If there was a viable business plan here, plenty of private investors would be lining up. The trouble is, there isn't.
I get the impression that you seem to think that Tesla asking the government for a loan means that they can't acquire funding in any other way.
It occurs to me that Tesla's issue is not money but rather the cost of that money. Certainly accepting money from private investors would require a loss of control/equity in the company. Or without the equity, having to repay far to much in interest.
The government loan option must appear to be pretty fantastic... Low interest rate loan and no loss of equity or control of the company.
If the government loan falls through and Tesla needs to raise more money, they will. I've no doubts that can get just about all the money they want, it's just the cost of doing so.
It's unfortunate they aren't publicly traded. I'd like to buy there stock... For a purely speculative gamble.
Seriously. Kids dvds are the worst at that. Lots of previews that you can't skip etc etc. I purchased a AppleTV hooked it up and now rip all of my dvd's. I had 2 motivating factors for doing this. Motivating factor number 1 was to keep physical media away from the (then 2.5yrs old) kid's hands. The other and the true motivating factor was the pain I'd have to go through to setup a kid's movie for my daughter to watch.
Not sure I agree with you when it comes to MMO's. I play WoW, simply because I enjoy MMO's and WoW happens to be the best/most entertaining right now.
As soon as something better comes along I'll switch. I want to switch. I'm dying to switch. I just want a new experience. I quit WoW once, before the BC. I played Eve Online for almost a year. Eve has some great qualities that are currently unmatched in any other game I've played. I quit Eve over the developer scandal among other reasons. Server populations really had nothing to do with my decision. It doesn't take very many people to make a MMO fun and/or active.
Eve has no where near the subscriber base as WoW yet the online community is much much larger. I don't know where it's at anymore but Eve regularly had 25-30k players online playing in the same universe as me. I don't know the numbers anymore but WoW had a 4 or 6k online player limit per server with only half of those being available to communicate/group with (horde/alliance.)
So I don't see it as new users want to go where the people are, it's that they want to go where the most compeling entertainment is. And for the moment, that is WoW.
I'm a WoW player. I don't like Warden, their rootkit. With that said, I don't care enough at this point to not play it because of it.
The simple truth is that most people who play WoW are like me. They just don't care enough. Hypocrisy is par for the course here at the Slash. The ones bitching the loudest are also probably the ones that will continue to play anyway. They can shout all day about how *you* should cancel your account and how incensed they are but when it comes down to it, they'll still pay to be mistreated.
The currency of democracies is the vote (it's supposed to be anyway.) You attempt to make changes to the government by complaining. Then you get others to complain. Then you threaten to use your vote. Finally you actually use your vote. In business, though the currency is money, the process is the same.
I find it irritating to see posts that read something like "If you don't like it, leave." If you like/want/need something the answer is not to short-circuit the above process and go straight for the kill. You go through the process to attempt to get what you want with the hope that things can be settled amicably.
I will concede complaining will probably not help your cause with Blizzard, unless it on a massive scale. Though I just don't see it happening. Irritating as it is I do understand the cut to the chase comments.
As a related anecdote. My new car came with XM, 3 free months. My free service ended in the middle of the Opie and Anthony hubbub. (they said something rude about Condi Rice or something) They were suspended for a month IIRC. In anycase I totally did not approve of their suspension. Part of the entire point of being on sat radio is that you're free to express your opinions using whatever level of crassness you want. If you cross the line to many times, the listeners will turn you off, and then the producers will. I've only attempted to listen to Opie and Anthony once or twice, I found them to be lame. With that said I was offended (as a listener) about the way that XM handled that situation. Though I generally enjoyed XM, I was on the fence about the service (I wasn't sure it was good enough to pay for.) The Opie and Anthony thing made up my mind.
When it came time to pay up or shut it off, I shut it off. XM goes all nutty when you leave their service, they start calling and mailing constantly for a couple of months with better offers and such to get you to stay. When I made my decision that I wasn't willing to pay anything for XM, I called up and canceled. The service rep asked why and I said because of how O&A was handled. The response? "Well, it's only for a month and they'll be back on the air." My response? "I don't approve, and I'm canceling." Regardless of the O&A thing, I wasn't keeping XM anyway, just wasn't worth it. Since I was leaving, I wanted them to believe I was leaving because of O&A, the hope is that others did what I did and management will think long and hard the next time a situation like this arises.
I guess my point, if your WoW subscription is expiring and you're not renewing, tell them it's because of Warden.
Thanks for that. I've been considering creating a dummy file with the icon I want... But when it comes down to it, though I hate it, I just doesn't impact me enough (on a day to day basis) to bother.
I've installed Leopard on three Apple machine (Mac Pro, G5 Power Mac, G5 iMac) so far with zero problems. I still have a G4 iMac and a G4 Mac mini to go, just been to lazy.
My general opinion is that Leopard is by far and away the best OS from Apple so far. The only installation problems I've read about had to do with people who were using APE. http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9806005-37.html Just out of habit I always do a fresh install so I typically never get bit by these types of issues.
