When I bought my Nexus One, the T-Mobile subsidized plan would have saved me around 30 bucks over the 2 year contract. But that was compared to getting the individual, contract-free, Even More Plus plan with text and data. Because I bought my Nexus One unsubsidized, my mom added the phone to her T-Mobile account, no data or text, and it costs me 5 bucks per month. I will save about $1800 in cell phone charges over two years. AT&T would not let me do this and Verizon was not an option (not that I would want it).
Unless the ebook is protected by copyright, which it probably is. Copying an ebook for a friend is not the same as loaning or giving a physical copy to a friend. I have no ethical misgivings about breaking DRM in order to make copies for personal use. I do have a problem with breaking DRM for no reason other than to save money for your cheap friends. That is not intended as an insult. I'm cheap too.
I don't have much experience with the Mac laptops. Speaking as someone who supports macs and PC's, I'd say that the macs have as many problems as the Dells and HP's. It varies by batch, just like PC's. I had an entire lab full of eMacs wiped out by the capacitor plague, just like the PC's I bought in the same era. Mac power supply and hard drive failure rates are roughly equivalent. The Dell Latitudes we have seem to hold up pretty well. I had a fleet of early ones, Latitude CPt's as I recall, with monitor troubles, and that was due to a cable that tended to loosen up. Reseating the cable and a strip of tape fixed them. I have a fleet of Latitude D600's where about 25% have developed power connection problems after 4 to 5 years. That is fixable with a little soldering, or a replacement motherboard for about 100 bucks. I have a stack of broken Mac Mini's, mostly from hard drive failures. I have a lab full of 4 year old HP's, AMD based, that are going strong. With those I have had to replace one power supply, a cooling fan, and a DVD-RW drive due to user damage. Our iMacs, not the lamp-shade model, and Mac towers have held up well. I did have a fleet of Dell desktops with a bad batch of hard drives. 80% of those failed within 3 years. The big problem for me with Mac repair is that they are sometimes harder to get into and the replacement parts cost more.
These guys used a solar deathray! 40 years ago, similar idiots would have used a shotgun. When borderline miscreants graduate from firearms to directed energy for their tools of destruction, that is progress!
The article was not so specific on what "comparable experience" includes. I'm not so sure that it adjusts for maternity leave and child care. I did not see anything in the article mentioning compensating for women with families, and I have no faith in the reporters' abilities to interpret statistics correctly. I have previously seen statistics showing that single women who have no children make within 98% of their male counterparts. That is an insignificant difference. What is significant is that starting a family continues to have a profound downward effect on a woman's career.
SOME men can be stay at home dads. I have a friend with no marketable skills who married a paralegal. He's a stay at home dad, and he's a good dad. My wife would have to start her own business in order to take advantage of her marketable skills, but she's terrified of doing it. Otherwise, her money earning potential is limited to dead end food service and retail jobs. I can not be a stay at home dad. My friends would not give me crap either. My friends would give me high-fives and ask me how I pulled it off. I think that if you surveyed men across the country, you would find the plurality are in my position.
My daughter is due to be born in about 4 weeks now. I will be certain that she understands that she can not expect a man to necessarily be able to support her in adult hood. I don't believe that a high-flying career is necessary for everyone, but developing a marketable skill, be it welding, nursing, sowing, or even *shudder* salesmanship, is important.
For my personal technology I have a desktop and a Nexus One, while I previously used a Palm. I use a laptop at work because I have to have one. I never know when I'll have to troubleshoot something in a wiring closet.
When people ask me if they should get a laptop or a desktop, the first thing I ask them is if they have a space constraint, where a laptop's size is an adavantage, and if they REALLY need mobility. My usual advice is to get a desktop plus a netbook for mobility. Then they say "I think I'll buy a laptop". Then I warn them that the desktop will give better performance for the dollar and last 2 to 3 years longer, that a laptop will cost them an extra 100 bucks every year or so in battery replacements, and that they are more expensive to repair if the parts are even available. Then they say, "I decided. I'm buying a laptop".
