I'm not the AC to whom you replied, but I did the same thing s/he did. Had an iPhone, switched to Android, and switched to a 4s as soon as my contract was up.
The reasons for moving to Android were openness and ability to side-load. It turned out, these weren't that big a deal.
First of all, ideologically, Android isn't really open for me. It's open in the same way that Tivo is open. Parts are based on Linux, other parts are new. Some of it is available to me, some of it isn't. But what matters (to me) is that I can't just download the source, compile it, and end up with a working build. At BEST, with a lot of work, I can get something on my phone which resembles the original (minus e.g. Google's apps, which are half of the reason to get an Android phone to begin with.) At worst, the phone has a locked bootloader, and you can't put a new ROM on there. If my two choices are both effectively closed, then the openness of the platform is irrelevant.
I also found that I never cared to sideload. It wasn't difficult to do--I just never had a reason to. And all of the apps I had on my phone would have gone through the Apple App Store approval process--I wasn't doing anything really off the wall. So I had no need to sideload.
Then there's the issue of upgradeability. I figure that my Android phone would have been vulnerable to known exploits for about 1/4 of the contract. That's due to the carrier/manufacturer failing to update in a timely manner. The build process is fairly onerous, so I wasn't going to do it myself. Going with Cyanogen, I got updates faster. But I don't want to have to do that. Apple updates very old hardware to new OSs. Their time-to-fix vulnerabilities isn't much (if any) worse than Cyanogen.
So at the end of the day, I had to decide based on features. Both Android and iOS do what I want them to, but iOS does it cleaner and smoother.
Cool. I live in a college town, which may contribute to this particular problem. On the other hand, movies are half the price of most other theaters in my state.
Honestly, I would have fired the customer at that point. There is no need to take abuse, though as one of the ACs correctly point out, the escalation really did probably start with the OceanMarketting (sic) guy.
However, I absolutely agree that the key problems are with regurgitated scripts, half-dead actors, a passion for not thinking, and a chronic paranoia towards originality.
Considering I'll rewatch movies multiple times if I enjoy them, "regurgitated scripts" don't bother me. Of course, I quite enjoy originality--though there's precious little of it these days.
The main thing that keeps me from going to the theater more is the experience. Whether it's people talking loudly (on their phone or to others) or texters who flash their screen at everyone behind them, it's the inconsiderate other patrons who irritate me the most. The other day, I actually sat just behind and to the left of someone who started looking up nudes of one of the actresses in the movie they were in, and continued to look at them for about 10 minutes before I asked him to turn off his phone.
How dare he want his controller by X-mas when it was advertised to him that it would arrive in early December!? How dare he ask for an update on the ETA.
I agree with you on these points, however:
How dare he get upset when the HEAD OF PUBLIC RELATIONS calls him a bitch!?
Well, the customer started the name-calling when he signed off his long e-mail with:
p.p.s. Welcome to the internet, bitch. That’s how I roll.
Guess that just shows how experiences vary. Every one of my monthly bills (and the ones that I've gotten rid of--e.g. satellite TV) accepts credit cards except for two: the gas bill and the credit card bill. It seems weird to me for one not to. Credit cards have become de facto ways of moving currency.
it is entirely possible that they process the regularly scheduled payments differently. There are credit card clearing houses that look for easy, repeat business and charge less for the service. (It is considered lower risk.) Even if they are not using one of these clearing houses, it is possible that they simply see the predictability of their income stream as enough reason to be worth the cost.
Well, that's speculation. A far cry from the certainty you expressed in your earlier post.
Our local utility has been doing this for years. You can pay them with a check, take a credit card to their office, or pay with a credit card online. Only the online option has a convenience fee.
[I]t is simply a cost recovery for credit card processing fees... This fee ONLY applies to credit card payments made over the phone or through the internet and ONLY to non-automatic online payments.
How are online non-automatic payments more costly than online automatic payments?
I've always thought it was unfair in my favor that they accept credit card for monthly billing
The screenshot I saw said that bank transfers did not incur the fee.
Pity, though. In the US, there is very little protection against Verizon from abusing your bank account. With the number of times I've had a company continue to charge me even after I had cancelled service, there's no way they're getting my bank account information.
Also, don't forget that credit card processing fees can be high, especially for a small vendor. Selling apps on your own would probably be very costly. Apple can negotiate a significantly lower rate and could share some of that savings with the app author.
For example, a common transaction fee is $0.30. That means that you pay $0.30 plus some percentage to your payment processor. For cheap apps, that's coming close to Apple's percentage, plus you have to deal with what is almost certainly a more convoluted process for payments and distribution.
It's honestly not surprising at all (to me) that developers approve of this model.
