The 360 right now looks overpriced and clunky for anyone who wants to watch HD movies with it 399 + how much for the HD-DVD strap on pack?
Because the core 360 package is just as upgradeable at the premium package, you should be using $299 as the base price.
Estimates for the price of the HD-DVD drive add-on I've heard are around $200. So $299+$200 = $499 for a 360 with HD-DVD capabilities. That's competitive with standalone HD-DVD players out there, plus you get a next-gen gaming system. Plus you get free integration with your Media Center PC, if you have one.
The stories of people who are on their FIFITH 360s are out there - pretending like there isn't a problem is not helping.
The people telling those stories are vastly outnumbered by people who have never had any problems with their 360s. It's just that satisfied users generally don't take to the Internets to passionately register their satisfaction.
You know, if you break a product once, it's probably faulty. If you break it four times in a row, you're probably doing something to cause it.
Also: what is 'BC'? You refer to it more than once in your questioning, but I don't know what you're referring to.
The time you spent doing a quick Google search, and the time everyone else who didn't know who Moore is spent doing the same, could have been saved if the submitter or the editor has simply put the two words "Microsoft exec" in the story capsule.
Given how many Slashdotters there are, that's cumulatively hours and hours of lost productivity. Thanks, Slashdot.
Possibly the biggest problem working on this laptop is its small 12' screen.
I dunno, 12 feet diagonal seems like it would be large enough for just about anything.
But seriously, it wasn't that long ago that we were all working on desktop computers with 13"-viewable CRTs and 640x480 resolutions. Or worse; the original Macintoshes had an 8-inch, 1-bit monochrome screen, and they turned out to be plenty useful.
The difference between your working day and the working day of a typical artist is that you can probably go to your office and read Slashdot all day, and you'll still get a paycheck this week. And next, and the next after that. By comparison, novelists, poets and musicians are among the three lowest paying profession. An average McDonald's employee brings in more than the median income for poets, musicians and writers.
While true, I don't think that has anything to do with why our laws give creative artists the opportunity to collect residual royalties for their work, but not a brick-layer or a hooker.
It is easily recognized that the creation and distribution of a artistic work has lasting cultural and societal benefits beyond the initial efforts of the artist. A piece of music or a painting can bring enjoyment to countless people, long after it's been written or recorded or painted; the same cannot be said about a cab ride after the cabbie has finished his driving.
The question is one of fairness. How long after the creation of a work should an artist continue to benefit?
My dad figured out that since he had 2 versions of the folder 'My Documents', one contained in My Computer, and one not (on the desktop), one was storing his files locally, and the other was storing them somewhere else, not on his computer.
Microsoft is solely to blame for this one. 'My Documents' isn't even a real place, it's a symlink to 'C:\Some\Ridiculously\Wordy\And\Different\In\Each\ OS\Version\Path\My Documents'.
And don't get me started on 'My Computer', which can be accessed both as a parent and as a child of the C: drive.
Apple GENERALLY is better about making the apparent location of a resource match it actual location in the filesystem (though the OS X Dock is an exception).
Fact: most people's mom encountered her first treelike structure the first day she typed a document in Word, and wanted to save it.
Whereas before, if Mom had a piece of paper she wanted to save, she went to the file cabinet, then opened a particular drawer of the cabinet, then opened a particular folder located in that drawer and placed the paper in it. The logical jump from that to the more abstract "collections of collections within a collection" generic tree model is not a large one.
I do wish that most database API's offered a "read-only" mode such that the query being sent to the database is designated read-only.
This is easy to do. Create a schema with SELECT-only privileges on the DB objects. Use that schema when connecting to the DB via your API for read-only actions.
If there's other circumstances where you need other DML commands to work, create separate schemae for them. If your data integrity is that important that you need every possible defense against SQL injection attacks, the overhead of closing and reopening connections to the DB occasionally is a small price to pay.
There's a lot of area between 65k and 1M which is handled better by a spreadsheet rather than a database.
If the data set is better handled by a spreadsheet than a database, then it shouldn't matter how many records there are.
Inversely, if a data set is better handled by a database than a spreadsheet, then it shouldn't matter how few records there are.
They're different tools, and they serve different purposes. I have to wonder where this problem came from where people so often use the wrong tool for the job. Is it because Excel and Access both display data in grid format? Is it because spreadsheets made headway into personal computing space long before RDBMS's did?
It's fine and dandy that Microsoft is re-compiling the Excel source with larger values for the MAX_ROWS and MAX_COLS constants. But there's no technical reason why such fixed limits should still even exist anymore. Can't they devise a way to allow spreadsheets to be limited in dimensions only by the available resources of the machine? Or will we have to wait and buy Office 2010 to get the ability to have 32,000 columns instead of just 16,000?
