Do I think they screwed up and should have done this a long time ago? Sure. Would it have been better if they kept stonewalling and never admitted an issue - or if they did only agree to fix within the year? Absolutely not. They screwed up for a while and are fixing the problem now. If you don't believe that they will also fix the root cause of the hardware now - with a three year commitment to have working systems for their customers, then you're crazy.
A three year warranty in the electronics industry, even after the fact, is EXTREMELY rare, without paying extra up front (or a monthly fee for many cell phone companies/vendors).
They could have done a LOT less and most customers (since Sony this generation is sucking hard and the Wii still doesn't have enough games - especially the type most XBox 360 owners want) would have had to suck it up and deal. They instead changed their policy and are now giving a three year warranty, none of which they are being forced to do.
I'm not normally a fan of MS, nor do I own a 360, but this is a great move by Microsoft - and not something they NEEDED to do. They could have just fixed the problems and made it a year or so but by extending this to a three year warranty (retroactive) they are going to save a lot of people money.
Companies like GameStop who sell extended warranties though might not be happy since I certainly wouldn't buy one now that MS is backing their system up for 3 years.
I'm in no way an expert on US copyright laws, but I would suspect that if Marvel felt obliged to pay any one creator who'd fallen on hard times for his works they might open themselves up to a number of lawsuits, so it makes business sense for them to stick to the original agreements with the creators.
Not really. They couldn't just give him a bunch of money and said "Hey - we feel that we owe you this", but they could have hired him as a "Creative Consultant" or some such at whatever amount they wanted to. I'm not saying they should or should not have - but could have.
Though I agree that Netscape 4.x was bad in all the ways you say - the major reason IE became popular was because it was installed on most people's desktops as an icon called "The Internet".
Blizzard's sales usually dwarf the average PC game. Many developers cannot justify the added cost when it will bring them sales in the 10000-20000 range.
Blizzard's games have such large sales numbers that even their Mac sales are significant and easily warrant it. If the number of Linux gamers (that don't use Wine/Cedega and don't dual boot to Windows) was significant - I'd imagine they'd have a Linux version as well.
I'd imagine these Fax Spammers are using computers with modems to do the dialing so if a fax is 'sent' back to them (assuming they even receive faxes) they will probably go into the bit bucket - not cause an actual printout.
Re:that's not what they told me
on
Is Your GPS Naive?
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· Score: 3, Informative
No - you have no obligation to go over the speed limit. You do have an obligation (in almost all states - I'm not sure if Virginia is one of them) to get the hell out of the left lane except when passing. If you're sitting in the left lane while you're not passing you are more of a problem then those who are speeding (at least those only going a reasonable amount over the limit).
That being said - I usually drive the speed limit exactly (65 usually) since its better for fuel efficiency than doing 75, 85, etc.
There are already enough planes that have satellite television (including news channels) along with air phones (at a very high cost - yes but still a source of information.
The real reason? Its bad enough when people are yapping on their phones constantly on the ground. Getting stuck on a plane near someone who won't shut up on the phone is MUCH MUCH worse due to the duration and the captive audience. For that reason I hope cell phones are never allowed (and if they are it should be a cell phone only section kept reasonable sound proof from the rest of the plane).
I dunno. You feel free to play all those garbage two-letter words. I'll play from a real vocabulary, and we'll see who wins. I'm betting the guy with the 835 point game that started this whole thing didn't once play the word 'ao'.
I actually would be surprised if he didn't use those B.S. two letter words. No - he wouldn't have ended his turn with one two letter word - but there's a good chance he spelled a long word, which formed a bunch of two letter words at once.
You know - in most situations - when someone is kicked out of college, or loses their job, or something else for doing too much 'X' - they would have found something else to spend that time with instead. If not Magic, it would have been something else for MOST people (not saying your specific situation). Anything in excess is a problem (games, alcohol, drugs, television, etc.).
What always scares me (in terms of the support nightmare it will make for many) is a virus which does its normal worm propagation, but after two weeks of being installed and running on a single machine it does something like rm -rf, or half flashing the bios or something nasty like that.
Though there are few people I would think who would want VOIP without a real internet connection, you CAN pay for VOIP through most Cable providers without paying for internet access. Its using their own private network for internet access true, but its more of an intranet connection since the traffic is staying within the cable companies network for all or most of the path.
$12? Where is this from?
on
USB Batteries
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· Score: -1
At $12 each I would hate to lose or break them on a regular basis.
The article mentions that they are £12.99 which is a lot more then $12.
I'm not saying things are the bottom of the barrel, I'm just saying its far from a 'Golden Age' as the article supposes. There are few companies taking risks now due to the extreme cost of games, whereas it was much easier in the 80s, 90s, or even earlier in this decade to do so.
To another poster - yes there have ALWAYS been games tied to licenses (movies, books, etc.) it just seems the percentage of games which are not licensed off of previous content or a sequal to a previous game is EXTREMELY small.
What Golden age? The huge amount of sequals of previous games, and games based on crappy movie, cartoon, book, etc. licenses? Having 25 different '2007' editions of various sports games with very little additions to them does not mean quality.
