I agree with almost everything you've said, but just to nit-pick a little, I see a significant difference between the 2 different 360 skus (Stock Keeping Somethings, Units?) and the PS3 skus: If you're unsure about the money involved in buying the premium 360 bundle, just get the basic one and buy add-ons later if you feel like it and you can get every single piece of functionality that's in the premium. This means that if a game developer wanted/needed to rest a game on a specific piece of hardware that was only in the premium, then they could do it and there would be absolutely zero 360 owners who couldn't play the game once they bought an accessory. Annoying, but possible. (plus, if you bought an HDTV after a year with the console, you could get the accessory... that kind of thing)
On the other hand, there is stuff in the premium PS3 that just isn't available if you buy the basic one. If something happened to come out that needed the premium functionality, then you're SOL - go buy a new console. Which of course means that developers will never do that - instead of extremely rarely do that which will be the case with the 360.
Now, I haven't looked at the two Sony skus, so it's possible that there's nothing between the PS3 premium/basic models that is like the hard drive/no hard drive dichotomy that's in the 360, so it doesn't matter, but it really does seem like a whole different world to me.
Re:How about some more *durable* flash drives?
on
16GB Flash USB Dongle
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· Score: 1
I have a Kingmax that has no cap, no metal shroud around the USB connector (which just means you have to remember which way is up) and no hollow body around it. It's pretty much just a solid piece of plastic, which means there's nothing really to compress and break. http://www.kingmaxdigi.com/product/superstick.htm
I've stepped on it, washed it, and it lives on my keychain, so it's always been beat up all to heck, but it still works fine.
Except what they're talking about here is not another piece of "every bit of hardware in existance", it's the single most popular music player on the market, and probably the most ubiquitous peripheral out there right now.
It's like the day I tried to install Linux and it wouldn't write to my data disc which was formatted in NTFS. No, it's not Linux's fault, but it made me go, "oh well, it would've been nice, but it's too much bother". A reaction that I promise you is more common than any other.
Well, a kind of counter-example to your theory would be Palm, who cornered the PDA market with (I seem to remember) something like 80 or 90 percent of the market at one point. Even when MS was up to version 3 of their Windows CE products. ('98 or so?)
Which is interesting because when I replaced the hard drive in my laptop, which required me to reactivate Windows for the gosh knows how many'th time (The machine and the software is 5 years old almost, I bought it used which meant it was activated at least twice before I bought it - once on the original purchase and once when it was wiped to be resold) the software didn't want to activate by itself since it said it had been activated too many times already. The conversation with the person on the phone went something like this:
MS: Thank you for calling Microsoft, can I have the installation id that's on your screen? Me: (reads long number) MS: Thank you. (pause) Ok, how many machines has this been installed on? (You could read this as someone accusing me of piracy, but it's a pretty reasonable question when some people might not realise you're not supposed to install on numerous machines) Me: Just the one MS: And why do you need to reactivate? Me: Replaced the hard drive in my laptop. MS: Ok, I'm going to read out an activation number for you to put in the box, and you should be ok. (Gives me long number)
Very polite, minimal questions, took less than 5 minutes, and it was at 11:30 at night on a Saturday.
Now, it's fair enough to say that there might not be a real need for activation, that MS is being boneheaded by requiring it, or that they should be more trusting of their customers; these are all fair comments. It's also possible that you might have had a phone agent on a bad day. I just know from my experience that they've been always very very polite and if they err, it's on the side of permissiveness. I also assume that if I was hyper-sensitive and acted like a jerk, they might have been less polite to me. I would never suggest that was the case with you of course.
And while I have no real idea what is the case in this particular instance, you could probably make the case that the speed (snappiness is the metric that I usually hear mentioned) of OSX comes from continual streamlining and refinement of the code, taking out rosetta code and such, while Windows has already had streamlining done to it already, and there aren't any more places for those kinds of easy speed wins in the code and architecture. It's known that Microsoft is slower at developing new releases of software than Apple, and that Apple is more 'feature' oriented than Microsoft, and I also know what happens to _my_ code when someone tells me to implement a feature by a certain date no matter what (ie, Cruft and Kludges ALL over the place. It works, it's pretty to the end user, but it's not necessarily fast or pretty code)
Like I said, I don't know if my scenario is more or less likely than yours. All I'm saying is that speed increases in subsequent releases in software may not mean better development practices, and may actually be counter proof of that.
