The PS2 and Gamecubes I bought at Walmart still work eight years later.
Those are examples of identically manufactured goods, for which Walmart can offer at best product bundles and cannot directly compete on price.
Ditto the 21" CRT TV.
It is well documented (citation needed) that TV manufacturers sell almost-but-not-quite identical TV models at Walmart. Quality is often cut, to some degree or another. Typically functionality, inputs, outputs, or some other such features are cut. The problem with this is, consumers do not know exactly what has been removed to get those prices down lower.
Indeed it is public knowledge that large brand name manufacturers will, in many cases, have seperate factory runs with lower quality material for products to be sold at Walmart. The article Supply Chain Partnerships: How Levi's Got Its Jeans into Wal-Mart, while quite old, does an excellent job of describing both the good side of Walmart's drive for efficiency. (Unfortunatly I cannot find the news article that details the seperate factory runs that are done for Walmart)
I am not saying there is going to always be a dramatic difference in quality. Of course sometimes there is a dramatic difference. A friend bought me a badminton set from Walmart and, well, to be blunt, the birdies didn't bounce. You'd hit them with the racket and they would just fall straight down to the ground, plop.
Sure the badminton set was ~$5 to $10 cheaper than if it had been bought at a sports store, but its value as a badminton set was effectively $0. When I put the birdie from Walmart next to a proper badminton birdie the material used was quite obviously different, significantly so.
Again, an extreme example, but one that demonstrates how saving $5 up front effectively negated the entire value of the purchase down the road (though in this case, "later on" was about as soon as the package was opened!)
Levis laying in the corner still are in good shape
You must not wear them very often. I haven't had a pair of Levi's last me more than 3 or 4 years! Then again I am the type who likes to walk through brush, black berry vines, and whatever else is in my way.
Shoot your city planners.:P Actually the Wikipedia article for your city, almost, if you don't pay close attention, makes things sound pretty good, but the devil is in the details.
Because it is assumed everyone drives, unless citizens push real hard cities will continue to spend their money under the assumption that, well, everyone drives.
When ever I have moved, one criteria I have always had is easy access to alternative transportation, in the case of the Seattle Metro area, that pretty much means buses. I make it part of my lifestyle to life close to mass transit, but obviously it is preferable if entire cities are designed around the idea that everyone should be close to mass transit that can get them quickly to their destination without having to go to great lengths and limit their housing options beyond what is reasonble. (e.g. if you want to live 15 miles out in the middle of farm land, bus service is not going to be available).
No house should be 3 miles from a bus stop though. That is just ridiculous. I am pretty sure that no house within the Seattle city limits is that far from a bus stop, except maybe those in a gated community or in other such exceptional circumstances were residents have purposefully isolated themselves.
I observed this very thing growing up. Even more annoying is when people are told to "buy more to save more!" and they actually believe it. Buy so much of a perishable good that 1/2 of it goes to waste, but hey, it was 25% off!
The issue is that previously there was little choice as in what to buy, essentially everyone was forced to save up to buy the American Made Tough As Hell goods. Now that lower cost alternatives are available for purchase (and really pick any medium to high value consumer good, from lawn mowers to power tools to home appliances and electronics), people are not forced to save up to buy the higher quality longer lasting good and can instead indulge in short term pleasurable activities and at the end of the day go out and make what will turn out to be a sub-optimal purchase.
Of course any sociologists or economist who took a time frozen snap shop survey of people would have results showing that everyone is happier. After all, people got to buy their "big purchase" and still had money to go out and party afterwards.
Of course 5 years they are stuck making the same purchase again. And again, and again. While at one instant in time they may have more disposable income (and therefore a higher standard of living, by some standards) over a period of time they actually will have less disposable income and therefore by the same measurements, a lower standard of living.
I have friends who have cloths they bought in third world SE Asian countries that have lasted over 10 years of constant use without any fading or visible wear. Good luck buying a shirt in America that will last you more than 2 or 3 years without fading. Heck I am wearing a $25 shirt right now, nice fabric, washed in a high end front loading HE washing machine with other similar fabrics, that is fading after just a few months.
