Almost everything he had problems with were trying to not overcomplicate things. He wanted to installs stuff and I told him to drag it to the application folder. Wouldn't belive me. Where is the uninstall control panel??? You throw it away.
Two things:
a) Neither of those is a matter of one method being complicated and the other not.
and
b) One of your examples doesn't actually work exactly the way you're explaining it there.
Mac people spend a lot of time talking about how intuitive their machines are compared to PC's. Well, I use both at work, with the Mac being my primary by default because it has a better monitor (a 23" Cinema Display HD, vs. an old NEC CRT for my PC). But I curse that thing every single day because stuff just does not work the way I expect it to work, even after using it for going on two years now. The bottom line is Macs take getting used to just like PC's do. They just work differently, not better.
I mean really, is mounting a dmg file (which shows up as a drive on your Mac), then opening your application folder and dragging an icon into it really simpler than just double-clicking an executable to install it? What are you supposed to do after you're done with the dmg? I've still got three dmg's mounted on my machine that complain whenever I try to unmount them. This is a serious question - I don't know how to get rid of these things. And I'm an experienced computer user - I've got four home-built PC's and my first computer was an Apple II. But I can't figure out how to close out these installers on my Mac at work. I eject them. I drag them to the trash. They complain every time about stuff not working if I go through with either action.
And to uninstall a program, while it might seem like a no-brainer to drag an application to the trash to uninstall it, that does not get rid of it if you've added it to the dock. For more advanced users that's not a big deal, but it's certainly not more "intuitive" than using an uninstall applet that gets rid of everything - start menu shortcuts and all - in one swat.
How about this one: let's try renaming a file under OSX. How do you do it? Click the file name, then click it *again* (but not too fast, mind you, or you'll open it!) and hold for 2 seconds. Now you can rename the file. Alternative, you can click and hold the icon (or right-click) and select "get info", then type a new name in the file name box. How do you do the same thing in Windows? Right click and select "Rename file". Which is easier? Which is a "bad habit"? (As anyone who works on the web will tell you, renaming files is something that has to be done over and over every day as you get files from various departments to post up that don't follow standard web naming conventions. So this is really a huge annoyance for me on Mac.)
Or this one: yesterday, I had to select about 50 QuickTime files, then un-select about 10 of them peppered throughout the list. I have my command key mapped to control (to stay consistent between my Mac and PC), so I did a shift-select, then a ctrl-select to de-select the files I didn't want. Easy on Windows. Of course, try this on Mac and if you click the wrong place on the filename, you end up trying to simultaneously open 50 different QuickTime files. Not something most computers like to do. This happened to me three separate times in succession at different points in the process yesterday.
People have been saying for a long time - since a lot earlier than this eWeek article - that any day now all these PC users would wake up and smell the coffee about OSX. My thinking is there's no great ignorance about OSX among PC users - I don't really know anyone who hasn't at least tried it. I think the fact is most people just don't see it as necessarily better. It is a different operating system with its own way of doing things, its own learning curve and its own annoyances. Some people can get past those annoyances and some can't, as with any other OS. But the en
I believe that applies to Nintendo and Sony products. I'm not sure it applied to the original X-Box or to the new 360 yet.
And hence the reason why they continue to lose literally billions of dollars on the Xbox and Xbox 360.
Sony and Nintendo understand how the game industry works. MS doesn't. They haven't learned this very basic fact; that it's not just about selling razor blades, it's about selling razor blades and razors. To be profitable in this business, you have to be profitable at both ends.
It was always a myth that companies lose money on hardware. Companies that lose money on hardware generally don't stay in the business very long.
(Yes, it does usually happen at the initial launch, but not for very long afterwards.)
I got rid of that channel when they eliminated the rest of the old TechTV programming
How do you "get rid of" a basic digital cable channel? Did you just ditch cable altogether because you didn't like G4? What do you have now instead? AFAIK all of the satellite companies also carry G4 with their basic service.
I *wish* I could get rid of G4, if only to make a statement. As it stands, they have no tangible way of knowing my dissatisfaction. I used to watch TechTV originally but never watch G4 - unfortunately, they probably have more subscribers now than ever. But it's not by choice; it's because their contracts with the cable MSO's stipulate the packages in which they're carried. It's by default.
Does Nielsen even track them? I've wondered if they're even aware how few people watch them, and how badly they've alienated their audience.
The classic sign of a top in a trend. Of course, it always seems that way just at the point of reversal. Now if only we could have a Business Week cover proclaiming that Apple is unstoppable, that would be a decisive indicator of a turn.
You do realize that people have been saying this kind of thing since at least 2002?
When a product becomes this popular, it is almost impossible to dislodge it, and it becomes self-perpetuating. I don't know where this idea started up that the more popular a product is, the less chance there is of its continued success - common sense should dictate that the opposite is true. Successful products tend to stay successful and build upon that success. That's the case with the iPod.
I don't see any trends in the industry that would indicate any reversal of that success, and that includes MS's Zune. The iPod continues to define what a portable media player is and should be in the minds of consumers, and as long as everybody else is following Apple's lead, there will be no "reversal" of the iPod's fortunes.
People don't stop buying products just because they're popular. In fact, the opposite is true. People stop buying products because better products become available at a cheaper price with a marketing message that appeals to them. How you define "better" becomes complicated when you're talking an entire ecosystem like the one that surrounds the iPod, but I think that you should listen to what consumers are saying by their actions, and what they're saying is that there is nothing better for them right now than the iPod.
Long story short, you can expect iPod sales to continue accelerating, despite what the naysayers have been saying for at least the last four years.
I think consumers are waiting out the iPod upgrade cycle and that has an impact. The market is fairly saturated as you note and there has not been a real upgrade in something like 18 months.
If they ever get a true 6G iPod out the door (and not the 5.5G that is being talked about) I think the market will respond favorably as there is a lot of pent up demand.
Did you read the article? iPod sales are up 32 percent year over year with sales of 8.1 million for the quarter. If there's "pent-up demand" there, then I can't wait to see what happens when the 6G actually is released.
The moral of the story is people keep buying iPods, and the pace continues to accelerate. There is no slowdown, despite what everybody seems to predict every single quarter. I think it's time people finally realize there really is no meaningful competition for Apple in music players and there never will be. (And yes, I've heard of the Zune.) It's going to take a paradigm shift in the way people listen to music to dislodge the iPod, but the current war is already won.
Fable 2 should be everything you expect, then 10 times more that you don't expect - and that doesn't just apply to this one feature... I almost said it then! - that applies to the whole game.
Good to see that Molyneux has learned his lesson about over-promising!
Maybe, just maybe, there was nothing released comparable to the present demand for the DS Lite in June of '05?
Analysts have consistently underestimated the appeal of the DS, and they continue to do it despite all evidence that consumers actually, really do LIKE this thing.
