It's actually quite hard to buy a console that doesn't ship with a couple of games No, it is not. When I bought my PS2, it didn't come with a game. I bought a game at the same time - AND I PICKED THE ONE I WANTED. When you bundle a game with the system, the problem is that it is likely not to be the game someone wants.
I know a lot of people probably don't use their PS2's as DVD players, but some do (I do). I used to when I first bought my PS2, but that thing is a lousy DVD player. What I found was that it was really hard to control and if anyone bumped the controller, we had to re-start the whole movie. It was difficult to pause, etc.
The availability of porn is important. It was a key factor why VHS won the format war against BetaMax, and why DVDs caught on so quickly. This is an urban legend and is untrue. The fact is that the porn industry is approximately 10X smaller than either the porn industry or the anti-porn crusaders want you to believe.
No. That's a terrible analogy. Simply being ahead in a format war helps you to get further ahead, since more players on the market encourage production of more media and more media in existance encourages more people to buy players. A footrace has no such positive feedback loop. You are exactly right. In order for HD-DVD to win, something has to happen to change the dynamic. For example, much cheaper (than Blue Ray) HD-DVD players, or some super-hot movie(s) coming out exclusive for HD-DVD might change things. But if things keep going like they are going, then Blue Ray will win.
so many comments about ps/3 and built-in BR drive. how about the xbox360 and the cheap add-on hddvd? 100% of PS3 units have the Blue Ray drive. What's the attach rate of this add-on? The attach rate for any specific accessory is almost always quite small. A large percentage of users buy accessories and accessories are very profitable, but for any specific accessory it is usually such a low number that people can't count of it being there.
That being the case, what does the vendor have to gain by selling Linux pre-installed? I think the one real advantage is that if an OEM could somehow get the general public to accept Linux on their PCs instead of Windows, then said OEM could eliminate the high price of licensing Microsoft's OS which would eliminate much of the cost of the PC. And the fact is that most people don't care about Windows per se, they just want all their hardware and software to work and they want a computer that is comprehensible to use. So, as Linux grows closer to this goal (and it has come a long way), OEMs have an incentive to start flirting with shipping Linux pre-installed because it could become a growth part of their business.
Microsoft has been the company that poisons standards. For example, they sat on the OpenGL standards body for years while actively engaged in a disinformation campaign against OpenGL. To this day Windows doesn't support it very well out of the box - they support it just well enough to try to convince people that it sucks which is worse than if they just dropped all support.
Microsoft has been lying for many many years. They will have to start acting with honor and telling the truth for at least a while before people start trusting them.
It is like Apple in 1996. Back then people thought that Apple was incompetent to execute anything or bring interesting and relevant products to market. Then Jobs came back and things changed, but it took years before people starting trusting them again.
Microsoft would have to do the same thing - and hiring one guy isn't much of a start.
No one deserve to ahve their life threatened or live in terror simply because they belive something different then you. Tell that to Salman Rushdie. Somehow I think that Salman Rushdie would agree with the GPP's basic premise.
Back in the day, Apple used to ship Macs with a copy of pre-OS X, Mac OS on a ROM. It was basically unused, but it did have the advantage that if your hard drive went down or an extension to the OS was making your system unbootable, you could always boot from the ROM and at least do a hardware check to see if your problem was hardware or software related. Apple could re-introduce this feature using Flash memory, although I'm not convinced it is really worth their time. I am quite convinced it wouldn't be worth their time. Almost fo one used or cared about this feature and as someone already pointed out, you can do the same thing by booting off a DVD or even a flash drive.
The iPod is, for the most part, a hard drive. Since the subject of this article is flash memory, I assume that the GPP was meaning the iPod nano/suffle which are flash based. Not hard drive based.
I wonder if the hybrid drive warranty in Apple's laptop will conveniently last about as long as the iPod's? I'm willing to bet that the warranty will be Apple's standard 1 year warranty. If your iPod is breaking after a year, you are abusing it.
Office for Mac wasn't making that much money at the time because the version of it that was out pretty much sucked. For the first time ever, Word for Mac was not the best selling word processor for Mac - NissusWriter had overtaken it.
