The increase in price from.25 a gallon until a few years ago, when the meteoric rise to today's $4 gas began, was simple inflation. Netflix has raised their prices by significantly more than the rate of inflation.
But then again, I'm sure you already knew that. You were just being an ass on purpose.
I doubt they'll lose too many subscribers in terms of the total number. But will everyone keep the same level of service?
I, for one, will likely drop the DVD part of my subscription and go streaming-only when the price increase hits. I sometimes struggle to keep my DVD queue filled with enough titles to keep the envelopes coming every few days as it is; while my instant queue has a backlog of probably a couple hundred different titles I haven't managed to find the time to watch. So the DVDs don't represent that important a part of the service for me. But for just $2 more, it was a handy addition in case there was a DVD-only title I had to have now Now NOW. For $8 more... not so much... I'd be better suited using a Redbox kiosk on those rare occasions.
Dropping down to a streaming-only membership means Netflix will actually get 20% less from me, not the 60% more I'm sure they were hoping for. And I bet there are a good number of people who will make the same choice.
And even if it's only $6... a 60% rate hike is a pretty big deal, especially coming with almost no advance communication or progression, apparently no increase in the catalog, and the casual and arrogant dismissal of peoples' complaints by that Netflix exec when he did deign to speak to the public. It's the principle of the thing, you see.
In just what sort of business do the owners randomly send its security types out to give unsuspecting customers the boot for no explicable reason anyway?
It sounds like not only were you being unnecessarily confrontational, but that "the owners" were rather daft in the first place.
Lawyers are bullshit artists extraordinaire. And the law is their paintbrush. This is the same lot who can take a statement like: "shall make no law", which by all rational standards should amount to a very simple boolean, and come up with a meaning like: "should, in general, refrain from making laws unless they really feel like it".
Sears actually took this very issue all the way to the supreme court and WON. That's how we have the "physical nexus" rule, any why Amazon's Fernley, NV distribution center handles most orders in California, in the first place. The ironic thing is that now Sears has done a 180 and wants Amazon to have to pay the tax that Sears does not. Fortunately, the ruling protects everyone, not just Sears.
How the state legislature thinks they can override the SCOTUS though, I don't know.
Also, I'd bet there are a number of people in a similar situation to myself. I *WAS* jailbreaking my iPhone. But I came to realize that Cydia is even more a vast sea of crapware than any app store. I eventually wound up with my phone jailbroken for one reason only: backgrounder, so I could have Pandora and iHeartRadio keep playing while I did other things.
With iOS 4 and background apps official supported; I haven't bothered to jailbreak since.
The cable's $50 price may be justified, but it's also a further reminder of why Thunderbolt may follow FireWire's path into obsolescence.
Preach on brother... you tell 'em. I also heard that Thunderbolt has no wireless and less space than a Nomad. No doubt that makes it doubly lame and triply doomed to obsolescence.
Microsoft is quite happy to cut off a revenue stream if they think they can harm an alternative platform.
See, for example, their purchase of Virtual PC from Connectix. Pretty much every purchase of Virtual PC also meant the purchase of a Windows license. Nevertheless, they bought it and killed it just to deprive Mac users of the ability to use the occasional Windows App. Also, there's Halo. Before microsoft bought Bungiee, Halo was going to be simultaneously released for all platforms, including the Macintosh. Gates put a stop to that right quick. And Halo wasn't made available for Mac until years later and in a poorly-done and poorly-performing port.
I don't think "terrorist" is especially appropriate. But when they graduated from protest to the willful destruction of other people's property, they certainly DID cease to be *activists*; and became nothing more than common criminals, who should be forced to pay restitution and then locked away from society.
Hah... I'd agree if you'd mentioned F1 or rallying or touring. But nascar? When all they do is drive in a circle and turn left; the only things to look forward to, IMO, are the crashes and the commercials and changing the channel to just about anything else.
> If you still answer "yes" to the above question, then imagine that > AT&T disallowed people to change to a different provider. Don't > you think that situation is a little awkward? And still we accept it > from social media.
