"Yes, because a color coded circle next to the song title to indicate DRMness would really confuse users."
It would. Trust me. It might not confuse you, but there would be a legion of people who would be confused. There would be lots of people asking "Why can't I do this with this track, even though I can do it with this other track?". Right now people know what they get when they buy a track from ITMS. They know what they can and can't do. If some songs had one set of restrictions, whereas other songs had no restrictions, it would get confusing. And it might give the labels more traction to demand more draconian DRM on the DRM'ed songs ("since you are willing to satisfy the wishes of those indies, what about us?")
People are already confused with copy-protected CD's. They expect it to work in certain way, and they get confused when it doesn't. Having variable DRM in ITMS would create a similar situation there. And for what? So we could get bunch of DRM-free artists there that no-one has ever heard of? Well whooppee!
"It would be simple enough for iTunes to offer unDRMed downloads alongside the DRMed ones."
So some songs would have certain set of restrictions, whereas some other songs would have different set of restrictions or none at all? For better or worse, Apple cares about consistency. Having variable DRM would ruin that consistency. And your "suggestion" on Flickr isn't really that good. "explicit" and "clean" songs are a whole different matter than DRM'ed and un-DRM'ed songs. The actual usage and purchase-procedure is identical, no matter if the song is explicit or clean. that would not be the case with DRM.
"Although Diamond and Creative were well known to us geeks, at the time they were not a household name in the music player industry. "
Neither was Apple. In fact, Apple had no music-players in the market, whereas Creative and Diamond did. Creative and Diamond were the dominant players in the market when Apple entered it.
"Unlike the other two you mention Apple's brand is well known and respected to geeks and non-geeks alike."
It is now. But back when iPod was released many people were still wondering when Apple is going to go out of business.
"The huge reason why I don't use itunes is because of the exessive DRM"
Well, it's not that bad. First of all, you can use iTunes just fine without ever touching DRM. Just don't buy from ITMS. And if you do... The DRM is not that bad. Yes, it only works with iTunes/iPod, but it's still better than PlaysForSure. The restrictions are a lot less draconian. You can share the content with several computer, you can share it with unlimited number of iPods, and you can burn it DRM-free on a CD (so you can turn the DRM'ed music on to 100% un-DRM'ed music very easily).
Well, Apple has publicly said that they would want to see DRM eliminated, period. So there's no argument there. And FairPlay is pretty damn crappy at "locking in" users to iTunes/iPod, since removing FairPlay is very, very easy and it can be done in iTunes itself. There's no need to "hack" anything, and it's 100% legal and allowed.
Yet you are rationalising and defending such a scheme? Instead of defending it, you should be up in arms and complaining to the opterators about it.
"It might seem that way, but try comparing those maps to a population density map - no one lives in the uncovered areas."
Northern Finland is practically frozen wasteland, yet the cell-phone coverage is for all intents and purposes 100% over there. And the population-density overall is very low in Finland, yet we have total coverage (USA has 29.77 people/square kilometer, Finland has 16.89 people/square kilometer).
"In the few areas where there is a per-minute charge, you pay for incoming and outgoing calls, just like with a cell phone"
Damn, that IS retarded.... When someone sends me a postcard, I do not have to pay to receive it. I don't pay for my friends net-connection when they email me. I do not have to pay when someone decides to call me.
"I just don't see what's so unreasonable about paying for the resources I actually use."
Well, if you don't mind paying double for the service, then go right ahead. I guess you also pay for your friends net-connection when you receiving IM or emails from him? Seriously, and I say this with all due respect, it seems to me that the operator-propaganda is working. They are double-charging you, and you actually like it. If you were given the choice of paying X dollars when you call someone, or paying X dollars when calling or receiving a call, you would actually choose the latter. It just boggles the mind. You get no benefit, you just get charged double.
"I would wager that Europeans do a lot more international travel, and roaming, than Americans."
Maybe. So? 99% of the time we are not roaming. Businesspeople might roam quite a bit, but they have cell-phones that are paid by their employers. And you are still comparing apples to oranges. We are talking about cell-phone service here, and then you start bringing in totally unrelated things, like geographical sizes of countries. You do not pay double because USA is a big country. And besides, since coverage is so poor in USA, it might be that your hypothetical scenario of going from California to Florida would actually mean no cell-phone service at all. I actually checked coverage-maps of USA last month, and it seems that even the best networks only cover fraction of the country.
