"I see absolutely nothing proprietary about my Sony MP3 CD player. "
Your one CD player. Go do a little more research.
"I see absolutely nothing proprietary about my Sony MP3 CD player. "
Yes, you're right. You'll find other Sony products that couldn't get away with it either. That does not negate my point. Sony couldn't make any money if they tried to enter a highly competitive market with proprietary garabe. Go do a search for "MagicGate" and you'll start to see what I'm talking about.
"Look, all you're demonstrating is that they are out to make money. That's nothing like Microsoft, who are out to make money by making sure that the consumer has no choice in markets they dominate. "
Really? So let me make sure I understand this, Sony's out to make money, but Microsoft's only out to maintain a monopoly? I think it's funny that you bring that up considering that every move that MS makes has Slashdot readers crying monopoly. "Oh, they made the XBOX, they're going to take over the Video Game market now." Wait a minute, that's not even in danger of happening. Could it be that, gasp, they don't have the monopolistic power to do that? Gee. Could Microsoft's evilness be overrated? Man, that'd be strange. Sony can do it, but Microsoft can't. Yeah, nobody's biased here. *eyeroll*
"Show me a lock-in deal where they've worked with other companies to make sure that only Sony products are sold in combination with their own."
Super NES CD?
" Show me examples of where they bought and buried technologies."
Clie?
"Show me examples of absurd licensing practices. "
With a hardware vendor? That's a trick quesrtion and you know it.
"I just don't see where you can say Sony is like Microsoft. "
That's because you're arguing with me instead of trying to see my point. I think I see what's really happening here. Sony makes stuff you like, so you don't mind buying Sony branded stuff. But Microsoft makes stuff you don't like, and when you have to buy MS branded stuff you get irritated because you don't want to give them money. Only then the word monopoly makes an appearance.
"Am I the only one that doesn't care if I can play games and take pictures with a PHONE?"
What exactly are you losing by having these features available? These things have a processor in them anyway, why not have the extra doodads?
Why are you so resistant to additional features, anyway? You'd be surprised what you might discover. For example, when I got my first internet phone, I was pleasantly surprised that it was easy to find show times for movies. Sounds useless until you're out with a group of friends who're bored. To my surprise, I ended up using that quite a bit.
And then, I got my T-68i. I'm the type of guy who likes to play with my new toys, and this thing didn't disappoint. It has COMPLETELY replaced my alarm clock. It has an alarm where you can not only set the time, but the days it goes off. It only goes off on work days, but remains quiet on my days off. You have no idea how long I've wanted that in an alarm clock. I can also set appts to have it wake me up for that. For example, I found out one Friday that they wanted me to work on Sunday. No prob, pushed a few buttons, and Sunday I was woken up with a message saying "go to work today." No problemo. I never ever thought I'd have a phone that did that. You might be thinking "so what? why not just get a more expensive alarm clock?", to which my answer is "Well, besides that it's already in my phone, I travel as well and the phone goes with me."
I don't see where communication possibilites have been pushed back for games. Perhaps you could elaborate on that? Color screen maybe? On the surface, I could sort of see the complaint there. Thing is, though, on a color screen black is black and white is white. On your traditional monochrome LCD screen, black is gray and white is silver. My point? You get much better contrast to read from. Also, you can assign icons to the people that call you. That's kind of neat. Important? Not really, but it's at least sort of useful.
"ALSO, is there anything more COMPLETELY FUCKING STUPID than TEXT MESSAGING someone from a PHONE, where you could type less and ACTUALLY CALL THEM? GRRRRRRR...... "
You mean besides situations where it would be inpolite to talk? Just because you don't see the point doesn't mean it's senseless. I discovered when I got my T68 talking to my laptop via bluetooth that SMS messages were ending up in my inbox in Outlook. That was pretty damn cool! I could get messages out via my cell phone using my laptop. Wish I had explored that more, never found the time tho.
I respect that you don't care about games on your phone etc, I don't think your rant is all that valid. It's one thing to have no interest, it's another to rant like everybody's stupid.
"how irritatating it would be to try and dial that thing, with the buttons not layed out in the traditional, muscle memory configuration."
