I don't seem to have noticed any great consumer demand for the console to come bundled with a HiDef drive. The games don't need it (not noticed many 2 disk 360 games anyway) - and as one of the main advantages I see for the PS3 over the 360 is the use of the hard drive to spool in games AND all machines having a hard drive - if they did need more space, they could've just put a data DVD to put on the drive and a Boot DVD to shove in the PS3 in the case and been done with it.
The BluRay drive is in the PS3 as sony wants to own the next big media format. If it takes off and beats HD-DVD, then you've kindly donated to this with your PS3 purchase. If HD-DVD wins, then you've just pissed away a load of money.
that paper is capable of being used as a medium to display pornographic images?
Paper is pervasive making it practically impossible to prevent your childrens exposure to it!!
As somebody with a vague technical leaning, I picked up MySQL and PHP and cobbled together a nice functional site a while back.
I'm proud of it, people seem to like it - but it is DOG ugly.... well maybe not actively ugly, but well minimalist in the extreme.
But I digress. Point I was wanting to make is that form must follow function for the design - but once you've nailed function, you're really going to want to go back and give it a good polishing.
is that a connection is between two points - it's only 5 Meg if it gets from A to B at that speed.
I've got a 24Mbit connection to my ISPs DSLAM - although it does tend to connect a bit slower (I'll forgive them for this).
Anyway, that 24Mbit is max speed - but most IPs I connect to don't give me that throughput.
Now I could blame my ISP for not peering properly to backbone, but that's only half the problem. There's the other leg from the backbone to the B-end.
You connect to a server with 10M NIC, or even a 100M NIC and it doesn't take that many connections to swamp the thing. Look at slashdotting - we don't all feel the need to write to our ISPs to complain about the speed as we've smoked a server.
Say you have an employee and pay them $50k a year.
They work 11 months of the year and 20 days for each of those 11 months, so 220 days a year.
So that works out at about $227 a day - which excluding the $50 you'd have to pay google, is about the same as what you're paying MS
Sooo if over a whole year, the switch from MS -> Google lost over 7.5 hours productivity, you've made a loss.
Now comparing the two solutions, it would appear that you're going to lose a whole load more than a single day a year in productivity - especially over the switch.
lower paid your employees, the less the switch is going to hurt - hence the emphasis on 'people normally not given computers/access'
with nothing very exciting running - but then I have 2 gig in my system, so would hope it would shove anything that may be useful in there for me.
If you're about to tell me you've only got a gig in your laptop, then that may be a problem - if as I suspect you've got 2Gig, then wtf are you complaining about?
If these computers can be bricked it they're stolen, then they're less likely to be stolen.
Although these are 'low cost' to most of us, in many of the places they're going, these are going to be comparatively expensive bits of kit (and easily the most expensive item a child is going to be carrying about).
Anyway, if the laptop can be made just a bit less stealable, then the child carrying it is that little bit safer - which is surely slightly more important than a load of self-righteous geeks blathering on.
moment. It seems that the number of things that count as disabilities has become insane.
On the current criteria, I'm slightly bemused as to why 'being thick' isn't allowed to count. It's not your fault, it puts you at a disadvantage, you can't change it etc.
Could anybody tell me why it's OK to discriminate against people being stupid in the workplace, but it's not if the mental/physical disability has a nice name?
This is not a fault in their product, it's your fault for trying to do it.
There may or may not be a fix for it in the next few weeks, but until then, just appreciate the aesthetics of your over-priced hardware.
lots of love,
SteveyJ
xxx
First office suite I pirated was MSO. When I got a job and they used licensed MSO, I knew how to use it.
My mum wants a word processor, I'd give her a pirate MSO as I know how to use it - and if she has any problems, I can help. If I can't help, she can buy a book to help (much easier for MSO than OO).
You've really got to applaud MS, they've simultaneously managed to make MSO ubiquitous whatever the depth of your pocket, whilst managing to derive a stonking great income from legit software.