But in 2000, most people had not seen DVD in action, players were ridiculously expensive, and more importantly, so were DVD movies. It had barely entered into the equation in PCs.
Not true. I built a computer with a DVD drive and MPEG decoder card in 1998, and quite affordably. By 2000, consumer DVD players were in the sub-$200 range and DVDs were already taking significant amounts of shelf space away from VHS in retail stores and video rental outlets. And at no time did the typical DVD movie EVER sell for about $30 or so.
By 2000, Circuit City's DIVX experiment had already failed.
As they say in the interview, Sony have clearly decided that they will still sell five million PS3s, even at this price. And let's face it, when you count the Japanese market, they're probably right.
This forecast I agree with. Sony will probably never come close to selling 100 million PS3's they way they did with a previous console, but five million units sold over the first couple of years seems like a reasonable prediction.
Sell 5m PS3s and they establish a user base for Blu-Ray - and kill HD-DVD.
This forecast I DON'T agree with. Not everyone who purchases a PS3 plans to or even cares about high-definition movie content. Look at the portable market -- just that the PSP didn't get killed immediately by Nintendo shows that the device is a measured success, and yet movies on UMD are showing all the signs of being a failed format. Gamers want to game, not to buy movies.
# Hitler did not have to invent a terrorist organisation called the Trust (or "the Base", or whatever) and did not blame it to be responsible for any act of violence against Nazi Germany.
No, of course not. The group he blamed for all of Germany's ills, "The Jews", was pre-existent.
And if you're suggesting that "al Qaeda" is a fictional construct dreamed up by the American government, I may have to spit in your face should I ever meet you. They're real -- they're not as clever or as well organized as some want to give them credit for, but they're real.
The NES, SNES, and N64 all had styling that survived the test of time.
Well, the Super Famicom did. The North American version was an ugly angular creature with bland purple accents.
And its top and bottom halves were apparently made of different kinds of plastic, as 15 years later the top of my SNES is as yellow as a smoker's teeth, while the bottom is still relatively ecru.
Do we really depend so much on the internet? Yes! Last holiday season, over 10% of purchases made using Visa were online
Does that show that we DEPEND on the internet, though? One might assume that if there were no internet commerce, those Visa cardholders would have made the same purchases some other way. In that scenario, the internet is a convenience, not a critical part of the economy.
When, in the arena of Law, is "intentional or unintentional" EVER beside the point?
Since he paid money to play the game, he is entitled and obliged to maximize his gaming experience by using the tools provided to him by the developer.
He paid money to play a game with the agreement that he would play by the game's rules. The game's operators determined unilaterally that his behavior was in violation of the rules (as the user agreement almost certainly gives them authority to do), and used said malfeasance as the basis for terminating the user's contract with them.
Plaintiff has no case, in my non-lawyerly opinion.
Seems more like taking the the price tags off, then going to the cashier and saying - "I think this should cost $199 - do you agree?" and the cashier agrees, rings it up and lets you leave with the BBQ. Then a week later Home Depot comes by your house and tries to reposses the BBQ.
1. You tampered with the product by removing the price tag. Legally and morally, it doesn't matter if you affixed another piece of sticky tape to the box or not. 2. The cashier is probably not authorized to negotiate sales prices on the store's behalf.
I'd say that odds are pretty good you would be required to relinquish your ill-gotten grill to the store you scammed it from.
If their code is smart enough to know a keyword "ServersCheck" is listed on webpages with the other keywords "ServersCheck crack", "ServersCheck keygen" or "ServersCheck pro crack" they should be able to put a filter in for it.
Technically, yes. They should be able to.
From a business standpoint, I don't see why Google should be compelled to modify their code for the benefit of ServersCheck or any other party who would complain about the behavior of the tool.
HD adoption is one of those chicken-and-egg paradigm shifts like you see ever so often. It's really no different than the DVD adoption was.
On the contrary, there are a couple of significant differences.
With the VHS to DVD transition, there was growing dissatisfaction with the previous format. Videotapes wore out quickly, were prone to breakage, were bulky, and had long long seek times. The technology had been available in the consumer market for over 20 years by that point, and the DVD format fixed almost all of the problems of videotape, and usually came with bonus features too.
That was only 10 years ago, and most of the market is still content with DVD's. 480i MPEG-2 video and 5.1-channel AC3 audio may not be good enough for everybody, but they're good enough for most.
