The students training cheaply with MS Office is not good for the students, it's good for MS. They get a few bucks as opposed to none at well, in the case that Office would be pirated. And they tie in users for the future. It's a bit like a guy pushing crack on the streets right?
No, it is not like a pusher on the streets at all. It is mutually beneficial because the student gets to legally use the latest software that businesses use (might come in handy for some) for a cheap price as opposed to pirating it and like you said MS gets a few bucks instead of none since the normal price is way out of the range for most college students. It also does somewhat tie in a user for the future but only if it is a good product and the student prefers it to the alternatives (which nowadays I do find MS Office more functional and useful than OO myself, OO is SLOW). I was lucky at the university I went to to get all MS products for free (although I only used MS Word and Excel and Windows XP Pro) and while I don't believe getting that stuff free will ever help me in the job market it was cool to be able to get a free upgrade to the latest MS OS to tinker with the new OS and play games on (not to mention the HUGE boost in reliability compared to Windows 98SE). Did this experience "lock me in for the future"? Not really, I use what I like and at my house I have one Windows box for games and some development and then a few linux boxes for various other things.
MS is also not pushing MS Office on anyone, the students have 100% of the choice to buy it or not as opposed to a crackhead who is addicted to crack and usually can't make the decision to quit. Crack is also only bad for one party and there is no way to "pirate" crack so your analogy is flawed. Nice try.
I wish people would stop getting pissed off at MS for doing nice things like price breaks for college students. Sure, MS hopes that by doing that it results in future sales to said students but that doesn't make doing so evil, a lot of businesses do similar things and will give big price breaks to educational institutions.
sad part is terrorists are destined on killing the passengers in the case their wishes are not met. so now instead of the slight chance of negotiation that is there in a normal hijacking they will straight away just kill everyone on board. so now instead of saving people were saving the plane?
Umm the point is for them to realize hijacking a plane is USELESS. I am sure if this gets put in place then possible hijackers will know about it and it will at least make them rethink their plans. I mean if they KNOW that there is no possible way for them to control the plane if they hijack it then why would they hijack it in the first place unless the only thing they really want to do is kill just the passengers (which is not very common and like you said they usually use the passengers as bargaining chips for other demands)? With this system they can't hijack a plane and tell the pilot to fly to some safe harbor until their demands are met and/or crash the plane into a high value target.
I think it is a great idea if done right and it could even be used in non terrorist situations that others have mentioned such as if the whole cabin is depressurized and the pilots get knocked out or some other situation where the pilots lose control. The scary thing to me is the quality of code that some of the airline manufacturers write for their flight systems, I don't know if the people were lying but some of them said after seeing some of the code they would not get on those particular brands again!
Programmers, no matter how "management" their title is, have no more business hiring than HR people have programming.
I notice you are going for an MBA and it cracks me up when people with MBA's think they are the God's of management when a lot of them (yes you) could really learn something by listening to the people you manage. I also think you are on a power trip if you think a programmer with a management position has no business hiring/managing, is that only reserved for the God's with MBA's? If you sincerely believe your above sentence then I hope I never work at a company you work at. Being able to be apart of the interview process for my potential co-workers is extremely important because I can evaluate the skills of a fellow developer much better than the typical HR drone. If someone has a million buzzwords on their resume it usually makes a HR person go nuts thinking they gotta get that person while I actually can figure out if they can back it up with actual knowledge. Unless the HR person or whoever is giving the interview truly understands the position in question and the technology that goes along with it then not having someone "from the trenches" be apart of the interviewing is plain stupid.
From the flip side if I was going to an interview at a company and none of my potential co-workers were apart of the interview I would be offended and I most likely would not take the job. I want to be able to ask the really technical questions about the position and get answers straight from someone who actually knows them.
Neither HR nor management care about saving money as much as they care about making money
These are the same thing in the end, if you can't save money then it eats away at the money you made and vice versa, any manager I know would be concerned about both equally.
a new graduate probably is more excited to work there, will work for less, and won't complain or sue; and old programers have their old ways of doing things, always demand more than market forces dictate, and always end up suing.
Of course a new graduate will work for less, that is true of any profession but I doubt ANY new graduate will be able to do 80% of the work at the same speed as a veteran programmer. That 50% money savings is not worth it when it takes them 4 times as long to accomplish the same thing and they can't do 20% of the things a veteran programmer can do. Now if the job truly is for an entry level programmer then hell yeah it would be a waste to hire the more expensive veteran. Find a person suitable for the position but don't bitch about a veteran programmer costing more when the job at hand requires that level of experience.
You crack me up saying they won't complain or sue, what do you want mindless drones working for you? I would rather have people working for me with a backbone who stand up for what they believe (within reason). If a person has a valid complaint why you rather have them be silent rather than speak out about it?
By the way what is your beef with "old programmers"? I am sure some of them are a pain in the ass but you just broadly group all of them together as overpaid complainers who have a little more knowledge but would never be worth any extra money. Is experience not worth anything to you?
That's not worth it when a young punk will do 80% as good for 50% of the money, and will have ideas.
There you go making yourself sound big and bad again since you have are going to have the MBA and think you are better than the "young punk" with a CS degree which is harder to get than your MBA (yes, I know this is true from the amount of friends I have who have gone to get MBA's). I don't get why you make it sound like old programmers won't have ideas. All of the "old programmers" I have met had great ideas, to tell you the truth they had some of the best ideas I have ever heard.
Get over yourself, you seem to have invented some hatred of "old programmers" just to validate your choice to hire
It has been long determined that "plenty of people like you steal stuff, we're coming in to have a look round" is not sufficient legal grounds and that when agents act otherwise it is called "oppression".
I agree with this statement but I don't believe it applies to Windows validation. I think Windows validation is more like what happens when I take my watch to the place I bought it from that said they would give me free service on it whenever I needed that service. Well a couple of months after I got the watch the wristband had a problem so I went back to the store and before they would service the watch they either needed the receipt or if you had let them put the serial number in their database then they could use that too so they could verify you did purchase the watch at their store and you weren't just some random person trying to get free service. Do you think this type of checking is over the top too?
That is all that Windows validation does and while it would be great if they could just do it once and never again I can use my brain and figure out why they must periodically check and having to click a couple buttons 2 times a year to be able to access Windows updates does not seem out of line to me.
The thing is there is NOTHING forcing a user to get validated if they don't want to. BUT if you want easy access to the Windows updates ie going to the Windows update webpage then you will have to validate. Validating a license for support reasons does not seem unreasonable to me at all. A user can get the updates other ways and install them manually if they really wish so there ARE other options if you don't want to be validated.
Now, if your computer would lock up if you refused to get validated that would be one thing (and a horrible thing at that) but that is not how it works.
I didn't have a power conditioning UPS on it when the drives failed (although I do now) but overall my apartment building had pretty good power (yes I checked it, I worked as an electrician while getting my CS degree). IMO power conditioners are a waste of money and the only place I have heard of them making a difference is with high end home theatre systems where the sound quality may be better with a conditioner. I don't think a conditioner would make much difference if I plugged my home computer into it.
