Maybe you can enlighten all of us as to how this delay has helped Micrsoft's bottom line?
Actually, it's a resource allocation problem.
They can spend 5 developers to hunt down the bug and fix it - OR - They can assign 1 developer to work on it part-time. That one developer spends time adding more useless "innovation" onto Windows, along with the 4 developers that could've helped hunting down bugs.
The result is that Microsoft has jammed more features into Longhorn, thus making it more of a "value" to upgrade, and an increase to Micrsoft's bottomline. And the bug was left open for 6 whole months.
That's why I think you're silly, because you don't understand Apple's strategy.
The iPod is a trojan horse product to attract people to Apple.
To answer your "where is the digital hub?" question, it's all there, on the Mac. The iPod is just the trail of bread crumbs that lead PC users to the Apple platform. That's how users switch.
It's not too different from advertising, really, where you pay money to put your logo somewhere prominent. Only in iPod's case, customers are paying an arm and a leg to showcase the Apple product and Apple logo.
This smacks of the One Click patent that Amazon.com secured.
Do you mean smack in the same way how no one has yet to discover prior art to invalide Amazon.com's patent, so Apple's patent is probably unique and valid too?
Seriously, will the anti-patent zealots actually try to tear apart the specific claims in a patent before calling them invalid? Because ultimately, that's what matters.
Obligatory call for prior art examples goes here.:-)
Why are you calling on others? If you believe there's prior art, why aren't you looking for it yourself?
Be nice if there was a no-HDD included version; standard size 2.5 inch disks can be had mailorder for cheaper than the difference in the various models' prices. All mp3 makers are guilty of this. Of course, that would cut into their nice margins on the high capacity models so we won't see it. sigh
All product manufacturers are guilty of this. We need companies that will ship out nothing but a huge thick manual, so they can teach us where to mine the metal, cast the metal cover, etch out the circuit boards, etc etc.
Damn these companies that try to charge us for the extra work!
We should begin with banning all flights from China and Hong Kong. THAT oughtta fix it.
We thought about quarantining Canada too, but then again, we need your hockey players (but your country doesn't have much use besides that).
Those icky people eat snakes and cats, and it were the poor kittens in cages where SARS started out from.
Right. And plenty of North Americans eat cows and chickens. What exactly is your point? I'm sure vegeterians find you "icky" too for eating meat. There's nothing inherently "different" in the meat in snakes and cat - but your close-mindedness simply believes so.
Can we have an interview with CmdrTaco on Slashdot Bloopers? Same format - list out all the dupes on slashdot in the past 5-6 years, and give Rob a good way to tell us why he doesn't read his own website.;-)
Let me be the first to tell you to RTFP. Clearly I've read the entire bullentin board posting.
Again, you can't even play when you have the retail cds in a drive unless those programs / virtual drives are removed.
No, YOU read the FA:
Try again, sport. You agree to specific conditions under which you use the license you purchased when you picked up Raven Shield at your local software r/etailer. You can use Daemon tools and Alcohol 120% all you want. You just are unable to use them in conjunction with Raven Shield running. *shurg*
You don't have to remove anything. Just turn them off. Oh my god my fingers are aching from doing that everytime I play!
Plus, I understood (and I guess everyone else here too) this fact by reading the/. piece alone. "Got Alcohol 120% on your system? You're a pirate! We don't want you!"
And Group Think is always correct. *smirk* Clearly the patch is implicating "Got Alcohol 120% on your system? Turn it off before you run Rainbow Six!"
Can't the makes of the virtual drive software sue UBI? Cmon, anyone can sue anyone in this country... let's all have some fun!
Yeah... Kind of like how a lot of install programs force you to disable anti-virus programs during installation, Symantec must be pretty busy these days suing everyone for everyone's stupid problems.
You mean I might have to go through the inconvenience of *gasp* placing the original CD into the drive, and disabling my virtual drives?
Honestly I don't see what the big deal is. If you're a legitimate user, blame the kids that pirate the games - they're the reason games are inconvenient these days. And yes, there are ways to get around it, and yes, this kind of protection will weed out a significant proportion of casual pirates.
Some poster on the messageboard cried out how this is just an intermediate step to some pay-per-play scheme. Oh please. Is this new patch tapping into your bank account? Until then, Mulder, please keep your theories on your Post-It notes inside your tin-foil hat.
If this gets seriously enough, go to the BBB or the FTC and complain.
As far as I know, Sprint is the only major carrier to up-front offer an honest coverage map. T-mobile, Verizon (my carrier, and providing very solid service here in the Tampa Bay, FL area), AT&T, all have very generous (Marketing division-drawn, no doubt) boundaries on their maps.