Consumers did not also have to upgrade other equipment to see the benefit of DVD like they do with High Definition. You could feed a DVD player into a 1960 black and white set if you wanted (probably requiring an RF converter, but possible). Yes, you can run an HD player into a SDTV too, but the picture isn't going to be any sharper than a std-def DVD -- so why bother spending the money?
It's *YOUR* ISP. They say to Google: Hey - we have a million users, unless you pay us $X, they'll get 1Kbytes/second to Google and 1Mbytes/second to Yahoo.
And if they go through with that, the ISP is going to get X00,000 angry users flooding their support lines, complaining that Google (or whatever other customer favorite site) is loading too slow.
The ISP's will spend more money answering those calls than they will bring in from the content providers who do decide to pony up the protection money. And that's why I don't believe net neutrality laws are needed -- if the ISP stops satisfying its customers, the market will correct the situation itself.
I don't think they [NeoGeo] intended to compete in the same market [as SNES/Genesis].
Correct, they didn't. SNK marketed the NeoGeo as an upscale form of home gaming; one that not every customer could afford, but promising (and delivering) a rarefied and special gaming experience for those that COULD afford it.
Which is EXACTLY how Kutaragi is defending the PS3's pricing today.
Most players in the US are built elsewhere in the world, on the same assembly lines as players that get exported to other regions. Even if region locking is enabled by default on some units that ship, it's not likely that they have fundamentally different enough designs that per region they could not be easily overcome by changing a jumper setting or flashing firmware.
In 1985 the average price of a new PC was a few grand, today the average price is only a few hundred.
An IBM AT might have cost you $3000 in 1985, but a Commodore 64 was considerably less.
But your point stands: the technology inside a Sega Genesis that made it cost $200 in 1989 is now cheap enough that the entire system can fit on a single chip and fit (along with 6 games) inside a replica controller, which you can buy at Wal*Mart for $19.97. And I guarantee you they're making a hefty profit on those things, too.
Slashdot Mirror
The 360 right now looks overpriced and clunky for anyone who wants to watch HD movies with it 399 + how much for the HD-DVD strap on pack?
Because the core 360 package is just as upgradeable at the premium package, you should be using $299 as the base price.
Estimates for the price of the HD-DVD drive add-on I've heard are around $200. So $299+$200 = $499 for a 360 with HD-DVD capabilities. That's competitive with standalone HD-DVD players out there, plus you get a next-gen gaming system. Plus you get free integration with your Media Center PC, if you have one.
The stories of people who are on their FIFITH 360s are out there - pretending like there isn't a problem is not helping.
The people telling those stories are vastly outnumbered by people who have never had any problems with their 360s. It's just that satisfied users generally don't take to the Internets to passionately register their satisfaction.
You know, if you break a product once, it's probably faulty. If you break it four times in a row, you're probably doing something to cause it.
Also: what is 'BC'? You refer to it more than once in your questioning, but I don't know what you're referring to.
The time you spent doing a quick Google search, and the time everyone else who didn't know who Moore is spent doing the same, could have been saved if the submitter or the editor has simply put the two words "Microsoft exec" in the story capsule.
Given how many Slashdotters there are, that's cumulatively hours and hours of lost productivity. Thanks, Slashdot.
Possibly the biggest problem working on this laptop is its small 12' screen.
I dunno, 12 feet diagonal seems like it would be large enough for just about anything.
But seriously, it wasn't that long ago that we were all working on desktop computers with 13"-viewable CRTs and 640x480 resolutions. Or worse; the original Macintoshes had an 8-inch, 1-bit monochrome screen, and they turned out to be plenty useful.
Education is great, provided the person will live to use it.
Alternately, a life without education isn't worth very much.
The difference between your working day and the working day of a typical artist is that you can probably go to your office and read Slashdot all day, and you'll still get a paycheck this week. And next, and the next after that. By comparison, novelists, poets and musicians are among the three lowest paying profession. An average McDonald's employee brings in more than the median income for poets, musicians and writers.
While true, I don't think that has anything to do with why our laws give creative artists the opportunity to collect residual royalties for their work, but not a brick-layer or a hooker.
It is easily recognized that the creation and distribution of a artistic work has lasting cultural and societal benefits beyond the initial efforts of the artist. A piece of music or a painting can bring enjoyment to countless people, long after it's been written or recorded or painted; the same cannot be said about a cab ride after the cabbie has finished his driving.
The question is one of fairness. How long after the creation of a work should an artist continue to benefit?
My dad figured out that since he had 2 versions of the folder 'My Documents', one contained in My Computer, and one not (on the desktop), one was storing his files locally, and the other was storing them somewhere else, not on his computer.
