>> That judge wouldnt get a clue with Cluestick 2000(tm) up her but powered by a nuclear powerplant.
Perhaps you and the other zealots are in needing of a whack from the cluestick, and the judge knew exactly what she was doing?
Being the market leader and being a monopoly are two different things. Apparantly Lindows, and linux at large has raised MSFT's eyes, and if you believe timothy, OSX as well. This happened WITHOUT any sort of pork-barrel judgement against them.
And this isn't anti-competitive behavior, this *is* competitive behavior. They're willing to adjust their pricing to sway important clients. So is the company I'm working for. So is just about any producer of anything willing to 'talk turkey' on volume purchases. If they didnt, and purposefully ran themselves into the ground to appease the OS community, that would be illegal, as they are beholden to their stockholders.
Personally I saw the entire case as an excuse to get Janet Reno's she-male face onto the front page of the newspaper. Defender of the working man. Fighter of corporate greed. I rob from the rich and give to the poor! Vote for Janet Reno!
+5 Insightful for you!! Most corporations are overpaying for hundreds of G4 macs for each cubicle. The rounded buttons make data entry much more efficient.
I don't think the ass-clown with 1 mac in his basement 'web-design' business gets a price cut, or even a visit from the MS reps, for that matter.
They're better off reviewing the final product and testing it for errors.
Open Source does not, and has never guaranteed a superior end product. It doesn't even encourage it. That's a myth started by zealots and their blind hatred for corporations like MSFT or Adobe.
And 'consultants' with nothing better to do than rant.
But there are still relatively few actual programmers.
Yeah, I'm sure every IT consultant in the biz sees no problem with releasing the code to everything, but of course they didn't put any of the work into it in the first place.
This isn't like a novel, it isnt like a painting, it isnt like a music CD, so screw with those damn analogies.
This is like requiring every manufacturer of goods to allow any customer to tour the plant and interview any employee at will.
He's saying "Trade secrets be damned, unless I can walk through the R&D wing at Sony, I'll never know how much 'quality' is in my walkman."
Code is a means to an end. It isn't the product, it's the factory and methods you use to manufacture the product. You cant guage the quality, or lack thereof, of a final product based on the sourcecode. You base it on the product itself.
actually, due to natural selection, the human race is getting prettier.. There's been legitimate research to back this up, I was watching about it on TLC.
Basically, good looking people get laid more than the ugly ones.
Did they really think Russia had any cash to piss away on the space station in the first place?
I mean, buying or creating the technology is one thing, but maintaining and supporting it is another.
That's why russian submarines end up at the bottom of the ocean (or sold to a cocaine smuggler), and their nuclear plants meltdown and irradiate hundreds of square miles.
They may as well ask Eithiopia to cough up their share.
The very fact that they charge each user 14,000 apiece means that these clowns have no way to measure or guage exactly how much piracy goes on, let alone what a single users portion of it would be.
It would be a far more legitimate campaign if they somehow tracked activity, and presented an itemized bill listing each and every provable download made by an individual.
It's a publicity stunt... Or extortion, if one could prove they actually believe anyone would pay the 14 Gs for fear of being sued.
Maybe one day Jobs will see it fit to overcharge you for a pair of iGlasses(tm), but until then, in the proudest tradition of Macintosh owners, you will be the last to play with new toys.
But at least it doesn't go like beep beep beep and wreck your really good paper.
Unless you have a 100,000$ Klipch speaker/amp setup to play it back on, you wont hear shit-all difference in quality.
And, if you do, I doubt you're in the market for 'cheap' cds.
For the average guy, playing it in his car stereo, where it's already got the background noise of the engine, air whistling past the windows, etc, etc, you can't even hear the differnce between a cassette tape and a CD (until the CD skips).
Re:Unacountable bits?
on
The Wireless City
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'd imagine a transparent proxy that won't let you do anything past HTTP and POP3.
I doubt they want warez kids sitting in the park to download their gamez on the fat wireless pipe, either.
95% of the world is already using IE and Windows. I'd wager closer to 100% of the target users of this system have IE and Windows.
Why is it such a constant shock that website developers don't go out of their way to make stuff compatible with mozilla?
Can noone just understand it's not worth the extra development time for such a miniscule audience?
And dont talk to me about standards. Standards on paper with a rubber stamp from W3C are fine and good, but, in the real world, though, 'standard' means 'what everyone else does', and thats just a fact of life.