They have a history of mistreating paying customers. I imagine the freebies (all very old games, of course) for the PSN outage were just a business decision that wound up in the customers' favor. Their other business decisions ended up in their favor, to the detriment of (some) of their customers.
I agree that it looks like they didn't start development until after the iPhone was announced--basically, I was giving the parent to my original post the benefit of the doubt.
It wouldn't surprise me if Google had begun some very preliminary designs early on. After all, it's not like there weren't touchscreen phones/PDAs prior to the iPhone.
Most people buy it because the device is at a better pricepoint than the iPhone or has features/formfactor that they want.
Maybe, but the cost difference isn't that much when you take the data plans into account. Even just looking at the subsidized prices for the various phones, Android phones are comparable in price and specs to iPhones. You can get a very usable iPhone for free (subsidized) just like a lot of Android phones. And the more you opt to pay, the better performance you'll get, in both cases.
Until recently, though, the cheapest iPhone you could get on Verizon was $200. People "stuck" on Verizon might pick a free Android over a $200 iPhone. And people on Sprint were just out of luck. I wonder if cheaper iPhones on these carriers will eventually affect things. It should certainly eliminate carrier dependency as a factor when choosing a platform. We need to revisit this question in two years.
Before Android bought it, the only Android prototype was a Blackberry clone. After the acquisition, Google began designing on two separate systems--one based upon the prototype with a keyboard, and one with just a touchscreen. The clone was the focus, to try to get something to market as soon as possible. The touchscreen version was considered a long-term goal. I doubt very seriously that full touch-screen considerations were being made on a device whose main purpose (for the company) is to get something to market. Google has shown a willingness to design separate product lines and integrate them later. It's extremely likely that this was the plan.
When Apple introduced the first iPhone, Google saw the writing on the wall and scrapped the Blackberry clone to focus all its Android efforts on a touchscreen version.
All that is largely irrelevant to the point at hand, though. No matter the history of the code, Google did design what is now the current design of Android with touchscreens in mind. And that fact makes it that much worse that they can't achieve the responsiveness of an iPhone today, 4 years later.
If it says, "Plays on PS3", it should play on a PS3.
Much like it wasn't illegal for Nintendo to require you to purchase the memory expansion for the N64 to play some games
Unless I'm mistaken, that dealt with physical limitations on the original console. But at least the games explicitly stated that they required the extra component.
Additionally, that is adding to the console in a way that can be reversed, unlike Sony's play.
NES owners had to buy a super Nintendo to play Super Mario world
Completely irrelevant. It's a different console.
A console is only legally obligated to be able to play the games that are out for it at the time of purchase
I'm not sure there's any legal basis for this statement.
Upcoming games are just that, unpredictable vapor-ware. If you bought your gamecube to buy duke nukem forever, which was an upcoming title expected to be released for the system, the fact that the game never came to be for the system is not grounds for a refund.
I would agree with you on specific titles. But what Sony did impacted almost every future game past a certain point. This isn't a new console. This isn't even adding new features. This is removing an advertised feature.
My cable company's DVR was horrible. Search was quite broken. You couldn't restrict the channels in the guide to only those which you could receive, and with basic cable, there were far more that I couldn't watch than those which I could. Overlapping schedules on TV means that I might miss the first or last few minutes of a show--and this was done intentionally during sweeps in the early 2000s (to keep you on the channel for 10 minute after the half-hour mark.) The guide also shows a giant ad, meaning I only get to see 4 channels at a time. And turning on closed captioning requires rebooting the PVR. I'm not kididng.
We swapped it for a TiVo, and then had a horrible time getting a cable card. After finally getting one, it was broken. The second only received local channels, not the whole basic cable package. TiVo is better--you can create a list of channels you get--but search is still bad and you still easily miss portions of shows.
It could definitely be better, but it's significantly cut down on the amount of dumb joke posts I've seen. I'm usually okay with missing genuinely insightful+funny comments. I'd love for more granular possibilities, though.
And one more time, because it managed to post from the test account I created to see if things worked.
https://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm lets you change how various mods affect the final score you see. Then you can set the threshold to not see them. Set Funny to -6 and hide scores of -1, and you won't see funny posts anymore.
I hate "Funny" comments as well. That's why I set "Funny" mods to have a negative impact on the overall score in my preferences.
Unfortunately, I can't find that option anymore. It seems to have stuck, though. If I log in, funny comments have -1 scores whereas the same comment will have a higher score if I log out.
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I'm not the AC to whom you replied, but I did the same thing s/he did. Had an iPhone, switched to Android, and switched to a 4s as soon as my contract was up.
The reasons for moving to Android were openness and ability to side-load. It turned out, these weren't that big a deal.