The problem is now the cost of making mass market games is so prohibitively expensive that few companies are willing to take a risk and do something different.
Don't get me wrong. There are some good games out now but calling it a Golden Age is a bit much in my opinion.
No. It's not. "Sovereign" is a word with a very specific legal meaning. For more than two centuries, the legal definition of "sovereign" has been evolving to mean "a country ruled by the consent of its people."
Can you give us a source to site this definition? I myself have never heard this definition before and was unable to find it anywhere (though I admit I am no scholar linguistics).
In related news, Blizzard has announced that tickets to the show will only be available in 'raid' and 'mini-raid' packages of 40 and 20 tickets respectively. Fans going alone will only see the first 30 minutes of the movie.
The one thing that Blizzard does that I have not heard of being done (at least on this scale) is the database clustering. This is much of the problem. You have 16 or so realms sharing the same database clusters. So one or two of those servers goes down (as happened this week) and you need to keep all of the cluster down to work on them.
I know their datacenters are limited in space but you cannot tell me that in a year and a half, they could not:
- increase the amount of data centers
- reduce significantly the number of servers per database cluster
They DO have a larger customer base but their costs are (per customer) considerably less due to spreading fixed costs out to more customers.
This is why RIM fought so hard against NTP. They could have settled early on for far less then the recent settlement + legal fees. They didn't want to give in early (or at all if possible) so they didn't end up as a target for a dozen more places like NTP.
If I rent TV shows I never have a problem. It seems that the times I want something 'mass market' I have to wait forever for them. It was rare that I would queue something more then a week before it was released so that (as another poster pointed out) may have been some of the problem.
On the other hand I've had Chronicles of Narnia (the new one, not the BBC production) in my queue since the week it came out and that has been MONTHS already. Perhaps because I keep moving things around in my queue it resets the timer for waits? Either way it is annoying. Now I can take my free printed DVD rental coupon to my local Lackluster video and pick it up now.
I already do see what I'm missing from Netflix. The split queues my wife and I used to have (one at a time for her, one for me, and one out at a time for us togther) will have to be manually done since Blockbuster doesn't let you split queues.
Until this morning I was a Netflix user. I had cancelled this morning and subscribed with Blockbuster before reading this article. The problem with Netflix is getting 'new' movies. I am a medium level user with Netflix (I get a good amount but I'm not one of the more heavy users) but anytime I want something relatively new it is in "Long Wait" for weeks or even months.
Even if Blockbuster makes me wait a while for the newer movies then I can still get the one free in-store movie a week, as well as satisfy the impulse rentals that my wife and I want.
It won't be some 'random guy' messaging you. You don't have to pay attention to people who talk to you. It will have GM in the name of the person who messages you (or something like that) and they'll actually say "This is GameMaster Whatshisname, can I talk to you" or something like that.
Slashdot Mirror
And many others (IBM, Bell Labs, Xerox, Apple, etc.) were needed for Microsoft to be successful. Who cares?
Their stock is falling so far I don't think they'll even get a dead cat bounce.
Do I think they screwed up and should have done this a long time ago? Sure. Would it have been better if they kept stonewalling and never admitted an issue - or if they did only agree to fix within the year? Absolutely not. They screwed up for a while and are fixing the problem now. If you don't believe that they will also fix the root cause of the hardware now - with a three year commitment to have working systems for their customers, then you're crazy.
A three year warranty in the electronics industry, even after the fact, is EXTREMELY rare, without paying extra up front (or a monthly fee for many cell phone companies/vendors).
They could have done a LOT less and most customers (since Sony this generation is sucking hard and the Wii still doesn't have enough games - especially the type most XBox 360 owners want) would have had to suck it up and deal. They instead changed their policy and are now giving a three year warranty, none of which they are being forced to do.
I'm not normally a fan of MS, nor do I own a 360, but this is a great move by Microsoft - and not something they NEEDED to do. They could have just fixed the problems and made it a year or so but by extending this to a three year warranty (retroactive) they are going to save a lot of people money.
Companies like GameStop who sell extended warranties though might not be happy since I certainly wouldn't buy one now that MS is backing their system up for 3 years.
Not really. They couldn't just give him a bunch of money and said "Hey - we feel that we owe you this", but they could have hired him as a "Creative Consultant" or some such at whatever amount they wanted to. I'm not saying they should or should not have - but could have.
Though I agree that Netscape 4.x was bad in all the ways you say - the major reason IE became popular was because it was installed on most people's desktops as an icon called "The Internet".
Blizzard's sales usually dwarf the average PC game. Many developers cannot justify the added cost when it will bring them sales in the 10000-20000 range.
Blizzard's games have such large sales numbers that even their Mac sales are significant and easily warrant it. If the number of Linux gamers (that don't use Wine/Cedega and don't dual boot to Windows) was significant - I'd imagine they'd have a Linux version as well.
I'd imagine these Fax Spammers are using computers with modems to do the dialing so if a fax is 'sent' back to them (assuming they even receive faxes) they will probably go into the bit bucket - not cause an actual printout.
