I hosts-blocked most ad sites on my girlfriend's computer when she started complaining about the web sites she uses being so slow; most of the time was spent waiting for some ad site or some tracking site like Google analytics.
I was thinking that, but so long as ads are just video and not Java applets, and so long as the TV companies charge a shedload of money so there are far fewer people producing them, it's not likely to be an issue.
Okay, shared DLLs save a bit of memory, but in this day and age, that's not an issue anymore.
Yes, this is a brilliant idea. Instead of having one copy of foobar.dll on your system which can be updated when there's a security fix, you now have fifty different versions of foobar.dll all over the system in different installation directories, so some programs using it will be safe and others will have major security holes and some will work if you replace the DLL with the new one and some will break.
Ah, the joy of Windows and its 'install anything anywhere, I don't care' philosophy.
So, moving manufacturing to the US should not add major costs to the product.
Yes, so long as you ignore the extra cost of:
1. Regulations. 2. Taxes. 3. Buildings and land. 4. Transporting components from where they are manufactured in China to where they'll be assembled in America.
All of those things rapidly make US manufacturing expensive even with automated factories. Even within America companies seem to be leaving expensive, high-regulation, high-tax states like California in favor of cheaper and less regulated states like Texas.
Indeed, and the contrast between Moffat and Davis is now clearer than ever because on the one hand you have the excellent Dr. Who and for direct comparison the cheese-fest that is Torchwood.
Am I the only one who's sick of Moffat's continual 'but it's OK, in the future I can go back in time and leave the macguffin behind that rock over there so I don't have to actually solve the problem myself' storylines?
Seriously, though, Inception's probably the best movie I've seen in years.
How many movies have you seen in those years?
Inception was OK, but ultimately it's a pointless action-fest (let's have a huge shootout with people who don't even exist, and no all those bullets smashing the windows couldn't possibly hit the people inside the vehicle) wrapped in some silly philosophising. I thought Dreamscape did a similar story better, obviously without the bazillion dollar effects; mostly because, unlike Inception, it didn't seem to believe it was amazingly profound when it wasn't.
The scary part is when Chinese owned and operated companies start selling chindles in the US, designed, built in china. All the value stays in China, with a tiny amount of revenue going to the sales and distribution network for them in the US.
Amazon has solved that: it's called DRM.
Unless the Chindles support Amazon DRM or included DMCA-violating DRM removal then they can't compete.
Check if the book's Simultaneous Device Usage says "Unlimited" in the Product Details. If I understand correctly, that means it does not have DRM.
Thank you: I just checked and two books which I know don't have DRM are listed as 'unlimited' while the book I bought with DRM doesn't list 'simultaneous device usage' at all. I'll remember that in future,
You do realise that when enough of book stores go down, demand for books will eventually follow? Bookstores create demand by letting people window shop, read, touch real books.
I've bought way more ebooks in the last year than I did physical books the year before.
I see your point that book shops should quit whining and do something instead. You're absolutely right. But why should Amazon get a free pass when it comes to sales tax?
Here's an idea. If sales tax is killing your business, maybe you could... drum roll... petition your politicians to get rid of the sales tax.
If most people are buying from Amazon solely to avoid sales tax then clearly it's a highly unpopular tax.
POD is coming, and the first company to nail it will re-write publishing.
To be fair, POD has been coming to rewrite publishing for the last twenty years or so. But I tend to agree, if I could go to a bookstore and walk out five minutes later with a decent printed copy of any book in existence at a reasonable price then I'd go there a lot more.
The bottom line is: you go to the bookstore to buy a book. You don't need to go there to socialize or to ask advice.
I dunno. At the bookstore I used to buy from when I was living in England there was this hot twentyish blonde chick who was unable to do up the top half of the buttons on her blouse and would lean over when running your credit card through the machine.
They get to keep more of their own money, and with Amazon they get a half decent DRM.
There's no such thing as 'half decent DRM'. I'm pissed off that Amazon don't tell you whether books for sale there have DRM, because I was caught by my first DRM-infested book purchase there this week and had no way to tell before I bought it.
Kindle DRM pisses off your readers and, according to a quick Google search, is useless against pirates because it appears to be easy to remove if you don't mind downloading dubious and possibly illegal software.
The only people who benefit from Kindle DRM are Amazon, because unless you crack the DRM it requires you to either buy a Kindle or use their Kindle software to read the books you buy. Pirates just download the pre-cracked books.
"Hello Mr Bookstore Owner, I'm looking for Big New Amazon Thriller." "Oh, you can't buy that here. We don't sell Amazon books. Amazon are evil." "So you're not going to sell me the books I want to buy?" "No. If you want to buy Amazon books you'll have to buy them from Amazon, or the bookstore down the road which does stock them." "Well, guess I won't be buying anything from you in future then."