I agree with you on the truthfulness of the coverage maps, but you'll notice that Garcia here only looked at the coverage map after he made the purchase, and went "holy shit! I'm locked into this for two years and there's no coverage for all these areas!"
What happened to him has nothing to do with the optimistic coverage maps, but more to do with him being a fool with his money. Any company's favorite kind of customer, I might add.
Of course it doesn't do anything for me. I am locked into a two-year agreement. I can't change carriers, look into other carriers, or even think about other carriers without first being charged $170.00.
The reason you're locked in is because your carrier pays a large subsidy upfront for your expensive cell phone. If you walk in with your own phone, no one is stopping you from getting a no-contract service.
The commercials seem to point at the fact that you can now have your home phone number moved to a cell phone. While I do use my cell phone more than my land line I must say that having an actual phone plugged into the wall not really requiring any batteries, chargers, or antennas is nice.
But for those people that never had a cell phone until now, the number that all their friends and family have known for years are now portable! That's convenient.
Honestly, it's just a gimmick.
The 6.7 million people living in my hometown (Hong Kong), would like to disagree.
They look fantastic until you pull up their coverage area... Here in the Twin Cities Metro area they have great coverage... Problem is I routinely travel outside of the metro area into western and southern MN along with western WI. No coverage there.
Caveat Emptor. It's not really T-Mobile's fault if you decided to pull up their coverage map AFTER being locked into a 2-year contract with them from having them subsidize your pricey cell phone.
I recently relocated to Bay Area, switched to AT&T GSM from T-Mobile because coverage is much better (no penalty since my T-Mobile contract expired a year ago), and I'm happily locked into a 2 year contract, because I got a free bluetooth camera phone that costs $300-400 retail in Europe/Asia.
Until my cell service is mandated not to drop calls, not to require as much recharging, and not to have locked in contracts of 2 years, it won't do me any good.
What really won't do you any good is if you walk into any long term contracts without evaluating the quality of service it offers. Do more research next time.
"MIT Graduates Can't Find Jobs to Pay Back Student Loans"
Future Headline?
Plenty of my friends from Class of 02 had problems getting a job by graduation, when my friends from 01 cashed in their signing bonuses half a year before graduating. Surprise surprise - just because we're from MIT doesn't make us any more vulnerable to outsourcing and the bad (but now recovering) economy.
The battle scenes were unexciting, the chase scenes were ho-hum, the fights seemed bloodless and drawn out, it was like watching stuff you had already seen a million times, in slow motion.
Really? I thought the battle scene was one of the better battle scenes (well, scifi-wise) I've seen (of course, unless you compare it to LotR.. then there's no comparison)
I definitely agree with you that they dragged it out a bit. Reloaded and Revolutions pretty much could've been a 3 hour sequel, but instead they chose to split it up and added one hour of junk. I kept saying "just DIE" under my breath during that last Trinity scene. They just didn't have enough material to make it a trilogy.
You and all the other panty wastes who still think AMD chips run hotten that Intel's should be castrated. Fucken retards. The joke is NOT funny anymore!
Yeah... I own a dual Athlon MP 1800, and I can tell you it's no coincidence that I'm the last person in my apartment to turn up the internal heating in my room. I can cook eggs on the top of my aluminum PC case if I wanted to.
I'm one of those that enjoyed Matrix 3 a lot, just like you.
My theory on why people thought it sucked - thousands of fans have created their own theories on how the trilogy should end, and as a result, walked into the theaters ALREADY with an ending in mind. Because the ending didn't have a "no way! no way!" twist, or because the ending was totally out of sync with their own "holy fucking shit" ending, they were disappointed.
Notice how most of the comments were along the lines of "letting me down", "didn't live up to the first one"? Of course it let them down, the ending is different than what them dreamed it to be. Of course it didn't live up to the first one, the first one was amazing because of its refreshing and original storyline and cinematography, and as a sequel, they were somewhat tied down to the plot/style of the original.
Frankly, I'm glad I was too lazy to guess how Matrix would end. I think that's why I liked it more than most people I know.
The feeling of actually placing an Athlon 64 notebook on your lap is probably not too different from placing an upside-down George Foreman grill on your lap.
Apple's TOS says nothing about not disabling the CD burning future or any other feature in the future. It does however say that they reserve the right to change the TOS whenever they feel like it.
I believe that's not retroactive for songs you have already paid for. You always have the right to NOT spend your money on future songs if the limitations have increased.
So why would they be using iTMS in the first place?