I am incredibly paranoid about all of my purchases and even I only own one shirt that has lasted me more than 3 years without falling to pieces. (Funny enough, it was ~$10 at Ross, got it in go figure, got it almost 7 years ago).
This is the other downside of constantly lowering product quality, eventually even those of us who want to buy long lasting durable goods may be unable to without going to great lengths, or because the economics of scale have been thrown out of wack, we may find ourselves paying far more than what is proportional for the higher quality goods.
In other words, where as a refrigerator that will last 1/2 as long may only be 30% cheaper, longer lasting cloths may very well cost 5x as much, if they can be found at all.
There is no group of people that "can only afford to shop at Walmart".
Ok let me rephrase that.
People who have not been brought up to properly evaluate the total cost of ownerhsip of consumer goods often time shop at Walmart not realizing that while they may be saving money in the short term, that in the medium and long term they will end up paying more as a result of having purchased goods of an inferior quality.
I would argue that there are people in America who are stuck buying sub-standard products though. Not everyone can afford a good $100+ pair of boots that will last for years and years. Then again it is often a trade off, people do not realize that in fact it is better to make the sacrifice now and dump $100 on shoes that will last them a long time. But then again if someone's $20 cheap shoes are falling apart and they need to buy a new pair right now, and they only have $20 to spend on shoes at this moment, then they may have no choice but to spend another $20 on shoes that will not last them very long. Thus a vicious cycle begins.
But you are right to an extent, many people could afford to buy higher quality goods if they accepted owning fewer goods overall, which was something I should have pointed out more clearly in my previous post.
And, meanwhile, Walmart is busy demanding lower prices from its suppliers, lowering quality and causing jobs to be shipped overseas which is destroying the American employment base. Just ask Snapper mowers, who stopped selling to Walmart when the "lower price" demands resulted in Snapper having to choose between jobs for Americans and being able to afford the price demanded by Walmart.
Walmart is helping to destroy America.
You are forgetting one other major problem with Walmart: The lower quality goods they sell do not last long, and require replacing much more frequently. This means people who can only afford to shop at Walmart end up spending their money in a continuous cycle of wasteful consumerism that is sub-optimal.
A lot of what Walmart does is good: They force suppliers to be organized, on time, track the movement of goods with accuracy and precision, and find ways to reduce waste from their manufacturing processes. (That last bit can, and often is, taken way too far unfortunately.)
What I cannot stand about Walmart is that the quality of the goods is crap. Name brand products sold at Walmart are often manufactured to a lower standard of quality specifically for Walmart. Be it clothes that will fall apart faster, TVs that will break sooner, or other goods that don't function at all even fresh out of the box.
Unfortunately people are used to shoddy quality and think that having to replace a product every few years is normal. Not that any of the other US stores has helped any, Costco is one of the few places you can walk into, close your eyes, pick up something to buy, and be pretty sure you'll have acquired a good quality product.
But what is happening is that a relatively small absolute improvement in their living standards is met with a significant absolute decrease in the living standards of middle class westerners.
Have you seen how much our living standard has been raised in the last 50 years? Holy crap. House sizes have exploded, families have 1 car per person, 1 TV per person, and go out to eat more often than not.
Surprise surprise, not every house needs a den, a dining room, a living room, and a breakfast nook! Nor does every bedroom need a TV in it. Likewise if people didn't insist on living in the middle of pretty much nowhere (so they can afford the aforementioned house) not everyone would need to own their own car to commute to work!
If people have to start cooking their own food, walk to the bus stop (and still have a shorter commute than driving miles and miles in heavy traffic), and agree as a family watch to do for entertainment at night, I highly suspect that the standard of living in America would actually increase.
and yet no-one has a decent (compiled) language that really makes types available to the program at compile time.
C++ has RTTI, but it is frequently (often?) disabled.