Fast forward 6 moths.
They come to me complaining that the screen is too small and hard to see, the keyboard is cramped, the performance is mediocre, it's heavy to lug around, the touch pad/trackball/track point is hard to use, and they hate having to keep plugging in the external keyboard/mouse/monitor when they go home, "oh and do you know why it shuts down after 10 minutes running on the battery?"
If it were a hard copy, I wouldn't be the slightest bit less ticked off. I'd be pressing charges for every law they broke in order to take back the book, and throw a lawsuit on top of it for whatever my lawyer could think of. That shit wouldn't fly, which is, I believe, the point of the post you were replying to.
Would you really go through all that trouble of getting a lawyer and pressing charges and bringing suits if it were a $20 book? If so, you're probably going to be in the minority.
This is why we're seeing these corporate "micro-crimes" where you get cheated out of $1, $5, $10 or much more. Whether it's something you bought that doesn't work and isn't worth the trouble of returning or a $50 game for which there was no demo that turns out to be garbage or unplayable. Most people just suck it up and move along, which is what the corporation is counting on. You say "I'll never buy from them again" but you do, you always do. Because if you have a Kindle, you're kind of stuck regarding where you can buy your books. If you have an iPhone, you're absolutely stuck as to where you buy your apps. In most American cities, you're stuck as to where you get your broadband.
So I disagree when you say "this shit wouldn't fly" because it's flying all over the place right now.
Hell yes I'd press charges! To take a hard copy book, they'd have to first, know that I'm the owner of the book. Then they have to either break into my home, or mug me, most likely among other crimes as well. Now multiply that by all the people that they want to repossess books from. See how that shit wouldn't fly now?
Of course with electronic books in a system like Apple's, it's much easier, because the customer doesn't have a tangible copy, nor do they have full control over the device they purchased from Apple. So Apple has the control and can easily take back any electronic item they sell. As you say, people don't seem to make too much of an issue of it. I would, but I guess that's why I don't own an iPhone or iPad.
It wouldn't even require a lawyer, just a police report. For that matter, small claims court is cheap and requires no legal representation. I doubt the publisher would even send their own representation..
When you buy a book, you're buying the physical media -- the paper and cover/spine/jacket/glue/stitching, and also the ink covering the page -- for what that's worth. You're also buying the consumption of the words. You're not buying the words or the right to reproduce them. The same holds true with digital media. You're buying the right to consume the information contained within a particular ordering of bits, but you're not buying the information itself or the right to make even one filecopy of that information which you sell or give to someone else. (Yes, backups are fair use, no matter what anyone says.) I'm sorry, but you're just not.
....
There is no such thing as a license to consume, and you can not be penalized for unauthorized consumption. Copyright is a protection against making copies of protected works, whether they be print or media. No one can be arrested or fined for borrowing a copy of a CD or a book. Listening, reading, or watching is not a crime. If I go down to the town square and start reading the most secret Scientology manuals to the public, the listeners can't be prosecuted. If my buddy copies his CD library and gives me copies, I doubt that I would even be liable, since I would not be the one who performed the act of copying the content. A license to consume would be getting too close for comfort to this scenario.
"To buy" a book versus "to license" it, I don't think you understand the concept. Granted, it was much easier to understand when books were hardcopy only. Back then, it was well understood that you couldn't just go to the local copy shop and have them make 10, 100, 1,000 copies which you then sold, or even gave away..... Now, that being said, if I purchase "1984" and wake up one morning and find it missing, then discover the publisher I bought it from repossessed it, I'm going to be ticked off. If they've refunded my purchase price in full, I'll be quite a bit less ticked off.
