Who the hell wants to use a 3 TB drive for the operating system? These are essentially storage drives, used only for data storage.
I have a 500 Gb drive for my OS (and associated software, excluding games) and it still seems awfully large, and I use that because it's the smallest drive I have. Games go on a 750 GB Drive and everything else goes to storage (currently 2x 1.5 TB Drives, one internal, for stuff that I use more often, and one external, for everything else).
As far as "wasted" space goes, I couldn't care less of 0.1, 1 or 10 GB "lost", nor for a small performance drop due to whatever sector misalignment there is. Storage drives are... storage drives, they're not really meant to be used as primary use devices, unless of course you're heavily using video editing or something similar, and in this case, you'd use more professional stuff.
Of course, some people may think differently, but that's how I imagine things.
Steam showed that halving the game's price results is more than twice the sales. Which in the end means more profit.
I am unsure how your math works.
Let's say a game costs 8 Euros to make and company sells it for 20. There are 100 buyers. Total profit, 1200 Euro.
Halving the price would result in a profit of 2 Euros per sale. 300 buyers would give the company 600 Euros profit. That is half of what the previous pricing would give.
Of course, my math isn't correct either, because the profit margin is a variable, also the game makiing cost is a variable. Therefore, you can't calculate the profit margin just like that.
Well, I said areas. Speaking about the country as a whole is just bad data in, bad data out. A generalization I avoid anyway:)
It's all a matter of cultural differences in the end.
Who said about localizing it? Unlike other countries *ahem*Western European*ahem*, The Eastern Block average Joes don't really need full localization. Documentation translation is required by law, indeed, but that's something you pay 0.05 cents per word. 100K words (which is a LOT of documentation) costs 5000 USD to translate fully (it's not a fortune, really). And FYI, we're not talking about third world countries. As a matter of fact, Romania is the 4th country in the world on average Broadband speed (http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/1004/). USA is 22nd. Mobile Phone subscriber amounts exceeded 100% in 2009 for Romania. So there's plenty of room for business.
Anyway, bottom line is Apple doesn't really care for these markets, period.
So?
iPad is not available for any of those stores. iPhone is not available for Romania in the "agreed" store. I don't care if a vendor is an "authorized reseller", all I care is to see the product at prices comparable to those in other countries.
But after all, we're talking about what can you do with the device in these countries AFTER you bought it. Online store? Forget about it.
This is a vicious circle. People buy devices at overinflated prices, then want to install software on them, but the software isn't officially available. Then some turn to jailbreaking the devices and installing pirated stuff on them. And then companies (Apple included) yell and grumble about the rampant piracy in those countries.
Now I wouldn't go as far as saying piracy exists solely because of this, but certainly things would improve if software store would exist for those countries.
Yeah, right. Ukraine, Poland and Romania amount to over 100 million people. In Poland and Romania, there are lots of people already owning iPhones and iPads are already being sold (and no, I mean no counterfeits, the real thing, they are legit devices bought from Western Europe and sold with inflated prices). And guess what, people buy them as well.
iTunes doesn't need large sums of money invested to make it work for these countries. But you are right, Apple "judges" and TBH, doesn't judge correctly. They CAN make money out of these countries, but they don't feel like trying. Oh well, this approach makes someone else rich anyway.
After all, we're throwing "back in my village"-like opinions.There isn't a proper advice for the guy/girl who posted the question. There isn't a general behavior to follow, an universal truth to this.
Desired/acceptable office behavior depends on the following:
- Country you're in. In some areas in Germany and the UK, it's expected from you to be stiffy and secluded unless specifically asked otherwise. In many India areas, you are expected to be gregarious, or you'll become isolated from the rest of the team. Those are just examples; each country/county has its own perks.
- Company you joined. A large company usually has a rule set that comes with the corporate citizenship; it's not necessarily written, but deductible to say the least. In US-centric companies, it's generally okay to skip your boss and go to his boss for quick advice regarding more important work related things. In India, it's a case of lese-majeste if you attempt to do that. You'll become an outcast. Same goes with peer contact. A smaller company may have a sort of blurred line between management lines ("only bosses, no red skins" approach)
- Department you are joining. The term "software company" loses its meaning if you're talking Microsoft, IBM or Oracle. There are departments there that largely differ in terms of team interactions from one and another.
- (last but not least) the team itself. They might be the bonded sort of thing, in which case you'll become a pariah pretty soon if you're "neutral" and secluded. Then again, they might each mind their own business, and then the "let's go to lunch" approach will be met with raised eyebrows and backs turning on you.
