If you're travelling anywhere for a reasonable length of time, it's much much cheaper just to buy a local PAYG SIM (and leave a voicemail message on your old one with the temp number). Should you wish to keep your Apple warranty, there's no way to use a local SIM, so if you're planning on running up a few hundred dollars, then you'd have been much better off buying a local SIM and phone for it (and leave the iphone at home).
as then they'd have nothing to announce when the next round of updates come along.
New version of hardware is introduced, then there's a series of updates where RAM/HD is increased, whilst surrounded by the new hardware.
Are the immediate family of Robert Jordan hanging about on slashdot, reading my posts and being offended.
If they are - sorry, I didn't expect you to be about and I'll vanish off into the void.
If in the case we like to call 'probable' there aren't, would you consider getting off your high f'in horse and quit the cries of "Will somebody think of the Jordans?".
Either way, I think I shall leave this thread to whither, I'm way too old and supposedly mature to induldge myself in bickering.
but as has been pointed out, he may have been onto something.
Refusing to sell is a bad idea, but as has been pointed out, using good grades to get a discount could work. Could even conbine this with good old-fashioned gambling. Stick your $10 pre-order for Halo3 (or whatever) down with us and as well as your $10 deposit, you'll get $5 off for a B and $10 for an A.
Actually to expand this a bit further, in the same way stores have loyalty cards have one that get you stuff for grades - money off, discounts etc (The old-crumblies seem to get this stuff merely for coffin-dodging). Back in my youth I was always short of cash and got 'alright' grades. I'm well aware I could have worked for better ones, but wasn't any real point. Got bad ones you'd get a bollocking, get 'fine' ones and everything was 'fine', get great ones and *shrugs* pat on the back maybe. Never actually got anything that was worth the effort.
If nothing else the scheme would be great PR - Company X supporting the intellectual future of the country blah blah.
if you can make more money selling ethanol than petrol and want the market to switch, switching petrol to ethanol in the considerable number of stations you control is the obvious way forward.
Seemingly it only rated as mediocre humour, but I can live with it.
Following on your second point - I have no soul and am bemused as to why the dead require respect.
Lots of people die. In fact it's one of those things that most of us seem to end up suffering from at one time or another - in fact along with population growth it seems to definitely be on the rise, but I digress. The reason Robert Jordan made it onto slashdot was that people liked buying his books and therefore is granted greater presence than the rest of us few mortals. Flipside of that is that I feel entirely entitled to attempt a humorous pop - please don't imagine that I urinate on the lowering coffins of plebs.
we see the inherent disadvantage of 'close-sourced' authorship.
People relying on Robert's output have now been left high and dry, without any guaranteed access to the source-notes.
If only people had followed the clearly superior 'open-authorship' model - i.e. a few thousand people simultaneously planning, writing, editing model - then this could all have been avoided. When will we learn not to rely on this out-dated system of 'author' and 'reader'??
they just got sick of trapping people for the RIAA and the RIAA getting to shake them down for cash.
Let torrent stuff you have copyright on (for example emails that've been stolen from you) and sue for cash yourself...
It's your computer and your browser and your net connection.
On the other end there's another persons server, content and bandwidth. If they don't want to serve you pages, then they don't have to.
Everybody's happy.
Just trying to pull back from all the tangents that've been posed all around this. If the editor of a paper doesn't want to publish something - then so what, it's his paper.
If you don't like what's in the paper, then just don't buy it.
In the UK we have our famed tabloid The Sun (this would be the national paper with the highest circulation). The Sun features "Page 3" - basically you open any issue and on the third page there's a topless woman. That's it, no news content, no social critique - just a picture.
The fact that the Washington Post does not run a similar feature, is not because it's illegal (actually, it might be in the land of the free, but that's not the point I'm trying to make). My point is that within a nanosecond of the idea coming up at the editorial meeting, somebody might point out that it would not be conherent with the editoral policy of the paper - or would 'anger' more of their readers than they'd 'make happy' (which is pretty much the point of the editorial policy).
The cartoon is available, just somebody doesn't want to publish it in their paper.
Well thinking about it.
Storage and bandwidth are cheap.
A decent soundcard/audio player can play quality in excess of 'CD quality'.
Record company have access to source material (often) at a quality higher than 'CD Quality'
If they're trying to come up with reasons to increase the value of a download over that of a physical CD, then why on earth not just offer it at a higher qaulity than CD?
