When a customer is sold on a product with term such as lifetime I'm sure Tivo know exactly how the customer will perceive that yet their happy to craft their terms of use in the fine print to give them an out.
The Tivo is primarily a consumer item, and the UK consumer laws are reasonably strong. IANAL, but from what I vaguely(!!) recollect, if that were true and (e.g.) they relied on that definition being obscurely and unintelligibly hidden away while they prominently sold the service on being "LIFETIME!" (knowing full well how most consumers would interpret that) the court may rule based on what an average person's reasonable interpretation of the deal presented was- i.e. lifetime of the box- taking this into account.
The only alternative is to never shut the service down, ever, until the end of time, which is patently ridiculous.
Of course it's ridiculous- even if they were to meet their promises to every Tivo owner, the boxes won't last forever. And anyway, past a certain point, they could probably afford to refund the very few remaining owners their subscription fees (and possibly the cost of the box) in full. I doubt any court- or indeed reasonable person- would consider Tivo obliged to do any more than that, at most.
They didn't actually do that though so this is irrelevant.
On the contrary, it's your red herring above- i.e. what they "actually" did- that's irrelevant here, not what he said. We were discussing the nature of the original agreement and what was possible by your (and possibly their) supposed definition of the word "lifetime".
If we use the "lifetime of the service" definition for "lifetime subscription", then technically they *could* have shut it off after a day. That was the point he was making- that they did or didn't do that is neither here nor there.
If "lifetime" referred to the lifetime of the box, or of the person, then the fact that they kept it running for ten years is irrelevant- it's not a lifetime subscription by that definition.
I don't know what the original agreement said, so I can't argue it further than that. I do know that *if* they used that definition of "lifetime", but deliberately didn't make it prominent, then (IANAL) a court might rest more heavily on the interpretation that an average person would take from the promotional and agreement material. Obviously a number of "ifs" there though.
The existing TiVo userbase is a (small) competitor to the new Virgin TiVo box
"Small" is putting it mildly. There were *very* few Tivo units sold in the UK in the first place (35,000 over the 18 months it was sold here according to Wikipedia, it was a pretty big flop). And it was withdrawn from the market 9 years ago.
AFAIK, those boxes only worked directly with analogue transmissions (*) which have already been discontinued in many areas and are due for imminent discontinuation in the rest of the UK, and only ever gave 5 channels in the vast majority of cases.
And I suspect that a large proportion of them will have broken down by now (hard drive most likely), or not be in use. Of the remainder, anyone interested in what Virgin could offer probably would have moved on by now. In short, the number of potential customers Virgin/Tivo might get by pressurising the existing Tivo userbase is probably negligible. In fact, it's just as likely that Tivo doesn't want to have to support a technologically obsolete service for the sake of a very small number of remaining users.
(*) I don't know if and how it worked with satellite services like (e.g.) Sky, IIRC there was some slightly convoluted way of recording Sky by connecting the Tivo to the Sky digibox's analogue output. And the current UK terrestrial standard, DVB-T, wasn't even used for freely-available transmissions at the time Tivo was being sold, only for the flop "ITV Digital" pay service that went bankrupt, so I doubt it supported that- and hence current "Freeview" DVB-T transmissions- directly.
How long will it take bloatware to include "browser bars" specifically designed to contaminate the results? If expertsexchange paid HP to add a browser bar that sent fake data to google claiming their domain is the best....
Not going to happen, at least not with them.
(1) IANAL, but Google would probably have some legal basis for sueing them up the wazoo if they were engaged in a blatant scheme to actively send bogus information and undermine their scheme. Not sure whether or not that would even require Google to prohibit this in the T&C, but I'm damn sure they'd include it anyway.
(2) The publicity could easily be dire for HP at least, unless they didn't know what was going on and could prove that they'd been innocent victims of EE's hypothetical scam. Then they'd sue EE into oblivion.
(3) Google would probably catch wind of what was going on and filter it out.
I'm sure some obscure and questionable sites would be happy to risk a tactic like this, more likely installing it on users' machines via some spyware-like nefarious means. Whether it would work is questionable.
