The guy whose question/problem forms the basis of this thread already *had* a job; he quit it on the basis of an agreement which was later reneged upon.
Now, although I feel sorry for him, the fact remains that he definitely *shouldn't* have done this if he didn't have the agreement in writing. As stated elsewhere, the contract is what you have in writing; anything else is a bonus.
Having said that, I don't know what U.S. laws are relating to verbal contracts (don't live there, don't ever intend living there). In the UK, verbal contracts are generally binding, but are obviously hard to prove. Note that the original poster stated
The relocation manager tells me that whenever there is conflict between their relocation policy and the offer, their internal relocation policy supersedes. This brings up some issues. If it could be proven in court that the relocation manager said this, does it imply that he/she knows that an offer was made, or are they simply reciting a general policy?
If the former, it implies that they are knowingly using their "policy" to renege on the verbal agreement. (Let's remember that if the agreement were in writing, this wouldn't- or shouldn't- fly, any more than "We agreed to pay you $40,000 in your contract, but that conflicts with our policy limiting your job to $25,000, so tough" would).
Even if the manager *didn't* know for sure about the verbal offer, the very existence of the "policy" is legally suspect, as its existence is only necessary if the company was routinely making verbal offers which it did not intend to fulfil. (This assumes that verbal contracts are binding in that jurisdiction).
Even if it could not be proven that the relocation manager said what he said in this specific case (let alone was aware of the terms of the original verbal offer), or that the policy he referred to was unwritten.... the company could implicate itself through a pattern of behaviour.
But... IANAL, particularly not an American one, and I wouldn't want to have to fight and prove this sort of stuff in court.
Didn't they used to do something similar in the early Atari 2600 days (before my time, mostly); i.e. the games had minor variants that were counted as separate games?
In fact, the more I think about it the more I wonder why used retailers don't attempt to take a slight loss on selling new consoles in order to "prime the pump" for their used market. The only two reasons I can think of Another potential reason- There's no guaranteed lock-in. That is, just because you got a product cheap from a particular used retailer, doesn't mean you'll buy from them again.
And depending on the price of the console (new ones especially), it might take a lot of used game sales to make up a percentage discount on the console. Plus, won't the used market be minor for consoles that are relatively new?
The Best-Buy/Currys/[Insert your country's chain here] model where they make most of the profit on extended warranties, grossly overpriced cables and the like doesn't apply here, because they're normally sold at the same time as the console.
First Life is a pyramid scheme too... some people tell us that our actions within it have benefits outside this life, but I see no proof. And to make it worthwhile for ourselves, we end up taking actions that tend to lead to the creation of a new generation of people within First Life, and so on ad infinitum.
I wasn't aware that Spinal Tap's audience was particularly geeky.
Anyhow, if you want a *real* "hand in your geek card" comment, I'll mention that I (genuinely) find the Star Wars films massively overrated...
Lots of people seem to love it, but I have admit that I didn't find it funny. Sure, there are some good quotes (like that one), but overall it just didn't do anything for me. OTOH, that's just my $0.02...
I'm well aware of that; I would assume that commercial tapes were using SP anyway.
On PAL systems (at least), E-180 and E-240 (three and four hours respectively using SP) are *the* standard tape lengths (don't know which of the two is most common). I've never been aware of problems caused by using E-240s, let alone E-180s.
However, I should point out that (in SP mode) PAL tapes run slower than NTSC (70% of the speed); thus an E-180 and E-240 would be labelled T-125 and T-167 respectively if meant for NTSC use. (*) So maybe the two-hour limit did make more sense for the U.S. market, and the Europeans followed their formatting, either because it was easier (e.g. if they wanted to use the same packaging/marketing) or because they thought they could make more money this way. But it still doesn't excuse 50 minute long tapes...
(*) AFAIK, blank PAL and NTSC VHS tapes are physically identical; the only difference is the labelling, since a tape of a given length will have a different duration under each system.
Okay; I was only going by what I heard. As I said, if you and other diehard Amiga owners enjoy using it, that's great; I just don't think it'll have any mainstream impact at all.
MiniDisc originally came out at the start of 1992. Whether or not the MP3 spec (as part of the MPEG-1 suite) had been released then, MP3 as a standalone format for listening to (and sharing) music was rare prior to the mid-1990s. (Even the term MP3- as the file extension- was only coined in 1995). And it wasn't until the late 1990s that it *really* exploded as a mainstream phenomenon.