Look at the other 'pirate' stories that come through/. "RIAA prosecutes single mother", "MPAA demands arrest of 12 year old" etc etc. MS never gets their hands dirty with this kind of stuff - all MS piracy busts are against guys selling thousands of fake licenses into enterprise (despite these large scale operations supplying far less instances than the millions of individual copies installed on home PCs).
To emphasise the level MS wants to go after for piracy, look at what they've done with WGA. Your installation fails WGA, you nark out your supplier, and you get a free legit copy. MS doesn't prosecute people using pirate software, they just gun for those selling it.
and quite frankly pathetic to say that the reason MSO succeeds where OO hasn't is merely down to MS's marketing budget.
CTOs know what OO is. If an enterprise CTO deployed OO and saved their company millions, they'd get a big gold star. The reason OO isn't deployed so widely is because if it were, stuff would 'stop working' and cost the company more.
Now you could argue (rightly) that there's nothing wrong with OO, but if you deploy it in an MS ecosystem (both your own systems and the stuff that'll come in from outside), stuff will stop working. OO's pitch is pretty much "We'll get 95% of your Office documents opened and working" - problem is that last 5% will cost more than you'll save by not coughing up for the MS license. It's not right, it's not fair, but it's a fact - and something the OO plugging CTO will be made to answer for.
Just to come back to your point on marketing, there are many countries that MS don't even bother with now, due to the levels of piracy. Surely if OO were the better product, then it would flourish without the evil MS marketing dollar - but they just don't...
If I pirate MSO, I know I'll have less problems than I do legitimately downloading OO. OO currently offers 95% of MSO for free - if you consider MSO to be 'free' then why on earth would you take that over something that offers 100% of MSO for free?
as it really is a much under-appreciated standard.
I have a tiny little SIM card.
I can shove it in practically any handset I want.
People can dial a number and talk to me, practically wherever I am on the planet.
Whilst you can bitch and moan about roaming charges and our fan-boy attachment to particular handset manufacturers, the just the basic idea of voice calls anywhere is amazing.
Telephony was a breakthrough - but on a global scale took decades to rollout - and even now most of the planet doesn't have a copper connection to their abode. GSM like most technologies hasn't just expanded onto a subset of what went before it - it's claimed it's own larger footprint.
Whilst I might have a warm feeling as my phone pops online at every airport I pass through, the image of a Maasai tribesman chatting on a Nokia handset in the middle of nowhere is quite simply amazing.
If you randomly selected two people of the face of the planet and tried to work out the easiest and fastest way to get them to communicate, GSM would definitely feature.
Just to come back ontopic, DRM is merely going to be a blip and it will go soon (for music at least). CDs aren't going anywhere. Whilst we have CDs, lossless 44.1kHz music will be available without DRM (both legally and illegally).
The simple truth is that digital DRM gives the customer nothing currently. CD is the same price, CD can be ripped onto anything, CD isn't going to break when you install Vista, CD isn't going to vanish when your HD crashes, CD doesn't restrict my next portable player choice, CD gives you better quality and if iTunes indulges your instant gratification button - then limewire, torrent, nntp etc can all do the same for less.
If DRM is to succeed, then it needs to give us something other than restrictions:
Better sound quality than CD
Streaming access on any client device I own
Time limited access to next album from somebody I've already bought
Basically there are unlimited options that could be given to me with 'digital music', but so far the best I've been offered is 'What you get from a CD + a load of restrictions'
is that it creates a level playing field.
Both MS office and OpenOffice are available at the same price and with the same level of support (precisely none apart from what google'll provide you with).
I'm not quite sure why there's any kind of surprise about this information. In the western world where you have to pay for MSOffice and Open Office is free, MS Office is still winning - why you'd expect a different result in an environment MS Office is free, is beyond me.
In my humble opinion the best thing to increase the penetration of Open Office around the planet (along with linux and every other OSS product that competes with MS) would be if MS introduced a completely secure DRM system to ensure that not a single un-licensed copy of their software was unable to function anywhere on the planet - forcing those that couldn't afford it to switch to OSS.
Always amuses me when people here bitch about WGA, as it has the potential to be the greatest force in switching people to OSS.