Although you usually physically cannot embed fonts in at least any of the Adobe formats if they're not allowed to be, they'd have to be sent separately and installed by the user (someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't think I am). Can you embed fonts in Word files? I didn't think you could...
I suppose it's kind of the same thing as if someone gave you a CD-R of AutoCad and said, "here's the software you'll need to open up those drawings I sent you". (and of course assuming that there wasn't a dongle or click-through licence agreement needed) Who's responsible in that case if it were audited?
The thing is that anyone who's worked with fonts professionally for more than a week or so(as a publishing house no doubt is) knows full well that fonts sometimes cost a lot of money (can a couple hundred bucks for a single style) and that the ones that look good usually have restrictive usage rights and that you must be careful as to how you manage them.
It's entirely possible that management in this place didn't know about the font problem. It beggars the imagination to think that the people who used them didn't know. What it comes down to is that I find it very very hard to believe that this was done without knowledge on someone's part that it was breaking copyright.
Absolutely. And the ones that don't allow this notify you when you try to embed them in any program I've used recently. It takes a concious effort to send someone a font that has usage guidelines that don't allow you to do so.
It always seems so strange to me that politicians would do that.
I mean, (and I don't mean for this to become a "rah rah Canada" post) it doesn't seem to happen here, and I have to wonder what we're doing differently to make this kind of thing not happen. And why nobody in the US has ever done anything about a practice that really does smack of the worst kind of dirty and underhanded politiking.
I think getting rid of this piggybacking practice would really do wonders to start to change people's opinion of the political process. But perhaps that's just my simple-minded naivety.
Yeah, my theory on that is that if a drive takes 2 seconds instead of 4 seconds to do what it needs to do, then even if it takes more power to operate, it's still going to be a net decrease in the amount of power that an individual operation takes.
I don't know if it actually works that way, but it's my theory and I like it.
Yes people used to have pride in their work, but the problem is that for someone to have pride in their work, and to actually know something, they need to be able to stay there for a while, and for them to stay there for a while, they need to be paid a living wage. If you don't pay a living wage, you're going to get either those who stay there only until they can get a job somewhere else, or the people who are unemployable anywhere else.
And the reason, of course, that people aren't paid a living wage is that we the consumer are drawn to the lowest cost. There are still electronics and computer stores where the people who own the store run it, who are in there as a career, and those are the places I shop. Unfortunately, to support that, the prices must be higher. I'm fine with paying an extra 5-10% (or more) to get good service from intelligent people who know what they're talking about. Most people arent, so the minimum wage big-box stores with retail drones are taking over the landscape.
If people actually want better service, they should be willing to pay a bit extra to get it. You can only have one or the other, not both.
I mean, you can honestly argue I suppose that the stories/characters/acting/ whatever is better, it's a matter of personal opinion, so not worth arguing over. But they don't look as good. Nowhere near, and probably never were.
Which ones have you been looking at? Because they're not the same ones I've seen.
My wife saw that video, turned to me and said, "we're getting this game, right?"
I'll give her this, when I told her it would cost us somewhere in the region of $2000 she actually had to consider it for a full second and a half before she said ok.
So, I'll get a new computer, but I won't be able to use it for six months, and I won't actually see my wife for that time either... Thanks Will Wright.
I wait for something to complete downloading in IE and go to something else, and when IE's done, I get the thing on the taskbar flashing orange. If several IE windows are open, the rollup button flashes, and when I click on that, the one that wants my attention is flashing on the pop-up. No focus stealing involved.
I don't, and because of that I choose to live in a country where my beliefs are upheld rather than yours. You are free to live wherever you want and where your beliefs are upheld by the legislative bent of that country.