MiniDisc was a relative failure in North America- IIRC- because it was too expensive for the teenage-type market it was aimed at. It should be noted that it *was* a success in Asia; well, Japan at least, where it replaced the traditional cassette.
Oddly, here in Europe it seemed to enjoy a moderate level of popularity in the late 90s/early 2000s, several years *after* it first came out and prior to the rise of usable-capacity MP3 players. They seem to have disappeared in the face of the iPod and the like.
But my point is that MP3 doesn't explain their overall lack of success; it's irrelevant to MiniDisc's early life, for example.
I'm always curious though... DVD never really took off (it was popular, but not in-every-living-room popular) until CSS was cracked and people could copy their own DVDs (or rather buy copied DVD movies for $5 from the kid down the hall.) That was the real death knell for VHS. I can only add to what others have said about the implausibility of this. I got my first DVD player (or rather, a drive for my PC) in 2002. The format was already well-established by then and there were many DVDs available at pretty decent prices (I got my first couple of DVDs from a Fopp retail store for £7).
Yet writable DVD drives were still in the £300-£400 range at that time.
And while we're on the subject, I used to subscribe to a Netflix-style service. I'd intended copying the discs, and whilst I was able to do this, it wasn't worth the hassle; averaging out the rental cost, plus the price of the disc, plus the time taken to rip and compress the DVD onto a single layer disc..... I realised that I could buy the complete box set at a decent price and said "sod it...."
The size of the discs probably made it possible to sell complete season/series box-sets widely. This never happened on VHS; although the tapes were bulkier, they also seemed to want to milk the buyer with 1h-2h content on a tape, when they could have fitted more. Possible result? Too expensive, too bulky; so how often did anyone buy complete runs? Not often.
I guess with DVD someone twigged that countless people buying the complete series at a third of the price equated to far more profit than four nerds who shelled out for a couple of seasons of ST:TNG at two episodes per tape...
Heh... sorry, for a minute I did mistake you for one of those rabid fanboys that thinks OS 4 really will mark a comeback for the Amiga.
Your Linux dream isn't entirely implausible; I doubt the US will ever lead the charge, but there are many developing countries which might deploy it widely enough. Personally, I don't think Windows will go down the tubes in the forseeable future, but there *may* be an end to its monoculture dominance, which is the important thing.
There's no reason that a completely new OS can't remain compatible (through emulation). Apple has done it a couple of times already, and in a limited way you could say that Sony do it with their PlayStation! I was thinking more of the OS architecture and calls than actual hardware emulation. But either way, it's possible of course, it'd just be pointless for a mainstream OS. As I said, all but the diehard hobbyists had migrated away from the Amiga by the end of the 1990s.
Those getting nostalgic for their Amiga days could use an A500 (or whatever) standalone emulator program; that would probably be better given that many games used brittle hardware tricks that bypassed the OS anyway. Those requiring access to Amiga data would likely have it converted to a modern format (though they've probably done that already).
it does sound like they just took Workbench and built some 3rd party modules into the core. That isn't necessarily a bad thing though, I guess. It sounds fine if you're an Amiga hobbyist, but everyone else would expect something *much* more modern. And since most people wouldn't be bothered about Amiga compatibility, it'd probably be better to build a new OS from scratch.
If it had a decent web browser and office suite then it's basically ready to work in an office environment, and if it runs faster and more stable (though it doesn't sound spectacularly stable from the review, and I did tend to elicit guru meditation in my Amiga days, though maybe that's because I was messing about with the OS too much or just coding poorly:p ), and also runs on cheap hardware, why not? It's like Linux And that's the nub; Linux is well-established, open, and can take advantage of modern hardware. What advantage does Amiga OS offer over it?
- it can be used, it's 'better than Windows' It depends what you're looking for. Windows XP (and certainly Vista), whatever its advantages and disadvantages, isn't Windows 3.1, the Amiga's inferior contemporary. I'm sure Amiga OS 3 was much more efficient for the hardware it ran on, but that's beside the point.
but it's just not as well known so it would take a lot of effort to get everyone to switch. I'm torn between being polite and expressing myself with the bluntness I want to use here....
You're living in cloud cuckoo land if you think anyone is going to switch back to Amiga OS after all these years without a compelling reason. Since you said yourself that the new Amiga OS seems to be the old one with some third-party modules, what is there? An OS that hasn't seen any significant mainstream development for at least 10 years. Sorry, but that's how I see it.