I upgraded to x64 vista - and it is indeed lovely. All my hardware was detected and drivers updated without me having to deal with any of it (well OK, I did have to download an Audigy driver, but that's it).
Apart from iTunes - all my Audible stuff now fails the DRM check. Just to clarify, all the audiobooks I bought for my iPod now no longer play and whilst I have a subscription for two more books this month (£15 I've paid) I can't listen to them.
All iTunes has to do is to decode MP3, M4A, M4P and AA files on my Computer - and map them to my ipod. The fact I can no longer do this either indicates that Apple are inept, or (taking into account today's press releases) they're holding me hostage to make a point.
is the human brain is supremely capable at generalizing facts, whilst code isn't.
Most specs are reasonably simple on the initial pitch, it's when questions are asked and development starts that the problems appear and the code grows tenfold in size.
I keep on reading about new coding techniques to reduce deployment time - but the coding technique surely isn't the problem. The problem is that the wonderful brain in your head allows you to simplify stuff - a simplification you don't see until you have to implement it.
Just to summarize, the problem isn't with coding, the problem is how our wonderful brains specify problems.
I like Audible, I like their audiobook selection and was tired of farting about trying to find bootlegs of the books I liked. I signed up for Audible (£15 for 2 books a month) I could play on my ipod and was a very happy bunny.
Few days ago I upgraded to Vista x64. iTunes installs, but gave me errors when trying to verify the DRM on my existing audible books. Basically iTunes on Vista x64 refuses to work with audible at all - I can't download books I've paid for on my subscription and I can't sync my ipod as it'll remove the rights on the ones I've already paid for (they won't even verify just within itunes on my PC).
Seeing as audible DRM is built into iTunes, I'd have expected some info about this from Apple - there is none. The Audible website just says it's an Apple bug and will be fixed in the next release of iTunes.
So I'm now in the position where I've got 2 audible books owed to me on my subscription that I've paid for - and I've got nothing to listen to as I walk to and from work as Apple haven't managed to update iTunes for Vista x64 (which has been out in public beta for about a year now). Just to rub salt into the wound, after a week of trying to get around this, Apple today, are seemingly telling people not to upgrade to Vista - until they can sort iTunes out.
If ever there was a reason to force Apple to open Fairplay, this must be it. Currently every single person, who has decided to pay for audiobooks from audible (rather than pirating them) and has installed the latest version of the most popular DRM purchasing system on the planet - is unable to sync their ipod, or download anything they've already paid for on subscription.
I know Apple have no interest in plugging Vista, but I bought your iPod, I bought a subscription from your licensee and I want what I paid for.
I've never liked the idea of DRM, but this is the first time I've ever had it not work, and the fact Apple don't seem to give a shit just makes me ever so slightly angry. Vista wasn't a great surpise, vista didn't suddenly leap forward in release date - I cannot for the life of me see what their excuse is for this not working.
If anybody is feeling paranoid about this issue, go to Apple dicussions and search for 'vista' under 'iTunes for Windows' - it returns one result (look in the actual forum and you'll see a shit-load more complaints).
for the BBC. When they sell content abroad or on DVD, that brings in more money, enabling them to spend more on content production, or charge less in license fee.
Whilst they have a charter to make TV available to people who bought a license, if online streaming decreases DVD and/or foreign sales, then either the content will suffer, or they'll be asking me for more money.
My understanding for the 30 days is that a load of BBC broadcast content is produced by 3rd party production companies - who themselves re-sell the content and rights to bring in more money than the BBC paid. If the BBC streaming content indefinitely and without restriction, then this would make that single payment from the BBC the production company's only source of income, so they'd sell it to the BBC for more and we, the end users, would end up paying more again.
The 30 day rule is a compromise that will hopefully keep everybody happy - it might even be an extension of the agreements the BBC has with companies allowing it to re-broadcast material on other channels at other times around the time or original broadcast.
One advert makes the point that the 'PC' is a boring machine designed for boring office activities and the Mac is the free-spirited bundle'o'fun that'll bring joy an amusement to your home.
