I think you and too many other people have lost the concept of what gaming is.
Any game - computer, board, sports, etc. - is supposed to be *FUN WHILE YOU ARE PLAYING IT* with an added bonus of possibly winning it at the end. The *FUN* bit generally happens because you are playing against opponents who are all around the same skill level - throw in one expert at the game & the *FUN* element disappears because the other players have no possibility of winning and the expert gets bored rapidly by trouncing everyone else.
If winning is of primary importance to you, then you can have a lot of *FUN* honing your skills to become better and better at the game as you understand the mechanics more. However, being able to *BUY* an advantage in a game is the equivalent to permissible cheating.
I'm more than happy to grind at a game as long as it's *FUN* to do so and as long as everyone else in that game is doing the same thing. But I don't see what *FUN* I am supposed to get from somebody who comes into the game and trounces me just because he or she has parted with good money to buy cheats.
Personally, I'm all for grinders of similar expertise being on their server, and cheats with their purchases on another.
The simple answer is that selling something as an ongoing service makes a lot more money over a longer period of time than selling to you once.
Personally, I don't get the whole microtrans stuff anyway. I do use Steam, I'm a big fan of all the Valve games, but I own the boxed copies of all the games I play on Steam. I've bought no downloadable "Steam-only" games because I don't get what it is I'm supposed to be paying for.
I have bought a few applications online, plus a few games from Good Old Games because, in both cases, I have them stored on my local hard disk(s) and therefore in my possession to install, use or play whenever I want to.
I have friends who play WoW (I tried it for a month but it didn't grab me) and who pay for all sorts of in-game objects but, again, I don't get that either.
I guess it's a case of "each to his own" but I'm not prepared to put that much faith in games companies that I truly believe the add-ons they want to sell me are just that, rather than stuff they deliberately left out of the original game to sell to me later on.
But for a mainly Linux using shell person like me, what it's doing isn't rocket science - it wouldn't take much effort just to use a tool like rsync to copy browser settings from my home directory from one PC to another. Even on a Windows PC, I could mount a Windows drive on Linux using Samba and use rsync with that also - or just use DeltaCopy on Windows as an rsync client to a Linux rsync server.
I for one refuse to pay that much for a CD when the majority of it goes to the record company and not the artist.
Why is this relevant? Personally, I don't give a shit how much the artists I like get paid, that's for them to negotiate with their record company via lawyers. Plus I don't see many music artists queuing up and wondering how much I get paid as an IT consultant. All that matters is whether the piece of music was worth the money I paid for it or not.
Save your technical BS for those that have not listened to the same track on both using good equipment. This is fact.
Wrong. It's *YOUR OPINION* only. Your hearing characteristics may be different to other people, maybe the music that you personally listen to sounds better on vinyl than CD. Maybe the CD version was mastered differently to the vinyl version.
Third, downloaded digital music is fine but the quality sucks and the cost is even higher than that for the CD if you want the whole album/CD.
I don't buy digital downloads & never will. But I do rip my CDs and with FLAC or MP3 at 192 bps or higher, I can't tell the difference on my reasonably good hifi system. But I'm in my 40s and whilst I had my hearing tested as fine a few months ago, age deterioration of hearing means I can't hear as well as I could in my 20s. Again, it's entirely subjective - so don't make sweeping statements based on your personal experiences.
DRM is a pain in the ass and only hurts the larger segment of the populace that just wants to listen to the music they have legally purchased.
This is your one statement I agree with. But the solution is simple - the populace grows a backbone and doesn't buy anything with DRM protection. Rather than caving in to marketing that tells them they're losers if they don't part with good money to buy DRM shit. Or even illegally downloading.
2. There's more diversity online because real stores don't stock a wide range of stuff
Twenty years ago we had thriving town centres with local specialist retailers who stocked a lot of the stuff you wanted and could probably order it for you if they didn't have it in stock.
Then the out-of-town supermarkets arrived with the sole intention of profiting by killing off those businesses. Because of the 80/20 rule (80% of sales are made from 20% of a product range), the supermarkets could stock the most profitable 20% of a range and kill all the profits of the small retailers, thus driving them out of business. (If you don't believe me, check the range of music CDs or magazines that your local supermarket actually stocks.)
With the small retailers killed off, in came the developers who put up large shopping malls with such high business rates that only the chain stores could afford to rent units in them - again, chain stores specialise in selling large volumes of small ranges. This led to the phenomenon of "clone towns" where the majority of British town centres now contain the same shops with very few specialist independent retailers.