As far as speed/performance is concerned, I found Leopard to *feel* considerably faster on all my machines so far. Whether or not it actually is faster or if Apple is just using tricks to alter my perception, I don't know... But I do know that my perception is that it feels quite a bit faster. When I first installed Leopard on my Mac Pro I was initially very concerned, every time I tried to do something (or doing nothing) my HD would grind away and the system was definitely a lot slower than Tiger. That turned out to just be Spotlight doing it's initial indexing. After an hour or so (I didn't pay attention) the initial index completed and all was well.
Is there room for improvement in Leopard, absolutely. But that whole notion is simply a understood reality, there's always room for improvement. IMHO Leopard is a bigtime improvement to Tiger, and it appears that you're relatively happy with Tiger.
One of the many improvements which is worth the price of admission for me (as dumb as it may be to begin with) connecting to different network devices now happens on a separate thread. Long story short If you're connected to another computer and that computer goes away your machine no longer hangs and becomes unusable while it tries to find it's missing connection.
I've read reviews, and tend to agree that people don't like the transparent menu system or the new 3D Dock. Neither of these things bother me much. In fact I really like the look of the new dock, but that's because I always have mine on the left side of the screen and it won't display in the 3d style with that configuration.
One of the things I both love and hate are Stacks. I really like how Stacks functions. Stacks basically does exactly what I used to do manually but makes it better and more automated. What I hate (and I can't stress this enough) about stacks is that the icon it uses to represent the folder is dynamic. This really lame when you have an applications folder and the icon for the applications folder is AddressBook since it's the first app in the folder (alphabetically.) With a wink and a nudge from a Apple authority I've been lead to believe that Apple is going to change this behavior with a update.
All in all I prefer Leopard to Tiger and I fully recommend the upgrade.
"Phatpod iPod Nano - Like your sleek device for workouts? Too bad, go get a Shuffle - BONED"
It's still damn small, not sure it's much to complain about.
"$.99 ringtone on top of $.99 to buy the song (certain songs only)- BONED"
Yeah, I think it's totally lame. With that said, it offers something that wasn't offered before. Nothing has been lost, an addtional choice has been gained. Lame as the choice is some people will like it, the rest can freely ignore it.
"Starbucks "integration" - now my iPhone will spend a few extra seconds every time I hook up to a Wifi access point looking for coffee music - BONED"
Way to display your bias. You, along with myself, have no idea how the service works yet. Obviously it's going to check, but is it totally passive? Can you turn off the service/check? Who knows, but I doubt it will create a negative user experiance.
"We managed to fit really nice HDs in iPods, but not the new Touch iPod - but you get a few millimeters back - BONED"
They managed to take the phone out of the iPhone and give us double the storage. - BONUS It's all in how you look at it. Like ring tones, it's a new choice, maybe not the best one, but it doesn't take away from anything else.
"$599 to $399 price drop in 2 months - EXTREMELY BONED"
Wait a minute, who are you talking about? Who's boned? Is it Apple because of the perceived need to drop the price so quickly? I'm sure Apple and ATT will be happy to be "EXTREMELY BONED" all the way to the bank.
Or are you talking about the earlier adopters who paid an extra 2 months because they couldn't wait a few months? That's the price of being a early adopter.
The only negative I see about the price drop is the drop in Apple's margins. Beyond that I think it's a win for everybody.
"iTunes Store wireless - kind of cool. Wish they'd do the same thing with TV shows in music (that's what I'd be inclined to buy in an airport somewhere)"
Yeah, that'd be nice.
"All in all, a particularly boneworthy afternoon."
All in all, a particularly postive afternoon, though nothing earth shattering.
Dude, I'm totally with you. When the t20 scandal first hit, while I thought it to be pretty serious, I mostly ignored it. I figured "eh, this doesn't affect me much, I don't really care." Since that time there has been a serious propaganda war. I have no idea what's true and what isn't, all I can do is try to interpret the end results with what I hear.
Bottom line, I feel that CCP favors BoB both directly and indirectly. With BoB's success, even if it was by far and away legitimate, I dont feel that it is. Ultimately (even if it isn't true) I believe that BoB "cheats" and that CCP allows it by assisting or turning a blind eye.
With that said, I've simply lost all the enjoyment I used to get from playing Eve. I've lost trust and faith in CCP. I have 2 accounts, unfortunately I paid for a year (on both) in advance. So I've got about 4 more months or so before those accounts expire. Because of how CCP handled t20 and because BoB's success I'm leaving the game and I wont be renewing my subscription. Though it's a small victory for BoB, though truth of the matter is that me (not me, but anybody really) leaving Eve is the absolute worst outcome possible for everybody involved.
In the last month I've played a lot of Titan Quest. It's a good, mindless, hack n slash, Diablo 2 clone. I also picked up City of Heroes/Villians over the weekend, I had heard good things about it. I really gave CoH/V a best effort, but I just couldn't get into it. In fact I've already canceled my account, within my first free month of play, and within 5 days I buying the game. Maybe I quit to soon, nothing about the game particularly excited me or "hooked" me and I couldn't see anything about the game that would (though I wanted to.)
In a bout of perfect timing Blizzard mailed a dvd containing both WoW and WoW BC and a 10 day free trial yesterday. I quit playing WoW about a year ago, simply got burned out and tired of all the kiddies. Which is one refreshing thing about Eve, the player base in Eve (in general) plays at a much higher maturity level. So anyways I installed BC and started playing. I ended the night by signing up for 6 months and the promise to my wife that I'll play WoW casually and not join any large raiding guilds.:)
There's really no other mmo I'm interested in atm, but I really want there to be one.