How does social media disallow you from changing to a different provider? Facebook may be the hot thing now. But really, it's the same functionality and the same network of friends I had on Myspace, and Tribe before that, and Friendster before that. Before too long, a new social network will become the thing to use, and we'll all have to switch and re-create our networks of friends yet again, and Facebook will have the same virtual tumbleweeds that all the others have now. Hell... there's no lock-in that stops me from stopping using Facebook other than the fact that my friends all use Facebook. As fickle as the public is, Friendster could, theoretically, become trendy again tomorrow.
The only one that's differentiated itself in any significant way is LinkedIn. And that's just marketing. There's nothing fundamentally different that prevents everyone from, for example, using alternate Facebook accounts for their professional networking... or deciding that Tribe would be great for that purpose.
The operating system that actually runs your computer though... that's an entirely different beast from J. Random web service.
> That said, MS still wants to make money. If they can keep customers > around, they will. It isn't in their own best interest to drop Linux > development of Skype, because the Linux users likely won't go out > and buy a version of Windows to use Skype in the future; hence they > become lost customers.
You could say that about any of the products that microsoft has bought and then dropped, or seriously curtailed, support for other OSs. Losing the customers and money won't stop them for a second if they think they can harm the other platform.
Remember Bungie's plans for Halo (simultaneous release for Mac and PC of a game that was demo'd to be significantly more awesome than the crippled not-multiplatform game that released) before microsoft bought them? Remember the plans for the continuation of the Oni and Myth properties? Now... remember what eventually happened with Halo and the planned Oni and Myth sequels?
Remember how Connectix VirtualPC was bought by microsoft? Remember how they then killed it? And that's a prime example of my point. Most VirtualPC sales were also sales of a copy of windows. So they'd have been making money off both the emulator and the guest OS. But they bought the software from Connectix, and gave up the money they could have made selling it, just to do harm to the Macintosh as a platform.
Microsoft has demonstrated plenty of times that they will give up some short-term profit if they think they can make one more step towards killing all other options and forcing everyone to use windows. Why should anyone believe their word when they say this time is different?
Eh.... If "being fucked by the West" (in particular the United States) were what breeds terrorism; then we should be seeing a hundred terrorists boiling up out of Latin America for every one from a middle eastern or muslim country. We've screwed Latin America over far worse than we've even *thought* about screwing over muslim countries. And we were doing it since a hundred years before most Americans, save for bible scholars, bothered to take notice that the Middle East was even there. In fact, the land I'm sitting on as I type this used to me part of Mexico. And California is considerably larger and nicer a hunk of land than that miserable little scrap that Israel sits on. (ZOMG!!! The west/Jews stole the part of the crumbling Ottoman/British Empire that WE had planned to steal!)
I'm no believer in the bushies' simplistic mantra that: "they hate us for our freedom". But It's equally simplistic, I think, to say that all they've done is a justified response to our (admittedly) crappy foreign policy. I think there IS a fundamental incompatibility between our societies. Otherwise.... where are the MEXICAN (and Panamanian, and Colombian, and Nicaraguan, and etc.) hijackers and suicide bombers?
You make a good argument there for a civil tort... defamation or libel or something... maybe even a restraining order to put a stop to it. But criminal charges? For speech; even offensive speech? That goes way beyond the pale, I think.
Just like when gates bought Bungie, Halo was still released simultaneously for Mac and PC (And with all the content and awesomeness demo'ed previously at Macworld.), and the Myth, Marathon, and Oni franchises continued to be developed... as was all in Bungie's pre-buyout plans... right?
>I guess I'm pining for the days when a computer was still >pretty useful and still getting updates 5 years after you >bought it.
My iPhone 3G was rather creaky with iOS 4. But my 2007 iMac is still my primary computer, still useful, and still getting updates. And based on the developer previews, I do expect it to run Lion fairly well. The only reason I can think of that won't "last" five years is if I switch to a MacBook Pro. And even then, I'd pass it along to a friend who could get some use out of it... almost certainly past the five year mark.
Netflix won't stream to you when you're on vacation. It doesn't matter that your billing address is still in the US or that you're not relocating yourself or your account. If you're on a non-US IP address, Netflix decides to punish you for the fact and block access to your account.
iTunes? Honestly I'm not sure about iTunes rental/streaming when outside the us. I don't do the rental thing. I prefer an unlimited subscription ala Netflix or outright ownership.