The thing is, once you have a system running around maintaining type data on all your objects in memory, you are halfway to having a virtual machine (and the associated performance hit) anyway, so why not just finish it off and implement a full virtual machine?
Reflection is such a perf hit either you want it or you don't, and if reflection is REALLY vital to your code, you mine as well run on a fully featured VM, the rest of the VM isn't going to weigh you down too much more.
WP7 is based on CE7, a continuation of CE6 which was pretty much a complete rewrite of CE. CE6 and 7 are both incredibly powerful embedded OSs with none of the limitations that previous CE versions had.
It's the libraries that are fucked up: the.NET base libraries are basically the managed versions of the Win32 platform.
lolwut?
The.NET libraries do not resemble Win32 at all. I know this because Win32 makes me want to gouge my eyes out where as.NET libraries cause no such adverse reaction.
Why run windows on these kiosks? An embedded OS would be more suitable and cheaper...
Most likely to dramatically cut development costs. With standard off the shelf x86 parts you can use whatever development environment and language is most convenient, and you can take advantage of the ever decreasing prices of x86 hardware.
In contrast embedded stuff, while better suited for some situations, is a much bigger pain to get off the ground initially, and pricing tends to stay pretty stable.
Not running as a privileged user (Even Windows XP's guest mode would work out fine here) and turning off auto-run would be good starts. I imagine if someone wanted to they might be able to find some sort of an exploit in one of the image handlers on these devices and infect them through that technique, but if all the kiosk is physically capable of doing is loading image files up, allowing for manipulation of those image files in whatever lame app they have, and then printing said files out, the machine would likely be Secure Enough.
For file system navigation I usually use the keyboard, especially since Vista+ you can use alt-up to go up a directory. I always tried to do that in 2000 and XP, since it naturally SHOULD work. Someone finally realized this in Vista and added it.
I asked people when I was at university how long they spent sorting out references, numbering figures etc. in their Word dissertations, and for most people it was a day or two of work, and if you changed anything you had to check it all again.
Word has features to handle much of that for the user. Indeed, in Word 2007 and above, there is a giant References tab on the ribbon.
People who don't use a program to its full extent will indeed find life painful. Someone can use LateX and manually label every diagram as well.
The longest technical document I wrote in Word was over 200 pages, choked full of diagrams and references to diagrams. This was using Word 2000 and it handled everything for me just fine.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that this lack of basic knowledge of the human female reproductive system is strongly correlated with the fact that you have a 5-digit user ID.
Actually, and I hate to say this, he is right. He just seriously lacks in communication skills, even given slashdot's very low standards.
This was actually a story on/. a year or two back.
What he MEANT to say is that prior to the modern industrial world and prior to family planning (not just birth control pills, but all forms of family planning) women spent the majority of their reproductive years either pregnant or nursing, which suppressed the menstrual cycle.
When someone in acadamia had an "ah hah! No shit sherlock" moment awhile back, he (and I am guessing it was a he, only a guy could be that stupid...) crunched the numbers and realized that all this talk about women "abusing" birth control pills to suppress their menstral cycle being potentially "dangerous" was actually bullshit, since such behavior more closely approximated what had been "natural" for thousands of years.
I'm not sure where MS thinks they're heading with Windows Phone 7.
Awesome revolutionary UX, stringently enforced hardware and performance standards (so you don't end up like Android with some devices kicking butt and others sucking) and a variety of form factors for customers to choose from.
What an utter BS! You are a liar, sir, and probably a corporate whore. I don't see why else you posted this. There is a difference between FLAC and 320kbit/s MP3. If you have the headphones to hear it. I do.
Blind A/B tests say you are wrong. You can continue to enjoy your lack of HD space, over sized files, and imaginary perceived quality.
First off CDs are lossy. All Analog to Digital conversions are lossy. CDs are a digital recording of an analog phenomenon, in the process of digitization some data of lost. Thankfully the data is recorded with such high fidelity that you do not notice that loss.