No, it was argued that MP3.com was guilty of "Making mechanical copies for commercial use without permission from the copyright owner (taken from wikipedia.)" And it was ruled that way. The court didn't rule Fair Use wasn't a defense, they essentially ruled it wasn't Fair Use.
I agree(d) with the courts decision, though I don't like it. MP3.com was using another companies product for commercial use, lost the argument that they were simply facilitating personal use. Bottom line, a for profit company was commercially using a product which they did not purchase a commercial license for.
I don't agree with the courts decision regarding Image City, though technically correct. In the US this could probably be covered via a common carrier argument. It's surprising to me that Japan doesn't have some sort of provision like this. Or maybe it wasn't argued well.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post. I don't think that this is the solution I'm looking for though. Or is it possibly to install a Matroska codec for quicktime, but more to the point, will this work with Apple TV? I suspect the answer is no.
I wasn't totally clear with my previous statement. I can get 5.1 audio into a.mov wrapper by transcoding the AC3 to multichannel AAC. So no real issue there, but it's not what I want.:) I've even muxed AC3 with h.264 video into a avi wrapper. I believe (I can't remember exactly what I did now) I've also created a.mp4 file using h.264 with AC3 audio that worked, but I had to use VLC. It's the combining of AC3 and h.264 into a.mov wrapper that's given me fits. The.mov wrapper is important to me as I'm attempting to use Quicktime as my media playback solution.
The idea behind this all is to setup a media center that's plugged into my HDTV. With Apple TV all of my problems are solved, sorta. Network connectivty, remote control, and audio/video connectivity are taken care of. The remaining problem has always been my largest problem, 5.1 audio.
So my issue with Apple TV is this. How am I going to create content that the Apple TV will be able to handle? The trick is that the file that Apple TV works with must output 5.1 audio to my receiver to process via the optical port.
Apple TV is almost a product I would buy. Actually I don't have any particular problem with the Apple TV product itself.
But as far as I am concerned there is a single fatal flaw. I don't know how rip a dvd into h.264/quicktime container and retain 5.1 audio. I wont buy any of product like this now, but as soon as I can solve this audio problem I will. Maybe it's already been solved and somebody can point me to some documentation.:)
I've been playing since early October, so you gave it a try before I got around to it. For what it's worth, there have been a few issues here and there with the new Revelations patch, however they seem to get fixed or mitigated pretty quickly.
I can't speak to what you experienced in October, but Eve seems relatively solid now. There are the occasional issues... The worst of which kept me out of the game for about an hour.
Hrm. I saw the message about the optional patch. I briefly read the description, determined I didn't have the problem and didn't install the patch. I'll look at it more closely again tonight though. I fit both possible problem vectors running a dual CPU with dual cores machine. So far I haven't experienced any signficant, re-occuring problems to speak of yet.
All in all, (with Jita being the lag hell) I find Eve to be a pretty stable game.
Washing detergent that's "new and improved" is not meant to necessarily to "sell" the consumer on the product. Though it's an added bonus.
Companies that produce the staples, soap, razors, etc... Have to play games with their products to keep their prices reasonable (profitable.) For example, Walmart expect that you will lower the price of your product by x percentage every six months to a year. And with Walmart, you will, or they will drop your product and go with a company that will reduce their prices. Which is one of the ways Walmart destroy's companies, but that's a different topic.
So to skirt the Walmart price lowing policy, you simply come out with a new product. Just look at razors and razor blades they are the great example.
Nope, I don't know what happened to Tank Man. That's what spawned my initial reply, apparently I am supposed to know.
From my prior reading one of the things I remembered is that all of the statements about what happened to Tank Man conflicted with each other, or the statements themselves were marked as possibly inaccurate. So anybody who makes a claim about what happened to Tank Man I immediately question where they get their facts and what their agenda is. Jurri didn't make a specific claim about what happened to Tank Man, he cleverly left it up to the reader to fill in the blank for him. But like I mentioned in a different post, I don't know jurri and I don't know his intent, it just came across as a very misleading thing to say.
I did not ask why nothing bad happened. In fact I didn't suggest either way, though I did suggest nobody "knew" if anything bad happened afterward. Have you seen the footage (in reference to how far away that camera appeared to be?) Do you really believe that nothing bad happened because of the camera? You believe and expect others to believe that the tank driver had full knowledge that there was a camera filming them? More than that you believe that armed with this knowledge the tank driver elected to not run him over because of that? Especially after what they (the tank drivers) did the evening before?
I happen to give that tank driver more credit than he possibly deserves. I happen to believe that that tank driver was more human and less robotic than the previous evening's tank drivers and did not run the guy over because he knew, in his heart I suppose, it was the wrong thing to do. Of course I could be completely wrong and their may be some completely callous reason for him not getting run over (like bad press.) But like I said, maybe I give the driver more credit than is deserves. The way I see it, I applaud that tank driver as he was probably going against his orders. The Tank Man incident showed 2 things in my eyes. First it showed how brave the student was to stand up to his government. Second it showed that not *everybody*, including people doing their "jobs" were willing to take an innocents life. That tank driver, in his own small way, also stood up to his government. In some respects, that entire incident gave me hope.