The biggest reason I think it would make no difference is because if unconditioned power is supposed to be so bad for electronics then why is the only thing that I have a problem with turn out to be the hard drives? I would think bad power would take out RAM before a hard disk. Either way the only failure I have had with this box is the hard drives, nothing else.
BTW I do have a high quality power supply in my main box so the blame can't be placed on a POS power supply which definitely do cause problems.
I didn't get physical media except for the recovery disc. Talk to the reseller you bought from about that, that is not MS's fault. Whoever you bought from is too cheap to provide you with a true backup copy.
They checked once - that should be the end of it.
The check once idea wouldn't work because there would obviously just be some bit somewhere (ok more complicated than that but you get the idea) saying "this copy of windows has already been checked" which some "pirate" could figure out how to set to bypass the checking. BTW this checking happens like once every 6 months and takes less than a minute to complete so it is not a hassle at all (unless you consider clicking 2 or three "next" buttons too much). You also have the choice NOT to accept the check if you wish if it really is too much for you.
A lot of people use unlicensed copies of of MS software and I don't blame them for at least attempting to stop some of it. If you owned a software company would you just be fine having millions of people around the world using unlicensed copies? I rely on software sales at the company I work at to put food on my plate and have a roof over my head so I know I would do something similar to what they are doing. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that I would do differently is check once a year instead of bi-annually, even so 2minutes a year and a couple button clicks is not worth bitching about and if it bothers you so damn much why did you get a new laptop with Windows XP on it in the first place? Wipe the drive and slap linux on it you whiner.
I thought the exact same thing. They are just dumbasses. The interface has probably zero effect on failure rate compared to the mechanical parts which are just about the same in all the drives.
FTA:
"the things that can go wrong with a drive are mechanical -- moving parts, motors, spindles, read-write heads," and these components are usually the same"
The only effect I can see it having would be if really shitty parts were used for one interface compared to the other.
I have had 3 personal use hard drives go bad in the last 5 years, they were either Maxtor or Wester Digital. I am not hard on the drives other than leaving them on 24/7. The drives that failed were all just for data backup and I put them in big, well ventilated boxes. With this use I would think the drives would last for years (at least 5 years), but nope! The drives did not arrive broken either, they all functioned great for 1-2 years before dying. The quality of consumer hard drives nowadays is way, WAY low, and the manufacturers should do something about it.
I don't consider myself a fluke because I know quite a few other people who have had similar problems. What's the deal?
Also, does anyone else find this quote interesting?:
"and may have failed for any reason, such as a harsh environment at the customer site and intensive, random read/write operations that cause premature wear to the mechanical components in the drive."
It's a f$#*ing hard drive! Jesus H Tapdancing Christ how can they call that premature wear, do they calculate the MTTF by just letting the drive sit idle and never reading and writing to it? That actually wouldn't suprise me.
but why MS expects people to keep putting up with this "phone home" behavior is beyond me... but I'm happy to trade off a little convenience for control of my own machine.
MS phoning home to check if the OS is pirated does not seem like some huge big deal to me. I mean if they have a list of KNOWN pirated keys then it is their right to be able to check for those keys if you want to be able to access the windows update webpage (which is one place I think the validation occurs but I could be wrong). It isn't really losing control either because I think it asks you before it does the checking, I know last night on my laptop a thing popped up asking to click through to validate and it was painless. If you call that losing control you are crazy IMO. If you are that paranoid then either don't install Windows in the first place, setup your firewall to block everything to Redmond, or don't connect the machine to the internet.
Is the reason you don't want to "put up with this phone home behavior" because your copy of Windows is pirated?
I am *so* glad Linux has evolved to the point it is today. Linux definitely has gotten better over the years but for me the biggest reason keeping me using Windows and not going Linux exlusively is games and the ease of installing new hardware. I have almost never had a problem installing new hardware on Windows XP Pro which I can't say the same thing for linux. Getting some things to work on linux is just a huge headache. My latest problem with linux was last month when I decided to download the latest Fedora ISO to install on an old P3 500 box I had sitting in the closet. Guess what? It couldn't even get more than about 20 seconds into the installation process! It got to a certain point checking the hardware if I remember correctly and just froze. I thought about digging up my old Red Hat discs I have somewhere that I have installed on the same machine sometime in the past but then ran out of time. Linux isn't to the point yet where I can dump Windows completely, it has A LOT of work left.
It's not that useless since it's possible (maybe even trivial, though I haven't tried it) to remove the fix and revert to the original firmware.
Actually it is IMPOSSIBLE to revert to earlier firmware because if you were updated with the fix it actually blew an eFuse. Some people knew this was coming and modded their boxes to prevent the eFuse from being blown so they can go back to the old firmware but everyone else who updated and didn't know that was going to happen are dead in the water.
You've made your own cogent argument for why there is no conspiracy, just a co-alignment of large-business interests that hurts the consumer - yet you hold fast to your assertion that other people are saying there is one. Very strange.
When did I say that the consumer was being hurt by the partnership between Dell and MS?
From what you write it is clear you do believe Microsoft was evil, and that during that time you knew it and still supported them because they bribed you with free stuff. You've now convinced yourself they are not evil anymore[sic] so that stuff that happened in the past is not a problem. Bzzzzt. wrong answer. Take some fscking responsibility for your actions.
I never said they were evil. I said that it sucks to be tied to one product but because a standard needs to be set for businesses to communicate effectively that being tied to one product is a necessary evil of the business world. I did not mean it to say MS is evil, they just happened to be the standard for this case (MS Office).
I was not bribed either. It is a fact that a lot of software is developed for Windows so it was just nice of them to provide me with a free license so that I could play around with Windows XP in my spare time and learn how it works and code for it. Something I should point out is that my University taught all CS courses on the UNIX OS, so even though that was the case MS still allowed copies of their software to be distributed for free to CS majors. I would think an evil Microsoft would instead make sure that the University they were giving free licenses to would be forced to teach at least a decent amount of classes on Windows.
I do take responsibility for my actions dim wit.
By doing business, I mean sending invoices, buying services and products and supporting users on those products.
I have not sent invoices to MS but that is irrelevant, I have worked with their company in other business aspects. I have bought their services (MSDN and other subscriptions) and have supported users on win32 applications I have developed as well as a few MS developed applications.
Hope you can wriggle your way out of the logical load of hoo-hah you created for yourself when MS comes crashing down and no one gives a hoot about your MSDN experience.
I can develop software for nearly any OS out there, I am not stuck with MS. Sure, the majority of my experience is for Windows but I have developed for UNIX/Linux as well as main frames. Nearly all of my experience before I started working as a developer professionally was for non-MS operating systems so you are incorrect if you believe I am stuck if MS goes down (which isn't going to happen anytime soon).
You don't seem to have understood the subtle inuendo: you are the sheep.
