>That's absolutely reasonable. When you wear that shirt, you're representing Tommy Hilfiger and are, therefore, impacting the future sales of that brand. By wearing that white shirt after labor day, you're in effect saying that the Hilfiger brand itself is out of style, causing irreparable and immeasurable damage. This theft of future sales is obviously wrong and it needs to be stopped.
Ok, since you brought it up, I have to wonder if that's the real reason Apple doesn't allow clones. Not because of loss of revenue -- the real thing will still be cooler and in demand -- but because proles will witness OSX running on a VG2230, for instance, instead of the much cooler Apple Cinema Display. Typing on a lumpy Microsoft Natural instead of an Apple Ultrathin. Using an ugly Thermolake Soprano instead of a Mac Pro. And this clearly dilutes the brand, because Apple is about style every bit as much as function.
Ok, but seriously. I have Windows Media Player XP 2005 as my primary media player. It sucks at recording television. I dunno why, it just does. It sucks at playing "live" TV. It sucks slightly less at playing DVDs. On an entirely adequate system, it works just well enough to be really irritating. The only thing -- this is the key point -- the only thing it does well, is play divx-encoded video files from hard disk. Let's meditate on that for awhile. Reading on "The Green Button", Vista Media Center is even worse. Meditate further.
I have Netflix, I have satellite, I have a really good antenna and I get THIRTEEN damned digital channels off-air. But the STUPID box SUCKS at doing the right thing, and there's nothing else that incorporates all these forms of content in a way my wife can operate. Couple that with fiber optic network, and it sets up a situation where I can record a jittery copy of The Big Bang Theory in real time and one time in three get something that plays well, or download a pristine copy in eight minutes. And "services" like Movielink and Cinema Now think they can "sell" you a download for MORE than the street price of the DVD. (They say "sell", but we all know it's a long term rental.) They think DRM is the answer? They don't understand the question.
> Psystar is not modifying the OS. Check the details! They are not running a cracked or modified version of OSX on their systems. What they have done is created the EFI backbone so that will allow the OS will install run nativly on it. This is no different from when IBM made their machines, and people reverse-engineered the bios to make clones.
Evil thought: As their last act before going out of business, I wonder how tempted Psystar would be to release their IP to the user community.
Has Psystar thought about selling the machines without an OS? (Or with, say, Intrepid Ibex installed?) That'd get around the license issues, I think, unless Apple could prove intent. Then it'd be the individual's responsibility that (cough) their copy of OSX was running on genuine Apple hardware.
> All apple has to get them on is that the OSX license stipulates that it MUST BE INSTALLED ON APPLE HARDWARE. This is EXACTLY the same if Microsoft turned around and said that windows can only be used on specific intel motherboard and cpu, and that only microsoft can decree what hardware is allowed to be used with it.
Speaking of which, why hasn't Microsoft done that yet? The great majority of the market is irrevocably locked into Windows. M$ could simply say "Windows version 8 will only run on the Xbox model 720" and corner the OS *and* hardware market in one fell swoop. Play their cards right, and -- icing on the cake -- they could have current Xbox users re-buying their gear. One wonders why it hasn't already happened.
> Apple should not be the only hardware manufacturer allowed to run OS-X, [...]
Allowed? It's their damned software, monkey-boy. They can decide that 10.6 is only licensed for F150 dashboard navigators (actually, that'd be kinda cool) and your choices would be to stick with leopard or work in your garage. OSX is a culture, a movement, a way of life... but it's also a product owned by Apple Inc.
That explains a lot. Makes me wonder how many episodes after "the naked time" really happened, (or were mass hallucinations, which would also explain a lot) and whether the infection was truly an accident.
I watched an episode of TOS Remastered with this in mind, and it really does put a different, more interesting slant on the show.
It's like, when I was a kid, I couldn't watch an episode of Green Acres. It was too inane, frustrating, over-the-top whimsical. Then at some point I realized that everyone in the cast except Oliver were aliens pretending to be human with little knowledge of how humans should act. Then everything made sense. (Ever noticed that Hank Kimball never blinks?)
Similarly, Inspector Gadget and Claw are both robots who have been programmed to believe they're augmented humans. The real brains are the dog and the cat, who are both disguised aliens waging a covert war on Earth. Penny is a midget NSA agent. See? It all works.
