This is laughable to me - the only thing that's changing is going to be TWC's quarterly profit. In my opinion, this is a cash grab, pure and simple
If they try that, they'll fail I'd have to guess. Someone else (like Verizon) will be happy to eat their lunch on that one, and Verizon is rolling out FiOS as fast as they can. Come to think of it, I saw a Verizon truck doing something in a manhole in my neighborhood recently...need to check FiOS availability again.
But I'll tell you what - if TWC implements a tiered system that results in any savings over current rates for the lowest tier (assuming the lowest tier isn't 128kbps or something ridiculous...), I'll come back here and acknowledge that you were right and I was wrong. Fair enough?
No need! I'm just saying tiered pricing is *fair*. If you're point is that Time-Warner is a bunch of jackasses and will try to screw this up...I'm with you! But in the end I think they'll find they better come up with the average user saving a little cash, and light users getting a fairly significant reduction. If they use this as an excuse for an across-the-board rate hike, they'll screw themselves. And I think they're probably using the local test markets to decide what prices consumers react well to.
You're making the faulty assumption that a 5GB/mo account would be significantly less than what you pay right now.
I'm talking about the actual concept, not the numbers. I'll withhold judgement on that until they iron out the tiers. The only way they'll screw this up is to turn it into a cash grab where the average consumer spends more, because competition from DSL and FiOS will prevent that.
Simple - they've been advertising unlimited usage for years now, and explicitly plugging the ability to download music and movies much faster than DSL.
And they got burned because people started taking advantage of that by using far more bandwidth than they planned for. So rather than weasle around by definining unlimited as, well, not unlimited, they're going to be honest about it now. Good for them. You know what you're signing up for, and you get exactly whan you pay for. No mysterious throttling, no unknown caps, no dropping of abusive customers.
I'm not "getting more than I'm paying for", I'm getting exactly what I'm paying for.
According to the current plan, yes. But that's only by averaging costs over all users, most of whom use less than you. So on a ber-byte basis, everyone else is subsidizing your internet connection. And they've finally figured out that, by not doing that anymore, 90%+ of the customers win.
Yet by doing so, apparently I'm now the bogeyman who is fucking up the internet for everyone else...
Oh, drop the persecution complex. Only thing that's changing is that the party's over for you, and the rest of us won't be charged for your usage anymore. Once this gets popular with the majority of carriers, you'll probably be forced into a plan like this and you can pay for the large amount of bandwidth you use.
I, beavis88, hereby pledge I will immediately terminate my Time Warner Cable "service" in the event they implement this new scheme without SUBSTANTIALLY reducing the price of the "low tier". I don't even run BT or pirate movies/music, and I probably came close to 5GB downloaded *yesterday* - Vista and Windows 2008.isos from MSDN, plus watched a movie online from Netflix.
I think the point is, if you're watching streaming movies and downloading ISOs, you ain't the low tier.
Now if they want to make it worth my while to reduce my usage, I might be amenable
I think the general idea is to give consumers a range of options to avoid charging light web users the same price as bandwidth hogs. So you would be given the option to decide which group you fall into.
but if they want to cap my usage, and keep charging the same insanely high prices
I think that's their very motivation behind the tiered approach, to avoid doing just that. To remain profitable while offering a flat price to everyone, they'd have to either A) cap bandwidth usage with sneaky fine print like they're doing now, or increase everyone's prices to the point that they drive cost-conscious consumers to DSL. The first is bad PR for them, the second loses customers.
I think the general idea is to give you a DSL-like price for DSL-like aggregate bandwidth usage, with the advantage being that when you *do* use it, it's faster than DSL. Alternately, if you really are using a ton of bandwidth, you'll have to pay for it. Which is fair, because I don't feel like subsidizing anybody's internet connection.
