Snopes ([url:http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp]) disagrees. As do a few other sites: [url:http://www.osmond-riba.org/lis/essay_mcdonald s.htm], [url:http://www.therationalradical.com/2005/01/mcd onalds-hot-coffee-lawsuit-facts.html], [url:http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=11070 89].
Some useful facts: = the coffee was found to be 30-50 degrees hotter than normal, at a temperature which causes 3rd degree burns in seconds. = there were hundreds of similar complaints that never saw court cases = Stella wasn't driving, and the car wasn't moving (many of the complaints regarding this case are about how stupid it is to get coffee and try to manipulate it in those conditions) = The QA manager testified that they knew the dangers of serving too-hot coffee, but they did it anyway.
Just some things to consider before jerking that knee.
Exactly. Good rootkits patch syscalls, not binary programs. This way, no matter what program does your directory listing, you'll never see the rootkit's hidden files. Only the rootkit's programs will have the key to making the syscalls work as normal.
That said, there's zero chance (IMO) that Microsoft would add ZFS to Vista. They already dropped their transaction-based filesystem in order to get Vista out the door this decade. Adding ZFS support (much less using it as the default or recommended FS) would simply take too long, even if Apple had announced support a year ago.
Many clients will stop accepting data from clients if they receive "bad data", which is essentially what this would provide. I guess these features could be removed, but it seems a shame, as this prevents malicious users from corrupting everyone's downloads and wasting time/bandwidth.
Even "trackerless" torrents could do this if any one member was not behind a firewall and could be used as the initial relay. Once all the members of the torrent have made the udp "connections", they wouldn't all have to talk to the relay much.
The biggest problem is data reliability. With live streaming audio/video, missed packets aren't that big a deal--that is, it may suck to miss a piece of data, but you can't generally rewind the conversation, so you just ask the person to repeat himself if you missed enough to lose that part of the conversation. With p2p, you need the whole file, so you have to be capable of determining that you didn't miss anything.
Did I say Apple didn't do anticompetitive things? I must have missed that part in the post I wrote.
But with Apple, it is a little different. Apple sells a black box. They sell a computer. They also sell software upgrades to that computer. They do not sell an operating system.
Also, they are not a monopoly, and so they aren't held to the same standard that monopolies are.
It seems to boil down to this: Microsoft tries to compete by removing competition. They want to be the only choice so that, in the future, they can own the entire market and fuel their company, not on innovation, but on lack of choice.
This sort of practice is legal if you don't have a monopoly. Microsoft has/had a monopoly, thus their anticompetitive practices were considered predatory.
Even if the vendors were 50% to blame, they are not the monopoly, Microsoft is. Microsoft set up the deals such that if any vendor wanted to remain competitive, they had to take the deal. Didn't take the deal? Your Windows PCs (the ones 99% of people wanted, anyway) cost $100-$200 more.
Microsoft also did some nasty things with undocumented APIs to prevent Windows from running on non-Microsoft DOS versions. Through and through, they've been anticompetitive almost from the beginning.
He should have said, "They don't sit around at night plotting to kill...IN THE NAME OF THEIR GOD."
And that is true, for the most part. There are individuals who do it, but collectively, as a group, Christians don't tend to these days. If they do it as a group, likely it isn't because they are Christian, or for God.
The registry allows sex offenders to be treated as outcasts for the rest of their lives. You see, people on the registry have to notify people--mostly local schools and other organizations that deal with children heavily--that they are moving in. Those organizations alert the neighborhoods, and everyone knows there's a sex offender nearby. Even if some people manage to miss the notifications, they can use free and easy online lookup services to find sex offenders in their neighborhood and shun them, even people who have completely paid their debt to society and are trying to build a new life for themselves.
The registry is there so that rapists can be punished for the rest of their lives without having the state pay for them in prison.
I think it's pretty awful. But then, we've got to think of the children.
640x480 may be crap for working in, but for video, it's just fine.
The vertical resolution is widely regarded to be the important resolution for quality. DVDs have 480i. Itunes is 480? (not sure if it's i or p). It makes sense given that it's not meant to be viewed on a screen which draws interlaced images.