So blame the supermarkets & chain stores for removing any pleasure from shopping. I used to be able to spend hours in my home town centre walking around new and second-hand music stores & book stores - when I was into wargaming and RPG gaming, there were even two shops for that that weren't Games Workshop - but these days it's one chain music store and two chain bookstores.
Erm, yes, that's because they sell Windows & MSDOS Games.
I don't get people like you that crow about "cutting off your nose to spite your face".
I use Linux far more than Windows, I also like games. I would like to see a lot more commercial Linux games but, until that happens, I'll use Wine to run DRM-free games from GOG.com and others.
RTCW ran really well on Linux once I'd done the required piece of hex editing - however, I'm an NVIDIA not ATI guy so maybe you experienced ATI driver issues.
I'm afraid I only use 64-bit Linux, the latest Windows versions I run are XP Service Pack 3 (32-bit). But it might be worth your while Googling some of the newer Quake ports that are out there - the "Darkplaces" engine for Quake springs to mind, it's Open Source and ruins fine on my 64-bit Gentoo Linux machines, I'm sure there'll be suitable Windows executables out there as well.
Maybe this will end the "Linux, it has no malware" illusion that many seems to have.
Erm, it doesn't. This exploit isn't malware, it's a security vulnerability, big difference. (Malware is something that gets downloaded and run, a vulnerability is something that already exists and needs to be patched or updated.)
Nobody ever said Linux was secure. Here, I'll even give you some ammunition you may want to use in future - Linux & UNIX are more susceptible to directed buffer overflow attacks on vulnerable services than Windows is, it always has been the case.
That's why you don't run services you don't need, run those you do with non-root permissions, and update regularly.
But we Linux & UNIX sysadmins & security people have it under control, so don't worry your pretty little head about it.
Yes, these vulnerabilities happen from time to time. End of story.
I actually loaded up RTCW on both a Windows XP and Linux PC the other week as I was feeling a bit nostalgic.
It took a bit of Googling to work out how to get it to run on both platforms as even with the latest patched executables (v1.41 off the top of my head), there's some kind of buffer overflow that happens due to the large number of GL Extensions that newer graphics card announce to the game - it took a bit of hex editing on the executable to get it to run.
It should be a bit easier now it's Open Source as hopefully someone will fix this, and other, issues.
I actually did play Halo I all the way through and it had a few good points.
But the Disney-like giggling aliens in it were really annoying and isn't a patch on Unreal Tournament, the Half-Lifes and the Quakes.
At the time it came out, console owners were starved of FPS games so I do accept it got a good reception from them - but compare it to many FPSes on the PC and it's just an average FPS.
Your sweeping statements clearly indicate that you have little or no knowledge of Linux because intelligent criticism would be able to show very specific examples of why you believe FOSS to be inferior.
You also fail to realise that there is as vast amount of FOSS software on Windows as there is on Linux so everybody has the opportunity to try some of it out, free of charge. If you try it and don't like it, fair enough - go buy some closed commercial software and enjoy it with my blessing.
But commenting when you clearly have no knowledge just ends up making you look like an idiot.
If the Brazilian government was not using FOSS then the chances are it would be using unlicensed copies of Windows and Office, rather than paying MS for proper licenses - so Microsoft would not benefit anyway.
People who use cracks to run licensed software free of charge are probably the worst offenders when it comes to the spread of viruses, in turn Microsoft (possibly) gets a worse security and malware reputation than it deserves.
So Microsoft actually reaps some *BENEFITS* from FOSS because at least those people who would never pay for a Microsoft product can run a legally free alternative.
If anyone here can tell me that Ubuntu, right out of the box, will do all of that
That's not a fair comparison as Windows right out of the box doesn't do it either - since Windows 7 out of the box does not include Team Fortress 2, Adobe CS3 or Nikon's RAW image processing suite.
1. A fair proportion of Windows games run well on Linux in WINE. No, it's by no means all of them and sometimes some fiddling is required but it does work quite well.
2. Linux is UNIX-like and therefore comes from a legacy of command-line dependency - therefore, it makes sense to keep directory names short so there is less to type. Also, if you spend a little time with it, the directory names are quite logical. Plus all your personal configuration and files are held in your home directory - I do like Windows XP for some reasons but the arrangements under "Documents and Settings" where some directories are hidden and where config files can exist under a heap of illogically named directories has always seemed overly complicated to me. It's "swings & roundabouts".