It's as if we're in 1986 again and everybody's still saying the NES is a fad and the big new game machine is going to be the Atari XEGS. Uh, duh? Have we learned nothing from history?
I remember reading from Pachter or Gartner or one of these outfits before the DS release that the DS and PSP would be neck and neck for a while, but that by this time the DS would be history and the PSP would be the clear market dominator. Hasn't worked out that way, has it? Yet rather than actually revise their thinking, these people continue to believe that the DS will just have no impact on the market. Pretty much the entire explanation for the discrepancy between the actual numbers and the projected numbers is DS Lite sales and DS games. (I know they mention "Cars", but that didn't really sell hugely over expectations, and in any case it's just one game.)
It's almost as if they looked at the upcoming DS Lite launch and wrote it off as a non-factor. When will they learn?
Why indeed - "urban culture" merely correlates extremely highly with race by... wait for it... complete accident! That's the ticket! On a completely different note, where did you get those ideological blinders of yours?
So I guess what you're saying is that I, as a white guy born and raised in NYC, the most urban of all US cities, cannot partake in "urban culture" because I'm white?
Who's racist now?
Assuming "urban" means "black" IS RACIST. It is pretty much the definition of racist. Not only that, it is elitist and offensive on several other levels - it is a label that suburban people give to people in the cities, as if we're somehow different than they are. I'm white and I'm urban. There are millions of us white people here, being New Yorkers and acting all urban on yo' ass. Deal with it.
I mean, if I talk about "suburban culture", am I automatically talking about, like, white valley girls? Should I assume that all suburbanites look and talk that way? Do you?
Do you think his charity is enough to make up for all the harm Microsoft has done to the economy over the years, between the predatory business practices, viruses, stifling non-Microsoft technologies, etc.? I'd say it's entirely possible that, if Microsoft had never existed, we might be so much more prosperous today that all that money would still be going to charity, and more.
You can't quantify whatever supposed harm MS has done to the economy vs. what they've also undoubtedly done to *help* the economy. Yes, viruses, predatory business practices, etc. have cost companies money. But whether you like them or not, Office apps and their standardized formats (proprietary or not), Windows networking, etc. have also helped increase overall productivity. If you're going to talk about net losses or net gains to the economy caused by one company, you have to talk about both sides - not just the negatives. Given our record economic expansion since MS has been in business, I think it's difficult to argue that they've had a measurable net negative effect on the economy. Whether a different company could have been *more* positive is a complete hypothetical - that doesn't mean MS has done "harm" to the economy, because you can't take away something that never existed in the first place.
The one thing that we *can* quantify is the billions of dollars Bill G has given to charity, and the billions more he has raised for his charity (including convincing hid buddy Warren B to donate the bulk of his fortune to his - Bill's - foundation). IMO, it's basically sour grapes if you don't recognize him for that. Most billionaires do not give the bulk of their fortunes away, and most company CEO's do not quit to run their charities. This is a fact. (In fact, some CEO's [cough Larry Ellison cough] say they're giving money away and then take it back.)
So does that mean that immediately upon hearing of investigatory action the investor in said company should dump all stock? Say they choose that route. Then the investigation reveals that the company was indeed breaking the law. Then it was a wise choice to dump the stock. But what if the investigation reveals the company wasn't breaking the law? Does the stock then get a noticable, predictable bump? I am seriously asking these questions.
It all goes back to the golden rule of investing, which is you buy stock based on the company, not based on the stock.
If a company was hiding serious financial problems, serious investors would have known about it long ago and dumped the stock. It's really difficult to hide financial problems that are so bad that they actually adversely affect the long-term viability of a company. Companies can and do put spin on their financial results all the time, but to actually mis-state what would have to amount to billions of dollars worth of results would be pretty unthinkable. (It's happened in some high-profile cases, but it's hardly the norm.)
In fact, TTWO *did* mis-state quite a bit of revenue a few years back, and they got caught and had to re-state. And it was a decent chunk of change, but it wasn't enough to affect the company going forward, so they took a bit of a hit and went on. Their stock was at 7 at that time but ultimately hit something like 31. If you were an investor who actually *bought* on the day they admitted wrongdoing, you would have come out nicely ahead.
The reason being, of course, that fundamentally the company was still putting out good products that people were interested in buying. If, on the other hand, you knew that TTWO's games weren't selling - if Vice City had only sold 1 million copies, for example, and San Andreas only 500,000 - but they *still* were claiming record profits, then you would start to ask questions. But the bottom line is it's not the result of any *investigation* that should cause a stock to go up or down, it's what that investigation reveals about the company itself. You need to look beyond the superficialities.
If the norm is that after a positive result, i.e. no law-breaking was found, the stock does not go up, then the only logical answer is to dump the stock no matter what when the investigation is announced.
In other words, buy high, sell low, huh? That's not really a winning strategy.
Good investors would have bought TTWO's stock after the negative results of the previous investigation, when everybody else was selling. Those people made out like bandits later on.
A smart strategy, if you're a stock holder that still truly believes in a company after all these investigations, is to simply buy more stock when it drops. This way, you average your costs - if you bought your first stock at 12, and it drops to 8, you can buy enough that your average cost was 10. You'll make more money later, provided the company itself continues to do well.
So in this respect whoever hears about the investigation first gets to lose the least amount of money. Which is to say, probably the company owners and employees. Is that insider trading?
Yes, and it's illegal. And since everybody has to report their buys and sells, it's not really possible to get away with it under obvious conditions like this.
And what of the possbility of a more secretive investigation? Because in this case it certainly seems like the company in question is essentially guilty until proven innocent, and possibly punished before any proof is found. This certainly seems to breach the idea of constitutional rights.
What constitutional rights would those be? So the government is not allowed to investigate anybody because some stupid idiot shareholders decide to sell the first wind of it they get?
Is there really any way to make this less damaging to the companies?
Again, in what way is it damaging? Is this investigation into TTWO in any way affe
I do. I particularly remember one issue where an in-depth profile of Treasure Games was the cover story. That's hardcore. "Forget about Gran Turismo, forget about whatever the latest movie tie-in is, we're going to put a 2D side-scrolling shooter on our cover and then devote 15 pages to the developer."
Of course, with editorial decisions like that, it's no wonder their run was so short-lived. They really only lasted in that form for about a year. After that, they scaled back to the point where they weren't much more than a pamphlet, hung on for another year or so and then folded.
I wish I still had some of the early GR's as well as some of the early Next-Gens. Both of these magazines could approach 300 pages on a good month, and about half of that was editorial (the other half was ads). EGM was about the same girth at that time, although they were definitely more mainstream, which is why they've stuck around. They've shed about 2/3 of their pages nowadays, though.
My understanding was that Microsoft would release an HDMI "cable" to replace the current one when the tech was ready. If you have a 360 now, with the latest update and VGA cables, your 360 now is upscaling DVD video to 720p. From the shots I've seen, it's not bad.
