because middle-aged, middle class Caucasian women are the target demographic for CCM. Why? because they buy it more than any other demographic. It's a simple matter of economics, really. That and the fact that Clearchannel owns the majority of CCM stations, and most of the CCM labels are owned by our friends at SonyBMG/EMI/Warner/Universal.
From everything I've read, girls between the ages of 12 and 16 are considered the 'gold mine demographic'. Sure they don't make thousands of dollars each year, but let's say that they make $50 one Saturday babysitting. Where is that going? Mortgage? Groceries? Electric? nope! that's going in her pocket, and she's saving up for a $200 pair of jeans! Kids don't make the money that Donald Trump does, but it's all disposable income, which makes it a marketer's wet dream.
As for getting sent to your room, apparently you and I (and I'm sure a decent number of slashdotters) had decent parents that taught us how to behave. They even used the wooden spoon! Call the CPA!! A few years in retail proved to me that kids like us who had parents who weren't afraid to discipline are becoming more and more rare. Too many kids get exactly what they want because their parents never figured out how to grow a pair and they're scared that they might hurt the kids feelings. OmGz ThEy MiGhTt HaTe Me11!!!11
Even apart from the past two points, the third point is that kids haven't quite got the perspective of how to properly view an advertisement. There is no concept of questioning the claims of the ad, or realizing that the intent is to sell the product.
Ads targeted at kids and young teens work because they have not yet learned the concept of skepticism, so even if the ad doesn't directly sell a product, it has what I call "The Lexus Effect" (although I'm sure there is an official term for it). The Lexus effect goes like this: I'll postulate that most of us here don't own a Lexus. I'll even venture to guess that the majority of us haven't even driven a Lexus. But when we hear the name "Lexus", we immediately consider it to be an expensive, luxury car. In reality, they're spritzed up Toyotas that cost twice the price. While of course selling a Lexus is the ultimate goal of an ad campaign, do you notice how they use a simpler color palette, don't have as many cuts (instead using relatively slow dissolves), have harder lighting, use elegant fonts, and are generally slower paced than a Ford commercial? All of this and more goes into creating an image that we associate with owning a Lexus. Even though most of us will never own a Lexus, the fact that there is a luxury associated with them increases the value to people who *do* decide to purchase one. In the majority of cases, people find value in being able to say "I own a Lexus", and those people will pay twice the price for a Toyota with a Lexus name on it.
First, the case that you make about iPhone users using less and less functionality as time goes on is probably accurate. My question is whether you believe that this is unique to the iPhone, because I don't think that it is. I'm sure that the WinMo, Symbian, Blackberry, and Android users would have this trait to some extent as well.
Second, it's not *just* about whether they've got headphones handy. What about people like myself who plug their phone into the car radio? Some people have an iPod dock on their desk at work. One of my friends' mom has an iPod dock in the kitchen. just because I don't carry headphones everywhere doesn't mean that the music functionality goes to waste. It is simply used in a different context.
Third, let's take this to the desktop. I've got my freeware that I use all the time (Firefox, icechat, digsby, filezilla, ultravnc), my paid apps that I use occasionally, (ACID, Street Atlas, Office 2007), and the apps that I paid through the nose for (Adobe Suite, Mixmeister). Go to Download.com/Tucows/Softpedia and you'll find the same needle-in-haystack story. Apps I pay more for I use more, but I paid alot of money for them because I knew that they would prove extremely useful to me. While it's partially a self-fulfilling prophecy, it's partially just knowing that I need something before I buy it. this is true anywhere and on any platform. As long as there are developers, there are good developers and there are bad developers. It's up to the end user to sift between them.
For real. I have legitimate, paid-for copies of both CS3 Production Premium and CS4 Production premium. Both are installed on my laptop which runs Win7. Photoshop seems to crash a bit, but I've never had it ask me to register after I simply told it to never ask me to register again. I didn't need to do any DLL voodoo for this. It hasn't nagged me, and the activation was completely transparent.