Because RIAA is suing p2p users that infringe on their copyrights? Together with fake files, the cost to get songs "for free" is becoming prohibitively expensive, both in terms of time and effort to find real songs, as well as the risk of getting sued.
I am fully aware of how FairPlay works, and that you can burn the music to CD.
But you were clearly not aware of Apple's commitments to DRM (re: Apple's TOS), since you made the insinuation that Apple might just disable CD-Burning in the feature. Next time you want to talk down on Apple's DRM, you might want to be a little more informed.
The purpose of Apple's DRM (and all DRM) is to make it difficult or impossible to commit copyright infringement.
That's why I said you don't "get it". Apple's DRM aims to make it a hassle to commit copyright infringement, not impossible. They're clearly aware that pirates and leeches will be able to get what they want for free no matter what, and it's fundamentaly impossible to stop them. Those people will never be any music store's target customer, because they refuse to spend money on music.
The aim of FairPlay has always been to prevent even the most casual users from sharing out their iTunes directory on P2P, so any song they buy is automatically shared out into the wild.
For the rest of us, who has disposable income from work, and no time to waste on IRC/Hotline to get songs (or no time to waste downloading fake files on P2P networks), Apple's service is perfect. There are also plenty of casual users who seriously can't be bothered to break FairPlay. One buck really isn't that much.
If/when a tool is developed that will allow me to easily convert my purchased music to formats that are more useful to me, I might consider it to be worth it.
Burn the songs you want (less than a few minutes for current burners) on a CD-RW. Rerip it on iTMS, or using whatever CD ripper you want. Done. Takes only marginally longer than ripping a CD, but you can buy the songs right away, instead of going to a store or waiting for it to ship to your house.
Since you're not an iTMS user, it's not like you already have a 1000 purchased song collection to start with.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you can enlighten all of us as to how this delay has helped Micrsoft's bottom line?
Actually, it's a resource allocation problem.
They can spend 5 developers to hunt down the bug and fix it - OR - They can assign 1 developer to work on it part-time. That one developer spends time adding more useless "innovation" onto Windows, along with the 4 developers that could've helped hunting down bugs.
The result is that Microsoft has jammed more features into Longhorn, thus making it more of a "value" to upgrade, and an increase to Micrsoft's bottomline. And the bug was left open for 6 whole months.
What a stupid name for a virus. The writer must be planning to get caught.
I don't think anyone plans to get caught when they deliver so much damage. I think you meant the writer must be expecting to get caught.
entirely representative of the lighting, polygon counts, bump-mapping and particle effects
Certainly not representative of screen resolution though, unless the xbox can display 1600x1200 on any TV.
That's why I think you're silly, because you don't understand Apple's strategy.
The iPod is a trojan horse product to attract people to Apple.
To answer your "where is the digital hub?" question, it's all there, on the Mac. The iPod is just the trail of bread crumbs that lead PC users to the Apple platform. That's how users switch.
It's not too different from advertising, really, where you pay money to put your logo somewhere prominent. Only in iPod's case, customers are paying an arm and a leg to showcase the Apple product and Apple logo.
I think you're very confused.
The "digital hub" strategy refers to the Mac as a digital hub.
iTunes for Mac/PC (free) exists to sell more iPods. iLife for Mac (free with new Macs, $49 to upgrade) exists to sell more Macs.
Apple has stated that they have no plans to port anything else over to PC for now. There's no Apple "digital hub" strategy for the PC.
This smacks of the One Click patent that Amazon.com secured.
:-)
Do you mean smack in the same way how no one has yet to discover prior art to invalide Amazon.com's patent, so Apple's patent is probably unique and valid too?
Seriously, will the anti-patent zealots actually try to tear apart the specific claims in a patent before calling them invalid? Because ultimately, that's what matters.
Obligatory call for prior art examples goes here.
Why are you calling on others? If you believe there's prior art, why aren't you looking for it yourself?
Be nice if there was a no-HDD included version; standard size 2.5 inch disks can be had mailorder for cheaper than the difference in the various models' prices. All mp3 makers are guilty of this. Of course, that would cut into their nice margins on the high capacity models so we won't see it. sigh
All product manufacturers are guilty of this. We need companies that will ship out nothing but a huge thick manual, so they can teach us where to mine the metal, cast the metal cover, etch out the circuit boards, etc etc.
Damn these companies that try to charge us for the extra work!
There's a brain overload from the amount of jokes you can make from this...
We should begin with banning all flights from China and Hong Kong. THAT oughtta fix it.
We thought about quarantining Canada too, but then again, we need your hockey players (but your country doesn't have much use besides that).