I have absolutely no problem with this if they don't screw it up (which they may, but we don't know that yet). I think the only people who are really screaming bloody murder are the bandwidth hogs who are getting more than they're paying for now. The majority of consumers *should* get a bit of a price break for giving up the ability to frequently use bandwidth hogging services like streaming video, P2P, huge downloads, etc.
I don't know how this is so intuitive for cell phone plans but not internet usage. Your cell company charges you for the minutes you use, and no one complains. Your internet company wants to do basically the same thing, which should benefit the majority of their customers. What's the problem?
There is a fundamental difference between the two activities: ANY technology-related problem can be solved because the whole system is human-designed. It's been understood from the beginning and the goals and functions of every single element are known because it was made to be so. You can read the documentation about it and you will know whithout a doubt how it's supposed to work so you can find out why it doesn't.
It may be human designed, but it doesn't mean it was designed properly, or that it was documented. And if the technician diagnosing the problem isn't aware of the arcane problem involved, it may as well have been designed by God as far as he's concerned.
We currently know a great deal about the way a human body does, but it's complexity is vastly superior to that of any known machine, and it's full of parts we don't know how they work, why they work, or even what are they supposed to do.
Sure, and it would be unfair of me to expect doctors to know the unknown. But I'm restricting my arguments to diseases that are reasonably well known, and whose description can be found on Google. By me, for instance.
Difficulty of ruling out failures in this environment is orders of magnitude higher.
You've never worked on a foreign car. I jest, but seriously - I'm not talking about making diagnoses that would require breakthroughs in medical science. Put it this way - especially in my case, since I was able to make a diagnosis that my doctors couldn't, it would seem that either A) I'm so damned smart that I could be a doctor without any medical training (I'm not), or B) the multitude of doctors I saw couldn't be bothered to do anything.
In my opinion, there are two problems with medical care. First, insurance companies are beating down the amount of time that doctors can spend on problems. We all know about this. But I also think the medical school process selects too often for unimaginative people who can memorize their way through life. That's among the reasons I had no interest in becoming a doctor. We need better.
I'm an engineer by nature, although with no degree. I crave problems to solve. Perhaps I should switch careers from IT to the biomedical field. Remember, you've gotta love what you do, or rather it helps a great deal
I have a whole lot more respect for a good auto mechanic or other problem solvers than your average doctor. Auto mechanic isn't done with your car until it runs right. Networking guy isn't done until your computer has a connection. Doctor can keep running tests forever.
Problem is, what you need to be a good doctor is good diagnostic skills, but what they teach in med school is a whole lot of memorization. Seems to me med school is good at weeding out people who would make useful doctors.
The stories I could tell about the pre-meds in Chemistry classes in college... Listening to those whiny little bastards complain because the classes were too hard was A) funny, but B) disturbing, because these are the people responsible for my health care. Anything that required them to actually think as opposed to memorize seemed to cause them physical pain.
or if your symptoms were so nondescript it could be a 100 things.
Well shit. If you rule out the hard cases, an RN could do anything a general practitioner doctor can.
That SHOULD be why they make the big bucks - the hard cases with confusing or nondescript symptoms. As a practical matter, most of them bail on anything they can't churn through in a 15 minute office visit. Even specialists are starting to suck. They can't be bothered to do any research, if the usual blood work doesn't solve the problem, they'll just roll through tests until they get lucky, or you just give up. Or die, maybe. And if your symptoms fall between specialties, you're completely fucked, because they can't be bothered to fill in knowledge gaps with...again...research. Which would help them put evidence together with their own expertise to make a successful diagnosis OR at least find the right specialist. But for most doctors, forget it.
i'd say the most likely case here is that the doctor is right, and you just THINK you know better.
I can back up the OP. I had a problem for 8 years that multiple doctors consistently failed at. None even came up with a guess, just saw me for an appointment, sent me off for the wrong test, told me they didn't know what it was, and referred me to someone else. When the 5th doctor in the chain referred me to the first, I said to hell with it and decided to live with the symptoms. I eventually got sick of that, and successfully diagnosed it myself. With Google, effort, and a brain.