It's up to you to decide what sort of approach you need to embrace. But in the end, if your own general way of being doesn't fit the bill, you can try meddling in, but ultimately you will fail, because who you are supersedes who you are trying too appear to be to them.
Here's a real life example:
There's this girl in my department. She's yummy (looks really good) and (probably) because of that, she became a team lead. She chose this "neutral" approach at work. She comes to work, sits on her chair all day long, keeps to herself and doesn't talk to everyone. She doesn't refuse to help others, but when talking to her, you feel like you are talking to a machine. Guess what. Nobody talks to her anymore unless they absolutely have to. She quickly became "a chair on a chair", some sort of furniture that only says "hi" and "bye" throughout the working day. Furthermore, she's so infused with policies that she can't interpret them as necessity arises. You know, following the letter rather than the spirit of the rules.
I was a way more successful Team Lead than she is. People in my department still come to me when they need help, so she asked me several times NOT to help them anymore, because "she's the Team Lead now". Well, tough luck, I told her people choose who to ask for help, and as long as they prefer to come to me, I will not turn them away. I tried getting some sense into her, explaining that interaction is essential to become liked and trusted, but I seem to have spoken to empty walls. Oh well.
The idea is: first you need to see for yourself if the team/department socialization methods fit yours. If they don't, you can still fit in (with a constant effort), but I'd suggest moving on as fast as possible.
You forgot archiving.
Since it's text-based, the whole thing could theoretically compress to 1% of its original size. So please redo the calculations:)
If you're counting the US only, maybe it was.
I am living in a totally different country (somewhere in Eastern Europe). I got hired by a large multinational company (a very large one indeed) in June 2007. I got promoted twice. My responsibilities tripled (I was a Helpdesk Analyst, then a Team Lead, now I am a Service Delivery Manager and in couple months will move to another position, or so they said), my salary raised 0% in all this time. I mean ZERO. No raise. No compensation. Nothing.
I am paid in local currency. Local currency took a sharp decline compared to Euro (roughly 30%). So where I was getting (let's say) 1000 Euro per month in 2007, I am now getting around 700. And most prices here are in Euro (rent, IT stuff, cars, electronics, houses, pretty much everything with a net value over 100 Euro... is specified in Euro).
I like what I am doing and the department is nice. However, the way the company is treating its employees plainly sucks. My purchasing power went down 30%, if not more, and I started working week-ends and overtime and taken night shift just to try being on par. And still am not on par with prices around. I work more, but I am poorer.
You might ask why don't I get the hell out of here. Well, I'm just fixing to climb the ladder a bit more before I do, and them jump boats with a large salary increase somewhere else (hopefully). But keep in mind, if you think -5% is a lot, think -30%.
Well in Bucharest, Romania you have 100 Mb/s metropolitan speed offered by most ISPs. Interestingly, larger/country-sized ISPs don't offer such speeds, not even for metropolitan network.
I have tested with other people connected to the same ISP, 100 Mb/s up/down is no problem. My ISP has over 40K subscribers, and transferring data to/from them is easy and fast. As for ping? 1-5 ms to any I have tried.
My requirements are fast speed and low ping to people close by. As for external websites (outside Romania), I get speeds of 10 Mbit/s and pings up to 150-170 ms, which is more than enough for my needs. Most big sites appear to be either mirrored or prioritized smehow (nVidia, Ati, IBM, Google, Microsoft and so on), therefore speeds are way higher than average (I download drivers from nVidia Website with roughly 50-70 Mbit/s). The funny thing is that they advertize lower speeds than this.
It doesn't matter at all that people who worked for Sun originally made the promise. Oracle acquired Sun, so they acquired all their promises, obligations, and dirty laundry too.
No shit. I promise I will give all my friends 1 million bucks each. Now you go ahead and adopt me.
I don't understand one thing: what stops Willie from continuing his work? Did Oracle fire him and take his brains away? Did he leave his knowledge in Oracle's courtyard and start playing Minesweeper for the rest of his life?
Gnome Accessibility code is Open Source AFAIK. Correct me if I'm wrong please. Therefore, anyone can continue doing that, including the oh-so-famous Willie. If a company decides there's no gain involved in keeping someone, the company will let the guy go. Furthermore, if Willie is as famous as you state, other companies should fight over him like crazy. Ergo: Either Willie ain't that good or he was doing what he was doing solely for money. And yes, if no passion was involved, I would be scared as well. Otherwise, just wait and see.