BAAA BAAA
I am not the sheep, sheep follow others without thinking which is not what I have done. I have looked at what MS has done and IMO most of it is not that bad. I don't believe bundling a web browser that at the time ended up being superior to Netscape Navigator is evil, that was just adding a basic functionality to the OS. I don't think anything they have bundled that I know of has been bad business practices, if there is a superior product out there it will end up winning. The only thing "evil" that I can think of off of the top of my head that MS has done business wise would be threatening computer resellers if they tried to sell their computers with other OS's besides MS's which I heard they may have done to Dell and Gateway.
No one wrote or implied anything about purpose or a conspiracy except you.
Umm did you miss about half of the OP post? Mainly this part?:
"The cycle looks something like this: Dell makes money when they sell new hardware. Microsoft makes money when they sell new OS and software. The reality is, most people don't need either - they just want systems to surf the web, do email, buy clothes and watch porn. Dell can't force you to upgrade that 3 year-old computer, unless the software runs slllooooooowwwwwww. So, Dell LIKES Microsoft products. Microsoft writes software that needs nice shiny new hardware to run well, with and insane amount of RAM just for the OS. Ironically, the worse the efficiency of the Microsoft software, the more money they BOTH make."
For fucks sake the title of the post was software and hardware backscratching, that sounds like a conspiricy to me.
They clearly are implying that there is a conspiricy going on between Dell and MS where MS is writing slow software on purpose and that is just not the case. Sure, Vista might run slow right now if you have all the bells and whistles turned on and install it on an old computer but if you get a new computer it should run very snappy and it will run even snappier on a new computer next year, etc. Would you rather that they don't push the limits for a new product? Are all of the game manufacturers in bed with Dell too since to run games at the highest settings a new, fast computer is needed?
People who spout terms like "necessary evil" cause a lot more damage than you realize. Are you actually supporting something you know to be evil?
If I were to not use MS Office products it would definitely cause many compatibility headaches for me at work. Sure, people within my company may be willing to use OO instead of MS Office but good luck getting the rest of the world to do so. I also don't feel the MS is that evil anymore, sure for example I hate when MS Word 2000 docs can't open in MS Word 97 but at least MS is now opening up the file formats so stuff like that shouldn't be an issue.
It's also very funny you call the OP a "sheep"! BAAA BAAA Have you ever conducted business with this company? Have you ever worked with Microsoft? - other than walking into a store and buying their product? From your post, it is clear you have not, or your opinions would be more informed.
Yes, I have done business with the company and they can suck at times but overall they haven't been so bad. When I was in college I got all of their products for free since I was a CS major which was pretty un-evil in my opinion since it let me try out the new Windows XP Pro as well as other software without having to make myself any poorer. I mainly used to play games since I did my coding on a linux box but it was still a good experience to get a free OS that all the new games would play on as well as being able to freely learn how to get around, use, and code on Windows XP which I knew would help me later in the job market.
Another sort of "business" contact I have had with them was a job interview. They were very professional and after the first phone interview offered to fly me out for a real interview for a Senior Developer job but I declined since I was too busy at my current job. They had no harsh feelings and told me to contact them in the future if I was looking for a job.
I also have done business with them by being a part of MSDN at my current job which is a pretty damn good service. We get so much software and licenses to use it is well worth the initial money spent on it. The MSDN website also comes in really handy and is very detailed to help me when I have API questions. I have also run into problems that the MSDN website could not answer and actual MS developers were very helpful in getting me the information I needed.
Is that informed enough for you? You will probably bring up one of the stupid arguments about how MS is so evil since they bundle stuff with the OS. O
The system is supposed to be able to last for a while. The 360 has been out for a year and they're already discussing releasing a new one in May with a bigger hard drive.
The 360 has excellent hardware too and it should be able to last for quite a while. Another thing is the premium edition comes with a 20GB hard disk which is equal to what the lowend PS3 comes with and the 360 is MUCH cheaper. The best thing is if they do release a new system with a bigger hard drive it won't be like the people who already bought a 360 will be stuck with the smaller HD, the HD comes right off at the click of a button so releasing the bigger HD as an upgrade will work perfectly.
I recently was looking at getting a new console and I ended up getting an xbox 360 premium because I couldn't get my hands on a Wii (without paying an arm and a leg) and the price of the PS3 was way too high plus there are way more quality games for the 360. If I want to I can pick up the HD-DVD drive for well under 200 bucks so I could have high definition DVD playability very easily too and I like not being forced to pay for that ability from the get go. I am very happy with my purchase and believe I made the right decision. I will pick up a Wii once they become easier to get but I am pretty sure I am going to skip on the PS3 completely, it just does not do anything right now that my 360 can't do and both look equally incredible graphics wise.
It still is early but I really believe the PS3 is going to be a big flop this round.
I think the Wii is something entirely different and if done correctly Sony could still retain their core gamer generation market who like fast action zillions of polygons and l337 skills whilst Nintendo will exist happily with their more family oriented gaming set.
I agree that the Wii is different and if someone were to offer me the choice between either a free PS3 or a free Wii (and I would not be able to resell either) I would go with the Wii strictly because the games focus on gameplay and it is damn fun to play compared to the PS3 which I can get nearly any game it has for my 360 and it will look just as good if not better.
However, I disagree that Sony will retain the "core gamer generation" because the xBox 360 already has awesome graphics as well as more games than the PS3 and it also is much cheaper than the PS3. Sure, some people will buy the PS3 because it doubles as a BluRay player but with the 360 you can get HD-DVD if you want to so at least you aren't forced into paying the extra money if you don't want the ability to play high definition DVD's.
Basically like you said the Wii will win over a lot of previous non-gamers but I think the 360 will (or already has) win over the hard core gamers. The PS3 is currently flopping and everything is pointing for it to end up a complete failure as a game console. It will most likely just end up just being a "cheap" way to get a bluray player that was supposed to double as a console but ended up with nearly no quality games.
You lost all credibility in my eyes at this sentence:
"That is the best reason yet to dump Micro$oft."
If you want to make a statement don't do retarded stuff like putting a dollar sign in the word Microsoft.
So, Dell LIKES Microsoft products. Microsoft writes software that needs nice shiny new hardware to run well, with and insane amount of RAM just for the OS. Ironically, the worse the efficiency of the Microsoft software, the more money they BOTH make.
Okay, I can see how Dell could make more money by Microsoft writing inefficient software but do you really believe MS would do that on purpose? What benefit would it be to them to do that? There are a lot of smart people working at MS and while I agree that a lot of their products suck balls I don't believe for a minute that it is POLICY there to write inefficient software. Take off your tin foil hat, there is no conspiricy between Dell and MS regarding purposely writing inefficient software to force upgrades.
I freed myself from the MS empire when my laptop was stolen and I switched to a Mac laptop in Nov 2005. Now everything is either OSX or Linux, and I havent missed it at all. I still use Word and Excel on Mac - but EVERYTHING else is now gone from my computer life from Microsoft and I like it that way.
