Why he would expect a large number of Linux-based visitors to the site when the media downloads are Windows XP only is not clear.
He's not talking about media downloads, but the entire bbc.co.uk site which, according to Google, is about 3,310,000 pages.
From the article:
Highfield used the numbers of non-Windows users visiting bbc.co.uk as justification for the corporation's XP-only release. "We have 17.1 million users of bbc.co.uk in the UK and, as far as our server logs can make out, 5per cent of those [use Macs] and around 400 to 600 are Linux users."
They didn't do a Linux version because only 0.0035% of users are identifying themselves as running Linux.
I'm not making any comments about whether or not this is a good idea. I'm sure others can provide good arguments for both ways.
Although he has a point, we humans love to compare and if you don't give us any metric by which to do that, then we don't feel like anything has been achieved.
"SuperGame is really good" is meaningless to me. What I want to know is, is it any better than GreatGame? If the reviewer gives a score for both then I can understand which he/she feels is better and by what margin. Since I've played GreatGame (and assuming I trust the reviewer), then I can set some sort of expectation of what SuperGame will be like.
Personally, I use Metacritic which aggregates a number of reviews. Again, it's not perfect, but when it gets a 75 or above score, I can be reasonably certain that I'm not getting a dud game. It might not be my type of game, but if it is, then it shouldn't be disappointing.
Apologies, I've re-read my comment and it could come across that way.
Essentially I don't want to purchase something which leaves me with two monitors, one being unused. Granted a monitor isn't too expensive, but when you have one that does the job - it's wasteful to replace it for no reason.
Looking at the UK Apple Store, iMacs range from £800-£2300. I have cut your gap down to £100.
Great, except that I am now the proud owner of two monitors. One of which is doing nothing.
There is still no middle ground between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro unless I'm prepared to give up my monitor and then purchase a new monitor every single time I upgrade my hardware.
Because you have a monitor, you can't buy an iMac?
No, I'm not kidding, but then I didn't say that either.
What I did say was that I already have a perfectly good monitor (which means I don't want to purchase an iMac) and with my, not particularly special, requirements I have a choice between an anaemic Mac Mini or a massively over powerful Mac Pro.
There is no middle ground unless I end up with an unused monitor - which is not what I want.
Because I can build a PC for FAR, FAR less than an equivalent Mac costs. I've not run Leopard on my Hackintosh yet (still on Tiger), but if I can run the OS I want on the hardware I want (saving about $1000 or more in the process) with the only negative being that it hurts Apple's feelings, then I'm gonna do that.
In addition, I cannot buy a Mac in the specification I want. That doesn't mean that my requirements are wild or unrealistic, but if I already have a monitor then I have only two choices - the Mac Pro (which at the very cheapest is £1,699.00) or the Mac Mini (which at the best specified is £639.00).
Unless I'm missing something, I have a £1060 price gap which cannot be satisfied.
If I want a 750GB hard-drive, reasonably fast processor, 2GB of RAM, use my existing monitor and a good enough graphics card to run bootcamp and some games then I'm SOL unless I plump for the Mac Pro.
I don't care about Apple opening up their operating system, but a few extra choices on the desktop would be nice.
(side note, the cheapest Mac laptop is £699. It may be better specified than a Dell at the same price but the average student can get away with a £399 laptop without a problem. Again, it comes down to a big hole in the choices)
Computer Business Review is reporting that less than 2% of UK-based firms have already upgraded all their desktops to Windows Vista. Just shy of 5% said that they have begun a Windows Vista desktop upgrade program. 6.5% said they will upgrade in the next 6 months; 12.6% in the next 12 months; 13% in the next 18 months; and 18% in the next two years
Didn't we all see a similar article like this back when XP was introduced?
We all know that businesses work on a far slower cycle than the consumer market - hell, it was only two years ago that my work computer (I'm not in IT) moved from Windows 2000 to Windows XP.
Based on that timescale (5 years), I don't expect to move to Vista till 2009...
Seriously though, yes our prices include VAT at 17.5% which people often forget to take into account but, even so, there are plenty of products which have such a colossal additional mark-up on them (Windows Vista is twice as expensive which tax and shipping costs cannot explain away) compared to our European and American counterparts that it is hard not to feel cheated.