If you think you can notice the difference between a high quality (320kbit/s or higher) MP3 and a CD then you need to have your head examined.
By a shrink.
In other news, printed books frequently have typos in them, photographs do not capture 100% of the visible light spectrum, and television pictures are made up of millions of little dots that quite frankly have lousy color gamut.
I have owned all of 2 physical CDs in my life. I have better things to do with my time. I am not going to go around finding arbitrary excuses for me to pirate music. "Oh those fuckers don't offer music in some-random-weird-format, so I have an excuse to steal everything I want to!!!"
No.
They have made a reasonable effort to offer music in every reasonable format known to mankind.
At this point in time, people can either buy CDs or download digital copies of songs, or buy CDs and rip to some lossless format and deal with everyone else looking at them like they are fucking nuts.
Many of the claims by the record labels are bupkis. It seems to be their business model. Instead of changing and embracing digital tech,
Sorry, that is last decade's argument.
Between all you can eat Zune Pass, streaming radio Pandora, digital ecosystem iTunes, and unencumbered MP3's from Amazon, music is now available in pretty much any digital format, with any sort of imaginable payment scheme.
~10 years ago I made a post similar to yours. Back then I was unable to legally purchase MP3s of the music I wanted. That has changed.
Instead argue about fair use possibilities for lime wire or something else like that.
and I've had AMD systems last as long as your Intel systems.
Quite frankly the quality of power supply, memory, and motherboard, are more important than the CPU. Both Intel and AMD make reliable CPUs, and you can find cut rate MoBos sold for either, and many low cost PCs using AMD CPUs also come with a low cost supply.
The first time I tried to kill the council of mages (or whatever they are called) and failed (they are invincible!) I dropped the game and gave up.
Open world my arse.
Oblivion is far too SIMPLE. Combat is simple, the storyline is linear and simple, and the promised "multiple paths" are only in terms of limited scripted events. Ooh I can be an evil bad ass if I do what the brotherhood of assassins (or again, whatever they are called, its been awhile) says I do. SCREW THAT. What if I want to jack all of them up? Oh can't do that, not in the script.
Slashdot Mirror
Those are examples of identically manufactured goods, for which Walmart can offer at best product bundles and cannot directly compete on price.
It is well documented (citation needed) that TV manufacturers sell almost-but-not-quite identical TV models at Walmart. Quality is often cut, to some degree or another. Typically functionality, inputs, outputs, or some other such features are cut. The problem with this is, consumers do not know exactly what has been removed to get those prices down lower.
Indeed it is public knowledge that large brand name manufacturers will, in many cases, have seperate factory runs with lower quality material for products to be sold at Walmart. The article Supply Chain Partnerships: How Levi's Got Its Jeans into Wal-Mart, while quite old, does an excellent job of describing both the good side of Walmart's drive for efficiency. (Unfortunatly I cannot find the news article that details the seperate factory runs that are done for Walmart)
I am not saying there is going to always be a dramatic difference in quality. Of course sometimes there is a dramatic difference. A friend bought me a badminton set from Walmart and, well, to be blunt, the birdies didn't bounce. You'd hit them with the racket and they would just fall straight down to the ground, plop.
Sure the badminton set was ~$5 to $10 cheaper than if it had been bought at a sports store, but its value as a badminton set was effectively $0. When I put the birdie from Walmart next to a proper badminton birdie the material used was quite obviously different, significantly so.
Again, an extreme example, but one that demonstrates how saving $5 up front effectively negated the entire value of the purchase down the road (though in this case, "later on" was about as soon as the package was opened!)
You must not wear them very often. I haven't had a pair of Levi's last me more than 3 or 4 years! Then again I am the type who likes to walk through brush, black berry vines, and whatever else is in my way.
Shoot your city planners. :P Actually the Wikipedia article for your city, almost, if you don't pay close attention, makes things sound pretty good, but the devil is in the details.