...because we have a plague of kids here in the UK who do not understand about responsibility & the consequences of their actions.
No, it's not all teenagers by any means & the press doesn't report on the good kids.
But we do have teenage gangs, teenage pregnancies and teenagers walking around with knives on the street - bad education, crap parents, whatever the reason, they need to stop, take a deep breath and think about the consequences of what they're thinking of doing.
Fortunately it doesn't happen very often but one of the most disgusting things that kids can get up to is put objects on railway tracks or drop objects from road bridges onto car windscreens. I don't think any of these kids realise they may end up randomly killing someone but our legal system needs to stop pussyfooting around and give them a short sharp shock - if it was me in the chair, I would put them out with the motorway or transport police for a few days; these people deal with motorway fatalities & railway suicides, let those kids see what a dead person actually looks like.
As to the drunk teenager and the Obama email, I say "Deal with it! If you can't control yourself when you're drunk, then don't drink."
Are you talking about dry aged beef? My grocery store does this on occasion, but the price premium is so much that I don't bother. I bought a 4-bone dry aged rib roast a couple of Christmases ago and it was well over $100.
I consider that price excessive but then again I'm in the UK so I can't claim to be an expert on US prices. Yes, 28-day hung beef costs more, whatever the amount - but food prices are far too low anyway.
Are you serious? Talk to them sometime. It's a tight job market and grocery stores are able to hire some damned good people these days. Lots of foodies are working at grocery stores. Stores have real butchers who can do custom cuts and give lots of advice. In my experience, they are happy to open just about any package on the shelf to trim, recut, or grind it for you. Even the cheese monger will talk all day if you let her (and hook you up with some raw milk cheeses if you ask - they have connections).
That's not my experience in UK supermarkets - maybe it's different in the US but the fact is that supermarkets everywhere have very high staff turnover rates, so it's not usually easy to find an expert to answer your questions.
Yep. To a lot of us, how food looks is as important as how it tastes. I won't buy bruised fruit or any vegetable with wilted leaves.
Wilted or bruised produce is a different thing to produce that is slightly the wrong shape or size but tastes perfectly fine. Supermarkets have very tight criteria for size, colour and shape.
Go buy replacement hardware now (note, we won't actually make it easy for you to tell if there are drivers for a Netcomm wireless adapter, you should KNOW it's a UCom 32k98ga rev 3 not a rev 4).
Like I said, they both have their strengths and weaknesses. I'm a 15-year Linux veteran but even I had to spend a good few hours working out what driver to use for the wireless on a HP laptop I bought about 2 years ago.
My music and movie tastes are not mainstream so I buy pretty much all of my stuff from Amazon.
But I used to be able to do day trips up to London and spend a day walking around the music shops - there used to be a huge Tower Records in Picadilly Circus and I'd start there, then walk up through Soho where there were 5 or 6 little independent music stores, finally I'd end up at HMV and Virgin on Oxford Street. I've not been to Soho for at least 10 years now so I don't know how the independent music stores are doing - but Tower and Virgin are no more.
In the case of those stores, consumer tastes and the rise of Amazon are probably as much of a contributory factor to their demise as cheaper products offered in supermarkets - but it still amounts to less consumer choice.
What would be interesting to hear are the negotiation discussions between Wal-Mart and T-Mobile. You can guarantee that Wal-Mart are constantly pushing down T-Mobile's prices and T-Mobile know they cannot ignore a customer as big as Wal-Mart.
Don't get me wrong, I've no sympathy for any of the price-fixing cellular providers - but you can guarantee Wal-Mart are exerting their corporate might on T-Mobile.
I fully admit that mobile phones are an exception because there has been price-fixing in that industry for years and governments have somewhat conveniently turned a blind eye to it for the sake of the network operators financing mobile networks across their countries.
But the reasons *WHY* supermarkets are going into that market is *NOT* about consumer choice - it's about the constant need for expansion and driving competition out of business.
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I think you and too many other people have lost the concept of what gaming is.
Any game - computer, board, sports, etc. - is supposed to be *FUN WHILE YOU ARE PLAYING IT* with an added bonus of possibly winning it at the end. The *FUN* bit generally happens because you are playing against opponents who are all around the same skill level - throw in one expert at the game & the *FUN* element disappears because the other players have no possibility of winning and the expert gets bored rapidly by trouncing everyone else.
