Microsoft is targeting companies with around 250 PCs in the initiative. Companies of that size often have problems with using incorrectly licensed and counterfeit software, Dhaliwal said.
250 PC's doesn't strike me as a 'small business.' The article, in fact opens with,
...will take a new approach toward mid-size companies it suspects...
.
And further,
So far, Microsoft will use the new approach only in the UK, Dhaliwal said.
While the summary isn't directly misleading on this point, one does assume they're hinting at the US. Surely this will come to the US sooner or later (sooner rather than later, one would imagine) but it's not here yet.
Mind you, I recognize this is slashdot and debates have raged for years that the site doesn't purport to be an unbiased news source but rather news commentary (think FOX News or CNN and such), but please, for me, try to be at least a little objective? Or "fair and balanced," if you swing that way.
One would think that the fact that the company is an MSDN subscriber (something Microsoft would, obviously, have records to verify) would be a simple matter. Depending on how Microsoft does their audit, if it's PC-by-PC or what, it's just a simple matter of making sure the unique key that this particular MSDN account has been granted is only used in one machine. Though even beyond that, you'd imagine that Microsoft could pretty easily check activation records (for their activation-enabled products, anyway) and see how many times that key has been used, though that's not a definite count as machines come and go.
But really, there's nothing too special about MSDN subscribers. They, just like other copies of the software, have a single license, in most cases. I know there are a few exceptions, though I can't recall them at the time.
Unless I'm way off and Universal subscribers have a different agreement than we do.
Reminds me of how Verizon turned off the MP3 support on the LG phone I had a while back (I forget the model, the one with the blue flip top and the media buttons on the outside that everyone has these days) in favor of only playing WMA, I think it was. Ten minutes of searching online led to the discovery of an extra menu item on the phone, 0, for the phone configuration, protected by the impossibly difficult service code 0000000. Once in there, a simple changing of the mp3 playback option from off to on and you're in business.
Is Verizon lazy or do they just not care and do the minimum amount of work necessary to keep partners happy? If so, carry on!
It strikes me as, to some degree, being the same reason people put Linux on pocket watches and toasters and their dogs: To see if it can be done.
I've run WinXP on some pretty ancient machines, it's not pretty even on only slightly ancient machines. I don't know the specs of the machine other than the SD slot and 512MB flash storage, but I'd have to agree with the side that believes that unless MS cuts out 9/10 of the inner workings it's going to be a dog. Can't imagine the battery life would do too well either.
But, and bear in mind this is coming from a guy who's lived in New England all his life, in certain weather conditions at least, they should.
Say you're driving on a snow-covered road with, potentially, an ice base beneath it. Traction is going to be reduced, due to the surface, meaning that as you make a turn, you need to be more mindful of the lateral forces on the car, and reduce them to keep the car's tires gripping solid surfaces.
This can be done in two ways; you can either slow down to a slight crawl as you make your turn, although slow down too much and you may become mired anyway, as traction is reduced when you try to turn hard from a stop.
Or
You can slow to a moderate speed, take the turn from the outside, hit the apex and then back out to the outside (assuming it is safe to do so with traffic and such), and still get through the turn pretty well. Having some degree of experience with countering lost traction is always good too, although the real experience has to come from real-life situations, as it's an entirely different sensation when failure to regain control of the car threatens your life and tens of thousands of your own dollars.
Mind you, very few people will probably see the game in this way. But that's just me.
Kudos to them for being the good business people that they are and refunding orders and settling store credit and so forth.
But it seems to me that given the business they're in, you'd expect at least a bit more of a bark back from them while making these arrangements, rather than a quick and quiet whimper as they back out the door. Mind you, you're right, without serious financial backing there's not a lot they can do (and whether they have legal backing anyway would be a question as well) but it would seem like there's perhaps a pretty vocal crowd over in Europe that would love to take a swing or two at Sony (moreso than has been already.)
With the courts in the EU loving to interfere with business as they do, I'm a little surprised they sided with such a large corporation. But then, they aren't Microsoft, I guess.
Flamebait me if you will, but it sounds to me that Lik-Sang is going the crybaby route and taking their toys and going home, hoping that people will, as have already on slashdot, go for the zomg boycott sony!@# approach.