If the mozilla team would quit with the philosophy crap, just make themselves compatible, then they could be the system the majority uses, and then they can dictate what's 'standard', and what isnt.
Until then, its a 'standard', yet incompatible browser.
Yeah, I get it.. The VIA eden platform is small. Real small. 7x7. And it produces very little heat.
It's also virtually useless for anything but light desktop duties. It hasn't the juice (the next version should) to even playback a DVD without lots of skipping.
So it's getting less and less impressive everytime someone sticks it into a [whatever].
Stick in a Shuttle FS50 (same size, but accepts a 478 pin P4), or it's Athlon XP cousin, add real video powers (VIVO, 3D), figure a way to fit in the PSU, find a way to keep it cool and reasonably quiet w/o looking like crap, then I'd be impressed. I'd like to see a powerful gaming/pvr/dvd/divx/ogg media box crammed into a [whatever].
But the VIA eden thing.. So what? It doesn't even require a real power supply, since it uses DC-DC converters, you can juice it up off a wallbox.
It's just too easy, and the end result is too useless. Up the ante.
I always wondered about this directed-advertising bulldink. How does it differentiate my favorite shows from my wifes, or my childrens, let alone know who's watching.
I mean it'd be showing trojan ads to my kids and pokemon ads to me.
(i know it's not there, yet, but thats what I see as the flaw in the concept at large)
I was in there with another friend (who was buying a few hundred cdn worth of stereo crap), and this clerk grabs me by the neck (like a chokehold/headlock thing) and starts cussing at me to leave and pulling me outside.
The clerk was the brother of some kid who didn't like me, though I didn't know him from shit, at the time.
When we got outside, I proceeded to kick the crap out of him.
The cops came, heard from all the witnesses (there were lots of 'em), then charged the clerk with assault - as I had done nothing to provoke him, and he never asked me to leave, just jumped me.
So the manager, now proprietor of the most-run-by-assholes store in town, banned me for life. He actually said 'power vested in me' when he proclaimed the ban universal, and even the cop was snickering at him.
Because, if you read my other post in this thread, you'd see that (at least in my store) they base this on your phone number.
So if you ever get a phone number, apparently you inherit its previous owners return history.
It's also apparently irrelevant as to WHY you returned an item. What if you just had a string of bad luck with a bunch of busted Tivos in a row?
Besides such, it's dumb business practice to insult and piss off your customers. If that's what it's for, just charge a restocking fee on all non-defective returns.
Yes they can. They can sell to whomever they want, whenever they want, so long as they don't discriminate based on race, sex or religion.
I got treated just like the parent poster, but the bitch of it is - they denied selling me a DVD player, based on the persons past history who USED to have my phone number.
They asked my phone number, looked it up, and this happened:
THEM: "We can't sell you this. The computer says we cant serve you any longer"
ME (confused): "Impossible."
THEM: "It says so on the computer"
ME: "Impossible."
THEM: "Well, that's what it says here."
ME (Craning to see computer screen): "Thats not my name, or my address"
THEM (Scurrying to block my view of the screen) "Well, I'm sorry sir.. blah blah.."
ME: "Let me talk to your manager"
THEM: "I am the manager"
ME: "I just moved here from another country a week ago. I've never even heard of Circuit City in my life. You people are fucking morons. It's not like I'm writing a bad cheque, I'm standing here with 4 100$ bills in my hand and you dont want them?"
CUSTOMER BEHIND ME: "Hey, you know Best Buy will beat their sale price by 10%"
ME: "Sweet, thanks bud"
I haven't been back since. That's one god-awful store full of overpriced crap for dipshit execs with more cash than sense.
Slashdot Mirror
>> That judge wouldnt get a clue with Cluestick 2000(tm) up her but powered by a nuclear powerplant.
Perhaps you and the other zealots are in needing of a whack from the cluestick, and the judge knew exactly what she was doing?
Being the market leader and being a monopoly are two different things. Apparantly Lindows, and linux at large has raised MSFT's eyes, and if you believe timothy, OSX as well. This happened WITHOUT any sort of pork-barrel judgement against them.
And this isn't anti-competitive behavior, this *is* competitive behavior. They're willing to adjust their pricing to sway important clients. So is the company I'm working for. So is just about any producer of anything willing to 'talk turkey' on volume purchases. If they didnt, and purposefully ran themselves into the ground to appease the OS community, that would be illegal, as they are beholden to their stockholders.