With policies this retarded it's no wonder so many bookstores are going bust.
They've got a pretty liberal return policy. Sometimes I "rent" from them until I am sure I want to buy something, and then I return it to best buy and order it online from Newegg or Amazon.
You were the kind of person we used to hate when I was in the hardware business; you'd 'rent' our hardware from the store, then return it and we'd then have to QA it again and sell it as a refurbished product.
Then people would complain that hardware prices were high. Well, duh.
On the other hand, try to discontinue a service you've subscribed to and you land back in telephone land. It took hours for shaw.ca to call me back yesterday. Unsubscribing from Telus (telephone provider) cannot be done in person with any form of "customer support" person; all done on the phone.
Wow. It's almost as though companies don't want you to stop paying for their services.
But with the Nook Color, people figured out that e-Readers were also tablet computers.
No, the Nook Color is a low-end tablet PC, which is why it costs $250, has a crappy LCD screen and only a few hours of battery life.
Real e-readers like the Kindle are much cheaper, have better screens for ebook reading (I'd rather be able to read the book in sunlight than have a color display), and vastly superior battery life.
I think the problem is that software developers aren't organized.
I don't just mean something like a labour union.
Good. Because a union would mean that not only would the company not be able to lay off the incompetent developers, but they'd be forced to pay them the same as me.
It could also be like the medics, civil engineers and lawyers, with widely regarded exams.
Which would mean that many developers would be out of work as the American Software Association decided they'd only issue a thousand licenses this year, and even more work would go to India or China instead.
BS, The Witcher 2 had no DRM from gog.com and was pirated heavily.
From what I remember, pirate versions of Witcher 2 were available before gog.com released it; I presume that was the Polish retail release which came out a day or three earlier.
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I hosts-blocked most ad sites on my girlfriend's computer when she started complaining about the web sites she uses being so slow; most of the time was spent waiting for some ad site or some tracking site like Google analytics.
I was thinking that, but so long as ads are just video and not Java applets, and so long as the TV companies charge a shedload of money so there are far fewer people producing them, it's not likely to be an issue.
Okay, shared DLLs save a bit of memory, but in this day and age, that's not an issue anymore.
Yes, this is a brilliant idea. Instead of having one copy of foobar.dll on your system which can be updated when there's a security fix, you now have fifty different versions of foobar.dll all over the system in different installation directories, so some programs using it will be safe and others will have major security holes and some will work if you replace the DLL with the new one and some will break.
Ah, the joy of Windows and its 'install anything anywhere, I don't care' philosophy.
At least I can still turn off my TV in the middle of an advertisement.
And TV ads don't eat into your download cap and infect your TV with malware.
So, moving manufacturing to the US should not add major costs to the product.
Yes, so long as you ignore the extra cost of:
1. Regulations.
2. Taxes.
3. Buildings and land.
4. Transporting components from where they are manufactured in China to where they'll be assembled in America.
All of those things rapidly make US manufacturing expensive even with automated factories. Even within America companies seem to be leaving expensive, high-regulation, high-tax states like California in favor of cheaper and less regulated states like Texas.
Since 2008 the windows entertainment division was making money.
And it was losing money for a long time before that.
And pretty soon it will have to find billions of dollars to fund the next Xbox. Which will initially have to be sold at a loss.
Indeed, and the contrast between Moffat and Davis is now clearer than ever because on the one hand you have the excellent Dr. Who and for direct comparison the cheese-fest that is Torchwood.
Am I the only one who's sick of Moffat's continual 'but it's OK, in the future I can go back in time and leave the macguffin behind that rock over there so I don't have to actually solve the problem myself' storylines?
Seriously, though, Inception's probably the best movie I've seen in years.
How many movies have you seen in those years?
Inception was OK, but ultimately it's a pointless action-fest (let's have a huge shootout with people who don't even exist, and no all those bullets smashing the windows couldn't possibly hit the people inside the vehicle) wrapped in some silly philosophising. I thought Dreamscape did a similar story better, obviously without the bazillion dollar effects; mostly because, unlike Inception, it didn't seem to believe it was amazingly profound when it wasn't.
Worked pretty good for the xbox.
If by 'worked pretty good' you mean 'lost money on every generation while hoping that they'd actually make money on the next one'.
I'm 99% sure that Microsoft haven't made enough money on either Xbox to pay all the development costs yet?
The scary part is when Chinese owned and operated companies start selling chindles in the US, designed, built in china.
All the value stays in China, with a tiny amount of revenue going to the sales and distribution network for them in the US.
Amazon has solved that: it's called DRM.