Can't get there from work, but I saw the trailer attached to Quantum of Solace. It's really not a full trailer, just "teaser number 2". Looks nice, though. Interesting how the dark woods and subdued lighting of the 1960's have given way to the Macintosh and Ikea look of this century.
I'd like to point out that "reboot" (if it's a true reboot) and "baggage" are mutually exclusive. It's a whole new timeline due to some standard trekish hand-waving, and everything that has happened doesn't necessarily need to happen again. This isn't just a prequel that sets up TOS. If the franchise continues, it can go in completely different directions, if the powers-that-be allow it.
My opinion: Trek has been done to death and I'm sick of it. If they're going to bother bringing it back at all, they needed to (a) dump every bit of Trek baggage and start fresh, and (b) for Fudd's Sake, get some younger actors. They've done (b). It looks like they've made a stab at (a), but we won't know until the film comes out.
I haven't been excited about Star Trek in a very long time. I'm still not excited per se, but I am curious.
I'd make the same statement, but in my case I *did* recognize many of the names, and oddly enough they were all women from my class (or the classes immediately before or after).
I have a theory about this. My personal information and photos tended to highlight my successes in life, and I've had a few (mostly during the dot com boom), although my lifestyle is much more pedestrian now. My photos included items like watching the space shuttle launch, sparring with a famous mixed-martial-arts fighter, my teenage daughter going to summer camp with a well-known teen actress, various travel photos, and so forth.
You have to understand, I'm from a small farming town, where high school graduates tend to aspire to management positions at the local Ace Hardware. My theory is that since my profile shows a higher than average degree of life achievement (for the area), I suddenly become appealing to former classmates who, incidentally, wouldn't give a poor geek the time of day when I was of dating age. Suddenly, I experience a popularity all out of proportion to anything I actually achieved in high school. Recently, from a guestbook entry, I've become pen pals with a former classmate on whom I had a fairly intense crush my junior year.
Re-reading this, it sounds like a commercial for classmates.com. Really, not. My situation was a combination of very low expectations and a few lucky events. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.
I have a confession to make. Hi, my name is Ron and I'm a user of Classmates.com.
I got an account when they first started in the mid nineties, when the service was entirely free. When they went to a 2 tiered scheme, I paid for the extended service for awhile but let it lapse when I was laid off during boom.dot.bust. Went back to the free tier at that time.
I wonder if classmates.com started out legit and then more recently drifted to the dark side. I did not have billing problems when I quit the paid service in 2001, but that was seven years ago; don't know what they're like now.
They *do* send a lot of cruft in the mail. No doubt about that. I wrote a rule to trash most of it. But as far as the service itself goes, I have to admit, I really have been contacted by former classmates and renewed a few relationships. Not many, probably 12 - 15 in 13 years, most of them after the turn of the century. But if someone held a gun to my head, I'd have to admit that the service has worked as advertised. Forced to rate the experience, I'd give it an ambivalent-to-mildly-positive.
That said, if they really are doing all the stuff in the article, they deserve to have the crap sued out of them.
This used to be called "cutting part off the string on this end and tying it to the other end". The technique is sometimes useful, but in this case, what if you're also concerned about shutdown time? For instance, I sometimes shut down my laptop at the end of a meeting for various reasons. Shutdown time is important because I have to wait until it shuts down completely before closing it, else it'll suspend and then resume shutting down when I'm trying to boot it up.
Windows *already* takes too long to shut down -- I'm not sure I want to wait even longer so it can also do prework for the next boot. Instead of tricks like this, why not load less cruft at boot?
Agreed, and when stores do this right, it's worth while. When I was a contractor during the dot com boom, (making big $$) I bought my clothes at Nordstroms. You could find better value elsewhere, but I was willing to pay extra for the privilege of walking in, plunking down my AmEx card and saying "I'm giving a presentation tomorrow and the airline has lost my luggage. Dress me." and they would scramble to do so.
Touchy-feely is good, but the rest, including getting to know your customers, is called "customer service" and is the primary reason brick-and-mortar stores continue to exist. The ones that don't get it, don't.
Since Windows 95, I've been repeatedly trained by M$ that "faster" really means "a few tricks to seem faster but actually slower on the same hardware". I'm a little surprised that anyone listens anymore, let alone wants to test it.