Personally I saw the entire case as an excuse to get Janet Reno's she-male face onto the front page of the newspaper. Defender of the working man. Fighter of corporate greed. I rob from the rich and give to the poor! Vote for Janet Reno!
*blech*
No.
Because Office is their flagship product, anyways. And they sell that to Mac users too.
>> I'm sure OS X is on MS's mind as well
+5 Insightful for you!! Most corporations are overpaying for hundreds of G4 macs for each cubicle. The rounded buttons make data entry much more efficient.
I don't think the ass-clown with 1 mac in his basement 'web-design' business gets a price cut, or even a visit from the MS reps, for that matter.
TIM-TIM-TIMMAY!
>> If all binaries had source with them then any copyright violations would be obvious.
And inevitably unenforcable.
So obvious that no more code could be written. Can you see the deluge of go-nowhere lawsuits based on inane shit like:
I wrote "for(i=1;i=100;++i)" first!
Or, "no my work is a PARODY of windows XP.. It's called Windoze EX-PEE! See! I changed the icons."
They're better off reviewing the final product and testing it for errors.
Open Source does not, and has never guaranteed a superior end product. It doesn't even encourage it. That's a myth started by zealots and their blind hatred for corporations like MSFT or Adobe.
And 'consultants' with nothing better to do than rant.
But there are still relatively few actual programmers.
Yeah, I'm sure every IT consultant in the biz sees no problem with releasing the code to everything, but of course they didn't put any of the work into it in the first place.
This isn't like a novel, it isnt like a painting, it isnt like a music CD, so screw with those damn analogies.
This is like requiring every manufacturer of goods to allow any customer to tour the plant and interview any employee at will.
He's saying "Trade secrets be damned, unless I can walk through the R&D wing at Sony, I'll never know how much 'quality' is in my walkman."
Code is a means to an end. It isn't the product, it's the factory and methods you use to manufacture the product. You cant guage the quality, or lack thereof, of a final product based on the sourcecode. You base it on the product itself.
Luckily, noone would ever take this seriously.
actually, due to natural selection, the human race is getting prettier.. There's been legitimate research to back this up, I was watching about it on TLC.
Basically, good looking people get laid more than the ugly ones.
Did they really think Russia had any cash to piss away on the space station in the first place?
I mean, buying or creating the technology is one thing, but maintaining and supporting it is another.
That's why russian submarines end up at the bottom of the ocean (or sold to a cocaine smuggler), and their nuclear plants meltdown and irradiate hundreds of square miles.
They may as well ask Eithiopia to cough up their share.
You do realize that not every workstation has access to the web, espescially when you consider that java is an EMBEDDED platform.
And even those that do, it gets knocked out from time to time.
Plus, many developers (myself included) like to do the bulk of our stuff in a 'sandbox', completely disconnected from the network at large.
And how many programmers have WWW access in the toilet, where most research is done.
You cant take Sun's online help to the shitter.
Well, maybe you can, but I cant.
And I agree, there's probably some kind of promotion agreement behind the scenes.
But, it gives the trolls another chance to get first post, so it cant be all bad.
puh-lease.
The very fact that they charge each user 14,000 apiece means that these clowns have no way to measure or guage exactly how much piracy goes on, let alone what a single users portion of it would be.
It would be a far more legitimate campaign if they somehow tracked activity, and presented an itemized bill listing each and every provable download made by an individual.
It's a publicity stunt... Or extortion, if one could prove they actually believe anyone would pay the 14 Gs for fear of being sued.
None. Nothing. Zip.
Maybe one day Jobs will see it fit to overcharge you for a pair of iGlasses(tm), but until then, in the proudest tradition of Macintosh owners, you will be the last to play with new toys.
But at least it doesn't go like beep beep beep and wreck your really good paper.
Yes, they require special drivers.
And they'll never work in linux.
Even under Win2k/XP they only work with nVidia cards.
If they only reviewed gaming hardware WITH linux support, then there'd be only one chance at First Post a year -- tops.
Noone wants that.
TTY devices (basically text-to-speech).
All the lipreading skills in the world don't help you watch old Godzilla flicks. When will they fix that?
Quality shmality.
Unless you have a 100,000$ Klipch speaker/amp setup to play it back on, you wont hear shit-all difference in quality.
And, if you do, I doubt you're in the market for 'cheap' cds.
For the average guy, playing it in his car stereo, where it's already got the background noise of the engine, air whistling past the windows, etc, etc, you can't even hear the differnce between a cassette tape and a CD (until the CD skips).
