Seriously though, when Sony decided it was ok to include a rootkit with their music I think they did not realize just how much damage they were doing to their brand. The rootkit fiasco may be well-known and unpopular amongst Slashdot readers, but I'm really not convinced that it's had that significant an impact amongst the public in general.
I bet that the majority haven't heard of it, or at least have forgotten most of the details (including Sony's involvement), and that most of the others don't consider it that big a deal, even though they should.
The reason why people have heard of Blu-Ray is largely due to the PS3 - all the teeny boppers whose relatives ask advice of are like "oh, yeah, Blu-Ray, my PS3 has that." Given the current price of the PS3, I find it exceptionally unlikely that more than a tiny proportion of kids in that age group (9-14 or so) will own one.
Late teens? More likely perhaps, but I'd assume that the vast majority of current owners are in their twenties or thirties. Course, that won't stop the kids from knowing about and wanting one (so in a way you're almost right anyway), but I'm sure Mummy and Daddy are more likely to buy them a Wii. Well, *would* if they could get their hands on one.
If you have to announce to people that something isn't dead then it is DEAD. The spokesman assures us that HD-DVD isn't dead, it's just pining for the fjords.
Whenever I see an "I Accept" bullshit llicense thing, I consider it null and void. How you personally "consider it" is irrelevant as far as your legal position goes. The only relevant issue- rightly or wrongly- is how a court would see it.
Of course, if you "consider it null and void" because it seems obviously legally unsound, that's understandable. But bear in mind that the things that many people here think they "know" about the law (or how a court would see things) is wrong.
You'd have the occasional eye-rolling when someone said their shibboleth differently (for instance, I grew up around Super NES kids, and the ess-ness and--god forbid!--ess-en-ee-ess kids were laughed at), but that was how things went. Sness. snez It's pronounced "Throatwarbler Mangrove", and that's an end to it.
Did you notice that I was arguing that the usual examples are not old because people around here are somewhat outdated, but because said "artists" where probably the last specimen of their species? In that case, as I pointed out, I'm not convinced that you're correct. American Idol, X Factor et al are the new home of manufactured pop stars. Although masquerading as talent contests, they are (for the most part) set up in such a way that a particular type of performer will win, and I would argue that the resultant stars are just as contrived and marketed as their late-1990s predecessors.
What the Hell are you ranting about? Very simple. The message I replied to said
"LCD main displays in notebooks are barely 15 years old and color ones not even that." In itself this is misleading if not downright wrong about how long colour LCDs have been around.
But *my* point was that the OP didn't specifically mention colour LCD displays anyway, and likely meant monochrome ones! *Those* have been in very common use since the 1970s. Anyone who knew what they were talking about would have realised that the OP probably had mono LCDs in mind. When the replier has the arrogance to say
I guess if you're going to say something stupid it might as well be really stupid. I'm quite happy to point out that *he's* the idiot saying something stupid, not the OP.
The important question that the GP asked -- and which you thoroughly failed to answer -- was this: were displays (of any sort; it doesn't matter which) ever put into the keys of keyboards?! No idea- since I'm not the person who made the original assertion, and answering it wasn't the reason for my post, I'm under no ******* obligation to have an answer to it.
In the paper yesterday, it said that although a lot of singles were downloaded, 95% of all album sales in the UK were physical CDs. Considering that for a whole album, iTunes often costs *more* than a CD- at least in the UK- that's hardly surprising. Maybe other places are cheaper, but I doubt it.
Point is that iTunes is great if you only want one or two songs, and don't want to buy the whole album (they're still much cheaper than CD singles- even though those don't seem to be as overpriced as they used to be- and you aren't restricted to the charts or even what's released as a single). But iTunes for albums? Overpriced.
They might have been good value against the price of physical CDs ten-plus years ago, but that was before ripoff merchants like HMV and Virgin faced competition from online retailers like Amazon and P2P downloads. Sometimes iTunes are shockingly uncompetitive. The latest UK NOW album was something like 15 quid, when it was around a tenner in the shops, and I've seen them price el-cheapo 3CD box sets as around 3 full-price CDs, giving you something like "The Best of the 80s" at 24 quid, instead of paying 8 quid for it at Woolies.
I've bought one album off them, because it was out of print and available without DRM. But even that was the type of album that- had it been available in the shops- would likely have cost less than iTunes had it for.