Then a couple of adverts later, they proudly tell you how your Mac'll run MS Office, a package which pretty much defines 'non-fun office stuff'
sniping only works if the snipe comes in over the maximum the bid the current bidder has put in.
If you have the high bid of $100 bucks and the price is $100, then you're just asking for snipers to come in at $110.
If on the other hand you've put in a max bid of $110, then it doesn't really matter if 5 people all snipe in at $105 in the last 3 seconds - in fact if you'd all been bidding on the item normally and there were 6 people all thinking it was worth $105, then the chances are you'd end up paying more as you all bid against each other.
not only has the seller lost a sale as he got greedy, he's then got to pay ebay their cut of the sale (or embark upon reporting his alias for non-payment and enter the general hell that is ebay support)
Google are asking people to get themselves noticed.
Google Maps belong to google, htf can you complain about people spamming somebody else (i.e. google), after they've asked to be spammed.
And putting all that aside for one moment, can't you just accept it might be 'fun' to get yourself on google earth?
Bunch of miserable bastards the lot of you, if you don't want to see people waving at the camera on google maps, then just don't log into google maps. FFS.
*bangs head on keyboard*
is the reason I will never ever buy another bit of Sony kit.
I'm a 30 yr old who doesn't seem to have grown up, I've got the 1080p TV with a stack of consoles beneath it and have trouble resisting anything new and shiny - surely the target early adopter market.
All the PS3 PR whoops I could excuse. I could excuse the price - I can afford it. Up to this point it was just a company with a product. Here's the product, here's the price, do you want to buy it? They weren't forcing me, it was just a potential transaction between myself and Sony
Then they shut down LikSang. I loved LikSang. I've never ordered a huge amount of stuff from them, just bits here and there, but I always enjoyed browsing their site and it was a little part of my life. Sony killed a little part of my life - my personal life - and it'd taint any business I will ever put Sony's way.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't seem to have noticed any great consumer demand for the console to come bundled with a HiDef drive. The games don't need it (not noticed many 2 disk 360 games anyway) - and as one of the main advantages I see for the PS3 over the 360 is the use of the hard drive to spool in games AND all machines having a hard drive - if they did need more space, they could've just put a data DVD to put on the drive and a Boot DVD to shove in the PS3 in the case and been done with it.
The BluRay drive is in the PS3 as sony wants to own the next big media format. If it takes off and beats HD-DVD, then you've kindly donated to this with your PS3 purchase. If HD-DVD wins, then you've just pissed away a load of money.
you tell your employer that he's overpaid you for what you did and write a letter to the IRS asking if they'd like some more money from you.
that paper is capable of being used as a medium to display pornographic images?
Paper is pervasive making it practically impossible to prevent your childrens exposure to it!!
*rushes off to start book-burn*
As somebody with a vague technical leaning, I picked up MySQL and PHP and cobbled together a nice functional site a while back.
I'm proud of it, people seem to like it - but it is DOG ugly.... well maybe not actively ugly, but well minimalist in the extreme.
But I digress. Point I was wanting to make is that form must follow function for the design - but once you've nailed function, you're really going to want to go back and give it a good polishing.
is that a connection is between two points - it's only 5 Meg if it gets from A to B at that speed.
I've got a 24Mbit connection to my ISPs DSLAM - although it does tend to connect a bit slower (I'll forgive them for this).
Anyway, that 24Mbit is max speed - but most IPs I connect to don't give me that throughput.
Now I could blame my ISP for not peering properly to backbone, but that's only half the problem. There's the other leg from the backbone to the B-end.
You connect to a server with 10M NIC, or even a 100M NIC and it doesn't take that many connections to swamp the thing. Look at slashdotting - we don't all feel the need to write to our ISPs to complain about the speed as we've smoked a server.
Say you have an employee and pay them $50k a year.
They work 11 months of the year and 20 days for each of those 11 months, so 220 days a year.
So that works out at about $227 a day - which excluding the $50 you'd have to pay google, is about the same as what you're paying MS
Sooo if over a whole year, the switch from MS -> Google lost over 7.5 hours productivity, you've made a loss.