I feel sorry for others though. I'm a scientist and have good research skills. People shouldn't have to be forced to do their own medical care.
Hell, you're being kind to them. Silicon Valley's preferred method is to fork it right around step 2 and go to a step 2.5 - hype the shit out of the company and hold an IPO before the company collapses, pushing losses onto hapless investors who thought they could get rich quick.
Sure, Silicon Valley VC folks love startups, because they get a piece of the action. Heck, they were happy as pigs in shit around 1998, despite the fact that about 1% of those startups had any hope of seeing a profit. But it doesn't mean that MS+Yahoo is destined to lose, simply because they're not the chic pick anymore.
None of that has any bearing on whether MS+Yahoo can beat Google or any of the hordes of little companies coming from Silicon Valley.
Seems so unlikely to ever be allowed by the regulators, yet they're willing to throw billions at it anyway. They must feel confident for some reason.
If they allowed Google and Doubleclick, they'll probably allow this too. This doesn't give anyone a monopoly or anything close to it, since Google's still #1 in search.
The question is, how long until MS feels compelled to screw up Yahoo like Hotmail?
I think everyone is forgetting that this a rework and not an incremental update of an older system.
And for a "from scratch" operating system that took 7 years, the result is underwhelming. I think that's where the frustration comes from - people heard about all these advanced features that didn't make it into the build, waited forever, and then get a result that has some better eye candy than XP (not hard to do), but little else.
The key here is they can't compete... not that they can't get some business. Yes, people may have shown they go out of their way to download a different browser, but if the market is still severely skewed (IMO it is) because of a monopoly abuse, there is a case for a remedy.
But the OP's point is still valid - if there's about a 2x difference between MS and Firefox, but about a 10x difference between Firefox and Opera, Opera's primary problem can't be MS. When another competitor proves it is possible to compete, you're going to have a real tough time making a case.
Additionally, they'll have to prove that MS used it's monopoly power on the desktop improperly. The answer to that is, are they preventing OEMs from installing Firefox? If they're not strongarming against it, then Opera probably has no case.
It's extremely unfortunate that Taiwan still has this reputation as a backwards nation and demonstrates the ignorance Americans have regarding the nation.
Ummm...are you responding to anyone in particular? Because I haven't seen anyone actually make that claim in this thread. Nor have I heard that for, say, the last 20 years.
The second problem is that Taiwanese people and companies in particular are exceedingly cheap. It's not so much that they cut corners like the Chinese do, but rather that they're not willing to spend a dollar more than is necessary to produce an acceptable product. This means their identity and branding is utter crap. It may seem insignificant but it basically insures that few people overseas every recognize the quality of their products. Related to that is quality product design which is sorely lacking.
In my experience, one place where some Taiwanese electronics manufacturers go wrong is in misunderstanding the Western market. Americans in particular expect good customer support. That does cost money and is consistent with what you're saying. But when I get a product (say, a graphics card) made by a fairly prominent Taiwanese manufacturer, and the manual has clearly not been proofread by anyone who speaks decent English...that doesn't inspire confidence.
Other than that, I don't think Americans have formed much of any opinion, overall, about Taiwan. If anything, most Americans confuse it with Thailand and think it's the same place.
Every 2-bit nerd thinks he knows what's best for Microsoft, why should Microsoft listen to him? Because he has a blog and people read his blog?
Of course not...if he were the only one. He isn't. Every 2-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit nerd who has used Vista seems to be saying the same thing. That's a problem.
Like they don't already have qualified people working on their PR problems.
Why should anyone tell them who anyone is? Shouldn't the RIAA be held for wrongful prosecution or whatever it is, for bringing suit against the wrong person?
If it's clearly negligent, yes, but in this case they got the correct house, and the parent is trying to play games, in my opinion.