And even in worse-case scenario, when we are roaming, we have similar situation to USA where we pay for incoming calls. 99% of the time that is not the case, so I fail to see how you can bring up that 1% of cases and use it to prove something.
"Because you never pay for any calls on a landline, incoming or outgoing. Talking on a landline is free; talking on a cell phone is not free. (Pay phones are the exception: incoming calls are free when they're available at all.)"
I bet that landlines are not 100% free. You do pay a monthly fee or something, right? And in payphones the caller pays, while the receiver does not. Yet with cell-phones it's suddenly different. I really don't buy the "you pay extra for convenience"-argument. You are getting ripped off, that's what's happening.
And, fact remains that you are paying twice. You pay if you call, and you pay if you are called. The per-minute charges (or package-deals) are more or less same in USA and Europe, but difference is that in USA you are charged whether you call or receive a call, wheres in here you only pay if you initiate the call. Therefore, I think it's safe to say that cell-phone service is about twice as expensive in USA than it is over here. No amount of spin changes that fact.
"The geographical size is relevant to the extent that it means most of our travel is done inside the country."
Most of our travel is done inside the country as well, so what's your point?
"If you go on vacation to Italy, and I go to Florida, you're paying roaming charges but I'm not."
And if I go to vacation in Lapland while you go for a vacation in Thailand, you're paying roaming-charges while I'm not. So what's your point? Again: the geographical size is irrelevant. I don't think the point of vacation is to get physically as far as possible from home as possible.
"If anything, RAID should make your hard disk access a lot faster. That is, unless you go for software RAID, which will put a hit on your processor."
Since we are talking about IO-bound operations, does that matter? I mean, CPU is hardly ever the bottleneck these days, the hard-drive quite often is. So even if soft-RAID puts more load on the CPU, does it cause any slowdown? Espesially if it makes IO faster?
"They're not treated any differently. When I'm talking on the phone, I'm charged for airtime, regardless of why I happen to be talking on it."
But you just said that you are not charged when you talk on a landline. And you said that if you call from a payphone to a landline, you pay for it. Why doesn't the receiver pay for it? But if you happen to be calling a cell-phone, you both pay for it. Cell-phones are clearly treated differently to other phones.
"Aha. Here, I can take my phone anywhere in the US--covering the area of several European countries--and it works the same as when I'm at home, for everyone involved."
But it's still one country. The geographical size of that country is 100% irrelevant. There really is no difference if you go from one end of USA to the other end of USA, as opposed of me going from one end of Finland to the other end of Finland. What you are now trying to do is to compare apples to oranges. As in: moving inside one country as opposed to roaming in different countries. You can't do that. And no, the sizes of the things you are comparing (some country in Europe and USA) do not matter one bit. If you want to do comparisons, how about comparing apples to apples? Either compare the situation inside one country, or compare roaming. But you can't compare moving around in one country to moving around in several different countries.
I don't pay for any calls on a landline; a flat monthly fee covers everything. (Well, I don't actually have one myself, but that's how they work.) Does that mean I should expect not to pay for any calls on a cell phone?
Well, you already kinda have that with cell-phones. You pay a fixed amoutn for certain amount of minutes. But for some reason incoming calls are treated differently, why?
One more thing - how does roaming work? Do you just keep the same SIM in your phone and use it in any country, paying the same rate as you would at home, or does something change when you travel?
Roaming is quite complex... You just keep the SIM in the phone, and it will change operators automatically. Receiving calls when roaming does cost money for some reason. I believe the reason is that the caller has no way of knowing if the receiver is abroad (since the number he's calling does not change). So the caller pays whatever he normally pays for his call, and the receiver pays on top of that.
Also I consider the fact that I pay for incoming calls to be a HUGE bonus. In the UK you pretty much need a landline to take business calls, new customers are much less likely to make a call that costs them 10x what a local call would.
Well, that really isn't an issue here. Cell-phone usage is "cheap enough" for people not to worry about it. And they have no problems calling a cell-phone number. Although landline-number might seem more "tangible", since it implies a fixed office for the company, instead of one guy walking around.