Seriously, no one cares except zealots. Sure, it would be great to not be bound to one company but thats a necessary evil at the moment especially if you do business with people using computers. Standards are needed and early on MS became that standard. Most people use MS Office because it is what they have used for a long time and they don't want to have to learn other applications. Open Office is nice but it still is somewhat different (which scares many people) and lacks some features which is why it is not a true replacement yet for the average user.
Another big reason people still stick with Windows other than for business is for PC games. If you are a PC gamer and want to play newly released PC games (and do it completely hassle free) you CANNOT be MS free. This will be even more true for the new DX10 games.
So have fun following the other MS haters and being a sheep by hating a company for reasons that make absolutely no sense (the alliance between MS and Dell). The rest of us will use what is appropriate to get the job at hand done easily whether that means using MS, Apple, or open source software. Why artificially restrict yourself?
if he ever gets in to an accident, and hurts anyone, or worse, kills someone while speeding, he is not going to get a "walk" for it.
I used to believe you up until the last couple months because I was watching the news down here in the Phoenix area and was SHOCKED by what I saw on the news. I believe last year an officer (under the influence mind you) struck and killed an innocent person and all that became of it was a fine and a SPEEDING TICKET. The officer didn't even have the dignity to show up to court for the final judgement. From what I got out of the story the officer had been at a bar (off duty I think) and left and then there was a call for officer assistance (the truthfullness of this was under scrutiny) and he happened to be nearby so he decided to try and get over to help but in the process ended up hitting some young man while travelling over 20mph (maybe more) over the speed limit. I think it was a 30mph zone.
Of course his fellow officers never gave him any field sobriety tests or anything like that although there were witnesses who saw him consuming alcohol at the bar right before the accident. Now you tell me how likely would it be for ANYONE besides an officer to leave a bar and have been drinking (and have the officers who arrive at the scene know this), hit and kill someone while excessively speeding, then not be asked to take any field sobriety tests or submit to a breathalyzer/blood alcohol content test, AND then only end up getting a fine for under $1000 and a SPEEDING TICKET? Not even a reckless driving ticket or manslaughter charge. That is just insane.
The family was rightfully very distraught over the outcome and they said what hurt them even worse was that the officer didn't even show up to the final court date. The officer KILLED somebody but still couldn't find the time to show up to court, it was like he was just treating it as a everyday, normal traffic offense.
After seeing that while I still respect officers and believe the majority of them really want to help the public I do not believe that they don't shield each other and literally can get away with murder. The do not just let fellow officers speed, they let them speed while drinking and kill people.
I wish I could quickly find a source to link to but I don't have the time since I am at work and my lunch break is now over. I did see this on the 6 o'clock news in the last 2 months so it is very real, if someone else can dig up a link that would be great.
Hell, even in the 60's and 70's, did they complain that if they bought a record and later scratched it, they should be entitled to a free new copy of that same album?
How I stand on this issue is if they claim they are selling me a license to listen to the music on a particular format and they want to restrict me from making a backup for myself from that particular format then I damn well better be able to get a replacement if the original format gets broken. I am not talking about a free replacement, just charge me the cost of the materials plus shipping. DON'T make me pay full price AGAIN, that is complete bullshit to do that.
Now, if a completely new format comes out and for example Terminator 2 is available on it (which I own on DVD) then I am completely fine having to repurchase it if the quality/benefits of it make it worthwhile such as the jump from VHS to DVD or if the price gets lowered to a reasonable level (which I am waiting for HD-DVD to do). It would be nice if they somehow offered a discount if you trade in your copy on the old format for the new format but I know that won't happen.
I understand if they say, "It's EOL'd so we're not going to expend any resources fixing it." But it looks more like they're saying, "We've expended resources fixing this for people who have paid for extended support. You can (a) pay us money to get the fix or (b) pay us money to get Vista." That sounds like extortion to me.
You are completely incorrect if you believe it is extortion. Basically they are saying if you really need support for EOL'ed software then it is going to cost us money and we are passing that cost onto you. I know that if someone came to my company and wanted us to support really old versions of our software that I would charge them money too.
Lets say they just decided to not support it at all, well that would possibly cause huge problems for some companies that still rely on the EOL'ed software so it is nice for MS to still support them. However, if they just let anyone have access to the EOL'ed support then there would be little reason for people to upgrade to software that is regularly supported and it would be a big cost for MS to keep supporting such old software. This is a nice compromise that lets people who really need the EOL'ed support get that support for a price while MS doesn't have to carry the cost burden of that support or alternatively just not support it at all.
The iPod battery is user accessible. Sure, it is not as easy as opening a battery cover and popping the battery out but it still is a trivial process. I think the current placement of the battery helps to keep the iPod size smaller too. I recently replaced my iPod's battery and it only took about ten minutes, about five of which were spent trying to get the damn case open but it still wasn't that bad. Once the case was open all that was needed was to unplug the old batter, pop the new battery in and seal the case back up.
Here is a decent tutorial that explains the process:
As in : If a video card is DX9 compatible, it is Vista Ready.
Personally I would want the card to be able to support DX10 (like the GeForce 8800 http://www.nvidia.com/page/8800_features.html) since that will be the whole reason to eventually upgrade to Vista for gamers.
DX10 == Vista ready to me, and since it will be a while before I upgrade I don't care if the drivers don't work yet, they will in time and I am sure they will be better than ATI/AMD's drivers like usual.
This was my second nvidia card and first in my primary desktop. I will not buy another one. AMD gets my money next time. Their drivers suck and they don't support any BSD, but at least they aren't rude.
I think you mean ATI?:-)
I will say that ATI's drivers do suck, I would say that 80% of the computers I have put together in the last 4-5 years with ATI cards were BITCHES to get working without problems like constantly crashing, not running at full speed, etc. 0% of the machines I put nVidia cards in failed to work flawlessly. These were all Windows machines I built for friends/family so I wanted to keep problems to a minimum and I will keep sticking with nVidia for just that reason. Sure, this move by them is shady, but I have no doubt they will have things ironed out very soon.
When you search for "Google" on Yahoo, Yahoo thoughtfully displays a second search box as if to tell you, "Hey cutie, you have a search engine right in front of you!" A puzzling phenomenon? An strange aberration?"
Well that sentence there just made thousands more nerds go boost the search term "google" farther up the list and away from "sex"!
I do find this article funny since there was an article (or maybe it was just some comments) recently talking about how a large majority of people will type "yahoo" or "google" into their search engine of choice instead of typing "www.google.com" or "www.yahoo.com" into the address bar.
Is it set in stone that an EULA is legally binding?
Besides that, I can make you sign a contract that has laws in it that attempt to circumvent statues, but statues always trump contracts.
Statues are usually made of stone but they don't trump a contract, statutes on the other hand are not made of stone but they usually trump a contract (especially one that tries to circumvent laws/statutes).:-)
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The students training cheaply with MS Office is not good for the students, it's good for MS. They get a few bucks as opposed to none at well, in the case that Office would be pirated. And they tie in users for the future. It's a bit like a guy pushing crack on the streets right?