What started out as me asking? What? What am I, the reader, supposed to know? As if something really bad happened to the guy (right then)... As if the "fill in the blank" was then he got run over. Has turned into something more like; lets ignore doughrama's entire point and simply continue to point out how horrible the Chinese governement is to it's own people.
To be clear. There is no arguement from me that the Chinese government has and is capable of being very bad. But that's not my point.
Not a single person has even attempted, especially the author jurri (who hasn't bothered with a response at all), to explain what I am supposed to know. And the reason for that is simply because jurri's post was something people want to believe. "See the Chinese goverment is so bad, that when their public gets exposed to reality they are outraged... As they should be."
I have no idea whether or not jurri is telling the truth, though I tend think that it is very possible that he is entirely full of shit. He played on everybody's emotions and got modded +5 for the effort.
I'd like to believe that his account is true, I liked it. But I don't believe it simply because he also has led me, the (supposedly) uninformed reader, that something really bad happened to the Tank Man... With a line like "and then... well you know."
Come to think of it, I'm surprised I haven't been modded all to hell considering that I question the validity of a "story" that people like.
I don't mean this to come acress poorly but WTF? Where did this come from?
This is not some philosophical "If a tree falls and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" position I've taken. I've not taken the position of if I'm not "absolutely sure" then maybe it didn't happen. It's entirely reasonable and in my opinion prudent to take a skeptical look and anybody who says that they "know" what happened to tank man.
Why? Because nobody knows specifically what happened to Tank Man. Hell, even his name is not known for sure. According to the Wikipedia article a British tabloid claims to know his name, but even Wikipedia says that that claim is "dubious."
But this is all besides the point. The entire point of original post was to get clarification on what the jurri meant when he said:
"As it was going on they showed the protest in Tienamen square and the student confronting the tank and then being... well you know."
"and then being... well you know." WHAT? Moved out of the way? That certainly is not nearly as exciting as what my brain would have come up with had I not already been familiar with the situation.
Yeah I've read that wikipedia entry. From what I've gathered nobody knows for sure who the student was or what actually happened afterward. Though several different sources claim to know, their facts conflict with each other. So anybody who claims to have factual details about what happened to the guy after he was pulled from the tanks should be looked upon with a bit of skepticism. Not saying they are wrong, just saying that they may not be right.
However I was more getting to the idea, that it seemed as though the parent left out what happened as to imply that the protestor was run over or shot. I mean, that would be the obvious conclusion if you didn't actually know the situation based on the authors tone and wording. At least it was my obvious conclusion. Which is why I've asked for further explanation. Is there as different student stopping tanks that he's talking about? Is the author intentionally trying to deceive by careful word choice and leaving out crucial bits of information? Is it me, did I totally walk away with the wrong impression? etc.
I never said that if you spoke poorly of Apple that you were an idiot. Trying to bolster your arguement my intentially mis-interpreting my comment is pretty shitty.
My comment about idiocy had nothing to do with Apple. Rather it had all to do with your extremely shallow reasoning.
There's nothing inherently wrong with liking the Zune. Having more features than an iPod is certianly a valid reason, supporting more formats is one too. A more intuitive interface is very subjective, if you prefer Zune's or iRiver's or whoever's interface better than the iPod, that's cool. Placing a high value on a consumer electronic purely because it's different, just because it's not X, is idiotic. Plain and simple.
There is nothing cool about "trying" to be different. If you have to try, then you're still a sheep, you just run with a different flock.
"Er... no. A burglar is tried because there's enough evidence that they may have broken the law. I'd like to think that 'innocent until proven guilty' still applies in this country."
Er... no. A burglar by definition has broken the law. Now a suspected burglar is a different story.
Your assertion that buying is cheaper than renting, in context, is wrong. I attempted to bait you (rather blatently) into making something up. Instead of making up a reason for high rental rates and low buy rates, you avoided the question altogether. Instead you decided to explain the rental business to me.
Your initial idea was that buying is cheaper than renting in your market. You back this up by saying that your mortgage is only a $1000/m while renting a smiliar house would be $2000/m. This implies that you can purchase equal housing for a lower mortgage payment than renting it would be. There is simply no way that this is true. There are lots of reasons why your home's mortgage may be significantly lower then average rental rates. None of them have any impact on a prospective home owner/renter (again, in context.) At any given time monthly rental rates will trail monthly mortgage payments when making an equal comparison. You did not make an equal comparison. You compared cost of today's rents, which comes from valuations of today's homes, to the cost of homes 3 years ago. A lot can happen in 3 years.
The bottom line is about time. Over the short term renting will be cheaper than buying... Over the long term (barring something highly unusual) buying will not only be cheaper but profitable.
Sounds like you have a pretty sweet setup, in regards to your living arrangements. Can you please explain why it is that renting is more expensive than buying where you live?
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If there was a viable business plan here, plenty of private investors would be lining up. The trouble is, there isn't.
I get the impression that you seem to think that Tesla asking the government for a loan means that they can't acquire funding in any other way.