I realize that it won't *always* be this way (my copy of Premiere Pro 1.5 asked me on more than one occasion to re-activate, even though I'd replaced no hardware on my laptop), but for now both suites have been as painless as possible when it comes to the DRM, and as long as it stays out of my way, backing down when I show it my invoice for both the PC it's loaded on and the software itself, then that's as good a compromise as I can ask for.
My other question is how the poster has carried this out. We're all slashdotters here, so we know the scientific method. You say it's Win7, fine. Why? is this something that MS has documented? Is this something that you've been able to consistently reproduce on Win7? If this is consistent on Win7, what about Vista or XP? Do either of them have this phenomenon? If they do, then it's not a Win7 issue. Hell, you say that ADOBE PHOTOSHOP stops working. Why is this MICROSOFT'S fault? If the Win7 activation tripped, fine. understandable. But can you consistently tie this issue (which, we're assuming happens a Microsoft-Issued copy of Win7 with a legit CS4 install disc with an Adobe issued patch)? to the fact that it's running on Win7? *starts Photoshop* I'm hard pressed to agree with your findings.
The nail in the coffin is the fact that you're apparently trusting the Windows Firewall for security. I'm not one of these "Windows-is-swiss-cheese" fanboys, but even I know that at the very least a firewall router (NAT+SPI) plus freeware Zone Alarm or Comodo is the bare necessities for an attack-inhibiting security setup. Sure you can go nuts fort-knoxing your computer, but if the only thing between you and an uninhibited internet connection is the Windows Firewall, then you could have said that Win7 gave Adobe my home address for all I care, I wouldn't believe the writer of this "article".
I own a jailbroken iphone. Every piece of media on it (music, movies, apps) has been paid for (or was given away by the devs/artists). If youre an iPhone developer and youve got apps in the app store, let me know which app(s). I will buy copies of them solely on principle and figure out what to do with them later. Im as avidly pro-jailbreaking as I am anti-software piracy, and Id like the opportunity to prove it.
That said, Im in a similar boat as you. Im a mobile DJ. Over the past several years, the DJ industry has faced a decline for three major reasons. First, people simply arent getting married as much. Second, many that are opt to scaling back their reception and
make a playlist on their iPod. Finally, any yahooligan with a laptop, a music library a la Limewire, a pirated copy of Virtual DJ, and $500 worth of amps and speakers calls themselves a DJ and promises the world for $200 on Craigs List, whether or not they are able to (or even intend to) do so. These three factors have the same effect on my business as Crackulous does on yours. Both of us have three possible responses. We can bury our heads in the sand and pretend that these problems dont exist, we can try to legislate the market back to the way that it was, or we can realize that piracy in your case and iPods in mine are a fact of life, theyre not going away, and respond accordingly.
Apple is trying to do #2 and are talking about #3, which is basically like WGA for iPhones. Personally Im not a fan of either.
sounds like you've never tried getting tech support from HP. They'll only talk to you if you're running the original OS that the computer came with, even if you're under warranty. if you upgrade your OS to a new version of Windows, downgrade to an older one, or install Linux/BSD, even if the screen is broken, they're not talking to you until you reformat.
When Apple went into retail, they got a guy from the nice Gap stores to set it up. When Microsoft does the same thing, they get a guy from WalMart.
That pretty much sums up the difference between Apple and Microsoft.
...Gap has got the 'hip' feel to it, but Wal-Mart is the single biggest retailer in the world.
I thought that by ignoring all that crap I was being my usual antisocial self. But it turns out, I'm actually like a naturally immune member of the population.
The problem is that the type of "immunity" you speak of will severely inhibits the likelihood of reproducing.
That was what DOS would say when it had issues reading a defective floppy disk ("Error Reading Drive X, Abort, Retry, Ignore?" Later versions of DOS appended Fail, still later versions replaced Ignore with Fail). Retry never worked, but Abort would prevent DOS from appearing to lock up when trying to read an unreadable disk.