You are right. In theory. Code should be better optimized, ported games should run faster on PCs und so Weiter. But that's not the point. Knowing where the problem is won't help you run the game/application faster. A better CPU would, though.
You're approaching the discussion from a power user's point of view, which is okay. I am doing the same from a gamer's point of view. I like a game, I bought the PC version, my game experience is not what I would have liked. Ranting and whining about how badly the code is written or how badly it has been ported to PC won't make it run faster. Period. A multicore CPU would.
Now there are lots of ported games out there who require higher than expected PC resources to run better. You could choose to not buy them and not play them, but as far as I'm concerned, this approach won't make me feel better. A multicore CPu would, though:)
Of course, it depends a lot on which settings you use in the game itself. Having a 24" full-HD monitor, I expect a game from late 2008 to run at a smooth framerate at high resolutions. It doesn't. First I thought the bottleneck was my graphic card, so I upgraded from an 8800 GTS to a GTX260. To my dismay, the performance increase was not as high as I expected, so I investigated further. Turns out my CPU limitations choked the framerate, so I turned to a friend and begged for a quad-core loan. At 1680x1050, with the same game settings, the performance jumped from 25-35 FPS to 36-48 FPS.
Now I don't say Tom's Hardware is wrong, all I say is it depends a lot of the in-game settings. There are things in the game that are very CPU-intensive (physics, number of cars, etc). Move the sliders down (in versions 1.0.3.0 or 1.0.4.0) for better performance but less gaming immersion/experience.
Furthermore, I never count avaregare framerate, which might be good. But those performance drops are really pissing me off. If during a certain mission, when things get tense, you are forced to play at 15 FPS, then that's annoying as hell. Who cares that casual cruisin' works smooth? Sure, turn all sliders down and you will have smooth FPS. But stuff will be rendered 50 feet in front of your car and man, that's frustrating as hell.
All I'm saying, in order for my gaming experience to be pleasant, I need a quad-core CPU. Benchmarks... only good for e-peen comparison:)
Maybe GTA 4 is a very specific app for you.To me, GTA 4 is an important application:)
And that game, my friend, requires a quad-core CPU. Which I don't have at the moment, and even with my Intel E6550 overclocked from 2.66 to 3.6 GHz the game runs at 25-35 FPS at 1680x1050, with both cores at 100%.
I used to have the same approach (multicore is dumb) but now it's a thing of the past.
There are more and more apps and games out there who take advantage of multicore, not to mention that operating systems (such as Windows 7) are better at allocationg sepaarte cores for single-core applications to balance the load.
Therefore, while I don't dismiss the need of having a multicore CPU, in the end it's all about balancing your investment against the benefits. If you need a 6-core CPU and it doesn't cost a kidney and a lung, then get it. Regardless of your decision as a customer, there's always a good thing in this sort of advancements: new stuff pushes down prices for older stuff:)
So you made fun of your girlfriend by installing an operating system which was specificaly designed with the following in mind:
1. Would cease working after the cut-off time
2. Should NOT be installed on any sort of "production" machines (it's a RC after all)
3. Would not be officially upgradeable to the W7 final
And now you're complaining of all of the above.
It's like buying fresh milk and whining it went bad 4 days later. you had been warned. What did you expect?
If you have a legit purchase, google for the installation workaround. Worked fine in my case. I too had Windows 7 Beta installed on a "production" machine, but was fully aware of the risks and managed to upgrade to final version with ease. But whining about its limitations never crossed my mind.
But in the end, it's just stats. I don't care where the SPAM originates from, I only care to get the least amount of SPAM in my Inbox. Whether it dropped in the US but increased in Brazil, I couldn't care less. I only care about how's SPAM doing worldwide; and if the amounts globally increased, the rest is just useless statistics. So no point being happy or sad, any SPAM sent to your e-mail address will get to your e-mail address, regardless whether it's from US, Nigeria or Romania.
The winners are often not established by skill but repetition, for how long they have been playing the game and (the thing which dwarfs them all) ping. Having a 500+ ms turnaround time simply means you get your ass handed by any random guy with an under 100 ms ping reply.
Slashdot Mirror
Who the hell wants to use a 3 TB drive for the operating system? These are essentially storage drives, used only for data storage.
I have a 500 Gb drive for my OS (and associated software, excluding games) and it still seems awfully large, and I use that because it's the smallest drive I have. Games go on a 750 GB Drive and everything else goes to storage (currently 2x 1.5 TB Drives, one internal, for stuff that I use more often, and one external, for everything else).