That's when the PS2 goes into tilt and shuts down the controller for 30 seconds while the boss that just beat you down starts taunting you and doing unspeakable things to your corpses for good measure.:-P
But... it's ducks! And hunting! In your living room! It's the best of both worlds! You don't have to even get out of your recliner, and if you finish your beer, you just have to ask your girlfriend/wife/hound dog to grab you another out of the fridge!
But yeah, that does seem a bit steep. But who knows, I've watched people pump dollar after dollar into the buck hunting machines at the arcade.
Granted, release dates from GameStop / EB aren't worth the paper they're printed on, but it's interesting to note that while most Wii release games have a ship date of 11/1/06, Metroid Prime 3 has a release date of 10/1/06. How great would it be if on the 14th/15th they just get up and say, "Here they are, start buying!"
At least in CT, sales people on the floor make $7-$8 per hour base (excluding bonuses), with higher tiers (managers-in-training, asst. managers, managers, etc.) obviously making higher bases and different sets of bonuses. No floor salesperson has their own radioshack email address, only a store-wide email account.
And no, they don't ask for home address anymore, only your zip code for marketing / store stock purposes, which you can decline with no argument. Addresses -are- needed in some situations though, for things like service plans and Answers Plus (in-store credit card) accounts though.
But you forget. This is Microsoft we're talking about. There's got to be an ulterior motive hidden there somewhere!
But hey, they're better than Mitsubishi. I paid them $5,000 for my car back in 2003 when I bought it new. But now they've had the nerve to, every month, demand an additional $200 from me! Every single month since May of 2003, and they have signaled they intend to continue straight through to 2008! At least Microsoft only charges you twice.
Seriously folks, you can get the whole game for $24 apparently, how much would it cost to get the whole game on PSP? And like some have said, what if it sucks and you don't even want to finish it? Then you can save yourself nine bucks and not buy *clears throat* the thrilling conclusion to tonight's adventure! In a way they're doing you a favor. I'm sure they inform you when you make the initial purchase that this is for the first X minutes/levels/whatever of the game, and you'll have to pay more for the rest, so there's no problem there. And no bitching just because you didn't read what it told you when you bought it.
And of course don't forget the demoralizing effect that having a big hefty stack of $500 bills has on the other players when they're looking at a sea of yellow, pink and white at their own sides of the board. Throw in a little trash talk and pity deals and it's great.
With the debit card though, the playing field is pretty much level, everyone's got a plastic card at their side of the board and no one has any clue how much is on the card, presumably. Aside from when it's being read anyway, but still. Commanding visual presence > fleeting glimpse any day.
Late last year and early this year I did a nine-month stint at Radio Shack, dealing a lot with both Sprint and Cingular customer service (oddly I almost never had to call Verizon for anything, their activation system worked like a charm for me), and yeah, cell phone companies hang up on everyone, even people selling phones for them. There's always a few bad apples, just call back and ask to go straight to a supervisor, make sure to get everyone's name that you talk to just in case.
And at the same time, remember, the CSR's aren't always able to give you the information you're asking them to, they aren't always just trying to brush you off. Instead of getting angry and shouting and cursing and, in one case, farting over the phone (go figure), just get their name and talk to a supervisor, they may still not be able to help you but might be able to direct you to someone who can.
While eldavojohn's suggestion may well be what it comes do, don't come out of the gate guns blazing, demanding this and that and not letting the rep speak. We're all humans, in spite of our best efforts if the person on the other end of the phone responds to our "Thanks for calling-" by shouting and demanding things without letting us speak, there's going to be some level of agitation, and that's going to interfere with reaching an acceptable resolution. Stay calm and be firm yet polite and things will be worked out with much less stress and much more quickly than they would be otherwise.
And please, for the love of god, don't file complaints against people like RS employees who don't even work directly for the phone companies, our hands are very tied in what we can do with the carriers. Being in a relatively well-to-do area, everyone had a holier-than-thou attitude and I ended up dealing with calls from my superiors almost daily about my employees who honestly did everything they could to make things right but just didn't have the power. Yeah, it's a pain to have to deal with middlemen who are forced to basically ask you to hold on while we get Sprint|Verizon|Cingular|Alltel|US Cellular|NEXTEL on the phone, but remember too though that most of the time we have our own numbers to use that take us straight to the people who (generally) have a clue.