I've thought similarly as well. While Netflix is the most legit business who have obtrusive ads, several others do as well. The thing is though that Netflix isn't necessarily doing this themselves. Odds are they have a graphic designer create an ad, and then give it to another firm whose job it is to serve those ads. That middleman firm is the one who is responsible for getting the ad in banners, popups, and adware titles all over the internet. It's not necessarily Netflix's fault, though I would hope that they would choose a more respectable firm who uses less dubious means to serve the ads.
Isn't is possible to use a software firewall to throttle your overall outbound bandwidth? Set that to 1K/s, and your employer won't be on your case about your outbound bandwidth, plus it's still within the EULA - you're not monitoring your traffic, you're controlling the flow of ALL outbound traffic...but the university will probably be on your case for installing software...damn.
Nothing wrong with my memory. I realize that only home and pro were available at launch, and Tablet/MCE were only with specific hardware.
My point was that complaining about the different variants of XP is limited. Win7 will have Home, Pro, and Ultimate available on retail shelves and OEM'd with new machines. The rest will be available in niche roles. I don't think that that's any worse than XP, personally.
-Starter (yes, there was a starter version, but it wasnt sold in the US)
-Home
-Pro
-Tablet
-Media Center
So there were five versions of XP, but only two of them were sold retail. The
rest were only available from OEM channels. Up until around the last 18 months
of XPs life cycle, machines shipped with the Home edition, then they started
shipping them all with Media Center. Now, Win7 is going to have them all
available retail, and somehow this is unacceptable?
As for debugging seven different versions, if it was written in a properly
modular fashion, then it doesnt matter all that much. For example, if theres a
bug in the Media Center code, and they track it down and fix it, all they have
to do is cut-and-paste it from Home Premium into Pro, Ultimate, and Enterprise.
Theyre not going to re-invent the wheel for each version.
Duplication of six SKUs might get a bit pricey, but just as an example
theyre probably not going to do a whole lot of duplication of the Enterprise
version since its not going to be on store shelves. Enterprise is going to be
exclusively available through Volume License Agreements, which means that IT
admins will get a single CD and buy a few hundred licenses for it. Not a whole
lot of duplication necessary there.
First, I realize that I am most certainly outnumbered here on Slashdot.
I personally have no problem with the concept of God having created life elsewhere in the universe. The thing is that the three most fundamental reasons why I believe that something isn't in the Bible is that it's either not important enough, there's different terminology, or there are underlying principles. If there's an alien civilization on the far side of Andromeda, our radio signals will take thousands of years to reach it, and it will be thousands of years before they respond. Unless both sides develop subspace communications, or we develop transwarp technology, it really won't matter all that much if they exist or not. Either way, I don't think that extraterrestrial intelligence is contrary to the Bible. I just don't think that it matters.
If Win7 really is "Vista SP2", then my question to you is this: how many updates does it take to justify a full version?
I am in full agreement that Vista upgrades should cost $49 tops - that's half of what an XP Home upgrade or Vista Basic upgrade costs retail. I also agree that there is alot of push in Microsoft to get Win7 out the door in an attempt to clean up the Vista mess. But let's take a look at case study to see where the line has been drawn before.
Windows XP brought the NT Kernel home and ended the 9x base that had been ubiquitous in homes for about five years. I think that we can all agree that that was a pretty hefty upgrade. XP didn't have a whole lot of earth-shattering new features on the UI side, but under the hood was a different story. XP Service Pack 2 rewrote alot of the operating system, and while it introduced a handful of new features (a WLAN manager that doesn't suck, bi-directional firewall, security center), this was insufficient to be considered a full release (though that idea was brought to the table).
Mac OSX is another interesting case study. I can only speak in generalizations here because I don't use OSX and thus do not know specifically which features were added and which ones were not. I do remember perusing the 10.6 feature list, though. There were a handful of really nice "That's def useful" and/or "that's def cool" features, but the vast majority of them were minor tweaks. Collectively i'm sure that they add up to a more fluid UI, but individually they were all minor. Still, Apple sold this as a full release. Was that acceptable? If so, how many features did it take for it to gain said acceptance? Do you feel that the list for Win7 isn't comparable? How wide is the gap between them? Do you believe that Leopard should have been given away for free to owners of the prior iteration of OSX? Reduced cost?