You 2 button fanatics need to get it through your thick heads that LOTS of PEOPLE cannot use a two button mouse. Old people. Children. Non-technical people.
Apple makes a mouse that can be easily configured to be one button or multi-button. The computer can be shared by two different people who have different levels of ability without anyone having to compromise - even in a lab environment (i.e. through Netboot). That's pretty slick if you ask me. They can even share the computer if they speak different languages. And it works pretty damned well.
Right clicking on a Mac laptop has gotten a lot better too. You place two fingers on the trac pad and click. I do it all the time in both Windows and OS X and it works great.
That's partly because when the iPod took off there weren't many competitors with Apple's stature. Bull. There was no reason that Diamond and Creative couldn't have competed perfectly well against the iPod. Both of them were large companies with long histories in the industry. At the time the iPod shipped, Apple was a has-been in the industry. I recall a joke from the Simpsons where Homer refers to the US Festival "sponsored by that guy from Apple Computers!" Record shop clerk: "What computers?"
Most people were like "Apple - didn't they go out of business in the 80s or something?" "Creative - yeah, I bought a sound blaster card from them!"
So, don't tell me about how big bad Apple came into the MP3 player market and took it over because they were largest most powerful company on earth.
They make money on software too. They just aren't assholes about installing their OS because they know that having to activate an OS sucks (i.e. Windows Genuine Advantage).
When iTunes first shipped, I used to use it with my Rio 500. This was before the iPod even hit the market. I'm not sure what the state is now, but I think other MP3 players work with iTunes (at least on Mac).
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft has been the company that poisons standards. For example, they sat on the OpenGL standards body for years while actively engaged in a disinformation campaign against OpenGL. To this day Windows doesn't support it very well out of the box - they support it just well enough to try to convince people that it sucks which is worse than if they just dropped all support.
Microsoft has been lying for many many years. They will have to start acting with honor and telling the truth for at least a while before people start trusting them.
It is like Apple in 1996. Back then people thought that Apple was incompetent to execute anything or bring interesting and relevant products to market. Then Jobs came back and things changed, but it took years before people starting trusting them again.
Microsoft would have to do the same thing - and hiring one guy isn't much of a start.
Last time I checked, Sealand was still safely sticking up out of the water.
One does not typically "prove a hypothesis", one disproves a null hypothesis.
The article speculates that there would be a miniature version of Mac OS X in these units. I'm not sure what the reasoning for that is.
If these disks make a MacBook use less battery power, great. But I don't see why the world needs a miniature version of MacOS X.
No shit.
Bush is struggling to remain relevant. I don't think he's got the political capital to go after YouTube.
Office for Mac wasn't making that much money at the time because the version of it that was out pretty much sucked. For the first time ever, Word for Mac was not the best selling word processor for Mac - NissusWriter had overtaken it.
Especially when their business model is "we don't have any costs - we just rake in money from our back catalog."
You 2 button fanatics need to get it through your thick heads that LOTS of PEOPLE cannot use a two button mouse. Old people. Children. Non-technical people.
Apple makes a mouse that can be easily configured to be one button or multi-button. The computer can be shared by two different people who have different levels of ability without anyone having to compromise - even in a lab environment (i.e. through Netboot). That's pretty slick if you ask me. They can even share the computer if they speak different languages. And it works pretty damned well.
Right clicking on a Mac laptop has gotten a lot better too. You place two fingers on the trac pad and click. I do it all the time in both Windows and OS X and it works great.
Most people were like "Apple - didn't they go out of business in the 80s or something?" "Creative - yeah, I bought a sound blaster card from them!"
So, don't tell me about how big bad Apple came into the MP3 player market and took it over because they were largest most powerful company on earth.
They make money on software too. They just aren't assholes about installing their OS because they know that having to activate an OS sucks (i.e. Windows Genuine Advantage).
When iTunes first shipped, I used to use it with my Rio 500. This was before the iPod even hit the market. I'm not sure what the state is now, but I think other MP3 players work with iTunes (at least on Mac).
Couldn't the same thing be achieved if Apple were to dictate terms under which other stores had to operate in order to license FairPlay?
Apple could just say "You license fairplay, but you have to charge $1/song."