The extra 80 pixels of horizontal resolution are really minimal. It all comes down to the encoding. I've seen properly encoded SVCDs that were indistinguishable from DVDs on a 27" TV. I've also seen SVCDs which were utter crap in comparison to broadcast TV. Bitrate and other encoding factors are almost as important as raw resolution.
I seem to recall that ripping groups were using about 175meg for 22min shows, 350meg for 44min shows, and 700-1400meg for movies awhile back. I have no idea what the resolution for these was.
My first Palm was a Palm IIIxe (yeah, one of the monochrome ones). It was great for what it does--keeping contact lists, reading eBooks/webpages (slurped into some offline reader), keeping my calendar, etc. I upgraded to a Tungsten T|2 and was more or less satisfied, though the multimedia capabilities were lacking. It could do Ogg/Mp3, which was good enough for me at the time.
Unfortunately, it died just after its warranty was up. Just wouldn't turn on all of a sudden. That kinda gave me a sour taste for Palm, and for PDAs in general, until a friend got me a used iPaq with Windows CE (2002 edition, I think). I thought the platform was pretty good, overall, and sometime later, I stepped up to the PPC6700.
I use the PDA much more now (and it is a different OS--WM5.0 compared to 2002), but I'm less pleased with it. I dunno.
I've heard that the Newton was a great device. If only Apple would release a PDA/Phone (yeah, I know the iPhone is coming--but seeing as it appears to be mostly an mp3/phone convergence device, I'm not getting my hopes up that it will be what I want).
I'd probably be ok with a good PDA, a good phone, and Bluetooth, but it just seems like there aren't any good PDAs out there. The Zaurus was something I'd been keeping my eye on for a long time, but frankly, I'd rather have something that works (and works well) right out of the box than something I have to seriously tinker with (hence many of my problems with the PPC6700). I enjoy tinkering and coding, but on these devices which are so essential to my life and my job, I'd rather not be playing guessing games.
I've heard that the AIM/MP3 playback abilities all used special hooks in the OS that won't work in the generic case. I honestly don't know the specifics, but ultimately, generic TCP connections apparently cannot be maintained when the application is backgrounded.
I do know for sure that early audio playback was specifically added in through the use of another chip in the Palm, because there was no other way to do it. And at least one AIM client a coworker used to use went through a proxy to keep the messages coming.
I'm aware that a lot of my issues have to do with this specific device, but the general WM5.0 issues don't. I'm curious to know what kind of battery life your device has. Without the phone component, I'm sure it's much higher than mine.
all of these gripes and you still keep your phone.. i'm going to bet its so you don't have to carry two devices around everywhere. which is understandable. i, on the other hand, have the best of both worlds and none of the griping.
Right now, the reason I'm keeping it is because I'm under contract.
In a year, who knows? I'm of two minds regarding total convergence. On the one hand, it's very nice not having to carry around two devices. On the other, carrying around two devices means twice(ish) the battery life, assuming I keep them both charged.
Ultimately, a PDA and phone, each with Bluetooth, would be great if both devices could connect to two other Bluetooth devices, but I'm not sure that I'll ever get past my WM5.0 gripes, which means I'd be stuck with the Palm platform. This platform has problems of its own, like a total lack of real multitasking (closing your SSH session just because you switch apps is really annoying).
But as another PPC6700 user, I'm going to have to agree. The phone does a lot--and I mean a lot. There are full-fledged web browsers for it (with Flash7, even, if you want it). Full IMAP clients. SSH clients. Etc. It comes with all the features you'd expect a PDA to have--calculator, datebook, contact list, etc. It even has Word, Powerpoint, and Excel, and as the GP mentioned, Terminal Services.
In most convergence devices, you expect them to do the job acceptably, though not outstandingly. The PPC6700 falls pretty short, here. It does these jobs miserably. The best I can say about it is the Netfront web browser (third-party and payware, to boot) does an awesome, albeit power-hungry job. The rest...meh.