Come to think of it, I *had* intended mentioning that the Mac was even later (didn't get proper pre-emptive multitasking until OS X in the late 90s IIRC). However, I kind of forgot about that when I got into the general anti-MS-DOS rant.:-)
And, yes, the majority of users at the time considered all that quite normal.
That says more about the blinkered state of mind of users who hadn't used anything but MS-DOS and considered its limitations and foibles to be normal, rather than a sign of it being an exceptionally dated OS full of kludgey workarounds to its original design limitations.
So by all accounts I dare say that it was Amiga which was ahead of its time, not MS and Apple which were behind.
You could argue it that way. That said, there was no good reason that (e.g.) Windows should have taken almost ten years to get around to doing the same thing.
But I think that MS-DOS's architectural limitations approaching the mid-90s weren't simply not as good as the Amiga. They were ******* dated in absolute terms, because the OS was basically a hacked ripoff of the 1970s CP/M! There was nothing "magic" about pre-emptive multitasking- could easily have been done on the Pentium, the Amiga's mid-80s 68000 was much less powerful- MS-DOS was just dated crap by then.
And because the users hadn't used anything but MS, they probably assumed this was the way it was meant to be.
Of course, now that multitasking is commonplace on computers, a "typical" user would (rightly) be shocked and annoyed if subjected to the restrictions of Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS.
The other persons were slow to the table (Win1998 and OS X 2001),
The date of 1998 for Windows makes no sense. If it's the reference to Win98, then Win95 had the same kind of multitasking 3 years before that - and yes, it was preemptive (though IIRC there were ways to lock up the system if you wanted). If talking about Windows in general, then NT 3.1 had it in 1993.
Personally, I'll happily concede that your dates were right, because they're the ones I would have used (had Commodore6502 not raised the subject first) to point out that even in the best case (Windows NT), MS still took 8 years (i.e. the best part of a sodding *decade*!) to get it at all and were over a decade behind for Windows 95, which was their mainstream Windows at the time.
A ******* decade! No need to exaggerate for that to still be poor.
Admittedly, Windows 3.1 still had co-operative multitasking, which meant that if (e.g.) you were telnetting to a remote Internet BBS server (yeah, this was circa 1994)- and the server wasn't responding, then the way the MS telnet client was written, it wouldn't relinquish control until the connection timed out and you could get your desktop back. (Easily enough time to boil a kettle and get some coffee). And even that was still around five years after the Amiga's fully co-operative multitasking.
This isn't just an "Amiga was great!" comment- although the Amiga *was* great for its time, MS should have caught up before then. It's as much a criticism of MS-DOS and those versions of Windows and how pathetic it was that its never-known-better (and conditioned to think that this was "normal" or the way that "proper" computers worked) users actually thought that pre-emptive multitasking was something brilliant, shiny and new in the mid-90s, instead of wondering why it was such a big deal when any remotely modern operating system should have had it years before that.
The same MS-DOS users who get nostalgic about the rudimentary "configurability" of all those tedious configuration files but don't realise that they only needed to dick about with that sort of stuff in the first place because their OS was a GUI pasted onto a kludgily-hacked descendant of an early-80s ripoff of a late-70s Z80-era operating system (i.e. CP/M) masquerading unsuccessfully as something modern. And they'd say "yes, but it was fifteen years ago" like that justified it. Yes, it was the 1990s- not the ******* 1970s.
My gut reaction is that the AC has nothing to do with MS and that he's simply trolling. It's an obvious button-push; suggest that your typical Slashdotters' dislike of MS is simply vapid, adolescent bandwagon jumping.
If he was really working for MS, I suspect he'd be a lot more sophisticated than that.
The C-64 was only a best seller from 83-85, the Amiga never was.
I would guess that you live in North America. The Amiga might not have done too well there, but it was massively popular throughout Western Europe during the late-80s and early-90s.
Re the C64, I assume you meant that it was later eclipsed by the NES's success. This again wasn't the case everywhere- in the UK, the 8-bit market continued to be based primarily around home computers, and while the 8-bit consoles sold, they were never a dominant part of the market. (Matter of fact, the NES was *outsold* here by the Sega Master System!)