The difference is, if a publisher breaks into my house to "repossessed" a book, I get to level a host of criminal charges including theft. If I posses a physical copy of bock, the copyright holder has no right to revoke my license. I own that copy and it is my property. Publishers and organizations like the RIAA and MPAA are trying to erode our property rights for copies, a case in point is the campaign against second-hand game, music, and movie stores.
The complication is that modern digital technology requires copying content in order to do anything interesting with it. In order to install copy protected software, you have to make a copy of the software onto your hard drive in violation of copyright law. If you want to rip your CD's to have your music on an iPod, you have to violate copyright law. Copyright holders have been trying to deal with this thorny problem for the past couple decades; at first by copy protection schemes, but more recently by complicated licensing schemes that decriminalize common, necessary steps that people have to do in order for the technology to work. But then, they don't want to give everything away, and thus licensing restrictions and DRM are borne. The problem, of course, is people. They tend not to like trickily worded agreements that make purchases feel less like property.
The Mini was always aimed at people who already had a screen and keyboard.
In other words, Apple is jacking up the profit margin.
I'll be interested when Apple releases a Mac Mini with an integrated Cablecard tuner for under 1 grand.
Taser inc. disagrees with you. FAQ
I have no doubt that the effects you describe would be the truth for the vast majority of cases. But I doubt you have experienced a true rage. I'm not talking about just being angry at someone. I 'm talking about a condition where your brain is fully engaged in fight or flight mode. It thankfully has not happened to me for 20 years. In that condition, there is no thought, no pain, and no memory of events. It's simply action and reaction. Someone could have shot me and I would not have slowed down. The taser would take someone in that condition down, but they would not stay down.
I have also seen multiple videos of people being tasered and getting back up, demonstrating that it is simply not the perfect weapon people make it out to be.
No matter how you feel about the incident, Rodney King was shot twice with a Tazer and got back up to fight. He later claimed to not remember much of the incident. Myself, in my younger days I had an incident where I was so enraged that I blacked out and beat up another kid. In that state, driven by nothing but adrenalin and instinct, no amount of pain will keep a person down.
To expand on the cable TV analogy.... For argument's sake, lets say there is a 5 minute commercial break, and that the content provider can sell advertising time for the first 3.5 minutes and the distributor, the cable company, can sell add time for the last 3.5 minutes. The cable company certainly won't sell add time to Direct TV, but the content providers may. The cable company can't simply strip the Direct TV adds out without repercussions. To do that, they would have to renegotiate their contracts with the content providers to limit what adds the content providers would run.
In the Apple vs app developer context, this is analogous to the distributor, Apple, renegotiating the contract with the content providers, the app developers. The glaring difference is that in TV circles, the content providers are on a much more equal footing to to the cable companies. If a cable company tried to restrict what adds the content providers could run, they could charge the cable company more for distribution rights. With the app store, Apple has all the power. Thus, Apple is free to screw the developers.
I'd have more respect for Apple if they had explicitly banned third party advertisers. That way they would have a better position to argue that they were protecting their users. This crafty wording makes the move feel underhanded.
Batons do subdue enraged subjects. Cops are trained to attack joints with them. If you beak both of a person's knees and collar bones, they are effectively immobilized, no matter what they are hopped up on. The problem with a Tazer is that it does not render someone unconscious or immobile for more than a few moments. If they are fully enraged, they will get back up and keep fighting.
At the end of the video you catch a glimpse of a marked patrol car and a uniformed officer. The motorcyclist knew he was being pulled over by real cops. The plain clothes officer never pointed it at the motorcyclist or made any verbal threats, let alone roughing the guy up. It makes me wonder why Maryland chose to go after this guy.
IANAEE (I am not an electrical engineer), but I've always wondered why Intel doesn't expose their micro-op architecture to programmers. It seems like compilers could do a lot of optimization ahead of time, much like they can with Itanium, if they could bypass the x86 instruction set. It would also let programmers transition slowly, rather than jumping in with both feet.
They are still orders of magnitude more cost effective than inkjet.
