Every desirable name (and even most typos) have been gobbled up by a bunch of greedy, talentless parasites who are hoping to strike it rich by cyberextorting from companies. I'm happy to see them lose these battles. Sure, there are probably some cases being decided the wrong way, but the good being done outweighs the bad.
Sorry if this opinion offends, but when I really resent jerks paying $35/year to register a domain and then extorting $200K out of some company. I'm tired of finding every domain name that I might want in the hands of some cybersquatter who has no intention of ever using or developing it. It reminds me of someone who buys up all of the plywood before a hurricane and sells it for $100/sheet to his desperate neighbors.
Worse, I'd hate to have a provider that explicitly disallows NAT (and can somehow scan for it)
Most broadband ISPs state that you can have only one computer connected to the cable modem. They don't state how many computers can be connected to that computer. One computer, two NICs, and life will be good.
I find this news especially odd because my local cable provider recently lowered the rates for @Home customers (quite a surprising move, IMO).
It's not that surprising. Many of the cable companies grossly overestimated the demand. They got caught up in the whole fantasy about the "new dot-com economy" and everyone telecommuting, taking courses online, and getting all of their content on demand. Bandwidth, in the commercial sector, has dropped considerably, allowing the cable modem companies to sell their services cheaper and still make a profit. So now many of them have cut rates in order to get their user base up.
Why be upset by this?
on
$1200 Cheap!
·
· Score: 3, Funny
On the one hand, Slashdotters, taken in total, believe that Satan is just one of Bill Gates' minions and that Microsoft is evil incarnate. On the other hand, many people on here get upset when Microsoft does something that will make their products less appealing. This story is a prime example. How many parents in a slowing U.S. economy are going to rush out and buy a $1,200 game console that includes a bunch of games that their kids don't really want? So what if Microsoft makes it the ultimate game console. That's one notch above "the ultimate cotton swab" as far as most people are concerned.
What would have me worried would be Microsoft selling the XBox for $149, paying a $50 trade-in for existing consoles (to reduce the user base), and giving away a bunch of games. All that they are doing with this kind of predatory pricing is convincing parents that their kids can make do with the existing Sony/Sega/Nintendo/whatever console.
Moderators, please note:
use of bold text to emphasize a point
negative portayal of Bill Gates and Microsoft
title not "*BSD is dying"
"fp" does not appear in title or body
prediction of negative outcome for Microsoft
"elite" not spelled "3l33t". "z" not replacing "s" at end of words (e.g., "hackerz")
message not critical of Apple, Linux, or BSD
Taken in total, those things must be worth a karma point or two.
Wow, talk about the dumbest analysis ever. So the intelligence of people who voted in a particular state is judged by the number of Ivy League schools in that state. Way to go, Champ.
Having a high IQ, and working and associating with others who also do, has lead me to sometimes expect too much from people. Sorry. I'll break down the reasoning further for you:
If you were building an automobile manufacturing plant, where would you build it? Where you could find qualified workers. If you build a top-notch university, would you build it where the average IQ was 95 and the average education was 10th grade? Of course not. That's why Alabama, West Virginia, and Arkansas do not have Ivy League schools.
An Ivy League university employs many of the top minds in the world. Thus, those people will immigrate into the state housing the University. They will bring spouses and children, who will be, on average, more intelligent and better-educated than the average person.
Many people, after getting out of college, settle down to live and work near where they went to school. That's why you will find a proliferation of high-tech businesses near MIT, for example. This tends to further increase the overall intelligence and education of the population in those areas.
To show the validity of this, let's look at an analysis of the numbers from the 2000 Census:
Percentage of residents with BA or higher degrees:
States with Ivy League schools: 28.96%
States w/o Ivy League schools: 24.38%
Looks like my reasoning is pretty sound.
By the way, I discovered an error in my original message. I attributed Rhode Island to both Gore and Bush. Rhode Island was the only state with an Ivy League school won by Bush.