I'm married to a Japanese woman and living in Japan. We don't want children because we don't want them. We have no desire to have them.
That's fine for you and your wife. But it obviously doesn't describe the average person in any locality - if it did, our species would probably be extinct.
In case it had escaped your attention, he wasn't talking about the "average person in any locality" though- he was talking about Japan. And it's also pretty well-known that Japan *does* have a serious problem with an ageing population and not enough children- which over the not-so-long term certainly *will* lead to their extinction if they don't do something about it.
Apparently never used C++ either. Especially if games are the first that comes to your mind when you think of low level access. What do you think the said sandboxed, garbage collected environments are written in?
You're very clever... but it's sandboxed environments all the way down!
Sweex isn't Chinese- they're Dutch, though AFAICT *are* still just basically a distributor for Chinese-made goods, who I assume are made and designed by other companies.
How much input and/or customisation Sweex have into "their" variant of a particular product (beyond getting their name on it), I don't know. However, regardless, I assume that they do get to know when the design of (e.g.) routers is changing and can choose to update their own product number accordingly.
What does this mean? It means that Sony's legal position is now much more tenuous
Are you sure of that? IANAL, and I'm sure you aren't either, but does the fact he was scammed into repeating something that was already public *plus* he didn't actually say "this is the secret key to unlock your playstation" alongside it, so you'd have had to already known what it was anyway.
If you boycott something properly you have to talk about it 8 million times. It's no good boycotting quietly.
Except that as the OP points out (and I've already criticised myself in this thread and numerous times on Slashdot) the vast majority of those people go on... and on... and ON about how they're going to boycott Sony or whoever- but when it comes down to it, they always cave in (*) and hand over their money anyway whenever the latest shiny geek toy is on sale.
(*) Actually, I don't even think that "cave in" is a good description here. It implies that there was at least a token effort or even a simple pretence of standing up for what they go on about.
Have they fixed their optics problems, then? Last time I picked up a Sony camera (about 6 months ago) there was a very noticeable distortion from the poor quality lenses they were using. They could have the best CCD in the world, but coupled with crappy optics it'll still take a crappy picture. There's a reason most professionals use Cannon or Fuji.
I was under the impression that the first choice of the professionals was Canon or Nikon, not Fuji. (*)
Anyway, assuming the camera in question was a DSLR (**), I remember reading reviews of Canon's low-end consumer DSLR a while back which stated that it was a good camera very badly let down by a crappy kit lens. (Its cheaper Nikon rival, by contrast, was praised for its lens). Yet professionals still buy Canon.
Not defending Sony or saying that their lens wasn't crap, but if it was a low-end model, you can't draw inferences from that alone about what professionals do (or don't) use. I suspect the reason that Sony's range isn't as widely used professionally is because Canon and Nikon are the 1000 lb gorillas with a well-established range of lenses and support and are serious about the professional market, whereas Sony's range is less-established and derived from Minolta's (who I don't think were that big at the time they got out of the market), and Sony appear to be starting at the lower end of the market first.
(*) Fujifilm's first DSLR's (around a decade ago) were even based on *Nikon's* F60 film SLR body, likely because their background was as a film company, not a camera maker.
(**) I sure as heck wouldn't consider the lens in (e.g.) a low-end compact as even a legitimate starting point on discussing the totally different professional DSLR market. I'm sure even Nikon's cheapest compacts have relatively crappy lenses.
Frankly, the whole thing stinks. Sony needs to remember that those geeks they screwed tend to be the people who recommend products to all their friends---particularly when it comes to electronic gadgets.
Doesn't make me happy to say so, but you overestimate the importance of the angry geek. For one thing, the large mainstream of tech-buying "geeks" aren't the Slashdot type, but simply tech-oriented consumers who like the latest gimmicky "boys toys". Some may have good technical knowledge, but they still don't really care about freedom or any higher principles. Some will unlock the device- if possible- *after* they bought it to run pirated software (free games!!!!!111), but that wouldn't be the driving motivation- they wouldn't not buy it in the first place because it was locked-down or anything.
And you also overestimate how much your average Slashdotter's principle's count for when push comes to shove.