Fact remains that if you pay for incoming calls, you guys are being charged twice. You pay if you call, and you pay if you answer the phone. We pay only once. And you are actually defending that scheme? Like I said: Unbelievable!
I'm interested to know if you really can beat this package and annual spend
OK, here you go (I went with a "package-plan" so it would be similar):
- 3000 minutes/month of regural calls to mobile-phones and landlines (regardless of the operator or time of call. If you use more than 3000 minutes, the extra minutes cost 9c/minute)) - 3000 minutes/month of 3G videocalls a month (regardless of the operator or time of call) - Unlimited data-transfer (3G, EDGE, GPRS, HSDPA) - 3000 SMS-messages a month - 3000 MMS-messages a month - All possible services (conference-calls, voicemail, caller-ID etc.) - Nokia N91 Music Edition
Price: about 900e/year ($1184/year at current exchange-rate). Price could be lower with a different phone (for example, with a RAZR it would be 780e/year), but not really any more expensive, since N91 is about as expensive as they get. And the minutes I listed only include outgoing calls, incoming calls are 100% free and they are not counted against the plan.
The caller in Europe is paying twice as much, because he has to cover both ends of the call.
No, they don't. The cost is quite comparable to the cost in USA (if not cheaper), apart from the fact that people only pay for outgoing calls.
If you call someone whose carrier has decided to charge $1/minute for incoming calls, you're stuck with that, right? You have to pay according to the plan your friend chose, instead of the one you chose yourself.
Um, what?!? The plan of the receiver has nothing to do with it. If the receiver has a plan that charges 1e/minute, and the caller has a plan that charges 1c/minute, then the caller gets charged 1c/minute, while the receiver is charged nothing. And no operator charges for incoming calls, so your whole question is meaningless. They only charge for outgoing calls, period. I do not have to worry about how much money my friends operator charges, all I have to care for is how much my operator charges. When I call my friend, I get charged at the rates my operator charges. Rates of my friends operator are 100% irrelevant.
You're the one who decided to get a cell phone - why shouldn't you pay for the convenience of receiving calls wherever you are? Why should your friends have to pay more because of a choice you made?
What choice? _They_ made the choice of calling me. No-one forced them to initiate that call. They decided to call you, they should pay for it. Or do you pay for your friends broadband-connection when they send you email?
Yes, I made the choice of buying a cell-phone. But I'm not forcing anyone to call me. If they want to call me, they should pay for it. It seems to me that your mindset is one that feels that cell-phones are a luxury, whereas landline is the standard. Things are not like that here. cell-phones have practically replaced landlines. Do you pay for incoming calls on landline? If you do not, why should you pay for incoming calls on a cell-phone? Because cell-phones are more "convenient"? More convenient than what? Landlines? And landlines are mor conveneint than telegram, surely you should pay for the "convenience" of receiving calls right at your home?
You shouldn't. That's exactly what I'm saying. I don't pay for other people's phone usage, I pay for my own. No one forces me to answer calls or even to get a cell phone in the first place. If I want to do those things, I pay for it.
I'm sorry, but that is truly retarded. It really is. If some operator here said that people should pay for incoming calls, they would be laughed at. Seriously. And you are actually defending that scheme! Unbelievable. "I can always choose not to answer the calls...". Unbelievable.
You pay the same rate no matter who you call? Perhaps something has been explained incorrectly to me in the past.
Depends on the plan, but yes, 6.9c/minute is quite common price. And that includes calls to ALL operators. And incoming calls are not included in the plan, only the calls you make are the ones that matter. And that is true no matter is it per-minute plan (the 6.9c I quoted is from per-minute plan), or package-plan where you pay a fixed sum for fixed amount of minutes (like you do in USA). Incoming calls are 100% free, period.
"Yes, airtime is counted whether the call is incoming or outgoing"
Well, that fact makes cell-phone usage VERY expensive in the USA, when compared to Europe. In Europe, you only pay for outgoing calls. Even if you had a plan that costs 40 dollars/month for X minutes, whereas in Europe it would cost 50 dollars/month for X minutes, it would still be chaper in Europe, since that X minutes only includes outgoing calls, whereas in USA both outgoing and incoming calls are counted in that X minutes.