They convinced people to rebuy their vinyl on CD with the promise of higher quality, why not try to get us to rebuy our CDs as HQ digital downloads? (The initial idea of selling it at the same price, with lower quality sound and only playable on certain devices quite remarkably doesn't seem too popular).
One thing AllofMP3 got right was starting with a lossless copy (well OK, lossless copy of a CD) and letting people select the format and bitrate they wanted that transcoded down to.
just if I could use it instead of the cyclone sounding drive in my 360 I'd be happy.
Actually what I'd really like is just being able to cache and spool games of the faster, quieter HD - ignore my post - as you were.
Only thing I'm waiting for from the PS3 is the ability to replace XBMC on my old Xbox (which is wonderful, but doesn't quite have the grunt for x264).
Media Centre extender is clever, but way too fussy with it's formats (and transcoding is a pain in the arse) - PS3 supports x264, but is a bit fussy with the wrappers (from my understanding).
Maybe that much touted Linux thing will help, but I want something more than games to justify an expensive place under my TV.
of charging is a bad idea, is just to think what would happen if everybody used.
I might run a moderately successful newsletter and I find it's blocked by host x.
So I pay host a $10 (I'll pretend this is cheap).
Now all my users will get their newletter - yay.
Then users on host b report their mail isn't showing up - so I pay out another $10.
Then users on host c etc etc.
Compounding this issue is the more hosts you pay, the more the others will want to be paid etc etc
I assume this would eventually lead to a situation where you'd pay off as many hosts as you can afford (in descending order of popularity/cost) until you could still just make a profit.
New users signing up, would be asked to try to use an email account you'd paid protection on, so you know you'd be able to get your mail to them. This I'd assume would lead to a gradual migration of end users to the provider that had collected the most protection money (and therefore you were more likely to get the majority of your email in).
Yes there is still paperwork obviously, but there is a lot less.
I'm British, so the NHS 'looks after' me. I'm sure there is some paper being shuffled around in the background, but less of it (nobody is running behind me totting up the bill).
Erm I've got no problem using generics, you want an aspirin, or some fancy ass branded-aspirin? If you mean cheaper drugs, then that is an issue. Drugs have to prove their clinical worth before being available - so some new/expensive/unproven drugs are not available and people want them. This is no different to the situation you'd have trying to get your insurance to pay for the same drug. NHS has started a new scheme to help out with this though, they will become available, but will only be paid for if there is a clinical response (which seems quite reasonable).
Government doesn't mandate salary, it offers one - you want to be an NHS nurse or doctor, you can take it - fail to see how this differs from any other job.
Finally your last point. Surely to take that to it's conclusion, then surely you should have a private fire service and police. "Help I'm being attacked?" 'Are you insured with us?'
Surely the point is there are services that everybody needs and improve society as a whole. I don't want my neighours house to burn down next to mine and I don't want him coughing TB about. Put his house fire out, stop him being infectious and even from a purely selfish point of view it makes my life better.
I really fail to understand how anybody could be against it.
If you can start with the assumption that you think everybody should have healthcare available to them, anyway.
It simply costs less to run - consider every single person/advert in the chain between you signing up with healthcare, going to hospital and coming back after an operation.
Socialized healthcare at a stroke allows you to remove huge layers of management and cost from the system. You still go to hospital, but less people get paid along the way - and as all those salaries/adverts etc are ultimately coming out of your pocket...
but VMWare (of which I am a recent convert) is ideal for this kind of annoyance.
Seeing as I bravely installed 64-bit vista (look 64 sounded better than 32 on the install screen, OK?) I have made extensive use.
Handy for the odd thing (currently only an old canon scanner) that doesn't have the necessary scanner. Initially installed it for iTunes when they refused to support Vista x64 (although it's still shonky as f#)
Not sure about the software you develop.
Alpha would be when I've cobbled it all together and it works after a fashion.
Beta would be when I've ironed out any bugs I can find (or at least are aware of them and report them up front), so I then give it to other people to stumble across the obscure ones.
Now working on the assumption that Apple can code, which they certainly can - they must have been aware of serious issues and released anyway. I assume whatever Alpha code they were currently working on has been ripped from their hands and thrust onto the world to enable a certain somebody to make a big announcement. I also know if were them I wouldn't be too happy.
I live in the UK and am forced to pay a license fee to support the BBC.
Now whilst I don't actually like being forced to pay, I don't mind paying as I love the BBC to bits (one of the few remaining things in this country I'm actually proud of) and think it's pretty good value.
Most of the planet is not paying to fund the BBC however, but gets free access to the website, radio stations and some international TV stations - I don't have a problem with this.