Since compatibility isn't an issue for mainstream users any more, the Amiga OS would offer no advantage over a "developed from scratch" OS (and look how many of them have fallen by the wayside). But if you're going to do that, it's not really an Amiga OS, is it?
On the other hand, maybe that's not an issue. I'm still struggling to see what that "Amiga Anywhere" Java-based platform thing had to do with the "real" Amiga, besides the name...
Re:Spaceballs?
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AmigaOS 4
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The Amiga really did switch tasks immediately, I'd forgotten that. The multitasking was way ahead of anything Windows had at the time, and probably even has now. That's true; the Amiga had pre-emptive multitasking in 1985. This was vastly better than the co-operative multitasking in "on-top-of-DOS" versions of Windows prior to 95.
I remember using telnet under Windows 3.1; when it was unable to connect to the remote machine, you had to wait for the connection to timeout before you got control of your computer back, because telnet didn't cede control of the multitasking. This was a PITA.
Hate to say it though; this OS release is likely wildly irrelevant from a mainstream perspective- one for the diehards only. The Amiga OS was fantastic in its time, but things have moved on and the serious users and applications migrated- never to return- a *long* time ago.
From that perspective, it'd have to build a reputation from scratch. And given this, great though Amigs OS was in its day, I think it would make more sense to build a new OS from the ground up, rather than remaining compatible with the old Amiga OS and its software. Of course, that's from a mainstream perspective; if this new release gives the hobbyists pleasure, that's fine by me.
So just what does Bill Gate's penis have to do with Windows Vista? Thats right nothing.
Which is why it's unlikely to be a problem beyond making WP look unprofessional. Unless people actually believe that Bill Gates has no dick and stop buying Windows for that very reason(!)
Yes that's true. However, the *facts* remain - your post spreads misinformation
No, it was a correct representation of my personal experience, which I clearly pointed out was "a while back".
As for you not knowing what the current situation viz Paypal is
The current *legal* situation; I don't know if they had a UK subsidiary at that time, and what (if any) UK legal obligations they had back then.
well maybe you shouldn't post on a subject where you know nothing about the current situation
So if I have a bad experience with a company, I shouldn't mention it later on because the company *might* have changed?
Nope; too bad. This is how reputations- both good and bad- are formed. If a company like PayPal gets a bad reputation (for valid reasons), which my experience confirmed, they have to work to change that. It might teach other businesses a lesson, and anyway, people have a right to be sceptical.
at least make allowance in your post for the fact that things might have changed.
You could say that about any complaint. I made clear that my experience was "a while back"; people can judge how valid it is in today's context. As I said, my experience was that I'd heard from numerous sources that PayPal sucked. I cut it some slack and gave it a chance, and it still sucked.
Maybe Microsoft SHOULD pay the better respected press memebers to keep Wikipedia on track until those that think that putting "Bill Gates has no penis" in the Windows Vista entry grow up.
They wouldn't be "well-respected" for their journalism if it ever got out that they were being paid by MS.
Anyhow, "Bill Gates has no penis" is blatant vandalism and abuse, and as such isn't likely to prove a problem for MS. Not unless it really *is* plausible that Bill Gates has no penis; and if that were true, the best way to avoid publicising the fact would be to act as if it weren't:-)
u should only go by snowflakes that u can actually SEE:) not lil microscopic ones that u cant see. i dont think those r really snowflakes
I'm not going to get involved in the troll/t'isnt argument, but I think that this has a good point. Did the people who first observed that "no two snowflakes are alike" really have the tiny meet-the-modern-technical-definition ones in mind? I suspect not. The saying is probably true enough in spirit if not literal interpretation.
: Well nice try FUD man. Here is the first page customers get when using Paypal as a payment gateway. Is it so hard to find the non paypal account option ?
Mmm... And I don't suppose it occurred to you that, since I clearly mentioned that I used them "a while back", PayPal may have changed their website/process since then?
:Also, notice the writing at the bottom of the page - Authorised and Regulated by the Financial Services Authority in the United Kingdom as an electronic money institution.
I don't recall PayPal's legal status in the UK back then, but I was discussing the "your money is safe with PayPal"-type guarantees (not their legal obligations) which only applied to US customers at the time.
:Just for completeness, here is the second page you get to if you choose non paypal. Oh, seems like that's pretty straightforward too.