"Someone has to pay for airtime - European carriers just charge your callers instead of you."
And in USA they charge both the caller and the receiver? So how exactly is that cheaper? In Europe, only the caller pays. You make the call, you pay for the call. Someone does pay: the caller. You might try to rationalize paying for incoming calls, but fact is that you are getting ripped off. Big time.
"You make the purchasing decision, but you aren't the one who has to pay, which probably means your friends are overcharged when they call you (and vice versa)."
I make the purchasing-decision, but I do not force my friends to call me. I pay for my own calls, why should I pay for phone-calls my friends make on their own phones? they make the decision to call me, they should pay for it. You make it sound like I'm leeching off my friends when I don't pay one dime when they call me. Why should I? It's their phone and their service-operator and their decision, why should I pay for it? The fact that you are actually defending the scheme of paying for incoming calls is.... well, retarded. Do you WANT to pay more? Seriously?
And no, they are not overcharged. Prices are quite cheap in fact. You just assume that "since you do not pay for incoming calls, callers are overcharged". Well, that is not the case. Only one being overcharged, is you. You are paying double, and you seem to gladly accept it. You said that you pay around 9 cents for your call, outgoing and incoming included. The usual price here is aroung 6.9 euro-cents, for outgoing calls only. Incoming calls are free.
So, what DO they mean by "branding"? I know what branding means, and if someone has some weird definition for the word, maybe they should share it with the rest of us?
"Ever heard of Fitt's Law? There's a very good reason for putting the menu bar at the top of the screen - it makes it much easier to 'hit' the menus with your mouse, because the mouse stops at the top of the screen."
I actually like the MacOS menubar, but it does have it's ahare of problems:
- As screen-resolutions increase, the distance between the app-window and the menubar increases - Related to the point above: multi-monitor setups. I'm working on a window on the secondary monitor. I need to do something with the menu's, what do I do? I need to move the cursor to the top of the primary monitor in order to access the menu.
Someone claimed that it was Apple who said that those who unlock are "bad guys". He was corrected with quotes which clearly show that it was not Apple who said it, but Cingular. Your response? "I love Apple spinsters". Huh? Fact is that the claim that Apple called phone-unlockers "bad guys" is 100% false, since it was Cingular that said it. There is no spin here.
"Who makes unlocked unbranded versions of nearly all of their phones? Well, Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, HTC and Palm...off the top of my head. But, they're only like 95% of the market, so, who knows."
Huh? I have NEVER seen an unbranded Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Siemens, Sony Ericsson etc. Every single one of them are clearly branded by the maker of the phone. Every single Nokia-phone I have seen has had "Nokia" written clearly on it. So what on EARTH are you blathering about "everybody makes unbranded phones"? Are you talking about branding by the operator? Well, iPhone is not branded in such way either, so what are you talking about? Seriously? Only thing iPhone has is the Apple-logo in the back of the phone, so it's in fact LESS branded than Nokias and the like. Nokia and other advertize the maker of the phone right in front of the phone, whereas Apple does it in the back of the phone.
I don't think so. US seem to be about those deals where you get certain amount of minutes for fixed amount of money. And on the surface they might seem "cheap". But what if you use more minutes than there are on your plan? Those extra minutes cost quite a bit, no? So the price goes up. And what if you use less minutes? You still pay the agreed sum, so the price per used minute can get very high.
So those package-deals might be "cheap" only if you use exactly the amount of minutes that are included in the plan. Use less or more, and the price goes up. And are incoming calls still counted against your plan? I honestly don't know.
Granted, all package-deals suffer from this problem, not just the ones in USA. Which is why I really prefer per-minute deals.
And there is a good reason why distros like Ubuntu default to GNOME and not KDE
And there is a good reason why distros like Kubuntu default to KDE and not GNOME.
The other problem is that KDE is slow, REAL slow
It's more or less as fast as GNOME is. I have used both (for the last year or so I have used GNOME), and I haven't seen any dramatic difference between the two.
"so I just elevate a command prompt and run it from there"
Yeah, I can see regural suers doing THAT. And if they do, we have come full-circle. For years Windows and Mac-users have said to Linux/BSD-users that "CLI sucks! It's too hard and complicated!". And now you are suggestsing that in order to get something done in Vista, we are required to use CLI? Oh the irony!