Some premium content the BBC produces such as documentaries (e.g. Planet Earth), drama (e.g. Rome), entertainment (e.g. Dr Who) are not released free to the world, but are instead sold to foreign networks for broadcast. The money this brings in is used to partially subsidize the production and help keep down the license fee I'm forced to pay.
If the BBC were to 'set the content free' then revenue would fall and the either the quality of output would have to be cut, or my license fee would be shoved up to subsidize the freeloaders.
Within the UK the BBC are pretty good at supplying me with free stuff, I can stream radio/tv online and my cable company can provide me with free BBC TV on demand for the last weeks programming.
Now there's still plenty more I want from the BBC (i.e. entire output ever, on demand, on every platform, whenever I want it), but they seem to be making progress towards this and I'm prepared to wait.
both of them having 4 gigs and dedicated GPU memory.
Maybe I've missed something here.. There's a 4 gig limit in Vista/XP if you're not using the 64-bit version, but that's all I can think of..
and spec a loaded Powerbook VS Dell XPS. Went to main UK sites and specced them both up to be as close as possible to each other.
Specs are identical - 4 Gig RAM, 160Gig 7.2k drive, 17" 1920x1200 screen
DELL: T7600 (2.33Ghz), 6x DVD burner, Built in modem, MS Works, Free one year onsite, 7950 GTX graphics card with 512MB DDR
MAC: Core Duo (2.4Ghz), 8x DVD burner, USB modem (take off £35 if you don't want the modem), iWork, (couldn't find similar service from Apple), 8600M GT graphics with 256MB
So in summary, Apple are offering a slightly faster CPU and Dell offer a significantly faster GPU (although 8600 is a DX10 part). Dell seem to provide a significantly better warranty, I'm assuming if your Mac has a problem you mail it back in or take it into a store to be fixed.
So the prices:
DELL - £2,162.75
MAC - £2,529.00 - 17% more.
Not quite sure what to take away from this comparison. Mac is definitely the prettier machine, Dell is the more powerful. 17% isn't too huge a difference in price - less than I'd expected.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're travelling anywhere for a reasonable length of time, it's much much cheaper just to buy a local PAYG SIM (and leave a voicemail message on your old one with the temp number).
Should you wish to keep your Apple warranty, there's no way to use a local SIM, so if you're planning on running up a few hundred dollars, then you'd have been much better off buying a local SIM and phone for it (and leave the iphone at home).
as then they'd have nothing to announce when the next round of updates come along.
New version of hardware is introduced, then there's a series of updates where RAM/HD is increased, whilst surrounded by the new hardware.
Are the immediate family of Robert Jordan hanging about on slashdot, reading my posts and being offended.
If they are - sorry, I didn't expect you to be about and I'll vanish off into the void.
If in the case we like to call 'probable' there aren't, would you consider getting off your high f'in horse and quit the cries of "Will somebody think of the Jordans?".
Either way, I think I shall leave this thread to whither, I'm way too old and supposedly mature to induldge myself in bickering.
but as has been pointed out, he may have been onto something.
Refusing to sell is a bad idea, but as has been pointed out, using good grades to get a discount could work. Could even conbine this with good old-fashioned gambling. Stick your $10 pre-order for Halo3 (or whatever) down with us and as well as your $10 deposit, you'll get $5 off for a B and $10 for an A.
Actually to expand this a bit further, in the same way stores have loyalty cards have one that get you stuff for grades - money off, discounts etc (The old-crumblies seem to get this stuff merely for coffin-dodging). Back in my youth I was always short of cash and got 'alright' grades. I'm well aware I could have worked for better ones, but wasn't any real point. Got bad ones you'd get a bollocking, get 'fine' ones and everything was 'fine', get great ones and *shrugs* pat on the back maybe. Never actually got anything that was worth the effort.
If nothing else the scheme would be great PR - Company X supporting the intellectual future of the country blah blah.
if you can make more money selling ethanol than petrol and want the market to switch, switching petrol to ethanol in the considerable number of stations you control is the obvious way forward.
Seemingly it only rated as mediocre humour, but I can live with it.
Following on your second point - I have no soul and am bemused as to why the dead require respect.
Lots of people die. In fact it's one of those things that most of us seem to end up suffering from at one time or another - in fact along with population growth it seems to definitely be on the rise, but I digress. The reason Robert Jordan made it onto slashdot was that people liked buying his books and therefore is granted greater presence than the rest of us few mortals. Flipside of that is that I feel entirely entitled to attempt a humorous pop - please don't imagine that I urinate on the lowering coffins of plebs.
we see the inherent disadvantage of 'close-sourced' authorship.