Obligatory car analogy: Imagine if they could prove your car was used in a hit in run case, and that it wasn't stolen but started with the original keys. The cops are going to lean on you pretty hard until and unless you can point at someone else in the house you loaned the key to, right?
Similar thing here - if they can show for sure it's your internet connection responsible, then I think you got some 'splainin' to do.
Nintendo was regarded as the underdog running into this generation. Its success literally took 3rd parties by surprise. So all they've had time to do was release disappointing ports. Give them some time.
Yeah, but the useful life of that excuse is wearing thin. It's been over a year now.
intendo-made games were enough to prop up the gamecube.
This is where my motivation is purely selfish - I got a Wii to play with my kids, but I'm personally not into the cutesie "Japanime" look of pretty much every Nintendo game.
The next gen is going to copy the Wii wholesale. So even if the Wii itself is hindered by 3rd party support, its legacy will be that it has fundamentally changed games forever.
We shall see. This year will be very important in the battle - Nintendo should get supplies of the Wii up, 3rd parties should have time to put out real Wii games...and Wii owners will be looking for something more than Mario, Wii Sports, and a horde of minigame collections. At the same time, PS3 will get cheaper (particularly as Blu-ray does), and Xbox 360 should (finally) fix their quality control issues. Wii should be able to use its novel control scheme to create games that appeal to a wide audience. The question is whether they will, and as far as copying Wii I think it needs to be shown as something more than a gimmick if it's copied wholesale as you say.
The greatest video games system of all time is the Wii - it has revolutionized the way people interact with the console.
More like, it's revolutionized the way people could and should interact with the console, but aside from Nintendo-made games has mainly resulted in a ton of disappointing ports.
He told me (and he didn't tell me it's a trade secret) that the entire SMS messaging in their network was handled by one single Sun workstation. IIRC it had cost about a million Euro (most of which was the price of SW) and just sits there, generating a revenue of roughly a million Euro per day. Maintenance costs: almost zero. Network load: almost zero, because messages are transmitted only in pauses between calls.
I don't know if your buddy had the full picture. That may be the case inside the building, in terms of the processing, but over the air text messages are carried on the same high-priority channel used for call initiation. That channel is highly trafficked. At least that's the case in the US - SMS is NOT carried in pauses in call traffic. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's the case for GSM as well, which (if I understand correctly) is the standard in Europe. So I think there's a very high chance your friend is simply wrong.
Because mobile phones use the same small portion of radio frequency, called the control channel, to both set up calls and send SMS messages, a flood of SMS messages could overwhelm a tower and effectively prevent any telephone calls from going through.
The article is from 2005, and with all the kiddies using text I have to imagine that they've upgraded that resource to handle the capacity. As such, I can't imagine today that terrorists could create a greater flood than a horde of 12 year old girls. But the point is still basically the same - the control channel is very high-priced real estate. So yes, data rates for traffic on that channel are far higher than standard data.
It's kind of like asking why air mail costs more than ground. You pay more for high priority traffic.
MinWin is a non-graphical kernel that doesn't do much more than boot up and host a webserver. It's not exactly a full functional operating system, so yes it's going to be considerably smaller.
Point is that by getting the cruft out of the kernel customization will be easier and the result probably still overall smaller.
Amazing ideas these MS boys have these days. Imagine an operating system with a small, even micro, kernel. To this the user can add the operating system toys that he needs around that kernel, resulting in a lean, mean operating system that does what he needs and nothing more.
I hear some crazy Finnish guy had a similar idea once but nobody listened to him.
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This is laughable to me - the only thing that's changing is going to be TWC's quarterly profit. In my opinion, this is a cash grab, pure and simple
If they try that, they'll fail I'd have to guess. Someone else (like Verizon) will be happy to eat their lunch on that one, and Verizon is rolling out FiOS as fast as they can. Come to think of it, I saw a Verizon truck doing something in a manhole in my neighborhood recently...need to check FiOS availability again.