1) Spontaneous prose worthy of Jack Kerouac. Applause.
2) Don't misunderstand me, I don't *care* whether Circuit City goes bankrupt or not. It's not a place I shop, and it's existence or lack thereof is not a concern. I was simply observing that in my experience they had crappy service, (with which you don't appear to disagree -- as far as I can tell) and stores with bad customer service tend to go under. That's hardly a revelation.
3) There seemed to be about 20 or 30 points in there, many of which are clearly arguable, ("fry like a crepe"?? using your debit card in a store is somehow safer than amazon?? and who the heck buys computers bundled with printers?) but are clearly off topic, except perhaps in a stream-of-consciousness sense.
Am I the only one having trouble parsing this? (Who mentioned Linux?)
It kinda sounds like you'd put up with offensive service for the privilege of walking into a physical store to make your purchase. It's not exactly clear why. "New Egg and Amazon and Ebay"... the first two are online stores, and the third is the online equivalent of a flea market, with all the caveat emptor issues of same. I'm also having a hard time understanding the "pliers and screwdriver" comment. Buying stuff at an outlet store doesn't necessarily improve the chances of getting what you paid for -- Much of the time, all you can really tell is that there's something heavy in the box. And you *do* know about the reshrink machine in the back, right?
I know, return policy -- but Amazon has that too (I've used it once, when what I bought was not what I received).
"Less than competent service is traded for freedom in the market"... I'd like to reply to that, but I haven't a clue what you meant.
Back in the old days, there used to be this thing called catalog sales. Sears and Montgomery Wards and so forth. Back in the day, catalog sales primarily existed so that people in outlying areas could still buy stuff even when the nearest physical store was a day's travel away. In this day of strip-mall saturation, we forget that our grandparents (great-grandparents in your case) had to rely on mail order if they didn't live in the city. Given a choice of brick-and-mortar or mail-order, there are several advantages of going to the store -- immediate gratification, and being able to touch and feel before making the purchase. But with electronic items, they're often just boxes that have very rigidly defined specs, or they're some common item (ipod touch, for instance) that you can see almost anywhere. Even then, the brick-and-mortar store has immediate gratification going for it but bad service can quickly negate that. If the widget is difficult to buy in a real store, there's less reason to go there. Apple (to continue with the example above) understands this, and the Apple outlets are pleasant places to shop. Circuit City did not understand this, and they're bankrupt. I guess (if I'm reading your response right) your complaint is that this gives you fewer physical stores in which to shop. This is true. But it begs the question, why would you want to go there in the first place?
At least in our area, Circuit City had the prices of Sharper Image and the customer service of Fry's. I can't remember another store where it was so difficult to buy something. (Well, I tried to do some Christmas shopping at CompUSA last November when the whiteshirts had already been given their layoff notice, which was arguably a worse experience, but that hardly counts.) You couldn't find anyone to help. If the merchandise was in a locked cabinet, you might as well leave, you're not getting it. And there was always one lone girl who looked about twelve trying to do all the sales.
Us geeks will put up with crappy customer service if the price is right, (it's almost a rite of passage, your first successful purchase of an OEM disk drive at Fry's) but Circuit City seemed to expect us to put up with warehouse-grade customer service at boutique prices. I can see where it might be possible to eck out a living in boom times with such a business model, but they had to realize that they'd be the first to go in any major slowdown.
What about "losing" boxes of ballots from precincts known to vote predominantly for the opposing party? How does low votes per polling place help with that?
I think what Fox is actually objecting to is that they can't be held responsible for what someone says in a live broadcast. And they can't, really, unless you want absolutely everything time-delayed.
Slashdot Mirror
>That's absolutely reasonable. When you wear that shirt, you're representing Tommy Hilfiger and are, therefore, impacting the future sales of that brand. By wearing that white shirt after labor day, you're in effect saying that the Hilfiger brand itself is out of style, causing irreparable and immeasurable damage. This theft of future sales is obviously wrong and it needs to be stopped.