People relying on Robert's output have now been left high and dry, without any guaranteed access to the source-notes.
If only people had followed the clearly superior 'open-authorship' model - i.e. a few thousand people simultaneously planning, writing, editing model - then this could all have been avoided.
When will we learn not to rely on this out-dated system of 'author' and 'reader'??
provided, my soul begs that the answer came back as:
"Zero. Should suggest to WB that they pay people to take it."
they just got sick of trapping people for the RIAA and the RIAA getting to shake them down for cash.
Let torrent stuff you have copyright on (for example emails that've been stolen from you) and sue for cash yourself...
It's your computer and your browser and your net connection.
On the other end there's another persons server, content and bandwidth. If they don't want to serve you pages, then they don't have to.
Everybody's happy.
were to fall on our heads?
Just trying to pull back from all the tangents that've been posed all around this. If the editor of a paper doesn't want to publish something - then so what, it's his paper.
If you don't like what's in the paper, then just don't buy it.
In the UK we have our famed tabloid The Sun (this would be the national paper with the highest circulation). The Sun features "Page 3" - basically you open any issue and on the third page there's a topless woman. That's it, no news content, no social critique - just a picture.
The fact that the Washington Post does not run a similar feature, is not because it's illegal (actually, it might be in the land of the free, but that's not the point I'm trying to make). My point is that within a nanosecond of the idea coming up at the editorial meeting, somebody might point out that it would not be conherent with the editoral policy of the paper - or would 'anger' more of their readers than they'd 'make happy' (which is pretty much the point of the editorial policy).
The cartoon is available, just somebody doesn't want to publish it in their paper.
Well thinking about it.
Storage and bandwidth are cheap.
A decent soundcard/audio player can play quality in excess of 'CD quality'.
Record company have access to source material (often) at a quality higher than 'CD Quality'
If they're trying to come up with reasons to increase the value of a download over that of a physical CD, then why on earth not just offer it at a higher qaulity than CD?
They convinced people to rebuy their vinyl on CD with the promise of higher quality, why not try to get us to rebuy our CDs as HQ digital downloads? (The initial idea of selling it at the same price, with lower quality sound and only playable on certain devices quite remarkably doesn't seem too popular).
One thing AllofMP3 got right was starting with a lossless copy (well OK, lossless copy of a CD) and letting people select the format and bitrate they wanted that transcoded down to.
just if I could use it instead of the cyclone sounding drive in my 360 I'd be happy.
Actually what I'd really like is just being able to cache and spool games of the faster, quieter HD - ignore my post - as you were.
Only thing I'm waiting for from the PS3 is the ability to replace XBMC on my old Xbox (which is wonderful, but doesn't quite have the grunt for x264).
Media Centre extender is clever, but way too fussy with it's formats (and transcoding is a pain in the arse) - PS3 supports x264, but is a bit fussy with the wrappers (from my understanding).
Maybe that much touted Linux thing will help, but I want something more than games to justify an expensive place under my TV.
but if this is useful and actually used by any companies, then it's a great way of getting yourself a job offer to carry on.
of charging is a bad idea, is just to think what would happen if everybody used.
I might run a moderately successful newsletter and I find it's blocked by host x.
So I pay host a $10 (I'll pretend this is cheap).
Now all my users will get their newletter - yay.
Then users on host b report their mail isn't showing up - so I pay out another $10.
Then users on host c etc etc.
Compounding this issue is the more hosts you pay, the more the others will want to be paid etc etc
I assume this would eventually lead to a situation where you'd pay off as many hosts as you can afford (in descending order of popularity/cost) until you could still just make a profit.
New users signing up, would be asked to try to use an email account you'd paid protection on, so you know you'd be able to get your mail to them. This I'd assume would lead to a gradual migration of end users to the provider that had collected the most protection money (and therefore you were more likely to get the majority of your email in).
Yes there is still paperwork obviously, but there is a lot less.
I'm British, so the NHS 'looks after' me. I'm sure there is some paper being shuffled around in the background, but less of it (nobody is running behind me totting up the bill).
Erm I've got no problem using generics, you want an aspirin, or some fancy ass branded-aspirin? If you mean cheaper drugs, then that is an issue. Drugs have to prove their clinical worth before being available - so some new/expensive/unproven drugs are not available and people want them. This is no different to the situation you'd have trying to get your insurance to pay for the same drug. NHS has started a new scheme to help out with this though, they will become available, but will only be paid for if there is a clinical response (which seems quite reasonable).