\ OS\Version\Path\My Documents'.
Microsoft is solely to blame for this one. 'My Documents' isn't even a real place, it's a symlink to 'C:\Some\Ridiculously\Wordy\And\Different\In\Each
And don't get me started on 'My Computer', which can be accessed both as a parent and as a child of the C: drive.
Apple GENERALLY is better about making the apparent location of a resource match it actual location in the filesystem (though the OS X Dock is an exception).
Fact: most people's mom encountered her first treelike structure the first day she typed a document in Word, and wanted to save it.
Whereas before, if Mom had a piece of paper she wanted to save, she went to the file cabinet, then opened a particular drawer of the cabinet, then opened a particular folder located in that drawer and placed the paper in it. The logical jump from that to the more abstract "collections of collections within a collection" generic tree model is not a large one.
I do wish that most database API's offered a "read-only" mode such that the query being sent to the database is designated read-only.
This is easy to do. Create a schema with SELECT-only privileges on the DB objects. Use that schema when connecting to the DB via your API for read-only actions.
If there's other circumstances where you need other DML commands to work, create separate schemae for them. If your data integrity is that important that you need every possible defense against SQL injection attacks, the overhead of closing and reopening connections to the DB occasionally is a small price to pay.
'"\'By the way, the dangling reference to a quote by one "Berkus" should be attributed to Josh Berkus.\' --Russ Nelson" --SaDan' --LearnToSpell
There's a lot of area between 65k and 1M which is handled better by a spreadsheet rather than a database.
If the data set is better handled by a spreadsheet than a database, then it shouldn't matter how many records there are.
Inversely, if a data set is better handled by a database than a spreadsheet, then it shouldn't matter how few records there are.
They're different tools, and they serve different purposes. I have to wonder where this problem came from where people so often use the wrong tool for the job. Is it because Excel and Access both display data in grid format? Is it because spreadsheets made headway into personal computing space long before RDBMS's did?
It's fine and dandy that Microsoft is re-compiling the Excel source with larger values for the MAX_ROWS and MAX_COLS constants. But there's no technical reason why such fixed limits should still even exist anymore. Can't they devise a way to allow spreadsheets to be limited in dimensions only by the available resources of the machine? Or will we have to wait and buy Office 2010 to get the ability to have 32,000 columns instead of just 16,000?
But in 2000, most people had not seen DVD in action, players were ridiculously expensive, and more importantly, so were DVD movies. It had barely entered into the equation in PCs.
Not true. I built a computer with a DVD drive and MPEG decoder card in 1998, and quite affordably. By 2000, consumer DVD players were in the sub-$200 range and DVDs were already taking significant amounts of shelf space away from VHS in retail stores and video rental outlets. And at no time did the typical DVD movie EVER sell for about $30 or so.
By 2000, Circuit City's DIVX experiment had already failed.
As they say in the interview, Sony have clearly decided that they will still sell five million PS3s, even at this price. And let's face it, when you count the Japanese market, they're probably right.
This forecast I agree with. Sony will probably never come close to selling 100 million PS3's they way they did with a previous console, but five million units sold over the first couple of years seems like a reasonable prediction.
Sell 5m PS3s and they establish a user base for Blu-Ray - and kill HD-DVD.
This forecast I DON'T agree with. Not everyone who purchases a PS3 plans to or even cares about high-definition movie content. Look at the portable market -- just that the PSP didn't get killed immediately by Nintendo shows that the device is a measured success, and yet movies on UMD are showing all the signs of being a failed format. Gamers want to game, not to buy movies.
The important thing to note about The Press is that it's not their IDENTITY, but rather their BEHAVIOR, which grants them special protections.
And by "them" I mean "us". A blogger has all the same freedom-of-the-press rights as a newspaper reporter, or a colonial pamphleteer.
# Hitler did not have to invent a terrorist organisation called the Trust (or "the Base", or whatever) and did not blame it to be responsible for any act of violence against Nazi Germany.
No, of course not. The group he blamed for all of Germany's ills, "The Jews", was pre-existent.
And if you're suggesting that "al Qaeda" is a fictional construct dreamed up by the American government, I may have to spit in your face should I ever meet you. They're real -- they're not as clever or as well organized as some want to give them credit for, but they're real.
The NES, SNES, and N64 all had styling that survived the test of time.
Well, the Super Famicom did. The North American version was an ugly angular creature with bland purple accents.
And its top and bottom halves were apparently made of different kinds of plastic, as 15 years later the top of my SNES is as yellow as a smoker's teeth, while the bottom is still relatively ecru.