Now comparing the two solutions, it would appear that you're going to lose a whole load more than a single day a year in productivity - especially over the switch.
lower paid your employees, the less the switch is going to hurt - hence the emphasis on 'people normally not given computers/access'
with nothing very exciting running - but then I have 2 gig in my system, so would hope it would shove anything that may be useful in there for me.
If you're about to tell me you've only got a gig in your laptop, then that may be a problem - if as I suspect you've got 2Gig, then wtf are you complaining about?
If these computers can be bricked it they're stolen, then they're less likely to be stolen.
Although these are 'low cost' to most of us, in many of the places they're going, these are going to be comparatively expensive bits of kit (and easily the most expensive item a child is going to be carrying about).
Anyway, if the laptop can be made just a bit less stealable, then the child carrying it is that little bit safer - which is surely slightly more important than a load of self-righteous geeks blathering on.
moment. It seems that the number of things that count as disabilities has become insane.
On the current criteria, I'm slightly bemused as to why 'being thick' isn't allowed to count. It's not your fault, it puts you at a disadvantage, you can't change it etc.
Could anybody tell me why it's OK to discriminate against people being stupid in the workplace, but it's not if the mental/physical disability has a nice name?
This is not a fault in their product, it's your fault for trying to do it.
There may or may not be a fix for it in the next few weeks, but until then, just appreciate the aesthetics of your over-priced hardware.
lots of love,
SteveyJ
xxx
First office suite I pirated was MSO. When I got a job and they used licensed MSO, I knew how to use it. /. "RIAA prosecutes single mother", "MPAA demands arrest of 12 year old" etc etc. MS never gets their hands dirty with this kind of stuff - all MS piracy busts are against guys selling thousands of fake licenses into enterprise (despite these large scale operations supplying far less instances than the millions of individual copies installed on home PCs).
My mum wants a word processor, I'd give her a pirate MSO as I know how to use it - and if she has any problems, I can help. If I can't help, she can buy a book to help (much easier for MSO than OO).
You've really got to applaud MS, they've simultaneously managed to make MSO ubiquitous whatever the depth of your pocket, whilst managing to derive a stonking great income from legit software.
Look at the other 'pirate' stories that come through
To emphasise the level MS wants to go after for piracy, look at what they've done with WGA. Your installation fails WGA, you nark out your supplier, and you get a free legit copy. MS doesn't prosecute people using pirate software, they just gun for those selling it.
and quite frankly pathetic to say that the reason MSO succeeds where OO hasn't is merely down to MS's marketing budget.
CTOs know what OO is. If an enterprise CTO deployed OO and saved their company millions, they'd get a big gold star. The reason OO isn't deployed so widely is because if it were, stuff would 'stop working' and cost the company more.
Now you could argue (rightly) that there's nothing wrong with OO, but if you deploy it in an MS ecosystem (both your own systems and the stuff that'll come in from outside), stuff will stop working. OO's pitch is pretty much "We'll get 95% of your Office documents opened and working" - problem is that last 5% will cost more than you'll save by not coughing up for the MS license. It's not right, it's not fair, but it's a fact - and something the OO plugging CTO will be made to answer for.
Just to come back to your point on marketing, there are many countries that MS don't even bother with now, due to the levels of piracy. Surely if OO were the better product, then it would flourish without the evil MS marketing dollar - but they just don't...
If I pirate MSO, I know I'll have less problems than I do legitimately downloading OO. OO currently offers 95% of MSO for free - if you consider MSO to be 'free' then why on earth would you take that over something that offers 100% of MSO for free?
as it really is a much under-appreciated standard.
I have a tiny little SIM card.
I can shove it in practically any handset I want.
People can dial a number and talk to me, practically wherever I am on the planet.
Whilst you can bitch and moan about roaming charges and our fan-boy attachment to particular handset manufacturers, the just the basic idea of voice calls anywhere is amazing.