I'd imagine a transparent proxy that won't let you do anything past HTTP and POP3.
I doubt they want warez kids sitting in the park to download their gamez on the fat wireless pipe, either.
>> so I can't use IE, not to mention WMA files
and you cant play PS2 games on it, either.
So what?
Sample and re-encode it.
Whoopty-doo.
95% of the world is already using IE and Windows. I'd wager closer to 100% of the target users of this system have IE and Windows.
Why is it such a constant shock that website developers don't go out of their way to make stuff compatible with mozilla?
Can noone just understand it's not worth the extra development time for such a miniscule audience?
And dont talk to me about standards. Standards on paper with a rubber stamp from W3C are fine and good, but, in the real world, though, 'standard' means 'what everyone else does', and thats just a fact of life.
If the mozilla team would quit with the philosophy crap, just make themselves compatible, then they could be the system the majority uses, and then they can dictate what's 'standard', and what isnt.
Until then, its a 'standard', yet incompatible browser.
Yeah, I get it.. The VIA eden platform is small. Real small. 7x7. And it produces very little heat.
It's also virtually useless for anything but light desktop duties. It hasn't the juice (the next version should) to even playback a DVD without lots of skipping.
So it's getting less and less impressive everytime someone sticks it into a [whatever].
Stick in a Shuttle FS50 (same size, but accepts a 478 pin P4), or it's Athlon XP cousin, add real video powers (VIVO, 3D), figure a way to fit in the PSU, find a way to keep it cool and reasonably quiet w/o looking like crap, then I'd be impressed. I'd like to see a powerful gaming/pvr/dvd/divx/ogg media box crammed into a [whatever].
But the VIA eden thing.. So what? It doesn't even require a real power supply, since it uses DC-DC converters, you can juice it up off a wallbox.
It's just too easy, and the end result is too useless. Up the ante.
Someone bought Cowboy Neals old TiVo on eBay.
I always wondered about this directed-advertising bulldink. How does it differentiate my favorite shows from my wifes, or my childrens, let alone know who's watching.
I mean it'd be showing trojan ads to my kids and pokemon ads to me.
(i know it's not there, yet, but thats what I see as the flaw in the concept at large)
Long story short.
I was in there with another friend (who was buying a few hundred cdn worth of stereo crap), and this clerk grabs me by the neck (like a chokehold/headlock thing) and starts cussing at me to leave and pulling me outside.
The clerk was the brother of some kid who didn't like me, though I didn't know him from shit, at the time.
When we got outside, I proceeded to kick the crap out of him.
The cops came, heard from all the witnesses (there were lots of 'em), then charged the clerk with assault - as I had done nothing to provoke him, and he never asked me to leave, just jumped me.
So the manager, now proprietor of the most-run-by-assholes store in town, banned me for life. He actually said 'power vested in me' when he proclaimed the ban universal, and even the cop was snickering at him.
Because, if you read my other post in this thread, you'd see that (at least in my store) they base this on your phone number.
So if you ever get a phone number, apparently you inherit its previous owners return history.
It's also apparently irrelevant as to WHY you returned an item. What if you just had a string of bad luck with a bunch of busted Tivos in a row?
Besides such, it's dumb business practice to insult and piss off your customers. If that's what it's for, just charge a restocking fee on all non-defective returns.
Yes they can. They can sell to whomever they want, whenever they want, so long as they don't discriminate based on race, sex or religion.
I got treated just like the parent poster, but the bitch of it is - they denied selling me a DVD player, based on the persons past history who USED to have my phone number.
They asked my phone number, looked it up, and this happened:
THEM: "We can't sell you this. The computer says we cant serve you any longer"
ME (confused): "Impossible."
THEM: "It says so on the computer"
ME: "Impossible."
THEM: "Well, that's what it says here."
ME (Craning to see computer screen): "Thats not my name, or my address"
THEM (Scurrying to block my view of the screen) "Well, I'm sorry sir.. blah blah.."
ME: "Let me talk to your manager"
THEM: "I am the manager"
ME: "I just moved here from another country a week ago. I've never even heard of Circuit City in my life. You people are fucking morons. It's not like I'm writing a bad cheque, I'm standing here with 4 100$ bills in my hand and you dont want them?"
CUSTOMER BEHIND ME: "Hey, you know Best Buy will beat their sale price by 10%"
ME: "Sweet, thanks bud"
I haven't been back since. That's one god-awful store full of overpriced crap for dipshit execs with more cash than sense.