No, it is not like a pusher on the streets at all. It is mutually beneficial because the student gets to legally use the latest software that businesses use (might come in handy for some) for a cheap price as opposed to pirating it and like you said MS gets a few bucks instead of none since the normal price is way out of the range for most college students. It also does somewhat tie in a user for the future but only if it is a good product and the student prefers it to the alternatives (which nowadays I do find MS Office more functional and useful than OO myself, OO is SLOW). I was lucky at the university I went to to get all MS products for free (although I only used MS Word and Excel and Windows XP Pro) and while I don't believe getting that stuff free will ever help me in the job market it was cool to be able to get a free upgrade to the latest MS OS to tinker with the new OS and play games on (not to mention the HUGE boost in reliability compared to Windows 98SE). Did this experience "lock me in for the future"? Not really, I use what I like and at my house I have one Windows box for games and some development and then a few linux boxes for various other things.
MS is also not pushing MS Office on anyone, the students have 100% of the choice to buy it or not as opposed to a crackhead who is addicted to crack and usually can't make the decision to quit. Crack is also only bad for one party and there is no way to "pirate" crack so your analogy is flawed. Nice try.
I wish people would stop getting pissed off at MS for doing nice things like price breaks for college students. Sure, MS hopes that by doing that it results in future sales to said students but that doesn't make doing so evil, a lot of businesses do similar things and will give big price breaks to educational institutions.
Come back with a real argument next time.
sad part is terrorists are destined on killing the passengers in the case their wishes are not met. so now instead of the slight chance of negotiation that is there in a normal hijacking they will straight away just kill everyone on board. so now instead of saving people were saving the plane?
Umm the point is for them to realize hijacking a plane is USELESS. I am sure if this gets put in place then possible hijackers will know about it and it will at least make them rethink their plans. I mean if they KNOW that there is no possible way for them to control the plane if they hijack it then why would they hijack it in the first place unless the only thing they really want to do is kill just the passengers (which is not very common and like you said they usually use the passengers as bargaining chips for other demands)? With this system they can't hijack a plane and tell the pilot to fly to some safe harbor until their demands are met and/or crash the plane into a high value target.
I think it is a great idea if done right and it could even be used in non terrorist situations that others have mentioned such as if the whole cabin is depressurized and the pilots get knocked out or some other situation where the pilots lose control. The scary thing to me is the quality of code that some of the airline manufacturers write for their flight systems, I don't know if the people were lying but some of them said after seeing some of the code they would not get on those particular brands again!
Programmers, no matter how "management" their title is, have no more business hiring than HR people have programming.
I notice you are going for an MBA and it cracks me up when people with MBA's think they are the God's of management when a lot of them (yes you) could really learn something by listening to the people you manage. I also think you are on a power trip if you think a programmer with a management position has no business hiring/managing, is that only reserved for the God's with MBA's? If you sincerely believe your above sentence then I hope I never work at a company you work at. Being able to be apart of the interview process for my potential co-workers is extremely important because I can evaluate the skills of a fellow developer much better than the typical HR drone. If someone has a million buzzwords on their resume it usually makes a HR person go nuts thinking they gotta get that person while I actually can figure out if they can back it up with actual knowledge. Unless the HR person or whoever is giving the interview truly understands the position in question and the technology that goes along with it then not having someone "from the trenches" be apart of the interviewing is plain stupid.
From the flip side if I was going to an interview at a company and none of my potential co-workers were apart of the interview I would be offended and I most likely would not take the job. I want to be able to ask the really technical questions about the position and get answers straight from someone who actually knows them.
Neither HR nor management care about saving money as much as they care about making money
These are the same thing in the end, if you can't save money then it eats away at the money you made and vice versa, any manager I know would be concerned about both equally.
a new graduate probably is more excited to work there, will work for less, and won't complain or sue; and old programers have their old ways of doing things, always demand more than market forces dictate, and always end up suing.
Of course a new graduate will work for less, that is true of any profession but I doubt ANY new graduate will be able to do 80% of the work at the same speed as a veteran programmer. That 50% money savings is not worth it when it takes them 4 times as long to accomplish the same thing and they can't do 20% of the things a veteran programmer can do. Now if the job truly is for an entry level programmer then hell yeah it would be a waste to hire the more expensive veteran. Find a person suitable for the position but don't bitch about a veteran programmer costing more when the job at hand requires that level of experience.
You crack me up saying they won't complain or sue, what do you want mindless drones working for you? I would rather have people working for me with a backbone who stand up for what they believe (within reason). If a person has a valid complaint why you rather have them be silent rather than speak out about it?
By the way what is your beef with "old programmers"? I am sure some of them are a pain in the ass but you just broadly group all of them together as overpaid complainers who have a little more knowledge but would never be worth any extra money. Is experience not worth anything to you?
That's not worth it when a young punk will do 80% as good for 50% of the money, and will have ideas.
There you go making yourself sound big and bad again since you have are going to have the MBA and think you are better than the "young punk" with a CS degree which is harder to get than your MBA (yes, I know this is true from the amount of friends I have who have gone to get MBA's). I don't get why you make it sound like old programmers won't have ideas. All of the "old programmers" I have met had great ideas, to tell you the truth they had some of the best ideas I have ever heard.
Get over yourself, you seem to have invented some hatred of "old programmers" just to validate your choice to hire
It has been long determined that "plenty of people like you steal stuff, we're coming in to have a look round" is not sufficient legal grounds and that when agents act otherwise it is called "oppression".
I agree with this statement but I don't believe it applies to Windows validation. I think Windows validation is more like what happens when I take my watch to the place I bought it from that said they would give me free service on it whenever I needed that service. Well a couple of months after I got the watch the wristband had a problem so I went back to the store and before they would service the watch they either needed the receipt or if you had let them put the serial number in their database then they could use that too so they could verify you did purchase the watch at their store and you weren't just some random person trying to get free service. Do you think this type of checking is over the top too?
That is all that Windows validation does and while it would be great if they could just do it once and never again I can use my brain and figure out why they must periodically check and having to click a couple buttons 2 times a year to be able to access Windows updates does not seem out of line to me.
The thing is there is NOTHING forcing a user to get validated if they don't want to. BUT if you want easy access to the Windows updates ie going to the Windows update webpage then you will have to validate. Validating a license for support reasons does not seem unreasonable to me at all. A user can get the updates other ways and install them manually if they really wish so there ARE other options if you don't want to be validated.
Now, if your computer would lock up if you refused to get validated that would be one thing (and a horrible thing at that) but that is not how it works.
I didn't have a power conditioning UPS on it when the drives failed (although I do now) but overall my apartment building had pretty good power (yes I checked it, I worked as an electrician while getting my CS degree). IMO power conditioners are a waste of money and the only place I have heard of them making a difference is with high end home theatre systems where the sound quality may be better with a conditioner. I don't think a conditioner would make much difference if I plugged my home computer into it.