External hard drives? Maybe you'd like to watch a newer movie; and the studio has elected to make things difficult for you by playing games with the disc that the Handbrake and RipIt developers haven't worked around yet.
Why watch movies while on vacation instead of actually vacationing? Inclement weather or airline delays can put the vacation on pause; and it's nice to have something with which to occupy yourself.
> RISC was seen as inherently better than older instruction > sets like x86. Heck, all the computer architecture classes > I taught in school taught MIPS, etc
Heh.
I spewed some of that anti-Intel venom myself. And that reminds me of one of the big reasons *I* hated Intel and x86 so much. When I took "CPU Architectures and Assembly Programming" in college, my professor was solidly in the Apple/Motorola camp, and he had an interesting way of teaching us why. For the first half of the semester, we learned M68K assembly and did all of our work on test boards with 68080's, IIRC. We then switched to Intel and did all of the exact same exercises in x86 assembly. And that experience put me solidly into the Intel-is-garbage camp as well.
But eventually, when Apple was making the switch, I realized something: I'd never programmed in assembly before that class, I hadn't since, and I was unlikely to ever need to do so in the future. So why did it matter to me anymore how much a steaming pile of rubbish Intel's instruction set is, when compilers and interpreters are there to shield me from that awfulness? So, while I still wish PPC had won; I'm okay with benefitting with the bazillions of dollars Intel pours into it's fab processes, even if their underlying CPU architecture is kind of junky.
Not necessarily a bug... it could have been a simple oversight. Just look at everything that's in/var/log on a vanilla UNIX/Linux installation. Unless you go in to your configurations and specifically dial things down, there's quite a lot in there that some nefarious party could exploit to get a very good idea of what you're doing on that box.
How do you suppose the phone company knows what cell you're in, so they can route calls to your phone? How do you suppose they get their E911 data?
As long as you have the thing powered on, the phone company know where you are. And if the police want to know, they won't go to your house, hack your computer, and read the log backup. They'll just go to the phone company with a subpoena.
This whole controversy was much ado about nothing. The only thing that was different was that the user had access to the data that "the man" had all along.
More to the point... a dozen different crappy phones that AT&T, and now Verizon, subsidize more than they do the iPhone; sometimes to the point that the phone winds up being free.
And to be perfectly fair, until the Verizon iPhone; there were plenty of people who went with Android because AT&T's network is just so bloody awful they wanted to be on any other carrier and even the iPhone wasn't enough to get them onto AT&T. The iPhone is the only reason I'm still on AT&T, that's for damn sure. And when the iPhone 5 comes out I'll most likely jump ship to Verizon as well.
> Don't kid yourself, Android is a huge threat to > Apple. Android is growing like wildfire.
Don't kid ourselves?
You people have been predicting and rooting for the demise of Apple pretty much ever since there's BEEN an Apple. And the list of culprits is plenty long. First it was going to be IBM, then Compaq, then Microsoft, then Sun, then Dell, then John Sculley and Gil Amelio's own incompetence (Okay, THAT very nearly did Apple in.), then Microsoft again, then IBM again, then Linux, then Palm. And now Google is the latest addition to that list of would-be assassins. Why should we believe you now, over any of the other times you've all been wrong; that Apple is doomed, and that I should abandon the platform, toss anything I own with the logo in the nearest dumpster, and get while the getting's good?
Somehow, I think you're full of it... dead wrong just like all the other times. I'd bet good money that in in another ten years I'll still have a Macintosh on my desk and an iPhone in my pocket (Or their equivalents, if Apple changes the names.), and the list of companies that were supposed to finally "drive the last nail into Apple's coffin" will be that much longer, and you people will still be telling anyone who'll listen that Apple is doomed because of $someCompanyOrAnother and we should dump it before it's too late.
Slashdot Mirror
> But Apple has a complete monopoly of the iOS device market.
That's like saying that Ford has a complete monopoly on the Mustang market. Technically true; but a straw man at best.
The increase in price from .25 a gallon until a few years ago, when the meteoric rise to today's $4 gas began, was simple inflation. Netflix has raised their prices by significantly more than the rate of inflation.
But then again, I'm sure you already knew that. You were just being an ass on purpose.