Telephony was a breakthrough - but on a global scale took decades to rollout - and even now most of the planet doesn't have a copper connection to their abode. GSM like most technologies hasn't just expanded onto a subset of what went before it - it's claimed it's own larger footprint.
Whilst I might have a warm feeling as my phone pops online at every airport I pass through, the image of a Maasai tribesman chatting on a Nokia handset in the middle of nowhere is quite simply amazing.
If you randomly selected two people of the face of the planet and tried to work out the easiest and fastest way to get them to communicate, GSM would definitely feature.
Just to come back ontopic, DRM is merely going to be a blip and it will go soon (for music at least). CDs aren't going anywhere. Whilst we have CDs, lossless 44.1kHz music will be available without DRM (both legally and illegally).
The simple truth is that digital DRM gives the customer nothing currently. CD is the same price, CD can be ripped onto anything, CD isn't going to break when you install Vista, CD isn't going to vanish when your HD crashes, CD doesn't restrict my next portable player choice, CD gives you better quality and if iTunes indulges your instant gratification button - then limewire, torrent, nntp etc can all do the same for less.
If DRM is to succeed, then it needs to give us something other than restrictions:
Better sound quality than CD
Streaming access on any client device I own
Time limited access to next album from somebody I've already bought
Basically there are unlimited options that could be given to me with 'digital music', but so far the best I've been offered is 'What you get from a CD + a load of restrictions'
is that it creates a level playing field.
Both MS office and OpenOffice are available at the same price and with the same level of support (precisely none apart from what google'll provide you with).
I'm not quite sure why there's any kind of surprise about this information. In the western world where you have to pay for MSOffice and Open Office is free, MS Office is still winning - why you'd expect a different result in an environment MS Office is free, is beyond me.
In my humble opinion the best thing to increase the penetration of Open Office around the planet (along with linux and every other OSS product that competes with MS) would be if MS introduced a completely secure DRM system to ensure that not a single un-licensed copy of their software was unable to function anywhere on the planet - forcing those that couldn't afford it to switch to OSS.
Always amuses me when people here bitch about WGA, as it has the potential to be the greatest force in switching people to OSS.
but why on earth didn't you just image your system - especially before installing a Beta OS over everything?
*shrugs*
I upgraded to x64 vista - and it is indeed lovely. All my hardware was detected and drivers updated without me having to deal with any of it (well OK, I did have to download an Audigy driver, but that's it).
Apart from iTunes - all my Audible stuff now fails the DRM check. Just to clarify, all the audiobooks I bought for my iPod now no longer play and whilst I have a subscription for two more books this month (£15 I've paid) I can't listen to them.
All iTunes has to do is to decode MP3, M4A, M4P and AA files on my Computer - and map them to my ipod. The fact I can no longer do this either indicates that Apple are inept, or (taking into account today's press releases) they're holding me hostage to make a point.
is the human brain is supremely capable at generalizing facts, whilst code isn't.
Most specs are reasonably simple on the initial pitch, it's when questions are asked and development starts that the problems appear and the code grows tenfold in size.
I keep on reading about new coding techniques to reduce deployment time - but the coding technique surely isn't the problem. The problem is that the wonderful brain in your head allows you to simplify stuff - a simplification you don't see until you have to implement it.
Just to summarize, the problem isn't with coding, the problem is how our wonderful brains specify problems.
I like Audible, I like their audiobook selection and was tired of farting about trying to find bootlegs of the books I liked. I signed up for Audible (£15 for 2 books a month) I could play on my ipod and was a very happy bunny.
Few days ago I upgraded to Vista x64. iTunes installs, but gave me errors when trying to verify the DRM on my existing audible books. Basically iTunes on Vista x64 refuses to work with audible at all - I can't download books I've paid for on my subscription and I can't sync my ipod as it'll remove the rights on the ones I've already paid for (they won't even verify just within itunes on my PC).
Seeing as audible DRM is built into iTunes, I'd have expected some info about this from Apple - there is none. The Audible website just says it's an Apple bug and will be fixed in the next release of iTunes.
