, picture messaging was one of the very basic things that an unmodded iPhone couldn't do for a number of years that every other seemingly piece of crap free phone could do just fine since the beginning of the decade.
Also misleading is the fact that Verizon's coverage maps are dark red while the AT&T's coverage maps are a light blue. The brain interprets the dark colors as dominant and the light blue as less dominant. The ad would be accurate only if both maps were the same color, or at least the same level of darkness.
How the brain interprets different colors is completely irrelevant when discussing the accuracy of the coverage maps. If AT&T went with that pitiful argument in court, they would have lost a long time ago. That's like trying to sue a company for showing pornography on TV after airing a bare foot because you have some foot fetish and your brain interprets feet as sexual objects and responds the same way as viewing the same naked body parts which are not allowed to be aired.
What your brain does is your own problem, utilizing certain colors in marketing is the oldest trick in the book and is used in basically every single commercial you've ever seen. That doesn't make the message misleading or any less truthful.
Teachers make piss for money and now someone is complaining that they are actually doing something to compliment that? Teachers on average make less than $50,000/year doing one of the most publicly scrutinized, emotionally demanding jobs in the USA.
In which they only work 180 days a year, get rock solid job security after a few years, have great family health coverage, and are provided a pension plan that absolves them from having to pay the social security "tax" every paycheck like the rest of us who probably won't even get anything out of it.
It's not as bad of a deal as you would think (why do you think so many people do it?) and it's not bad pay actually if you break it down on a per day basis, and your pay is guaranteed to increase over time as well as increase even more if you further your education. You can continue working over summer if you want more money or you can go on a 3 month trip to some foreign country you've always wanted to visit like my mom does every summer because teachers get such a massive amount of time off they can do stuff like that.
So if one hand has to hold the screen how are you even going to use the keyboard? I'm completely lost on the supposed advantage of having the screen detach from the keyboard.
Water beats rock every time.
And god forbid it comes into contact with paper
Exactly. The summary poses a problem that this new program is supposed to fix, then says the new program works just as well as the old one. If it isn't better than what I have installed already, what is the point?
I believe the summary is just worded poorly. What it means to say is that the automatic recommendations will be as accurate for categorizing and recommending undiscovered music as Genius is for popular music.
The only thing I remember about Albatross is from Super Mario Bros. 2 and them dropping bobombs all over the place and me jumping on their backs to ride them to different areas of the level.
I have no idea how that relates to the Vista release though.
You have what they call a life. Many people, whom do not have lives, will fake like they do by playing video games together in the same room.
Kind of like other people who might fake like they have a life by playing alcohol-related games and drinking together in the same room?
Honest question: how often does this happen for other people that you have three other people over and you say "Hey, let's play mario kart" and they say "sure?" One of the 3 people for me is invariably my wife who has made it clear she doesn't enjoy playing videogames even "casual" games in a group
It happens pretty often for those in which one of those 3 people is not a wife. You've either become really disconnected from your younger years or video games just wasn't part of what you and your friends used to do in your childhood if you seriously think this very common situation is so odd.
And next console generation, can we establish before hand which consoles are going to have libraries that are mostly group games and which consoles have more games that you can play online or by yourself? I got a wii early. I think Muramasa, demon blade is the only game I've played on it this year.
If there was any console in which it was blatantly obvious about what type of games were going to be on the system, it was the Wii. It was dubbed the party/casual game system from the get-go and if you even looked into any of the titles coming out for it around launch time that was quite clear. I mean the controller by itself should have made that clear enough, did you think you were going to be standing there by yourself swinging your arms around for 4+ hour long sessions of in-depth solitary gameplay? Not that the Wii doesn't have some good in-depth games you can sink your teeth into and spend long game sessions with, but seriously it was very clear that was going to be more the exception rather than the norm.
Gawd that's ugly. Why not integrate the buttons into the main body. It seriously looks like a maxi pad. I hope this is just the rumor mill at work.
While probably not a reliable concept picture of the new device, the reason for the buttons being separated from the screen body is because this is supposed to show us slide/twist design where the screen can be turned to portrait mode for DS games and then turned to landscape mode and slid upwards like a typical cell phone design for TS games.
Although for that design to work the buttons would have to be nearly flush to the device to not interfere with the sliding screen. While that's fine for the ABXY buttons, a flush D-pad would be kind of ridiculous. Again, probably not real.
