Seriously. Disks under ntfs become so badly fragmented that it can take the best part of a day to repair a large partition. At least it should attempt to do defragmentation during idle time to reduce the problem. I have't kept my eye on what Vista promises but that should be top of the list.
If Hans Reiser and a bunch of guys can knock up an extremely sophisticated journaling file system from scratch AND rewrite an even more advanced pluggable replacement in the space of time that WinFS *hasn't* appeared. Perhaps WinFS should have set its sights lower to begin with.
Not very stable is a subjective term. For day to day use, I've yet to find any Linux dist where crashes are anything but extremely infrequent events. Fedora was pretty stable when I played around with it on my Linux machine. I recall around FC2 or 3 that SELinux policies were pretty flakey but that was about the extent my problems with it. I switched to SUSE 10.x not long after, not for any particular reason but simply for the change and experience.
I guess if you're trying to run a server then you shouldn't be using FC, Ubuntu or any other dist which is basically a moving target. While Fedora is probably just fine, if I were running something critical I wouldn't trust anything less that RHEL or similar for the task. I think that support would be another deciding factor in choosing a dist. Community support is fine when its just you and your machine. It's not fine when your job or your business depends on high uptime.
It's hard to compare it directly because of the odd screen size, but it's only $100-$200 more than a PC, if even that.)
$100-200 is about right. You can buy a Lenovo 14" 512Mb 80Gb 1.66Ghz Core Duo w/ DVD+RW for $899. That's $200 of a difference. I expect other makers will be equally competitive with their Core Duo models as they begin to appear.
But is $100-200 justifiable? It certainly sounds like a pretty large markup for a basic system. And by all accounts the MacBook has its fair share of build quality issues. I would be livid if any laptop I bought had horrible yellowy brown patches within a few weeks of using it. Or one that got so hot that it might explain why Apple insists its a "notebook", not a "laptop".
Apple defenders used to justify the price difference for build quality, but basically we're talking about a consumer level device with highly visible issues which costs more than its competition. Apple OS X is a great OS and I love how fast my decrepit Mac boots, but I wonder if it is justification to buy a hardware lemon. Still, they are desirable devices, but perhaps it's better to wait a revision or two. After all it's the people who queue up on launch day who we should thank for paying to find all the problems.
Laser printers, PCs flat, CD-ROM drives, hard drives, screen monitors etc. all cost a fortune when they first appeared. That's because early adopters pay a lot more for kit. Sometimes its because they need the gear and other times because they have more money than sense and want shiny things.
The price will come down eventually. Since BD-ROMs are aimed fairly and squarely at consumers it is inevitable that you'll start to see them ship in some of the higher price PC models by the end of the year. I doubt they'll cost no more than $300 in 9 months from now, especially as the PS3 will hasten price drops. A few more years after that and they'll probably be the de facto standard assuming HD-DVD doesn't get there first. If history repeats itself doubtless we'll see hybrid drives eventuall costing $100 capable of coping with anything thrown at them, BD, HD-DVD, DVD, CD of all varieties.
You assume that a mod chip will appear for the PS3. Perhaps one will but it will have to be damned careful to be totally undetectable to the firmware and future versions of the firmware. Furthermore I expect that Sony & Microsoft have carefully watched how their previous consoles got hacked to make sure that it is far, far harder to do the same to their latest. Not just the firmware, but what solder points they stick on the board and so on. Besides, Sony is bound to force you to update your firmware whether you're online or not in the same way as they do with the PSP - new games won't run if your firmware is not up to date and Sony will make sure new discs ship with the new firmware.
Anyway I think it is a unlikely that all or even the majority of PS3 games will all ship on Blu-Ray for some time. I expect most will go out on DVD (just like some PS2 games go out on CD). The games that benefit most from Blu-Ray are those with enormous amounts of textures, graphics, audio, cutscenes etc. Even then they'd be pushed to fill a DVD. Perhaps Blu-Ray will become more prevalent when discs ship with localized content for multiple regions.
Previously if ever the price of a Mac was mentioned, you can bet someone would explain how the premium ensured build quality. Recently (the last 2-3 years), the build quality of certain Macs and certain iPods has been pretty superficial. You get a snazzy looking laptop that is too hot to put on your lap (it's not a laptop, it's a notebook!), where the battery pops (from the heat), and if you go for the cheaper model it turns yellow after a few weeks. So what was the high price for again? Certainly not for the quality it seems.