The Wikipedia article on it is worth reading and notes that these items cost significantly more in the UK:
CDs and DVDs
iTunes Store songs, tv programmes, iPod, and iPod games
Computer Software - the most notable example being Microsoft Windows Vista
Books
Electrical Goods
Houses
Petroleum and diesel fuel
Unfortunately as we put up with paying those prices, we allow companies to continually screw us.
The major flaw is not how it's rated, but the fact that it is rated. I have no problem with independent reviewers rating games and/or movies, but I do have a problem with an arbitrary organization making ratings; it becomes legalized censorship.
This is no different than the rating on films, yet no-one seems to complain about them.
I have to admit, I don't understand why people on Slashdot are so upset that games are rated. We are no longer in the 8 bit age of pixelated graphics and some of these games are pretty gory and have disturbing themes.
Having a rating on the box, gives the parent an immediate indicator of the level of maturity required for a game when making a purchasing decision. Yes it would be best if they could play it for themselves and make the decision that way - but who is going to pay £30 per game just to check whether or not it is suitable for their kids?
I'm not a parent, but there is no way I'd like my 10 year old to watch an 18 rated film. In the same way I wouldn't let them play an 18 rated game nor would I want them to have the ability to go and buy one. On the other hand, if I'm happy for them to play it then I'll go and buy it.
Despite online connectivity being a marketing cornerstone for all new consoles, the study concluded that 45 percent of retail games are not utilizing it in any way -- 98 percent of Nintendo Wii games have no online functionality at all.
Can't speak for next-gen consoles but my limited experience of PC online gaming was a complete let down. The major reason being that the team deathmatch type games are really teamy at all.
You start the game and everyone runs off in different directions - the only thing that is team orientated is that half the people don't try to kill you. There is no team-work, covering people, supporting groups in ambushes or anything that would be done in a real-life game (such as paintball).
On Tuesday, the USPTO granted Microsoft a patent for privacy policy change notification, which describes how to threaten users with the loss of their accounts and access to web sites and services should they refuse to consent to changes in a privacy policy.
Most of the sites I've ever visited (and bothered to read their privacy policy) tell me that they have the right to change the policy at any time, it is up to me to keep abreast of their changes and by continuing to use the site I accept any revisions they've made to their policy.
In short, I have no idea what or when they change something and could find myself a year down the line using a service which is selling my data to anyone who comes knocking.
Based on that, isn't this slightly better in the fact you'll know when those onerous changes come?
The content on Slashdot *should* be ideal for reading on the way to work on my mobile - content that can be laid out easily in a linear fashion, lots of content on a single page so I can keep on reading through blackspots, no pictures - but the way it's laid out makes it way too annoying (and this is with an unlimited 3G data plan).
I wanted everything you asked for and ended up writing this which I think does a pretty good job.
You can't get that technician come out until after you actually order the service, and you can't actually order the service until after you buy the property. So what the fuck do you suggest people do instead?
Sorry, can't help you there. In the UK you can take actions against providers who incorrectly claim they can support you. Sounds like you don't have such a thing in America.
I called it [slashdot.org] and pretty much anyone who wasn't a self-professed "hard core gamer" did too.
My vote is for Wii, PS2 then xbox 360. The PS2 is a good console, well established with lots of available games and, thanks to the PS3, is now dirt cheap. They're going for £70 in the shops here, which might not be cheap by American standards, but is still half the price it used to be before the PS3 came out.
In addition, if you don't own a HDTV then I don't really see the point in picking up a PS3 or xbox 360. A lot of people I know have a big enough television that does the job just fine and have no desire to pay into a subscription service just to get a couple of HD channels.
Unless you're a latest games junkie, I can't see why you wouldn't get a Wii and a PS2 and play for a good couple of years until no more games are produced for the latter platform. Hell, the current stack of PS2 games will be cheaper too.
Then, in a year or two, PS3 price will have dropped to something less expensive and you can get that and hopefully get some of your old PS2 games working on it too - if you're lucky.
Soon after moving to Gilsum, N.H. (population 811), [Kim] Rossey learned that he couldn't get broadband to support his Web programming business, TooCoolWebs.
This isn't a fault of rural America or telecoms at all, Mr Rossey failed to adequately research the area before purchasing a property.