"If it gets to the point where it annoys the hell out of you, turn it off."
Yes, because the best security-features are those that you have switched off, right? The thing is that UAC COULD be done right. But Microsoft failed at it. They failed so bad that any benefits UAC gives have been brushed aside, since users either automatically clicks "OK", or they switch it off entirely. In either case, it's useless.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yes, because a color coded circle next to the song title to indicate DRMness would really confuse users."
It would. Trust me. It might not confuse you, but there would be a legion of people who would be confused. There would be lots of people asking "Why can't I do this with this track, even though I can do it with this other track?". Right now people know what they get when they buy a track from ITMS. They know what they can and can't do. If some songs had one set of restrictions, whereas other songs had no restrictions, it would get confusing. And it might give the labels more traction to demand more draconian DRM on the DRM'ed songs ("since you are willing to satisfy the wishes of those indies, what about us?")
People are already confused with copy-protected CD's. They expect it to work in certain way, and they get confused when it doesn't. Having variable DRM in ITMS would create a similar situation there. And for what? So we could get bunch of DRM-free artists there that no-one has ever heard of? Well whooppee!
"It would be simple enough for iTunes to offer unDRMed downloads alongside the DRMed ones."
So some songs would have certain set of restrictions, whereas some other songs would have different set of restrictions or none at all? For better or worse, Apple cares about consistency. Having variable DRM would ruin that consistency. And your "suggestion" on Flickr isn't really that good. "explicit" and "clean" songs are a whole different matter than DRM'ed and un-DRM'ed songs. The actual usage and purchase-procedure is identical, no matter if the song is explicit or clean. that would not be the case with DRM.
"Although Diamond and Creative were well known to us geeks, at the time they were not a household name in the music player industry. "
Neither was Apple. In fact, Apple had no music-players in the market, whereas Creative and Diamond did. Creative and Diamond were the dominant players in the market when Apple entered it.
"Unlike the other two you mention Apple's brand is well known and respected to geeks and non-geeks alike."
It is now. But back when iPod was released many people were still wondering when Apple is going to go out of business.
"The huge reason why I don't use itunes is because of the exessive DRM"
Well, it's not that bad. First of all, you can use iTunes just fine without ever touching DRM. Just don't buy from ITMS. And if you do... The DRM is not that bad. Yes, it only works with iTunes/iPod, but it's still better than PlaysForSure. The restrictions are a lot less draconian. You can share the content with several computer, you can share it with unlimited number of iPods, and you can burn it DRM-free on a CD (so you can turn the DRM'ed music on to 100% un-DRM'ed music very easily).
Well, Apple has publicly said that they would want to see DRM eliminated, period. So there's no argument there. And FairPlay is pretty damn crappy at "locking in" users to iTunes/iPod, since removing FairPlay is very, very easy and it can be done in iTunes itself. There's no need to "hack" anything, and it's 100% legal and allowed.
Hey! Your nose is going to be three foot wide across your face by the time I've finished with you!
"Meek...inheriting...earth."
You hear that? Blessed are the Greek. Apparently he's going to inherit the Earth.
"No, of course I wouldn't."
Yet you are rationalising and defending such a scheme? Instead of defending it, you should be up in arms and complaining to the opterators about it.
"It might seem that way, but try comparing those maps to a population density map - no one lives in the uncovered areas."
Northern Finland is practically frozen wasteland, yet the cell-phone coverage is for all intents and purposes 100% over there. And the population-density overall is very low in Finland, yet we have total coverage (USA has 29.77 people/square kilometer, Finland has 16.89 people/square kilometer).
For comparison:
Cingular's coverage in USA.
Sonera's coverage in Finland
"In the few areas where there is a per-minute charge, you pay for incoming and outgoing calls, just like with a cell phone"
Damn, that IS retarded.... When someone sends me a postcard, I do not have to pay to receive it. I don't pay for my friends net-connection when they email me. I do not have to pay when someone decides to call me.
"I just don't see what's so unreasonable about paying for the resources I actually use."
Well, if you don't mind paying double for the service, then go right ahead. I guess you also pay for your friends net-connection when you receiving IM or emails from him? Seriously, and I say this with all due respect, it seems to me that the operator-propaganda is working. They are double-charging you, and you actually like it. If you were given the choice of paying X dollars when you call someone, or paying X dollars when calling or receiving a call, you would actually choose the latter. It just boggles the mind. You get no benefit, you just get charged double.