Maybe you're right; as I said, it was a couple of years ago (or so) that I used PayPal. Though I'm still sceptical until I've seen the whole payment process for myself, and I'm not inclined to waste any more of my time on it.
:Maybe you're just a troll.
Feel free to check my comment history for troll-like behaviour if you like; I doubt you'll find much.
I note that your homepage is a commercial website that uses PayPal as its payment system. If we're throwing accusations about, I'd say you have a vested interest in PayPal not looking bad.
Personally, I still won't touch them with a barge pole; others can judge for themselves.
Billionaires often feel that they are better than everyone else, and that they don't have to be open and honest. The billionaires who run eBay seem to think that way.
That's because eBay is verging on being a monopoly when it comes to online auctions. If there were an alternative that got anything like the audience eBay gets, I suspect a lot of users sick of their BS would switch over very quickly.
Personally, I wouldn't. I'd already heard enough on them withholding payments on dubious grounds that I won't even consider setting up an account (which I might otherwise have considered for buying/selling stuff on EBay).
However, a while back I wanted to pay for something, and PayPal gave the impression you could do this through them without setting up an account. Yet when I actually tried paying, every step seemed to want account details, or be forcing me in that direction. I concluded that (at best) it *might* have been theoretically possible to pay without an account, but that the process was deliberately designed to make this hard, and to bully and niggle you into setting one up.
That wasn't going to happen, and I wasn't prepared to fight this nonsense over God-knows-how-many screens. Partly because I didn't have the inclination, and partly because it confirmed that PayPal were a lousy, self-interested company who didn't give a damn for their customers' interests. From what I've read elsewhere in this thread, this was the right conclusion; PayPal don't even look like a good bet for simple payments.
Half their BS "guarantees" don't even apply in the UK (where I stay) anyway.
My guess would be silicon costs and/or complexity of the spec.
My point was that this would be *optional*. Not all players would be required to support it; nor even all CDs (although I really doubt it would have increased the complexity of mastering much). Machines that don't support it only need to recognise it as an unsupported feature and skip however many bytes. That's all- trivial.
You say that memory was measured in kilobytes; well, as I said, the feature would be optional, but the basic details for an album (name, artist, songs) could probably be stored in a single kilobyte of that 650MB space; and each song title would require (say) 50 bytes to be held for the display.
It's quite reasonable to assume that by the time CDs had become an established mass-market technology, things would have progressed far enough that *some* higher-end (or non-portable) players might have been able to support a rudimentary text display. Maybe not in 1982, but there's this little thing called "foresight"...
As I said, I believe it would have been trivial to add to the spec, caused no harm (or additional complexity) if the early players didn't support it, and might have proved very useful later on. It just seems risible that on a system that had (for the time) mindboggling amounts of digital storage, no-one thought to reserve a few bytes for some optional ASCII text that could be ignored anyway.
It defies belief that this wasn't incorporated into the CD standard from the beginning; how much space would the ASCII (or similar) encoded artist name, album name, song titles and some other brief information have taken up on a 650MB disk?!
Sure, the early players likely wouldn't have supported it, due to the cost of displays. But this would likely have changed as costs came down, and it could be treated as an "optional" feature (either for the players or for a given CD) anyway. Since it would have been trivial to include in the spec, and to add such information at the mastering/manufacturing stage, there is very little justification for *not* including this from the beginning. Stupid.
I remember a series of painting that mysteriously displayed photograph like perspective that later were determined to have been made using the equivalent of a pinhole camera. The artist traced the outline of the scene while inside the darkroom on the canvas which was illuminated with the pinhole image.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, although I feel sorry for him, the fact remains that he definitely *shouldn't* have done this if he didn't have the agreement in writing. As stated elsewhere, the contract is what you have in writing; anything else is a bonus.
Having said that, I don't know what U.S. laws are relating to verbal contracts (don't live there, don't ever intend living there). In the UK, verbal contracts are generally binding, but are obviously hard to prove. Note that the original poster stated The relocation manager tells me that whenever there is conflict between their relocation policy and the offer, their internal relocation policy supersedes. This brings up some issues. If it could be proven in court that the relocation manager said this, does it imply that he/she knows that an offer was made, or are they simply reciting a general policy?
If the former, it implies that they are knowingly using their "policy" to renege on the verbal agreement. (Let's remember that if the agreement were in writing, this wouldn't- or shouldn't- fly, any more than "We agreed to pay you $40,000 in your contract, but that conflicts with our policy limiting your job to $25,000, so tough" would).