But I'll tell you what - if TWC implements a tiered system that results in any savings over current rates for the lowest tier (assuming the lowest tier isn't 128kbps or something ridiculous...), I'll come back here and acknowledge that you were right and I was wrong. Fair enough?
No need! I'm just saying tiered pricing is *fair*. If you're point is that Time-Warner is a bunch of jackasses and will try to screw this up...I'm with you! But in the end I think they'll find they better come up with the average user saving a little cash, and light users getting a fairly significant reduction. If they use this as an excuse for an across-the-board rate hike, they'll screw themselves. And I think they're probably using the local test markets to decide what prices consumers react well to.
You're making the faulty assumption that a 5GB/mo account would be significantly less than what you pay right now.
I'm talking about the actual concept, not the numbers. I'll withhold judgement on that until they iron out the tiers. The only way they'll screw this up is to turn it into a cash grab where the average consumer spends more, because competition from DSL and FiOS will prevent that.
Simple - they've been advertising unlimited usage for years now, and explicitly plugging the ability to download music and movies much faster than DSL.
And they got burned because people started taking advantage of that by using far more bandwidth than they planned for. So rather than weasle around by definining unlimited as, well, not unlimited, they're going to be honest about it now. Good for them. You know what you're signing up for, and you get exactly whan you pay for. No mysterious throttling, no unknown caps, no dropping of abusive customers.
I'm not "getting more than I'm paying for", I'm getting exactly what I'm paying for.
According to the current plan, yes. But that's only by averaging costs over all users, most of whom use less than you. So on a ber-byte basis, everyone else is subsidizing your internet connection. And they've finally figured out that, by not doing that anymore, 90%+ of the customers win.
Yet by doing so, apparently I'm now the bogeyman who is fucking up the internet for everyone else...
Oh, drop the persecution complex. Only thing that's changing is that the party's over for you, and the rest of us won't be charged for your usage anymore. Once this gets popular with the majority of carriers, you'll probably be forced into a plan like this and you can pay for the large amount of bandwidth you use.
I, beavis88, hereby pledge I will immediately terminate my Time Warner Cable "service" in the event they implement this new scheme without SUBSTANTIALLY reducing the price of the "low tier". I don't even run BT or pirate movies/music, and I probably came close to 5GB downloaded *yesterday* - Vista and Windows 2008 .isos from MSDN, plus watched a movie online from Netflix.
I think the point is, if you're watching streaming movies and downloading ISOs, you ain't the low tier.
Now if they want to make it worth my while to reduce my usage, I might be amenable
I think the general idea is to give consumers a range of options to avoid charging light web users the same price as bandwidth hogs. So you would be given the option to decide which group you fall into.
but if they want to cap my usage, and keep charging the same insanely high prices
I think that's their very motivation behind the tiered approach, to avoid doing just that. To remain profitable while offering a flat price to everyone, they'd have to either A) cap bandwidth usage with sneaky fine print like they're doing now, or increase everyone's prices to the point that they drive cost-conscious consumers to DSL. The first is bad PR for them, the second loses customers.
I think the general idea is to give you a DSL-like price for DSL-like aggregate bandwidth usage, with the advantage being that when you *do* use it, it's faster than DSL. Alternately, if you really are using a ton of bandwidth, you'll have to pay for it. Which is fair, because I don't feel like subsidizing anybody's internet connection.
I have absolutely no problem with this if they don't screw it up (which they may, but we don't know that yet). I think the only people who are really screaming bloody murder are the bandwidth hogs who are getting more than they're paying for now. The majority of consumers *should* get a bit of a price break for giving up the ability to frequently use bandwidth hogging services like streaming video, P2P, huge downloads, etc.
I don't know how this is so intuitive for cell phone plans but not internet usage. Your cell company charges you for the minutes you use, and no one complains. Your internet company wants to do basically the same thing, which should benefit the majority of their customers. What's the problem?