Ok, since you brought it up, I have to wonder if that's the real reason Apple doesn't allow clones. Not because of loss of revenue -- the real thing will still be cooler and in demand -- but because proles will witness OSX running on a VG2230, for instance, instead of the much cooler Apple Cinema Display. Typing on a lumpy Microsoft Natural instead of an Apple Ultrathin. Using an ugly Thermolake Soprano instead of a Mac Pro. And this clearly dilutes the brand, because Apple is about style every bit as much as function.
How does turning on torrent encryption affect this?
The first question I'd be asking is what the hell kind of spider is it?
This could be the plot for the next Sam Raimi flick.
Ok, but seriously. I have Windows Media Player XP 2005 as my primary media player. It sucks at recording television. I dunno why, it just does. It sucks at playing "live" TV. It sucks slightly less at playing DVDs. On an entirely adequate system, it works just well enough to be really irritating. The only thing -- this is the key point -- the only thing it does well, is play divx-encoded video files from hard disk. Let's meditate on that for awhile. Reading on "The Green Button", Vista Media Center is even worse. Meditate further.
I have Netflix, I have satellite, I have a really good antenna and I get THIRTEEN damned digital channels off-air. But the STUPID box SUCKS at doing the right thing, and there's nothing else that incorporates all these forms of content in a way my wife can operate. Couple that with fiber optic network, and it sets up a situation where I can record a jittery copy of The Big Bang Theory in real time and one time in three get something that plays well, or download a pristine copy in eight minutes. And "services" like Movielink and Cinema Now think they can "sell" you a download for MORE than the street price of the DVD. (They say "sell", but we all know it's a long term rental.) They think DRM is the answer? They don't understand the question.
Now you know how us Windows XP users have been feeling. :-)
Yeah. Nothing will play, but we're feeling damned superior about it.
> Psystar is not modifying the OS. Check the details! They are not running a cracked or modified version of OSX on their systems. What they have done is created the EFI backbone so that will allow the OS will install run nativly on it. This is no different from when IBM made their machines, and people reverse-engineered the bios to make clones.
Evil thought: As their last act before going out of business, I wonder how tempted Psystar would be to release their IP to the user community.
Has Psystar thought about selling the machines without an OS? (Or with, say, Intrepid Ibex installed?) That'd get around the license issues, I think, unless Apple could prove intent. Then it'd be the individual's responsibility that (cough) their copy of OSX was running on genuine Apple hardware.
> All apple has to get them on is that the OSX license stipulates that it MUST BE INSTALLED ON APPLE HARDWARE. This is EXACTLY the same if Microsoft turned around and said that windows can only be used on specific intel motherboard and cpu, and that only microsoft can decree what hardware is allowed to be used with it.
Speaking of which, why hasn't Microsoft done that yet? The great majority of the market is irrevocably locked into Windows. M$ could simply say "Windows version 8 will only run on the Xbox model 720" and corner the OS *and* hardware market in one fell swoop. Play their cards right, and -- icing on the cake -- they could have current Xbox users re-buying their gear. One wonders why it hasn't already happened.
> Apple should not be the only hardware manufacturer allowed to run OS-X, [...]
Allowed? It's their damned software, monkey-boy. They can decide that 10.6 is only licensed for F150 dashboard navigators (actually, that'd be kinda cool) and your choices would be to stick with leopard or work in your garage. OSX is a culture, a movement, a way of life... but it's also a product owned by Apple Inc.
That explains a lot. Makes me wonder how many episodes after "the naked time" really happened, (or were mass hallucinations, which would also explain a lot) and whether the infection was truly an accident.
I watched an episode of TOS Remastered with this in mind, and it really does put a different, more interesting slant on the show.
It's like, when I was a kid, I couldn't watch an episode of Green Acres. It was too inane, frustrating, over-the-top whimsical. Then at some point I realized that everyone in the cast except Oliver were aliens pretending to be human with little knowledge of how humans should act. Then everything made sense. (Ever noticed that Hank Kimball never blinks?)
Similarly, Inspector Gadget and Claw are both robots who have been programmed to believe they're augmented humans. The real brains are the dog and the cat, who are both disguised aliens waging a covert war on Earth. Penny is a midget NSA agent. See? It all works.
Got to go, time for a lie-down.
Can't get there from work, but I saw the trailer attached to Quantum of Solace. It's really not a full trailer, just "teaser number 2". Looks nice, though. Interesting how the dark woods and subdued lighting of the 1960's have given way to the Macintosh and Ikea look of this century.