Even if the manager *didn't* know for sure about the verbal offer, the very existence of the "policy" is legally suspect, as its existence is only necessary if the company was routinely making verbal offers which it did not intend to fulfil. (This assumes that verbal contracts are binding in that jurisdiction).
Even if it could not be proven that the relocation manager said what he said in this specific case (let alone was aware of the terms of the original verbal offer), or that the policy he referred to was unwritten.... the company could implicate itself through a pattern of behaviour.
But... IANAL, particularly not an American one, and I wouldn't want to have to fight and prove this sort of stuff in court.
HP have lost their soul now that they've been taken over by Heinz and moved their brown sauce production to the Netherlands.
What?
Didn't they used to do something similar in the early Atari 2600 days (before my time, mostly); i.e. the games had minor variants that were counted as separate games?
And depending on the price of the console (new ones especially), it might take a lot of used game sales to make up a percentage discount on the console. Plus, won't the used market be minor for consoles that are relatively new?
The Best-Buy/Currys/[Insert your country's chain here] model where they make most of the profit on extended warranties, grossly overpriced cables and the like doesn't apply here, because they're normally sold at the same time as the console.
First Life is a pyramid scheme too... some people tell us that our actions within it have benefits outside this life, but I see no proof. And to make it worthwhile for ourselves, we end up taking actions that tend to lead to the creation of a new generation of people within First Life, and so on ad infinitum.
Bleh!
I wasn't aware that Spinal Tap's audience was particularly geeky. Anyhow, if you want a *real* "hand in your geek card" comment, I'll mention that I (genuinely) find the Star Wars films massively overrated...
"This is Spinal Tap", a mock rock documentary.
Lots of people seem to love it, but I have admit that I didn't find it funny. Sure, there are some good quotes (like that one), but overall it just didn't do anything for me. OTOH, that's just my $0.02...
I'm well aware of that; I would assume that commercial tapes were using SP anyway.
On PAL systems (at least), E-180 and E-240 (three and four hours respectively using SP) are *the* standard tape lengths (don't know which of the two is most common). I've never been aware of problems caused by using E-240s, let alone E-180s.
However, I should point out that (in SP mode) PAL tapes run slower than NTSC (70% of the speed); thus an E-180 and E-240 would be labelled T-125 and T-167 respectively if meant for NTSC use. (*) So maybe the two-hour limit did make more sense for the U.S. market, and the Europeans followed their formatting, either because it was easier (e.g. if they wanted to use the same packaging/marketing) or because they thought they could make more money this way. But it still doesn't excuse 50 minute long tapes...
(*) AFAIK, blank PAL and NTSC VHS tapes are physically identical; the only difference is the labelling, since a tape of a given length will have a different duration under each system.
Okay; I was only going by what I heard. As I said, if you and other diehard Amiga owners enjoy using it, that's great; I just don't think it'll have any mainstream impact at all.
MiniDisc originally came out at the start of 1992. Whether or not the MP3 spec (as part of the MPEG-1 suite) had been released then, MP3 as a standalone format for listening to (and sharing) music was rare prior to the mid-1990s. (Even the term MP3- as the file extension- was only coined in 1995). And it wasn't until the late 1990s that it *really* exploded as a mainstream phenomenon.
MiniDisc was a relative failure in North America- IIRC- because it was too expensive for the teenage-type market it was aimed at. It should be noted that it *was* a success in Asia; well, Japan at least, where it replaced the traditional cassette.
Oddly, here in Europe it seemed to enjoy a moderate level of popularity in the late 90s/early 2000s, several years *after* it first came out and prior to the rise of usable-capacity MP3 players. They seem to have disappeared in the face of the iPod and the like.
But my point is that MP3 doesn't explain their overall lack of success; it's irrelevant to MiniDisc's early life, for example.
Yet writable DVD drives were still in the £300-£400 range at that time.
And while we're on the subject, I used to subscribe to a Netflix-style service. I'd intended copying the discs, and whilst I was able to do this, it wasn't worth the hassle; averaging out the rental cost, plus the price of the disc, plus the time taken to rip and compress the DVD onto a single layer disc..... I realised that I could buy the complete box set at a decent price and said "sod it...."