Love to see an example of that. LCD main displays in notebooks are barely 15 years old and color ones not even that. The Atari Lynx games console came out in 1989 and had a colour LCD display. Technically, that wasn't a notebook, but it suffices for the purposes of this discussion. Furthermore, you assume (wrongly) that "LCD display" means the modern colour type (i.e. where the liquid crystals are used with a tri-colour filter and backlight to vary the brightness of colour pixels).
As the other reply also stated, they could have been (and were) monochromatic. Monochromatic LCD displays (the type with "floating" grey elements against a non-illuminated reflective silver background), have been around since the early 1970s and were in widespread- and cheap- use by the early 1980s.
And yes, smartass, these were also "liquid crystal displays", and commonly referred to as LCDs. Up until a few years ago, this is the type of display people would have thought you meant when you said "LCD".
In other words, GP was right, you're wrong and...
I guess if you're going to say something stupid it might as well be really stupid. Oh, the irony.
Did you noticed that the studios haven't be able to make up a Britney Spears or Spice Girls since broadband and peer-to-peer became common? Are you implying that *I* said otherwise (which I didn't)?
Or was it just a general observation (the "you" being the collective Slashdot audience)?
Have you failed to notice that formerly all-powerful CD empire is in ashes? Again, nothing I said implies otherwise, nor relies upon this fact. What I said was that many of the examples Slashdotters use for bad "modern" pop music are now fairly dated (8 or so years out of date). Nothing more.
But since you bring up the subject, I'll point out that current shows (which started circa 2001) like Pop Idol and The X Factor (in the UK) and American Idol (the U.S. version of Pop Idol) have produced major selling artists such as Kelly Clarkson. Although I have to say that the other winners of American Idol don't appear to be that big in the UK, the winners of our X Factor are pretty big here (for a short while, anyway).
Since these shows are somewhat contrived and blandly restricted for entertainment reasons, the resulting pop stars are still somewhat manufactured.
Certainly true, but they made a comeback recently, and I saw an ad for their latest record on the TV yesterday. I'm aware of that, but apparently their comeback single did quite badly in the UK (compared to how it had been expected to do), and they're still basically riding on the backs of their 1990s popularity.
Why in the heck would somebody pay nearly double the price so that you can see the butt pimple of an actor? Eh, I'm sure that there are enough geeks out there who'd pay the money if they thought it would give them a better chance of seeing something like a couple of supposed stray pubes peeking out the edge of Natalie Portman's swimming costume in some beach scene or other.
Have you thought perhaps that for the vast majority of spice-girl-loving, Shrek-3 adoring consumers Spice Girls were at their commercial peak 10 years ago- all the little girls who were into their music back then are now grown up and halfway through university.
I've also noticed that "Backstreet Boys" and the like seem to crop up as examples of bad manufactured modern music, despite being phenomena of the late-1990s/early-2000s. Perhaps a sign that the Slashdot demographic is getting older (including myself, admittedly) and more out-of-touch? Not that I'm saying that a lot of current manufactured music is worth being "in touch" with- let alone listening to;-), but that's beside the point.
Anyway, Slashdot's archetypal "bad manufactured modern pop" princess, Britney Spears, originally dates from the same period (despite having an ongoing career). And she (or her producers) have released at least two bona fide pop classics (Baby One More Time and Toxic)- manufactured or not- as well as some other decent pop stuff. Granted, she's also released an awful lot of worthless pap, but enough with the "everything Britney Spears does is crap" schtick.
Very flawed reasoning:-
If the people buying the computers didn't want MS products then none of your so called illegal tactics would work. Claiming that people "want" Windows because they buy it oversimplifies the situation to the point of being misleading.
People "want" to run popular software and use an OS that they are "familiar" (*) with. Due to the self-reinforcing dominant position Windows is in (runs popular software and hardware, and is well known which means that most software is developed for it, and most people use it, leading to increased familiarity), that's what they go for.
And that's why not being able to offer Windows- or having to pay more for it than their rivals- would seriously harm most companies.
If there was a viable alternative at the time that people actually wanted, then the manufacturers would have told MS to piss off. Know why that didn't happen? Because people wanted to run IBM PC software, and (whether on an original PC or a clone) they needed MS-DOS to do that.
Again, not because of MS-DOS's own merits. (Let's disregard the fact that the original PC was technically nothing spectacular, and probably sold because it was an IBM).
Even disregarding that, I find your implication questionable. Namely that, had MS-DOS/Windows achieved their early success solely on their merits and/or genuine popularity (20 or so years ago), then this would make okay the current situation where Windows' current "popularity" is a function of its self-reinforcing, near-monopolistic market dominance? I disagree.