For starters, the battery life is atrocious. This is partially a factor of CDMA, but the life of the T-Mo equivalent to this phone is also short. It's also slow (well, it seems less responsive than the Treo 650). None of this is helped by the fact that programs are left in memory after you "close" them. I quote "close" because, while using the similar X button style that Windows users have become quite accustomed to, the program is never really closed in this way. They are not only left in memory, but they are STILL ACTIVE (close the web browser before it is done rendering the page--then come back--it has finished). They've taken the common UI brainwashing and remapped its function to that of the _ (minimize). Programs left in memory are programs taking up battery life. It requires 6 clicks from the Today screen to close a program, with an additional two clicks per additional program closed, assuming you stay on the same screen.
But ok. Say you get used to this behavior and you accept it. So you start using your device, you have lots of programs open (read: lots of memory being eaten up) and you need to go back to a program you've already used--huh? It's no longer in memory. Why? Because the memory management closes old programs on a whim--or rather, when all the memory is exhausted and it needs more to open a program. It does this without asking. It won't be a problem if the program is written well enough to handle this, but let's face it, all programs aren't written well, and even if they were, it may be bloody annoying to have to regain whatever state you were in (re-navigating to webpages, opening files, etc).
Now these are things that are easily worked around--there are plenty of memory management add-ons. But what about the other things--the little things that make the experience either wonderful or horrible?
The contact list for dialing is grouped by letter. ABC is one button, DEF is another, etc. You have to press the button (which is tiny--very difficult to press with your thumb while holding the device with one hand) and then it only takes you to the first contact with that letter. Further presses of the same button jump to the next letter, but there's no good way to scroll through contacts whose names start with the same letter.
Speaking of calling someone, dialing out is a pain. The biggest problem is that the buttons are digital, on the touch screen. Touch screens are notorious for going out of sync, so even if you're dialing with your stylus (and who wants to do that?), you're bound to mess up a few numbers and have to correct. The obvious solution is to use contacts, but that is cumbersome, as I've pointed out before.
SSH is pretty good, though not default with the OS. I use PockeTTY, the newest version of which has soft-ctrl key support, which is essential for us screen addicts.
Oh. Activesync. My God, the horror. Activesync is the application on the device-side of the sync process. It does its job just fine--although for some reason it activates when it isn't needed. I'll leave my phone on the nightstand, all programs closed, and when I wake up in the morning, Activesync is running. It's trying to sync to nonexistent servers, has been doing so for hours, and has drained my battery
In a situation like this, you'd eventually see a complete turnover of traffic laws. Traffic analysts have shown that without speeders, congestion is unbelievable (or more accurately, if everyone is going the same speed, the congestion is terrible). Because so many people are willing to go the speed limit, and a few people drive below and above it, traffic flow is reasonable. Speeders only speed because there is a low chance of being caught.
With automatic tracking/ticketing of speeders, beyond the obvious problem of loaning your car to someone, you'll see the roads getting clogged constantly. Something will have to be done to alleviate the problem, and that something will either be having personal speed limits (you can drive faster if you pass a safety test), greater public transportation to reduce the cars on the road (I'm all for this--there's virtually none in my state), bigger roads (ug), or a reversal to manually tracked speeding.
But it's very hard to prove that they said that one thing. In this case, he recorded people saying it after the fact which might help his case, but is certainly not proof that he was quoted the lower rate before.
I've heard a lot of horror stories about electronic equipment service plans from major retailers--(where they make almost all of their profits on computers and such, and there is often a commission for the salesdrone for such sales). Lots of times, the customer will allege that the salesperson told him/her that the plan covers things which it doesn't, such as accidental abuse, etc. Having worked in that industry, I can say first-hand that some people will manipulate and lie to get that sale, because the commission off of it is substantial. They're counting on two things when they do it:
1) The plans are nearly worthless anyway--most electronics die either within the manufacturer's warranty or well outside the service plan's terms. One thing they never lie about is how long the plan is (of course, it's usually written in big bold print on the literature) 2) No one records what they tell the customer, so they're in the clear if the customer comes in to bitch about the lie.