I doubt they'll lose too many subscribers in terms of the total number. But will everyone keep the same level of service?
I, for one, will likely drop the DVD part of my subscription and go streaming-only when the price increase hits. I sometimes struggle to keep my DVD queue filled with enough titles to keep the envelopes coming every few days as it is; while my instant queue has a backlog of probably a couple hundred different titles I haven't managed to find the time to watch. So the DVDs don't represent that important a part of the service for me. But for just $2 more, it was a handy addition in case there was a DVD-only title I had to have now Now NOW. For $8 more... not so much... I'd be better suited using a Redbox kiosk on those rare occasions.
Dropping down to a streaming-only membership means Netflix will actually get 20% less from me, not the 60% more I'm sure they were hoping for. And I bet there are a good number of people who will make the same choice.
And even if it's only $6... a 60% rate hike is a pretty big deal, especially coming with almost no advance communication or progression, apparently no increase in the catalog, and the casual and arrogant dismissal of peoples' complaints by that Netflix exec when he did deign to speak to the public. It's the principle of the thing, you see.
In just what sort of business do the owners randomly send its security types out to give unsuspecting customers the boot for no explicable reason anyway?
It sounds like not only were you being unnecessarily confrontational, but that "the owners" were rather daft in the first place.
Basically, it boils down to one thing:
Lawyers are bullshit artists extraordinaire. And the law is their paintbrush. This is the same lot who can take a statement like: "shall make no law", which by all rational standards should amount to a very simple boolean, and come up with a meaning like: "should, in general, refrain from making laws unless they really feel like it".
Obviously, it's no different in Belgium.
Sears actually took this very issue all the way to the supreme court and WON. That's how we have the "physical nexus" rule, any why Amazon's Fernley, NV distribution center handles most orders in California, in the first place. The ironic thing is that now Sears has done a 180 and wants Amazon to have to pay the tax that Sears does not. Fortunately, the ruling protects everyone, not just Sears.
How the state legislature thinks they can override the SCOTUS though, I don't know.
> Apple is very hostile to advanced, technical users,
> no matter how you slice it.
Really? Here's an exercise. Compare & contrast:
Sony's treatment of Playstaytion jailbreakers.
vs.
Apple's treatment of iOS jailbreakers.
The MPAA's reactions towards DVD Jon and DeCSS.
vs.
Apple's reactions towards DVD Jon and QTFairUse
Microsoft's policies towards X-Boxes known to have been jailbroken.
vs.
Apple's policies towards iPhones known to have been jailbroken.
Also, I'd bet there are a number of people in a similar situation to myself. I *WAS* jailbreaking my iPhone. But I came to realize that Cydia is even more a vast sea of crapware than any app store. I eventually wound up with my phone jailbroken for one reason only: backgrounder, so I could have Pandora and iHeartRadio keep playing while I did other things.
With iOS 4 and background apps official supported; I haven't bothered to jailbreak since.
Preach on brother... you tell 'em. I also heard that Thunderbolt has no wireless and less space than a Nomad. No doubt that makes it doubly lame and triply doomed to obsolescence.
Like, for example, military personnel, for whom 85K is approximately the pay for an officer with 10+ years of service or an enlistee with about 20?
Cops are chumps compared to soldiers, sailors, or marines. They should certainly not be being paid more.
Microsoft is quite happy to cut off a revenue stream if they think they can harm an alternative platform.
See, for example, their purchase of Virtual PC from Connectix. Pretty much every purchase of Virtual PC also meant the purchase of a Windows license. Nevertheless, they bought it and killed it just to deprive Mac users of the ability to use the occasional Windows App. Also, there's Halo. Before microsoft bought Bungiee, Halo was going to be simultaneously released for all platforms, including the Macintosh. Gates put a stop to that right quick. And Halo wasn't made available for Mac until years later and in a poorly-done and poorly-performing port.
I don't think "terrorist" is especially appropriate. But when they graduated from protest to the willful destruction of other people's property, they certainly DID cease to be *activists*; and became nothing more than common criminals, who should be forced to pay restitution and then locked away from society.
Hah... I'd agree if you'd mentioned F1 or rallying or touring. But nascar? When all they do is drive in a circle and turn left; the only things to look forward to, IMO, are the crashes and the commercials and changing the channel to just about anything else.