Al served as a military journalist in the Vietnam war--not a soldier.
So you feel that it is less courageous and honorable to go to Vietnam as a journalist than to go AWOL from the National Guard after daddy's friends pushed you to the front of the waiting list? You have a strange set of values.
Would that be the five courses he failed at Vanderbilt?
Yes. So he took some courses he did not complete. Big deal. He proved his mettle at Harvard, graduating with honors, while Bush barely squeaked by at Yale with a "gentleman's C" GPA.
Bush won his country. You obviously don't understand the electoral system of your own country
No, Bush won the Electoral College and lost the country. Over 500,000 more American citizens voted for Gore than for Bush. More American citizens wanted Gore as their President and an antiquated, unbalanced system left over from the days when votes were carried in by horseback robbed the American people of their choice.
Had the election gone the other way, you'd have been screaming about how unfair the Electoral College was.
Umm, it's well established in political science today that the less educated one is, the more likely he or she is to favor the Democratic Party.
[sarcasm]That's why Bush did so well in areas with the most-educated populations.[/sarcasm]
Let's look at states that have Ivy League Schools (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale). Gore won Massachusetts (MIT and Harvard), Connecticut (Yale), Rhode Island (Brown University), New York (Columbia, Cornell), New Jersey (Princeton), and Pennsylvania (University of Pennsylvania).
Bush, on the other hand, won only a single state that had an Ivy League school -- Rhode Island (Brown). Of course Bush also carried intellectual meccas like Alabama, West Virginia, and South Carolina.
Then again, if a majority of the people who know Gore best, the residents of his own state of Tennessee, hadn't voted for his opponent, then yes, he really would be president right now.
Gore graduated from Harvard with honors in 1969.
George W. Bush graduated from Yale in 1968 with a GPA he said could be described as a "gentleman's C."
Al Gore enlisted and served in Vietnam through 1971.
George Bush joined the Texas National Guard -- getting pushed ahead of a waiting list of about 500.
After Gore returned from Vietnam, he took graduate courses at Vanderbilt while simultaneously holding a job as a newspaper reporter.
George W. Bush was AWOL from the National Guard during that same period of time.
Considering that Bush lost his home country, Gore has nothing to be ashamed of.
Gore won in the cities and states with the best-educated voters. Uneducated yahoos in the bible belt preferred Bush.
perhaps people filing law suits should find out if what they think has any bases in reality.
I agree with this, but how? Do they hire a team of engineers to do a failure analysis? All that they know is that they did a Hotsync and their motherboard failed.
besides If Palm is found out not to be the cause, they just say 'you know what, we'll wave that fee if we can use the evidence found as proof agains other lawsuits'.
Palm does not need the permission of some third party to allow its engineers to testify in future court cases.
I thought that spin was obvious, sorry
I misunderstood you to say that Palm should offer every user that complains that option, not just those that had filed suit.
Besides, what you just offered up as a solution is how the legal system works now. Users A&B file suit against Palm. Palm has their engineers examine the evidence. If Palm finds out that their device is not at fault, they present their findings in court. Judge finds for Palm (in the absence of Plaintiffs' evidence showing that Palm's engineers are wrong). Palm, if they want to look like a corporate bully, sues Users A&B for the engineering and legal costs incurred by Palm in defending themselves.
You mean the same user that cost Palm thousands of dollars by filing this silly lawsuit in the first place? Uh, yeah.
No, I mean those 127 users who claimed that they were going to file a lawsuit alleging that Palm had broken their motherboard/hard disk/CD-ROM/toaster oven/etc. I stand by my original post: You can't sell a $200 handhelds and then fly engineers all over the country to investigate every user claim of damage.
You make it known that you will 'happily send some engineers to look at the problem' and if there are any validity to the claims they'll replace their systems.
of course you also let there lawyer know that if they don't find any problems then palm will expect to be reimbursed for the money thay spent for the engineers.
or you get an arbitrator to chose the engineers and whom ever "looses" foots the bill.