I'd like to point out that "reboot" (if it's a true reboot) and "baggage" are mutually exclusive. It's a whole new timeline due to some standard trekish hand-waving, and everything that has happened doesn't necessarily need to happen again. This isn't just a prequel that sets up TOS. If the franchise continues, it can go in completely different directions, if the powers-that-be allow it.
My opinion: Trek has been done to death and I'm sick of it. If they're going to bother bringing it back at all, they needed to (a) dump every bit of Trek baggage and start fresh, and (b) for Fudd's Sake, get some younger actors. They've done (b). It looks like they've made a stab at (a), but we won't know until the film comes out.
I haven't been excited about Star Trek in a very long time. I'm still not excited per se, but I am curious.
> A lightsaber is a unique device, created by hand -- the controls will be slightly different on each individual lightsaber that you buy.
Buy? I was under the impression that each Jedi fashioned his own.
Geek mode off...
That said, I don't think the article works even as a parody.
I'd make the same statement, but in my case I *did* recognize many of the names, and oddly enough they were all women from my class (or the classes immediately before or after).
I have a theory about this. My personal information and photos tended to highlight my successes in life, and I've had a few (mostly during the dot com boom), although my lifestyle is much more pedestrian now. My photos included items like watching the space shuttle launch, sparring with a famous mixed-martial-arts fighter, my teenage daughter going to summer camp with a well-known teen actress, various travel photos, and so forth.
You have to understand, I'm from a small farming town, where high school graduates tend to aspire to management positions at the local Ace Hardware. My theory is that since my profile shows a higher than average degree of life achievement (for the area), I suddenly become appealing to former classmates who, incidentally, wouldn't give a poor geek the time of day when I was of dating age. Suddenly, I experience a popularity all out of proportion to anything I actually achieved in high school. Recently, from a guestbook entry, I've become pen pals with a former classmate on whom I had a fairly intense crush my junior year.
Re-reading this, it sounds like a commercial for classmates.com. Really, not. My situation was a combination of very low expectations and a few lucky events. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.
I have a confession to make. Hi, my name is Ron and I'm a user of Classmates.com.
I got an account when they first started in the mid nineties, when the service was entirely free. When they went to a 2 tiered scheme, I paid for the extended service for awhile but let it lapse when I was laid off during boom.dot.bust. Went back to the free tier at that time.
I wonder if classmates.com started out legit and then more recently drifted to the dark side. I did not have billing problems when I quit the paid service in 2001, but that was seven years ago; don't know what they're like now.
They *do* send a lot of cruft in the mail. No doubt about that. I wrote a rule to trash most of it. But as far as the service itself goes, I have to admit, I really have been contacted by former classmates and renewed a few relationships. Not many, probably 12 - 15 in 13 years, most of them after the turn of the century. But if someone held a gun to my head, I'd have to admit that the service has worked as advertised. Forced to rate the experience, I'd give it an ambivalent-to-mildly-positive.
That said, if they really are doing all the stuff in the article, they deserve to have the crap sued out of them.
This used to be called "cutting part off the string on this end and tying it to the other end". The technique is sometimes useful, but in this case, what if you're also concerned about shutdown time? For instance, I sometimes shut down my laptop at the end of a meeting for various reasons. Shutdown time is important because I have to wait until it shuts down completely before closing it, else it'll suspend and then resume shutting down when I'm trying to boot it up.
Windows *already* takes too long to shut down -- I'm not sure I want to wait even longer so it can also do prework for the next boot. Instead of tricks like this, why not load less cruft at boot?
Agreed, and when stores do this right, it's worth while. When I was a contractor during the dot com boom, (making big $$) I bought my clothes at Nordstroms. You could find better value elsewhere, but I was willing to pay extra for the privilege of walking in, plunking down my AmEx card and saying "I'm giving a presentation tomorrow and the airline has lost my luggage. Dress me." and they would scramble to do so.
Touchy-feely is good, but the rest, including getting to know your customers, is called "customer service" and is the primary reason brick-and-mortar stores continue to exist. The ones that don't get it, don't.
Since Windows 95, I've been repeatedly trained by M$ that "faster" really means "a few tricks to seem faster but actually slower on the same hardware". I'm a little surprised that anyone listens anymore, let alone wants to test it.