The contract is clear, but these people lie to get the sale. There's no proof of the lie. The company (and salesdrone) get away with it.
Sadly, if you don't get it in writing, you can't really prove anything. Even a recording of the original call might help, but if their rates are posted anywhere in writing (or on his contract) he's basically never going to get the allegedly quoted price.
It is hilarious, though, that the CSRs don't know the difference between dollars and cents.
The problem is that you'll start doing more and more in Windows. Like you'll quit playing your game and want to go read a FAQ, so you open up IE. While you're there, you might as well check your e-mail. And there's no point in rebooting, because you'll want to play the game next time you use your computer, anyway.
Sooner or later, your bookmarks on Windows exceed the ones in Linux, and the time it takes to reboot seems like such a waste, and you eventually end up blowing your Linux partition away in favor of Windows, because you're in it all the time, anyway.
I've never read anything that implied this was the case for OEM/OTS versions. Got a citation?
B) dosen't need to re-validate on a regular basis and break if it doesn't
I haven't read anything about this, either, except for the typical WGA stuff. Is there any evidence that business customers don't have to run WGA stuff to apply updates?
C) doesn't throw a hissy fit if they do too many hardware upgrades, and,
I thought Microsoft caved on this one.
D) continues to work the way the product SHOULD work when they are actually legitimate customers, despite whatever bugs may exist in the validation software.
This one's a good point, but the validation is inherent in Vista. Nothing says the Business version might not freak out and think it needs to be activated with Microsoft (which, given that it will have a Business key, might not even be possible--I just don't know).
Anyway, legitimate users are probably better off playing by Microsoft's rules. They might get through a few patch cycles fine, but eventually Microsoft will release a patch that stops this behavior, and then they're going to have proglems.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation doesn't mention pressure or temperature.
Snopes ([url:http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp]) disagrees. As do a few other sites: [url:http://www.osmond-riba.org/lis/essay_mcdonald s.htm], [url:http://www.therationalradical.com/2005/01/mcd onalds-hot-coffee-lawsuit-facts.html], [url:http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=11070 89].
Some useful facts:
= the coffee was found to be 30-50 degrees hotter than normal, at a temperature which causes 3rd degree burns in seconds.
= there were hundreds of similar complaints that never saw court cases
= Stella wasn't driving, and the car wasn't moving (many of the complaints regarding this case are about how stupid it is to get coffee and try to manipulate it in those conditions)
= The QA manager testified that they knew the dangers of serving too-hot coffee, but they did it anyway.
Just some things to consider before jerking that knee.
Exactly. Good rootkits patch syscalls, not binary programs. This way, no matter what program does your directory listing, you'll never see the rootkit's hidden files. Only the rootkit's programs will have the key to making the syscalls work as normal.
Yeah, guess I got some terminology and features mixed up, sorry!
That said, there's zero chance (IMO) that Microsoft would add ZFS to Vista. They already dropped their transaction-based filesystem in order to get Vista out the door this decade. Adding ZFS support (much less using it as the default or recommended FS) would simply take too long, even if Apple had announced support a year ago.
Many clients will stop accepting data from clients if they receive "bad data", which is essentially what this would provide. I guess these features could be removed, but it seems a shame, as this prevents malicious users from corrupting everyone's downloads and wasting time/bandwidth.
Even "trackerless" torrents could do this if any one member was not behind a firewall and could be used as the initial relay. Once all the members of the torrent have made the udp "connections", they wouldn't all have to talk to the relay much.
The biggest problem is data reliability. With live streaming audio/video, missed packets aren't that big a deal--that is, it may suck to miss a piece of data, but you can't generally rewind the conversation, so you just ask the person to repeat himself if you missed enough to lose that part of the conversation. With p2p, you need the whole file, so you have to be capable of determining that you didn't miss anything.
Did I say Apple didn't do anticompetitive things? I must have missed that part in the post I wrote.
But with Apple, it is a little different. Apple sells a black box. They sell a computer. They also sell software upgrades to that computer. They do not sell an operating system.