There is no separate VGA output. There's simply a cable you plug into a specialized port. I would imagine an HDMI cable would be a no-brainer.
I've neither heard nor seen evidence that the Xbox 360 supports this. It's not just a question of whether or not the connector exists. There would be pretty clear evidence just looking at the motherboard of whether an HDMI connection was actually possible.
You can't assume anything by the fact that a VGA cable exists. VGA is analog, just as component is. They're different, but they probably rely on the same DAC. But is there a TMDS encoder chip somewhere on the 360 motherboard? That's just one requirement of HDMI. According to Anandtech's review of the X360 innards, there is no such chip on the 360 motherboard, and they say the connector appears to be purely analog. It also wouldn't really make sense for MS to have HDMI capability in the current 360 but not offer a cable for it - do they want to make money or not? They could sell a $5 cable at a 1,000% markup and people would buy it because they'd have no other choice but to use that proprietary connector.
I think it's possible a new revision of the Xbox 360 will support HDMI, but I would bet that the current one does not, and that no cable for it will be forthcoming.
Can you pick out one person from this list that is invaluable? Hell, they're all upper managers and marketing/PR flunkies. Getting rid of them can only improve game development.
And you hereby demonstrate your utter lack of knowledge of the game industry.
What exactly do you think upper management does at a game company? Who do you think manages development of the games? What do you think the title "VP of Development" (it's actually VP for Development) means? What do you think product managers do? Do you have any idea?
As for marketing, Rockstar has always been about image, and it's now lost almost all of its image makers. The image any company projects comes from its marketing and PR departments. Rockstar's fall in public perception (including among hardcore gamers, as this submission demonstrates) is directly related to the loss of a large part of that marketing department, and the entire PR department (two times over, in fact).
People like you apparently think the world would be a better place if it was just made up of a bunch of coders. Where do you think all the artwork for Rockstar's games come from? It comes from the marketing department, which is where all the designers are. Ditto for the music in the games; the soundtracks for all the GTA games comes from marketing. Who do you think makes sure the games hit their milestones? Who do you think project manages, produces, writes the scripts, hires the voice talent, does the recording, does the game testing? It ain't the coders.
Every single one of the people on that list was important. These were some of the top people at Rockstar, responsible for making decisions both big and small. A coder can be replaced in a day. A good manager that has a larger understanding of the industry and the company is almost impossible to replace in any time frame.
Depends on how you look at it. A company that needs to work its employees until 2 AM would count as a sinking ship for me, even in the games market. Even when you factor in that the game companies do have a seemingly endless stream of young idealists willing to be overworked just because, hey, making games is cool, the worse you treat them, the faster anyone with marketable skills looks for a job somewhere else.
Well, yeah, but the point is you're talking about the entire game industry then. There's nothing unique to Rockstar about that, and there's nothing new to Rockstar about that that would warrant a news story about how suddenly it's all gone wrong.
I totally agree that this is a terrible way to run a company, and I've had conversations with my former co-workers both while I was there and afterwards about how the turnover would eventually bite the company in the ass.
But Rockstar is a young company even by game industry standards. I believe they were founded only something like 8 years ago, if I remember right. They haven't yet learned all the lessons a young company needs to learn; they don't know anything about retaining top talent, that much is obvious. But the first high-profile defections aren't happening now. The first high-profile defections happened around 2 years ago, when the two creative directors (who were the only creative directors the company had ever known, as far as I remember) left. That was a shock to the system, but the thought was it was an isolated incident. One of them took four people with her, though. Shortly after that, almost the entire web department turned over (including myself) and then it was like the floodgates opened.
It could be, in fact, that their recent issues are the result of, rather than the cause of, all this turnover. A lot of the things I've seen happen at Rockstar in the past 18 months would never have happened while I was there (not necessarily because of me, but because of all the other people who left at around that time, and before and shortly after). Some of the things I've seen coming out of their PR department lately have left me shocked - after years of running such a tight PR ship, it's like they've got two left feet lately. Their new web site design is at the least uninspired, and a lot of their recent marketing seems to basically be copying past marketing. Their games have lost that trademark sense of humor and are now just mean-spirited, except when they release a game like Table Tennis that just totally breaks their ethos completely. I could go on and on. They really seem like a company that's lost its way and I'm sure it's because the working conditions have just forced out all the top talent. I think assuming these problems are causing the turnover is probably backwards; the turnover was already going on, and it's causing the problems.
So yeah, you could consider them a slowly sinking ship, but if so, then the same is true for every publisher, and they've had a slow leak since they were founded and never even knew it. The question is whether or not they know it now. You can't consistently run a company forever staffed with 20 year olds that all have to learn the same lessons over and over, and most of whom are not going to be very talented and/or experienced at any given time. There was sort of a "golden age" at Rockstar for a while where a few of the early hires had come into their own, and in turn had trained the new hires well - a period when pretty much everybody was firing on all cylinders. Then people started leaving, and the new hires didn't have any mentors to really look up to, and things started falling apart. There's got to be a concerted effort to keep the top talent around at any company, even if it means concessions to their quality of life.
I will say that looking at the list of recent defections, I can only think of three people in positions of importance left from the early days of the company, or even from the days when I was there. Almost the entire upper ranks of the company has been replaced.
I suppose the one good thing about this is that Rockstar North is relatively immune from what goes on at Rockstar Games, so it's still pretty likely that GTA4 will be a killer game.
If the ship is going down, the smart employees would jump first and probably ahead of any disasters in the making.
I don't have a lot of time to write this, so I may expand upon it later.
I'm about 6 months off that list, having left Rockstar about 18 months ago (maybe a bit more). I know all of the people on that list, and still talk to many of them. (A few of those departures are surprising, though, and I wasn't aware of all of them.)
I will just say that this is nothing new at Rockstar, which has always had a ridiculously high turnover. What you don't see on that list is that both of the marketing creative directors (print and online) quit at about the same time I did, along with two of the senior print designers, a game producer and several others. There was a steady stream of departures after I left as well.
The problem is poor working conditions. It's really got nothing to do with any of the company's recent troubles. We all always knew Rockstar was basically a one hit wonder and could go down at any time; none of us cared about that. What we cared about was working until 2 AM every night and never having any time to ourselves. You've all heard about EA; well, Rockstar is no better (and is probably worse).
Jen Gross, Jamie King and a few of these others, though, are some pretty big names. They were overworked just as much as the rest of us, though, and being management doesn't mean your mind and body is able to take any more abuse than anyone else. So it's still not totally unexpected to see.
The company's got some problems, but they're systemic - they have nothing to do with a "sinking ship" that's been caused by Hot Coffee or anything else recent. They're cultural, just as they are at EA and other developers.