Government doesn't mandate salary, it offers one - you want to be an NHS nurse or doctor, you can take it - fail to see how this differs from any other job.
Finally your last point. Surely to take that to it's conclusion, then surely you should have a private fire service and police. "Help I'm being attacked?" 'Are you insured with us?'
Surely the point is there are services that everybody needs and improve society as a whole. I don't want my neighours house to burn down next to mine and I don't want him coughing TB about. Put his house fire out, stop him being infectious and even from a purely selfish point of view it makes my life better.
Now if only I can get the office water cooler laced with this stuff.
I really fail to understand how anybody could be against it.
If you can start with the assumption that you think everybody should have healthcare available to them, anyway.
It simply costs less to run - consider every single person/advert in the chain between you signing up with healthcare, going to hospital and coming back after an operation.
Socialized healthcare at a stroke allows you to remove huge layers of management and cost from the system. You still go to hospital, but less people get paid along the way - and as all those salaries/adverts etc are ultimately coming out of your pocket...
but VMWare (of which I am a recent convert) is ideal for this kind of annoyance.
Seeing as I bravely installed 64-bit vista (look 64 sounded better than 32 on the install screen, OK?) I have made extensive use.
Handy for the odd thing (currently only an old canon scanner) that doesn't have the necessary scanner. Initially installed it for iTunes when they refused to support Vista x64 (although it's still shonky as f#)
Not sure about the software you develop.
Alpha would be when I've cobbled it all together and it works after a fashion.
Beta would be when I've ironed out any bugs I can find (or at least are aware of them and report them up front), so I then give it to other people to stumble across the obscure ones.
Now working on the assumption that Apple can code, which they certainly can - they must have been aware of serious issues and released anyway. I assume whatever Alpha code they were currently working on has been ripped from their hands and thrust onto the world to enable a certain somebody to make a big announcement. I also know if were them I wouldn't be too happy.
I live in the UK and am forced to pay a license fee to support the BBC.
Now whilst I don't actually like being forced to pay, I don't mind paying as I love the BBC to bits (one of the few remaining things in this country I'm actually proud of) and think it's pretty good value.
Most of the planet is not paying to fund the BBC however, but gets free access to the website, radio stations and some international TV stations - I don't have a problem with this.
Some premium content the BBC produces such as documentaries (e.g. Planet Earth), drama (e.g. Rome), entertainment (e.g. Dr Who) are not released free to the world, but are instead sold to foreign networks for broadcast. The money this brings in is used to partially subsidize the production and help keep down the license fee I'm forced to pay.
If the BBC were to 'set the content free' then revenue would fall and the either the quality of output would have to be cut, or my license fee would be shoved up to subsidize the freeloaders.
Within the UK the BBC are pretty good at supplying me with free stuff, I can stream radio/tv online and my cable company can provide me with free BBC TV on demand for the last weeks programming.
Now there's still plenty more I want from the BBC (i.e. entire output ever, on demand, on every platform, whenever I want it), but they seem to be making progress towards this and I'm prepared to wait.
both of them having 4 gigs and dedicated GPU memory.
Maybe I've missed something here.. There's a 4 gig limit in Vista/XP if you're not using the 64-bit version, but that's all I can think of..
and spec a loaded Powerbook VS Dell XPS. Went to main UK sites and specced them both up to be as close as possible to each other.
Specs are identical - 4 Gig RAM, 160Gig 7.2k drive, 17" 1920x1200 screen
DELL: T7600 (2.33Ghz), 6x DVD burner, Built in modem, MS Works, Free one year onsite, 7950 GTX graphics card with 512MB DDR
MAC: Core Duo (2.4Ghz), 8x DVD burner, USB modem (take off £35 if you don't want the modem), iWork, (couldn't find similar service from Apple), 8600M GT graphics with 256MB
So in summary, Apple are offering a slightly faster CPU and Dell offer a significantly faster GPU (although 8600 is a DX10 part). Dell seem to provide a significantly better warranty, I'm assuming if your Mac has a problem you mail it back in or take it into a store to be fixed.
So the prices:
DELL - £2,162.75
MAC - £2,529.00 - 17% more.
Not quite sure what to take away from this comparison. Mac is definitely the prettier machine, Dell is the more powerful. 17% isn't too huge a difference in price - less than I'd expected.