The car and cash is a prize in a contest. You only get either if you produce something which wins by whatever ever-shifting criteria SCO decide to impose. Oh and you have to use EdgeBuilder SDK, which appears to be part of some dubious MLM business model they're setting up called "Me Inc.".
When you toss SCO, MLM and prize into the mix, you'd have to be a pretty gung-ho sort of guy to think you're going to see much from it. Besides, the contest doesn't close until 2007. That means unless you put the better part of a year into your app, you don't even stand a chance of winning. May as well get a job if that's the case and be guaranteed of winning. Or write something else and sell it - probably the risk is no less.
Lots of companies have the same practice, though they may not be so extreme. Signing up is made as swift and simple as possible.
Attempting to cancel sees you playing a key pad symphony, put on hold and finally being subjected to 20 questions, each designed to undermime your determination to quit. Cancellations are known as "churn" or to AOL "massive internal haemoraging". Once he says he wants to cancel the reps will be reading from a script. If this customer had said he was a modem, chances are he would have been sold up "free" to broadband. If he said the "software sucks" he would have been asked if he was using AOL 9.0 or the great AOL 10.0 (scheduled for 2012), or put through to a solution rep who'd call back in 3 years. If he said he hated the price plan they'd probably toss in a free 30 days. etc. Anything but anything to stop you quitting. I've been through similar experiences when trying to cancel satellite and mobile phone subs.
I expect AOL are just being hard asses at the moment because they're dying. There is nothing wrong with AOL as a service if you're totally clueless, but the days of clueless internet users are drawing to a close, especially when other providers are much cheaper and broadband just works (for the most part). Even grannies can fathom how to use broadband. I bet AOL reps are under huge pressure to stop waverers from leaving which means you're going to have asshole reps trying to earn their commission or being a dick to do it. Wouldn't surprise me if AOL call centers were like Glengarry Glen Ross at the moment.
Any half decent upgrader / uninstaller I've used is able to kill running applications for itself. The question is, why can't Norton do likewise? Or at least state that the removal of some components require a reboot, at which point it executes a delete batch file which removes them before they have a chance to be loaded again.
Google around for people that have gone thru plenty of PS2s, plenty of Apple POwerbooks, or MacBooks.
More fool them. If the hardware sucks, why keep going back for more of it? Understandable I guess if you're covered by a warranty - up to a point, but not really understandable outside the warranty unless you own a massive library of titles.
As for MacBooks, I'm surprised to hear people going through plenty of them as they're only just out.
It must count as one of the biggest wastes of energy in the home. When some is turned off, it should really be turned off. Talk that the Nintendo Wii is still active and downloading content while in standby is worrying since it means the thing is constantly consuming a ton of power even if its not used more than once a week.
If I were Blizzard, I'd stick up warnings in prominent places such as the login screen indicating that buying or farming gold is subject to instant suspension and then follow through with it. If people are stupid enough to do it despite the warning then its their subscription they're throwing away.
Besides, we're talking a world over which Blizzard have total control. They can log everything, be anywhere, watch anyone. They could flag "suspects" with ease and actually watch what they are up to. Or put triggers on phrases such as "buy some gold". Or flag people who've transferred more than a certain amount of money in a day and to who. Or monitor IP addresses of known farmers. Or flag people who're carrying more gold than someone at their level ought to be etc. Or ban in-game email for 20 days for new players. In short they could do *anything* and stamp on the practice so hard that its worth it for no one.
I guess the reason it is prevalent is because it is economically viable for farming to exist. Once you start kick banning the farmers and their customers, the cost of doing business exceeds the income and the people go on to look for other games to exploit.
I think its legitimate to complain that a machine you've just bought is stained yellow within a few weeks of getting it. Though anyone foolish enough to buy any consumer electronics the very second it appears is asking for it to some extent. Some Mac / iPod seem to suffer it as much as console gamers - their brain is overwhelmed by the hype and they can't help themselves. Hence we see them complaining of yellowing keyboards, overheating laptops, scratchy fascias, broken earjacks etc. Cooler heads wait and see - at worst it means a few weeks or months of using something else - something else which probably doesn't even need replacing immediately anyway.