Because it is assumed everyone drives, unless citizens push real hard cities will continue to spend their money under the assumption that, well, everyone drives.
When ever I have moved, one criteria I have always had is easy access to alternative transportation, in the case of the Seattle Metro area, that pretty much means buses. I make it part of my lifestyle to life close to mass transit, but obviously it is preferable if entire cities are designed around the idea that everyone should be close to mass transit that can get them quickly to their destination without having to go to great lengths and limit their housing options beyond what is reasonble. (e.g. if you want to live 15 miles out in the middle of farm land, bus service is not going to be available).
No house should be 3 miles from a bus stop though. That is just ridiculous. I am pretty sure that no house within the Seattle city limits is that far from a bus stop, except maybe those in a gated community or in other such exceptional circumstances were residents have purposefully isolated themselves.
I observed this very thing growing up. Even more annoying is when people are told to "buy more to save more!" and they actually believe it. Buy so much of a perishable good that 1/2 of it goes to waste, but hey, it was 25% off!
The issue is that previously there was little choice as in what to buy, essentially everyone was forced to save up to buy the American Made Tough As Hell goods. Now that lower cost alternatives are available for purchase (and really pick any medium to high value consumer good, from lawn mowers to power tools to home appliances and electronics), people are not forced to save up to buy the higher quality longer lasting good and can instead indulge in short term pleasurable activities and at the end of the day go out and make what will turn out to be a sub-optimal purchase.
Of course any sociologists or economist who took a time frozen snap shop survey of people would have results showing that everyone is happier. After all, people got to buy their "big purchase" and still had money to go out and party afterwards.
Of course 5 years they are stuck making the same purchase again. And again, and again. While at one instant in time they may have more disposable income (and therefore a higher standard of living, by some standards) over a period of time they actually will have less disposable income and therefore by the same measurements, a lower standard of living.
I have friends who have cloths they bought in third world SE Asian countries that have lasted over 10 years of constant use without any fading or visible wear. Good luck buying a shirt in America that will last you more than 2 or 3 years without fading. Heck I am wearing a $25 shirt right now, nice fabric, washed in a high end front loading HE washing machine with other similar fabrics, that is fading after just a few months.
I am incredibly paranoid about all of my purchases and even I only own one shirt that has lasted me more than 3 years without falling to pieces. (Funny enough, it was ~$10 at Ross, got it in go figure, got it almost 7 years ago).
This is the other downside of constantly lowering product quality, eventually even those of us who want to buy long lasting durable goods may be unable to without going to great lengths, or because the economics of scale have been thrown out of wack, we may find ourselves paying far more than what is proportional for the higher quality goods.
In other words, where as a refrigerator that will last 1/2 as long may only be 30% cheaper, longer lasting cloths may very well cost 5x as much, if they can be found at all.
There is no group of people that "can only afford to shop at Walmart".
Ok let me rephrase that.
People who have not been brought up to properly evaluate the total cost of ownerhsip of consumer goods often time shop at Walmart not realizing that while they may be saving money in the short term, that in the medium and long term they will end up paying more as a result of having purchased goods of an inferior quality.
I would argue that there are people in America who are stuck buying sub-standard products though. Not everyone can afford a good $100+ pair of boots that will last for years and years. Then again it is often a trade off, people do not realize that in fact it is better to make the sacrifice now and dump $100 on shoes that will last them a long time. But then again if someone's $20 cheap shoes are falling apart and they need to buy a new pair right now, and they only have $20 to spend on shoes at this moment, then they may have no choice but to spend another $20 on shoes that will not last them very long. Thus a vicious cycle begins.
But you are right to an extent, many people could afford to buy higher quality goods if they accepted owning fewer goods overall, which was something I should have pointed out more clearly in my previous post.
And, meanwhile, Walmart is busy demanding lower prices from its suppliers, lowering quality and causing jobs to be shipped overseas which is destroying the American employment base. Just ask Snapper mowers, who stopped selling to Walmart when the "lower price" demands resulted in Snapper having to choose between jobs for Americans and being able to afford the price demanded by Walmart.