(Note: not trying to be flamebait, just trying to get a feel for the parent poster's beliefs on the topic at hand)
It looks, feel, and operates almost exactly LIKE Vista, in nearly every way. Yes, there are some changes, some of them even approach fundamental, but even those only affect one specific bit of OS behavior. By and large, it feels EXACTLY like a service pack for Vista.
(disclaimer: I don't work for Microsoft, I have used Windows 7 exclusively since the day it went public beta)
If that's what you're going to judge it on, then you've put Microsoft in a catch-22. On one hand, they could keep the UI and programming APIs the same so that end users don't require yet *another* training session and software and driver developers don't have to rewrite all their code. Nearly everything their customers have will be compatible, and several incrementally new features will benefit the customers to convince them to roll it out. On the other hand, they could make radical changes, get accused of making "change for the sake of change", while "offering no financial incentive for businesses to switch over because their hardware & software works on XP/Vista but will break on 7."
I'm no Microsoft apologist, but it seems much more worthwhile for them to make smaller changes than foundationally bigger ones. They did that with the driver stack with Vista, and all hell broke loose. Now they're keeping the driver stack largely the same so that virtually every Vista compliant device will work properly with Win7 (all the hardware on my laptop works flawlessly using Vista drivers), and they haven't made enough changes to warrant a full release?
There is not a food shortage. The problem is getting food properly distributed. People aren't dying because we are growing all that we can grow and there just isn't enough food to go around. People are dying because food is either prohibitively expensive for them to buy, or it is stored away to rot. The UN can have all the conferences they want, but when morality goes against greed, it's seldom that morality wins.
Slashdot Mirror
because middle-aged, middle class Caucasian women are the target demographic for CCM. Why? because they buy it more than any other demographic. It's a simple matter of economics, really. That and the fact that Clearchannel owns the majority of CCM stations, and most of the CCM labels are owned by our friends at SonyBMG/EMI/Warner/Universal.
As for getting sent to your room, apparently you and I (and I'm sure a decent number of slashdotters) had decent parents that taught us how to behave. They even used the wooden spoon! Call the CPA!! A few years in retail proved to me that kids like us who had parents who weren't afraid to discipline are becoming more and more rare. Too many kids get exactly what they want because their parents never figured out how to grow a pair and they're scared that they might hurt the kids feelings. OmGz ThEy MiGhTt HaTe Me11!!!11
Even apart from the past two points, the third point is that kids haven't quite got the perspective of how to properly view an advertisement. There is no concept of questioning the claims of the ad, or realizing that the intent is to sell the product.
Ads targeted at kids and young teens work because they have not yet learned the concept of skepticism, so even if the ad doesn't directly sell a product, it has what I call "The Lexus Effect" (although I'm sure there is an official term for it). The Lexus effect goes like this: I'll postulate that most of us here don't own a Lexus. I'll even venture to guess that the majority of us haven't even driven a Lexus. But when we hear the name "Lexus", we immediately consider it to be an expensive, luxury car. In reality, they're spritzed up Toyotas that cost twice the price. While of course selling a Lexus is the ultimate goal of an ad campaign, do you notice how they use a simpler color palette, don't have as many cuts (instead using relatively slow dissolves), have harder lighting, use elegant fonts, and are generally slower paced than a Ford commercial? All of this and more goes into creating an image that we associate with owning a Lexus. Even though most of us will never own a Lexus, the fact that there is a luxury associated with them increases the value to people who *do* decide to purchase one. In the majority of cases, people find value in being able to say "I own a Lexus", and those people will pay twice the price for a Toyota with a Lexus name on it.
First, the case that you make about iPhone users using less and less functionality as time goes on is probably accurate. My question is whether you believe that this is unique to the iPhone, because I don't think that it is. I'm sure that the WinMo, Symbian, Blackberry, and Android users would have this trait to some extent as well.