So, if the poor end-user who thought that the Palm blew up his motherboard is proven wrong, he's not only out the cost of the motherboard, but also thousands of dollars for engineers, plane fares, hotel bills, rental cars, per-diem expenses, etc. That will make for a great Slashdot story: "Palm user billed $17,500 for tech support."
Do yourself a favor: Don't ever get involved in public relations.
This is an example of the kind of attitude that keeps corporate users unhappy with their technical support.
No, it is the kind of attitude that keeps Palm handhelds from costing $900. A firm that sells a $200 handheld cannot afford to do a failure analysis each time some customer claims that they want a free computer because the handheld 'blowed up the motherboard.' The manufacturers need to use statistics and engineering expertise to recognize if a given problem could conceivably be caused by their product. If not, they can't afford to spend time and money on it.
The argument that this company shipped more than 13 million units is hardly support for the premise that they can't screw up.
It is statistical evidence that Palm does not have a design flaw. It's hardly surprising that, with 13,000,000+ units sold, that two people may have experienced a motherboard failure coincident with Hotsyncing their Palms. Probably two others experienced motherboard failures when inserting CD-ROMs, two others had failures while opening Word, and so forth. Things fail and often that failure is coincident with some action, but it does not prove that the action caused the failure.
Both the computer hardware and software industries get away with far too little responsibility to ensure quality in their products.
Software, yes. They hide behind the argument that they are selling a license to use a product rather than a product, thus circumventing consumer protection laws. Hardware manufacturers are a different story. I have gotten notices of class action suits against Iomega, HP, and other firms whose products I have purchased. Intel has recalled CPUs, support chips, motherboards, etc. Hardware manufacturers receive lots of scrutiny.
Okay, let's hypothesize that you are running Palm. What would you do in this situation? Replace the motherboards as a goodwill gesture? That could lead to a loss of confidence in your product and might make others think "free motherboards", after which you would be awash in fraudulent claims. Do you send a team of engineers to investigate the claims? How much will that cost? Do you do it each and every time someone claims that your product caused some failure? Or do you look at statistics (number sold vs. number of reported failures) and your product's engineering and decide to stand by your product? Tell us how you think Palm should handle this.
I don't care about the legality, ethics, morals, etc. of this. If some idiot, after weeks of warnings in the popular press, still has not installed the patch, he better find a way to keep from the virus on his system from attempting to infect my computer. Otherwise, his system is fair game as far as I am concerned. Since the legal system is not punishing these people, I might.
Let's also drop the insane analogies comparing this to someone threatening a family member's life. It's just a bunch of computers.
Beta users will go to their grave believing that Beta was infinitely superior to VHS, despite all the objective evidence.
I was the one who just provided you with "objective evidence". I cited specific, industry-standard measurements for resolution and video S/N ratio where Beta was superior and you chose to ignore that based on your own bias and preconceptions about the performance.
All of these had (and have) their proponets that swear that it makes huge differences ("I guess my perception is just better than yours"), despite objective measurements
I used specific examples of objective performance: luminance resolution, chroma resolution (horizontal and vertical), as well as chroma S/N ratio. If you are too ignorant or stupid to understand commonly-used video performance measurements, don't blame me. You, unlike me, seem to feel that no measurements are needed to compare the performance of the two formats.
Just for the record, the dramatic quality difference between VHS and Beta is a well documented myth (although, the question is a little more complicated than that, as usual).
Beta had superior picture quality. I have owned both Beta and VHS and, though I no longer own the Beta, I am painfully aware that it had measurably better performance. The chroma resolution, in both horizontal and vertical, was significantly better than VHS as was the chroma signal to noise ratio. The total number of lines of luminance resolution was slightly higher than VHS. The Beta HiFi audio was more robust and less prone to degradation due to tape wear. I won't waste either of our time by writing an in-depth technical treatise on Beta, but let me assure you that the link you provided was clearly not created by videophiles.