Those icky people eat snakes and cats, and it were the poor kittens in cages where SARS started out from.
Right. And plenty of North Americans eat cows and chickens. What exactly is your point? I'm sure vegeterians find you "icky" too for eating meat. There's nothing inherently "different" in the meat in snakes and cat - but your close-mindedness simply believes so.
Can we have an interview with CmdrTaco on Slashdot Bloopers? Same format - list out all the dupes on slashdot in the past 5-6 years, and give Rob a good way to tell us why he doesn't read his own website. ;-)
... but plagiarizing an industrial design failure is the purest form of idiocy.
Your quote was from EvilAvatar's lackey. Mine was from the official Ubisoft forum moderator. Common sense would suggest EvilAvatar messed up.
Let me be the first to tell you to RTFA
/. piece alone. "Got Alcohol 120% on your system? You're a pirate! We don't want you!"
Let me be the first to tell you to RTFP. Clearly I've read the entire bullentin board posting.
Again, you can't even play when you have the retail cds in a drive unless those programs / virtual drives are removed.
No, YOU read the FA:
Try again, sport. You agree to specific conditions under which you use the license you purchased when you picked up Raven Shield at your local software r/etailer. You can use Daemon tools and Alcohol 120% all you want. You just are unable to use them in conjunction with Raven Shield running. *shurg*
You don't have to remove anything. Just turn them off. Oh my god my fingers are aching from doing that everytime I play!
Plus, I understood (and I guess everyone else here too) this fact by reading the
And Group Think is always correct. *smirk* Clearly the patch is implicating "Got Alcohol 120% on your system? Turn it off before you run Rainbow Six!"
Can't the makes of the virtual drive software sue UBI? Cmon, anyone can sue anyone in this country... let's all have some fun!
Yeah... Kind of like how a lot of install programs force you to disable anti-virus programs during installation, Symantec must be pretty busy these days suing everyone for everyone's stupid problems.
You mean I might have to go through the inconvenience of *gasp* placing the original CD into the drive, and disabling my virtual drives?
Honestly I don't see what the big deal is. If you're a legitimate user, blame the kids that pirate the games - they're the reason games are inconvenient these days. And yes, there are ways to get around it, and yes, this kind of protection will weed out a significant proportion of casual pirates.
Some poster on the messageboard cried out how this is just an intermediate step to some pay-per-play scheme. Oh please. Is this new patch tapping into your bank account? Until then, Mulder, please keep your theories on your Post-It notes inside your tin-foil hat.
If this gets seriously enough, go to the BBB or the FTC and complain.
As far as I know, Sprint is the only major carrier to up-front offer an honest coverage map. T-mobile, Verizon (my carrier, and providing very solid service here in the Tampa Bay, FL area), AT&T, all have very generous (Marketing division-drawn, no doubt) boundaries on their maps.
I agree with you on the truthfulness of the coverage maps, but you'll notice that Garcia here only looked at the coverage map after he made the purchase, and went "holy shit! I'm locked into this for two years and there's no coverage for all these areas!"
What happened to him has nothing to do with the optimistic coverage maps, but more to do with him being a fool with his money. Any company's favorite kind of customer, I might add.
Of course it doesn't do anything for me. I am locked into a two-year agreement. I can't change carriers, look into other carriers, or even think about other carriers without first being charged $170.00.
The reason you're locked in is because your carrier pays a large subsidy upfront for your expensive cell phone. If you walk in with your own phone, no one is stopping you from getting a no-contract service.
The commercials seem to point at the fact that you can now have your home phone number moved to a cell phone. While I do use my cell phone more than my land line I must say that having an actual phone plugged into the wall not really requiring any batteries, chargers, or antennas is nice.
But for those people that never had a cell phone until now, the number that all their friends and family have known for years are now portable! That's convenient.
Honestly, it's just a gimmick.
The 6.7 million people living in my hometown (Hong Kong), would like to disagree.
They look fantastic until you pull up their coverage area... Here in the Twin Cities Metro area they have great coverage... Problem is I routinely travel outside of the metro area into western and southern MN along with western WI. No coverage there.
Caveat Emptor. It's not really T-Mobile's fault if you decided to pull up their coverage map AFTER being locked into a 2-year contract with them from having them subsidize your pricey cell phone.
I recently relocated to Bay Area, switched to AT&T GSM from T-Mobile because coverage is much better (no penalty since my T-Mobile contract expired a year ago), and I'm happily locked into a 2 year contract, because I got a free bluetooth camera phone that costs $300-400 retail in Europe/Asia.