There is a fundamental difference between the two activities: ANY technology-related problem can be solved because the whole system is human-designed. It's been understood from the beginning and the goals and functions of every single element are known because it was made to be so. You can read the documentation about it and you will know whithout a doubt how it's supposed to work so you can find out why it doesn't.
It may be human designed, but it doesn't mean it was designed properly, or that it was documented. And if the technician diagnosing the problem isn't aware of the arcane problem involved, it may as well have been designed by God as far as he's concerned.
We currently know a great deal about the way a human body does, but it's complexity is vastly superior to that of any known machine, and it's full of parts we don't know how they work, why they work, or even what are they supposed to do.
Sure, and it would be unfair of me to expect doctors to know the unknown. But I'm restricting my arguments to diseases that are reasonably well known, and whose description can be found on Google. By me, for instance.
Difficulty of ruling out failures in this environment is orders of magnitude higher.
You've never worked on a foreign car. I jest, but seriously - I'm not talking about making diagnoses that would require breakthroughs in medical science. Put it this way - especially in my case, since I was able to make a diagnosis that my doctors couldn't, it would seem that either A) I'm so damned smart that I could be a doctor without any medical training (I'm not), or B) the multitude of doctors I saw couldn't be bothered to do anything.
In my opinion, there are two problems with medical care. First, insurance companies are beating down the amount of time that doctors can spend on problems. We all know about this. But I also think the medical school process selects too often for unimaginative people who can memorize their way through life. That's among the reasons I had no interest in becoming a doctor. We need better.
I'm an engineer by nature, although with no degree. I crave problems to solve. Perhaps I should switch careers from IT to the biomedical field. Remember, you've gotta love what you do, or rather it helps a great deal
I have a whole lot more respect for a good auto mechanic or other problem solvers than your average doctor. Auto mechanic isn't done with your car until it runs right. Networking guy isn't done until your computer has a connection. Doctor can keep running tests forever.
Problem is, what you need to be a good doctor is good diagnostic skills, but what they teach in med school is a whole lot of memorization. Seems to me med school is good at weeding out people who would make useful doctors.
The stories I could tell about the pre-meds in Chemistry classes in college... Listening to those whiny little bastards complain because the classes were too hard was A) funny, but B) disturbing, because these are the people responsible for my health care. Anything that required them to actually think as opposed to memorize seemed to cause them physical pain.
or if your symptoms were so nondescript it could be a 100 things.
Well shit. If you rule out the hard cases, an RN could do anything a general practitioner doctor can.
That SHOULD be why they make the big bucks - the hard cases with confusing or nondescript symptoms. As a practical matter, most of them bail on anything they can't churn through in a 15 minute office visit. Even specialists are starting to suck. They can't be bothered to do any research, if the usual blood work doesn't solve the problem, they'll just roll through tests until they get lucky, or you just give up. Or die, maybe. And if your symptoms fall between specialties, you're completely fucked, because they can't be bothered to fill in knowledge gaps with...again...research. Which would help them put evidence together with their own expertise to make a successful diagnosis OR at least find the right specialist. But for most doctors, forget it.
i'd say the most likely case here is that the doctor is right, and you just THINK you know better.
I can back up the OP. I had a problem for 8 years that multiple doctors consistently failed at. None even came up with a guess, just saw me for an appointment, sent me off for the wrong test, told me they didn't know what it was, and referred me to someone else. When the 5th doctor in the chain referred me to the first, I said to hell with it and decided to live with the symptoms. I eventually got sick of that, and successfully diagnosed it myself. With Google, effort, and a brain.
I feel sorry for others though. I'm a scientist and have good research skills. People shouldn't have to be forced to do their own medical care.
Hell, you're being kind to them. Silicon Valley's preferred method is to fork it right around step 2 and go to a step 2.5 - hype the shit out of the company and hold an IPO before the company collapses, pushing losses onto hapless investors who thought they could get rich quick.