If he depended on the web so much for his company, you would have thought he would at least know what he can and cannot get before signing the contracts and accepting the keys.
Before you start complaining about the US price vs the European prices, always remember to remove the VAT from the European prices. Why can't Europeans bother to remember such a simple thing? List prices in the US do not include tax.
Fair point but Amazon is offering the PS3 60GB version for $499 in the USA and £399 in the UK.
Take 17.5% off £399 and you get roughly £340 which, according to xe.com, is $683.
You're looking at $680 vs $499 for exactly the same product - even without the VAT, we have every right to still complain.
Now, if there aren't lots of quality games to choose from by this time next year, there will be problems without a doubt.
Agreed, but the PS3 is actually doing pretty well - it is the Wii owners that should be worried.
Assuming a good game is one that has an average score of 80% or higher - then current figures from Metacritic are:
PS3 = 19 out of 61 = 31%
Wii = 7 out of 78 = 9%
Xbox 360 = 59 out of 232 = 25%
I've no doubt that the innovative controller of the Wii could revolutionise gaming and make it more appealling to the masses and that there are great games coming in the future - which is great, but doesn't really mean much if the developers are unable to make and sell games right now which use it well and produce what people consider a "great game".
According to Philips the first discs from the assembly line in Langenhangen were ABBA's "The Visitor".
I'm also led to believe that Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms" was also one of the first set of albums from the assembly line and subsequently went on to be the first CD album to sell over one million copies.
Unfortunately I cannot find a source that will confirm this although Wikipedia does note that "when the disc was released, it was said that more people owned a copy of the CD than owned CD players."
I'm in a mildly technical role, no development or anything like that - essentially I'm a product manager. On a day between 9am and 6pm I will receive, on average, one email just under every 3 minutes (about 180+ a day). Of these, about 50% of them are directed at me which require a response. 10% are from members of my team which are outward communication that I need to know about because, as the product manager, if someone asks you a question, they expect you to know the answer. 40% of them are chains.
I spend, on average, 20 hours a week in meetings. That means that over the course of a week 400 emails arrive when I'm not physically at my computer. Of which 200 require a response from me.
As an addition to the meetings, I have to actually do some work. However for every three minutes I'm working on a proposition document, roadmap, presentation or what-have-you, another email has dropped into my inbox.
Messages on group distribution lists aren't counted. They're filtered away and I only rarely read them - as a consequence, I often miss out on company information. When I went on holiday three months ago for two weeks, upon my return, I moved all emails sent during that time into a separate folder which I would go back and review once I'd done the more recent stuff. With this I assumed that 80% of people would have got the answer they wanted whilst I was away. Fast forward to today and I haven't touched the folder. It still contains the 1,921 emails. All unread.
At present my inbox has 458 emails, 381 of them are unread and 77 are marked for follow-up. I use the conversation mode in Outlook to easily spot conversation threads and jump over them. I colour messages with me in the cc grey so that I don't prioritise them over the ones in blue which are directed at me. Ones from key people (my boss, board members, marketing) are in a different colour for importance. I don't have the pop-up telling me every time I have new email otherwise I'd never be able to work. I check email and respond when I can.
My turn around for email (assuming I do it in strict order) is a response about three days after it was sent and, for many people, it isn't good enough. I've been told I need to get that down to the point when I can respond in less than an hour. If I reverse it and start at the most recent, then people complain that I haven't responded to their earlier email.
That's why you surf the lighter-weight versions of pages: http://slashdot.org/palm/ gives a front page that weighs only 8 KB. A page view at those rates is a dime, instead of $25.00
I'm biased, but I would suggest this instead of the Palm version. You need to set it up on a server (after some idiot abused the public copy I had for people) but it does present Slashdot far better.
To be fair, it is at a little more cost, as the current front page weighs in at about 24KB - but better comments and navigation and all can be configured to not be shown.
Given the controversial nature, relative complexity, and significant importance of the standard, the results of INCIT's vote is unsurprising
Of the 15 that voted, it got 53% of the vote, only needed one more (which could have been achieved as there was one abstention) to be given ISO standardisation - and this is "unsurprising"?