Second, it's not *just* about whether they've got headphones handy. What about people like myself who plug their phone into the car radio? Some people have an iPod dock on their desk at work. One of my friends' mom has an iPod dock in the kitchen. just because I don't carry headphones everywhere doesn't mean that the music functionality goes to waste. It is simply used in a different context.
Third, let's take this to the desktop. I've got my freeware that I use all the time (Firefox, icechat, digsby, filezilla, ultravnc), my paid apps that I use occasionally, (ACID, Street Atlas, Office 2007), and the apps that I paid through the nose for (Adobe Suite, Mixmeister). Go to Download.com/Tucows/Softpedia and you'll find the same needle-in-haystack story. Apps I pay more for I use more, but I paid alot of money for them because I knew that they would prove extremely useful to me. While it's partially a self-fulfilling prophecy, it's partially just knowing that I need something before I buy it. this is true anywhere and on any platform. As long as there are developers, there are good developers and there are bad developers. It's up to the end user to sift between them.
The card or the girl?
For real. I have legitimate, paid-for copies of both CS3 Production Premium and CS4 Production premium. Both are installed on my laptop which runs Win7. Photoshop seems to crash a bit, but I've never had it ask me to register after I simply told it to never ask me to register again. I didn't need to do any DLL voodoo for this. It hasn't nagged me, and the activation was completely transparent.
I realize that it won't *always* be this way (my copy of Premiere Pro 1.5 asked me on more than one occasion to re-activate, even though I'd replaced no hardware on my laptop), but for now both suites have been as painless as possible when it comes to the DRM, and as long as it stays out of my way, backing down when I show it my invoice for both the PC it's loaded on and the software itself, then that's as good a compromise as I can ask for.
My other question is how the poster has carried this out. We're all slashdotters here, so we know the scientific method. You say it's Win7, fine. Why? is this something that MS has documented? Is this something that you've been able to consistently reproduce on Win7? If this is consistent on Win7, what about Vista or XP? Do either of them have this phenomenon? If they do, then it's not a Win7 issue. Hell, you say that ADOBE PHOTOSHOP stops working. Why is this MICROSOFT'S fault? If the Win7 activation tripped, fine. understandable. But can you consistently tie this issue (which, we're assuming happens a Microsoft-Issued copy of Win7 with a legit CS4 install disc with an Adobe issued patch)? to the fact that it's running on Win7? *starts Photoshop* I'm hard pressed to agree with your findings.
The nail in the coffin is the fact that you're apparently trusting the Windows Firewall for security. I'm not one of these "Windows-is-swiss-cheese" fanboys, but even I know that at the very least a firewall router (NAT+SPI) plus freeware Zone Alarm or Comodo is the bare necessities for an attack-inhibiting security setup. Sure you can go nuts fort-knoxing your computer, but if the only thing between you and an uninhibited internet connection is the Windows Firewall, then you could have said that Win7 gave Adobe my home address for all I care, I wouldn't believe the writer of this "article".
I own a jailbroken iphone. Every piece of media on it (music, movies, apps) has been paid for (or was given away by the devs/artists). If youre an iPhone developer and youve got apps in the app store, let me know which app(s). I will buy copies of them solely on principle and figure out what to do with them later. Im as avidly pro-jailbreaking as I am anti-software piracy, and Id like the opportunity to prove it.
That said, Im in a similar boat as you. Im a mobile DJ. Over the past several years, the DJ industry has faced a decline for three major reasons. First, people simply arent getting married as much. Second, many that are opt to scaling back their reception and make a playlist on their iPod. Finally, any yahooligan with a laptop, a music library a la Limewire, a pirated copy of Virtual DJ, and $500 worth of amps and speakers calls themselves a DJ and promises the world for $200 on Craigs List, whether or not they are able to (or even intend to) do so. These three factors have the same effect on my business as Crackulous does on yours. Both of us have three possible responses. We can bury our heads in the sand and pretend that these problems dont exist, we can try to legislate the market back to the way that it was, or we can realize that piracy in your case and iPods in mine are a fact of life, theyre not going away, and respond accordingly.