Let's be honest here- even on Slashdot there are way, *way* too many people who whine and complain about the behaviour of companies like Sony, and make half-baked threats about boycotts etc... but when the next shiny gadget comes out they'll line up to hand over their money anyway. Then bitch and whine again about something later on. Not saying that everyone here is like that, but there are way too many that are.
If even the tech-nerd geeks can't stand up for what they supposedly believe in, they're sure as heck not likely to convince their mainstream friends to avoid buying the latest electronic must-have goodie.
Your average man on the street does not give a toss about DRM per se, or the Sony rootkit or whatever.
I'd rate Sony['s DSLR range] virtually tied with Canon as it's really a re-badged Minolta.
As I mentioned elsewhere, "re-badged" suggests straightforward relabelling of products already being made, designed and sold by another independent company, which is misleading here. Sony bought Minolta's camera division outright a few years back, and on top of that have probably developed Minolta's early DSLR designs quite a bit since then.
Sony's DSLR is just a re-branded Minolta in any case. Just like how most of their TVs are re-branded Samsung units with different software and menus.
That's misleading- the DSLRs *aren't* simply rebranded products made by someone else in the way that their TVs are.
In fact, Sony bought out Konica Minolta's entire photographic division around 5 years ago. While it's likely true that Sony's DSLR range was originally based primarily (if not entirely) on Minolta's DSLR designs, I don't doubt that Sony have developed it quite a bit since then. (They'd have had to if they were remotely serious about competing with Canon, Nikon et al).
As for the OP's assertion that Sony makes the best MP3 players, I don't see any basis for that. They may have been the byword for portable audio in the 80s and through the 90s, but they totally blew it by stubbornly resisting the MP3 revolution, sticking to their proprietary MiniDisc technology, to the extent that even when they *did* decide to go for it, their first "MP3" players were ATRAC (MiniDisc codec) players which required MP3 files to be converted using their software! They lost that market, and deservedly so.
I get the impression that even in their heyday, Sony products were generally good or very good, and often innovative, but even then they weren't *quite* as consistently outstanding as the hype suggested. Still, I'm extremely happy with my 17-year old Trinitron portable that has never had to be fixed once yet still looks as crisp as new. Best £200 I ever spent.
Nowadays I've seen the Sony name used on totally badge-engineered versions of mediocre products made by other companies, and I doubt anyone here would take them to be a manufacturer of "quality" goods any more, given some of the stories I've heard about their stuff.
Similarly, a two dimensional space with no beginning or end can be represented as the surface of a three dimensional sphere.
Wasn't it a torus, or does a sphere work for a one-dimensional space with non-Euclidean geometry or something like that? (Note; I only vaguely know what I'm talking about here...:-))
Hmm, I had kind of read into your post that you were in (or born in) Asia, originally in the country associated with your ethnic group, whatever that is..
Either way, "Richmond, VA" doesn't really explain that...:-/
[from other post] And I am not a guy.
Perhaps not, but that's ultimately irrelevant as we weren't discussing you being mistaken for a guy! For all the rest of us still know, you might be ethnically Korean, a dark-skinned black person, a blonde of Swedish descent, or whatever. Each of which would put a somewhat different spin on your story.
In all honesty, that wouldn't be a matter of great relevance here either, except that your original comment is somewhat pointless without it(!) Anyway, whatever.
Sorry, not all of us are chinese, so it is news for us!
I am not Chinese either, but non-Asians confuse me as being Chinese all of the time! Some Asians too, but not many.
Well, since you mention that, you don't say where you're *actually* from. I'm guessing that you're probably Japanese or Korean, but for all we know you *could* be a dark-skinned guy from Nigeria, which would make your being mistaken for a Chinese person somewhat surprising.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
When a customer is sold on a product with term such as lifetime I'm sure Tivo know exactly how the customer will perceive that yet their happy to craft their terms of use in the fine print to give them an out.