Even so, you are not comparing apple to apples. Because HP integrates the drum into the cartridge, you are replacing that with every toner replacement. How do the numbers look when you have to replace the drum in competing manufacturer's printers? My guess is that it will be pretty even on balance.
Really the Vista analogue is Win2k. I think that Win2k:XP and Vista:Win7 are very parallel. I don't think people remember how truly awful Win2k was on day one. I installed it the week it was released and it was incompatible with so much of my hardware I was offline for three weeks until I just went back to 98SE (which I used until XP came out)....
I had a very different experience with Windows 2000. I had already jumped from Win9x to Windows NT 4 as my primary desktop operating system. The upgrade to 2000 was easy for me because all my devices already had drivers. To this day I prefer 2000 over XP because of the more streamlined interface, smaller memory footprint, and better stability. Unfortunately, more and more software is coming out that does not support 2000.
I think that Microsoft's mistake, with 2000 and then with Vista, was in selling retail and upgrade versions too soon. The hardware incompatibilities you mention with 2000 and that we saw with Vista were due mostly to manufactures not having available drivers. If MS would have only provided OEM licenses for 6 months to a year, there would have been less trouble.
Of course, MS made many more mistakes with Vista in regards to hardware requirements. They allowed OEMs to certify machines as Vista Ready or Capable that didn't have enough memory for the OS, they allowed OEMs to turn on Aero Glass on machines with substandard integrated graphics, and they caved to pressure to release a 32bit version of the operating system. These mistakes are what allowed Vista's reputation for slow performance to take root.
I bought a Nexus One with up front, and I'm paying 5 bucks (plus tax) per month for cell phone service.
My mother has been a T-Mobile customer for a long time and T-Mobile doesn't force you into a data package when you are off-contract. We just added my new Nexus One to her account for 15 bucks, and it's an additional 5 dollars per month for the additional line.
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When I bought my Nexus One, the T-Mobile subsidized plan would have saved me around 30 bucks over the 2 year contract. But that was compared to getting the individual, contract-free, Even More Plus plan with text and data. Because I bought my Nexus One unsubsidized, my mom added the phone to her T-Mobile account, no data or text, and it costs me 5 bucks per month. I will save about $1800 in cell phone charges over two years. AT&T would not let me do this and Verizon was not an option (not that I would want it).
Unless the ebook is protected by copyright, which it probably is. Copying an ebook for a friend is not the same as loaning or giving a physical copy to a friend. I have no ethical misgivings about breaking DRM in order to make copies for personal use. I do have a problem with breaking DRM for no reason other than to save money for your cheap friends. That is not intended as an insult. I'm cheap too.
I don't have much experience with the Mac laptops. Speaking as someone who supports macs and PC's, I'd say that the macs have as many problems as the Dells and HP's. It varies by batch, just like PC's. I had an entire lab full of eMacs wiped out by the capacitor plague, just like the PC's I bought in the same era. Mac power supply and hard drive failure rates are roughly equivalent. The Dell Latitudes we have seem to hold up pretty well. I had a fleet of early ones, Latitude CPt's as I recall, with monitor troubles, and that was due to a cable that tended to loosen up. Reseating the cable and a strip of tape fixed them. I have a fleet of Latitude D600's where about 25% have developed power connection problems after 4 to 5 years. That is fixable with a little soldering, or a replacement motherboard for about 100 bucks. I have a stack of broken Mac Mini's, mostly from hard drive failures. I have a lab full of 4 year old HP's, AMD based, that are going strong. With those I have had to replace one power supply, a cooling fan, and a DVD-RW drive due to user damage. Our iMacs, not the lamp-shade model, and Mac towers have held up well. I did have a fleet of Dell desktops with a bad batch of hard drives. 80% of those failed within 3 years. The big problem for me with Mac repair is that they are sometimes harder to get into and the replacement parts cost more.
How about this for progress?