Remember though, this is a beta they're showing off, as other people have said, they're probably saving the GUI work for the end once the stuff behind the screen has taken a solid form and can be trusted to not change too much anymore (and no other features will get cut out of the product:-P)
Elsewhere I've read that this beta was directed primarily towards developers, as well, meaning that yes, the GUI will have taken a back seat while they work on demoing the new APIs and such. Sure it looks like crap, but that could be a good thing, it might mean most of their guys are being put to work on more important things first.
Besides, what OS has been revolutionary as of late with its GUI? OS X has menubars (ooh!) and the 'dock,' essentially a differntly-style task bar (holy cow!). I personally think the WinXP start menu and stuff works pretty well, if it ain't broke don't fix it. I am amused by the fact that "Shut Down" doesn't fit on their start menu though.:)
Minor wording nitpick, you actually do get to keep the files, Rhapsody stores any song it completely buffered in a file under the Rhapsody directory called radfile.rcf. No clue as to what format it's in, although I recall sniffing traffic one day and noticing that Rhapsody does all of its authentication and downloading of music via HTTPS.
It'd be a blessing if someone could spend the time to come up with a proxy to authenticate Rhapsody locally, since once it's buffered a song it doesn't download it again, the only reason I was able to stay sane while visiting my parents with dial-up.
I don't know if perhaps you got served up a different page (perhaps depending on your OS, since it is Windows-only) but there's a big button at the top of the page on http://www.real.com/ that says DOWNLOAD RHAPSODY FREE.
The actual website for Rhapsody however is http://www.listen.com/. I've tried briefly to run it in wine with little luck, but that was on a Knoppix CD so I didn't really have much in the way of options for buggering things out. A couple library replacements later I at least got an error from Rhapsody itself, not from wine.
Ditto to that, when I signed up for cable through RCN in the Boston metro area, they gave me a 30-day trial of Rhapsody, this was two years ago, my subscription's still going strong. They've even got some moderately obscure stuff that I listen to, even a couple video game soundtracks (albeit GTA soundtracks.)
Slashdot Mirror
And further, While the summary isn't directly misleading on this point, one does assume they're hinting at the US. Surely this will come to the US sooner or later (sooner rather than later, one would imagine) but it's not here yet.
Mind you, I recognize this is slashdot and debates have raged for years that the site doesn't purport to be an unbiased news source but rather news commentary (think FOX News or CNN and such), but please, for me, try to be at least a little objective? Or "fair and balanced," if you swing that way.
One would think that the fact that the company is an MSDN subscriber (something Microsoft would, obviously, have records to verify) would be a simple matter. Depending on how Microsoft does their audit, if it's PC-by-PC or what, it's just a simple matter of making sure the unique key that this particular MSDN account has been granted is only used in one machine. Though even beyond that, you'd imagine that Microsoft could pretty easily check activation records (for their activation-enabled products, anyway) and see how many times that key has been used, though that's not a definite count as machines come and go.
But really, there's nothing too special about MSDN subscribers. They, just like other copies of the software, have a single license, in most cases. I know there are a few exceptions, though I can't recall them at the time.
Unless I'm way off and Universal subscribers have a different agreement than we do.
That, or perhaps folks capable of acting out very bad kung fu movie dubs.
Suddenly, Michael Winslow becomes in-demand again.
Reminds me of how Verizon turned off the MP3 support on the LG phone I had a while back (I forget the model, the one with the blue flip top and the media buttons on the outside that everyone has these days) in favor of only playing WMA, I think it was. Ten minutes of searching online led to the discovery of an extra menu item on the phone, 0, for the phone configuration, protected by the impossibly difficult service code 0000000. Once in there, a simple changing of the mp3 playback option from off to on and you're in business.
Is Verizon lazy or do they just not care and do the minimum amount of work necessary to keep partners happy? If so, carry on!
It strikes me as, to some degree, being the same reason people put Linux on pocket watches and toasters and their dogs: To see if it can be done.
I've run WinXP on some pretty ancient machines, it's not pretty even on only slightly ancient machines. I don't know the specs of the machine other than the SD slot and 512MB flash storage, but I'd have to agree with the side that believes that unless MS cuts out 9/10 of the inner workings it's going to be a dog. Can't imagine the battery life would do too well either.
But, and bear in mind this is coming from a guy who's lived in New England all his life, in certain weather conditions at least, they should.
Say you're driving on a snow-covered road with, potentially, an ice base beneath it. Traction is going to be reduced, due to the surface, meaning that as you make a turn, you need to be more mindful of the lateral forces on the car, and reduce them to keep the car's tires gripping solid surfaces.