The Tivo is primarily a consumer item, and the UK consumer laws are reasonably strong. IANAL, but from what I vaguely(!!) recollect, if that were true and (e.g.) they relied on that definition being obscurely and unintelligibly hidden away while they prominently sold the service on being "LIFETIME!" (knowing full well how most consumers would interpret that) the court may rule based on what an average person's reasonable interpretation of the deal presented was- i.e. lifetime of the box- taking this into account.
The only alternative is to never shut the service down, ever, until the end of time, which is patently ridiculous.
Of course it's ridiculous- even if they were to meet their promises to every Tivo owner, the boxes won't last forever. And anyway, past a certain point, they could probably afford to refund the very few remaining owners their subscription fees (and possibly the cost of the box) in full. I doubt any court- or indeed reasonable person- would consider Tivo obliged to do any more than that, at most.
That is NOT what the agreement said.
Not defending the guy, but do you actually know for a fact what the original (UK) agreement said?
They didn't actually do that though so this is irrelevant.
On the contrary, it's your red herring above- i.e. what they "actually" did- that's irrelevant here, not what he said. We were discussing the nature of the original agreement and what was possible by your (and possibly their) supposed definition of the word "lifetime".
If we use the "lifetime of the service" definition for "lifetime subscription", then technically they *could* have shut it off after a day. That was the point he was making- that they did or didn't do that is neither here nor there.
If "lifetime" referred to the lifetime of the box, or of the person, then the fact that they kept it running for ten years is irrelevant- it's not a lifetime subscription by that definition.
I don't know what the original agreement said, so I can't argue it further than that. I do know that *if* they used that definition of "lifetime", but deliberately didn't make it prominent, then (IANAL) a court might rest more heavily on the interpretation that an average person would take from the promotional and agreement material. Obviously a number of "ifs" there though.
The existing TiVo userbase is a (small) competitor to the new Virgin TiVo box
"Small" is putting it mildly. There were *very* few Tivo units sold in the UK in the first place (35,000 over the 18 months it was sold here according to Wikipedia, it was a pretty big flop). And it was withdrawn from the market 9 years ago.
AFAIK, those boxes only worked directly with analogue transmissions (*) which have already been discontinued in many areas and are due for imminent discontinuation in the rest of the UK, and only ever gave 5 channels in the vast majority of cases.
And I suspect that a large proportion of them will have broken down by now (hard drive most likely), or not be in use. Of the remainder, anyone interested in what Virgin could offer probably would have moved on by now. In short, the number of potential customers Virgin/Tivo might get by pressurising the existing Tivo userbase is probably negligible. In fact, it's just as likely that Tivo doesn't want to have to support a technologically obsolete service for the sake of a very small number of remaining users.
(*) I don't know if and how it worked with satellite services like (e.g.) Sky, IIRC there was some slightly convoluted way of recording Sky by connecting the Tivo to the Sky digibox's analogue output. And the current UK terrestrial standard, DVB-T, wasn't even used for freely-available transmissions at the time Tivo was being sold, only for the flop "ITV Digital" pay service that went bankrupt, so I doubt it supported that- and hence current "Freeview" DVB-T transmissions- directly.
How long will it take bloatware to include "browser bars" specifically designed to contaminate the results? If expertsexchange paid HP to add a browser bar that sent fake data to google claiming their domain is the best ....
Not going to happen, at least not with them.
(1) IANAL, but Google would probably have some legal basis for sueing them up the wazoo if they were engaged in a blatant scheme to actively send bogus information and undermine their scheme. Not sure whether or not that would even require Google to prohibit this in the T&C, but I'm damn sure they'd include it anyway.
(2) The publicity could easily be dire for HP at least, unless they didn't know what was going on and could prove that they'd been innocent victims of EE's hypothetical scam. Then they'd sue EE into oblivion.
(3) Google would probably catch wind of what was going on and filter it out.
I'm sure some obscure and questionable sites would be happy to risk a tactic like this, more likely installing it on users' machines via some spyware-like nefarious means. Whether it would work is questionable.
Well, MacOS was no better at the time
Come to think of it, I *had* intended mentioning that the Mac was even later (didn't get proper pre-emptive multitasking until OS X in the late 90s IIRC). However, I kind of forgot about that when I got into the general anti-MS-DOS rant. :-)
And, yes, the majority of users at the time considered all that quite normal.