Apple is trying to do #2 and are talking about #3, which is basically like WGA for iPhones. Personally Im not a fan of either.
sounds like you've never tried getting tech support from HP. They'll only talk to you if you're running the original OS that the computer came with, even if you're under warranty. if you upgrade your OS to a new version of Windows, downgrade to an older one, or install Linux/BSD, even if the screen is broken, they're not talking to you until you reformat.
When Apple went into retail, they got a guy from the nice Gap stores to set it up. When Microsoft does the same thing, they get a guy from WalMart. That pretty much sums up the difference between Apple and Microsoft.
...Gap has got the 'hip' feel to it, but Wal-Mart is the single biggest retailer in the world.
I thought that by ignoring all that crap I was being my usual antisocial self. But it turns out, I'm actually like a naturally immune member of the population.
The problem is that the type of "immunity" you speak of will severely inhibits the likelihood of reproducing.
Rumor has it that if they are successful, the Authors Guild will next file suit against God for providing a source of light outside in daytime.
I'd love to see that settlement.
"God, you will prevent the sun from shining as to not infringe upon their rights."
God: "If I do that, then the trees will die and you will have no pulp to create paper out of to print your books on..."
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail...
Did any of them actually ever work?
That was what DOS would say when it had issues reading a defective floppy disk ("Error Reading Drive X, Abort, Retry, Ignore?" Later versions of DOS appended Fail, still later versions replaced Ignore with Fail). Retry never worked, but Abort would prevent DOS from appearing to lock up when trying to read an unreadable disk.
LOL, if I hadn't commented, I would mod you funny.
Thanks, but I was going for insightful.
Microsoft is implying that all the people who had trouble using their camera with Windows is less intelligent than a 4 1/2 year old child.
That's because most people *are* less intelligent than a 4 1/2 year old child.
I'm DOS and get OFF MY LAWN you DAMN KIDS!
Bad command or file name.
This will all be settled by the Great Windo-Linux War of 2089. Or so my future self told me, during his last visit.
...So 2089 will be the year of the Linux desktop?
*REAL* geeks would be in jail for having DVD-rips of the first season of Prison Break.
I'm already off your lawn.
I've thought similarly as well. While Netflix is the most legit business who have obtrusive ads, several others do as well. The thing is though that Netflix isn't necessarily doing this themselves. Odds are they have a graphic designer create an ad, and then give it to another firm whose job it is to serve those ads. That middleman firm is the one who is responsible for getting the ad in banners, popups, and adware titles all over the internet. It's not necessarily Netflix's fault, though I would hope that they would choose a more respectable firm who uses less dubious means to serve the ads.
Isn't is possible to use a software firewall to throttle your overall outbound bandwidth? Set that to 1K/s, and your employer won't be on your case about your outbound bandwidth, plus it's still within the EULA - you're not monitoring your traffic, you're controlling the flow of ALL outbound traffic...but the university will probably be on your case for installing software...damn.
My point was that complaining about the different variants of XP is limited. Win7 will have Home, Pro, and Ultimate available on retail shelves and OEM'd with new machines. The rest will be available in niche roles. I don't think that that's any worse than XP, personally.
Lets count the number of versions of XP:
-Starter (yes, there was a starter version, but it wasnt sold in the US)
-Home
-Pro
-Tablet
-Media Center
So there were five versions of XP, but only two of them were sold retail. The rest were only available from OEM channels. Up until around the last 18 months of XPs life cycle, machines shipped with the Home edition, then they started shipping them all with Media Center. Now, Win7 is going to have them all available retail, and somehow this is unacceptable?
As for debugging seven different versions, if it was written in a properly modular fashion, then it doesnt matter all that much. For example, if theres a bug in the Media Center code, and they track it down and fix it, all they have to do is cut-and-paste it from Home Premium into Pro, Ultimate, and Enterprise. Theyre not going to re-invent the wheel for each version.