These guys used a solar deathray! 40 years ago, similar idiots would have used a shotgun. When borderline miscreants graduate from firearms to directed energy for their tools of destruction, that is progress!
The article was not so specific on what "comparable experience" includes. I'm not so sure that it adjusts for maternity leave and child care. I did not see anything in the article mentioning compensating for women with families, and I have no faith in the reporters' abilities to interpret statistics correctly. I have previously seen statistics showing that single women who have no children make within 98% of their male counterparts. That is an insignificant difference. What is significant is that starting a family continues to have a profound downward effect on a woman's career.
SOME men can be stay at home dads. I have a friend with no marketable skills who married a paralegal. He's a stay at home dad, and he's a good dad. My wife would have to start her own business in order to take advantage of her marketable skills, but she's terrified of doing it. Otherwise, her money earning potential is limited to dead end food service and retail jobs. I can not be a stay at home dad. My friends would not give me crap either. My friends would give me high-fives and ask me how I pulled it off. I think that if you surveyed men across the country, you would find the plurality are in my position.
My daughter is due to be born in about 4 weeks now. I will be certain that she understands that she can not expect a man to necessarily be able to support her in adult hood. I don't believe that a high-flying career is necessary for everyone, but developing a marketable skill, be it welding, nursing, sowing, or even *shudder* salesmanship, is important.
For my personal technology I have a desktop and a Nexus One, while I previously used a Palm. I use a laptop at work because I have to have one. I never know when I'll have to troubleshoot something in a wiring closet.
When people ask me if they should get a laptop or a desktop, the first thing I ask them is if they have a space constraint, where a laptop's size is an adavantage, and if they REALLY need mobility. My usual advice is to get a desktop plus a netbook for mobility. Then they say "I think I'll buy a laptop". Then I warn them that the desktop will give better performance for the dollar and last 2 to 3 years longer, that a laptop will cost them an extra 100 bucks every year or so in battery replacements, and that they are more expensive to repair if the parts are even available. Then they say, "I decided. I'm buying a laptop".
Fast forward 6 moths.
They come to me complaining that the screen is too small and hard to see, the keyboard is cramped, the performance is mediocre, it's heavy to lug around, the touch pad/trackball/track point is hard to use, and they hate having to keep plugging in the external keyboard/mouse/monitor when they go home, "oh and do you know why it shuts down after 10 minutes running on the battery?"
Would you really go through all that trouble of getting a lawyer and pressing charges and bringing suits if it were a $20 book? If so, you're probably going to be in the minority.
This is why we're seeing these corporate "micro-crimes" where you get cheated out of $1, $5, $10 or much more. Whether it's something you bought that doesn't work and isn't worth the trouble of returning or a $50 game for which there was no demo that turns out to be garbage or unplayable. Most people just suck it up and move along, which is what the corporation is counting on. You say "I'll never buy from them again" but you do, you always do. Because if you have a Kindle, you're kind of stuck regarding where you can buy your books. If you have an iPhone, you're absolutely stuck as to where you buy your apps. In most American cities, you're stuck as to where you get your broadband.
So I disagree when you say "this shit wouldn't fly" because it's flying all over the place right now.
Hell yes I'd press charges! To take a hard copy book, they'd have to first, know that I'm the owner of the book. Then they have to either break into my home, or mug me, most likely among other crimes as well. Now multiply that by all the people that they want to repossess books from. See how that shit wouldn't fly now?
Of course with electronic books in a system like Apple's, it's much easier, because the customer doesn't have a tangible copy, nor do they have full control over the device they purchased from Apple. So Apple has the control and can easily take back any electronic item they sell. As you say, people don't seem to make too much of an issue of it. I would, but I guess that's why I don't own an iPhone or iPad.
It wouldn't even require a lawyer, just a police report. For that matter, small claims court is cheap and requires no legal representation. I doubt the publisher would even send their own representation..