"Did you also bitch when they switched from rotary dialers to touch tone? We handled the change back then, and unless you have an IQ well below 100, I think you can handle this too. "
Don't you think you're being an ass? He's talking about being able to dial a number without having to stare at it. I have an idea, try closing your eyes and typing your response. I bet you get pretty far with relatively few mistakes. Then, once your response is done, try clicking on the submit button without opening your eyes. Can't do it, can ya? You'll understand at that point how frustrating it is to lose tactile feedback.
Why don't you actually listen to what people are saying and try to understand their point instead of trying to make fun of them for making a legitimate complaint?
"So if Marvel stands up to them then sony will come up with a kick-ass superhero? cool. "
He'll seem like a superhero, but before long DC will come up with a superhero that has more depth and fewer weakenesses. So Sony will fight back by flooding the market with tons of rushed derivitive stories about their superhero.
"Yeah, they don't oppose and even encourage Linux on the PS2. That's important around here. "
You mean the $200 Linux kit that doesn't allow you to burn your apps to disc for others to play with? I guess I can give them credit for kissing Slashdot's ass. It's not so interesting when you read the FAQ and realize it's not near as interesting as it could be. Sega had it right with their Dreamcast.
"Also, they sell (sold? haven't seen one recently) CD-RW drives, DVD-RW drives, MP3 players, etc. even though they are into producing content in a BIG way. "
CD and DVD products were made by so many companies that Sony really had no choice but to compete. The market wouldn't support their mischief. However, their MP3 players are evil. Not only do they only take Memory Stick or Minidisc, but they also are pushing a proprietary copy protection format known as MagicGate.
"... without regard to some grand lockin strategy. Unlike certain Massive Software vendors I can think of. "
Oh really? Okay, find me a Sony brand Digital Camera that supports anything besides Memory Stick. Find me an MP3 player that uses Compact Flash or Smart Media. I could probably keep poking around here, but the reason that you don't percieve their lock-in scheme is that they compete in areas that have a little too much competition. Sony can't make a Sony-only DVD-R because nobody'd buy it.
You can turn a blind eye to it if ya like, but sooner or later you're going to buy a Sony product and figure out just how proprietary they are, especially when they're the only one providing a product like that.
"It's impossible to get parts or service manuals for their products. They treat their employees like felons (I had the misfortune to work at their US product returns warehouse one summer). They try to push their crappy proprietary stuff (Minidisk, memory stick) down everyone's throats. The company is incredibilly arrogant."
I've had some not-so-pleasant experiences with them myself. I used to be a video game salesman. My first xmas was spent selling their defective Playstations. We had like 1 in 4 machines that went bad after a month or two of use. Instead of admitting that they made a faulty product, they instead placed the blame of the customers. "Well, they must be using it wrong." In reality, what happened was that the speed of the drives would change as they burned in. As a result, sometimes they dipped below the minimum spec needed to keep the data flowing when playing FMV.
The fix was pretty simple, they just needed to turn a screw to make the disc spin a little faster. As a matter of fact, they offered this service to people for $80 + a 2 week wait time. Ruthless. Since then, they fixed the machines and pretended like nothing ever happened.
A friend of mine was a manager at an Electronics Boutique. He told me a story about Sony that really bothered me. This was about year 2 of the Playstation. Anybody remember the trick where you can trick an original Playstation into playing import games? Sony fought that by releasing a new unit with that exploit fixed. A woman bought one of these new units for her son. She brought it back because she bought one of the original PS games (Toshinden? Not sure..) and it wouldn't play. He said that he tried it there in the store, and she was right, it just didn't work. He replaced the unit with another new one, same problem.
He called a Sony rep and asked them if maybe a bug was introduced when they fixed the exploit. The response he got was shocking. Not only did they deny that the Playstation had changed (never mind that magically the later machines couldn't be tricked into playing import games), but the rep actually got hostile with this guy on the phone and accused him of lying and a bunch of other nasty stuff.
I'm not a big fan of Sony. I don't think they have customer interests in mind. I also don't think that they should be allowed to slip under Slashdot's radar.
Sony's every bit as evil as you guys thing Microsoft is. I don't know why they're not on Slashdot's radar.
The basic gist of the complaint is that they are attempting to rebrand Spiderman as a Sony product. Though I don't have any opinion as to whether they're guilty here or not as I don't have enough info to base an opinion on, I do know that Sony's been complained about before. Anybody remember when they were developing the Super NES CD that never arrived? It fell through because Sony wanted this to be a Sony branded machine. They basically wanted to take over Nintendo's well developed market. Fortunately, Nintendo had the balls to stand up to them. That's indirectly how Sony came around with the Playstation.