The biggest reason I think it would make no difference is because if unconditioned power is supposed to be so bad for electronics then why is the only thing that I have a problem with turn out to be the hard drives? I would think bad power would take out RAM before a hard disk. Either way the only failure I have had with this box is the hard drives, nothing else.
BTW I do have a high quality power supply in my main box so the blame can't be placed on a POS power supply which definitely do cause problems.
I didn't get physical media except for the recovery disc.
Talk to the reseller you bought from about that, that is not MS's fault. Whoever you bought from is too cheap to provide you with a true backup copy.
They checked once - that should be the end of it.
The check once idea wouldn't work because there would obviously just be some bit somewhere (ok more complicated than that but you get the idea) saying "this copy of windows has already been checked" which some "pirate" could figure out how to set to bypass the checking. BTW this checking happens like once every 6 months and takes less than a minute to complete so it is not a hassle at all (unless you consider clicking 2 or three "next" buttons too much). You also have the choice NOT to accept the check if you wish if it really is too much for you.
A lot of people use unlicensed copies of of MS software and I don't blame them for at least attempting to stop some of it. If you owned a software company would you just be fine having millions of people around the world using unlicensed copies? I rely on software sales at the company I work at to put food on my plate and have a roof over my head so I know I would do something similar to what they are doing. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that I would do differently is check once a year instead of bi-annually, even so 2minutes a year and a couple button clicks is not worth bitching about and if it bothers you so damn much why did you get a new laptop with Windows XP on it in the first place? Wipe the drive and slap linux on it you whiner.
I thought the exact same thing. They are just dumbasses. The interface has probably zero effect on failure rate compared to the mechanical parts which are just about the same in all the drives.
FTA:
"the things that can go wrong with a drive are mechanical -- moving parts, motors, spindles, read-write heads," and these components are usually the same"
The only effect I can see it having would be if really shitty parts were used for one interface compared to the other.
I have had 3 personal use hard drives go bad in the last 5 years, they were either Maxtor or Wester Digital. I am not hard on the drives other than leaving them on 24/7. The drives that failed were all just for data backup and I put them in big, well ventilated boxes. With this use I would think the drives would last for years (at least 5 years), but nope! The drives did not arrive broken either, they all functioned great for 1-2 years before dying. The quality of consumer hard drives nowadays is way, WAY low, and the manufacturers should do something about it.
I don't consider myself a fluke because I know quite a few other people who have had similar problems. What's the deal?
Also, does anyone else find this quote interesting?:
"and may have failed for any reason, such as a harsh environment at the customer site and intensive, random read/write operations that cause premature wear to the mechanical components in the drive."
It's a f$#*ing hard drive! Jesus H Tapdancing Christ how can they call that premature wear, do they calculate the MTTF by just letting the drive sit idle and never reading and writing to it? That actually wouldn't suprise me.
but why MS expects people to keep putting up with this "phone home" behavior is beyond me... but I'm happy to trade off a little convenience for control of my own machine.
MS phoning home to check if the OS is pirated does not seem like some huge big deal to me. I mean if they have a list of KNOWN pirated keys then it is their right to be able to check for those keys if you want to be able to access the windows update webpage (which is one place I think the validation occurs but I could be wrong). It isn't really losing control either because I think it asks you before it does the checking, I know last night on my laptop a thing popped up asking to click through to validate and it was painless. If you call that losing control you are crazy IMO. If you are that paranoid then either don't install Windows in the first place, setup your firewall to block everything to Redmond, or don't connect the machine to the internet.
Is the reason you don't want to "put up with this phone home behavior" because your copy of Windows is pirated?
I am *so* glad Linux has evolved to the point it is today.
Linux definitely has gotten better over the years but for me the biggest reason keeping me using Windows and not going Linux exlusively is games and the ease of installing new hardware. I have almost never had a problem installing new hardware on Windows XP Pro which I can't say the same thing for linux. Getting some things to work on linux is just a huge headache. My latest problem with linux was last month when I decided to download the latest Fedora ISO to install on an old P3 500 box I had sitting in the closet. Guess what? It couldn't even get more than about 20 seconds into the installation process! It got to a certain point checking the hardware if I remember correctly and just froze. I thought about digging up my old Red Hat discs I have somewhere that I have installed on the same machine sometime in the past but then ran out of time. Linux isn't to the point yet where I can dump Windows completely, it has A LOT of work left.
It's not that useless since it's possible (maybe even trivial, though I haven't tried it) to remove the fix and revert to the original firmware.
Actually it is IMPOSSIBLE to revert to earlier firmware because if you were updated with the fix it actually blew an eFuse. Some people knew this was coming and modded their boxes to prevent the eFuse from being blown so they can go back to the old firmware but everyone else who updated and didn't know that was going to happen are dead in the water.
You've made your own cogent argument for why there is no conspiracy, just a co-alignment of large-business interests that hurts the consumer - yet you hold fast to your assertion that other people are saying there is one. Very strange.
When did I say that the consumer was being hurt by the partnership between Dell and MS?
From what you write it is clear you do believe Microsoft was evil, and that during that time you knew it and still supported them because they bribed you with free stuff. You've now convinced yourself they are not evil anymore[sic] so that stuff that happened in the past is not a problem. Bzzzzt. wrong answer. Take some fscking responsibility for your actions.
I never said they were evil. I said that it sucks to be tied to one product but because a standard needs to be set for businesses to communicate effectively that being tied to one product is a necessary evil of the business world. I did not mean it to say MS is evil, they just happened to be the standard for this case (MS Office).
I was not bribed either. It is a fact that a lot of software is developed for Windows so it was just nice of them to provide me with a free license so that I could play around with Windows XP in my spare time and learn how it works and code for it. Something I should point out is that my University taught all CS courses on the UNIX OS, so even though that was the case MS still allowed copies of their software to be distributed for free to CS majors. I would think an evil Microsoft would instead make sure that the University they were giving free licenses to would be forced to teach at least a decent amount of classes on Windows.
I do take responsibility for my actions dim wit.
By doing business, I mean sending invoices, buying services and products and supporting users on those products.
I have not sent invoices to MS but that is irrelevant, I have worked with their company in other business aspects. I have bought their services (MSDN and other subscriptions) and have supported users on win32 applications I have developed as well as a few MS developed applications.
Hope you can wriggle your way out of the logical load of hoo-hah you created for yourself when MS comes crashing down and no one gives a hoot about your MSDN experience.
I can develop software for nearly any OS out there, I am not stuck with MS. Sure, the majority of my experience is for Windows but I have developed for UNIX/Linux as well as main frames. Nearly all of my experience before I started working as a developer professionally was for non-MS operating systems so you are incorrect if you believe I am stuck if MS goes down (which isn't going to happen anytime soon).
You don't seem to have understood the subtle inuendo: you are the sheep.