Unless the Chindles support Amazon DRM or included DMCA-violating DRM removal then they can't compete.
Check if the book's Simultaneous Device Usage says "Unlimited" in the Product Details. If I understand correctly, that means it does not have DRM.
Thank you: I just checked and two books which I know don't have DRM are listed as 'unlimited' while the book I bought with DRM doesn't list 'simultaneous device usage' at all. I'll remember that in future,
You do realise that when enough of book stores go down, demand for books will eventually follow? Bookstores create demand by letting people window shop, read, touch real books.
I've bought way more ebooks in the last year than I did physical books the year before.
I see your point that book shops should quit whining and do something instead. You're absolutely right. But why should Amazon get a free pass when it comes to sales tax?
Here's an idea. If sales tax is killing your business, maybe you could... drum roll... petition your politicians to get rid of the sales tax.
If most people are buying from Amazon solely to avoid sales tax then clearly it's a highly unpopular tax.
FYI: they pay taxes to other countries they ship to. If they didn't their goods would simply get impounded in customs.
Amazon UK don't charge tax on shipments to me; if customs decide I need to pay tax I have to collect it at the post office and pay there.
POD is coming, and the first company to nail it will re-write publishing.
To be fair, POD has been coming to rewrite publishing for the last twenty years or so. But I tend to agree, if I could go to a bookstore and walk out five minutes later with a decent printed copy of any book in existence at a reasonable price then I'd go there a lot more.
The bottom line is: you go to the bookstore to buy a book. You don't need to go there to socialize or to ask advice.
I dunno. At the bookstore I used to buy from when I was living in England there was this hot twentyish blonde chick who was unable to do up the top half of the buttons on her blouse and would lean over when running your credit card through the machine.
You don't get that at Amazon.
They get to keep more of their own money, and with Amazon they get a half decent DRM.
There's no such thing as 'half decent DRM'. I'm pissed off that Amazon don't tell you whether books for sale there have DRM, because I was caught by my first DRM-infested book purchase there this week and had no way to tell before I bought it.
Kindle DRM pisses off your readers and, according to a quick Google search, is useless against pirates because it appears to be easy to remove if you don't mind downloading dubious and possibly illegal software.
The only people who benefit from Kindle DRM are Amazon, because unless you crack the DRM it requires you to either buy a Kindle or use their Kindle software to read the books you buy. Pirates just download the pre-cracked books.
Plus most ebooks are 500kB so you could download it over a 9600 baud modem in a few minutes.
"Hello Mr Bookstore Owner, I'm looking for Big New Amazon Thriller."
"Oh, you can't buy that here. We don't sell Amazon books. Amazon are evil."
"So you're not going to sell me the books I want to buy?"
"No. If you want to buy Amazon books you'll have to buy them from Amazon, or the bookstore down the road which does stock them."
"Well, guess I won't be buying anything from you in future then."
With policies this retarded it's no wonder so many bookstores are going bust.
They've got a pretty liberal return policy. Sometimes I "rent" from them until I am sure I want to buy something, and then I return it to best buy and order it online from Newegg or Amazon.
You were the kind of person we used to hate when I was in the hardware business; you'd 'rent' our hardware from the store, then return it and we'd then have to QA it again and sell it as a refurbished product.
Then people would complain that hardware prices were high. Well, duh.
On the other hand, try to discontinue a service you've subscribed to and you land back in telephone land. It took hours for shaw.ca to call me back yesterday. Unsubscribing from Telus (telephone provider) cannot be done in person with any form of "customer support" person; all done on the phone.
Wow. It's almost as though companies don't want you to stop paying for their services.
But with the Nook Color, people figured out that e-Readers were also tablet computers.
No, the Nook Color is a low-end tablet PC, which is why it costs $250, has a crappy LCD screen and only a few hours of battery life.
Real e-readers like the Kindle are much cheaper, have better screens for ebook reading (I'd rather be able to read the book in sunlight than have a color display), and vastly superior battery life.
I think the problem is that software developers aren't organized.
I don't just mean something like a labour union.
Good. Because a union would mean that not only would the company not be able to lay off the incompetent developers, but they'd be forced to pay them the same as me.
It could also be like the medics, civil engineers and lawyers, with widely regarded exams.
Which would mean that many developers would be out of work as the American Software Association decided they'd only issue a thousand licenses this year, and even more work would go to India or China instead.
BS, The Witcher 2 had no DRM from gog.com and was pirated heavily.
From what I remember, pirate versions of Witcher 2 were available before gog.com released it; I presume that was the Polish retail release which came out a day or three earlier.
The problem with NOT buying something as a form of protest is that the company selling the product doesn't know that you didn't buy it for a reason.
But that doesn't matter, because when enough people do it they go bust.