It occurs to me that Tesla's issue is not money but rather the cost of that money. Certainly accepting money from private investors would require a loss of control/equity in the company. Or without the equity, having to repay far to much in interest.
The government loan option must appear to be pretty fantastic... Low interest rate loan and no loss of equity or control of the company.
If the government loan falls through and Tesla needs to raise more money, they will. I've no doubts that can get just about all the money they want, it's just the cost of doing so.
It's unfortunate they aren't publicly traded. I'd like to buy there stock... For a purely speculative gamble.
Seriously. Kids dvds are the worst at that. Lots of previews that you can't skip etc etc. I purchased a AppleTV hooked it up and now rip all of my dvd's. I had 2 motivating factors for doing this. Motivating factor number 1 was to keep physical media away from the (then 2.5yrs old) kid's hands. The other and the true motivating factor was the pain I'd have to go through to setup a kid's movie for my daughter to watch.
Not sure I agree with you when it comes to MMO's. I play WoW, simply because I enjoy MMO's and WoW happens to be the best/most entertaining right now.
As soon as something better comes along I'll switch. I want to switch. I'm dying to switch. I just want a new experience. I quit WoW once, before the BC. I played Eve Online for almost a year. Eve has some great qualities that are currently unmatched in any other game I've played. I quit Eve over the developer scandal among other reasons. Server populations really had nothing to do with my decision. It doesn't take very many people to make a MMO fun and/or active.
Eve has no where near the subscriber base as WoW yet the online community is much much larger. I don't know where it's at anymore but Eve regularly had 25-30k players online playing in the same universe as me. I don't know the numbers anymore but WoW had a 4 or 6k online player limit per server with only half of those being available to communicate/group with (horde/alliance.)
So I don't see it as new users want to go where the people are, it's that they want to go where the most compeling entertainment is. And for the moment, that is WoW.
I'm a WoW player. I don't like Warden, their rootkit. With that said, I don't care enough at this point to not play it because of it.
The simple truth is that most people who play WoW are like me. They just don't care enough. Hypocrisy is par for the course here at the Slash. The ones bitching the loudest are also probably the ones that will continue to play anyway. They can shout all day about how *you* should cancel your account and how incensed they are but when it comes down to it, they'll still pay to be mistreated.
The currency of democracies is the vote (it's supposed to be anyway.) You attempt to make changes to the government by complaining. Then you get others to complain. Then you threaten to use your vote. Finally you actually use your vote. In business, though the currency is money, the process is the same.
I find it irritating to see posts that read something like "If you don't like it, leave." If you like/want/need something the answer is not to short-circuit the above process and go straight for the kill. You go through the process to attempt to get what you want with the hope that things can be settled amicably.
I will concede complaining will probably not help your cause with Blizzard, unless it on a massive scale. Though I just don't see it happening. Irritating as it is I do understand the cut to the chase comments.
As a related anecdote. My new car came with XM, 3 free months. My free service ended in the middle of the Opie and Anthony hubbub. (they said something rude about Condi Rice or something) They were suspended for a month IIRC. In anycase I totally did not approve of their suspension. Part of the entire point of being on sat radio is that you're free to express your opinions using whatever level of crassness you want. If you cross the line to many times, the listeners will turn you off, and then the producers will. I've only attempted to listen to Opie and Anthony once or twice, I found them to be lame. With that said I was offended (as a listener) about the way that XM handled that situation. Though I generally enjoyed XM, I was on the fence about the service (I wasn't sure it was good enough to pay for.) The Opie and Anthony thing made up my mind.
When it came time to pay up or shut it off, I shut it off. XM goes all nutty when you leave their service, they start calling and mailing constantly for a couple of months with better offers and such to get you to stay. When I made my decision that I wasn't willing to pay anything for XM, I called up and canceled. The service rep asked why and I said because of how O&A was handled. The response? "Well, it's only for a month and they'll be back on the air." My response? "I don't approve, and I'm canceling." Regardless of the O&A thing, I wasn't keeping XM anyway, just wasn't worth it. Since I was leaving, I wanted them to believe I was leaving because of O&A, the hope is that others did what I did and management will think long and hard the next time a situation like this arises.
I guess my point, if your WoW subscription is expiring and you're not renewing, tell them it's because of Warden.
Thanks for that. I've been considering creating a dummy file with the icon I want... But when it comes down to it, though I hate it, I just doesn't impact me enough (on a day to day basis) to bother.
I've installed Leopard on three Apple machine (Mac Pro, G5 Power Mac, G5 iMac) so far with zero problems. I still have a G4 iMac and a G4 Mac mini to go, just been to lazy.
My general opinion is that Leopard is by far and away the best OS from Apple so far. The only installation problems I've read about had to do with people who were using APE. http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9806005-37.html Just out of habit I always do a fresh install so I typically never get bit by these types of issues.
As far as speed/performance is concerned, I found Leopard to *feel* considerably faster on all my machines so far. Whether or not it actually is faster or if Apple is just using tricks to alter my perception, I don't know... But I do know that my perception is that it feels quite a bit faster. When I first installed Leopard on my Mac Pro I was initially very concerned, every time I tried to do something (or doing nothing) my HD would grind away and the system was definitely a lot slower than Tiger. That turned out to just be Spotlight doing it's initial indexing. After an hour or so (I didn't pay attention) the initial index completed and all was well.