If you're interested, you can go to Reverend Phelps' screed on Canada Here
He's not too happy with Canada because he was told not to come here preaching hate and advocating violence against gay people and the people who allow them basic human rights.
The problem is that we hold in our charter that harming someone is not just confined to physical harm - you can harm me and my society by just your speech. The U.S.A does not agree with this concept, and there you can say pretty much what you want as long as you don't physically attack someone.
I happen to agree more with the thought here, that by advocating hate and violence - as Phelps and others do - you can cause more hurt than just with physical violence, and should be limited. So it's regulated to a certain extent, and if you step over the line, you can be held responsible and told to stop, fined, or sent to jail. Or, in the case of Ernst Jundel, deported.
Because some speech is allowed, and some is not, it's not as easy to define when you've stepped over it as in some jurisdictions who say, "verbal attacks are always allowed, and physical attacks are never allowed", but it is defined, and while it's pretty much up to a judge to decide when you have gone too far, we have a good system of reviews with courts of appeal that I haven't yet seen a specific case where it ended up that I didn't agree with the result.
Our courts are pretty good at deciding these things, which helps. You can say what you want about our non-elected judiciary system, but we don't have too many idealogues in the hot seats. Different strokes I suppose...
If it came down to a case where courts or parliament were overstepping their bounds, there would probably be some polite concern expressed by the people of Canada, and things would change... That's the way we do things here;)
It reminds me of the booming business (back in the day) there was selling shareware software for five or ten dollars in the stores.
I always wondered how many people were very confused when installing it and then being told that they should send money to the developers if they liked and continued using the software since they had already paid for it.
I was always kind of peeved at it since I'm sure the people who packaged and distributed the discs probably made far more than the developers ever did. I guess middle men always make more than the creators of a work... Plus, at the time there wasn't a handy dandy interweb thingy for people to get the shareware if they didn't buy it, so it definately had a reason to be.
Absolutely. But what people should realise is that those three things don't necessarily have an equal weight. For myself, right now, I don't care about power at all, I sort of care about money, and I really do care about satisfaction a whole lot. I'd give up a whole lot of the first and some of the second to have more of the third. But I don't have a family, and I'm not the kind of person who needs power.
Inherent in this is the fact that none of these factors are a have/not have situation. You're never going to rate a job on whether you have power or not, or are satisfied or not, or have money or not. (And no, unless you're Bill G you can't even say you have 'enough' money. Nobody ever thinks they have enough money) Everything is a continuum, everything is fluid. How much money is a lot, how much is not much?
Also, security should be there, along with a whole lot of other factors - moral, religious, etc. but when you're trying to make a pithy reductionist theory about things I guess something's gotta give.
What I'm saying is that your answer would be different from mine. Not just which order they'd be in, but how much of each you'd give up for the other. If, for example, you had a family, with three kids who needed medical care and had no savings, I'm absolutely sure your money factor would be very very important to you - Perhaps to the point where the other two factors are almost non-existant. We have no idea where the OP is in his or her life, what his or her background is, all that kind of stuff. Nothing we say here is really going to have a whole lot of bearing on their situation, and nothing we do will change that.
You have to live your life to your own standards. Not anyone elses.
Slashdot Mirror
I won't send you to the 'new features in Vista' page that is on Wikipeda since that gets trotted out every time this subject comes up.
_ best.asp
But here's a Thurrott article about some of the good things in Vista that kind of counterbalances his post about all the stuff he hates...
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_rc1
He may be overly sensational, but he seems to be overly sensational on both sides of the subject pretty much equally.