What this says to me is that the people doing the voting do not understand the issues at hand. If they did, then there should have been no-where near that number of votes for this format.
Right. Because as we all know, MS certainly lost a lot of marketshare due to their many FUD campaigns.
I get your point, although to be fair Microsoft's FUD is generally a little bit slicker than the "Micky$oft Windoze suxx!" type posts that you see with general Google searches. I'm sure there are companies out there that do a good job of debunking their claims - it's just a shame they tend to get lost in the noise.
Or perhaps you were claiming that FUD doesn't work with you. Ok, I can't argue with that. But, you are not the general population of potential users/customers. Clearly, FUD at least doesn't hurt in the vast majority of cases.
True, I think a lot of it comes down to how you market that FUD.
Microsoft (and a good many other companies) are very good at marketing their product and doing "comparisons" with others to get their point across - unfortunately the Linux community aren't so good at that (which is fair, it's not their day job) and it tends to come across a bit childish and namecalling.
Not related to you at all but creative spellings of companies is one that always gets my goat. I see no reason to call it "Linsux" in the same way I see no reason to call it "Windoze" or "Micro$oft".
Why should I have any respect for an organisation that's been convicted of anti-competitive practices on 2 continents? Microsoft is a bunch of crooks selling a third-rate products. Respect has to earned, not expected.
That is fine, but when you're trying to get me (as a customer or just as an interested third party) to buy into your non-Microsoft solution (either for business or home) and you tell me that Microsoft are a "bunch of crooks selling a third-rate products" then you've immediately lost, do not pass go and do not collect £200. However correct that may be.
You may not like Microsoft, you may not respect them - but in advocacy ridiculing a competitor is not a way to encourage people (and those in companies that make the key decisions) to change. Sell them on what Linux can do for them, not how much Microsoft sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
He's not talking about media downloads, but the entire bbc.co.uk site which, according to Google, is about 3,310,000 pages.
From the article:
They didn't do a Linux version because only 0.0035% of users are identifying themselves as running Linux.
I'm not making any comments about whether or not this is a good idea. I'm sure others can provide good arguments for both ways.
Although he has a point, we humans love to compare and if you don't give us any metric by which to do that, then we don't feel like anything has been achieved.
"SuperGame is really good" is meaningless to me. What I want to know is, is it any better than GreatGame? If the reviewer gives a score for both then I can understand which he/she feels is better and by what margin. Since I've played GreatGame (and assuming I trust the reviewer), then I can set some sort of expectation of what SuperGame will be like.
Personally, I use Metacritic which aggregates a number of reviews. Again, it's not perfect, but when it gets a 75 or above score, I can be reasonably certain that I'm not getting a dud game. It might not be my type of game, but if it is, then it shouldn't be disappointing.
Apologies, I've re-read my comment and it could come across that way.
Essentially I don't want to purchase something which leaves me with two monitors, one being unused. Granted a monitor isn't too expensive, but when you have one that does the job - it's wasteful to replace it for no reason.
Great, except that I am now the proud owner of two monitors. One of which is doing nothing.
There is still no middle ground between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro unless I'm prepared to give up my monitor and then purchase a new monitor every single time I upgrade my hardware.
No, I'm not kidding, but then I didn't say that either.
What I did say was that I already have a perfectly good monitor (which means I don't want to purchase an iMac) and with my, not particularly special, requirements I have a choice between an anaemic Mac Mini or a massively over powerful Mac Pro.
There is no middle ground unless I end up with an unused monitor - which is not what I want.
In addition, I cannot buy a Mac in the specification I want. That doesn't mean that my requirements are wild or unrealistic, but if I already have a monitor then I have only two choices - the Mac Pro (which at the very cheapest is £1,699.00) or the Mac Mini (which at the best specified is £639.00).
Unless I'm missing something, I have a £1060 price gap which cannot be satisfied.
If I want a 750GB hard-drive, reasonably fast processor, 2GB of RAM, use my existing monitor and a good enough graphics card to run bootcamp and some games then I'm SOL unless I plump for the Mac Pro.
I don't care about Apple opening up their operating system, but a few extra choices on the desktop would be nice.
(side note, the cheapest Mac laptop is £699. It may be better specified than a Dell at the same price but the average student can get away with a £399 laptop without a problem. Again, it comes down to a big hole in the choices)
This is not a review, more instructions on how to play the game.