Is there room for improvement in Leopard, absolutely. But that whole notion is simply a understood reality, there's always room for improvement. IMHO Leopard is a bigtime improvement to Tiger, and it appears that you're relatively happy with Tiger.
One of the many improvements which is worth the price of admission for me (as dumb as it may be to begin with) connecting to different network devices now happens on a separate thread. Long story short If you're connected to another computer and that computer goes away your machine no longer hangs and becomes unusable while it tries to find it's missing connection.
I've read reviews, and tend to agree that people don't like the transparent menu system or the new 3D Dock. Neither of these things bother me much. In fact I really like the look of the new dock, but that's because I always have mine on the left side of the screen and it won't display in the 3d style with that configuration.
One of the things I both love and hate are Stacks. I really like how Stacks functions. Stacks basically does exactly what I used to do manually but makes it better and more automated. What I hate (and I can't stress this enough) about stacks is that the icon it uses to represent the folder is dynamic. This really lame when you have an applications folder and the icon for the applications folder is AddressBook since it's the first app in the folder (alphabetically.) With a wink and a nudge from a Apple authority I've been lead to believe that Apple is going to change this behavior with a update.
All in all I prefer Leopard to Tiger and I fully recommend the upgrade.
"Phatpod iPod Nano - Like your sleek device for workouts? Too bad, go get a Shuffle - BONED"
It's still damn small, not sure it's much to complain about.
"$.99 ringtone on top of $.99 to buy the song (certain songs only)- BONED"
Yeah, I think it's totally lame. With that said, it offers something that wasn't offered before. Nothing has been lost, an addtional choice has been gained. Lame as the choice is some people will like it, the rest can freely ignore it.
"Starbucks "integration" - now my iPhone will spend a few extra seconds every time I hook up to a Wifi access point looking for coffee music - BONED"
Way to display your bias. You, along with myself, have no idea how the service works yet. Obviously it's going to check, but is it totally passive? Can you turn off the service/check? Who knows, but I doubt it will create a negative user experiance.
"We managed to fit really nice HDs in iPods, but not the new Touch iPod - but you get a few millimeters back - BONED"
They managed to take the phone out of the iPhone and give us double the storage. - BONUS It's all in how you look at it. Like ring tones, it's a new choice, maybe not the best one, but it doesn't take away from anything else.
"$599 to $399 price drop in 2 months - EXTREMELY BONED"
Wait a minute, who are you talking about? Who's boned? Is it Apple because of the perceived need to drop the price so quickly? I'm sure Apple and ATT will be happy to be "EXTREMELY BONED" all the way to the bank.
Or are you talking about the earlier adopters who paid an extra 2 months because they couldn't wait a few months? That's the price of being a early adopter.
The only negative I see about the price drop is the drop in Apple's margins. Beyond that I think it's a win for everybody.
"iTunes Store wireless - kind of cool. Wish they'd do the same thing with TV shows in music (that's what I'd be inclined to buy in an airport somewhere)"
Yeah, that'd be nice.
"All in all, a particularly boneworthy afternoon."
All in all, a particularly postive afternoon, though nothing earth shattering.
Dude, I'm totally with you. When the t20 scandal first hit, while I thought it to be pretty serious, I mostly ignored it. I figured "eh, this doesn't affect me much, I don't really care." Since that time there has been a serious propaganda war. I have no idea what's true and what isn't, all I can do is try to interpret the end results with what I hear.
:)
Bottom line, I feel that CCP favors BoB both directly and indirectly. With BoB's success, even if it was by far and away legitimate, I dont feel that it is. Ultimately (even if it isn't true) I believe that BoB "cheats" and that CCP allows it by assisting or turning a blind eye.
With that said, I've simply lost all the enjoyment I used to get from playing Eve. I've lost trust and faith in CCP. I have 2 accounts, unfortunately I paid for a year (on both) in advance. So I've got about 4 more months or so before those accounts expire. Because of how CCP handled t20 and because BoB's success I'm leaving the game and I wont be renewing my subscription. Though it's a small victory for BoB, though truth of the matter is that me (not me, but anybody really) leaving Eve is the absolute worst outcome possible for everybody involved.
In the last month I've played a lot of Titan Quest. It's a good, mindless, hack n slash, Diablo 2 clone. I also picked up City of Heroes/Villians over the weekend, I had heard good things about it. I really gave CoH/V a best effort, but I just couldn't get into it. In fact I've already canceled my account, within my first free month of play, and within 5 days I buying the game. Maybe I quit to soon, nothing about the game particularly excited me or "hooked" me and I couldn't see anything about the game that would (though I wanted to.)
In a bout of perfect timing Blizzard mailed a dvd containing both WoW and WoW BC and a 10 day free trial yesterday. I quit playing WoW about a year ago, simply got burned out and tired of all the kiddies. Which is one refreshing thing about Eve, the player base in Eve (in general) plays at a much higher maturity level. So anyways I installed BC and started playing. I ended the night by signing up for 6 months and the promise to my wife that I'll play WoW casually and not join any large raiding guilds.
There's really no other mmo I'm interested in atm, but I really want there to be one.