BAAA BAAA
I am not the sheep, sheep follow others without thinking which is not what I have done. I have looked at what MS has done and IMO most of it is not that bad. I don't believe bundling a web browser that at the time ended up being superior to Netscape Navigator is evil, that was just adding a basic functionality to the OS. I don't think anything they have bundled that I know of has been bad business practices, if there is a superior product out there it will end up winning. The only thing "evil" that I can think of off of the top of my head that MS has done business wise would be threatening computer resellers if they tried to sell their computers with other OS's besides MS's which I heard they may have done to Dell and Gateway.
You can go back to your sheep pen now.
No one wrote or implied anything about purpose or a conspiracy except you.
Umm did you miss about half of the OP post? Mainly this part?:
"The cycle looks something like this: Dell makes money when they sell new hardware. Microsoft makes money when they sell new OS and software. The reality is, most people don't need either - they just want systems to surf the web, do email, buy clothes and watch porn. Dell can't force you to upgrade that 3 year-old computer, unless the software runs slllooooooowwwwwww. So, Dell LIKES Microsoft products. Microsoft writes software that needs nice shiny new hardware to run well, with and insane amount of RAM just for the OS. Ironically, the worse the efficiency of the Microsoft software, the more money they BOTH make."
For fucks sake the title of the post was software and hardware backscratching, that sounds like a conspiricy to me.
They clearly are implying that there is a conspiricy going on between Dell and MS where MS is writing slow software on purpose and that is just not the case. Sure, Vista might run slow right now if you have all the bells and whistles turned on and install it on an old computer but if you get a new computer it should run very snappy and it will run even snappier on a new computer next year, etc. Would you rather that they don't push the limits for a new product? Are all of the game manufacturers in bed with Dell too since to run games at the highest settings a new, fast computer is needed?
People who spout terms like "necessary evil" cause a lot more damage than you realize. Are you actually supporting something you know to be evil?
If I were to not use MS Office products it would definitely cause many compatibility headaches for me at work. Sure, people within my company may be willing to use OO instead of MS Office but good luck getting the rest of the world to do so. I also don't feel the MS is that evil anymore, sure for example I hate when MS Word 2000 docs can't open in MS Word 97 but at least MS is now opening up the file formats so stuff like that shouldn't be an issue.
It's also very funny you call the OP a "sheep"! BAAA BAAA Have you ever conducted business with this company? Have you ever worked with Microsoft? - other than walking into a store and buying their product? From your post, it is clear you have not, or your opinions would be more informed.
Yes, I have done business with the company and they can suck at times but overall they haven't been so bad. When I was in college I got all of their products for free since I was a CS major which was pretty un-evil in my opinion since it let me try out the new Windows XP Pro as well as other software without having to make myself any poorer. I mainly used to play games since I did my coding on a linux box but it was still a good experience to get a free OS that all the new games would play on as well as being able to freely learn how to get around, use, and code on Windows XP which I knew would help me later in the job market.
Another sort of "business" contact I have had with them was a job interview. They were very professional and after the first phone interview offered to fly me out for a real interview for a Senior Developer job but I declined since I was too busy at my current job. They had no harsh feelings and told me to contact them in the future if I was looking for a job.
I also have done business with them by being a part of MSDN at my current job which is a pretty damn good service. We get so much software and licenses to use it is well worth the initial money spent on it. The MSDN website also comes in really handy and is very detailed to help me when I have API questions. I have also run into problems that the MSDN website could not answer and actual MS developers were very helpful in getting me the information I needed.
Is that informed enough for you? You will probably bring up one of the stupid arguments about how MS is so evil since they bundle stuff with the OS. O
The system is supposed to be able to last for a while. The 360 has been out for a year and they're already discussing releasing a new one in May with a bigger hard drive.
The 360 has excellent hardware too and it should be able to last for quite a while. Another thing is the premium edition comes with a 20GB hard disk which is equal to what the lowend PS3 comes with and the 360 is MUCH cheaper. The best thing is if they do release a new system with a bigger hard drive it won't be like the people who already bought a 360 will be stuck with the smaller HD, the HD comes right off at the click of a button so releasing the bigger HD as an upgrade will work perfectly.
I recently was looking at getting a new console and I ended up getting an xbox 360 premium because I couldn't get my hands on a Wii (without paying an arm and a leg) and the price of the PS3 was way too high plus there are way more quality games for the 360. If I want to I can pick up the HD-DVD drive for well under 200 bucks so I could have high definition DVD playability very easily too and I like not being forced to pay for that ability from the get go. I am very happy with my purchase and believe I made the right decision. I will pick up a Wii once they become easier to get but I am pretty sure I am going to skip on the PS3 completely, it just does not do anything right now that my 360 can't do and both look equally incredible graphics wise.
It still is early but I really believe the PS3 is going to be a big flop this round.
I think the Wii is something entirely different and if done correctly Sony could still retain their core gamer generation market who like fast action zillions of polygons and l337 skills whilst Nintendo will exist happily with their more family oriented gaming set.
I agree that the Wii is different and if someone were to offer me the choice between either a free PS3 or a free Wii (and I would not be able to resell either) I would go with the Wii strictly because the games focus on gameplay and it is damn fun to play compared to the PS3 which I can get nearly any game it has for my 360 and it will look just as good if not better.
However, I disagree that Sony will retain the "core gamer generation" because the xBox 360 already has awesome graphics as well as more games than the PS3 and it also is much cheaper than the PS3. Sure, some people will buy the PS3 because it doubles as a BluRay player but with the 360 you can get HD-DVD if you want to so at least you aren't forced into paying the extra money if you don't want the ability to play high definition DVD's.
Basically like you said the Wii will win over a lot of previous non-gamers but I think the 360 will (or already has) win over the hard core gamers. The PS3 is currently flopping and everything is pointing for it to end up a complete failure as a game console. It will most likely just end up just being a "cheap" way to get a bluray player that was supposed to double as a console but ended up with nearly no quality games.
You lost all credibility in my eyes at this sentence:
"That is the best reason yet to dump Micro$oft."
If you want to make a statement don't do retarded stuff like putting a dollar sign in the word Microsoft.
So, Dell LIKES Microsoft products. Microsoft writes software that needs nice shiny new hardware to run well, with and insane amount of RAM just for the OS. Ironically, the worse the efficiency of the Microsoft software, the more money they BOTH make.
Okay, I can see how Dell could make more money by Microsoft writing inefficient software but do you really believe MS would do that on purpose? What benefit would it be to them to do that? There are a lot of smart people working at MS and while I agree that a lot of their products suck balls I don't believe for a minute that it is POLICY there to write inefficient software. Take off your tin foil hat, there is no conspiricy between Dell and MS regarding purposely writing inefficient software to force upgrades.
I freed myself from the MS empire when my laptop was stolen and I switched to a Mac laptop in Nov 2005. Now everything is either OSX or Linux, and I havent missed it at all. I still use Word and Excel on Mac - but EVERYTHING else is now gone from my computer life from Microsoft and I like it that way.