As far as "wasted" space goes, I couldn't care less of 0.1, 1 or 10 GB "lost", nor for a small performance drop due to whatever sector misalignment there is. Storage drives are... storage drives, they're not really meant to be used as primary use devices, unless of course you're heavily using video editing or something similar, and in this case, you'd use more professional stuff.
Of course, some people may think differently, but that's how I imagine things.
Steam showed that halving the game's price results is more than twice the sales. Which in the end means more profit.
I am unsure how your math works.
Let's say a game costs 8 Euros to make and company sells it for 20. There are 100 buyers. Total profit, 1200 Euro.
Halving the price would result in a profit of 2 Euros per sale. 300 buyers would give the company 600 Euros profit. That is half of what the previous pricing would give.
Of course, my math isn't correct either, because the profit margin is a variable, also the game makiing cost is a variable. Therefore, you can't calculate the profit margin just like that.
Try The Black Dwarf technique: http://www.willudesign.com/BlackDwarfTop.html
Well, I said areas. Speaking about the country as a whole is just bad data in, bad data out. A generalization I avoid anyway :)
It's all a matter of cultural differences in the end.
Who said about localizing it? Unlike other countries *ahem*Western European*ahem*, The Eastern Block average Joes don't really need full localization. Documentation translation is required by law, indeed, but that's something you pay 0.05 cents per word. 100K words (which is a LOT of documentation) costs 5000 USD to translate fully (it's not a fortune, really). And FYI, we're not talking about third world countries. As a matter of fact, Romania is the 4th country in the world on average Broadband speed (http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/1004/). USA is 22nd.
Mobile Phone subscriber amounts exceeded 100% in 2009 for Romania. So there's plenty of room for business. Anyway, bottom line is Apple doesn't really care for these markets, period.
So?
iPad is not available for any of those stores. iPhone is not available for Romania in the "agreed" store. I don't care if a vendor is an "authorized reseller", all I care is to see the product at prices comparable to those in other countries.
But after all, we're talking about what can you do with the device in these countries AFTER you bought it. Online store? Forget about it.
This is a vicious circle. People buy devices at overinflated prices, then want to install software on them, but the software isn't officially available. Then some turn to jailbreaking the devices and installing pirated stuff on them. And then companies (Apple included) yell and grumble about the rampant piracy in those countries.
Now I wouldn't go as far as saying piracy exists solely because of this, but certainly things would improve if software store would exist for those countries.
Yeah, right. Ukraine, Poland and Romania amount to over 100 million people. In Poland and Romania, there are lots of people already owning iPhones and iPads are already being sold (and no, I mean no counterfeits, the real thing, they are legit devices bought from Western Europe and sold with inflated prices). And guess what, people buy them as well.
iTunes doesn't need large sums of money invested to make it work for these countries. But you are right, Apple "judges" and TBH, doesn't judge correctly. They CAN make money out of these countries, but they don't feel like trying. Oh well, this approach makes someone else rich anyway.
After all, we're throwing "back in my village"-like opinions.There isn't a proper advice for the guy/girl who posted the question. There isn't a general behavior to follow, an universal truth to this.
Desired/acceptable office behavior depends on the following:
- Country you're in. In some areas in Germany and the UK, it's expected from you to be stiffy and secluded unless specifically asked otherwise. In many India areas, you are expected to be gregarious, or you'll become isolated from the rest of the team. Those are just examples; each country/county has its own perks.
- Company you joined. A large company usually has a rule set that comes with the corporate citizenship; it's not necessarily written, but deductible to say the least. In US-centric companies, it's generally okay to skip your boss and go to his boss for quick advice regarding more important work related things. In India, it's a case of lese-majeste if you attempt to do that. You'll become an outcast. Same goes with peer contact. A smaller company may have a sort of blurred line between management lines ("only bosses, no red skins" approach)
- Department you are joining. The term "software company" loses its meaning if you're talking Microsoft, IBM or Oracle. There are departments there that largely differ in terms of team interactions from one and another.
- (last but not least) the team itself. They might be the bonded sort of thing, in which case you'll become a pariah pretty soon if you're "neutral" and secluded. Then again, they might each mind their own business, and then the "let's go to lunch" approach will be met with raised eyebrows and backs turning on you.
It's up to you to decide what sort of approach you need to embrace. But in the end, if your own general way of being doesn't fit the bill, you can try meddling in, but ultimately you will fail, because who you are supersedes who you are trying too appear to be to them.