The crew of the airship has been made available to the public, the Army has recruited a rag-tag group of unlikely heroes brought together under impossible circumstances from completely different backgrounds and cultures including:
-Guy with tough exterior yet internally continues on a never ending journey of soul searching
-Hot chick who uses her hotness to tame the tough exterior of soul searching boy
-Underage girl with mysterious supernatural abilities
-Relatively hot chick who doesn't know she's hot and hangs out with guys that have obvious emotional problems
-Overly cool guy who is infatuated with himself to hook up with any of these girls on the ship
-Random tough guy who is there to do man tasks like open jars and move furniture for all these emo boys and girls
-Some non-human creature that nobody really knows why is even there in the first place
-Pilot, named Cid, reportedly just completed rehab for alcoholism and a gambling addiction.
The ribbon actually IS a much better menu system once you get used to it. All the normal things that most users generally use are pretty easy to find, and many of the mid-level and intermediate things they weren't already aware of are presented more easily.
If a UI isn't immediately perceived as more functional and accessible, then it has already failed over the previous version. Saying it is better "once you get used to it" is just bullshit to cover how terrible it is because you can "get used to" any crappy UI so long as the functions you need are still there somewhere.The real test of a UI is throwing a random person in front of it and watching how effective they are without any prior knowledge on the UI itself.
Is there really a complete lack of college graduates with scientific majors seeking scientific jobs? Are brilliant scientifically-oriented minds really being drawn completely away from anything scientific related? I really don't think so. As long as there are always enough people with the capacity to perform the available scientific jobs out there, and their minds are being educated and nurtured appropriately to inspire them to push the limits of our current understanding while having the associated technical knowledge to do so, then I don't really see what the problem is.
The science police should be caring less about breaking in to mainstream media and more about how they are educating their future prospects. If there's anything science doesn't need, its more prospective candidates coming from the mainstream MTV crowd.
I had mandatory touch-typing in middle school (6th-8th grades) and it was worthless. I didn't learn a thing - I typed slowly and uncomfortably.
Then one day, I decided I wanted to learn to program computers. I taught myself C, and halfway through the project discovered that I had become a pretty good touch typist. Typing is a skill like riding a bike - you'll learn it by doing it. Forcing it on kids (who would rather be taking another, more meaningful course but can't because their schedule is full of crap) is only going to make them resent it.
Just because you didn't bother to utilize the skills you learned in middle school, doesn't mean you didn't learn it. Programming C doesn't magically enable everyone to touch type, you brain fell back on your middle school training without realizing and sharpened those skills when you finally started having to type in larger volumes and needed to do so with moderate efficiency.
I took this course to get my Win7 Ultimate for $10, I did not take it to learn anything. Seriously, those of us in retail take courses like these all the times where different vendors feed us their propaganda and we answer correctly based on what they want us to answer to get free stuff. None of us really care.
Why don't you post news stories on Slashdot for every manufacturer that says something negative about another in these courses? Oh you know what, because you'd be posting something every day. But oh no, God forbid Linux gets mentioned by Microsoft in one the thousands of courses we can take to get free crap and its time to take screen shots and call the evening news.
If there was really a 54% failure rate of the Xbox 360 you would have heard about it from retailers long before this unscientific, selection-biased poll came out.
Retailers did in fact take action on the Xbox 360 problems. Best Buy, for example, stopped exchanging defective Xbox 360 consoles that were covered under their extended warranty and is now sending Xbox 360s to their service center. You will get a different refurbished console in a week or so, which originated as someone else's broken console that got sent in weeks before. On the other hand if you have any other gaming console that is broken which you had an extended warranty for like a PS3, PS2, or Wii, you walk in to the store and get a new one right there.
With the 20-somethings, they'll get annoyed if you try to engage them in a long phone conversation because they're more comfortable with IM.
I just don't get that. It's so ass-backwards it's ridiculous. It's like calling sending someone an email and getting an irritated reply asking you to send all future correspondence by Western Union Telegram.
No it's not really that backwards and your comparison is not valid at all.
You have to understand that multi-tasking is simply how we have been raised and taught how to live our lives. Those of us in younger generation are pushed into involving ourselves into a ridiculous number of different things that doing something that limits our ability to multi-task needs to be done sparingly. Text messaging/IM'ing are very conducive to multi-tasking , while a phone conversation more or less locks you in and keeps you from conversing with anyone else at the time and may inhibit another task you might need to perform to a certain degree. Not to say you can't do other things while on a phone, but if given the choice we would rather not want to lock ourselves into a phone conversation unless it is seriously that important which requires actual dialogue, or we are completely 100% doing nothing and bored at the time.