"Redundant" would indicate that no further information was added. In this case, I pointed out that improper branch prediction would result in a very slight slowdown while the "analogies" were examples of computers failing to function 10% of the time.
There is no moderation word that means "this post agreed with a previous one but provided clarification and additional information." Maybe that's because posts like that are not supposed to be modded down. If you are a moderator, make sure that you understand the meaning of the words before you moderate.
I will second that! What an incredibly stupid analogy! In one case, you have something that results in an almost imperceptible slowdown while, in the "analogy", you have a computer completely failing to work one out of ten times.
Would the moderator that modded my message down please explain to me how it was "Offtopic"? It was about the comparisons being made between the new Sun Ultrasparc III CPU and the Intel stuff. Other moderators thought it was "interesting" and "informative." So what bug crawled up your butt and made you mod it down as "Offtopic"?
P.S. I now have "only" 49 karma points. You've injured me to the core! hehehe
When the whole issue of copy-protected audio CDs first came out, I called Philips and spoke with one of their attorneys. I urged him to get Philips to refuse to license the CD logo to these non-compliant discs. I argued that the return rates and subsequent problems would cause consumers to lose faith in the CD standard and could eventually cost Philips business as consumers embraced other, non-Philips standards for recorded audio. As you see, my 45 minute long phone call apparently did little to sway Philips' opinions about this matter.
How I hate to ruin a good discussion about cool stuff from Sun talking about MS legacy junk.
I agree, but it's infuriating to see Intel's chips and architecture trashed in comparison to Sun's based mostly on problems with the Windows OS. Yes, Sun's stuff is far superior, but Intel's, while not elegant, is pretty damned fast.
I would not think of running any of their newer bloaty code on a 486.
That's okay because it's not an option. Their setup for ME tests to verify that you have AT LEAST a 150mhz Pentium. Anything less and it refuses to install (there is a secret switch to skip that test).
I have seen various generalizations in this thread about RISC vs. CISC, Intel vs. Sun, etc. It makes no sense to compare a Sun running Solaris to an Pentium/Athlon running Windows 9X/ME/NT/2000/. When you consider that even a $35 Duron running at 750mhz is executing 2 BILLION instructions per second, a better question is "where is all of that horsepower going??!!" It is going into bloated, overly-complex, overly-layered code. Things that should have been written in assembly language have been written in high-level languages.
Just look at the requirements to run the various Windows OSs. When Windows 95 came out, the bare minimum to run it was a 386DX at 33mhz, 4MB RAM, and a 100MB hard drive. Windows ME requires, at a minimum, a 150mhz Pentium, 32MB of RAM, and 480MB of hard drive space. The RAM requirements have quadrupled, the hard drive space has gone up by a factor of five, and CPU power has gone up by somewhere around a factor of 10. (I know that there is some disagreement about what the actual minimums are, but I believe these to be in the ballpark and they illustrate my point.)
So, if you want to find out what the CPU is capable of, dump the OS, write an application that taxes the CPU, and run it on each. (No, you do not need an OS to run a program.) Until you do that, you're just tossing around meaningless numbers.
It's actually a very good analogy (which is why it was modded up to +5). If you think that content can't be stolen, talk to the fine folks over at the RIAA and see if they agree.
I said that telling advertisers that you have found a way to skip their ads is "as clever as telling a store owner that you found a neat way to shoplift from his store." I did not say that it was stealing and, in fact, pointed out that, unlike stealing, it was not illegal. The end result is the same nonetheless: You get something from them while depriving them of their revenue stream -- either directly, in the case of shoplifting, or indirectly, through skipping the ads.
It's simple economics: If advertisers do not believe that the ads are cost-effective, they will stop placing them or demand a lower advertising rate. If the networks lower the advertising rates, then they have to run more commercials to get the same amount of income. When the number of ads goes up, viewership will probably go down. The networks will have to lower the rates again when that happens. Eventually, advertising will not be able to pay for the programming and then the viewers will pay or the programming will go away.