Here's a real life example:
There's this girl in my department. She's yummy (looks really good) and (probably) because of that, she became a team lead. She chose this "neutral" approach at work. She comes to work, sits on her chair all day long, keeps to herself and doesn't talk to everyone. She doesn't refuse to help others, but when talking to her, you feel like you are talking to a machine. Guess what. Nobody talks to her anymore unless they absolutely have to. She quickly became "a chair on a chair", some sort of furniture that only says "hi" and "bye" throughout the working day. Furthermore, she's so infused with policies that she can't interpret them as necessity arises. You know, following the letter rather than the spirit of the rules.
I was a way more successful Team Lead than she is. People in my department still come to me when they need help, so she asked me several times NOT to help them anymore, because "she's the Team Lead now". Well, tough luck, I told her people choose who to ask for help, and as long as they prefer to come to me, I will not turn them away. I tried getting some sense into her, explaining that interaction is essential to become liked and trusted, but I seem to have spoken to empty walls. Oh well.
The idea is: first you need to see for yourself if the team/department socialization methods fit yours. If they don't, you can still fit in (with a constant effort), but I'd suggest moving on as fast as possible.
You forgot archiving. :)
Since it's text-based, the whole thing could theoretically compress to 1% of its original size. So please redo the calculations
Doesn't sound so "random" to me.
It's a bigger company, actually :)
If you're counting the US only, maybe it was.
I am living in a totally different country (somewhere in Eastern Europe). I got hired by a large multinational company (a very large one indeed) in June 2007. I got promoted twice. My responsibilities tripled (I was a Helpdesk Analyst, then a Team Lead, now I am a Service Delivery Manager and in couple months will move to another position, or so they said), my salary raised 0% in all this time. I mean ZERO. No raise. No compensation. Nothing.
I am paid in local currency. Local currency took a sharp decline compared to Euro (roughly 30%). So where I was getting (let's say) 1000 Euro per month in 2007, I am now getting around 700. And most prices here are in Euro (rent, IT stuff, cars, electronics, houses, pretty much everything with a net value over 100 Euro... is specified in Euro).
I like what I am doing and the department is nice. However, the way the company is treating its employees plainly sucks. My purchasing power went down 30%, if not more, and I started working week-ends and overtime and taken night shift just to try being on par. And still am not on par with prices around. I work more, but I am poorer.
You might ask why don't I get the hell out of here. Well, I'm just fixing to climb the ladder a bit more before I do, and them jump boats with a large salary increase somewhere else (hopefully). But keep in mind, if you think -5% is a lot, think -30%.
Wait, there is a puzzle? Where? xkcd? What's that? Who? What year is it? /. - nevermind then, all makes sense now.
Oh, it's
Well in Bucharest, Romania you have 100 Mb/s metropolitan speed offered by most ISPs. Interestingly, larger/country-sized ISPs don't offer such speeds, not even for metropolitan network.
I have tested with other people connected to the same ISP, 100 Mb/s up/down is no problem. My ISP has over 40K subscribers, and transferring data to/from them is easy and fast. As for ping? 1-5 ms to any I have tried.
My requirements are fast speed and low ping to people close by. As for external websites (outside Romania), I get speeds of 10 Mbit/s and pings up to 150-170 ms, which is more than enough for my needs. Most big sites appear to be either mirrored or prioritized smehow (nVidia, Ati, IBM, Google, Microsoft and so on), therefore speeds are way higher than average (I download drivers from nVidia Website with roughly 50-70 Mbit/s). The funny thing is that they advertize lower speeds than this.
Hence you answered your own question right there. If Sun made promises that exceed the benefits, then they should be dropped.
It doesn't matter at all that people who worked for Sun originally made the promise. Oracle acquired Sun, so they acquired all their promises, obligations, and dirty laundry too.
No shit. I promise I will give all my friends 1 million bucks each. Now you go ahead and adopt me.
I don't understand one thing: what stops Willie from continuing his work? Did Oracle fire him and take his brains away? Did he leave his knowledge in Oracle's courtyard and start playing Minesweeper for the rest of his life?
Gnome Accessibility code is Open Source AFAIK. Correct me if I'm wrong please. Therefore, anyone can continue doing that, including the oh-so-famous Willie. If a company decides there's no gain involved in keeping someone, the company will let the guy go. Furthermore, if Willie is as famous as you state, other companies should fight over him like crazy.