Walmart is helping to destroy America.
You are forgetting one other major problem with Walmart: The lower quality goods they sell do not last long, and require replacing much more frequently. This means people who can only afford to shop at Walmart end up spending their money in a continuous cycle of wasteful consumerism that is sub-optimal.
A lot of what Walmart does is good: They force suppliers to be organized, on time, track the movement of goods with accuracy and precision, and find ways to reduce waste from their manufacturing processes. (That last bit can, and often is, taken way too far unfortunately.)
What I cannot stand about Walmart is that the quality of the goods is crap. Name brand products sold at Walmart are often manufactured to a lower standard of quality specifically for Walmart. Be it clothes that will fall apart faster, TVs that will break sooner, or other goods that don't function at all even fresh out of the box.
Unfortunately people are used to shoddy quality and think that having to replace a product every few years is normal. Not that any of the other US stores has helped any, Costco is one of the few places you can walk into, close your eyes, pick up something to buy, and be pretty sure you'll have acquired a good quality product.
Have you seen how much our living standard has been raised in the last 50 years? Holy crap. House sizes have exploded, families have 1 car per person, 1 TV per person, and go out to eat more often than not.
Surprise surprise, not every house needs a den, a dining room, a living room, and a breakfast nook! Nor does every bedroom need a TV in it. Likewise if people didn't insist on living in the middle of pretty much nowhere (so they can afford the aforementioned house) not everyone would need to own their own car to commute to work!
If people have to start cooking their own food, walk to the bus stop (and still have a shorter commute than driving miles and miles in heavy traffic), and agree as a family watch to do for entertainment at night, I highly suspect that the standard of living in America would actually increase.
Depends on the quality of the automatic transmission. My car's auto is driving me nuts.
C++ has RTTI, but it is frequently (often?) disabled.
The thing is, once you have a system running around maintaining type data on all your objects in memory, you are halfway to having a virtual machine (and the associated performance hit) anyway, so why not just finish it off and implement a full virtual machine?
Reflection is such a perf hit either you want it or you don't, and if reflection is REALLY vital to your code, you mine as well run on a fully featured VM, the rest of the VM isn't going to weigh you down too much more.
And Android is based on "creaky old Linux".
Anything else stupid you want to say?
WP7 is based on CE7, a continuation of CE6 which was pretty much a complete rewrite of CE. CE6 and 7 are both incredibly powerful embedded OSs with none of the limitations that previous CE versions had.
That would involve coding in C++ for a week. Eew.
Straight up C, no problem. Awesome language. Love it.
C++ requires me to mentally juggle too many balls in the air, it is mental effort that I could be expending on writing actual code.
lolwut?
The .NET libraries do not resemble Win32 at all. I know this because Win32 makes me want to gouge my eyes out where as .NET libraries cause no such adverse reaction.
Most likely to dramatically cut development costs. With standard off the shelf x86 parts you can use whatever development environment and language is most convenient, and you can take advantage of the ever decreasing prices of x86 hardware.
In contrast embedded stuff, while better suited for some situations, is a much bigger pain to get off the ground initially, and pricing tends to stay pretty stable.
Not running as a privileged user (Even Windows XP's guest mode would work out fine here) and turning off auto-run would be good starts. I imagine if someone wanted to they might be able to find some sort of an exploit in one of the image handlers on these devices and infect them through that technique, but if all the kiosk is physically capable of doing is loading image files up, allowing for manipulation of those image files in whatever lame app they have, and then printing said files out, the machine would likely be Secure Enough.
For file system navigation I usually use the keyboard, especially since Vista+ you can use alt-up to go up a directory. I always tried to do that in 2000 and XP, since it naturally SHOULD work. Someone finally realized this in Vista and added it.
Back button on the mouse, booyah.