The size of the discs probably made it possible to sell complete season/series box-sets widely. This never happened on VHS; although the tapes were bulkier, they also seemed to want to milk the buyer with 1h-2h content on a tape, when they could have fitted more. Possible result? Too expensive, too bulky; so how often did anyone buy complete runs? Not often.
I guess with DVD someone twigged that countless people buying the complete series at a third of the price equated to far more profit than four nerds who shelled out for a couple of seasons of ST:TNG at two episodes per tape...
Heh... sorry, for a minute I did mistake you for one of those rabid fanboys that thinks OS 4 really will mark a comeback for the Amiga.
Your Linux dream isn't entirely implausible; I doubt the US will ever lead the charge, but there are many developing countries which might deploy it widely enough. Personally, I don't think Windows will go down the tubes in the forseeable future, but there *may* be an end to its monoculture dominance, which is the important thing.
You're living in cloud cuckoo land if you think anyone is going to switch back to Amiga OS after all these years without a compelling reason. Since you said yourself that the new Amiga OS seems to be the old one with some third-party modules, what is there? An OS that hasn't seen any significant mainstream development for at least 10 years. Sorry, but that's how I see it.
Since compatibility isn't an issue for mainstream users any more, the Amiga OS would offer no advantage over a "developed from scratch" OS (and look how many of them have fallen by the wayside). But if you're going to do that, it's not really an Amiga OS, is it?
On the other hand, maybe that's not an issue. I'm still struggling to see what that "Amiga Anywhere" Java-based platform thing had to do with the "real" Amiga, besides the name...
I remember using telnet under Windows 3.1; when it was unable to connect to the remote machine, you had to wait for the connection to timeout before you got control of your computer back, because telnet didn't cede control of the multitasking. This was a PITA.
Hate to say it though; this OS release is likely wildly irrelevant from a mainstream perspective- one for the diehards only. The Amiga OS was fantastic in its time, but things have moved on and the serious users and applications migrated- never to return- a *long* time ago.
From that perspective, it'd have to build a reputation from scratch. And given this, great though Amigs OS was in its day, I think it would make more sense to build a new OS from the ground up, rather than remaining compatible with the old Amiga OS and its software. Of course, that's from a mainstream perspective; if this new release gives the hobbyists pleasure, that's fine by me.
So just what does Bill Gate's penis have to do with Windows Vista? Thats right nothing.
Which is why it's unlikely to be a problem beyond making WP look unprofessional. Unless people actually believe that Bill Gates has no dick and stop buying Windows for that very reason(!)
Yes that's true. However, the *facts* remain - your post spreads misinformation
No, it was a correct representation of my personal experience, which I clearly pointed out was "a while back".
As for you not knowing what the current situation viz Paypal is
The current *legal* situation; I don't know if they had a UK subsidiary at that time, and what (if any) UK legal obligations they had back then.
well maybe you shouldn't post on a subject where you know nothing about the current situation
So if I have a bad experience with a company, I shouldn't mention it later on because the company *might* have changed?
Nope; too bad. This is how reputations- both good and bad- are formed. If a company like PayPal gets a bad reputation (for valid reasons), which my experience confirmed, they have to work to change that. It might teach other businesses a lesson, and anyway, people have a right to be sceptical.
at least make allowance in your post for the fact that things might have changed.
You could say that about any complaint. I made clear that my experience was "a while back"; people can judge how valid it is in today's context. As I said, my experience was that I'd heard from numerous sources that PayPal sucked. I cut it some slack and gave it a chance, and it still sucked.
And how long is that going to work for, even if you never publicise the details of your scheme?
Maybe Microsoft SHOULD pay the better respected press memebers to keep Wikipedia on track until those that think that putting "Bill Gates has no penis" in the Windows Vista entry grow up.
:-)
They wouldn't be "well-respected" for their journalism if it ever got out that they were being paid by MS.
Anyhow, "Bill Gates has no penis" is blatant vandalism and abuse, and as such isn't likely to prove a problem for MS. Not unless it really *is* plausible that Bill Gates has no penis; and if that were true, the best way to avoid publicising the fact would be to act as if it weren't
u should only go by snowflakes that u can actually SEE :) not lil microscopic ones that u cant see. i dont think those r really snowflakes
I'm not going to get involved in the troll/t'isnt argument, but I think that this has a good point. Did the people who first observed that "no two snowflakes are alike" really have the tiny meet-the-modern-technical-definition ones in mind? I suspect not. The saying is probably true enough in spirit if not literal interpretation.