But my point is that even this was never the case- from its very beginning, MS-DOS's popularity was not solely- nor even primarily- because it was the "best". I seriously doubt that a mediocre CP/M knock-off called QDOS would have gained such popularity on its on merits.
Know why people bought MS-DOS instead of DR-DOS, because they wanted Windows. Spew all you want about illegal tactics, and openness and everything else, people wanted Windows Claiming that people "wanted" (again) MS-DOS over DR-DOS on that basis is highly questionable, since MS tried to make sure that DR-DOS couldn't run Windows. So, yeah, people "wanted" MS-DOS because it could run Windows and DR-DOS couldn't. I believe that was the point(!!); it says nothing about the quality of MS-DOS per se, and everything about MS's dirty tactics.
Be it familiarity This is not necessarily because Windows would be considered the best if everyone was starting from scratch. It's because it's the standard.
Standardisation has many advantages, and some may argue that a single de facto "standard" operating system is better than several superior OSs. That as may be, it doesn't mean that specific OS is the best, or the one that most people would want, everything else being equal. It's popular because it's standard.
This isn't to say that everything MS release sucks royally by any stretch of the imagination. It *is* to say that your assertion that people used- and continue to use- Windows because they actually "want" it is seriously flawed.
(*) This may be overstated, however- many people don't "know" Windows per se, yhey just know how to click a few icons and change some settings. The sort of stuff that may change quite a lot between major releases anyway (and the stuff that doesn't may be somewhat similar across various other non-Windows OSs). But the self-reinforcing belief that Windows is what people "know" will persist for some time.
I thought my comment was *very* obviously a tongue-in-cheek response (in the spirit of the post being replied to), making fun of the rivalry in a lighthearted manner. I was faintly worried that someone would take it in the wrong spirit, so I left the winking smiley on.
And there's *still* someone out there who takes it the wrong way. *And* reads way more into it than there was *and* uses it as an excuse (intentionally or otherwise) to air the bees in *their* bonnet!
You need to look up "Sassenachs" in a dictionary. And then note carefully the geographical location of the city of Edinburgh. Funny, I looked it up in two dictionaries, and they both claimed that it referred to the English.
Yes, I'm well aware that its origins were probably different, and that some may argue that it still holds those meanings, but frankly, I don't intend getting into a nitpicking discussion with the type of person who overanalyses, misses the humour in and misses the point of a throwaway joke.
You might, too, want to note that the University of Edinburgh has a very low percentage of Scots-born students and staff. To be blunt, had I been serious, I wouldn't have claimed that this that specifically a "Scottish" achievement- I believe that it was probably done in conjunction with lots of people, including those at other universities.
I'd half-expected someone to make another joshing response (in the same spirit as mine) along those lines- would have been quite funny then. More than can be said for you.
It wouldn't hurt you to also note that "Scotland" is a figment of your imagination. [..snip..] Do you seriously think that Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth or Dundee have ANYTHING in common? [..snip..] The parliament is just a new way of scamming more local government funds [etc] Seriously, did you just use my one-line joshing as an excuse to launch this rant?
Sorry, but despite being born in Edinburgh, I couldn't give a damn where you popped out of your Mum's womb. Regardless of who you are, what you consider your nationality to be, whatever, you're still a dick.
I'm seriously tired of small-minded, chip-on-the-shoulder Scottish-Nazism. So, from a one-line comment that any reasonable person would (at worst) take in the spirit of friendly rivalry and (at best) see as a tongue-in-check acknowledgement/parody of that rivalry- a one line comment that includes a winking smiley for fuck's sake(!), you manage to read all that into it and end up trying to associate me with Nazism?
You humourless, odious prick.
Your reply says far more about you than it ever will about me.
Chip-on-the-shoulder? You blatantly have a chip on *your* shoulder if you managed to get all that ranting out of a mildly funny joke.
The British don't mind being at any number as long as the best French *whatever* is lower ranked - 19 in the case of the latest supercomputer list. I'd say us Scots feel the same way about having the UK's fastest computer rather than the Sassenachs;-)
Go with AMD, you won't be disappointed. Yeah, but dont go with tyan, you will be disappointed Since you haven't bothered giving even a basic justification for this "opinion", and also that you're posting as an AC, I doubt many people will take this seriously. Probably a troll anyway.