That says more about the blinkered state of mind of users who hadn't used anything but MS-DOS and considered its limitations and foibles to be normal, rather than a sign of it being an exceptionally dated OS full of kludgey workarounds to its original design limitations.
So by all accounts I dare say that it was Amiga which was ahead of its time, not MS and Apple which were behind.
You could argue it that way. That said, there was no good reason that (e.g.) Windows should have taken almost ten years to get around to doing the same thing.
But I think that MS-DOS's architectural limitations approaching the mid-90s weren't simply not as good as the Amiga. They were ******* dated in absolute terms, because the OS was basically a hacked ripoff of the 1970s CP/M! There was nothing "magic" about pre-emptive multitasking- could easily have been done on the Pentium, the Amiga's mid-80s 68000 was much less powerful- MS-DOS was just dated crap by then.
And because the users hadn't used anything but MS, they probably assumed this was the way it was meant to be.
Of course, now that multitasking is commonplace on computers, a "typical" user would (rightly) be shocked and annoyed if subjected to the restrictions of Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS.
The other persons were slow to the table (Win1998 and OS X 2001),
The date of 1998 for Windows makes no sense. If it's the reference to Win98, then Win95 had the same kind of multitasking 3 years before that - and yes, it was preemptive (though IIRC there were ways to lock up the system if you wanted). If talking about Windows in general, then NT 3.1 had it in 1993.
Personally, I'll happily concede that your dates were right, because they're the ones I would have used (had Commodore6502 not raised the subject first) to point out that even in the best case (Windows NT), MS still took 8 years (i.e. the best part of a sodding *decade*!) to get it at all and were over a decade behind for Windows 95, which was their mainstream Windows at the time.
A ******* decade! No need to exaggerate for that to still be poor.
Admittedly, Windows 3.1 still had co-operative multitasking, which meant that if (e.g.) you were telnetting to a remote Internet BBS server (yeah, this was circa 1994)- and the server wasn't responding, then the way the MS telnet client was written, it wouldn't relinquish control until the connection timed out and you could get your desktop back. (Easily enough time to boil a kettle and get some coffee). And even that was still around five years after the Amiga's fully co-operative multitasking.
This isn't just an "Amiga was great!" comment- although the Amiga *was* great for its time, MS should have caught up before then. It's as much a criticism of MS-DOS and those versions of Windows and how pathetic it was that its never-known-better (and conditioned to think that this was "normal" or the way that "proper" computers worked) users actually thought that pre-emptive multitasking was something brilliant, shiny and new in the mid-90s, instead of wondering why it was such a big deal when any remotely modern operating system should have had it years before that.
The same MS-DOS users who get nostalgic about the rudimentary "configurability" of all those tedious configuration files but don't realise that they only needed to dick about with that sort of stuff in the first place because their OS was a GUI pasted onto a kludgily-hacked descendant of an early-80s ripoff of a late-70s Z80-era operating system (i.e. CP/M) masquerading unsuccessfully as something modern. And they'd say "yes, but it was fifteen years ago" like that justified it. Yes, it was the 1990s- not the ******* 1970s.
Bleh.
My gut reaction is that the AC has nothing to do with MS and that he's simply trolling. It's an obvious button-push; suggest that your typical Slashdotters' dislike of MS is simply vapid, adolescent bandwagon jumping.
If he was really working for MS, I suspect he'd be a lot more sophisticated than that.
The C-64 was only a best seller from 83-85, the Amiga never was.
I would guess that you live in North America. The Amiga might not have done too well there, but it was massively popular throughout Western Europe during the late-80s and early-90s.
Re the C64, I assume you meant that it was later eclipsed by the NES's success. This again wasn't the case everywhere- in the UK, the 8-bit market continued to be based primarily around home computers, and while the 8-bit consoles sold, they were never a dominant part of the market. (Matter of fact, the NES was *outsold* here by the Sega Master System!)
I'm married to a Japanese woman and living in Japan. We don't want children because we don't want them. We have no desire to have them.
That's fine for you and your wife. But it obviously doesn't describe the average person in any locality - if it did, our species would probably be extinct.