Is it just me or doesn't there seem to be a single coder or designer there? Nobody who actually makes these games?
Rockstar Games is a publisher, not a developer.
That said, they own outright all of the games they have gotten in trouble over, and the creative ideas and planning is all handled by them. So they can't turn around over Hot Coffee and say "it's Rockstar North's fault - they were the ones who developed the game." No. Rockstar Games is either directly or indirectly responsible for all of their own problems. But they don't employ a single coder - though parent company Take 2 does (as owners of Rockstar North and other developers).
It was already ported over to Gamecube (sorta). In Super Smash Brothers Melee, one of the challenge states set you up as a huge character versus 128 tiny marios.
That's not the same thing.
There was a GameCube tech demo shown at E3 and Space World before the GC's release called "128 Marios". A lot of people over the years have confused this with Super Mario 128. They are two different things. 128 Marios was literally just 128 Marios - it was intended to show the power of the GameCube by rendering 128 Mario characters from the N64's Super Mario 64 simultaneously. That idea is what made it into SSBM.
Super Mario 128 was supposed to be the next actual Mario game after Super Mario 64. The "128" was really just a number, it didn't mean anything, really, and probably would have been changed before the game's release. It was just how Miyamoto and co. referred to the game internally and in the press.
From what I understand, SMB128 was more of a concept and maybe some early programming demos rather than a nearly-finished game, as some have speculated. But it was supposed to be a real game, not just a bunch of Marios running around, which is what 128 Marios is.
There, no, just a little right... yes, thats it. You had some Sony goo at the corner of your mouth.
You don't need to be pro-Sony in order to read a sales chart. Here are last week's console sales, for one example:
Nintendo DS Lite - 153,566 PSP - 25,935 PS2 - 23,133 Nintendo DS - 3,504 Game Boy Advance SP - 2,919 X360 - 1,897 Game Boy Micro - 1,443 GameCube - 1,002 Game Boy Advance - 17 Xbox - 8
The DS lite sold around 80 times more units than the Xbox 360. The 6 year old PS2 sold more than ten times as many units.
This is not going to change, ever. It's over, unless you can name one case in the history of game consoles where a year after launch, after languishing completely out of public consciousness for so long and so far behind the competition, a console has come roaring back to be a success. In any territory, much less Japan. It just doesn't happen. Places can change, a company that's in 1st place and slip to 2nd and vice versa, but never can a console just be so totally out of the popular culture and ever hope to challenge the big boys.
This talk of "comeback" is a misnomer as well, because it implies that the situation was different at some point. In order to have a comeback, you have to have been popular before. That's not the case with the 360 in Japan. The 360 in Japan just has no place in popular consciousness - it's not that people hate it, it's that they just don't think about it. You can't reverse perceptions (a "comeback") if there's no perception to reverse. The 360 just isn't considered. And it's not for lack of marketing, either - MS has spent plenty of money on ads, to no avail.
Microsoft has access to %96 of all desktops in the world. Apple does not even come close though the Ipod has a nice marketshare at the current moment.
Ummm...
In terms of music players and software, Apple has access to more like 99% of desktops in the world (discounting Linux and Unix desktops). Or have you forgotten that iTunes for Windows exists? If you're going to throw meaningless numbers like that around, Apple actually comes out on top.
Apple also is starting this "war" with around 80% market share in hard drive players. MS is starting with 0%.
Itunes is a royal pain in the ass but all the labels want DRM or they wont sell you the music.
I've got about 500 CD's and 2,865 ripped mp3 tracks on my iPod that say otherwise. And they work just fine with iTunes as well (in fact, about half of them were ripped using it).
Presumably MS's player will do the same. If you're encumbered by DRM at this point, you've got nobody to blame but yourself. You do still have choices as to where and how to buy your music. You're the one who chose DRM.
If you don't want the industry to use DRM, why not try buying music on a format that does not include it? The industry is going to continue supporting DRM as long as people like you keep buying it.
(I know some CD's have it as well, but most don't, and you may as well at least make the effort to check.)
This is a clear cut violation of First Amendment rights. Not the free speach ones but the free press ones.
Huh? Free press? A guy video tapes somebody on his doorstep and suddenly that qualifies him as a member of the press?
Regardless of whether he's press or not, I think you need to read the Bill of Rights again because you obviously don't know what it says. You don't have to be a literalist to understand that this doesn't mean what you think it means:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I don't see how this case has anything whatsoever to do with congress abridging freedom of the press. This is about a guy who got arrested for superfluous reasons. It's obviously one of those situations where the cops got annoyed, so they looked for whatever law they could find that they might be able to charge him against. It should be looked at in that light; trying to turn it into some weird and inappropriate first amendment discussion is not going to help anyone.
Vincent was a little unreasonable- 4 minutes isn't so terrible either. Vincent needed to be more patient, but has a right to cancel the account.
Vincent wasn't unreasonable at all. He answered John's first four or five questions. After that, he basically said "you're not going to convince me, so just cancel the account." At that point, the conversation is over.
Maybe John just isn't a good listener, or maybe it's corporate policy. I think it's a little of both; it seems obvious that AOL CS reps either get rewarded for customer retentions or punished for customer losses. So first you have a corporate policy that encourages annoying behavior on the part of CS reps, and then you have this particular CS rep who just does. not. listen.
I mean by about the third minute of the call, he's just going over and over the same ground. His entire routine seemed to be that Vincent uses the account more than he thinks he does. This is his sales tactic - "sir, would you believe it if I told you that you used this account for THREE DAYS STRAIGHT last week? Do you STILL want to cancel??"
But after the first time Vincent said "I don't care, cancel the account", that's it. You can't just keep saying "no, but seriously, do you have ANY IDEA how much you use this account?? No, really!" Because then not only are you being a stubborn ass, you're on the borderline of doing something illegal, which is charging somebody for an unwanted and unsolicited service.
It sounds to me like you're dangerously close to saying companies have a right to harrass you into backing out of a cancellation. They certainly have a right to OFFER customers something not to cancel, but they don't have a right to either guilt you into not cancelling or to otherwise harangue you about it. It's the customer's money, and it's the customer's credit card. In the absence of a contractual agreement, they have the right and expectation to be able to call and cancel at any time without getting any guff about it.
As far as I'm concerned, only one "cancel the account" should have been sufficient to get the job done.
I would imagine that whoever takes over at Microsoft will kill off the Xbox mess immediately. Should have been done years ago.
Steve Ballmer isn't going anywhere, and Bill G will remain chairman of the board. There's no leadership change at the company. BG is just giving up his grunt work; the stuff that he has decided he just can't stand doing anymore. The glamor stuff is either still his or his buddy's.
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Almost everything he had problems with were trying to not overcomplicate things. He wanted to installs stuff and I told him to drag it to the application folder. Wouldn't belive me. Where is the uninstall control panel??? You throw it away.