"I would wager that Europeans do a lot more international travel, and roaming, than Americans."
Maybe. So? 99% of the time we are not roaming. Businesspeople might roam quite a bit, but they have cell-phones that are paid by their employers. And you are still comparing apples to oranges. We are talking about cell-phone service here, and then you start bringing in totally unrelated things, like geographical sizes of countries. You do not pay double because USA is a big country. And besides, since coverage is so poor in USA, it might be that your hypothetical scenario of going from California to Florida would actually mean no cell-phone service at all. I actually checked coverage-maps of USA last month, and it seems that even the best networks only cover fraction of the country.
And even in worse-case scenario, when we are roaming, we have similar situation to USA where we pay for incoming calls. 99% of the time that is not the case, so I fail to see how you can bring up that 1% of cases and use it to prove something.
"Because you never pay for any calls on a landline, incoming or outgoing. Talking on a landline is free; talking on a cell phone is not free. (Pay phones are the exception: incoming calls are free when they're available at all.)"
I bet that landlines are not 100% free. You do pay a monthly fee or something, right? And in payphones the caller pays, while the receiver does not. Yet with cell-phones it's suddenly different. I really don't buy the "you pay extra for convenience"-argument. You are getting ripped off, that's what's happening.
And, fact remains that you are paying twice. You pay if you call, and you pay if you are called. The per-minute charges (or package-deals) are more or less same in USA and Europe, but difference is that in USA you are charged whether you call or receive a call, wheres in here you only pay if you initiate the call. Therefore, I think it's safe to say that cell-phone service is about twice as expensive in USA than it is over here. No amount of spin changes that fact.
"The geographical size is relevant to the extent that it means most of our travel is done inside the country."
Most of our travel is done inside the country as well, so what's your point?
"If you go on vacation to Italy, and I go to Florida, you're paying roaming charges but I'm not."
And if I go to vacation in Lapland while you go for a vacation in Thailand, you're paying roaming-charges while I'm not. So what's your point? Again: the geographical size is irrelevant. I don't think the point of vacation is to get physically as far as possible from home as possible.
"If anything, RAID should make your hard disk access a lot faster. That is, unless you go for software RAID, which will put a hit on your processor."
Since we are talking about IO-bound operations, does that matter? I mean, CPU is hardly ever the bottleneck these days, the hard-drive quite often is. So even if soft-RAID puts more load on the CPU, does it cause any slowdown? Espesially if it makes IO faster?
"They're not treated any differently. When I'm talking on the phone, I'm charged for airtime, regardless of why I happen to be talking on it."
But you just said that you are not charged when you talk on a landline. And you said that if you call from a payphone to a landline, you pay for it. Why doesn't the receiver pay for it? But if you happen to be calling a cell-phone, you both pay for it. Cell-phones are clearly treated differently to other phones.
"Aha. Here, I can take my phone anywhere in the US--covering the area of several European countries--and it works the same as when I'm at home, for everyone involved."
But it's still one country. The geographical size of that country is 100% irrelevant. There really is no difference if you go from one end of USA to the other end of USA, as opposed of me going from one end of Finland to the other end of Finland. What you are now trying to do is to compare apples to oranges. As in: moving inside one country as opposed to roaming in different countries. You can't do that. And no, the sizes of the things you are comparing (some country in Europe and USA) do not matter one bit. If you want to do comparisons, how about comparing apples to apples? Either compare the situation inside one country, or compare roaming. But you can't compare moving around in one country to moving around in several different countries.
Well, you already kinda have that with cell-phones. You pay a fixed amoutn for certain amount of minutes. But for some reason incoming calls are treated differently, why?
Roaming is quite complex... You just keep the SIM in the phone, and it will change operators automatically. Receiving calls when roaming does cost money for some reason. I believe the reason is that the caller has no way of knowing if the receiver is abroad (since the number he's calling does not change). So the caller pays whatever he normally pays for his call, and the receiver pays on top of that.