In case it had escaped your attention, he wasn't talking about the "average person in any locality" though- he was talking about Japan. And it's also pretty well-known that Japan *does* have a serious problem with an ageing population and not enough children- which over the not-so-long term certainly *will* lead to their extinction if they don't do something about it.
Apparently never used C++ either. Especially if games are the first that comes to your mind when you think of low level access. What do you think the said sandboxed, garbage collected environments are written in?
You're very clever... but it's sandboxed environments all the way down!
"We're All Missing the Point on Computer Security"
Yep- that article was written ten years back, but it couldn't be more insightful and ahead-of-its-time in the context of this discussion.
Sweex isn't Chinese- they're Dutch, though AFAICT *are* still just basically a distributor for Chinese-made goods, who I assume are made and designed by other companies.
How much input and/or customisation Sweex have into "their" variant of a particular product (beyond getting their name on it), I don't know. However, regardless, I assume that they do get to know when the design of (e.g.) routers is changing and can choose to update their own product number accordingly.
What does this mean? It means that Sony's legal position is now much more tenuous
Are you sure of that? IANAL, and I'm sure you aren't either, but does the fact he was scammed into repeating something that was already public *plus* he didn't actually say "this is the secret key to unlock your playstation" alongside it, so you'd have had to already known what it was anyway.
If you boycott something properly you have to talk about it 8 million times. It's no good boycotting quietly.
Except that as the OP points out (and I've already criticised myself in this thread and numerous times on Slashdot) the vast majority of those people go on... and on... and ON about how they're going to boycott Sony or whoever- but when it comes down to it, they always cave in (*) and hand over their money anyway whenever the latest shiny geek toy is on sale.
(*) Actually, I don't even think that "cave in" is a good description here. It implies that there was at least a token effort or even a simple pretence of standing up for what they go on about.
Have they fixed their optics problems, then? Last time I picked up a Sony camera (about 6 months ago) there was a very noticeable distortion from the poor quality lenses they were using. They could have the best CCD in the world, but coupled with crappy optics it'll still take a crappy picture. There's a reason most professionals use Cannon or Fuji.
I was under the impression that the first choice of the professionals was Canon or Nikon, not Fuji. (*)
Anyway, assuming the camera in question was a DSLR (**), I remember reading reviews of Canon's low-end consumer DSLR a while back which stated that it was a good camera very badly let down by a crappy kit lens. (Its cheaper Nikon rival, by contrast, was praised for its lens). Yet professionals still buy Canon.
Not defending Sony or saying that their lens wasn't crap, but if it was a low-end model, you can't draw inferences from that alone about what professionals do (or don't) use. I suspect the reason that Sony's range isn't as widely used professionally is because Canon and Nikon are the 1000 lb gorillas with a well-established range of lenses and support and are serious about the professional market, whereas Sony's range is less-established and derived from Minolta's (who I don't think were that big at the time they got out of the market), and Sony appear to be starting at the lower end of the market first.
(*) Fujifilm's first DSLR's (around a decade ago) were even based on *Nikon's* F60 film SLR body, likely because their background was as a film company, not a camera maker.
(**) I sure as heck wouldn't consider the lens in (e.g.) a low-end compact as even a legitimate starting point on discussing the totally different professional DSLR market. I'm sure even Nikon's cheapest compacts have relatively crappy lenses.
Frankly, the whole thing stinks. Sony needs to remember that those geeks they screwed tend to be the people who recommend products to all their friends---particularly when it comes to electronic gadgets.
Doesn't make me happy to say so, but you overestimate the importance of the angry geek. For one thing, the large mainstream of tech-buying "geeks" aren't the Slashdot type, but simply tech-oriented consumers who like the latest gimmicky "boys toys". Some may have good technical knowledge, but they still don't really care about freedom or any higher principles. Some will unlock the device- if possible- *after* they bought it to run pirated software (free games!!!!!111), but that wouldn't be the driving motivation- they wouldn't not buy it in the first place because it was locked-down or anything.
And you also overestimate how much your average Slashdotter's principle's count for when push comes to shove.