: Well nice try FUD man. Here is the first page customers get when using Paypal as a payment gateway. Is it so hard to find the non paypal account option ?
:Also, notice the writing at the bottom of the page - Authorised and Regulated by the Financial Services Authority in the United Kingdom as an electronic money institution.
:Just for completeness, here is the second page you get to if you choose non paypal. Oh, seems like that's pretty straightforward too.
:Maybe you're just a troll.
Mmm... And I don't suppose it occurred to you that, since I clearly mentioned that I used them "a while back", PayPal may have changed their website/process since then?
I don't recall PayPal's legal status in the UK back then, but I was discussing the "your money is safe with PayPal"-type guarantees (not their legal obligations) which only applied to US customers at the time.
Maybe you're right; as I said, it was a couple of years ago (or so) that I used PayPal. Though I'm still sceptical until I've seen the whole payment process for myself, and I'm not inclined to waste any more of my time on it.
Feel free to check my comment history for troll-like behaviour if you like; I doubt you'll find much.
I note that your homepage is a commercial website that uses PayPal as its payment system. If we're throwing accusations about, I'd say you have a vested interest in PayPal not looking bad.
Personally, I still won't touch them with a barge pole; others can judge for themselves.
Billionaires often feel that they are better than everyone else, and that they don't have to be open and honest. The billionaires who run eBay seem to think that way.
That's because eBay is verging on being a monopoly when it comes to online auctions. If there were an alternative that got anything like the audience eBay gets, I suspect a lot of users sick of their BS would switch over very quickly.
Personally, i would use paypal.
Personally, I wouldn't. I'd already heard enough on them withholding payments on dubious grounds that I won't even consider setting up an account (which I might otherwise have considered for buying/selling stuff on EBay).
However, a while back I wanted to pay for something, and PayPal gave the impression you could do this through them without setting up an account. Yet when I actually tried paying, every step seemed to want account details, or be forcing me in that direction. I concluded that (at best) it *might* have been theoretically possible to pay without an account, but that the process was deliberately designed to make this hard, and to bully and niggle you into setting one up.
That wasn't going to happen, and I wasn't prepared to fight this nonsense over God-knows-how-many screens. Partly because I didn't have the inclination, and partly because it confirmed that PayPal were a lousy, self-interested company who didn't give a damn for their customers' interests. From what I've read elsewhere in this thread, this was the right conclusion; PayPal don't even look like a good bet for simple payments.
Half their BS "guarantees" don't even apply in the UK (where I stay) anyway.
PayPal is a deal-breaker; I won't use it, period.
My guess would be silicon costs and/or complexity of the spec.
My point was that this would be *optional*. Not all players would be required to support it; nor even all CDs (although I really doubt it would have increased the complexity of mastering much). Machines that don't support it only need to recognise it as an unsupported feature and skip however many bytes. That's all- trivial.
You say that memory was measured in kilobytes; well, as I said, the feature would be optional, but the basic details for an album (name, artist, songs) could probably be stored in a single kilobyte of that 650MB space; and each song title would require (say) 50 bytes to be held for the display.
It's quite reasonable to assume that by the time CDs had become an established mass-market technology, things would have progressed far enough that *some* higher-end (or non-portable) players might have been able to support a rudimentary text display. Maybe not in 1982, but there's this little thing called "foresight"...
As I said, I believe it would have been trivial to add to the spec, caused no harm (or additional complexity) if the early players didn't support it, and might have proved very useful later on. It just seems risible that on a system that had (for the time) mindboggling amounts of digital storage, no-one thought to reserve a few bytes for some optional ASCII text that could be ignored anyway.
It defies belief that this wasn't incorporated into the CD standard from the beginning; how much space would the ASCII (or similar) encoded artist name, album name, song titles and some other brief information have taken up on a 650MB disk?!
Sure, the early players likely wouldn't have supported it, due to the cost of displays. But this would likely have changed as costs came down, and it could be treated as an "optional" feature (either for the players or for a given CD) anyway. Since it would have been trivial to include in the spec, and to add such information at the mastering/manufacturing stage, there is very little justification for *not* including this from the beginning. Stupid.
I remember a series of painting that mysteriously displayed photograph like perspective that later were determined to have been made using the equivalent of a pinhole camera. The artist traced the outline of the scene while inside the darkroom on the canvas which was illuminated with the pinhole image.
Possibly Vermeer?