No - you have no obligation to go over the speed limit. You do have an obligation (in almost all states - I'm not sure if Virginia is one of them) to get the hell out of the left lane except when passing. If you're sitting in the left lane while you're not passing you are more of a problem then those who are speeding (at least those only going a reasonable amount over the limit).
That being said - I usually drive the speed limit exactly (65 usually) since its better for fuel efficiency than doing 75, 85, etc.
There are already enough planes that have satellite television (including news channels) along with air phones (at a very high cost - yes but still a source of information.
The real reason? Its bad enough when people are yapping on their phones constantly on the ground. Getting stuck on a plane near someone who won't shut up on the phone is MUCH MUCH worse due to the duration and the captive audience. For that reason I hope cell phones are never allowed (and if they are it should be a cell phone only section kept reasonable sound proof from the rest of the plane).
Speaking as a university employee...
We cannot tell you not to use a wireless router - we just can tell you you cannot plug it into our network.
I actually would be surprised if he didn't use those B.S. two letter words. No - he wouldn't have ended his turn with one two letter word - but there's a good chance he spelled a long word, which formed a bunch of two letter words at once.
You know - in most situations - when someone is kicked out of college, or loses their job, or something else for doing too much 'X' - they would have found something else to spend that time with instead. If not Magic, it would have been something else for MOST people (not saying your specific situation). Anything in excess is a problem (games, alcohol, drugs, television, etc.).
What always scares me (in terms of the support nightmare it will make for many) is a virus which does its normal worm propagation, but after two weeks of being installed and running on a single machine it does something like rm -rf, or half flashing the bios or something nasty like that.
Though there are few people I would think who would want VOIP without a real internet connection, you CAN pay for VOIP through most Cable providers without paying for internet access. Its using their own private network for internet access true, but its more of an intranet connection since the traffic is staying within the cable companies network for all or most of the path.
The article mentions that they are £12.99 which is a lot more then $12.
I'm not saying things are the bottom of the barrel, I'm just saying its far from a 'Golden Age' as the article supposes. There are few companies taking risks now due to the extreme cost of games, whereas it was much easier in the 80s, 90s, or even earlier in this decade to do so.
To another poster - yes there have ALWAYS been games tied to licenses (movies, books, etc.) it just seems the percentage of games which are not licensed off of previous content or a sequal to a previous game is EXTREMELY small.
What Golden age? The huge amount of sequals of previous games, and games based on crappy movie, cartoon, book, etc. licenses? Having 25 different '2007' editions of various sports games with very little additions to them does not mean quality.
The problem is now the cost of making mass market games is so prohibitively expensive that few companies are willing to take a risk and do something different.
Don't get me wrong. There are some good games out now but calling it a Golden Age is a bit much in my opinion.
Can you give us a source to site this definition? I myself have never heard this definition before and was unable to find it anywhere (though I admit I am no scholar linguistics).
In related news, Blizzard has announced that tickets to the show will only be available in 'raid' and 'mini-raid' packages of 40 and 20 tickets respectively. Fans going alone will only see the first 30 minutes of the movie.
The one thing that Blizzard does that I have not heard of being done (at least on this scale) is the database clustering. This is much of the problem. You have 16 or so realms sharing the same database clusters. So one or two of those servers goes down (as happened this week) and you need to keep all of the cluster down to work on them.
I know their datacenters are limited in space but you cannot tell me that in a year and a half, they could not:
- increase the amount of data centers
- reduce significantly the number of servers per database cluster
They DO have a larger customer base but their costs are (per customer) considerably less due to spreading fixed costs out to more customers.
This is why RIM fought so hard against NTP. They could have settled early on for far less then the recent settlement + legal fees. They didn't want to give in early (or at all if possible) so they didn't end up as a target for a dozen more places like NTP.
If I rent TV shows I never have a problem. It seems that the times I want something 'mass market' I have to wait forever for them. It was rare that I would queue something more then a week before it was released so that (as another poster pointed out) may have been some of the problem.
On the other hand I've had Chronicles of Narnia (the new one, not the BBC production) in my queue since the week it came out and that has been MONTHS already. Perhaps because I keep moving things around in my queue it resets the timer for waits? Either way it is annoying. Now I can take my free printed DVD rental coupon to my local Lackluster video and pick it up now.
I already do see what I'm missing from Netflix. The split queues my wife and I used to have (one at a time for her, one for me, and one out at a time for us togther) will have to be manually done since Blockbuster doesn't let you split queues.
Until this morning I was a Netflix user. I had cancelled this morning and subscribed with Blockbuster before reading this article. The problem with Netflix is getting 'new' movies. I am a medium level user with Netflix (I get a good amount but I'm not one of the more heavy users) but anytime I want something relatively new it is in "Long Wait" for weeks or even months.
Even if Blockbuster makes me wait a while for the newer movies then I can still get the one free in-store movie a week, as well as satisfy the impulse rentals that my wife and I want.
It won't be some 'random guy' messaging you. You don't have to pay attention to people who talk to you. It will have GM in the name of the person who messages you (or something like that) and they'll actually say "This is GameMaster Whatshisname, can I talk to you" or something like that.