I agree with almost everything you've said, but just to nit-pick a little, I see a significant difference between the 2 different 360 skus (Stock Keeping Somethings, Units?) and the PS3 skus: If you're unsure about the money involved in buying the premium 360 bundle, just get the basic one and buy add-ons later if you feel like it and you can get every single piece of functionality that's in the premium. This means that if a game developer wanted/needed to rest a game on a specific piece of hardware that was only in the premium, then they could do it and there would be absolutely zero 360 owners who couldn't play the game once they bought an accessory. Annoying, but possible. (plus, if you bought an HDTV after a year with the console, you could get the accessory... that kind of thing)
On the other hand, there is stuff in the premium PS3 that just isn't available if you buy the basic one. If something happened to come out that needed the premium functionality, then you're SOL - go buy a new console. Which of course means that developers will never do that - instead of extremely rarely do that which will be the case with the 360.
Now, I haven't looked at the two Sony skus, so it's possible that there's nothing between the PS3 premium/basic models that is like the hard drive/no hard drive dichotomy that's in the 360, so it doesn't matter, but it really does seem like a whole different world to me.
I have a Kingmax that has no cap, no metal shroud around the USB connector (which just means you have to remember which way is up) and no hollow body around it. It's pretty much just a solid piece of plastic, which means there's nothing really to compress and break. http://www.kingmaxdigi.com/product/superstick.htm
I've stepped on it, washed it, and it lives on my keychain, so it's always been beat up all to heck, but it still works fine.
Plus, it's kind of cute.
Fair enough, but since all of our energy (except nuclear?) can be traced back to solar isn't that getting a little bit pedantic?
My wife would find it a bit rich that I just called someone else pedantic... I don't think I'll tell her.
We do actually have electrical generating stations that run with gravity... In fact there's a huge one at niagara falls.
You could argue I suppose that they run on the evaporative cycle, but I prefer to think of them running on Gravity.
Except what they're talking about here is not another piece of "every bit of hardware in existance", it's the single most popular music player on the market, and probably the most ubiquitous peripheral out there right now.
It's like the day I tried to install Linux and it wouldn't write to my data disc which was formatted in NTFS. No, it's not Linux's fault, but it made me go, "oh well, it would've been nice, but it's too much bother". A reaction that I promise you is more common than any other.
Well, a kind of counter-example to your theory would be Palm, who cornered the PDA market with (I seem to remember) something like 80 or 90 percent of the market at one point. Even when MS was up to version 3 of their Windows CE products. ('98 or so?)
How much do they have now?
Which is interesting because when I replaced the hard drive in my laptop, which required me to reactivate Windows for the gosh knows how many'th time (The machine and the software is 5 years old almost, I bought it used which meant it was activated at least twice before I bought it - once on the original purchase and once when it was wiped to be resold) the software didn't want to activate by itself since it said it had been activated too many times already. The conversation with the person on the phone went something like this:
MS: Thank you for calling Microsoft, can I have the installation id that's on your screen?
Me: (reads long number)
MS: Thank you. (pause) Ok, how many machines has this been installed on? (You could read this as someone accusing me of piracy, but it's a pretty reasonable question when some people might not realise you're not supposed to install on numerous machines)
Me: Just the one
MS: And why do you need to reactivate?
Me: Replaced the hard drive in my laptop.
MS: Ok, I'm going to read out an activation number for you to put in the box, and you should be ok. (Gives me long number)
Very polite, minimal questions, took less than 5 minutes, and it was at 11:30 at night on a Saturday.
Now, it's fair enough to say that there might not be a real need for activation, that MS is being boneheaded by requiring it, or that they should be more trusting of their customers; these are all fair comments. It's also possible that you might have had a phone agent on a bad day. I just know from my experience that they've been always very very polite and if they err, it's on the side of permissiveness. I also assume that if I was hyper-sensitive and acted like a jerk, they might have been less polite to me. I would never suggest that was the case with you of course.
And while I have no real idea what is the case in this particular instance, you could probably make the case that the speed (snappiness is the metric that I usually hear mentioned) of OSX comes from continual streamlining and refinement of the code, taking out rosetta code and such, while Windows has already had streamlining done to it already, and there aren't any more places for those kinds of easy speed wins in the code and architecture. It's known that Microsoft is slower at developing new releases of software than Apple, and that Apple is more 'feature' oriented than Microsoft, and I also know what happens to _my_ code when someone tells me to implement a feature by a certain date no matter what (ie, Cruft and Kludges ALL over the place. It works, it's pretty to the end user, but it's not necessarily fast or pretty code)
Like I said, I don't know if my scenario is more or less likely than yours. All I'm saying is that speed increases in subsequent releases in software may not mean better development practices, and may actually be counter proof of that.