Mission accomprished. All SrashDot deveropers are berong to us...
"ME SO SOLLY! AH SO!"
Dude, it's the twenty-first century. Can we try to show a LITTLE respect for foreign cultures?
Do we really depend so much on the internet?
Yes! Last holiday season, over 10% of purchases made using Visa were online
Does that show that we DEPEND on the internet, though? One might assume that if there were no internet commerce, those Visa cardholders would have made the same purchases some other way. In that scenario, the internet is a convenience, not a critical part of the economy.
Intentional or unintentional is beside the point.
When, in the arena of Law, is "intentional or unintentional" EVER beside the point?
Since he paid money to play the game, he is entitled and obliged to maximize his gaming experience by using the tools provided to him by the developer.
He paid money to play a game with the agreement that he would play by the game's rules. The game's operators determined unilaterally that his behavior was in violation of the rules (as the user agreement almost certainly gives them authority to do), and used said malfeasance as the basis for terminating the user's contract with them.
Plaintiff has no case, in my non-lawyerly opinion.
Seems more like taking the the price tags off, then going to the cashier and saying - "I think this should cost $199 - do you agree?" and the cashier agrees, rings it up and lets you leave with the BBQ. Then a week later Home Depot comes by your house and tries to reposses the BBQ.
1. You tampered with the product by removing the price tag. Legally and morally, it doesn't matter if you affixed another piece of sticky tape to the box or not.
2. The cashier is probably not authorized to negotiate sales prices on the store's behalf.
I'd say that odds are pretty good you would be required to relinquish your ill-gotten grill to the store you scammed it from.
If their code is smart enough to know a keyword "ServersCheck" is listed on webpages with the other keywords "ServersCheck crack", "ServersCheck keygen" or "ServersCheck pro crack" they should be able to put a filter in for it.
Technically, yes. They should be able to.
From a business standpoint, I don't see why Google should be compelled to modify their code for the benefit of ServersCheck or any other party who would complain about the behavior of the tool.
HD adoption is one of those chicken-and-egg paradigm shifts like you see ever so often. It's really no different than the DVD adoption was.
On the contrary, there are a couple of significant differences.
With the VHS to DVD transition, there was growing dissatisfaction with the previous format. Videotapes wore out quickly, were prone to breakage, were bulky, and had long long seek times. The technology had been available in the consumer market for over 20 years by that point, and the DVD format fixed almost all of the problems of videotape, and usually came with bonus features too.
That was only 10 years ago, and most of the market is still content with DVD's. 480i MPEG-2 video and 5.1-channel AC3 audio may not be good enough for everybody, but they're good enough for most.
Consumers did not also have to upgrade other equipment to see the benefit of DVD like they do with High Definition. You could feed a DVD player into a 1960 black and white set if you wanted (probably requiring an RF converter, but possible). Yes, you can run an HD player into a SDTV too, but the picture isn't going to be any sharper than a std-def DVD -- so why bother spending the money?
It's *YOUR* ISP. They say to Google: Hey - we have a million users, unless you pay us $X, they'll get 1Kbytes/second to Google and 1Mbytes/second to Yahoo.
And if they go through with that, the ISP is going to get X00,000 angry users flooding their support lines, complaining that Google (or whatever other customer favorite site) is loading too slow.
The ISP's will spend more money answering those calls than they will bring in from the content providers who do decide to pony up the protection money. And that's why I don't believe net neutrality laws are needed -- if the ISP stops satisfying its customers, the market will correct the situation itself.
I don't think they [NeoGeo] intended to compete in the same market [as SNES/Genesis].
Correct, they didn't. SNK marketed the NeoGeo as an upscale form of home gaming; one that not every customer could afford, but promising (and delivering) a rarefied and special gaming experience for those that COULD afford it.
Which is EXACTLY how Kutaragi is defending the PS3's pricing today.
Most [...] players in the US are region 1 only
Most players in the US are built elsewhere in the world, on the same assembly lines as players that get exported to other regions. Even if region locking is enabled by default on some units that ship, it's not likely that they have fundamentally different enough designs that per region they could not be easily overcome by changing a jumper setting or flashing firmware.
In 1985 the average price of a new PC was a few grand, today the average price is only a few hundred.
An IBM AT might have cost you $3000 in 1985, but a Commodore 64 was considerably less.
But your point stands: the technology inside a Sega Genesis that made it cost $200 in 1989 is now cheap enough that the entire system can fit on a single chip and fit (along with 6 games) inside a replica controller, which you can buy at Wal*Mart for $19.97. And I guarantee you they're making a hefty profit on those things, too.