Finland
Well, that really isn't an issue here. Cell-phone usage is "cheap enough" for people not to worry about it. And they have no problems calling a cell-phone number. Although landline-number might seem more "tangible", since it implies a fixed office for the company, instead of one guy walking around.
Fact remains that if you pay for incoming calls, you guys are being charged twice. You pay if you call, and you pay if you answer the phone. We pay only once. And you are actually defending that scheme? Like I said: Unbelievable!
OK, here you go (I went with a "package-plan" so it would be similar):
- 3000 minutes/month of regural calls to mobile-phones and landlines (regardless of the operator or time of call. If you use more than 3000 minutes, the extra minutes cost 9c/minute))
- 3000 minutes/month of 3G videocalls a month (regardless of the operator or time of call)
- Unlimited data-transfer (3G, EDGE, GPRS, HSDPA)
- 3000 SMS-messages a month
- 3000 MMS-messages a month
- All possible services (conference-calls, voicemail, caller-ID etc.)
- Nokia N91 Music Edition
Price: about 900e/year ($1184/year at current exchange-rate). Price could be lower with a different phone (for example, with a RAZR it would be 780e/year), but not really any more expensive, since N91 is about as expensive as they get. And the minutes I listed only include outgoing calls, incoming calls are 100% free and they are not counted against the plan.
"At the risk of stating the obvious, "branding" = "phone service provider has customised the phone"."
That's what I thought it means. and iPhone has none of that branding. So I fail to see what the fuzz is about.
No, they don't. The cost is quite comparable to the cost in USA (if not cheaper), apart from the fact that people only pay for outgoing calls.
Um, what?!? The plan of the receiver has nothing to do with it. If the receiver has a plan that charges 1e/minute, and the caller has a plan that charges 1c/minute, then the caller gets charged 1c/minute, while the receiver is charged nothing. And no operator charges for incoming calls, so your whole question is meaningless. They only charge for outgoing calls, period. I do not have to worry about how much money my friends operator charges, all I have to care for is how much my operator charges. When I call my friend, I get charged at the rates my operator charges. Rates of my friends operator are 100% irrelevant.
What choice? _They_ made the choice of calling me. No-one forced them to initiate that call. They decided to call you, they should pay for it. Or do you pay for your friends broadband-connection when they send you email?
Yes, I made the choice of buying a cell-phone. But I'm not forcing anyone to call me. If they want to call me, they should pay for it. It seems to me that your mindset is one that feels that cell-phones are a luxury, whereas landline is the standard. Things are not like that here. cell-phones have practically replaced landlines. Do you pay for incoming calls on landline? If you do not, why should you pay for incoming calls on a cell-phone? Because cell-phones are more "convenient"? More convenient than what? Landlines? And landlines are mor conveneint than telegram, surely you should pay for the "convenience" of receiving calls right at your home?
I'm sorry, but that is truly retarded. It really is. If some operator here said that people should pay for incoming calls, they would be laughed at. Seriously. And you are actually defending that scheme! Unbelievable. "I can always choose not to answer the calls...". Unbelievable.
Depends on the plan, but yes, 6.9c/minute is quite common price. And that includes calls to ALL operators. And incoming calls are not included in the plan, only the calls you make are the ones that matter. And that is true no matter is it per-minute plan (the 6.9c I quoted is from per-minute plan), or package-plan where you pay a fixed sum for fixed amount of minutes (like you do in USA). Incoming calls are 100% free, period.
"Yes, airtime is counted whether the call is incoming or outgoing"
Well, that fact makes cell-phone usage VERY expensive in the USA, when compared to Europe. In Europe, you only pay for outgoing calls. Even if you had a plan that costs 40 dollars/month for X minutes, whereas in Europe it would cost 50 dollars/month for X minutes, it would still be chaper in Europe, since that X minutes only includes outgoing calls, whereas in USA both outgoing and incoming calls are counted in that X minutes.
"Someone has to pay for airtime - European carriers just charge your callers instead of you."
And in USA they charge both the caller and the receiver? So how exactly is that cheaper? In Europe, only the caller pays. You make the call, you pay for the call. Someone does pay: the caller. You might try to rationalize paying for incoming calls, but fact is that you are getting ripped off. Big time.
"You make the purchasing decision, but you aren't the one who has to pay, which probably means your friends are overcharged when they call you (and vice versa)."