Funnily enough I can still play console games without any problems, they are not the same at all. Perhaps it's just pseudo social aspect, or the feeling while playing WoW that you are forced to grind (e.g. it's out of your control). An interesting thing that will probably be studied by psychologists for years to come.
The key difference with a game like WoW is that you are playing with other people who depend on you for something. Like they need you to help them on a raid, gather items/materials, make your character stronger so you can perform better for the group, etc. This satisfies that fundamental human need to feel wanted by somebody that may not be getting fulfilled in the real world and is what causes that level of addiction in most people. With single-player games, you are just playing in a sandbox by yourself and will be amused in the same way. Not to say that some can't get addicted to that, chemical imbalances in the brain can predispose someone to addictions in general, but it is not as common as an addiction formed by something fulfilling a fundamental human need that was not being fulfilled before.
Also, MMOG's in particular can seem way more addictive than they actually are from the outside because you literally can not get out of your seat at times when you are playing. Those who have not played an MMOG at length will not be accustomed to the "live" nature of an MMOG. Someone who is not addicted at all and just playing for fun can seem completely obsessive about the game from an outsider (like family or the media) who doesn't understand the immediate attention that can be necessary to play the game and how there is no pause button.
Well Blizzard, I think you just died. It's amazing. As a kid on a Mac there was a heyday when in a few short years Blizzard put out Warcraft, Warcraft II, Starcraft, Diablo, Diablo II. When Bungie put out the Marathon series, the Myth series, and then Oni. When Sid Meyer put out SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000. And then they all shuttered up, sold-out, and then died of money-poisoning,
You can't really blame the video game developers for this. Back then, quality games that could appeal to large audiences did not require movie-like multi-million dollar budgets like they do today. Small game companies could thrive on their own and still make an A-list game that could sell to the masses as the risk wasn't so great. Nowadays all the production that needs to be involved in making video games for our current generation of consoles and computer hardware is just not even remotely comparable to how it was when games like Warcraft and SimCity first popped up. That's why so many game companies have merged, why we don't see as many fresh new titles with innovative gameplay, and why we keep seeing a stream of sequels and clones of already established and successful franchises.
It's not because the game developers have all turned to suck, or are greedy, or some other evil reason we'd like to think of, but our standards for what makes a good video game continually get higher and higher as technology improves and meeting these expectations means more of a financial risk. Taking on this financial risk means looking to "the man" who has the money, and accepting that having someone foot the bill for you means you are going to have to deal having to give them what they want in addition to doing what you want.
I didn't realize that Mission Viejo was such a hot market... No one goes to The Shops except for locals. If MS really wanted to 'showcase' their products they could have chosen a much more high profile-venue. And there are plenty in OC: The Spectrum, South Coast, Fashion Island, or even The Block.
The Shops being more of a locals mall is exactly why it is a good place. It is deep in south Orange County and surrounded by large amounts of high class residential neighborhoods who are in the perfect position to give the mall repeat business. You also have to realize what "locals" means to The Shops, as there are no other malls or major shopping centers from Laguna Hills mall (which sucks and I don't even go there despite it being my closest mall) to all the way down past San Clemente. It's where most of south Orange County shops, plain and simple, and is a perfect market to break into.
The Spectrum and The Block are both outdoor malls with movie theaters, entertainment, and hangout destinations. You really need instant gratification and that gee-whiz factor to keep people's attention in those types of entertainment malls, something Microsoft totally does not have. South Coast, while very high class in its selection of stores, is more of a tourist/destination mall, and the Costa Mesa/Santa Ana area is really not the best market for local repeat business. Fashion Island would probably be a good alternative, and was one of the first places I remember there being an Apple Store around here, but The Shops still has the better location due to its lack of competition of other nearby shopping centers while Fashion Island has the equally classy South Coast mall less than 10 miles away to compete with.
Anyway I used to work at The Shops and the majority of the clientele were MILFs/trophy wives or the equally well-funded affluent teenage children of said MILF/trophy wives. These people are prime pickings for computer products and services as they love technology but have no idea what they are doing, are easily influenced, and will believe anything you show/tell them. The place I work at in the area charges over a hundred dollars to go plug in a wireless router to your cable modem and connect your laptop to it and these people will seriously pay it. If Microsoft wants a place to dispense its own flavor of kool-aid, The Shops would be it.