Slashdot really should be eyeballing Sony. Sometimes you guys pay too much attention to Microsoft.
"I knew this was fictional before all of you, because, I am in fact, from next Wednesday! I traveled back in time several days just to get the first post here telling you all it's false."
"In related news, the former Iraqi Minister of Information held a press conference that the reports of spam are all lies. "These reports of alleged unrequested email are all falsifications of the infidels." He went on to claim that email itself is simply a hallucination brought on by watching Fox News. "
"2)Beat the shit out of the cabbie for the hell of it."
Yeah, you can bop him a couple of times until he falls. It's hardly shocking in light of Bugs Bunny catoons that we've all watched for years. It's violent, but it's not ultra violent.
Ultra violent would be like the first part of the Animatrix where that group of men attacked the female robot, ripping her to pieces.
I can't believe GTA3 is that misunderstood, considering how popular it is.
"Is it really possible that programmers would ever become extinct (at least in some sense)? "
Calculators did not make mathematictions exctinct.
The worst that'll happen is that programming in general is a lot more like scripting is today. Simplified, ineffecient in many ways, but anybody can program it.
Slashdot Mirror
"I see absolutely nothing proprietary about my Sony MP3 CD player. "
Your one CD player. Go do a little more research.
"I see absolutely nothing proprietary about my Sony MP3 CD player. "
Yes, you're right. You'll find other Sony products that couldn't get away with it either. That does not negate my point. Sony couldn't make any money if they tried to enter a highly competitive market with proprietary garabe. Go do a search for "MagicGate" and you'll start to see what I'm talking about.
"Look, all you're demonstrating is that they are out to make money. That's nothing like Microsoft, who are out to make money by making sure that the consumer has no choice in markets they dominate. "
Really? So let me make sure I understand this, Sony's out to make money, but Microsoft's only out to maintain a monopoly? I think it's funny that you bring that up considering that every move that MS makes has Slashdot readers crying monopoly. "Oh, they made the XBOX, they're going to take over the Video Game market now." Wait a minute, that's not even in danger of happening. Could it be that, gasp, they don't have the monopolistic power to do that? Gee. Could Microsoft's evilness be overrated? Man, that'd be strange. Sony can do it, but Microsoft can't. Yeah, nobody's biased here. *eyeroll*
"Show me a lock-in deal where they've worked with other companies to make sure that only Sony products are sold in combination with their own."
Super NES CD?
" Show me examples of where they bought and buried technologies."
Clie?
"Show me examples of absurd licensing practices. "
With a hardware vendor? That's a trick quesrtion and you know it.
"I just don't see where you can say Sony is like Microsoft. "
That's because you're arguing with me instead of trying to see my point. I think I see what's really happening here. Sony makes stuff you like, so you don't mind buying Sony branded stuff. But Microsoft makes stuff you don't like, and when you have to buy MS branded stuff you get irritated because you don't want to give them money. Only then the word monopoly makes an appearance.
"Am I the only one that doesn't care if I can play games and take pictures with a PHONE?"
What exactly are you losing by having these features available? These things have a processor in them anyway, why not have the extra doodads?
Why are you so resistant to additional features, anyway? You'd be surprised what you might discover. For example, when I got my first internet phone, I was pleasantly surprised that it was easy to find show times for movies. Sounds useless until you're out with a group of friends who're bored. To my surprise, I ended up using that quite a bit.
And then, I got my T-68i. I'm the type of guy who likes to play with my new toys, and this thing didn't disappoint. It has COMPLETELY replaced my alarm clock. It has an alarm where you can not only set the time, but the days it goes off. It only goes off on work days, but remains quiet on my days off. You have no idea how long I've wanted that in an alarm clock. I can also set appts to have it wake me up for that. For example, I found out one Friday that they wanted me to work on Sunday. No prob, pushed a few buttons, and Sunday I was woken up with a message saying "go to work today." No problemo. I never ever thought I'd have a phone that did that. You might be thinking "so what? why not just get a more expensive alarm clock?", to which my answer is "Well, besides that it's already in my phone, I travel as well and the phone goes with me."