No, it was argued that MP3.com was guilty of "Making mechanical copies for commercial use without permission from the copyright owner (taken from wikipedia.)" And it was ruled that way. The court didn't rule Fair Use wasn't a defense, they essentially ruled it wasn't Fair Use.
I agree(d) with the courts decision, though I don't like it. MP3.com was using another companies product for commercial use, lost the argument that they were simply facilitating personal use. Bottom line, a for profit company was commercially using a product which they did not purchase a commercial license for.
I don't agree with the courts decision regarding Image City, though technically correct. In the US this could probably be covered via a common carrier argument. It's surprising to me that Japan doesn't have some sort of provision like this. Or maybe it wasn't argued well.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post. I don't think that this is the solution I'm looking for though. Or is it possibly to install a Matroska codec for quicktime, but more to the point, will this work with Apple TV? I suspect the answer is no.
.mov wrapper by transcoding the AC3 to multichannel AAC. So no real issue there, but it's not what I want. :) I've even muxed AC3 with h.264 video into a avi wrapper. I believe (I can't remember exactly what I did now) I've also created a .mp4 file using h.264 with AC3 audio that worked, but I had to use VLC. It's the combining of AC3 and h.264 into a .mov wrapper that's given me fits. The .mov wrapper is important to me as I'm attempting to use Quicktime as my media playback solution.
I wasn't totally clear with my previous statement. I can get 5.1 audio into a
The idea behind this all is to setup a media center that's plugged into my HDTV. With Apple TV all of my problems are solved, sorta. Network connectivty, remote control, and audio/video connectivity are taken care of. The remaining problem has always been my largest problem, 5.1 audio.
So my issue with Apple TV is this. How am I going to create content that the Apple TV will be able to handle? The trick is that the file that Apple TV works with must output 5.1 audio to my receiver to process via the optical port.
Apple TV is almost a product I would buy. Actually I don't have any particular problem with the Apple TV product itself.
:)
But as far as I am concerned there is a single fatal flaw. I don't know how rip a dvd into h.264/quicktime container and retain 5.1 audio. I wont buy any of product like this now, but as soon as I can solve this audio problem I will. Maybe it's already been solved and somebody can point me to some documentation.
I've been playing since early October, so you gave it a try before I got around to it. For what it's worth, there have been a few issues here and there with the new Revelations patch, however they seem to get fixed or mitigated pretty quickly.
I can't speak to what you experienced in October, but Eve seems relatively solid now. There are the occasional issues... The worst of which kept me out of the game for about an hour.
Hrm. I saw the message about the optional patch. I briefly read the description, determined I didn't have the problem and didn't install the patch. I'll look at it more closely again tonight though. I fit both possible problem vectors running a dual CPU with dual cores machine. So far I haven't experienced any signficant, re-occuring problems to speak of yet.
All in all, (with Jita being the lag hell) I find Eve to be a pretty stable game.
Washing detergent that's "new and improved" is not meant to necessarily to "sell" the consumer on the product. Though it's an added bonus.
Companies that produce the staples, soap, razors, etc... Have to play games with their products to keep their prices reasonable (profitable.) For example, Walmart expect that you will lower the price of your product by x percentage every six months to a year. And with Walmart, you will, or they will drop your product and go with a company that will reduce their prices. Which is one of the ways Walmart destroy's companies, but that's a different topic.
So to skirt the Walmart price lowing policy, you simply come out with a new product. Just look at razors and razor blades they are the great example.
Nope, I don't know what happened to Tank Man. That's what spawned my initial reply, apparently I am supposed to know.
From my prior reading one of the things I remembered is that all of the statements about what happened to Tank Man conflicted with each other, or the statements themselves were marked as possibly inaccurate. So anybody who makes a claim about what happened to Tank Man I immediately question where they get their facts and what their agenda is. Jurri didn't make a specific claim about what happened to Tank Man, he cleverly left it up to the reader to fill in the blank for him. But like I mentioned in a different post, I don't know jurri and I don't know his intent, it just came across as a very misleading thing to say.
I did not ask why nothing bad happened. In fact I didn't suggest either way, though I did suggest nobody "knew" if anything bad happened afterward. Have you seen the footage (in reference to how far away that camera appeared to be?) Do you really believe that nothing bad happened because of the camera? You believe and expect others to believe that the tank driver had full knowledge that there was a camera filming them? More than that you believe that armed with this knowledge the tank driver elected to not run him over because of that? Especially after what they (the tank drivers) did the evening before?
I happen to give that tank driver more credit than he possibly deserves. I happen to believe that that tank driver was more human and less robotic than the previous evening's tank drivers and did not run the guy over because he knew, in his heart I suppose, it was the wrong thing to do. Of course I could be completely wrong and their may be some completely callous reason for him not getting run over (like bad press.) But like I said, maybe I give the driver more credit than is deserves. The way I see it, I applaud that tank driver as he was probably going against his orders. The Tank Man incident showed 2 things in my eyes. First it showed how brave the student was to stand up to his government. Second it showed that not *everybody*, including people doing their "jobs" were willing to take an innocents life. That tank driver, in his own small way, also stood up to his government. In some respects, that entire incident gave me hope.