If winning is of primary importance to you, then you can have a lot of *FUN* honing your skills to become better and better at the game as you understand the mechanics more. However, being able to *BUY* an advantage in a game is the equivalent to permissible cheating.
I'm more than happy to grind at a game as long as it's *FUN* to do so and as long as everyone else in that game is doing the same thing. But I don't see what *FUN* I am supposed to get from somebody who comes into the game and trounces me just because he or she has parted with good money to buy cheats.
Personally, I'm all for grinders of similar expertise being on their server, and cheats with their purchases on another.
The simple answer is that selling something as an ongoing service makes a lot more money over a longer period of time than selling to you once.
Personally, I don't get the whole microtrans stuff anyway. I do use Steam, I'm a big fan of all the Valve games, but I own the boxed copies of all the games I play on Steam. I've bought no downloadable "Steam-only" games because I don't get what it is I'm supposed to be paying for.
I have bought a few applications online, plus a few games from Good Old Games because, in both cases, I have them stored on my local hard disk(s) and therefore in my possession to install, use or play whenever I want to.
I have friends who play WoW (I tried it for a month but it didn't grab me) and who pay for all sorts of in-game objects but, again, I don't get that either.
I guess it's a case of "each to his own" but I'm not prepared to put that much faith in games companies that I truly believe the add-ons they want to sell me are just that, rather than stuff they deliberately left out of the original game to sell to me later on.
I use it for the convenience, I like it as well.
But for a mainly Linux using shell person like me, what it's doing isn't rocket science - it wouldn't take much effort just to use a tool like rsync to copy browser settings from my home directory from one PC to another. Even on a Windows PC, I could mount a Windows drive on Linux using Samba and use rsync with that also - or just use DeltaCopy on Windows as an rsync client to a Linux rsync server.
However, there's nothing wrong with piracy because all you need are enough users to pay for the product.
I'm glad *YOU* think it's fair that legitimate users subsidise those that pirate because *I* most certainly don't!
I for one refuse to pay that much for a CD when the majority of it goes to the record company and not the artist.
Why is this relevant? Personally, I don't give a shit how much the artists I like get paid, that's for them to negotiate with their record company via lawyers. Plus I don't see many music artists queuing up and wondering how much I get paid as an IT consultant. All that matters is whether the piece of music was worth the money I paid for it or not.
Save your technical BS for those that have not listened to the same track on both using good equipment. This is fact.
Wrong. It's *YOUR OPINION* only. Your hearing characteristics may be different to other people, maybe the music that you personally listen to sounds better on vinyl than CD. Maybe the CD version was mastered differently to the vinyl version.
Third, downloaded digital music is fine but the quality sucks and the cost is even higher than that for the CD if you want the whole album/CD.
I don't buy digital downloads & never will. But I do rip my CDs and with FLAC or MP3 at 192 bps or higher, I can't tell the difference on my reasonably good hifi system. But I'm in my 40s and whilst I had my hearing tested as fine a few months ago, age deterioration of hearing means I can't hear as well as I could in my 20s. Again, it's entirely subjective - so don't make sweeping statements based on your personal experiences.
DRM is a pain in the ass and only hurts the larger segment of the populace that just wants to listen to the music they have legally purchased.
This is your one statement I agree with. But the solution is simple - the populace grows a backbone and doesn't buy anything with DRM protection. Rather than caving in to marketing that tells them they're losers if they don't part with good money to buy DRM shit. Or even illegally downloading.
I pirate all my music...
I (happily) buy all my music - so you can thank me for subsidising your music collection at your leisure.
I know I put that tiniest violin in the world down here somewhere...
People shop online for 2 reasons:
1. The stuff is cheaper
2. There's more diversity online because real stores don't stock a wide range of stuff
Twenty years ago we had thriving town centres with local specialist retailers who stocked a lot of the stuff you wanted and could probably order it for you if they didn't have it in stock.
Then the out-of-town supermarkets arrived with the sole intention of profiting by killing off those businesses. Because of the 80/20 rule (80% of sales are made from 20% of a product range), the supermarkets could stock the most profitable 20% of a range and kill all the profits of the small retailers, thus driving them out of business. (If you don't believe me, check the range of music CDs or magazines that your local supermarket actually stocks.)
With the small retailers killed off, in came the developers who put up large shopping malls with such high business rates that only the chain stores could afford to rent units in them - again, chain stores specialise in selling large volumes of small ranges. This led to the phenomenon of "clone towns" where the majority of British town centres now contain the same shops with very few specialist independent retailers.