First of all, ideologically, Android isn't really open for me. It's open in the same way that Tivo is open. Parts are based on Linux, other parts are new. Some of it is available to me, some of it isn't. But what matters (to me) is that I can't just download the source, compile it, and end up with a working build. At BEST, with a lot of work, I can get something on my phone which resembles the original (minus e.g. Google's apps, which are half of the reason to get an Android phone to begin with.) At worst, the phone has a locked bootloader, and you can't put a new ROM on there.
If my two choices are both effectively closed, then the openness of the platform is irrelevant.
I also found that I never cared to sideload. It wasn't difficult to do--I just never had a reason to. And all of the apps I had on my phone would have gone through the Apple App Store approval process--I wasn't doing anything really off the wall. So I had no need to sideload.
Then there's the issue of upgradeability. I figure that my Android phone would have been vulnerable to known exploits for about 1/4 of the contract. That's due to the carrier/manufacturer failing to update in a timely manner. The build process is fairly onerous, so I wasn't going to do it myself. Going with Cyanogen, I got updates faster. But I don't want to have to do that. Apple updates very old hardware to new OSs. Their time-to-fix vulnerabilities isn't much (if any) worse than Cyanogen.
So at the end of the day, I had to decide based on features. Both Android and iOS do what I want them to, but iOS does it cleaner and smoother.
Also using your salesman incentive argument win phone 7 should be doing better as ms actually pays.
That just started happening. We won't see if it's had an effect for a couple of months.
I agree with everything you say except:
Linux fragmentation is the #1 or #2 reason companies won't bother with supporting it
Really? It's not the 1% marketshare?
Huh.
Cool. I live in a college town, which may contribute to this particular problem. On the other hand, movies are half the price of most other theaters in my state.
Yeah.
Honestly, I would have fired the customer at that point. There is no need to take abuse, though as one of the ACs correctly point out, the escalation really did probably start with the OceanMarketting (sic) guy.
However, I absolutely agree that the key problems are with regurgitated scripts, half-dead actors, a passion for not thinking, and a chronic paranoia towards originality.
Considering I'll rewatch movies multiple times if I enjoy them, "regurgitated scripts" don't bother me. Of course, I quite enjoy originality--though there's precious little of it these days.
The main thing that keeps me from going to the theater more is the experience. Whether it's people talking loudly (on their phone or to others) or texters who flash their screen at everyone behind them, it's the inconsiderate other patrons who irritate me the most. The other day, I actually sat just behind and to the left of someone who started looking up nudes of one of the actresses in the movie they were in, and continued to look at them for about 10 minutes before I asked him to turn off his phone.
How dare he want his controller by X-mas when it was advertised to him that it would arrive in early December!? How dare he ask for an update on the ETA.
I agree with you on these points, however:
How dare he get upset when the HEAD OF PUBLIC RELATIONS calls him a bitch!?
Well, the customer started the name-calling when he signed off his long e-mail with:
p.p.s. Welcome to the internet, bitch. That’s how I roll.
Guess that just shows how experiences vary. Every one of my monthly bills (and the ones that I've gotten rid of--e.g. satellite TV) accepts credit cards except for two: the gas bill and the credit card bill. It seems weird to me for one not to. Credit cards have become de facto ways of moving currency.
it is entirely possible that they process the regularly scheduled payments differently. There are credit card clearing houses that look for easy, repeat business and charge less for the service. (It is considered lower risk.) Even if they are not using one of these clearing houses, it is possible that they simply see the predictability of their income stream as enough reason to be worth the cost.
Well, that's speculation. A far cry from the certainty you expressed in your earlier post.
Our local utility has been doing this for years. You can pay them with a check, take a credit card to their office, or pay with a credit card online. Only the online option has a convenience fee.
[I]t is simply a cost recovery for credit card processing fees ... This fee ONLY applies to credit card payments made over the phone or through the internet and ONLY to non-automatic online payments.
How are online non-automatic payments more costly than online automatic payments?
I've always thought it was unfair in my favor that they accept credit card for monthly billing
Huh? Why?
The screenshot I saw said that bank transfers did not incur the fee.
Pity, though. In the US, there is very little protection against Verizon from abusing your bank account. With the number of times I've had a company continue to charge me even after I had cancelled service, there's no way they're getting my bank account information.
Also, don't forget that credit card processing fees can be high, especially for a small vendor. Selling apps on your own would probably be very costly. Apple can negotiate a significantly lower rate and could share some of that savings with the app author.
For example, a common transaction fee is $0.30. That means that you pay $0.30 plus some percentage to your payment processor. For cheap apps, that's coming close to Apple's percentage, plus you have to deal with what is almost certainly a more convoluted process for payments and distribution.
It's honestly not surprising at all (to me) that developers approve of this model.