They're still running around trying to locate the BFG first? No, no, The BFG wouldn't harm a fly. It's the maneating giants that you need if you want to get Jack Thompson.
Though personally, I'd have thought it easier just to get some sort of big fucking gun than to get a fictitious character from a Roald Dahl children's story to do the dirty work..:)
Record producers did try to fit the sound for low-fi at least as far back as the seventies As far as I'm aware, Phil Spector's early-1960s records were recorded to sound good on AM radio. Also, if you think about it, the "Wall of Sound" could be considered as aiming at the same target as compression did later. It aimed to give the listener an... erm, wall of sound that filled the whole audio spectrum. Some might argue that it did this in a more artistically interesting way, but it still seemed to be aiming for the same thing.
Could a company in Antigua take GPL software, strip out the copyrights and then "sell" that newly licensed code to Microsoft? Well, for one thing, I would guess that the majority of moderate-to-large-size GPLed projects have one or more notable contributions (and hence copyright) from non-Americans, so that's a spanner in the works for a start.
And ignoring that issue, I'm guessing that it would still be illegal for Microsoft to copy that stuff, it just wouldn't be illegal for the Antiguans to sell it to them.
some video formats get a little confused when like 1 bit is bad in the wrong place *cough cough WMV* Video formats don't get "confused" per se, that'd be the decoder that has to display them. (*) And I don't know how difficult it would be to recover a damaged WMV *if* this was necessary and enough people were motivated to consider the problem of data recovery. It's probably considered not necessary because film studios and the like wouldn't use such formats for archival purposes; if your copy is corrupt you get another copy. And those using it for home movies are out of luck(!)
(*) Disregarding that this is still anthropomorphisation, obviously:)
512 megs of RAM should have been perfectly fine. Anyone saying the OP was wasting time going thru the system in such a thorough fashion is likely just talking out of their ass. If you go back and read what RulerOf said in his original post, you'll see that he was- implicitly by mentioning the fact that the computer "only" had 512MB, and explicitly(!) by agreeing with the post he was replying to- stating that, yes, he agreed that memory *was* an issue and that Joe Sixpack could benefit from more of it.
Whether expanding to 1GB would have solved the problem altogether is open to question, but going by what RulerOf implied, it would have helped, even if the game wasn't the cause.
Yes, I made a mistake by misreading the game as WoW instead of Warcraft III, but quite frankly, you weren't paying any more attention yourself. If I was wrong, then the OP was equally wrong.
A friend of mine was running an XP computer with 512 of ram. He couldn't play Warcraft III [..]
After I gutted his computer [..] was he able to play the game acceptably and not get screwed by alt-tabbing. Quite frankly, given the cost of RAM these days, wouldn't it have made sense for him to upgrade that by at least 512MB anyway (at least in addition to the work you already did)? If he can afford to play WOW, he can clearly afford a half-gig stick of RAM.
Of course, if you weren't charging him for your time (or you consider your time worth nothing), then it makes more economic sense for him to get you to fix it- it's not costing him anything, so it's cheaper than spending a massive $45 on a new stick of RAM. Some people might consider that taking advantage of friendship, though since I don't know if you'd actually pointed out that upgrading his RAM would have solved much of the problem, it might not be fair to blame him.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet that the majority haven't heard of it, or at least have forgotten most of the details (including Sony's involvement), and that most of the others don't consider it that big a deal, even though they should.
Late teens? More likely perhaps, but I'd assume that the vast majority of current owners are in their twenties or thirties. Course, that won't stop the kids from knowing about and wanting one (so in a way you're almost right anyway), but I'm sure Mummy and Daddy are more likely to buy them a Wii. Well, *would* if they could get their hands on one.
Of course, if you "consider it null and void" because it seems obviously legally unsound, that's understandable. But bear in mind that the things that many people here think they "know" about the law (or how a court would see things) is wrong.
But *my* point was that the OP didn't specifically mention colour LCD displays anyway, and likely meant monochrome ones! *Those* have been in very common use since the 1970s. Anyone who knew what they were talking about would have realised that the OP probably had mono LCDs in mind. When the replier has the arrogance to say I guess if you're going to say something stupid it might as well be really stupid. I'm quite happy to point out that *he's* the idiot saying something stupid, not the OP. The important question that the GP asked -- and which you thoroughly failed to answer -- was this: were displays (of any sort; it doesn't matter which) ever put into the keys of keyboards?! No idea- since I'm not the person who made the original assertion, and answering it wasn't the reason for my post, I'm under no ******* obligation to have an answer to it.