I make the purchasing-decision, but I do not force my friends to call me. I pay for my own calls, why should I pay for phone-calls my friends make on their own phones? they make the decision to call me, they should pay for it. You make it sound like I'm leeching off my friends when I don't pay one dime when they call me. Why should I? It's their phone and their service-operator and their decision, why should I pay for it? The fact that you are actually defending the scheme of paying for incoming calls is.... well, retarded. Do you WANT to pay more? Seriously?
And no, they are not overcharged. Prices are quite cheap in fact. You just assume that "since you do not pay for incoming calls, callers are overcharged". Well, that is not the case. Only one being overcharged, is you. You are paying double, and you seem to gladly accept it. You said that you pay around 9 cents for your call, outgoing and incoming included. The usual price here is aroung 6.9 euro-cents, for outgoing calls only. Incoming calls are free.
So, what DO they mean by "branding"? I know what branding means, and if someone has some weird definition for the word, maybe they should share it with the rest of us?
"Ever heard of Fitt's Law? There's a very good reason for putting the menu bar at the top of the screen - it makes it much easier to 'hit' the menus with your mouse, because the mouse stops at the top of the screen."
I actually like the MacOS menubar, but it does have it's ahare of problems:
- As screen-resolutions increase, the distance between the app-window and the menubar increases
- Related to the point above: multi-monitor setups. I'm working on a window on the secondary monitor. I need to do something with the menu's, what do I do? I need to move the cursor to the top of the primary monitor in order to access the menu.
"I love the Apple spinsters."
Someone claimed that it was Apple who said that those who unlock are "bad guys". He was corrected with quotes which clearly show that it was not Apple who said it, but Cingular. Your response? "I love Apple spinsters". Huh? Fact is that the claim that Apple called phone-unlockers "bad guys" is 100% false, since it was Cingular that said it. There is no spin here.
"Who makes unlocked unbranded versions of nearly all of their phones? Well, Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, HTC and Palm...off the top of my head. But, they're only like 95% of the market, so, who knows."
Huh? I have NEVER seen an unbranded Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Siemens, Sony Ericsson etc. Every single one of them are clearly branded by the maker of the phone. Every single Nokia-phone I have seen has had "Nokia" written clearly on it. So what on EARTH are you blathering about "everybody makes unbranded phones"? Are you talking about branding by the operator? Well, iPhone is not branded in such way either, so what are you talking about? Seriously? Only thing iPhone has is the Apple-logo in the back of the phone, so it's in fact LESS branded than Nokias and the like. Nokia and other advertize the maker of the phone right in front of the phone, whereas Apple does it in the back of the phone.
"The US services do seem considerably cheaper."
I don't think so. US seem to be about those deals where you get certain amount of minutes for fixed amount of money. And on the surface they might seem "cheap". But what if you use more minutes than there are on your plan? Those extra minutes cost quite a bit, no? So the price goes up. And what if you use less minutes? You still pay the agreed sum, so the price per used minute can get very high.
So those package-deals might be "cheap" only if you use exactly the amount of minutes that are included in the plan. Use less or more, and the price goes up. And are incoming calls still counted against your plan? I honestly don't know.
Granted, all package-deals suffer from this problem, not just the ones in USA. Which is why I really prefer per-minute deals.
And there is a good reason why distros like Kubuntu default to KDE and not GNOME.
It's more or less as fast as GNOME is. I have used both (for the last year or so I have used GNOME), and I haven't seen any dramatic difference between the two.
Examples please.
Such as?
4MB is a "metric fuckton"? That's less than 3 floppies of data!
"so I just elevate a command prompt and run it from there"
Yeah, I can see regural suers doing THAT. And if they do, we have come full-circle. For years Windows and Mac-users have said to Linux/BSD-users that "CLI sucks! It's too hard and complicated!". And now you are suggestsing that in order to get something done in Vista, we are required to use CLI? Oh the irony!
"If it gets to the point where it annoys the hell out of you, turn it off."
Yes, because the best security-features are those that you have switched off, right? The thing is that UAC COULD be done right. But Microsoft failed at it. They failed so bad that any benefits UAC gives have been brushed aside, since users either automatically clicks "OK", or they switch it off entirely. In either case, it's useless.