The former is completely unverifiable. It came second-hand via a developer. Here's a source. There are many like it. http://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/cbe-oss-dev/2010-February/007202.html
As for the rootkits:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20051108/0117239.shtml
They have a history of mistreating paying customers. I imagine the freebies (all very old games, of course) for the PSN outage were just a business decision that wound up in the customers' favor. Their other business decisions ended up in their favor, to the detriment of (some) of their customers.
I agree that it looks like they didn't start development until after the iPhone was announced--basically, I was giving the parent to my original post the benefit of the doubt.
It wouldn't surprise me if Google had begun some very preliminary designs early on. After all, it's not like there weren't touchscreen phones/PDAs prior to the iPhone.
Most people buy it because the device is at a better pricepoint than the iPhone or has features/formfactor that they want.
Maybe, but the cost difference isn't that much when you take the data plans into account. Even just looking at the subsidized prices for the various phones, Android phones are comparable in price and specs to iPhones. You can get a very usable iPhone for free (subsidized) just like a lot of Android phones. And the more you opt to pay, the better performance you'll get, in both cases.
Until recently, though, the cheapest iPhone you could get on Verizon was $200. People "stuck" on Verizon might pick a free Android over a $200 iPhone. And people on Sprint were just out of luck. I wonder if cheaper iPhones on these carriers will eventually affect things. It should certainly eliminate carrier dependency as a factor when choosing a platform. We need to revisit this question in two years.
Before Android bought it, the only Android prototype was a Blackberry clone. After the acquisition, Google began designing on two separate systems--one based upon the prototype with a keyboard, and one with just a touchscreen. The clone was the focus, to try to get something to market as soon as possible. The touchscreen version was considered a long-term goal. I doubt very seriously that full touch-screen considerations were being made on a device whose main purpose (for the company) is to get something to market. Google has shown a willingness to design separate product lines and integrate them later. It's extremely likely that this was the plan.
When Apple introduced the first iPhone, Google saw the writing on the wall and scrapped the Blackberry clone to focus all its Android efforts on a touchscreen version.
All that is largely irrelevant to the point at hand, though. No matter the history of the code, Google did design what is now the current design of Android with touchscreens in mind. And that fact makes it that much worse that they can't achieve the responsiveness of an iPhone today, 4 years later.
future games are not a guaranteed access
If it says, "Plays on PS3", it should play on a PS3.
Much like it wasn't illegal for Nintendo to require you to purchase the memory expansion for the N64 to play some games
Unless I'm mistaken, that dealt with physical limitations on the original console. But at least the games explicitly stated that they required the extra component.
Additionally, that is adding to the console in a way that can be reversed, unlike Sony's play.
NES owners had to buy a super Nintendo to play Super Mario world
Completely irrelevant. It's a different console.
A console is only legally obligated to be able to play the games that are out for it at the time of purchase
I'm not sure there's any legal basis for this statement.
Upcoming games are just that, unpredictable vapor-ware. If you bought your gamecube to buy duke nukem forever, which was an upcoming title expected to be released for the system, the fact that the game never came to be for the system is not grounds for a refund.
I would agree with you on specific titles. But what Sony did impacted almost every future game past a certain point. This isn't a new console. This isn't even adding new features. This is removing an advertised feature.
The ruling was misinformed.
You also lost access to a number of future games. There are plenty of games which require updating in order to play.
Exactly. It's a legal warrantless wiretap, which is the problem.
The guy was complaining about content. Then he started talking about timing.
And many PVRs are really horrible experiences.
My cable company's DVR was horrible. Search was quite broken. You couldn't restrict the channels in the guide to only those which you could receive, and with basic cable, there were far more that I couldn't watch than those which I could. Overlapping schedules on TV means that I might miss the first or last few minutes of a show--and this was done intentionally during sweeps in the early 2000s (to keep you on the channel for 10 minute after the half-hour mark.) The guide also shows a giant ad, meaning I only get to see 4 channels at a time. And turning on closed captioning requires rebooting the PVR. I'm not kididng.
We swapped it for a TiVo, and then had a horrible time getting a cable card. After finally getting one, it was broken. The second only received local channels, not the whole basic cable package. TiVo is better--you can create a list of channels you get--but search is still bad and you still easily miss portions of shows.
Indeed!
It could definitely be better, but it's significantly cut down on the amount of dumb joke posts I've seen. I'm usually okay with missing genuinely insightful+funny comments. I'd love for more granular possibilities, though.
And one more time, because it managed to post from the test account I created to see if things worked.
https://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm lets you change how various mods affect the final score you see. Then you can set the threshold to not see them. Set Funny to -6 and hide scores of -1, and you won't see funny posts anymore.
I hate "Funny" comments as well. That's why I set "Funny" mods to have a negative impact on the overall score in my preferences.
Unfortunately, I can't find that option anymore. It seems to have stuck, though. If I log in, funny comments have -1 scores whereas the same comment will have a higher score if I log out.