Point is that iTunes is great if you only want one or two songs, and don't want to buy the whole album (they're still much cheaper than CD singles- even though those don't seem to be as overpriced as they used to be- and you aren't restricted to the charts or even what's released as a single). But iTunes for albums? Overpriced.
They might have been good value against the price of physical CDs ten-plus years ago, but that was before ripoff merchants like HMV and Virgin faced competition from online retailers like Amazon and P2P downloads. Sometimes iTunes are shockingly uncompetitive. The latest UK NOW album was something like 15 quid, when it was around a tenner in the shops, and I've seen them price el-cheapo 3CD box sets as around 3 full-price CDs, giving you something like "The Best of the 80s" at 24 quid, instead of paying 8 quid for it at Woolies.
I've bought one album off them, because it was out of print and available without DRM. But even that was the type of album that- had it been available in the shops- would likely have cost less than iTunes had it for.
As the other reply also stated, they could have been (and were) monochromatic. Monochromatic LCD displays (the type with "floating" grey elements against a non-illuminated reflective silver background), have been around since the early 1970s and were in widespread- and cheap- use by the early 1980s.
And yes, smartass, these were also "liquid crystal displays", and commonly referred to as LCDs. Up until a few years ago, this is the type of display people would have thought you meant when you said "LCD".
In other words, GP was right, you're wrong and... I guess if you're going to say something stupid it might as well be really stupid. Oh, the irony.
Or was it just a general observation (the "you" being the collective Slashdot audience)? Have you failed to notice that formerly all-powerful CD empire is in ashes? Again, nothing I said implies otherwise, nor relies upon this fact. What I said was that many of the examples Slashdotters use for bad "modern" pop music are now fairly dated (8 or so years out of date). Nothing more.
But since you bring up the subject, I'll point out that current shows (which started circa 2001) like Pop Idol and The X Factor (in the UK) and American Idol (the U.S. version of Pop Idol) have produced major selling artists such as Kelly Clarkson. Although I have to say that the other winners of American Idol don't appear to be that big in the UK, the winners of our X Factor are pretty big here (for a short while, anyway).
Since these shows are somewhat contrived and blandly restricted for entertainment reasons, the resulting pop stars are still somewhat manufactured.
I've also noticed that "Backstreet Boys" and the like seem to crop up as examples of bad manufactured modern music, despite being phenomena of the late-1990s/early-2000s. Perhaps a sign that the Slashdot demographic is getting older (including myself, admittedly) and more out-of-touch? Not that I'm saying that a lot of current manufactured music is worth being "in touch" with- let alone listening to
Anyway, Slashdot's archetypal "bad manufactured modern pop" princess, Britney Spears, originally dates from the same period (despite having an ongoing career). And she (or her producers) have released at least two bona fide pop classics (Baby One More Time and Toxic)- manufactured or not- as well as some other decent pop stuff. Granted, she's also released an awful lot of worthless pap, but enough with the "everything Britney Spears does is crap" schtick.
People "want" to run popular software and use an OS that they are "familiar" (*) with. Due to the self-reinforcing dominant position Windows is in (runs popular software and hardware, and is well known which means that most software is developed for it, and most people use it, leading to increased familiarity), that's what they go for.
And that's why not being able to offer Windows- or having to pay more for it than their rivals- would seriously harm most companies. If there was a viable alternative at the time that people actually wanted, then the manufacturers would have told MS to piss off. Know why that didn't happen? Because people wanted to run IBM PC software, and (whether on an original PC or a clone) they needed MS-DOS to do that.
Again, not because of MS-DOS's own merits. (Let's disregard the fact that the original PC was technically nothing spectacular, and probably sold because it was an IBM).
Even disregarding that, I find your implication questionable. Namely that, had MS-DOS/Windows achieved their early success solely on their merits and/or genuine popularity (20 or so years ago), then this would make okay the current situation where Windows' current "popularity" is a function of its self-reinforcing, near-monopolistic market dominance? I disagree.
But my point is that even this was never the case- from its very beginning, MS-DOS's popularity was not solely- nor even primarily- because it was the "best". I seriously doubt that a mediocre CP/M knock-off called QDOS would have gained such popularity on its on merits. Know why people bought MS-DOS instead of DR-DOS, because they wanted Windows. Spew all you want about illegal tactics, and openness and everything else, people wanted Windows Claiming that people "wanted" (again) MS-DOS over DR-DOS on that basis is highly questionable, since MS tried to make sure that DR-DOS couldn't run Windows. So, yeah, people "wanted" MS-DOS because it could run Windows and DR-DOS couldn't. I believe that was the point(!!); it says nothing about the quality of MS-DOS per se, and everything about MS's dirty tactics. Be it familiarity This is not necessarily because Windows would be considered the best if everyone was starting from scratch. It's because it's the standard.