I guess the answer to that is I don't know...
Although you usually physically cannot embed fonts in at least any of the Adobe formats if they're not allowed to be, they'd have to be sent separately and installed by the user (someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't think I am). Can you embed fonts in Word files? I didn't think you could...
I suppose it's kind of the same thing as if someone gave you a CD-R of AutoCad and said, "here's the software you'll need to open up those drawings I sent you". (and of course assuming that there wasn't a dongle or click-through licence agreement needed) Who's responsible in that case if it were audited?
The thing is that anyone who's worked with fonts professionally for more than a week or so(as a publishing house no doubt is) knows full well that fonts sometimes cost a lot of money (can a couple hundred bucks for a single style) and that the ones that look good usually have restrictive usage rights and that you must be careful as to how you manage them.
It's entirely possible that management in this place didn't know about the font problem. It beggars the imagination to think that the people who used them didn't know. What it comes down to is that I find it very very hard to believe that this was done without knowledge on someone's part that it was breaking copyright.
Absolutely. And the ones that don't allow this notify you when you try to embed them in any program I've used recently. It takes a concious effort to send someone a font that has usage guidelines that don't allow you to do so.
It always seems so strange to me that politicians would do that.
I mean, (and I don't mean for this to become a "rah rah Canada" post) it doesn't seem to happen here, and I have to wonder what we're doing differently to make this kind of thing not happen. And why nobody in the US has ever done anything about a practice that really does smack of the worst kind of dirty and underhanded politiking.
I think getting rid of this piggybacking practice would really do wonders to start to change people's opinion of the political process. But perhaps that's just my simple-minded naivety.
Yeah, my theory on that is that if a drive takes 2 seconds instead of 4 seconds to do what it needs to do, then even if it takes more power to operate, it's still going to be a net decrease in the amount of power that an individual operation takes.
I don't know if it actually works that way, but it's my theory and I like it.
We're the problem.
No, really...
Yes people used to have pride in their work, but the problem is that for someone to have pride in their work, and to actually know something, they need to be able to stay there for a while, and for them to stay there for a while, they need to be paid a living wage. If you don't pay a living wage, you're going to get either those who stay there only until they can get a job somewhere else, or the people who are unemployable anywhere else.
And the reason, of course, that people aren't paid a living wage is that we the consumer are drawn to the lowest cost. There are still electronics and computer stores where the people who own the store run it, who are in there as a career, and those are the places I shop. Unfortunately, to support that, the prices must be higher. I'm fine with paying an extra 5-10% (or more) to get good service from intelligent people who know what they're talking about. Most people arent, so the minimum wage big-box stores with retail drones are taking over the landscape.
If people actually want better service, they should be willing to pay a bit extra to get it. You can only have one or the other, not both.
Better film quality? Are you on crack?
I mean, you can honestly argue I suppose that the stories/characters/acting/ whatever is better, it's a matter of personal opinion, so not worth arguing over. But they don't look as good. Nowhere near, and probably never were.
Which ones have you been looking at? Because they're not the same ones I've seen.
Never mind that, I have to go kill myself now, I actually was able to read and understand your entire post. Without using any translators.
What's more, I understood the reference.
And *urg* found it vaguely amusing.
My wife saw that video, turned to me and said, "we're getting this game, right?"
I'll give her this, when I told her it would cost us somewhere in the region of $2000 she actually had to consider it for a full second and a half before she said ok.
So, I'll get a new computer, but I won't be able to use it for six months, and I won't actually see my wife for that time either... Thanks Will Wright.
Yeah, this happens to me on Windows too.
I wait for something to complete downloading in IE and go to something else, and when IE's done, I get the thing on the taskbar flashing orange. If several IE windows are open, the rollup button flashes, and when I click on that, the one that wants my attention is flashing on the pop-up. No focus stealing involved.