> If you still answer "yes" to the above question, then imagine that
> AT&T disallowed people to change to a different provider. Don't
> you think that situation is a little awkward? And still we accept it
> from social media.
How does social media disallow you from changing to a different provider? Facebook may be the hot thing now. But really, it's the same functionality and the same network of friends I had on Myspace, and Tribe before that, and Friendster before that. Before too long, a new social network will become the thing to use, and we'll all have to switch and re-create our networks of friends yet again, and Facebook will have the same virtual tumbleweeds that all the others have now. Hell... there's no lock-in that stops me from stopping using Facebook other than the fact that my friends all use Facebook. As fickle as the public is, Friendster could, theoretically, become trendy again tomorrow.
The only one that's differentiated itself in any significant way is LinkedIn. And that's just marketing. There's nothing fundamentally different that prevents everyone from, for example, using alternate Facebook accounts for their professional networking... or deciding that Tribe would be great for that purpose.
The operating system that actually runs your computer though... that's an entirely different beast from J. Random web service.
> That said, MS still wants to make money. If they can keep customers
> around, they will. It isn't in their own best interest to drop Linux
> development of Skype, because the Linux users likely won't go out
> and buy a version of Windows to use Skype in the future; hence they
> become lost customers.
You could say that about any of the products that microsoft has bought and then dropped, or seriously curtailed, support for other OSs. Losing the customers and money won't stop them for a second if they think they can harm the other platform.
Remember Bungie's plans for Halo (simultaneous release for Mac and PC of a game that was demo'd to be significantly more awesome than the crippled not-multiplatform game that released) before microsoft bought them? Remember the plans for the continuation of the Oni and Myth properties? Now... remember what eventually happened with Halo and the planned Oni and Myth sequels?
Remember how Connectix VirtualPC was bought by microsoft? Remember how they then killed it? And that's a prime example of my point. Most VirtualPC sales were also sales of a copy of windows. So they'd have been making money off both the emulator and the guest OS. But they bought the software from Connectix, and gave up the money they could have made selling it, just to do harm to the Macintosh as a platform.
Microsoft has demonstrated plenty of times that they will give up some short-term profit if they think they can make one more step towards killing all other options and forcing everyone to use windows. Why should anyone believe their word when they say this time is different?
Eh.... If "being fucked by the West" (in particular the United States) were what breeds terrorism; then we should be seeing a hundred terrorists boiling up out of Latin America for every one from a middle eastern or muslim country. We've screwed Latin America over far worse than we've even *thought* about screwing over muslim countries. And we were doing it since a hundred years before most Americans, save for bible scholars, bothered to take notice that the Middle East was even there. In fact, the land I'm sitting on as I type this used to me part of Mexico. And California is considerably larger and nicer a hunk of land than that miserable little scrap that Israel sits on. (ZOMG!!! The west/Jews stole the part of the crumbling Ottoman/British Empire that WE had planned to steal!)
I'm no believer in the bushies' simplistic mantra that: "they hate us for our freedom". But It's equally simplistic, I think, to say that all they've done is a justified response to our (admittedly) crappy foreign policy. I think there IS a fundamental incompatibility between our societies. Otherwise.... where are the MEXICAN (and Panamanian, and Colombian, and Nicaraguan, and etc.) hijackers and suicide bombers?
You make a good argument there for a civil tort... defamation or libel or something... maybe even a restraining order to put a stop to it. But criminal charges? For speech; even offensive speech? That goes way beyond the pale, I think.
Just like when gates bought Bungie, Halo was still released simultaneously for Mac and PC (And with all the content and awesomeness demo'ed previously at Macworld.), and the Myth, Marathon, and Oni franchises continued to be developed... as was all in Bungie's pre-buyout plans... right?
Oh... wait.
>I guess I'm pining for the days when a computer was still
>pretty useful and still getting updates 5 years after you
>bought it.
My iPhone 3G was rather creaky with iOS 4. But my 2007 iMac is still my primary computer, still useful, and still getting updates. And based on the developer previews, I do expect it to run Lion fairly well. The only reason I can think of that won't "last" five years is if I switch to a MacBook Pro. And even then, I'd pass it along to a friend who could get some use out of it... almost certainly past the five year mark.