Two things:
a) Neither of those is a matter of one method being complicated and the other not.
and
b) One of your examples doesn't actually work exactly the way you're explaining it there.
Mac people spend a lot of time talking about how intuitive their machines are compared to PC's. Well, I use both at work, with the Mac being my primary by default because it has a better monitor (a 23" Cinema Display HD, vs. an old NEC CRT for my PC). But I curse that thing every single day because stuff just does not work the way I expect it to work, even after using it for going on two years now. The bottom line is Macs take getting used to just like PC's do. They just work differently, not better.
I mean really, is mounting a dmg file (which shows up as a drive on your Mac), then opening your application folder and dragging an icon into it really simpler than just double-clicking an executable to install it? What are you supposed to do after you're done with the dmg? I've still got three dmg's mounted on my machine that complain whenever I try to unmount them. This is a serious question - I don't know how to get rid of these things. And I'm an experienced computer user - I've got four home-built PC's and my first computer was an Apple II. But I can't figure out how to close out these installers on my Mac at work. I eject them. I drag them to the trash. They complain every time about stuff not working if I go through with either action.
And to uninstall a program, while it might seem like a no-brainer to drag an application to the trash to uninstall it, that does not get rid of it if you've added it to the dock. For more advanced users that's not a big deal, but it's certainly not more "intuitive" than using an uninstall applet that gets rid of everything - start menu shortcuts and all - in one swat.
How about this one: let's try renaming a file under OSX. How do you do it? Click the file name, then click it *again* (but not too fast, mind you, or you'll open it!) and hold for 2 seconds. Now you can rename the file. Alternative, you can click and hold the icon (or right-click) and select "get info", then type a new name in the file name box. How do you do the same thing in Windows? Right click and select "Rename file". Which is easier? Which is a "bad habit"? (As anyone who works on the web will tell you, renaming files is something that has to be done over and over every day as you get files from various departments to post up that don't follow standard web naming conventions. So this is really a huge annoyance for me on Mac.)
Or this one: yesterday, I had to select about 50 QuickTime files, then un-select about 10 of them peppered throughout the list. I have my command key mapped to control (to stay consistent between my Mac and PC), so I did a shift-select, then a ctrl-select to de-select the files I didn't want. Easy on Windows. Of course, try this on Mac and if you click the wrong place on the filename, you end up trying to simultaneously open 50 different QuickTime files. Not something most computers like to do. This happened to me three separate times in succession at different points in the process yesterday.
People have been saying for a long time - since a lot earlier than this eWeek article - that any day now all these PC users would wake up and smell the coffee about OSX. My thinking is there's no great ignorance about OSX among PC users - I don't really know anyone who hasn't at least tried it. I think the fact is most people just don't see it as necessarily better. It is a different operating system with its own way of doing things, its own learning curve and its own annoyances. Some people can get past those annoyances and some can't, as with any other OS. But the en
I believe that applies to Nintendo and Sony products. I'm not sure it applied to the original X-Box or to the new 360 yet.
And hence the reason why they continue to lose literally billions of dollars on the Xbox and Xbox 360.
Sony and Nintendo understand how the game industry works. MS doesn't. They haven't learned this very basic fact; that it's not just about selling razor blades, it's about selling razor blades and razors. To be profitable in this business, you have to be profitable at both ends.
It was always a myth that companies lose money on hardware. Companies that lose money on hardware generally don't stay in the business very long.
(Yes, it does usually happen at the initial launch, but not for very long afterwards.)
I got rid of that channel when they eliminated the rest of the old TechTV programming
How do you "get rid of" a basic digital cable channel? Did you just ditch cable altogether because you didn't like G4? What do you have now instead? AFAIK all of the satellite companies also carry G4 with their basic service.
I *wish* I could get rid of G4, if only to make a statement. As it stands, they have no tangible way of knowing my dissatisfaction. I used to watch TechTV originally but never watch G4 - unfortunately, they probably have more subscribers now than ever. But it's not by choice; it's because their contracts with the cable MSO's stipulate the packages in which they're carried. It's by default.
Does Nielsen even track them? I've wondered if they're even aware how few people watch them, and how badly they've alienated their audience.
The classic sign of a top in a trend. Of course, it always seems that way just at the point of reversal. Now if only we could have a Business Week cover proclaiming that Apple is unstoppable, that would be a decisive indicator of a turn.
You do realize that people have been saying this kind of thing since at least 2002?
When a product becomes this popular, it is almost impossible to dislodge it, and it becomes self-perpetuating. I don't know where this idea started up that the more popular a product is, the less chance there is of its continued success - common sense should dictate that the opposite is true. Successful products tend to stay successful and build upon that success. That's the case with the iPod.
I don't see any trends in the industry that would indicate any reversal of that success, and that includes MS's Zune. The iPod continues to define what a portable media player is and should be in the minds of consumers, and as long as everybody else is following Apple's lead, there will be no "reversal" of the iPod's fortunes.
People don't stop buying products just because they're popular. In fact, the opposite is true. People stop buying products because better products become available at a cheaper price with a marketing message that appeals to them. How you define "better" becomes complicated when you're talking an entire ecosystem like the one that surrounds the iPod, but I think that you should listen to what consumers are saying by their actions, and what they're saying is that there is nothing better for them right now than the iPod.
Long story short, you can expect iPod sales to continue accelerating, despite what the naysayers have been saying for at least the last four years.
I think consumers are waiting out the iPod upgrade cycle and that has an impact. The market is fairly saturated as you note and there has not been a real upgrade in something like 18 months.
If they ever get a true 6G iPod out the door (and not the 5.5G that is being talked about) I think the market will respond favorably as there is a lot of pent up demand.
Did you read the article? iPod sales are up 32 percent year over year with sales of 8.1 million for the quarter. If there's "pent-up demand" there, then I can't wait to see what happens when the 6G actually is released.
The moral of the story is people keep buying iPods, and the pace continues to accelerate. There is no slowdown, despite what everybody seems to predict every single quarter. I think it's time people finally realize there really is no meaningful competition for Apple in music players and there never will be. (And yes, I've heard of the Zune.) It's going to take a paradigm shift in the way people listen to music to dislodge the iPod, but the current war is already won.
Fable 2 should be everything you expect, then 10 times more that you don't expect - and that doesn't just apply to this one feature... I almost said it then! - that applies to the whole game.
Good to see that Molyneux has learned his lesson about over-promising!
Maybe, just maybe, there was nothing released comparable to the present demand for the DS Lite in June of '05?
Analysts have consistently underestimated the appeal of the DS, and they continue to do it despite all evidence that consumers actually, really do LIKE this thing.
It's as if we're in 1986 again and everybody's still saying the NES is a fad and the big new game machine is going to be the Atari XEGS. Uh, duh? Have we learned nothing from history?