So I'm now in the position where I've got 2 audible books owed to me on my subscription that I've paid for - and I've got nothing to listen to as I walk to and from work as Apple haven't managed to update iTunes for Vista x64 (which has been out in public beta for about a year now). Just to rub salt into the wound, after a week of trying to get around this, Apple today, are seemingly telling people not to upgrade to Vista - until they can sort iTunes out.
If ever there was a reason to force Apple to open Fairplay, this must be it. Currently every single person, who has decided to pay for audiobooks from audible (rather than pirating them) and has installed the latest version of the most popular DRM purchasing system on the planet - is unable to sync their ipod, or download anything they've already paid for on subscription.
I know Apple have no interest in plugging Vista, but I bought your iPod, I bought a subscription from your licensee and I want what I paid for.
I've never liked the idea of DRM, but this is the first time I've ever had it not work, and the fact Apple don't seem to give a shit just makes me ever so slightly angry. Vista wasn't a great surpise, vista didn't suddenly leap forward in release date - I cannot for the life of me see what their excuse is for this not working.
If anybody is feeling paranoid about this issue, go to Apple dicussions and search for 'vista' under 'iTunes for Windows' - it returns one result (look in the actual forum and you'll see a shit-load more complaints).
for the BBC. When they sell content abroad or on DVD, that brings in more money, enabling them to spend more on content production, or charge less in license fee.
Whilst they have a charter to make TV available to people who bought a license, if online streaming decreases DVD and/or foreign sales, then either the content will suffer, or they'll be asking me for more money.
My understanding for the 30 days is that a load of BBC broadcast content is produced by 3rd party production companies - who themselves re-sell the content and rights to bring in more money than the BBC paid. If the BBC streaming content indefinitely and without restriction, then this would make that single payment from the BBC the production company's only source of income, so they'd sell it to the BBC for more and we, the end users, would end up paying more again.
The 30 day rule is a compromise that will hopefully keep everybody happy - it might even be an extension of the agreements the BBC has with companies allowing it to re-broadcast material on other channels at other times around the time or original broadcast.
One advert makes the point that the 'PC' is a boring machine designed for boring office activities and the Mac is the free-spirited bundle'o'fun that'll bring joy an amusement to your home.
Then a couple of adverts later, they proudly tell you how your Mac'll run MS Office, a package which pretty much defines 'non-fun office stuff'
sniping only works if the snipe comes in over the maximum the bid the current bidder has put in.
If you have the high bid of $100 bucks and the price is $100, then you're just asking for snipers to come in at $110.
If on the other hand you've put in a max bid of $110, then it doesn't really matter if 5 people all snipe in at $105 in the last 3 seconds - in fact if you'd all been bidding on the item normally and there were 6 people all thinking it was worth $105, then the chances are you'd end up paying more as you all bid against each other.
not only has the seller lost a sale as he got greedy, he's then got to pay ebay their cut of the sale (or embark upon reporting his alias for non-payment and enter the general hell that is ebay support)
Google are asking people to get themselves noticed.
Google Maps belong to google, htf can you complain about people spamming somebody else (i.e. google), after they've asked to be spammed.
And putting all that aside for one moment, can't you just accept it might be 'fun' to get yourself on google earth?
Bunch of miserable bastards the lot of you, if you don't want to see people waving at the camera on google maps, then just don't log into google maps. FFS.
*bangs head on keyboard*
is the reason I will never ever buy another bit of Sony kit.
I'm a 30 yr old who doesn't seem to have grown up, I've got the 1080p TV with a stack of consoles beneath it and have trouble resisting anything new and shiny - surely the target early adopter market.
All the PS3 PR whoops I could excuse. I could excuse the price - I can afford it. Up to this point it was just a company with a product. Here's the product, here's the price, do you want to buy it? They weren't forcing me, it was just a potential transaction between myself and Sony
Then they shut down LikSang. I loved LikSang. I've never ordered a huge amount of stuff from them, just bits here and there, but I always enjoyed browsing their site and it was a little part of my life. Sony killed a little part of my life - my personal life - and it'd taint any business I will ever put Sony's way.