Let's be honest here- even on Slashdot there are way, *way* too many people who whine and complain about the behaviour of companies like Sony, and make half-baked threats about boycotts etc... but when the next shiny gadget comes out they'll line up to hand over their money anyway. Then bitch and whine again about something later on. Not saying that everyone here is like that, but there are way too many that are.
If even the tech-nerd geeks can't stand up for what they supposedly believe in, they're sure as heck not likely to convince their mainstream friends to avoid buying the latest electronic must-have goodie.
Your average man on the street does not give a toss about DRM per se, or the Sony rootkit or whatever.
I'd rate Sony['s DSLR range] virtually tied with Canon as it's really a re-badged Minolta.
As I mentioned elsewhere, "re-badged" suggests straightforward relabelling of products already being made, designed and sold by another independent company, which is misleading here. Sony bought Minolta's camera division outright a few years back, and on top of that have probably developed Minolta's early DSLR designs quite a bit since then.
Sony's DSLR is just a re-branded Minolta in any case. Just like how most of their TVs are re-branded Samsung units with different software and menus.
That's misleading- the DSLRs *aren't* simply rebranded products made by someone else in the way that their TVs are.
In fact, Sony bought out Konica Minolta's entire photographic division around 5 years ago. While it's likely true that Sony's DSLR range was originally based primarily (if not entirely) on Minolta's DSLR designs, I don't doubt that Sony have developed it quite a bit since then. (They'd have had to if they were remotely serious about competing with Canon, Nikon et al).
As for the OP's assertion that Sony makes the best MP3 players, I don't see any basis for that. They may have been the byword for portable audio in the 80s and through the 90s, but they totally blew it by stubbornly resisting the MP3 revolution, sticking to their proprietary MiniDisc technology, to the extent that even when they *did* decide to go for it, their first "MP3" players were ATRAC (MiniDisc codec) players which required MP3 files to be converted using their software! They lost that market, and deservedly so.
I get the impression that even in their heyday, Sony products were generally good or very good, and often innovative, but even then they weren't *quite* as consistently outstanding as the hype suggested. Still, I'm extremely happy with my 17-year old Trinitron portable that has never had to be fixed once yet still looks as crisp as new. Best £200 I ever spent.
Nowadays I've seen the Sony name used on totally badge-engineered versions of mediocre products made by other companies, and I doubt anyone here would take them to be a manufacturer of "quality" goods any more, given some of the stories I've heard about their stuff.
That's because you are an ignorant cunt. They owned unix and linux you know.
I think he's just using it as an excuse to avoid paying his $699 license fee. Must be some sort of cock-smoking teabagger.
Similarly, a two dimensional space with no beginning or end can be represented as the surface of a three dimensional sphere.
Wasn't it a torus, or does a sphere work for a one-dimensional space with non-Euclidean geometry or something like that? (Note; I only vaguely know what I'm talking about here... :-))
You could DOS them with physical mail (but probably shouldn't), but very few of us live in Kuwait so a boycott might be less effective.
If you were really serious, you'd move to Kuwait and *then* boycott them. ;-)
I am from Richmond, VA.
Hmm, I had kind of read into your post that you were in (or born in) Asia, originally in the country associated with your ethnic group, whatever that is..
:-/
Either way, "Richmond, VA" doesn't really explain that...
[from other post] And I am not a guy.
Perhaps not, but that's ultimately irrelevant as we weren't discussing you being mistaken for a guy! For all the rest of us still know, you might be ethnically Korean, a dark-skinned black person, a blonde of Swedish descent, or whatever. Each of which would put a somewhat different spin on your story.
In all honesty, that wouldn't be a matter of great relevance here either, except that your original comment is somewhat pointless without it(!) Anyway, whatever.
Sorry, not all of us are chinese, so it is news for us!
I am not Chinese either, but non-Asians confuse me as being Chinese all of the time! Some Asians too, but not many.
Well, since you mention that, you don't say where you're *actually* from. I'm guessing that you're probably Japanese or Korean, but for all we know you *could* be a dark-skinned guy from Nigeria, which would make your being mistaken for a Chinese person somewhat surprising. ;-)