Sure, Silicon Valley VC folks love startups, because they get a piece of the action. Heck, they were happy as pigs in shit around 1998, despite the fact that about 1% of those startups had any hope of seeing a profit. But it doesn't mean that MS+Yahoo is destined to lose, simply because they're not the chic pick anymore.
None of that has any bearing on whether MS+Yahoo can beat Google or any of the hordes of little companies coming from Silicon Valley.
Call it "Cobra" or something. Too many kludges will confuse people. A new name and file extension will emphasize that this is "in with the new".
I'm totally going to invent some certification and call myself a "Cobra Commander" on my resume.
Seems so unlikely to ever be allowed by the regulators, yet they're willing to throw billions at it anyway. They must feel confident for some reason.
If they allowed Google and Doubleclick, they'll probably allow this too. This doesn't give anyone a monopoly or anything close to it, since Google's still #1 in search.
The question is, how long until MS feels compelled to screw up Yahoo like Hotmail?
If Google wins, and they don't know what else to do with it, I think they should release their block of the 700 MHz bandwidth under the GPL.
It would be worth it just to see approximately a million dorks have their heads explode as they endlessly debate what it means to copyright bandwidth.
I think everyone is forgetting that this a rework and not an incremental update of an older system.
And for a "from scratch" operating system that took 7 years, the result is underwhelming. I think that's where the frustration comes from - people heard about all these advanced features that didn't make it into the build, waited forever, and then get a result that has some better eye candy than XP (not hard to do), but little else.
The key here is they can't compete... not that they can't get some business. Yes, people may have shown they go out of their way to download a different browser, but if the market is still severely skewed (IMO it is) because of a monopoly abuse, there is a case for a remedy.
But the OP's point is still valid - if there's about a 2x difference between MS and Firefox, but about a 10x difference between Firefox and Opera, Opera's primary problem can't be MS. When another competitor proves it is possible to compete, you're going to have a real tough time making a case.
Additionally, they'll have to prove that MS used it's monopoly power on the desktop improperly. The answer to that is, are they preventing OEMs from installing Firefox? If they're not strongarming against it, then Opera probably has no case.
It's extremely unfortunate that Taiwan still has this reputation as a backwards nation and demonstrates the ignorance Americans have regarding the nation.
Ummm...are you responding to anyone in particular? Because I haven't seen anyone actually make that claim in this thread. Nor have I heard that for, say, the last 20 years.
The second problem is that Taiwanese people and companies in particular are exceedingly cheap. It's not so much that they cut corners like the Chinese do, but rather that they're not willing to spend a dollar more than is necessary to produce an acceptable product. This means their identity and branding is utter crap. It may seem insignificant but it basically insures that few people overseas every recognize the quality of their products. Related to that is quality product design which is sorely lacking.
In my experience, one place where some Taiwanese electronics manufacturers go wrong is in misunderstanding the Western market. Americans in particular expect good customer support. That does cost money and is consistent with what you're saying. But when I get a product (say, a graphics card) made by a fairly prominent Taiwanese manufacturer, and the manual has clearly not been proofread by anyone who speaks decent English...that doesn't inspire confidence.
Other than that, I don't think Americans have formed much of any opinion, overall, about Taiwan. If anything, most Americans confuse it with Thailand and think it's the same place.
Did you know Google was also responsible for that UFO sighting in Texas?
Every 2-bit nerd thinks he knows what's best for Microsoft, why should Microsoft listen to him? Because he has a blog and people read his blog?
Of course not...if he were the only one. He isn't. Every 2-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit nerd who has used Vista seems to be saying the same thing. That's a problem.
Like they don't already have qualified people working on their PR problems.
Appears it isn't working. PR can't polish a turd.
OEMs don't get forced into buying Vista after all,
If you believe that, I'll sell you this nice pretty bridge I live under.