I can't comment on anything else in your post, but Bombardier is actually a Canadian company. They do make lots of choo-choos though.
Fair enough.
I don't, and because of that I choose to live in a country where my beliefs are upheld rather than yours. You are free to live wherever you want and where your beliefs are upheld by the legislative bent of that country.
Ooops.
For some reason I spelled Idiothead Zundel's name with a J. Need more coffee.
More on him here. A pro-Zundel site, if you want to listen to morons defending the indefensable is here
And yes, the descriptions I have up there about Ernst are allowed in Canada. Just throwing an example out there.
Yes, in fact it does.
;)
If you're interested, you can go to Reverend Phelps' screed on Canada Here
He's not too happy with Canada because he was told not to come here preaching hate and advocating violence against gay people and the people who allow them basic human rights.
The problem is that we hold in our charter that harming someone is not just confined to physical harm - you can harm me and my society by just your speech. The U.S.A does not agree with this concept, and there you can say pretty much what you want as long as you don't physically attack someone.
I happen to agree more with the thought here, that by advocating hate and violence - as Phelps and others do - you can cause more hurt than just with physical violence, and should be limited. So it's regulated to a certain extent, and if you step over the line, you can be held responsible and told to stop, fined, or sent to jail. Or, in the case of Ernst Jundel, deported.
Because some speech is allowed, and some is not, it's not as easy to define when you've stepped over it as in some jurisdictions who say, "verbal attacks are always allowed, and physical attacks are never allowed", but it is defined, and while it's pretty much up to a judge to decide when you have gone too far, we have a good system of reviews with courts of appeal that I haven't yet seen a specific case where it ended up that I didn't agree with the result.
Our courts are pretty good at deciding these things, which helps. You can say what you want about our non-elected judiciary system, but we don't have too many idealogues in the hot seats. Different strokes I suppose...
If it came down to a case where courts or parliament were overstepping their bounds, there would probably be some polite concern expressed by the people of Canada, and things would change... That's the way we do things here
Well, the inventor of Scrabble wasn't all that good at Scrabble... Not too uncommon I guess.
Heh.
It reminds me of the booming business (back in the day) there was selling shareware software for five or ten dollars in the stores.
I always wondered how many people were very confused when installing it and then being told that they should send money to the developers if they liked and continued using the software since they had already paid for it.
I was always kind of peeved at it since I'm sure the people who packaged and distributed the discs probably made far more than the developers ever did. I guess middle men always make more than the creators of a work... Plus, at the time there wasn't a handy dandy interweb thingy for people to get the shareware if they didn't buy it, so it definately had a reason to be.
Absolutely. But what people should realise is that those three things don't necessarily have an equal weight. For myself, right now, I don't care about power at all, I sort of care about money, and I really do care about satisfaction a whole lot. I'd give up a whole lot of the first and some of the second to have more of the third. But I don't have a family, and I'm not the kind of person who needs power.
Inherent in this is the fact that none of these factors are a have/not have situation. You're never going to rate a job on whether you have power or not, or are satisfied or not, or have money or not. (And no, unless you're Bill G you can't even say you have 'enough' money. Nobody ever thinks they have enough money) Everything is a continuum, everything is fluid. How much money is a lot, how much is not much?
Also, security should be there, along with a whole lot of other factors - moral, religious, etc. but when you're trying to make a pithy reductionist theory about things I guess something's gotta give.
What I'm saying is that your answer would be different from mine. Not just which order they'd be in, but how much of each you'd give up for the other. If, for example, you had a family, with three kids who needed medical care and had no savings, I'm absolutely sure your money factor would be very very important to you - Perhaps to the point where the other two factors are almost non-existant. We have no idea where the OP is in his or her life, what his or her background is, all that kind of stuff. Nothing we say here is really going to have a whole lot of bearing on their situation, and nothing we do will change that.
You have to live your life to your own standards. Not anyone elses.