First of all, I am marrying a woman, not a man, and it is not appropriate for you to make assumptions such as this.
You referred to your "fiance" -- a word that means a man who is engaged to be married . It's like referring to your "son" and getting angry when someone assumes that your "son" is male.
In your first message you wrote:
My fiance[sic] and I deliberately fast forward through all commercials
Now you write:
We don't simply ignore all advertising.
At least try to be consistent. First you tell us that you fast-forward through all commercials because you "want advertisers to realize just how ineffective their advertising has become." Now you tell us that you are trying to vote on which commercials that you like through your remote. If you want to show which ads you like, buy the products advertised in them. There have been plenty of entertaining ads that failed to sell products.
The bottom line is this: If you convice all advertisers, except The Cartoon Network ("We will watch those cartoon network ads on occasion though"), that their ads are worthless, then the ads will go away. The ad revenue will go away. And we will all end up paying for television channels that we now enjoy at little or no cost.
The problem with lying like this is the market statistics that devices like Tivo collect. Even if they got a thousand face to face respnses that said people love ads, the data that Tivo collected (every click!) will tell them otherwise.
TiVo does not have a financial interest in you watching the ads so, while they have the information about the commercials that you skipped, they are unlikely to share it with advertisers. They might tell them what shows you watch, when, etc., but I doubt that they will be bragging to the advertisers that TiVo watchers skip all of the commercials.
My fiance and I deliberately fast forward through all commercials, even taking that extra couple of seconds to find the beginning of the show. The reason is that we want advertisers to realize just how ineffective their advertising has become.
That's because you and your future husband are mind-numbingly stupid. What would happen if advertisers decided that TV ads were not effective and stopped paying for them? Who do you think would pay the costs of keeping the networks profitable? The viewers would be stuck paying the networks all of the money that the advertisers now pay. Take a look at what HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, and other premium channels cost. Do you want to pay that much per channel per month? Get a clue!
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry if this opinion offends, but when I really resent jerks paying $35/year to register a domain and then extorting $200K out of some company. I'm tired of finding every domain name that I might want in the hands of some cybersquatter who has no intention of ever using or developing it. It reminds me of someone who buys up all of the plywood before a hurricane and sells it for $100/sheet to his desperate neighbors.
Most broadband ISPs state that you can have only one computer connected to the cable modem. They don't state how many computers can be connected to that computer. One computer, two NICs, and life will be good.
I find this news especially odd because my local cable provider recently lowered the rates for @Home customers (quite a surprising move, IMO).
It's not that surprising. Many of the cable companies grossly overestimated the demand. They got caught up in the whole fantasy about the "new dot-com economy" and everyone telecommuting, taking courses online, and getting all of their content on demand. Bandwidth, in the commercial sector, has dropped considerably, allowing the cable modem companies to sell their services cheaper and still make a profit. So now many of them have cut rates in order to get their user base up.
What would have me worried would be Microsoft selling the XBox for $149, paying a $50 trade-in for existing consoles (to reduce the user base), and giving away a bunch of games. All that they are doing with this kind of predatory pricing is convincing parents that their kids can make do with the existing Sony/Sega/Nintendo/whatever console.
Moderators, please note:
use of bold text to emphasize a point
negative portayal of Bill Gates and Microsoft
title not "*BSD is dying"
"fp" does not appear in title or body
prediction of negative outcome for Microsoft
"elite" not spelled "3l33t". "z" not replacing "s" at end of words (e.g., "hackerz")
message not critical of Apple, Linux, or BSD
Taken in total, those things must be worth a karma point or two.
Having a high IQ, and working and associating with others who also do, has lead me to sometimes expect too much from people. Sorry. I'll break down the reasoning further for you:
If you were building an automobile manufacturing plant, where would you build it? Where you could find qualified workers. If you build a top-notch university, would you build it where the average IQ was 95 and the average education was 10th grade? Of course not. That's why Alabama, West Virginia, and Arkansas do not have Ivy League schools.