1) Spontaneous prose worthy of Jack Kerouac. Applause.
2) Don't misunderstand me, I don't *care* whether Circuit City goes bankrupt or not. It's not a place I shop, and it's existence or lack thereof is not a concern. I was simply observing that in my experience they had crappy service, (with which you don't appear to disagree -- as far as I can tell) and stores with bad customer service tend to go under. That's hardly a revelation.
3) There seemed to be about 20 or 30 points in there, many of which are clearly arguable, ("fry like a crepe"?? using your debit card in a store is somehow safer than amazon?? and who the heck buys computers bundled with printers?) but are clearly off topic, except perhaps in a stream-of-consciousness sense.
Am I the only one having trouble parsing this? (Who mentioned Linux?)
It kinda sounds like you'd put up with offensive service for the privilege of walking into a physical store to make your purchase. It's not exactly clear why. "New Egg and Amazon and Ebay"... the first two are online stores, and the third is the online equivalent of a flea market, with all the caveat emptor issues of same. I'm also having a hard time understanding the "pliers and screwdriver" comment. Buying stuff at an outlet store doesn't necessarily improve the chances of getting what you paid for -- Much of the time, all you can really tell is that there's something heavy in the box. And you *do* know about the reshrink machine in the back, right?
I know, return policy -- but Amazon has that too (I've used it once, when what I bought was not what I received).
"Less than competent service is traded for freedom in the market"... I'd like to reply to that, but I haven't a clue what you meant.
Back in the old days, there used to be this thing called catalog sales. Sears and Montgomery Wards and so forth. Back in the day, catalog sales primarily existed so that people in outlying areas could still buy stuff even when the nearest physical store was a day's travel away. In this day of strip-mall saturation, we forget that our grandparents (great-grandparents in your case) had to rely on mail order if they didn't live in the city. Given a choice of brick-and-mortar or mail-order, there are several advantages of going to the store -- immediate gratification, and being able to touch and feel before making the purchase. But with electronic items, they're often just boxes that have very rigidly defined specs, or they're some common item (ipod touch, for instance) that you can see almost anywhere. Even then, the brick-and-mortar store has immediate gratification going for it but bad service can quickly negate that. If the widget is difficult to buy in a real store, there's less reason to go there. Apple (to continue with the example above) understands this, and the Apple outlets are pleasant places to shop. Circuit City did not understand this, and they're bankrupt. I guess (if I'm reading your response right) your complaint is that this gives you fewer physical stores in which to shop. This is true. But it begs the question, why would you want to go there in the first place?
> Given this optical limit, a point is reached where the addition of more pixels on the sensor becomes, essentially, a useless exercise [...]
Except for marketing, of course. :-)
At least in our area, Circuit City had the prices of Sharper Image and the customer service of Fry's. I can't remember another store where it was so difficult to buy something. (Well, I tried to do some Christmas shopping at CompUSA last November when the whiteshirts had already been given their layoff notice, which was arguably a worse experience, but that hardly counts.) You couldn't find anyone to help. If the merchandise was in a locked cabinet, you might as well leave, you're not getting it. And there was always one lone girl who looked about twelve trying to do all the sales.
Us geeks will put up with crappy customer service if the price is right, (it's almost a rite of passage, your first successful purchase of an OEM disk drive at Fry's) but Circuit City seemed to expect us to put up with warehouse-grade customer service at boutique prices. I can see where it might be possible to eck out a living in boom times with such a business model, but they had to realize that they'd be the first to go in any major slowdown.
What about "losing" boxes of ballots from precincts known to vote predominantly for the opposing party? How does low votes per polling place help with that?
Centerfold scans in 16 colors... that takes me back...
Hey, it was a step up from ascii art.
> To test these they want to use them into a massively multi-player online games like World of Warcraft or Eve online."
Doesn't that violate the TOS?
I think what Fox is actually objecting to is that they can't be held responsible for what someone says in a live broadcast. And they can't, really, unless you want absolutely everything time-delayed.
#Watching for when the log stops growing:
while true
do
ls -lt logs/install.log
echo ""
sleep 2
done
#Show Java process number and name:
ps -ef | grep -i java | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2, $NF}'
#Kill 'em all
kill -9 `ps -ef | grep -i java | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`