Didn't we all see a similar article like this back when XP was introduced?
We all know that businesses work on a far slower cycle than the consumer market - hell, it was only two years ago that my work computer (I'm not in IT) moved from Windows 2000 to Windows XP.
Based on that timescale (5 years), I don't expect to move to Vista till 2009...
It's not called Rip Off Britain for nothing you know.
Seriously though, yes our prices include VAT at 17.5% which people often forget to take into account but, even so, there are plenty of products which have such a colossal additional mark-up on them (Windows Vista is twice as expensive which tax and shipping costs cannot explain away) compared to our European and American counterparts that it is hard not to feel cheated.
The Wikipedia article on it is worth reading and notes that these items cost significantly more in the UK:
Unfortunately as we put up with paying those prices, we allow companies to continually screw us.
This is no different than the rating on films, yet no-one seems to complain about them.
I have to admit, I don't understand why people on Slashdot are so upset that games are rated. We are no longer in the 8 bit age of pixelated graphics and some of these games are pretty gory and have disturbing themes.
Having a rating on the box, gives the parent an immediate indicator of the level of maturity required for a game when making a purchasing decision. Yes it would be best if they could play it for themselves and make the decision that way - but who is going to pay £30 per game just to check whether or not it is suitable for their kids?
I'm not a parent, but there is no way I'd like my 10 year old to watch an 18 rated film. In the same way I wouldn't let them play an 18 rated game nor would I want them to have the ability to go and buy one. On the other hand, if I'm happy for them to play it then I'll go and buy it.
Can't speak for next-gen consoles but my limited experience of PC online gaming was a complete let down. The major reason being that the team deathmatch type games are really teamy at all.
You start the game and everyone runs off in different directions - the only thing that is team orientated is that half the people don't try to kill you. There is no team-work, covering people, supporting groups in ambushes or anything that would be done in a real-life game (such as paintball).
As such, I got bored pretty quickly.
Most of the sites I've ever visited (and bothered to read their privacy policy) tell me that they have the right to change the policy at any time, it is up to me to keep abreast of their changes and by continuing to use the site I accept any revisions they've made to their policy.
In short, I have no idea what or when they change something and could find myself a year down the line using a service which is selling my data to anyone who comes knocking.
Based on that, isn't this slightly better in the fact you'll know when those onerous changes come?
I wanted everything you asked for and ended up writing this which I think does a pretty good job.
Sorry, can't help you there. In the UK you can take actions against providers who incorrectly claim they can support you. Sounds like you don't have such a thing in America.
My vote is for Wii, PS2 then xbox 360. The PS2 is a good console, well established with lots of available games and, thanks to the PS3, is now dirt cheap. They're going for £70 in the shops here, which might not be cheap by American standards, but is still half the price it used to be before the PS3 came out.
In addition, if you don't own a HDTV then I don't really see the point in picking up a PS3 or xbox 360. A lot of people I know have a big enough television that does the job just fine and have no desire to pay into a subscription service just to get a couple of HD channels.
Unless you're a latest games junkie, I can't see why you wouldn't get a Wii and a PS2 and play for a good couple of years until no more games are produced for the latter platform. Hell, the current stack of PS2 games will be cheaper too.
Then, in a year or two, PS3 price will have dropped to something less expensive and you can get that and hopefully get some of your old PS2 games working on it too - if you're lucky.
This isn't a fault of rural America or telecoms at all, Mr Rossey failed to adequately research the area before purchasing a property.
If he depended on the web so much for his company, you would have thought he would at least know what he can and cannot get before signing the contracts and accepting the keys.
Fair point but Amazon is offering the PS3 60GB version for $499 in the USA and £399 in the UK.
Take 17.5% off £399 and you get roughly £340 which, according to xe.com, is $683.
You're looking at $680 vs $499 for exactly the same product - even without the VAT, we have every right to still complain.
Agreed, but the PS3 is actually doing pretty well - it is the Wii owners that should be worried.
Assuming a good game is one that has an average score of 80% or higher - then current figures from Metacritic are:
I've no doubt that the innovative controller of the Wii could revolutionise gaming and make it more appealling to the masses and that there are great games coming in the future - which is great, but doesn't really mean much if the developers are unable to make and sell games right now which use it well and produce what people consider a "great game".