I don't see where communication possibilites have been pushed back for games. Perhaps you could elaborate on that? Color screen maybe? On the surface, I could sort of see the complaint there. Thing is, though, on a color screen black is black and white is white. On your traditional monochrome LCD screen, black is gray and white is silver. My point? You get much better contrast to read from. Also, you can assign icons to the people that call you. That's kind of neat. Important? Not really, but it's at least sort of useful.
"ALSO, is there anything more COMPLETELY FUCKING STUPID than TEXT MESSAGING someone from a PHONE, where you could type less and ACTUALLY CALL THEM? GRRRRRRR...... "
You mean besides situations where it would be inpolite to talk? Just because you don't see the point doesn't mean it's senseless. I discovered when I got my T68 talking to my laptop via bluetooth that SMS messages were ending up in my inbox in Outlook. That was pretty damn cool! I could get messages out via my cell phone using my laptop. Wish I had explored that more, never found the time tho.
I respect that you don't care about games on your phone etc, I don't think your rant is all that valid. It's one thing to have no interest, it's another to rant like everybody's stupid.
"CDMA is like windows, being controlled by one company - Qualcomm
GSM is an open standard "
Yeah it's a pity that coverage is far more important than open standards.
"Did you also bitch when they switched from rotary dialers to touch tone? We handled the change back then, and unless you have an IQ well below 100, I think you can handle this too. "
Don't you think you're being an ass? He's talking about being able to dial a number without having to stare at it. I have an idea, try closing your eyes and typing your response. I bet you get pretty far with relatively few mistakes. Then, once your response is done, try clicking on the submit button without opening your eyes. Can't do it, can ya? You'll understand at that point how frustrating it is to lose tactile feedback.
Why don't you actually listen to what people are saying and try to understand their point instead of trying to make fun of them for making a legitimate complaint?
'I don't think you're using it properly.'
Makes you wonder how he manages to type so well.
"So if Marvel stands up to them then sony will come up with a kick-ass superhero? cool. "
He'll seem like a superhero, but before long DC will come up with a superhero that has more depth and fewer weakenesses. So Sony will fight back by flooding the market with tons of rushed derivitive stories about their superhero.
"Yeah, they don't oppose and even encourage Linux on the PS2. That's important around here. "
You mean the $200 Linux kit that doesn't allow you to burn your apps to disc for others to play with? I guess I can give them credit for kissing Slashdot's ass. It's not so interesting when you read the FAQ and realize it's not near as interesting as it could be. Sega had it right with their Dreamcast.
"Also, they sell (sold? haven't seen one recently) CD-RW drives, DVD-RW drives, MP3 players, etc. even though they are into producing content in a BIG way. "
CD and DVD products were made by so many companies that Sony really had no choice but to compete. The market wouldn't support their mischief. However, their MP3 players are evil. Not only do they only take Memory Stick or Minidisc, but they also are pushing a proprietary copy protection format known as MagicGate.
"... without regard to some grand lockin strategy. Unlike certain Massive Software vendors I can think of. "
Oh really? Okay, find me a Sony brand Digital Camera that supports anything besides Memory Stick. Find me an MP3 player that uses Compact Flash or Smart Media. I could probably keep poking around here, but the reason that you don't percieve their lock-in scheme is that they compete in areas that have a little too much competition. Sony can't make a Sony-only DVD-R because nobody'd buy it.
You can turn a blind eye to it if ya like, but sooner or later you're going to buy a Sony product and figure out just how proprietary they are, especially when they're the only one providing a product like that.
...that the 'Sony Clie' tries really hard to make you forget that it's a Palm device?
Sony's got a track record for this, no?
"It's impossible to get parts or service manuals for their products. They treat their employees like felons (I had the misfortune to work at their US product returns warehouse one summer). They try to push their crappy proprietary stuff (Minidisk, memory stick) down everyone's throats. The company is incredibilly arrogant."
I've had some not-so-pleasant experiences with them myself. I used to be a video game salesman. My first xmas was spent selling their defective Playstations. We had like 1 in 4 machines that went bad after a month or two of use. Instead of admitting that they made a faulty product, they instead placed the blame of the customers. "Well, they must be using it wrong." In reality, what happened was that the speed of the drives would change as they burned in. As a result, sometimes they dipped below the minimum spec needed to keep the data flowing when playing FMV.