I urge you to throw man years of effort on your version of Linux. I'm sure people will be FLOCKING to use it, especially as its based on the LATEST 2.5 kernel. It certainly won't be a miserable flop that opens you up to further litigation or drags you into bankruptcy any quicker. Oh no indeed.
I think this more of an excuse than a valid reason. I use a white logitech keyboard. It attracts muck, fluff, hair, dirt etc. and looks filthy. All I have to do to restore its colour to white is wipe it down with a baby wipe. That's it. If the same is not true for the MacBook, people should be seeking a refund.
If Macs are permenantly discoloured after a mere fortnight on the market, it is because Apple blew it. And it is the people who breathlessly bought into the hype and got their MacBook (or MacBook Pro, or iPod Nano, or iPod Mini etc.) on day 0 who are the ones who've been bitten.
The oils in the hands - dirty or clean - will rub into any white surface and discolor it.
I've used plenty of white / cream keyboards for years and they get mucky but any discolouration is as easy to remove as scratching it with a nail or rubbing it down with a wet wipe. If Apple laptops are getting permenantly stained, perhaps people should be getting angry with Apple for producing crap laptops that can't even last a few weeks without getting marked.
Apple proponents harp on about the "quality" of their products, but the litany of build quality issues that accompany each release would suggest otherwise.
Why do you not consider DVD to contain DRM though? I can't play my DVDs anywhere. My PS2 doesn't play half my titles. Why? Because they're region 1 encoded and my PS2 is set to region 2. Only players which can be hacked, or software decoders like VLC are able to play all my content.
The difference being that it should be fairly easy to automatically detect unusual large money transfers, plus any conversation that preceded it, plus the levels of those involved, plus the countries that each player hails from. I expect that in itself would provide sufficient evidence in many cases.
A DS Lite is a Nintendo DS in a smaller form factor. If you own the latter, what the hell are you doing buying another one? If the original was great, what's the urgency to replace it? If the original was bad, then perhaps you shouldn't be buying another one.
If you're a new buyer, why the sudden clamour to buy something which has been out there in a slightly larger format for over a year now?
Either way I don't get it. These things aren't going to disappear overnight.
Access is capable of storing stuff as blobs (as others have said). It can also be used over a network, if the.mdb file resides on a network drive. Not exactly reliable but it can be done.
The biggest issue is that Access has a ~2GB file limitation so storing large things in it is not a good idea. Secondly, JET is well and truly dead and unsupported and doesn't support things you really might need for multi-user system such as referential integrity, triggers, stored procs.
MS provide a SQL Server Express 2005 with a 4Gb DB limit for free that would be a good option. Oracle has something similar. There is also PostgreSQL that has no limits. The last option has the benefit of being totally unencumbered, but I don't believe the ODBC or.NET drivers are quite as polished as the other options.
Every group has that fringe of nitwits who'll spend absurd money for something which gives them an "edge". Look at all the shit that modders, stereophiles, golfers, wine buffs, ricers etc. buy. It's actually a surprise it's taken so long for gamers to be targetted. Though I do recall another mouse before this that had removable weights(!) so you could finely adjust the performance for various FPS games.
The moral of this tale. Idiots with money to burn are a rich market. For the same price as this corded mouse you could buy two other corded laser mice. Funnily enough I bet the surface you play on has far more effect on your mouse than the mouse itself.
Slashdot Mirror
If Hans Reiser and a bunch of guys can knock up an extremely sophisticated journaling file system from scratch AND rewrite an even more advanced pluggable replacement in the space of time that WinFS *hasn't* appeared. Perhaps WinFS should have set its sights lower to begin with.
I guess if you're trying to run a server then you shouldn't be using FC, Ubuntu or any other dist which is basically a moving target. While Fedora is probably just fine, if I were running something critical I wouldn't trust anything less that RHEL or similar for the task. I think that support would be another deciding factor in choosing a dist. Community support is fine when its just you and your machine. It's not fine when your job or your business depends on high uptime.