So blame the supermarkets & chain stores for removing any pleasure from shopping. I used to be able to spend hours in my home town centre walking around new and second-hand music stores & book stores - when I was into wargaming and RPG gaming, there were even two shops for that that weren't Games Workshop - but these days it's one chain music store and two chain bookstores.
Something exploits the vulnerability? Then it is malware.
Thanks for the definition but I know what I'm talking about.
Like I said, it's a vulnerability caused by a software bug. How that vulnerability is exploited is irrelevant.
Last time I checked they didn't sell Ubuntu apps.
Erm, yes, that's because they sell Windows & MSDOS Games.
I don't get people like you that crow about "cutting off your nose to spite your face".
I use Linux far more than Windows, I also like games. I would like to see a lot more commercial Linux games but, until that happens, I'll use Wine to run DRM-free games from GOG.com and others.
It ain't perfect but it's the next best thing.
RTCW ran really well on Linux once I'd done the required piece of hex editing - however, I'm an NVIDIA not ATI guy so maybe you experienced ATI driver issues.
I'm afraid I only use 64-bit Linux, the latest Windows versions I run are XP Service Pack 3 (32-bit). But it might be worth your while Googling some of the newer Quake ports that are out there - the "Darkplaces" engine for Quake springs to mind, it's Open Source and ruins fine on my 64-bit Gentoo Linux machines, I'm sure there'll be suitable Windows executables out there as well.
Maybe this will end the "Linux, it has no malware" illusion that many seems to have.
Erm, it doesn't. This exploit isn't malware, it's a security vulnerability, big difference. (Malware is something that gets downloaded and run, a vulnerability is something that already exists and needs to be patched or updated.)
Nobody ever said Linux was secure. Here, I'll even give you some ammunition you may want to use in future - Linux & UNIX are more susceptible to directed buffer overflow attacks on vulnerable services than Windows is, it always has been the case.
That's why you don't run services you don't need, run those you do with non-root permissions, and update regularly.
But we Linux & UNIX sysadmins & security people have it under control, so don't worry your pretty little head about it.
Yes, these vulnerabilities happen from time to time. End of story.
I actually loaded up RTCW on both a Windows XP and Linux PC the other week as I was feeling a bit nostalgic.
It took a bit of Googling to work out how to get it to run on both platforms as even with the latest patched executables (v1.41 off the top of my head), there's some kind of buffer overflow that happens due to the large number of GL Extensions that newer graphics card announce to the game - it took a bit of hex editing on the executable to get it to run.
It should be a bit easier now it's Open Source as hopefully someone will fix this, and other, issues.
I have just awakened from a 20-year long coma and found it extremely amusing, you insensitive clod!
I actually did play Halo I all the way through and it had a few good points.
But the Disney-like giggling aliens in it were really annoying and isn't a patch on Unreal Tournament, the Half-Lifes and the Quakes.
At the time it came out, console owners were starved of FPS games so I do accept it got a good reception from them - but compare it to many FPSes on the PC and it's just an average FPS.
Your sweeping statements clearly indicate that you have little or no knowledge of Linux because intelligent criticism would be able to show very specific examples of why you believe FOSS to be inferior.
You also fail to realise that there is as vast amount of FOSS software on Windows as there is on Linux so everybody has the opportunity to try some of it out, free of charge. If you try it and don't like it, fair enough - go buy some closed commercial software and enjoy it with my blessing.
But commenting when you clearly have no knowledge just ends up making you look like an idiot.
If the Brazilian government was not using FOSS then the chances are it would be using unlicensed copies of Windows and Office, rather than paying MS for proper licenses - so Microsoft would not benefit anyway.
People who use cracks to run licensed software free of charge are probably the worst offenders when it comes to the spread of viruses, in turn Microsoft (possibly) gets a worse security and malware reputation than it deserves.
So Microsoft actually reaps some *BENEFITS* from FOSS because at least those people who would never pay for a Microsoft product can run a legally free alternative.
If anyone here can tell me that Ubuntu, right out of the box, will do all of that
That's not a fair comparison as Windows right out of the box doesn't do it either - since Windows 7 out of the box does not include Team Fortress 2, Adobe CS3 or Nikon's RAW image processing suite.
1. A fair proportion of Windows games run well on Linux in WINE. No, it's by no means all of them and sometimes some fiddling is required but it does work quite well.