This can be done in two ways; you can either slow down to a slight crawl as you make your turn, although slow down too much and you may become mired anyway, as traction is reduced when you try to turn hard from a stop.
Or
You can slow to a moderate speed, take the turn from the outside, hit the apex and then back out to the outside (assuming it is safe to do so with traffic and such), and still get through the turn pretty well. Having some degree of experience with countering lost traction is always good too, although the real experience has to come from real-life situations, as it's an entirely different sensation when failure to regain control of the car threatens your life and tens of thousands of your own dollars.
Mind you, very few people will probably see the game in this way. But that's just me.
Kudos to them for being the good business people that they are and refunding orders and settling store credit and so forth.
But it seems to me that given the business they're in, you'd expect at least a bit more of a bark back from them while making these arrangements, rather than a quick and quiet whimper as they back out the door. Mind you, you're right, without serious financial backing there's not a lot they can do (and whether they have legal backing anyway would be a question as well) but it would seem like there's perhaps a pretty vocal crowd over in Europe that would love to take a swing or two at Sony (moreso than has been already.)
With the courts in the EU loving to interfere with business as they do, I'm a little surprised they sided with such a large corporation. But then, they aren't Microsoft, I guess.
Flamebait me if you will, but it sounds to me that Lik-Sang is going the crybaby route and taking their toys and going home, hoping that people will, as have already on slashdot, go for the zomg boycott sony!@# approach.
Well played.
That's when the PS2 goes into tilt and shuts down the controller for 30 seconds while the boss that just beat you down starts taunting you and doing unspeakable things to your corpses for good measure. :-P
But... it's ducks! And hunting! In your living room! It's the best of both worlds! You don't have to even get out of your recliner, and if you finish your beer, you just have to ask your girlfriend/wife/hound dog to grab you another out of the fridge!
But yeah, that does seem a bit steep. But who knows, I've watched people pump dollar after dollar into the buck hunting machines at the arcade.
For the price, sounds like it's similar to the iPod socks / condoms.
Had my hopes up for a minute, there.
Granted, release dates from GameStop / EB aren't worth the paper they're printed on, but it's interesting to note that while most Wii release games have a ship date of 11/1/06, Metroid Prime 3 has a release date of 10/1/06. How great would it be if on the 14th/15th they just get up and say, "Here they are, start buying!"
In other news, Duck Hunt!
At least in CT, sales people on the floor make $7-$8 per hour base (excluding bonuses), with higher tiers (managers-in-training, asst. managers, managers, etc.) obviously making higher bases and different sets of bonuses. No floor salesperson has their own radioshack email address, only a store-wide email account.
And no, they don't ask for home address anymore, only your zip code for marketing / store stock purposes, which you can decline with no argument. Addresses -are- needed in some situations though, for things like service plans and Answers Plus (in-store credit card) accounts though.
But at the same time, one needs to be wary of public opinion, and not give in to their every whim.
Let this be a horiffic reminder of the dangers of giving the public what they want.
(I know this post is entirely-OT and ignoring the parent's inflammatory and to some degree uninformed comments. Sue me.)
But you forget. This is Microsoft we're talking about. There's got to be an ulterior motive hidden there somewhere!
But hey, they're better than Mitsubishi. I paid them $5,000 for my car back in 2003 when I bought it new. But now they've had the nerve to, every month, demand an additional $200 from me! Every single month since May of 2003, and they have signaled they intend to continue straight through to 2008! At least Microsoft only charges you twice.
Seriously folks, you can get the whole game for $24 apparently, how much would it cost to get the whole game on PSP? And like some have said, what if it sucks and you don't even want to finish it? Then you can save yourself nine bucks and not buy *clears throat* the thrilling conclusion to tonight's adventure! In a way they're doing you a favor. I'm sure they inform you when you make the initial purchase that this is for the first X minutes/levels/whatever of the game, and you'll have to pay more for the rest, so there's no problem there. And no bitching just because you didn't read what it told you when you bought it.
Because this week's Outrage of the Week(tm) is Google.
Pay attention!
Next week we'll move on to mozilla.org and their tracking cookie for web analytics. A line must be drawn!
And of course don't forget the demoralizing effect that having a big hefty stack of $500 bills has on the other players when they're looking at a sea of yellow, pink and white at their own sides of the board. Throw in a little trash talk and pity deals and it's great.