Think of all the money they save on real life activities too :)
$100-200 is about right. You can buy a Lenovo 14" 512Mb 80Gb 1.66Ghz Core Duo w/ DVD+RW for $899. That's $200 of a difference. I expect other makers will be equally competitive with their Core Duo models as they begin to appear.
But is $100-200 justifiable? It certainly sounds like a pretty large markup for a basic system. And by all accounts the MacBook has its fair share of build quality issues. I would be livid if any laptop I bought had horrible yellowy brown patches within a few weeks of using it. Or one that got so hot that it might explain why Apple insists its a "notebook", not a "laptop".
Apple defenders used to justify the price difference for build quality, but basically we're talking about a consumer level device with highly visible issues which costs more than its competition. Apple OS X is a great OS and I love how fast my decrepit Mac boots, but I wonder if it is justification to buy a hardware lemon. Still, they are desirable devices, but perhaps it's better to wait a revision or two. After all it's the people who queue up on launch day who we should thank for paying to find all the problems.
The price will come down eventually. Since BD-ROMs are aimed fairly and squarely at consumers it is inevitable that you'll start to see them ship in some of the higher price PC models by the end of the year. I doubt they'll cost no more than $300 in 9 months from now, especially as the PS3 will hasten price drops. A few more years after that and they'll probably be the de facto standard assuming HD-DVD doesn't get there first. If history repeats itself doubtless we'll see hybrid drives eventuall costing $100 capable of coping with anything thrown at them, BD, HD-DVD, DVD, CD of all varieties.
Anyway I think it is a unlikely that all or even the majority of PS3 games will all ship on Blu-Ray for some time. I expect most will go out on DVD (just like some PS2 games go out on CD). The games that benefit most from Blu-Ray are those with enormous amounts of textures, graphics, audio, cutscenes etc. Even then they'd be pushed to fill a DVD. Perhaps Blu-Ray will become more prevalent when discs ship with localized content for multiple regions.
Previously if ever the price of a Mac was mentioned, you can bet someone would explain how the premium ensured build quality. Recently (the last 2-3 years), the build quality of certain Macs and certain iPods has been pretty superficial. You get a snazzy looking laptop that is too hot to put on your lap (it's not a laptop, it's a notebook!), where the battery pops (from the heat), and if you go for the cheaper model it turns yellow after a few weeks. So what was the high price for again? Certainly not for the quality it seems.
Too bad my stock was down 30% before it happened.
When you toss SCO, MLM and prize into the mix, you'd have to be a pretty gung-ho sort of guy to think you're going to see much from it. Besides, the contest doesn't close until 2007. That means unless you put the better part of a year into your app, you don't even stand a chance of winning. May as well get a job if that's the case and be guaranteed of winning. Or write something else and sell it - probably the risk is no less.
Attempting to cancel sees you playing a key pad symphony, put on hold and finally being subjected to 20 questions, each designed to undermime your determination to quit. Cancellations are known as "churn" or to AOL "massive internal haemoraging". Once he says he wants to cancel the reps will be reading from a script. If this customer had said he was a modem, chances are he would have been sold up "free" to broadband. If he said the "software sucks" he would have been asked if he was using AOL 9.0 or the great AOL 10.0 (scheduled for 2012), or put through to a solution rep who'd call back in 3 years. If he said he hated the price plan they'd probably toss in a free 30 days. etc. Anything but anything to stop you quitting. I've been through similar experiences when trying to cancel satellite and mobile phone subs.
I expect AOL are just being hard asses at the moment because they're dying. There is nothing wrong with AOL as a service if you're totally clueless, but the days of clueless internet users are drawing to a close, especially when other providers are much cheaper and broadband just works (for the most part). Even grannies can fathom how to use broadband. I bet AOL reps are under huge pressure to stop waverers from leaving which means you're going to have asshole reps trying to earn their commission or being a dick to do it. Wouldn't surprise me if AOL call centers were like Glengarry Glen Ross at the moment.
Any half decent upgrader / uninstaller I've used is able to kill running applications for itself. The question is, why can't Norton do likewise? Or at least state that the removal of some components require a reboot, at which point it executes a delete batch file which removes them before they have a chance to be loaded again.