Ergo: Either Willie ain't that good or he was doing what he was doing solely for money. And yes, if no passion was involved, I would be scared as well. Otherwise, just wait and see.
You are right. In theory. Code should be better optimized, ported games should run faster on PCs und so Weiter. But that's not the point. Knowing where the problem is won't help you run the game/application faster. A better CPU would, though. :)
You're approaching the discussion from a power user's point of view, which is okay. I am doing the same from a gamer's point of view. I like a game, I bought the PC version, my game experience is not what I would have liked. Ranting and whining about how badly the code is written or how badly it has been ported to PC won't make it run faster. Period. A multicore CPU would.
Now there are lots of ported games out there who require higher than expected PC resources to run better. You could choose to not buy them and not play them, but as far as I'm concerned, this approach won't make me feel better. A multicore CPu would, though
Of course, it depends a lot on which settings you use in the game itself. Having a 24" full-HD monitor, I expect a game from late 2008 to run at a smooth framerate at high resolutions. It doesn't. First I thought the bottleneck was my graphic card, so I upgraded from an 8800 GTS to a GTX260. To my dismay, the performance increase was not as high as I expected, so I investigated further. Turns out my CPU limitations choked the framerate, so I turned to a friend and begged for a quad-core loan. At 1680x1050, with the same game settings, the performance jumped from 25-35 FPS to 36-48 FPS. :)
Now I don't say Tom's Hardware is wrong, all I say is it depends a lot of the in-game settings. There are things in the game that are very CPU-intensive (physics, number of cars, etc). Move the sliders down (in versions 1.0.3.0 or 1.0.4.0) for better performance but less gaming immersion/experience.
Furthermore, I never count avaregare framerate, which might be good. But those performance drops are really pissing me off. If during a certain mission, when things get tense, you are forced to play at 15 FPS, then that's annoying as hell. Who cares that casual cruisin' works smooth? Sure, turn all sliders down and you will have smooth FPS. But stuff will be rendered 50 feet in front of your car and man, that's frustrating as hell.
All I'm saying, in order for my gaming experience to be pleasant, I need a quad-core CPU. Benchmarks... only good for e-peen comparison
Maybe GTA 4 is a very specific app for you.To me, GTA 4 is an important application :) :)
And that game, my friend, requires a quad-core CPU. Which I don't have at the moment, and even with my Intel E6550 overclocked from 2.66 to 3.6 GHz the game runs at 25-35 FPS at 1680x1050, with both cores at 100%.
I used to have the same approach (multicore is dumb) but now it's a thing of the past.
There are more and more apps and games out there who take advantage of multicore, not to mention that operating systems (such as Windows 7) are better at allocationg sepaarte cores for single-core applications to balance the load.
Therefore, while I don't dismiss the need of having a multicore CPU, in the end it's all about balancing your investment against the benefits. If you need a 6-core CPU and it doesn't cost a kidney and a lung, then get it. Regardless of your decision as a customer, there's always a good thing in this sort of advancements: new stuff pushes down prices for older stuff
If you are going to buy a Windows OS, I see no reason to get XP over 7 unless you have hardware issues.
Rephrasing: unless you, as a person, have hardware issues... in the attic.
So you made fun of your girlfriend by installing an operating system which was specificaly designed with the following in mind:
1. Would cease working after the cut-off time
2. Should NOT be installed on any sort of "production" machines (it's a RC after all)
3. Would not be officially upgradeable to the W7 final
And now you're complaining of all of the above.
It's like buying fresh milk and whining it went bad 4 days later. you had been warned. What did you expect?
If you have a legit purchase, google for the installation workaround. Worked fine in my case. I too had Windows 7 Beta installed on a "production" machine, but was fully aware of the risks and managed to upgrade to final version with ease. But whining about its limitations never crossed my mind.
Agreed. it would be the proper way to go. As a matter of fact, this is not the first time this sort of translation is being made available by Oracle.
But in the end, it's just stats. I don't care where the SPAM originates from, I only care to get the least amount of SPAM in my Inbox. Whether it dropped in the US but increased in Brazil, I couldn't care less. I only care about how's SPAM doing worldwide; and if the amounts globally increased, the rest is just useless statistics. So no point being happy or sad, any SPAM sent to your e-mail address will get to your e-mail address, regardless whether it's from US, Nigeria or Romania.
The winners are often not established by skill but repetition, for how long they have been playing the game and (the thing which dwarfs them all) ping. Having a 500+ ms turnaround time simply means you get your ass handed by any random guy with an under 100 ms ping reply.