Also, they are not a monopoly, and so they aren't held to the same standard that monopolies are.
It seems to boil down to this: Microsoft tries to compete by removing competition. They want to be the only choice so that, in the future, they can own the entire market and fuel their company, not on innovation, but on lack of choice.
This sort of practice is legal if you don't have a monopoly. Microsoft has/had a monopoly, thus their anticompetitive practices were considered predatory.
Even if the vendors were 50% to blame, they are not the monopoly, Microsoft is. Microsoft set up the deals such that if any vendor wanted to remain competitive, they had to take the deal. Didn't take the deal? Your Windows PCs (the ones 99% of people wanted, anyway) cost $100-$200 more.
Microsoft also did some nasty things with undocumented APIs to prevent Windows from running on non-Microsoft DOS versions. Through and through, they've been anticompetitive almost from the beginning.
The GP was unfortunately inspecific.
He should have said, "They don't sit around at night plotting to kill...IN THE NAME OF THEIR GOD."
And that is true, for the most part. There are individuals who do it, but collectively, as a group, Christians don't tend to these days. If they do it as a group, likely it isn't because they are Christian, or for God.
It asks you by default, and gives you the option to disable the feature when it does.
Actually, the registry does a lot more than that.
The registry allows sex offenders to be treated as outcasts for the rest of their lives. You see, people on the registry have to notify people--mostly local schools and other organizations that deal with children heavily--that they are moving in. Those organizations alert the neighborhoods, and everyone knows there's a sex offender nearby. Even if some people manage to miss the notifications, they can use free and easy online lookup services to find sex offenders in their neighborhood and shun them, even people who have completely paid their debt to society and are trying to build a new life for themselves.
The registry is there so that rapists can be punished for the rest of their lives without having the state pay for them in prison.
I think it's pretty awful. But then, we've got to think of the children.
640x480 may be crap for working in, but for video, it's just fine.
The vertical resolution is widely regarded to be the important resolution for quality. DVDs have 480i. Itunes is 480? (not sure if it's i or p). It makes sense given that it's not meant to be viewed on a screen which draws interlaced images.
The extra 80 pixels of horizontal resolution are really minimal. It all comes down to the encoding. I've seen properly encoded SVCDs that were indistinguishable from DVDs on a 27" TV. I've also seen SVCDs which were utter crap in comparison to broadcast TV. Bitrate and other encoding factors are almost as important as raw resolution.
I seem to recall that ripping groups were using about 175meg for 22min shows, 350meg for 44min shows, and 700-1400meg for movies awhile back. I have no idea what the resolution for these was.
I've had similar experiences to you, I guess.
My first Palm was a Palm IIIxe (yeah, one of the monochrome ones). It was great for what it does--keeping contact lists, reading eBooks/webpages (slurped into some offline reader), keeping my calendar, etc. I upgraded to a Tungsten T|2 and was more or less satisfied, though the multimedia capabilities were lacking. It could do Ogg/Mp3, which was good enough for me at the time.
Unfortunately, it died just after its warranty was up. Just wouldn't turn on all of a sudden. That kinda gave me a sour taste for Palm, and for PDAs in general, until a friend got me a used iPaq with Windows CE (2002 edition, I think). I thought the platform was pretty good, overall, and sometime later, I stepped up to the PPC6700.
I use the PDA much more now (and it is a different OS--WM5.0 compared to 2002), but I'm less pleased with it. I dunno.
I've heard that the Newton was a great device. If only Apple would release a PDA/Phone (yeah, I know the iPhone is coming--but seeing as it appears to be mostly an mp3/phone convergence device, I'm not getting my hopes up that it will be what I want).
I'd probably be ok with a good PDA, a good phone, and Bluetooth, but it just seems like there aren't any good PDAs out there. The Zaurus was something I'd been keeping my eye on for a long time, but frankly, I'd rather have something that works (and works well) right out of the box than something I have to seriously tinker with (hence many of my problems with the PPC6700). I enjoy tinkering and coding, but on these devices which are so essential to my life and my job, I'd rather not be playing guessing games.