More fool them. If the hardware sucks, why keep going back for more of it? Understandable I guess if you're covered by a warranty - up to a point, but not really understandable outside the warranty unless you own a massive library of titles.
As for MacBooks, I'm surprised to hear people going through plenty of them as they're only just out.
It must count as one of the biggest wastes of energy in the home. When some is turned off, it should really be turned off. Talk that the Nintendo Wii is still active and downloading content while in standby is worrying since it means the thing is constantly consuming a ton of power even if its not used more than once a week.
Besides, we're talking a world over which Blizzard have total control. They can log everything, be anywhere, watch anyone. They could flag "suspects" with ease and actually watch what they are up to. Or put triggers on phrases such as "buy some gold". Or flag people who've transferred more than a certain amount of money in a day and to who. Or monitor IP addresses of known farmers. Or flag people who're carrying more gold than someone at their level ought to be etc. Or ban in-game email for 20 days for new players. In short they could do *anything* and stamp on the practice so hard that its worth it for no one.
I guess the reason it is prevalent is because it is economically viable for farming to exist. Once you start kick banning the farmers and their customers, the cost of doing business exceeds the income and the people go on to look for other games to exploit.
I think its legitimate to complain that a machine you've just bought is stained yellow within a few weeks of getting it. Though anyone foolish enough to buy any consumer electronics the very second it appears is asking for it to some extent. Some Mac / iPod seem to suffer it as much as console gamers - their brain is overwhelmed by the hype and they can't help themselves. Hence we see them complaining of yellowing keyboards, overheating laptops, scratchy fascias, broken earjacks etc. Cooler heads wait and see - at worst it means a few weeks or months of using something else - something else which probably doesn't even need replacing immediately anyway.
I urge you to throw man years of effort on your version of Linux. I'm sure people will be FLOCKING to use it, especially as its based on the LATEST 2.5 kernel. It certainly won't be a miserable flop that opens you up to further litigation or drags you into bankruptcy any quicker. Oh no indeed.
If Macs are permenantly discoloured after a mere fortnight on the market, it is because Apple blew it. And it is the people who breathlessly bought into the hype and got their MacBook (or MacBook Pro, or iPod Nano, or iPod Mini etc.) on day 0 who are the ones who've been bitten.
I've used plenty of white / cream keyboards for years and they get mucky but any discolouration is as easy to remove as scratching it with a nail or rubbing it down with a wet wipe. If Apple laptops are getting permenantly stained, perhaps people should be getting angry with Apple for producing crap laptops that can't even last a few weeks without getting marked.
Apple proponents harp on about the "quality" of their products, but the litany of build quality issues that accompany each release would suggest otherwise.
Why do you not consider DVD to contain DRM though? I can't play my DVDs anywhere. My PS2 doesn't play half my titles. Why? Because they're region 1 encoded and my PS2 is set to region 2. Only players which can be hacked, or software decoders like VLC are able to play all my content.
The difference being that it should be fairly easy to automatically detect unusual large money transfers, plus any conversation that preceded it, plus the levels of those involved, plus the countries that each player hails from. I expect that in itself would provide sufficient evidence in many cases.
If you're a new buyer, why the sudden clamour to buy something which has been out there in a slightly larger format for over a year now?
Either way I don't get it. These things aren't going to disappear overnight.
Assuming it doesn't slip again. If the quality of beta 2 is anything to go by, it will slip again.
The biggest issue is that Access has a ~2GB file limitation so storing large things in it is not a good idea. Secondly, JET is well and truly dead and unsupported and doesn't support things you really might need for multi-user system such as referential integrity, triggers, stored procs.
MS provide a SQL Server Express 2005 with a 4Gb DB limit for free that would be a good option. Oracle has something similar. There is also PostgreSQL that has no limits. The last option has the benefit of being totally unencumbered, but I don't believe the ODBC or .NET drivers are quite as polished as the other options.
Insert coin. Randomly mash joystick. Insert coin. Randomly mash joystick. Insert coin. Randomly mash joystick - success!!!! - randomly mash joystick. Insert coin etc.
The moral of this tale. Idiots with money to burn are a rich market. For the same price as this corded mouse you could buy two other corded laser mice. Funnily enough I bet the surface you play on has far more effect on your mouse than the mouse itself.