Seriously though, why reload? I use it maybe once a week, if that. Have some patience people! (or just hit F5)
Word has features to handle much of that for the user. Indeed, in Word 2007 and above, there is a giant References tab on the ribbon.
People who don't use a program to its full extent will indeed find life painful. Someone can use LateX and manually label every diagram as well.
The longest technical document I wrote in Word was over 200 pages, choked full of diagrams and references to diagrams. This was using Word 2000 and it handled everything for me just fine.
At least your cable provider uses HDMI. Comcast is still screwing Seattle with el-cheapo Motorola component boxes.
Actually, and I hate to say this, he is right. He just seriously lacks in communication skills, even given slashdot's very low standards.
This was actually a story on /. a year or two back.
What he MEANT to say is that prior to the modern industrial world and prior to family planning (not just birth control pills, but all forms of family planning) women spent the majority of their reproductive years either pregnant or nursing, which suppressed the menstrual cycle.
When someone in acadamia had an "ah hah! No shit sherlock" moment awhile back, he (and I am guessing it was a he, only a guy could be that stupid...) crunched the numbers and realized that all this talk about women "abusing" birth control pills to suppress their menstral cycle being potentially "dangerous" was actually bullshit, since such behavior more closely approximated what had been "natural" for thousands of years.
Awesome revolutionary UX, stringently enforced hardware and performance standards (so you don't end up like Android with some devices kicking butt and others sucking) and a variety of form factors for customers to choose from.
Sounds like enough to make a great product to me.
Blind A/B tests say you are wrong. You can continue to enjoy your lack of HD space, over sized files, and imaginary perceived quality.
Wow that is hilarious.
"20? We're turning this plane around."
Awesome.
Oh for fucks sake.
First off CDs are lossy. All Analog to Digital conversions are lossy. CDs are a digital recording of an analog phenomenon, in the process of digitization some data of lost. Thankfully the data is recorded with such high fidelity that you do not notice that loss.
If you think you can notice the difference between a high quality (320kbit/s or higher) MP3 and a CD then you need to have your head examined.
By a shrink.
In other news, printed books frequently have typos in them, photographs do not capture 100% of the visible light spectrum, and television pictures are made up of millions of little dots that quite frankly have lousy color gamut.
I have owned all of 2 physical CDs in my life. I have better things to do with my time. I am not going to go around finding arbitrary excuses for me to pirate music. "Oh those fuckers don't offer music in some-random-weird-format, so I have an excuse to steal everything I want to!!!"
No.
They have made a reasonable effort to offer music in every reasonable format known to mankind.
At this point in time, people can either buy CDs or download digital copies of songs, or buy CDs and rip to some lossless format and deal with everyone else looking at them like they are fucking nuts.
Sorry, that is last decade's argument.
Between all you can eat Zune Pass, streaming radio Pandora, digital ecosystem iTunes, and unencumbered MP3's from Amazon, music is now available in pretty much any digital format, with any sort of imaginable payment scheme.
~10 years ago I made a post similar to yours. Back then I was unable to legally purchase MP3s of the music I wanted. That has changed.
Instead argue about fair use possibilities for lime wire or something else like that.
Hmm?
I have done my fair share of batch file writing, what exactly was taken out?
and I've had AMD systems last as long as your Intel systems.
Quite frankly the quality of power supply, memory, and motherboard, are more important than the CPU. Both Intel and AMD make reliable CPUs, and you can find cut rate MoBos sold for either, and many low cost PCs using AMD CPUs also come with a low cost supply.
Yah umm, screw oblivion.
The first time I tried to kill the council of mages (or whatever they are called) and failed (they are invincible!) I dropped the game and gave up.
Open world my arse.
Oblivion is far too SIMPLE. Combat is simple, the storyline is linear and simple, and the promised "multiple paths" are only in terms of limited scripted events. Ooh I can be an evil bad ass if I do what the brotherhood of assassins (or again, whatever they are called, its been awhile) says I do. SCREW THAT. What if I want to jack all of them up? Oh can't do that, not in the script.
Fooie.