I remember reading from Pachter or Gartner or one of these outfits before the DS release that the DS and PSP would be neck and neck for a while, but that by this time the DS would be history and the PSP would be the clear market dominator. Hasn't worked out that way, has it? Yet rather than actually revise their thinking, these people continue to believe that the DS will just have no impact on the market. Pretty much the entire explanation for the discrepancy between the actual numbers and the projected numbers is DS Lite sales and DS games. (I know they mention "Cars", but that didn't really sell hugely over expectations, and in any case it's just one game.)
It's almost as if they looked at the upcoming DS Lite launch and wrote it off as a non-factor. When will they learn?
Why indeed - "urban culture" merely correlates extremely highly with race by... wait for it... complete accident! That's the ticket! On a completely different note, where did you get those ideological blinders of yours?
So I guess what you're saying is that I, as a white guy born and raised in NYC, the most urban of all US cities, cannot partake in "urban culture" because I'm white?
Who's racist now?
Assuming "urban" means "black" IS RACIST. It is pretty much the definition of racist. Not only that, it is elitist and offensive on several other levels - it is a label that suburban people give to people in the cities, as if we're somehow different than they are. I'm white and I'm urban. There are millions of us white people here, being New Yorkers and acting all urban on yo' ass. Deal with it.
I mean, if I talk about "suburban culture", am I automatically talking about, like, white valley girls? Should I assume that all suburbanites look and talk that way? Do you?
Do you think his charity is enough to make up for all the harm Microsoft has done to the economy over the years, between the predatory business practices, viruses, stifling non-Microsoft technologies, etc.? I'd say it's entirely possible that, if Microsoft had never existed, we might be so much more prosperous today that all that money would still be going to charity, and more.
You can't quantify whatever supposed harm MS has done to the economy vs. what they've also undoubtedly done to *help* the economy. Yes, viruses, predatory business practices, etc. have cost companies money. But whether you like them or not, Office apps and their standardized formats (proprietary or not), Windows networking, etc. have also helped increase overall productivity. If you're going to talk about net losses or net gains to the economy caused by one company, you have to talk about both sides - not just the negatives. Given our record economic expansion since MS has been in business, I think it's difficult to argue that they've had a measurable net negative effect on the economy. Whether a different company could have been *more* positive is a complete hypothetical - that doesn't mean MS has done "harm" to the economy, because you can't take away something that never existed in the first place.
The one thing that we *can* quantify is the billions of dollars Bill G has given to charity, and the billions more he has raised for his charity (including convincing hid buddy Warren B to donate the bulk of his fortune to his - Bill's - foundation). IMO, it's basically sour grapes if you don't recognize him for that. Most billionaires do not give the bulk of their fortunes away, and most company CEO's do not quit to run their charities. This is a fact. (In fact, some CEO's [cough Larry Ellison cough] say they're giving money away and then take it back.)
So does that mean that immediately upon hearing of investigatory action the investor in said company should dump all stock? Say they choose that route. Then the investigation reveals that the company was indeed breaking the law. Then it was a wise choice to dump the stock. But what if the investigation reveals the company wasn't breaking the law? Does the stock then get a noticable, predictable bump? I am seriously asking these questions.
It all goes back to the golden rule of investing, which is you buy stock based on the company, not based on the stock.
If a company was hiding serious financial problems, serious investors would have known about it long ago and dumped the stock. It's really difficult to hide financial problems that are so bad that they actually adversely affect the long-term viability of a company. Companies can and do put spin on their financial results all the time, but to actually mis-state what would have to amount to billions of dollars worth of results would be pretty unthinkable. (It's happened in some high-profile cases, but it's hardly the norm.)
In fact, TTWO *did* mis-state quite a bit of revenue a few years back, and they got caught and had to re-state. And it was a decent chunk of change, but it wasn't enough to affect the company going forward, so they took a bit of a hit and went on. Their stock was at 7 at that time but ultimately hit something like 31. If you were an investor who actually *bought* on the day they admitted wrongdoing, you would have come out nicely ahead.
The reason being, of course, that fundamentally the company was still putting out good products that people were interested in buying. If, on the other hand, you knew that TTWO's games weren't selling - if Vice City had only sold 1 million copies, for example, and San Andreas only 500,000 - but they *still* were claiming record profits, then you would start to ask questions. But the bottom line is it's not the result of any *investigation* that should cause a stock to go up or down, it's what that investigation reveals about the company itself. You need to look beyond the superficialities.
If the norm is that after a positive result, i.e. no law-breaking was found, the stock does not go up, then the only logical answer is to dump the stock no matter what when the investigation is announced.
In other words, buy high, sell low, huh? That's not really a winning strategy.
Good investors would have bought TTWO's stock after the negative results of the previous investigation, when everybody else was selling. Those people made out like bandits later on.
A smart strategy, if you're a stock holder that still truly believes in a company after all these investigations, is to simply buy more stock when it drops. This way, you average your costs - if you bought your first stock at 12, and it drops to 8, you can buy enough that your average cost was 10. You'll make more money later, provided the company itself continues to do well.
So in this respect whoever hears about the investigation first gets to lose the least amount of money. Which is to say, probably the company owners and employees. Is that insider trading?
Yes, and it's illegal. And since everybody has to report their buys and sells, it's not really possible to get away with it under obvious conditions like this.
And what of the possbility of a more secretive investigation? Because in this case it certainly seems like the company in question is essentially guilty until proven innocent, and possibly punished before any proof is found. This certainly seems to breach the idea of constitutional rights.
What constitutional rights would those be? So the government is not allowed to investigate anybody because some stupid idiot shareholders decide to sell the first wind of it they get?
Is there really any way to make this less damaging to the companies?
Again, in what way is it damaging? Is this investigation into TTWO in any way affe
Does anyone here remeber Gamer's Republic?
I do. I particularly remember one issue where an in-depth profile of Treasure Games was the cover story. That's hardcore. "Forget about Gran Turismo, forget about whatever the latest movie tie-in is, we're going to put a 2D side-scrolling shooter on our cover and then devote 15 pages to the developer."
Of course, with editorial decisions like that, it's no wonder their run was so short-lived. They really only lasted in that form for about a year. After that, they scaled back to the point where they weren't much more than a pamphlet, hung on for another year or so and then folded.
I wish I still had some of the early GR's as well as some of the early Next-Gens. Both of these magazines could approach 300 pages on a good month, and about half of that was editorial (the other half was ads). EGM was about the same girth at that time, although they were definitely more mainstream, which is why they've stuck around. They've shed about 2/3 of their pages nowadays, though.
My understanding was that Microsoft would release an HDMI "cable" to replace the current one when the tech was ready. If you have a 360 now, with the latest update and VGA cables, your 360 now is upscaling DVD video to 720p. From the shots I've seen, it's not bad.