Not really. If you're going to get people to buy into a new music format, it would make sense to give them popular music to re-buy.
I'm also led to believe that Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms" was also one of the first set of albums from the assembly line and subsequently went on to be the first CD album to sell over one million copies.
Unfortunately I cannot find a source that will confirm this although Wikipedia does note that "when the disc was released, it was said that more people owned a copy of the CD than owned CD players."
Give me Dire Straits over Abba any time :)
This article is a lot about people like me.
I'm in a mildly technical role, no development or anything like that - essentially I'm a product manager. On a day between 9am and 6pm I will receive, on average, one email just under every 3 minutes (about 180+ a day). Of these, about 50% of them are directed at me which require a response. 10% are from members of my team which are outward communication that I need to know about because, as the product manager, if someone asks you a question, they expect you to know the answer. 40% of them are chains.
I spend, on average, 20 hours a week in meetings. That means that over the course of a week 400 emails arrive when I'm not physically at my computer. Of which 200 require a response from me.
As an addition to the meetings, I have to actually do some work. However for every three minutes I'm working on a proposition document, roadmap, presentation or what-have-you, another email has dropped into my inbox.
Messages on group distribution lists aren't counted. They're filtered away and I only rarely read them - as a consequence, I often miss out on company information. When I went on holiday three months ago for two weeks, upon my return, I moved all emails sent during that time into a separate folder which I would go back and review once I'd done the more recent stuff. With this I assumed that 80% of people would have got the answer they wanted whilst I was away. Fast forward to today and I haven't touched the folder. It still contains the 1,921 emails. All unread.
At present my inbox has 458 emails, 381 of them are unread and 77 are marked for follow-up. I use the conversation mode in Outlook to easily spot conversation threads and jump over them. I colour messages with me in the cc grey so that I don't prioritise them over the ones in blue which are directed at me. Ones from key people (my boss, board members, marketing) are in a different colour for importance. I don't have the pop-up telling me every time I have new email otherwise I'd never be able to work. I check email and respond when I can.
My turn around for email (assuming I do it in strict order) is a response about three days after it was sent and, for many people, it isn't good enough. I've been told I need to get that down to the point when I can respond in less than an hour. If I reverse it and start at the most recent, then people complain that I haven't responded to their earlier email.
This is inbox overload. It's hell.
I'm biased, but I would suggest this instead of the Palm version. You need to set it up on a server (after some idiot abused the public copy I had for people) but it does present Slashdot far better.
To be fair, it is at a little more cost, as the current front page weighs in at about 24KB - but better comments and navigation and all can be configured to not be shown.
Of the 15 that voted, it got 53% of the vote, only needed one more (which could have been achieved as there was one abstention) to be given ISO standardisation - and this is "unsurprising"?
What this says to me is that the people doing the voting do not understand the issues at hand. If they did, then there should have been no-where near that number of votes for this format.
I get your point, although to be fair Microsoft's FUD is generally a little bit slicker than the "Micky$oft Windoze suxx!" type posts that you see with general Google searches. I'm sure there are companies out there that do a good job of debunking their claims - it's just a shame they tend to get lost in the noise.
True, I think a lot of it comes down to how you market that FUD.
Microsoft (and a good many other companies) are very good at marketing their product and doing "comparisons" with others to get their point across - unfortunately the Linux community aren't so good at that (which is fair, it's not their day job) and it tends to come across a bit childish and namecalling.
Not related to you at all but creative spellings of companies is one that always gets my goat. I see no reason to call it "Linsux" in the same way I see no reason to call it "Windoze" or "Micro$oft".
That is fine, but when you're trying to get me (as a customer or just as an interested third party) to buy into your non-Microsoft solution (either for business or home) and you tell me that Microsoft are a "bunch of crooks selling a third-rate products" then you've immediately lost, do not pass go and do not collect £200. However correct that may be.
You may not like Microsoft, you may not respect them - but in advocacy ridiculing a competitor is not a way to encourage people (and those in companies that make the key decisions) to change. Sell them on what Linux can do for them, not how much Microsoft sucks.