I've heard that the AIM/MP3 playback abilities all used special hooks in the OS that won't work in the generic case. I honestly don't know the specifics, but ultimately, generic TCP connections apparently cannot be maintained when the application is backgrounded.
I do know for sure that early audio playback was specifically added in through the use of another chip in the Palm, because there was no other way to do it. And at least one AIM client a coworker used to use went through a proxy to keep the messages coming.
I'm aware that a lot of my issues have to do with this specific device, but the general WM5.0 issues don't. I'm curious to know what kind of battery life your device has. Without the phone component, I'm sure it's much higher than mine.
all of these gripes and you still keep your phone.. i'm going to bet its so you don't have to carry two devices around everywhere. which is understandable. i, on the other hand, have the best of both worlds and none of the griping.
Right now, the reason I'm keeping it is because I'm under contract.
In a year, who knows? I'm of two minds regarding total convergence. On the one hand, it's very nice not having to carry around two devices. On the other, carrying around two devices means twice(ish) the battery life, assuming I keep them both charged.
Ultimately, a PDA and phone, each with Bluetooth, would be great if both devices could connect to two other Bluetooth devices, but I'm not sure that I'll ever get past my WM5.0 gripes, which means I'd be stuck with the Palm platform. This platform has problems of its own, like a total lack of real multitasking (closing your SSH session just because you switch apps is really annoying).
Low UIDs don't mean much.
But as another PPC6700 user, I'm going to have to agree. The phone does a lot--and I mean a lot. There are full-fledged web browsers for it (with Flash7, even, if you want it). Full IMAP clients. SSH clients. Etc. It comes with all the features you'd expect a PDA to have--calculator, datebook, contact list, etc. It even has Word, Powerpoint, and Excel, and as the GP mentioned, Terminal Services.
In most convergence devices, you expect them to do the job acceptably, though not outstandingly. The PPC6700 falls pretty short, here. It does these jobs miserably. The best I can say about it is the Netfront web browser (third-party and payware, to boot) does an awesome, albeit power-hungry job. The rest...meh.
For starters, the battery life is atrocious. This is partially a factor of CDMA, but the life of the T-Mo equivalent to this phone is also short. It's also slow (well, it seems less responsive than the Treo 650). None of this is helped by the fact that programs are left in memory after you "close" them. I quote "close" because, while using the similar X button style that Windows users have become quite accustomed to, the program is never really closed in this way. They are not only left in memory, but they are STILL ACTIVE (close the web browser before it is done rendering the page--then come back--it has finished). They've taken the common UI brainwashing and remapped its function to that of the _ (minimize). Programs left in memory are programs taking up battery life. It requires 6 clicks from the Today screen to close a program, with an additional two clicks per additional program closed, assuming you stay on the same screen.
But ok. Say you get used to this behavior and you accept it. So you start using your device, you have lots of programs open (read: lots of memory being eaten up) and you need to go back to a program you've already used--huh? It's no longer in memory. Why? Because the memory management closes old programs on a whim--or rather, when all the memory is exhausted and it needs more to open a program. It does this without asking. It won't be a problem if the program is written well enough to handle this, but let's face it, all programs aren't written well, and even if they were, it may be bloody annoying to have to regain whatever state you were in (re-navigating to webpages, opening files, etc).
Now these are things that are easily worked around--there are plenty of memory management add-ons. But what about the other things--the little things that make the experience either wonderful or horrible?
The contact list for dialing is grouped by letter. ABC is one button, DEF is another, etc. You have to press the button (which is tiny--very difficult to press with your thumb while holding the device with one hand) and then it only takes you to the first contact with that letter. Further presses of the same button jump to the next letter, but there's no good way to scroll through contacts whose names start with the same letter.
Speaking of calling someone, dialing out is a pain. The biggest problem is that the buttons are digital, on the touch screen. Touch screens are notorious for going out of sync, so even if you're dialing with your stylus (and who wants to do that?), you're bound to mess up a few numbers and have to correct. The obvious solution is to use contacts, but that is cumbersome, as I've pointed out before.