Duplication of six SKUs might get a bit pricey, but just as an example theyre probably not going to do a whole lot of duplication of the Enterprise version since its not going to be on store shelves. Enterprise is going to be exclusively available through Volume License Agreements, which means that IT admins will get a single CD and buy a few hundred licenses for it. Not a whole lot of duplication necessary there.
First, I realize that I am most certainly outnumbered here on Slashdot.
I personally have no problem with the concept of God having created life elsewhere in the universe. The thing is that the three most fundamental reasons why I believe that something isn't in the Bible is that it's either not important enough, there's different terminology, or there are underlying principles. If there's an alien civilization on the far side of Andromeda, our radio signals will take thousands of years to reach it, and it will be thousands of years before they respond. Unless both sides develop subspace communications, or we develop transwarp technology, it really won't matter all that much if they exist or not. Either way, I don't think that extraterrestrial intelligence is contrary to the Bible. I just don't think that it matters.
I am in full agreement that Vista upgrades should cost $49 tops - that's half of what an XP Home upgrade or Vista Basic upgrade costs retail. I also agree that there is alot of push in Microsoft to get Win7 out the door in an attempt to clean up the Vista mess. But let's take a look at case study to see where the line has been drawn before.
Windows XP brought the NT Kernel home and ended the 9x base that had been ubiquitous in homes for about five years. I think that we can all agree that that was a pretty hefty upgrade. XP didn't have a whole lot of earth-shattering new features on the UI side, but under the hood was a different story. XP Service Pack 2 rewrote alot of the operating system, and while it introduced a handful of new features (a WLAN manager that doesn't suck, bi-directional firewall, security center), this was insufficient to be considered a full release (though that idea was brought to the table).
Mac OSX is another interesting case study. I can only speak in generalizations here because I don't use OSX and thus do not know specifically which features were added and which ones were not. I do remember perusing the 10.6 feature list, though. There were a handful of really nice "That's def useful" and/or "that's def cool" features, but the vast majority of them were minor tweaks. Collectively i'm sure that they add up to a more fluid UI, but individually they were all minor. Still, Apple sold this as a full release. Was that acceptable? If so, how many features did it take for it to gain said acceptance? Do you feel that the list for Win7 isn't comparable? How wide is the gap between them? Do you believe that Leopard should have been given away for free to owners of the prior iteration of OSX? Reduced cost?
(Note: not trying to be flamebait, just trying to get a feel for the parent poster's beliefs on the topic at hand)
It looks, feel, and operates almost exactly LIKE Vista, in nearly every way. Yes, there are some changes, some of them even approach fundamental, but even those only affect one specific bit of OS behavior. By and large, it feels EXACTLY like a service pack for Vista.
(disclaimer: I don't work for Microsoft, I have used Windows 7 exclusively since the day it went public beta)
If that's what you're going to judge it on, then you've put Microsoft in a catch-22. On one hand, they could keep the UI and programming APIs the same so that end users don't require yet *another* training session and software and driver developers don't have to rewrite all their code. Nearly everything their customers have will be compatible, and several incrementally new features will benefit the customers to convince them to roll it out. On the other hand, they could make radical changes, get accused of making "change for the sake of change", while "offering no financial incentive for businesses to switch over because their hardware & software works on XP/Vista but will break on 7."
I'm no Microsoft apologist, but it seems much more worthwhile for them to make smaller changes than foundationally bigger ones. They did that with the driver stack with Vista, and all hell broke loose. Now they're keeping the driver stack largely the same so that virtually every Vista compliant device will work properly with Win7 (all the hardware on my laptop works flawlessly using Vista drivers), and they haven't made enough changes to warrant a full release?
which is it?
There is not a food shortage. The problem is getting food properly distributed. People aren't dying because we are growing all that we can grow and there just isn't enough food to go around. People are dying because food is either prohibitively expensive for them to buy, or it is stored away to rot. The UN can have all the conferences they want, but when morality goes against greed, it's seldom that morality wins.