Standardisation has many advantages, and some may argue that a single de facto "standard" operating system is better than several superior OSs. That as may be, it doesn't mean that specific OS is the best, or the one that most people would want, everything else being equal. It's popular because it's standard.
This isn't to say that everything MS release sucks royally by any stretch of the imagination. It *is* to say that your assertion that people used- and continue to use- Windows because they actually "want" it is seriously flawed.
(*) This may be overstated, however- many people don't "know" Windows per se, yhey just know how to click a few icons and change some settings. The sort of stuff that may change quite a lot between major releases anyway (and the stuff that doesn't may be somewhat similar across various other non-Windows OSs). But the self-reinforcing belief that Windows is what people "know" will persist for some time.
I thought my comment was *very* obviously a tongue-in-cheek response (in the spirit of the post being replied to), making fun of the rivalry in a lighthearted manner. I was faintly worried that someone would take it in the wrong spirit, so I left the winking smiley on.
And there's *still* someone out there who takes it the wrong way. *And* reads way more into it than there was *and* uses it as an excuse (intentionally or otherwise) to air the bees in *their* bonnet! You need to look up "Sassenachs" in a dictionary. And then note carefully the geographical location of the city of Edinburgh. Funny, I looked it up in two dictionaries, and they both claimed that it referred to the English.
Yes, I'm well aware that its origins were probably different, and that some may argue that it still holds those meanings, but frankly, I don't intend getting into a nitpicking discussion with the type of person who overanalyses, misses the humour in and misses the point of a throwaway joke. You might, too, want to note that the University of Edinburgh has a very low percentage of Scots-born students and staff. To be blunt, had I been serious, I wouldn't have claimed that this that specifically a "Scottish" achievement- I believe that it was probably done in conjunction with lots of people, including those at other universities.
I'd half-expected someone to make another joshing response (in the same spirit as mine) along those lines- would have been quite funny then. More than can be said for you. It wouldn't hurt you to also note that "Scotland" is a figment of your imagination. [..snip..] Do you seriously think that Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth or Dundee have ANYTHING in common? [..snip..] The parliament is just a new way of scamming more local government funds [etc] Seriously, did you just use my one-line joshing as an excuse to launch this rant? Sorry, but despite being born in Edinburgh, I couldn't give a damn where you popped out of your Mum's womb. Regardless of who you are, what you consider your nationality to be, whatever, you're still a dick. I'm seriously tired of small-minded, chip-on-the-shoulder Scottish-Nazism. So, from a one-line comment that any reasonable person would (at worst) take in the spirit of friendly rivalry and (at best) see as a tongue-in-check acknowledgement/parody of that rivalry- a one line comment that includes a winking smiley for fuck's sake(!), you manage to read all that into it and end up trying to associate me with Nazism?
You humourless, odious prick.
Your reply says far more about you than it ever will about me.
Chip-on-the-shoulder? You blatantly have a chip on *your* shoulder if you managed to get all that ranting out of a mildly funny joke.
Though personally, I'd have thought it easier just to get some sort of big fucking gun than to get a fictitious character from a Roald Dahl children's story to do the dirty work..
And ignoring that issue, I'm guessing that it would still be illegal for Microsoft to copy that stuff, it just wouldn't be illegal for the Antiguans to sell it to them.
(*) Disregarding that this is still anthropomorphisation, obviously
Mod parent down, more MyMiniCity spam.
Whether expanding to 1GB would have solved the problem altogether is open to question, but going by what RulerOf implied, it would have helped, even if the game wasn't the cause.
Yes, I made a mistake by misreading the game as WoW instead of Warcraft III, but quite frankly, you weren't paying any more attention yourself. If I was wrong, then the OP was equally wrong.
Of course, if you weren't charging him for your time (or you consider your time worth nothing), then it makes more economic sense for him to get you to fix it- it's not costing him anything, so it's cheaper than spending a massive $45 on a new stick of RAM. Some people might consider that taking advantage of friendship, though since I don't know if you'd actually pointed out that upgrading his RAM would have solved much of the problem, it might not be fair to blame him.