SSH is pretty good, though not default with the OS. I use PockeTTY, the newest version of which has soft-ctrl key support, which is essential for us screen addicts.
Oh. Activesync. My God, the horror. Activesync is the application on the device-side of the sync process. It does its job just fine--although for some reason it activates when it isn't needed. I'll leave my phone on the nightstand, all programs closed, and when I wake up in the morning, Activesync is running. It's trying to sync to nonexistent servers, has been doing so for hours, and has drained my battery
I live in a medium-sized city with virtually no public transport... neither walking nor our pitiful public transport is feasible for me.
In a situation like this, you'd eventually see a complete turnover of traffic laws. Traffic analysts have shown that without speeders, congestion is unbelievable (or more accurately, if everyone is going the same speed, the congestion is terrible). Because so many people are willing to go the speed limit, and a few people drive below and above it, traffic flow is reasonable. Speeders only speed because there is a low chance of being caught.
With automatic tracking/ticketing of speeders, beyond the obvious problem of loaning your car to someone, you'll see the roads getting clogged constantly. Something will have to be done to alleviate the problem, and that something will either be having personal speed limits (you can drive faster if you pass a safety test), greater public transportation to reduce the cars on the road (I'm all for this--there's virtually none in my state), bigger roads (ug), or a reversal to manually tracked speeding.
But it's very hard to prove that they said that one thing. In this case, he recorded people saying it after the fact which might help his case, but is certainly not proof that he was quoted the lower rate before.
I've heard a lot of horror stories about electronic equipment service plans from major retailers--(where they make almost all of their profits on computers and such, and there is often a commission for the salesdrone for such sales). Lots of times, the customer will allege that the salesperson told him/her that the plan covers things which it doesn't, such as accidental abuse, etc. Having worked in that industry, I can say first-hand that some people will manipulate and lie to get that sale, because the commission off of it is substantial. They're counting on two things when they do it:
1) The plans are nearly worthless anyway--most electronics die either within the manufacturer's warranty or well outside the service plan's terms. One thing they never lie about is how long the plan is (of course, it's usually written in big bold print on the literature)
2) No one records what they tell the customer, so they're in the clear if the customer comes in to bitch about the lie.
The contract is clear, but these people lie to get the sale. There's no proof of the lie. The company (and salesdrone) get away with it.
Sadly, if you don't get it in writing, you can't really prove anything. Even a recording of the original call might help, but if their rates are posted anywhere in writing (or on his contract) he's basically never going to get the allegedly quoted price.
It is hilarious, though, that the CSRs don't know the difference between dollars and cents.
The problem is that you'll start doing more and more in Windows. Like you'll quit playing your game and want to go read a FAQ, so you open up IE. While you're there, you might as well check your e-mail. And there's no point in rebooting, because you'll want to play the game next time you use your computer, anyway.
Sooner or later, your bookmarks on Windows exceed the ones in Linux, and the time it takes to reboot seems like such a waste, and you eventually end up blowing your Linux partition away in favor of Windows, because you're in it all the time, anyway.
A) doesn't phone home to MS on a regular basis
I've never read anything that implied this was the case for OEM/OTS versions. Got a citation?
B) dosen't need to re-validate on a regular basis and break if it doesn't
I haven't read anything about this, either, except for the typical WGA stuff. Is there any evidence that business customers don't have to run WGA stuff to apply updates?
C) doesn't throw a hissy fit if they do too many hardware upgrades, and,
I thought Microsoft caved on this one.
D) continues to work the way the product SHOULD work when they are actually legitimate customers, despite whatever bugs may exist in the validation software.
This one's a good point, but the validation is inherent in Vista. Nothing says the Business version might not freak out and think it needs to be activated with Microsoft (which, given that it will have a Business key, might not even be possible--I just don't know).
Anyway, legitimate users are probably better off playing by Microsoft's rules. They might get through a few patch cycles fine, but eventually Microsoft will release a patch that stops this behavior, and then they're going to have proglems.