Until my cell service is mandated not to drop calls, not to require as much recharging, and not to have locked in contracts of 2 years, it won't do me any good.
What really won't do you any good is if you walk into any long term contracts without evaluating the quality of service it offers. Do more research next time.
"MIT Graduates Can't Find Jobs to Pay Back Student Loans"
Future Headline?
Plenty of my friends from Class of 02 had problems getting a job by graduation, when my friends from 01 cashed in their signing bonuses half a year before graduating. Surprise surprise - just because we're from MIT doesn't make us any more vulnerable to outsourcing and the bad (but now recovering) economy.
The battle scenes were unexciting, the chase scenes were ho-hum, the fights seemed bloodless and drawn out, it was like watching stuff you had already seen a million times, in slow motion.
Really? I thought the battle scene was one of the better battle scenes (well, scifi-wise) I've seen (of course, unless you compare it to LotR.. then there's no comparison)
I definitely agree with you that they dragged it out a bit. Reloaded and Revolutions pretty much could've been a 3 hour sequel, but instead they chose to split it up and added one hour of junk. I kept saying "just DIE" under my breath during that last Trinity scene. They just didn't have enough material to make it a trilogy.
You and all the other panty wastes who still think AMD chips run hotten that Intel's should be castrated. Fucken retards. The joke is NOT funny anymore!
Yeah... I own a dual Athlon MP 1800, and I can tell you it's no coincidence that I'm the last person in my apartment to turn up the internal heating in my room. I can cook eggs on the top of my aluminum PC case if I wanted to.
I'm one of those that enjoyed Matrix 3 a lot, just like you.
My theory on why people thought it sucked - thousands of fans have created their own theories on how the trilogy should end, and as a result, walked into the theaters ALREADY with an ending in mind. Because the ending didn't have a "no way! no way!" twist, or because the ending was totally out of sync with their own "holy fucking shit" ending, they were disappointed.
Notice how most of the comments were along the lines of "letting me down", "didn't live up to the first one"? Of course it let them down, the ending is different than what them dreamed it to be. Of course it didn't live up to the first one, the first one was amazing because of its refreshing and original storyline and cinematography, and as a sequel, they were somewhat tied down to the plot/style of the original.
Frankly, I'm glad I was too lazy to guess how Matrix would end. I think that's why I liked it more than most people I know.
The feeling of actually placing an Athlon 64 notebook on your lap is probably not too different from placing an upside-down George Foreman grill on your lap.
No kids for you!
Apple's TOS says nothing about not disabling the CD burning future or any other feature in the future. It does however say that they reserve the right to change the TOS whenever they feel like it.
I believe that's not retroactive for songs you have already paid for. You always have the right to NOT spend your money on future songs if the limitations have increased.
So why would they be using iTMS in the first place?
Because RIAA is suing p2p users that infringe on their copyrights? Together with fake files, the cost to get songs "for free" is becoming prohibitively expensive, both in terms of time and effort to find real songs, as well as the risk of getting sued.
I am fully aware of how FairPlay works, and that you can burn the music to CD.
But you were clearly not aware of Apple's commitments to DRM (re: Apple's TOS), since you made the insinuation that Apple might just disable CD-Burning in the feature. Next time you want to talk down on Apple's DRM, you might want to be a little more informed.
The purpose of Apple's DRM (and all DRM) is to make it difficult or impossible to commit copyright infringement.
That's why I said you don't "get it". Apple's DRM aims to make it a hassle to commit copyright infringement, not impossible. They're clearly aware that pirates and leeches will be able to get what they want for free no matter what, and it's fundamentaly impossible to stop them. Those people will never be any music store's target customer, because they refuse to spend money on music.
The aim of FairPlay has always been to prevent even the most casual users from sharing out their iTunes directory on P2P, so any song they buy is automatically shared out into the wild.
For the rest of us, who has disposable income from work, and no time to waste on IRC/Hotline to get songs (or no time to waste downloading fake files on P2P networks), Apple's service is perfect. There are also plenty of casual users who seriously can't be bothered to break FairPlay. One buck really isn't that much.
If/when a tool is developed that will allow me to easily convert my purchased music to formats that are more useful to me, I might consider it to be worth it.
Burn the songs you want (less than a few minutes for current burners) on a CD-RW. Rerip it on iTMS, or using whatever CD ripper you want. Done. Takes only marginally longer than ripping a CD, but you can buy the songs right away, instead of going to a store or waiting for it to ship to your house.
Since you're not an iTMS user, it's not like you already have a 1000 purchased song collection to start with.