There is no separate VGA output. There's simply a cable you plug into a specialized port. I would imagine an HDMI cable would be a no-brainer.
I've neither heard nor seen evidence that the Xbox 360 supports this. It's not just a question of whether or not the connector exists. There would be pretty clear evidence just looking at the motherboard of whether an HDMI connection was actually possible.
You can't assume anything by the fact that a VGA cable exists. VGA is analog, just as component is. They're different, but they probably rely on the same DAC. But is there a TMDS encoder chip somewhere on the 360 motherboard? That's just one requirement of HDMI. According to Anandtech's review of the X360 innards, there is no such chip on the 360 motherboard, and they say the connector appears to be purely analog. It also wouldn't really make sense for MS to have HDMI capability in the current 360 but not offer a cable for it - do they want to make money or not? They could sell a $5 cable at a 1,000% markup and people would buy it because they'd have no other choice but to use that proprietary connector.
I think it's possible a new revision of the Xbox 360 will support HDMI, but I would bet that the current one does not, and that no cable for it will be forthcoming.
Can you pick out one person from this list that is invaluable? Hell, they're all upper managers and marketing/PR flunkies. Getting rid of them can only improve game development.
And you hereby demonstrate your utter lack of knowledge of the game industry.
What exactly do you think upper management does at a game company? Who do you think manages development of the games? What do you think the title "VP of Development" (it's actually VP for Development) means? What do you think product managers do? Do you have any idea?
As for marketing, Rockstar has always been about image, and it's now lost almost all of its image makers. The image any company projects comes from its marketing and PR departments. Rockstar's fall in public perception (including among hardcore gamers, as this submission demonstrates) is directly related to the loss of a large part of that marketing department, and the entire PR department (two times over, in fact).
People like you apparently think the world would be a better place if it was just made up of a bunch of coders. Where do you think all the artwork for Rockstar's games come from? It comes from the marketing department, which is where all the designers are. Ditto for the music in the games; the soundtracks for all the GTA games comes from marketing. Who do you think makes sure the games hit their milestones? Who do you think project manages, produces, writes the scripts, hires the voice talent, does the recording, does the game testing? It ain't the coders.
Every single one of the people on that list was important. These were some of the top people at Rockstar, responsible for making decisions both big and small. A coder can be replaced in a day. A good manager that has a larger understanding of the industry and the company is almost impossible to replace in any time frame.
Depends on how you look at it. A company that needs to work its employees until 2 AM would count as a sinking ship for me, even in the games market. Even when you factor in that the game companies do have a seemingly endless stream of young idealists willing to be overworked just because, hey, making games is cool, the worse you treat them, the faster anyone with marketable skills looks for a job somewhere else.
Well, yeah, but the point is you're talking about the entire game industry then. There's nothing unique to Rockstar about that, and there's nothing new to Rockstar about that that would warrant a news story about how suddenly it's all gone wrong.
I totally agree that this is a terrible way to run a company, and I've had conversations with my former co-workers both while I was there and afterwards about how the turnover would eventually bite the company in the ass.
But Rockstar is a young company even by game industry standards. I believe they were founded only something like 8 years ago, if I remember right. They haven't yet learned all the lessons a young company needs to learn; they don't know anything about retaining top talent, that much is obvious. But the first high-profile defections aren't happening now. The first high-profile defections happened around 2 years ago, when the two creative directors (who were the only creative directors the company had ever known, as far as I remember) left. That was a shock to the system, but the thought was it was an isolated incident. One of them took four people with her, though. Shortly after that, almost the entire web department turned over (including myself) and then it was like the floodgates opened.
It could be, in fact, that their recent issues are the result of, rather than the cause of, all this turnover. A lot of the things I've seen happen at Rockstar in the past 18 months would never have happened while I was there (not necessarily because of me, but because of all the other people who left at around that time, and before and shortly after). Some of the things I've seen coming out of their PR department lately have left me shocked - after years of running such a tight PR ship, it's like they've got two left feet lately. Their new web site design is at the least uninspired, and a lot of their recent marketing seems to basically be copying past marketing. Their games have lost that trademark sense of humor and are now just mean-spirited, except when they release a game like Table Tennis that just totally breaks their ethos completely. I could go on and on. They really seem like a company that's lost its way and I'm sure it's because the working conditions have just forced out all the top talent. I think assuming these problems are causing the turnover is probably backwards; the turnover was already going on, and it's causing the problems.
So yeah, you could consider them a slowly sinking ship, but if so, then the same is true for every publisher, and they've had a slow leak since they were founded and never even knew it. The question is whether or not they know it now. You can't consistently run a company forever staffed with 20 year olds that all have to learn the same lessons over and over, and most of whom are not going to be very talented and/or experienced at any given time. There was sort of a "golden age" at Rockstar for a while where a few of the early hires had come into their own, and in turn had trained the new hires well - a period when pretty much everybody was firing on all cylinders. Then people started leaving, and the new hires didn't have any mentors to really look up to, and things started falling apart. There's got to be a concerted effort to keep the top talent around at any company, even if it means concessions to their quality of life.
I will say that looking at the list of recent defections, I can only think of three people in positions of importance left from the early days of the company, or even from the days when I was there. Almost the entire upper ranks of the company has been replaced.
I suppose the one good thing about this is that Rockstar North is relatively immune from what goes on at Rockstar Games, so it's still pretty likely that GTA4 will be a killer game.
other developers.
By which I mean other publishers, of course. Not enough time to think!
If the ship is going down, the smart employees would jump first and probably ahead of any disasters in the making.
I don't have a lot of time to write this, so I may expand upon it later.
I'm about 6 months off that list, having left Rockstar about 18 months ago (maybe a bit more). I know all of the people on that list, and still talk to many of them. (A few of those departures are surprising, though, and I wasn't aware of all of them.)
I will just say that this is nothing new at Rockstar, which has always had a ridiculously high turnover. What you don't see on that list is that both of the marketing creative directors (print and online) quit at about the same time I did, along with two of the senior print designers, a game producer and several others. There was a steady stream of departures after I left as well.
The problem is poor working conditions. It's really got nothing to do with any of the company's recent troubles. We all always knew Rockstar was basically a one hit wonder and could go down at any time; none of us cared about that. What we cared about was working until 2 AM every night and never having any time to ourselves. You've all heard about EA; well, Rockstar is no better (and is probably worse).
Jen Gross, Jamie King and a few of these others, though, are some pretty big names. They were overworked just as much as the rest of us, though, and being management doesn't mean your mind and body is able to take any more abuse than anyone else. So it's still not totally unexpected to see.
The company's got some problems, but they're systemic - they have nothing to do with a "sinking ship" that's been caused by Hot Coffee or anything else recent. They're cultural, just as they are at EA and other developers.
Is it just me or doesn't there seem to be a single coder or designer there? Nobody who actually makes these games?