Netflix won't stream to you when you're on vacation. It doesn't matter that your billing address is still in the US or that you're not relocating yourself or your account. If you're on a non-US IP address, Netflix decides to punish you for the fact and block access to your account.
iTunes? Honestly I'm not sure about iTunes rental/streaming when outside the us. I don't do the rental thing. I prefer an unlimited subscription ala Netflix or outright ownership.
External hard drives? Maybe you'd like to watch a newer movie; and the studio has elected to make things difficult for you by playing games with the disc that the Handbrake and RipIt developers haven't worked around yet.
Why watch movies while on vacation instead of actually vacationing? Inclement weather or airline delays can put the vacation on pause; and it's nice to have something with which to occupy yourself.
> RISC was seen as inherently better than older instruction
> sets like x86. Heck, all the computer architecture classes
> I taught in school taught MIPS, etc
Heh.
I spewed some of that anti-Intel venom myself. And that reminds me of one of the big reasons *I* hated Intel and x86 so much. When I took "CPU Architectures and Assembly Programming" in college, my professor was solidly in the Apple/Motorola camp, and he had an interesting way of teaching us why. For the first half of the semester, we learned M68K assembly and did all of our work on test boards with 68080's, IIRC. We then switched to Intel and did all of the exact same exercises in x86 assembly. And that experience put me solidly into the Intel-is-garbage camp as well.
But eventually, when Apple was making the switch, I realized something: I'd never programmed in assembly before that class, I hadn't since, and I was unlikely to ever need to do so in the future. So why did it matter to me anymore how much a steaming pile of rubbish Intel's instruction set is, when compilers and interpreters are there to shield me from that awfulness? So, while I still wish PPC had won; I'm okay with benefitting with the bazillions of dollars Intel pours into it's fab processes, even if their underlying CPU architecture is kind of junky.
Not necessarily a bug... it could have been a simple oversight. Just look at everything that's in /var/log on a vanilla UNIX/Linux installation. Unless you go in to your configurations and specifically dial things down, there's quite a lot in there that some nefarious party could exploit to get a very good idea of what you're doing on that box.
How do you suppose the phone company knows what cell you're in, so they can route calls to your phone? How do you suppose they get their E911 data?
As long as you have the thing powered on, the phone company know where you are. And if the police want to know, they won't go to your house, hack your computer, and read the log backup. They'll just go to the phone company with a subpoena.
This whole controversy was much ado about nothing. The only thing that was different was that the user had access to the data that "the man" had all along.
More to the point... a dozen different crappy phones that AT&T, and now Verizon, subsidize more than they do the iPhone; sometimes to the point that the phone winds up being free.
And to be perfectly fair, until the Verizon iPhone; there were plenty of people who went with Android because AT&T's network is just so bloody awful they wanted to be on any other carrier and even the iPhone wasn't enough to get them onto AT&T. The iPhone is the only reason I'm still on AT&T, that's for damn sure. And when the iPhone 5 comes out I'll most likely jump ship to Verizon as well.
> Don't kid yourself, Android is a huge threat to
> Apple. Android is growing like wildfire.
Don't kid ourselves?
You people have been predicting and rooting for the demise of Apple pretty much ever since there's BEEN an Apple. And the list of culprits is plenty long. First it was going to be IBM, then Compaq, then Microsoft, then Sun, then Dell, then John Sculley and Gil Amelio's own incompetence (Okay, THAT very nearly did Apple in.), then Microsoft again, then IBM again, then Linux, then Palm. And now Google is the latest addition to that list of would-be assassins. Why should we believe you now, over any of the other times you've all been wrong; that Apple is doomed, and that I should abandon the platform, toss anything I own with the logo in the nearest dumpster, and get while the getting's good?
Somehow, I think you're full of it... dead wrong just like all the other times. I'd bet good money that in in another ten years I'll still have a Macintosh on my desk and an iPhone in my pocket (Or their equivalents, if Apple changes the names.), and the list of companies that were supposed to finally "drive the last nail into Apple's coffin" will be that much longer, and you people will still be telling anyone who'll listen that Apple is doomed because of $someCompanyOrAnother and we should dump it before it's too late.