What started out as me asking? What? What am I, the reader, supposed to know? As if something really bad happened to the guy (right then)... As if the "fill in the blank" was then he got run over. Has turned into something more like; lets ignore doughrama's entire point and simply continue to point out how horrible the Chinese governement is to it's own people.
To be clear. There is no arguement from me that the Chinese government has and is capable of being very bad. But that's not my point.
Not a single person has even attempted, especially the author jurri (who hasn't bothered with a response at all), to explain what I am supposed to know. And the reason for that is simply because jurri's post was something people want to believe. "See the Chinese goverment is so bad, that when their public gets exposed to reality they are outraged... As they should be."
I have no idea whether or not jurri is telling the truth, though I tend think that it is very possible that he is entirely full of shit. He played on everybody's emotions and got modded +5 for the effort.
I'd like to believe that his account is true, I liked it. But I don't believe it simply because he also has led me, the (supposedly) uninformed reader, that something really bad happened to the Tank Man... With a line like "and then... well you know."
Come to think of it, I'm surprised I haven't been modded all to hell considering that I question the validity of a "story" that people like.
I don't mean this to come acress poorly but WTF? Where did this come from?
This is not some philosophical "If a tree falls and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" position I've taken. I've not taken the position of if I'm not "absolutely sure" then maybe it didn't happen. It's entirely reasonable and in my opinion prudent to take a skeptical look and anybody who says that they "know" what happened to tank man.
Why? Because nobody knows specifically what happened to Tank Man. Hell, even his name is not known for sure. According to the Wikipedia article a British tabloid claims to know his name, but even Wikipedia says that that claim is "dubious."
But this is all besides the point. The entire point of original post was to get clarification on what the jurri meant when he said:
"As it was going on they showed the protest in Tienamen square and the student confronting the tank and then being... well you know."
"and then being... well you know." WHAT? Moved out of the way? That certainly is not nearly as exciting as what my brain would have come up with had I not already been familiar with the situation.
Yeah I've read that wikipedia entry. From what I've gathered nobody knows for sure who the student was or what actually happened afterward. Though several different sources claim to know, their facts conflict with each other. So anybody who claims to have factual details about what happened to the guy after he was pulled from the tanks should be looked upon with a bit of skepticism. Not saying they are wrong, just saying that they may not be right.
However I was more getting to the idea, that it seemed as though the parent left out what happened as to imply that the protestor was run over or shot. I mean, that would be the obvious conclusion if you didn't actually know the situation based on the authors tone and wording. At least it was my obvious conclusion. Which is why I've asked for further explanation. Is there as different student stopping tanks that he's talking about? Is the author intentionally trying to deceive by careful word choice and leaving out crucial bits of information? Is it me, did I totally walk away with the wrong impression? etc.
"As it was going on they showed the protest in Tienamen square and the student confronting the tank and then being... well you know."
I guess I don't know, please explain.
The only student confronting a tank that I could think of is the famous one where nothing bad happened to the student. (as far as we "know")
I never said that if you spoke poorly of Apple that you were an idiot. Trying to bolster your arguement my intentially mis-interpreting my comment is pretty shitty.
My comment about idiocy had nothing to do with Apple. Rather it had all to do with your extremely shallow reasoning.
There's nothing inherently wrong with liking the Zune. Having more features than an iPod is certianly a valid reason, supporting more formats is one too. A more intuitive interface is very subjective, if you prefer Zune's or iRiver's or whoever's interface better than the iPod, that's cool. Placing a high value on a consumer electronic purely because it's different, just because it's not X, is idiotic. Plain and simple.
There is nothing cool about "trying" to be different. If you have to try, then you're still a sheep, you just run with a different flock.
I gotta agree. I think wireless sharing is a pretty cool idea. Like you said, if done right it could be a big deal.
The way Microsoft implemented it does sucks.
Your comment made me laugh... and cry. I just realized how old I must because I could clearly see the idiocy in your statement.
Now, get of my lawn!!!
"Er... no. A burglar is tried because there's enough evidence that they may have broken the law. I'd like to think that 'innocent until proven guilty' still applies in this country."
Er... no. A burglar by definition has broken the law. Now a suspected burglar is a different story.
Your assertion that buying is cheaper than renting, in context, is wrong. I attempted to bait you (rather blatently) into making something up. Instead of making up a reason for high rental rates and low buy rates, you avoided the question altogether. Instead you decided to explain the rental business to me.
Your initial idea was that buying is cheaper than renting in your market. You back this up by saying that your mortgage is only a $1000/m while renting a smiliar house would be $2000/m. This implies that you can purchase equal housing for a lower mortgage payment than renting it would be. There is simply no way that this is true. There are lots of reasons why your home's mortgage may be significantly lower then average rental rates. None of them have any impact on a prospective home owner/renter (again, in context.) At any given time monthly rental rates will trail monthly mortgage payments when making an equal comparison. You did not make an equal comparison. You compared cost of today's rents, which comes from valuations of today's homes, to the cost of homes 3 years ago. A lot can happen in 3 years.
The bottom line is about time. Over the short term renting will be cheaper than buying... Over the long term (barring something highly unusual) buying will not only be cheaper but profitable.
Sounds like you have a pretty sweet setup, in regards to your living arrangements. Can you please explain why it is that renting is more expensive than buying where you live?