....
When you buy a book, you're buying the physical media -- the paper and cover/spine/jacket/glue/stitching, and also the ink covering the page -- for what that's worth. You're also buying the consumption of the words. You're not buying the words or the right to reproduce them. The same holds true with digital media. You're buying the right to consume the information contained within a particular ordering of bits, but you're not buying the information itself or the right to make even one filecopy of that information which you sell or give to someone else. (Yes, backups are fair use, no matter what anyone says.) I'm sorry, but you're just not.
There is no such thing as a license to consume, and you can not be penalized for unauthorized consumption. Copyright is a protection against making copies of protected works, whether they be print or media. No one can be arrested or fined for borrowing a copy of a CD or a book. Listening, reading, or watching is not a crime. If I go down to the town square and start reading the most secret Scientology manuals to the public, the listeners can't be prosecuted. If my buddy copies his CD library and gives me copies, I doubt that I would even be liable, since I would not be the one who performed the act of copying the content. A license to consume would be getting too close for comfort to this scenario.
"To buy" a book versus "to license" it, I don't think you understand the concept. Granted, it was much easier to understand when books were hardcopy only. Back then, it was well understood that you couldn't just go to the local copy shop and have them make 10, 100, 1,000 copies which you then sold, or even gave away. .... Now, that being said, if I purchase "1984" and wake up one morning and find it missing, then discover the publisher I bought it from repossessed it, I'm going to be ticked off. If they've refunded my purchase price in full, I'll be quite a bit less ticked off.
The difference is, if a publisher breaks into my house to "repossessed" a book, I get to level a host of criminal charges including theft. If I posses a physical copy of bock, the copyright holder has no right to revoke my license. I own that copy and it is my property. Publishers and organizations like the RIAA and MPAA are trying to erode our property rights for copies, a case in point is the campaign against second-hand game, music, and movie stores.
The complication is that modern digital technology requires copying content in order to do anything interesting with it. In order to install copy protected software, you have to make a copy of the software onto your hard drive in violation of copyright law. If you want to rip your CD's to have your music on an iPod, you have to violate copyright law. Copyright holders have been trying to deal with this thorny problem for the past couple decades; at first by copy protection schemes, but more recently by complicated licensing schemes that decriminalize common, necessary steps that people have to do in order for the technology to work. But then, they don't want to give everything away, and thus licensing restrictions and DRM are borne. The problem, of course, is people. They tend not to like trickily worded agreements that make purchases feel less like property.
I'm lactose intolerant you insensitive clod!
But seriously, I grew up on Red Rose with milk and a touch of sugar. Every time I'm forced to resort to Lipton I feel a little dirty.
The Mini was always aimed at people who already had a screen and keyboard.
In other words, Apple is jacking up the profit margin. I'll be interested when Apple releases a Mac Mini with an integrated Cablecard tuner for under 1 grand.
Taser inc. disagrees with you. FAQ I have no doubt that the effects you describe would be the truth for the vast majority of cases. But I doubt you have experienced a true rage. I'm not talking about just being angry at someone. I 'm talking about a condition where your brain is fully engaged in fight or flight mode. It thankfully has not happened to me for 20 years. In that condition, there is no thought, no pain, and no memory of events. It's simply action and reaction. Someone could have shot me and I would not have slowed down. The taser would take someone in that condition down, but they would not stay down. I have also seen multiple videos of people being tasered and getting back up, demonstrating that it is simply not the perfect weapon people make it out to be.
No matter how you feel about the incident, Rodney King was shot twice with a Tazer and got back up to fight. He later claimed to not remember much of the incident. Myself, in my younger days I had an incident where I was so enraged that I blacked out and beat up another kid. In that state, driven by nothing but adrenalin and instinct, no amount of pain will keep a person down.