An Ivy League university employs many of the top minds in the world. Thus, those people will immigrate into the state housing the University. They will bring spouses and children, who will be, on average, more intelligent and better-educated than the average person.
Many people, after getting out of college, settle down to live and work near where they went to school. That's why you will find a proliferation of high-tech businesses near MIT, for example. This tends to further increase the overall intelligence and education of the population in those areas.
To show the validity of this, let's look at an analysis of the numbers from the 2000 Census:
Percentage of residents with BA or higher degrees:
States with Ivy League schools: 28.96%
States w/o Ivy League schools: 24.38%
Looks like my reasoning is pretty sound.
By the way, I discovered an error in my original message. I attributed Rhode Island to both Gore and Bush. Rhode Island was the only state with an Ivy League school won by Bush.
So you feel that it is less courageous and honorable to go to Vietnam as a journalist than to go AWOL from the National Guard after daddy's friends pushed you to the front of the waiting list? You have a strange set of values.
Would that be the five courses he failed at Vanderbilt?
Yes. So he took some courses he did not complete. Big deal. He proved his mettle at Harvard, graduating with honors, while Bush barely squeaked by at Yale with a "gentleman's C" GPA.
Bush won his country. You obviously don't understand the electoral system of your own country
No, Bush won the Electoral College and lost the country. Over 500,000 more American citizens voted for Gore than for Bush. More American citizens wanted Gore as their President and an antiquated, unbalanced system left over from the days when votes were carried in by horseback robbed the American people of their choice.
Had the election gone the other way, you'd have been screaming about how unfair the Electoral College was.
[sarcasm]That's why Bush did so well in areas with the most-educated populations.[/sarcasm]
Let's look at states that have Ivy League Schools (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale). Gore won Massachusetts (MIT and Harvard), Connecticut (Yale), Rhode Island (Brown University), New York (Columbia, Cornell), New Jersey (Princeton), and Pennsylvania (University of Pennsylvania).
Bush, on the other hand, won only a single state that had an Ivy League school -- Rhode Island (Brown). Of course Bush also carried intellectual meccas like Alabama, West Virginia, and South Carolina.
Gore graduated from Harvard with honors in 1969. George W. Bush graduated from Yale in 1968 with a GPA he said could be described as a "gentleman's C."
Al Gore enlisted and served in Vietnam through 1971. George Bush joined the Texas National Guard -- getting pushed ahead of a waiting list of about 500.
After Gore returned from Vietnam, he took graduate courses at Vanderbilt while simultaneously holding a job as a newspaper reporter. George W. Bush was AWOL from the National Guard during that same period of time.
Considering that Bush lost his home country, Gore has nothing to be ashamed of. Gore won in the cities and states with the best-educated voters. Uneducated yahoos in the bible belt preferred Bush.
If Florida had limited voting in the Presidential election to people with a high-school education, Gore would be President right now!
I agree with this, but how? Do they hire a team of engineers to do a failure analysis? All that they know is that they did a Hotsync and their motherboard failed.
besides If Palm is found out not to be the cause, they just say 'you know what, we'll wave that fee if we can use the evidence found as proof agains other lawsuits'.
Palm does not need the permission of some third party to allow its engineers to testify in future court cases.
I thought that spin was obvious, sorry
I misunderstood you to say that Palm should offer every user that complains that option, not just those that had filed suit.
Besides, what you just offered up as a solution is how the legal system works now. Users A&B file suit against Palm. Palm has their engineers examine the evidence. If Palm finds out that their device is not at fault, they present their findings in court. Judge finds for Palm (in the absence of Plaintiffs' evidence showing that Palm's engineers are wrong). Palm, if they want to look like a corporate bully, sues Users A&B for the engineering and legal costs incurred by Palm in defending themselves.