Rockstar Games is a publisher, not a developer.
That said, they own outright all of the games they have gotten in trouble over, and the creative ideas and planning is all handled by them. So they can't turn around over Hot Coffee and say "it's Rockstar North's fault - they were the ones who developed the game." No. Rockstar Games is either directly or indirectly responsible for all of their own problems. But they don't employ a single coder - though parent company Take 2 does (as owners of Rockstar North and other developers).
It was already ported over to Gamecube (sorta). In Super Smash Brothers Melee, one of the challenge states set you up as a huge character versus 128 tiny marios.
That's not the same thing.
There was a GameCube tech demo shown at E3 and Space World before the GC's release called "128 Marios". A lot of people over the years have confused this with Super Mario 128. They are two different things. 128 Marios was literally just 128 Marios - it was intended to show the power of the GameCube by rendering 128 Mario characters from the N64's Super Mario 64 simultaneously. That idea is what made it into SSBM.
Super Mario 128 was supposed to be the next actual Mario game after Super Mario 64. The "128" was really just a number, it didn't mean anything, really, and probably would have been changed before the game's release. It was just how Miyamoto and co. referred to the game internally and in the press.
From what I understand, SMB128 was more of a concept and maybe some early programming demos rather than a nearly-finished game, as some have speculated. But it was supposed to be a real game, not just a bunch of Marios running around, which is what 128 Marios is.
There, no, just a little right... yes, thats it. You had some Sony goo at the corner of your mouth.
You don't need to be pro-Sony in order to read a sales chart. Here are last week's console sales, for one example:
Nintendo DS Lite - 153,566
PSP - 25,935
PS2 - 23,133
Nintendo DS - 3,504
Game Boy Advance SP - 2,919
X360 - 1,897
Game Boy Micro - 1,443
GameCube - 1,002
Game Boy Advance - 17
Xbox - 8
The DS lite sold around 80 times more units than the Xbox 360. The 6 year old PS2 sold more than ten times as many units.
This is not going to change, ever. It's over, unless you can name one case in the history of game consoles where a year after launch, after languishing completely out of public consciousness for so long and so far behind the competition, a console has come roaring back to be a success. In any territory, much less Japan. It just doesn't happen. Places can change, a company that's in 1st place and slip to 2nd and vice versa, but never can a console just be so totally out of the popular culture and ever hope to challenge the big boys.
This talk of "comeback" is a misnomer as well, because it implies that the situation was different at some point. In order to have a comeback, you have to have been popular before. That's not the case with the 360 in Japan. The 360 in Japan just has no place in popular consciousness - it's not that people hate it, it's that they just don't think about it. You can't reverse perceptions (a "comeback") if there's no perception to reverse. The 360 just isn't considered. And it's not for lack of marketing, either - MS has spent plenty of money on ads, to no avail.
Microsoft has access to %96 of all desktops in the world. Apple does not even come close though the Ipod has a nice marketshare at the current moment.
Ummm...
In terms of music players and software, Apple has access to more like 99% of desktops in the world (discounting Linux and Unix desktops). Or have you forgotten that iTunes for Windows exists? If you're going to throw meaningless numbers like that around, Apple actually comes out on top.
Apple also is starting this "war" with around 80% market share in hard drive players. MS is starting with 0%.
I know who I'd put my money on.
Itunes is a royal pain in the ass but all the labels want DRM or they wont sell you the music.
I've got about 500 CD's and 2,865 ripped mp3 tracks on my iPod that say otherwise. And they work just fine with iTunes as well (in fact, about half of them were ripped using it).
Presumably MS's player will do the same. If you're encumbered by DRM at this point, you've got nobody to blame but yourself. You do still have choices as to where and how to buy your music. You're the one who chose DRM.
If you don't want the industry to use DRM, why not try buying music on a format that does not include it? The industry is going to continue supporting DRM as long as people like you keep buying it.
(I know some CD's have it as well, but most don't, and you may as well at least make the effort to check.)
This is a clear cut violation of First Amendment rights. Not the free speach ones but the free press ones.
Huh? Free press? A guy video tapes somebody on his doorstep and suddenly that qualifies him as a member of the press?
Regardless of whether he's press or not, I think you need to read the Bill of Rights again because you obviously don't know what it says. You don't have to be a literalist to understand that this doesn't mean what you think it means:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I don't see how this case has anything whatsoever to do with congress abridging freedom of the press. This is about a guy who got arrested for superfluous reasons. It's obviously one of those situations where the cops got annoyed, so they looked for whatever law they could find that they might be able to charge him against. It should be looked at in that light; trying to turn it into some weird and inappropriate first amendment discussion is not going to help anyone.
Vincent was a little unreasonable- 4 minutes isn't so terrible either. Vincent needed to be more patient, but has a right to cancel the account.
Vincent wasn't unreasonable at all. He answered John's first four or five questions. After that, he basically said "you're not going to convince me, so just cancel the account." At that point, the conversation is over.
Maybe John just isn't a good listener, or maybe it's corporate policy. I think it's a little of both; it seems obvious that AOL CS reps either get rewarded for customer retentions or punished for customer losses. So first you have a corporate policy that encourages annoying behavior on the part of CS reps, and then you have this particular CS rep who just does. not. listen.
I mean by about the third minute of the call, he's just going over and over the same ground. His entire routine seemed to be that Vincent uses the account more than he thinks he does. This is his sales tactic - "sir, would you believe it if I told you that you used this account for THREE DAYS STRAIGHT last week? Do you STILL want to cancel??"
But after the first time Vincent said "I don't care, cancel the account", that's it. You can't just keep saying "no, but seriously, do you have ANY IDEA how much you use this account?? No, really!" Because then not only are you being a stubborn ass, you're on the borderline of doing something illegal, which is charging somebody for an unwanted and unsolicited service.
It sounds to me like you're dangerously close to saying companies have a right to harrass you into backing out of a cancellation. They certainly have a right to OFFER customers something not to cancel, but they don't have a right to either guilt you into not cancelling or to otherwise harangue you about it. It's the customer's money, and it's the customer's credit card. In the absence of a contractual agreement, they have the right and expectation to be able to call and cancel at any time without getting any guff about it.
As far as I'm concerned, only one "cancel the account" should have been sufficient to get the job done.
Who else read this title and thought (In the words of the great Borat) "F*#k To You".
I just thought it must have been missing a few words:
SCO to Unix developers: We want (to shoot) you (in the) back
I would imagine that whoever takes over at Microsoft will kill off the Xbox mess immediately. Should have been done years ago.
Steve Ballmer isn't going anywhere, and Bill G will remain chairman of the board. There's no leadership change at the company. BG is just giving up his grunt work; the stuff that he has decided he just can't stand doing anymore. The glamor stuff is either still his or his buddy's.