To expand on the cable TV analogy.... For argument's sake, lets say there is a 5 minute commercial break, and that the content provider can sell advertising time for the first 3.5 minutes and the distributor, the cable company, can sell add time for the last 3.5 minutes. The cable company certainly won't sell add time to Direct TV, but the content providers may. The cable company can't simply strip the Direct TV adds out without repercussions. To do that, they would have to renegotiate their contracts with the content providers to limit what adds the content providers would run. In the Apple vs app developer context, this is analogous to the distributor, Apple, renegotiating the contract with the content providers, the app developers. The glaring difference is that in TV circles, the content providers are on a much more equal footing to to the cable companies. If a cable company tried to restrict what adds the content providers could run, they could charge the cable company more for distribution rights. With the app store, Apple has all the power. Thus, Apple is free to screw the developers.
I'd have more respect for Apple if they had explicitly banned third party advertisers. That way they would have a better position to argue that they were protecting their users. This crafty wording makes the move feel underhanded.
Batons do subdue enraged subjects. Cops are trained to attack joints with them. If you beak both of a person's knees and collar bones, they are effectively immobilized, no matter what they are hopped up on. The problem with a Tazer is that it does not render someone unconscious or immobile for more than a few moments. If they are fully enraged, they will get back up and keep fighting.
At the end of the video you catch a glimpse of a marked patrol car and a uniformed officer. The motorcyclist knew he was being pulled over by real cops. The plain clothes officer never pointed it at the motorcyclist or made any verbal threats, let alone roughing the guy up. It makes me wonder why Maryland chose to go after this guy.
Develop a one-bowl-of-oatmeal-a-day habit and keep using your reusable filter.
IANAEE (I am not an electrical engineer), but I've always wondered why Intel doesn't expose their micro-op architecture to programmers. It seems like compilers could do a lot of optimization ahead of time, much like they can with Itanium, if they could bypass the x86 instruction set. It would also let programmers transition slowly, rather than jumping in with both feet.
They are still orders of magnitude more cost effective than inkjet. Even so, you are not comparing apple to apples. Because HP integrates the drum into the cartridge, you are replacing that with every toner replacement. How do the numbers look when you have to replace the drum in competing manufacturer's printers? My guess is that it will be pretty even on balance.
Really the Vista analogue is Win2k. I think that Win2k:XP and Vista:Win7 are very parallel. I don't think people remember how truly awful Win2k was on day one. I installed it the week it was released and it was incompatible with so much of my hardware I was offline for three weeks until I just went back to 98SE (which I used until XP came out). ...
I had a very different experience with Windows 2000. I had already jumped from Win9x to Windows NT 4 as my primary desktop operating system. The upgrade to 2000 was easy for me because all my devices already had drivers. To this day I prefer 2000 over XP because of the more streamlined interface, smaller memory footprint, and better stability. Unfortunately, more and more software is coming out that does not support 2000. I think that Microsoft's mistake, with 2000 and then with Vista, was in selling retail and upgrade versions too soon. The hardware incompatibilities you mention with 2000 and that we saw with Vista were due mostly to manufactures not having available drivers. If MS would have only provided OEM licenses for 6 months to a year, there would have been less trouble. Of course, MS made many more mistakes with Vista in regards to hardware requirements. They allowed OEMs to certify machines as Vista Ready or Capable that didn't have enough memory for the OS, they allowed OEMs to turn on Aero Glass on machines with substandard integrated graphics, and they caved to pressure to release a 32bit version of the operating system. These mistakes are what allowed Vista's reputation for slow performance to take root.
I bought a Nexus One with up front, and I'm paying 5 bucks (plus tax) per month for cell phone service. My mother has been a T-Mobile customer for a long time and T-Mobile doesn't force you into a data package when you are off-contract. We just added my new Nexus One to her account for 15 bucks, and it's an additional 5 dollars per month for the additional line.
Exactly. I bought my Nexus One a couple weeks ago. I really just needed a PDA, the cell phone capability is a nifty additional feature.