No, I mean those 127 users who claimed that they were going to file a lawsuit alleging that Palm had broken their motherboard/hard disk/CD-ROM/toaster oven/etc. I stand by my original post: You can't sell a $200 handhelds and then fly engineers all over the country to investigate every user claim of damage.
So, if the poor end-user who thought that the Palm blew up his motherboard is proven wrong, he's not only out the cost of the motherboard, but also thousands of dollars for engineers, plane fares, hotel bills, rental cars, per-diem expenses, etc. That will make for a great Slashdot story: "Palm user billed $17,500 for tech support."
Do yourself a favor: Don't ever get involved in public relations.
No, it is the kind of attitude that keeps Palm handhelds from costing $900. A firm that sells a $200 handheld cannot afford to do a failure analysis each time some customer claims that they want a free computer because the handheld 'blowed up the motherboard.' The manufacturers need to use statistics and engineering expertise to recognize if a given problem could conceivably be caused by their product. If not, they can't afford to spend time and money on it.
The argument that this company shipped more than 13 million units is hardly support for the premise that they can't screw up.
It is statistical evidence that Palm does not have a design flaw. It's hardly surprising that, with 13,000,000+ units sold, that two people may have experienced a motherboard failure coincident with Hotsyncing their Palms. Probably two others experienced motherboard failures when inserting CD-ROMs, two others had failures while opening Word, and so forth. Things fail and often that failure is coincident with some action, but it does not prove that the action caused the failure.
Both the computer hardware and software industries get away with far too little responsibility to ensure quality in their products.
Software, yes. They hide behind the argument that they are selling a license to use a product rather than a product, thus circumventing consumer protection laws. Hardware manufacturers are a different story. I have gotten notices of class action suits against Iomega, HP, and other firms whose products I have purchased. Intel has recalled CPUs, support chips, motherboards, etc. Hardware manufacturers receive lots of scrutiny.
Okay, let's hypothesize that you are running Palm. What would you do in this situation? Replace the motherboards as a goodwill gesture? That could lead to a loss of confidence in your product and might make others think "free motherboards", after which you would be awash in fraudulent claims. Do you send a team of engineers to investigate the claims? How much will that cost? Do you do it each and every time someone claims that your product caused some failure? Or do you look at statistics (number sold vs. number of reported failures) and your product's engineering and decide to stand by your product? Tell us how you think Palm should handle this.
Let's also drop the insane analogies comparing this to someone threatening a family member's life. It's just a bunch of computers.
I was the one who just provided you with "objective evidence". I cited specific, industry-standard measurements for resolution and video S/N ratio where Beta was superior and you chose to ignore that based on your own bias and preconceptions about the performance.
I used specific examples of objective performance: luminance resolution, chroma resolution (horizontal and vertical), as well as chroma S/N ratio. If you are too ignorant or stupid to understand commonly-used video performance measurements, don't blame me. You, unlike me, seem to feel that no measurements are needed to compare the performance of the two formats.
Beta had superior picture quality. I have owned both Beta and VHS and, though I no longer own the Beta, I am painfully aware that it had measurably better performance. The chroma resolution, in both horizontal and vertical, was significantly better than VHS as was the chroma signal to noise ratio. The total number of lines of luminance resolution was slightly higher than VHS. The Beta HiFi audio was more robust and less prone to degradation due to tape wear. I won't waste either of our time by writing an in-depth technical treatise on Beta, but let me assure you that the link you provided was clearly not created by videophiles.
There is no moderation word that means "this post agreed with a previous one but provided clarification and additional information." Maybe that's because posts like that are not supposed to be modded down. If you are a moderator, make sure that you understand the meaning of the words before you moderate.
P.S. Oh no! I'm down to 48 karma points!
Mod the parent down to -1.
I will second that! What an incredibly stupid analogy! In one case, you have something that results in an almost imperceptible slowdown while, in the "analogy", you have a computer completely failing to work one out of ten times.