Seriously, no one cares except zealots. Sure, it would be great to not be bound to one company but thats a necessary evil at the moment especially if you do business with people using computers. Standards are needed and early on MS became that standard. Most people use MS Office because it is what they have used for a long time and they don't want to have to learn other applications. Open Office is nice but it still is somewhat different (which scares many people) and lacks some features which is why it is not a true replacement yet for the average user.
Another big reason people still stick with Windows other than for business is for PC games. If you are a PC gamer and want to play newly released PC games (and do it completely hassle free) you CANNOT be MS free. This will be even more true for the new DX10 games.
So have fun following the other MS haters and being a sheep by hating a company for reasons that make absolutely no sense (the alliance between MS and Dell). The rest of us will use what is appropriate to get the job at hand done easily whether that means using MS, Apple, or open source software. Why artificially restrict yourself?
if he ever gets in to an accident, and hurts anyone, or worse, kills someone while speeding, he is not going to get a "walk" for it.
I used to believe you up until the last couple months because I was watching the news down here in the Phoenix area and was SHOCKED by what I saw on the news. I believe last year an officer (under the influence mind you) struck and killed an innocent person and all that became of it was a fine and a SPEEDING TICKET. The officer didn't even have the dignity to show up to court for the final judgement. From what I got out of the story the officer had been at a bar (off duty I think) and left and then there was a call for officer assistance (the truthfullness of this was under scrutiny) and he happened to be nearby so he decided to try and get over to help but in the process ended up hitting some young man while travelling over 20mph (maybe more) over the speed limit. I think it was a 30mph zone.
Of course his fellow officers never gave him any field sobriety tests or anything like that although there were witnesses who saw him consuming alcohol at the bar right before the accident. Now you tell me how likely would it be for ANYONE besides an officer to leave a bar and have been drinking (and have the officers who arrive at the scene know this), hit and kill someone while excessively speeding, then not be asked to take any field sobriety tests or submit to a breathalyzer/blood alcohol content test, AND then only end up getting a fine for under $1000 and a SPEEDING TICKET? Not even a reckless driving ticket or manslaughter charge. That is just insane.
The family was rightfully very distraught over the outcome and they said what hurt them even worse was that the officer didn't even show up to the final court date. The officer KILLED somebody but still couldn't find the time to show up to court, it was like he was just treating it as a everyday, normal traffic offense.
After seeing that while I still respect officers and believe the majority of them really want to help the public I do not believe that they don't shield each other and literally can get away with murder. The do not just let fellow officers speed, they let them speed while drinking and kill people.
I wish I could quickly find a source to link to but I don't have the time since I am at work and my lunch break is now over. I did see this on the 6 o'clock news in the last 2 months so it is very real, if someone else can dig up a link that would be great.
Hell, even in the 60's and 70's, did they complain that if they bought a record and later scratched it, they should be entitled to a free new copy of that same album?
How I stand on this issue is if they claim they are selling me a license to listen to the music on a particular format and they want to restrict me from making a backup for myself from that particular format then I damn well better be able to get a replacement if the original format gets broken. I am not talking about a free replacement, just charge me the cost of the materials plus shipping. DON'T make me pay full price AGAIN, that is complete bullshit to do that.
Now, if a completely new format comes out and for example Terminator 2 is available on it (which I own on DVD) then I am completely fine having to repurchase it if the quality/benefits of it make it worthwhile such as the jump from VHS to DVD or if the price gets lowered to a reasonable level (which I am waiting for HD-DVD to do). It would be nice if they somehow offered a discount if you trade in your copy on the old format for the new format but I know that won't happen.
Thats why you use UTC and then it doesn't matter what timezone you are in. You would not be able to get a wire transfer from "the future".
I understand if they say, "It's EOL'd so we're not going to expend any resources fixing it." But it looks more like they're saying, "We've expended resources fixing this for people who have paid for extended support. You can (a) pay us money to get the fix or (b) pay us money to get Vista." That sounds like extortion to me.
You are completely incorrect if you believe it is extortion. Basically they are saying if you really need support for EOL'ed software then it is going to cost us money and we are passing that cost onto you. I know that if someone came to my company and wanted us to support really old versions of our software that I would charge them money too.
Lets say they just decided to not support it at all, well that would possibly cause huge problems for some companies that still rely on the EOL'ed software so it is nice for MS to still support them. However, if they just let anyone have access to the EOL'ed support then there would be little reason for people to upgrade to software that is regularly supported and it would be a big cost for MS to keep supporting such old software. This is a nice compromise that lets people who really need the EOL'ed support get that support for a price while MS doesn't have to carry the cost burden of that support or alternatively just not support it at all.
Now make the battery user accessible
m l
The iPod battery is user accessible. Sure, it is not as easy as opening a battery cover and popping the battery out but it still is a trivial process. I think the current placement of the battery helps to keep the iPod size smaller too. I recently replaced my iPod's battery and it only took about ten minutes, about five of which were spent trying to get the damn case open but it still wasn't that bad. Once the case was open all that was needed was to unplug the old batter, pop the new battery in and seal the case back up.
Here is a decent tutorial that explains the process:
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-10165_7-5643378-1.ht
As in : If a video card is DX9 compatible, it is Vista Ready.
Personally I would want the card to be able to support DX10 (like the GeForce 8800 http://www.nvidia.com/page/8800_features.html) since that will be the whole reason to eventually upgrade to Vista for gamers.
DX10 == Vista ready to me, and since it will be a while before I upgrade I don't care if the drivers don't work yet, they will in time and I am sure they will be better than ATI/AMD's drivers like usual.
This was my second nvidia card and first in my primary desktop. I will not buy another one. AMD gets my money next time. Their drivers suck and they don't support any BSD, but at least they aren't rude.
:-)
I think you mean ATI?
I will say that ATI's drivers do suck, I would say that 80% of the computers I have put together in the last 4-5 years with ATI cards were BITCHES to get working without problems like constantly crashing, not running at full speed, etc. 0% of the machines I put nVidia cards in failed to work flawlessly. These were all Windows machines I built for friends/family so I wanted to keep problems to a minimum and I will keep sticking with nVidia for just that reason. Sure, this move by them is shady, but I have no doubt they will have things ironed out very soon.
When you search for "Google" on Yahoo, Yahoo thoughtfully displays a second search box as if to tell you, "Hey cutie, you have a search engine right in front of you!" A puzzling phenomenon? An strange aberration?"
Well that sentence there just made thousands more nerds go boost the search term "google" farther up the list and away from "sex"!
I do find this article funny since there was an article (or maybe it was just some comments) recently talking about how a large majority of people will type "yahoo" or "google" into their search engine of choice instead of typing "www.google.com" or "www.yahoo.com" into the address bar.
Is it set in stone that an EULA is legally binding?
:-)
Besides that, I can make you sign a contract that has laws in it that attempt to circumvent statues, but statues always trump contracts.
Statues are usually made of stone but they don't trump a contract, statutes on the other hand are not made of stone but they usually trump a contract (especially one that tries to circumvent laws/statutes).