The fix was pretty simple, they just needed to turn a screw to make the disc spin a little faster. As a matter of fact, they offered this service to people for $80 + a 2 week wait time. Ruthless. Since then, they fixed the machines and pretended like nothing ever happened.
A friend of mine was a manager at an Electronics Boutique. He told me a story about Sony that really bothered me. This was about year 2 of the Playstation. Anybody remember the trick where you can trick an original Playstation into playing import games? Sony fought that by releasing a new unit with that exploit fixed. A woman bought one of these new units for her son. She brought it back because she bought one of the original PS games (Toshinden? Not sure..) and it wouldn't play. He said that he tried it there in the store, and she was right, it just didn't work. He replaced the unit with another new one, same problem.
He called a Sony rep and asked them if maybe a bug was introduced when they fixed the exploit. The response he got was shocking. Not only did they deny that the Playstation had changed (never mind that magically the later machines couldn't be tricked into playing import games), but the rep actually got hostile with this guy on the phone and accused him of lying and a bunch of other nasty stuff.
I'm not a big fan of Sony. I don't think they have customer interests in mind. I also don't think that they should be allowed to slip under Slashdot's radar.
Sony's every bit as evil as you guys thing Microsoft is. I don't know why they're not on Slashdot's radar.
The basic gist of the complaint is that they are attempting to rebrand Spiderman as a Sony product. Though I don't have any opinion as to whether they're guilty here or not as I don't have enough info to base an opinion on, I do know that Sony's been complained about before. Anybody remember when they were developing the Super NES CD that never arrived? It fell through because Sony wanted this to be a Sony branded machine. They basically wanted to take over Nintendo's well developed market. Fortunately, Nintendo had the balls to stand up to them. That's indirectly how Sony came around with the Playstation.
Slashdot really should be eyeballing Sony. Sometimes you guys pay too much attention to Microsoft.
"And this is different from Citrix or Terminal Services or a remote X session or good ole SSH how? "
You get an interface designed to use with your PDA, instead of trying to cram a 1280 by 1024 image on a 240 by 320 screen. RTFA.
"I knew this was fictional before all of you, because, I am in fact, from next Wednesday! I traveled back in time several days just to get the first post here telling you all it's false."
What'd you do, follow the dupe from next week?
.. on April 1st.
"In related news, the former Iraqi Minister of Information held a press conference that the reports of spam are all lies. "These reports of alleged unrequested email are all falsifications of the infidels." He went on to claim that email itself is simply a hallucination brought on by watching Fox News. "
Insightful? Who was enlightened?
"Wouldn't realtime by WHILE the scene is filmed? "
No. It means they can play it back at any camera view without having to wait for it to render.
"Granted, they would all be professionaly made, but who cares? Most of the player-made doom wads were pathetic. "
The player-made Quake mods were awesome.
Don't be willfully ignorant to my point.
"2)Beat the shit out of the cabbie for the hell of it."
Yeah, you can bop him a couple of times until he falls. It's hardly shocking in light of Bugs Bunny catoons that we've all watched for years. It's violent, but it's not ultra violent.
Ultra violent would be like the first part of the Animatrix where that group of men attacked the female robot, ripping her to pieces.
I can't believe GTA3 is that misunderstood, considering how popular it is.
"You're obviously not playing GTA3 right... "
I just beat it a couple of nights ago.
I'll make my point clearer: Calling GTA3 ultra violent is like calling Anna Nicole Smith ultra fat.
"Is it really possible that programmers would ever become extinct (at least in some sense)? "
Calculators did not make mathematictions exctinct.
The worst that'll happen is that programming in general is a lot more like scripting is today. Simplified, ineffecient in many ways, but anybody can program it.
"It'll have net play without a doubt, so what would really be missing?"
Mods.
"...the ultraviolence of Grand Theft Auto III"...
Ultraviolence in GTA3? What ultraviolence? I wouldn't mind, but they claim it followed Doom.
GTA3: Simulation of a city.
Doom: Run around and kill.
GTA has its moments, but ultraviolent is not the term for it by far.
"Yes, congress, not michigan. "
I've heard a couple of references to Michigan lately, but not clear on what I missed. What's the story?
... Every time there's some advance in technology, there's doom and gloom predicted about it. Have any doom and gloom predictions actually come true?
"Why? What would happen? "
;)
Nothin. I just like talking shit.
...just to see the result of somebody calling me a camping fag in person.