P.S. I now have "only" 49 karma points. You've injured me to the core! hehehe
When the whole issue of copy-protected audio CDs first came out, I called Philips and spoke with one of their attorneys. I urged him to get Philips to refuse to license the CD logo to these non-compliant discs. I argued that the return rates and subsequent problems would cause consumers to lose faith in the CD standard and could eventually cost Philips business as consumers embraced other, non-Philips standards for recorded audio. As you see, my 45 minute long phone call apparently did little to sway Philips' opinions about this matter.
I agree, but it's infuriating to see Intel's chips and architecture trashed in comparison to Sun's based mostly on problems with the Windows OS. Yes, Sun's stuff is far superior, but Intel's, while not elegant, is pretty damned fast.
I would not think of running any of their newer bloaty code on a 486.
That's okay because it's not an option. Their setup for ME tests to verify that you have AT LEAST a 150mhz Pentium. Anything less and it refuses to install (there is a secret switch to skip that test).
Just look at the requirements to run the various Windows OSs. When Windows 95 came out, the bare minimum to run it was a 386DX at 33mhz, 4MB RAM, and a 100MB hard drive. Windows ME requires, at a minimum, a 150mhz Pentium, 32MB of RAM, and 480MB of hard drive space. The RAM requirements have quadrupled, the hard drive space has gone up by a factor of five, and CPU power has gone up by somewhere around a factor of 10. (I know that there is some disagreement about what the actual minimums are, but I believe these to be in the ballpark and they illustrate my point.)
So, if you want to find out what the CPU is capable of, dump the OS, write an application that taxes the CPU, and run it on each. (No, you do not need an OS to run a program.) Until you do that, you're just tossing around meaningless numbers.
I said that telling advertisers that you have found a way to skip their ads is "as clever as telling a store owner that you found a neat way to shoplift from his store." I did not say that it was stealing and, in fact, pointed out that, unlike stealing, it was not illegal. The end result is the same nonetheless: You get something from them while depriving them of their revenue stream -- either directly, in the case of shoplifting, or indirectly, through skipping the ads.
It's simple economics: If advertisers do not believe that the ads are cost-effective, they will stop placing them or demand a lower advertising rate. If the networks lower the advertising rates, then they have to run more commercials to get the same amount of income. When the number of ads goes up, viewership will probably go down. The networks will have to lower the rates again when that happens. Eventually, advertising will not be able to pay for the programming and then the viewers will pay or the programming will go away.
You referred to your "fiance" -- a word that means a man who is engaged to be married . It's like referring to your "son" and getting angry when someone assumes that your "son" is male.
In your first message you wrote:
My fiance[sic] and I deliberately fast forward through all commercials
Now you write:
We don't simply ignore all advertising.
At least try to be consistent. First you tell us that you fast-forward through all commercials because you "want advertisers to realize just how ineffective their advertising has become." Now you tell us that you are trying to vote on which commercials that you like through your remote. If you want to show which ads you like, buy the products advertised in them. There have been plenty of entertaining ads that failed to sell products.
The bottom line is this: If you convice all advertisers, except The Cartoon Network ("We will watch those cartoon network ads on occasion though"), that their ads are worthless, then the ads will go away. The ad revenue will go away. And we will all end up paying for television channels that we now enjoy at little or no cost.
TiVo does not have a financial interest in you watching the ads so, while they have the information about the commercials that you skipped, they are unlikely to share it with advertisers. They might tell them what shows you watch, when, etc., but I doubt that they will be bragging to the advertisers that TiVo watchers skip all of the commercials.
My fiance and I deliberately fast forward through all commercials, even taking that extra couple of seconds to find the beginning of the show. The reason is that we want advertisers to realize just how ineffective their advertising has become.
That's because you and your future husband are mind-numbingly stupid. What would happen if advertisers decided that TV ads were not effective and stopped paying for them? Who do you think would pay the costs of keeping the networks profitable? The viewers would be stuck paying the networks all of the money that the advertisers now pay. Take a look at what HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, and other premium channels cost. Do you want to pay that much per channel per month? Get a clue!