With the debit card though, the playing field is pretty much level, everyone's got a plastic card at their side of the board and no one has any clue how much is on the card, presumably. Aside from when it's being read anyway, but still. Commanding visual presence > fleeting glimpse any day.
Late last year and early this year I did a nine-month stint at Radio Shack, dealing a lot with both Sprint and Cingular customer service (oddly I almost never had to call Verizon for anything, their activation system worked like a charm for me), and yeah, cell phone companies hang up on everyone, even people selling phones for them. There's always a few bad apples, just call back and ask to go straight to a supervisor, make sure to get everyone's name that you talk to just in case.
:-P)
And at the same time, remember, the CSR's aren't always able to give you the information you're asking them to, they aren't always just trying to brush you off. Instead of getting angry and shouting and cursing and, in one case, farting over the phone (go figure), just get their name and talk to a supervisor, they may still not be able to help you but might be able to direct you to someone who can.
While eldavojohn's suggestion may well be what it comes do, don't come out of the gate guns blazing, demanding this and that and not letting the rep speak. We're all humans, in spite of our best efforts if the person on the other end of the phone responds to our "Thanks for calling-" by shouting and demanding things without letting us speak, there's going to be some level of agitation, and that's going to interfere with reaching an acceptable resolution. Stay calm and be firm yet polite and things will be worked out with much less stress and much more quickly than they would be otherwise.
And please, for the love of god, don't file complaints against people like RS employees who don't even work directly for the phone companies, our hands are very tied in what we can do with the carriers. Being in a relatively well-to-do area, everyone had a holier-than-thou attitude and I ended up dealing with calls from my superiors almost daily about my employees who honestly did everything they could to make things right but just didn't have the power. Yeah, it's a pain to have to deal with middlemen who are forced to basically ask you to hold on while we get Sprint|Verizon|Cingular|Alltel|US Cellular|NEXTEL on the phone, but remember too though that most of the time we have our own numbers to use that take us straight to the people who (generally) have a clue.
(sorry, got ranty on that last one.
Remember though, this is a beta they're showing off, as other people have said, they're probably saving the GUI work for the end once the stuff behind the screen has taken a solid form and can be trusted to not change too much anymore (and no other features will get cut out of the product :-P)
:)
Elsewhere I've read that this beta was directed primarily towards developers, as well, meaning that yes, the GUI will have taken a back seat while they work on demoing the new APIs and such. Sure it looks like crap, but that could be a good thing, it might mean most of their guys are being put to work on more important things first.
Besides, what OS has been revolutionary as of late with its GUI? OS X has menubars (ooh!) and the 'dock,' essentially a differntly-style task bar (holy cow!). I personally think the WinXP start menu and stuff works pretty well, if it ain't broke don't fix it. I am amused by the fact that "Shut Down" doesn't fit on their start menu though.
Because obviously Microsoft has put all their work into the way Longhorn looks, rather than under-the-hood things.
Screenshots tell all. Microsoft is asleep at the wheel.
Minor wording nitpick, you actually do get to keep the files, Rhapsody stores any song it completely buffered in a file under the Rhapsody directory called radfile.rcf. No clue as to what format it's in, although I recall sniffing traffic one day and noticing that Rhapsody does all of its authentication and downloading of music via HTTPS.
It'd be a blessing if someone could spend the time to come up with a proxy to authenticate Rhapsody locally, since once it's buffered a song it doesn't download it again, the only reason I was able to stay sane while visiting my parents with dial-up.
I don't know if perhaps you got served up a different page (perhaps depending on your OS, since it is Windows-only) but there's a big button at the top of the page on http://www.real.com/ that says DOWNLOAD RHAPSODY FREE.
The actual website for Rhapsody however is http://www.listen.com/. I've tried briefly to run it in wine with little luck, but that was on a Knoppix CD so I didn't really have much in the way of options for buggering things out. A couple library replacements later I at least got an error from Rhapsody itself, not from wine.
Ditto to that, when I signed up for cable through RCN in the Boston metro area, they gave me a 30-day trial of Rhapsody, this was two years ago, my subscription's still going strong. They've even got some moderately obscure stuff that I listen to, even a couple video game soundtracks (albeit GTA soundtracks.)
And then the even more interesting number, how many of those 'signatures' are actually real, living people. :-P
"Thank you, we'll be in touch."