Why should anyone tell them who anyone is? Shouldn't the RIAA be held for wrongful prosecution or whatever it is, for bringing suit against the wrong person?
If it's clearly negligent, yes, but in this case they got the correct house, and the parent is trying to play games, in my opinion.
Obligatory car analogy: Imagine if they could prove your car was used in a hit in run case, and that it wasn't stolen but started with the original keys. The cops are going to lean on you pretty hard until and unless you can point at someone else in the house you loaned the key to, right?
Similar thing here - if they can show for sure it's your internet connection responsible, then I think you got some 'splainin' to do.
I think their solution amounts to, "If anyone's going to be making money off of domain tasting, it's us."
Nintendo was regarded as the underdog running into this generation. Its success literally took 3rd parties by surprise. So all they've had time to do was release disappointing ports. Give them some time.
Yeah, but the useful life of that excuse is wearing thin. It's been over a year now.
intendo-made games were enough to prop up the gamecube.
This is where my motivation is purely selfish - I got a Wii to play with my kids, but I'm personally not into the cutesie "Japanime" look of pretty much every Nintendo game.
The next gen is going to copy the Wii wholesale. So even if the Wii itself is hindered by 3rd party support, its legacy will be that it has fundamentally changed games forever.
We shall see. This year will be very important in the battle - Nintendo should get supplies of the Wii up, 3rd parties should have time to put out real Wii games...and Wii owners will be looking for something more than Mario, Wii Sports, and a horde of minigame collections. At the same time, PS3 will get cheaper (particularly as Blu-ray does), and Xbox 360 should (finally) fix their quality control issues. Wii should be able to use its novel control scheme to create games that appeal to a wide audience. The question is whether they will, and as far as copying Wii I think it needs to be shown as something more than a gimmick if it's copied wholesale as you say.
The greatest video games system of all time is the Wii - it has revolutionized the way people interact with the console.
More like, it's revolutionized the way people could and should interact with the console, but aside from Nintendo-made games has mainly resulted in a ton of disappointing ports.
Bull*shit*, chief. Hoover wiretapped and bugged whatever and whomever the hell he wanted, and nobody dared complain-
Bobby Kennedy did. He didn't like Hoover having all the fun. ;)
He told me (and he didn't tell me it's a trade secret) that the entire SMS messaging in their network was handled by one single Sun workstation. IIRC it had cost about a million Euro (most of which was the price of SW) and just sits there, generating a revenue of roughly a million Euro per day. Maintenance costs: almost zero. Network load: almost zero, because messages are transmitted only in pauses between calls.
I don't know if your buddy had the full picture. That may be the case inside the building, in terms of the processing, but over the air text messages are carried on the same high-priority channel used for call initiation. That channel is highly trafficked. At least that's the case in the US - SMS is NOT carried in pauses in call traffic. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's the case for GSM as well, which (if I understand correctly) is the standard in Europe. So I think there's a very high chance your friend is simply wrong.
Here's an interesting article on the phenomenon:
http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsid=4525
The article is from 2005, and with all the kiddies using text I have to imagine that they've upgraded that resource to handle the capacity. As such, I can't imagine today that terrorists could create a greater flood than a horde of 12 year old girls. But the point is still basically the same - the control channel is very high-priced real estate. So yes, data rates for traffic on that channel are far higher than standard data.
It's kind of like asking why air mail costs more than ground. You pay more for high priority traffic.
MinWin is a non-graphical kernel that doesn't do much more than boot up and host a webserver. It's not exactly a full functional operating system, so yes it's going to be considerably smaller.
Point is that by getting the cruft out of the kernel customization will be easier and the result probably still overall smaller.
Amazing ideas these MS boys have these days. Imagine an operating system with a small, even micro, kernel. To this the user can add the operating system toys that he needs around that kernel, resulting in a lean, mean operating system that does what he needs and nothing more.
I hear some crazy Finnish guy had a similar idea once but nobody listened to him.