2. Linux is UNIX-like and therefore comes from a legacy of command-line dependency - therefore, it makes sense to keep directory names short so there is less to type. Also, if you spend a little time with it, the directory names are quite logical. Plus all your personal configuration and files are held in your home directory - I do like Windows XP for some reasons but the arrangements under "Documents and Settings" where some directories are hidden and where config files can exist under a heap of illogically named directories has always seemed overly complicated to me. It's "swings & roundabouts".
...because we have a plague of kids here in the UK who do not understand about responsibility & the consequences of their actions.
No, it's not all teenagers by any means & the press doesn't report on the good kids.
But we do have teenage gangs, teenage pregnancies and teenagers walking around with knives on the street - bad education, crap parents, whatever the reason, they need to stop, take a deep breath and think about the consequences of what they're thinking of doing.
Fortunately it doesn't happen very often but one of the most disgusting things that kids can get up to is put objects on railway tracks or drop objects from road bridges onto car windscreens. I don't think any of these kids realise they may end up randomly killing someone but our legal system needs to stop pussyfooting around and give them a short sharp shock - if it was me in the chair, I would put them out with the motorway or transport police for a few days; these people deal with motorway fatalities & railway suicides, let those kids see what a dead person actually looks like.
As to the drunk teenager and the Obama email, I say "Deal with it! If you can't control yourself when you're drunk, then don't drink."
Are you talking about dry aged beef? My grocery store does this on occasion, but the price premium is so much that I don't bother. I bought a 4-bone dry aged rib roast a couple of Christmases ago and it was well over $100.
I consider that price excessive but then again I'm in the UK so I can't claim to be an expert on US prices. Yes, 28-day hung beef costs more, whatever the amount - but food prices are far too low anyway.
Are you serious? Talk to them sometime. It's a tight job market and grocery stores are able to hire some damned good people these days. Lots of foodies are working at grocery stores. Stores have real butchers who can do custom cuts and give lots of advice. In my experience, they are happy to open just about any package on the shelf to trim, recut, or grind it for you. Even the cheese monger will talk all day if you let her (and hook you up with some raw milk cheeses if you ask - they have connections).
That's not my experience in UK supermarkets - maybe it's different in the US but the fact is that supermarkets everywhere have very high staff turnover rates, so it's not usually easy to find an expert to answer your questions.
Yep. To a lot of us, how food looks is as important as how it tastes. I won't buy bruised fruit or any vegetable with wilted leaves.
Wilted or bruised produce is a different thing to produce that is slightly the wrong shape or size but tastes perfectly fine. Supermarkets have very tight criteria for size, colour and shape.
Go buy replacement hardware now (note, we won't actually make it easy for you to tell if there are drivers for a Netcomm wireless adapter, you should KNOW it's a UCom 32k98ga rev 3 not a rev 4).
Like I said, they both have their strengths and weaknesses. I'm a 15-year Linux veteran but even I had to spend a good few hours working out what driver to use for the wireless on a HP laptop I bought about 2 years ago.
No one said it was perfect! :-)
My music and movie tastes are not mainstream so I buy pretty much all of my stuff from Amazon.
But I used to be able to do day trips up to London and spend a day walking around the music shops - there used to be a huge Tower Records in Picadilly Circus and I'd start there, then walk up through Soho where there were 5 or 6 little independent music stores, finally I'd end up at HMV and Virgin on Oxford Street. I've not been to Soho for at least 10 years now so I don't know how the independent music stores are doing - but Tower and Virgin are no more.
In the case of those stores, consumer tastes and the rise of Amazon are probably as much of a contributory factor to their demise as cheaper products offered in supermarkets - but it still amounts to less consumer choice.
What would be interesting to hear are the negotiation discussions between Wal-Mart and T-Mobile. You can guarantee that Wal-Mart are constantly pushing down T-Mobile's prices and T-Mobile know they cannot ignore a customer as big as Wal-Mart.
Don't get me wrong, I've no sympathy for any of the price-fixing cellular providers - but you can guarantee Wal-Mart are exerting their corporate might on T-Mobile.
I fully admit that mobile phones are an exception because there has been price-fixing in that industry for years and governments have somewhat conveniently turned a blind eye to it for the sake of the network operators financing mobile networks across their countries.
But the reasons *WHY* supermarkets are going into that market is *NOT* about consumer choice - it's about the constant need for expansion and driving competition out of business.