Your nerd credentials are hereby revoked. Slashdot bylaws section 12, paragraph 23: to post here you must have at least one half disassembled and operable PC within 100ft of you at all times.
Instant +1 karma if run the system without any mechanical structure at all, beyond FR4 and off the shelf PSUs/HDs.
One caveat, flash memory is not as reliable of a storage medium as some believe, particularly as densities increase, particularly as they use smaller and smaller processes. Depending on the specific technology, and the level of error correction built into it, optical (even with dust and scratches) is more robust. Flash is great for sneaker net, or the family vacation pictures, but I'm not sure it's suitable for anything you care about.
As long as the market driving this media is digital photography, the concern about the occasional bit being flipped isn't going to change anything. Flipping a bit on almost anything else, is catastrophic.
But he may have a point about being able to play only one MMOG at a time, and how carefully us users are going to analyze it before we even pay a single dollar.
I'd even go as far as saying that downloading continuously at max capacity is somewhat immoral in itself, so long as you know that you are using far more than everyone else _and_ that it causes congestion problems. You are like the person founding a car wash next to the canal and saying that the contract stated unlimited access.
Some of us are paying for 3Mbps down/ 384kbps up, I see nothing immoral about actually using it. If the business did not anticipate that people would use what they pay a a premium on, then the business needs to change. We're not here to second guess them, if they offer a service, expect us to use it. They absolutely have, and always have had, the ability to regulate our bandwidth to the contracted rate. You won't get a penny more than you pay for.
It's very easy to caclulate the total "bytes" needed to accomodate this, although it's misleading to do so. Unlike your reservoir model, the actual limitation is the flow rate through the pipe, not the "available bytes". At certain times of the day the flow rate might be maxed out and they start dropping packets. More importantly they already have the models to know what they need to do to meet their capacity demands. No one can drain the reservoir, unless someone is selling a product he can't deliver on. Who wants to start that class action suit? Count me in.
The real issue is the networks are horribly out of date, since there has never really been a push to give customers better service, only service to more customers. The question they want to get answered is "who is going to fund upgrades?" because in a monopoly, you don't take the cost of upgrades out of your net profits, you make customers pay. On this I can't blame them, why should they suffer just to deliver a product that won't deliver a single extra dollar?
No, karma doesn't count, that they've been robbing us for half a century has been long forgotten, at least by them.
This is exactly why we have to bail out the lazy bankers who couldnt be bothered to risk check their own assets, and the lazier mortgage holders who want to waste time reading about britney rather than working so their families arent kicked out.
Have you considered suicide? Your viewpoint on the world is so outrageously negative, that I see no room for love, happiness or hope. I wonder if you need a doctor.
Isn't it more likely bankers did their risk assessment, but did it incorrectly, or believed the assessment was incorrect? Isn't it more likely that those who held the mortgages thought they could flip the house, or make the payments? I think it's far more likely that these individuals made decisions with risks they thought they could handle, but with very little in the way of a safety net. They gambled and lost. Dumb perhaps, but not corrupt.
This wont be popular at slashdot, but I genuinely think workplaces should have a whitelist approach to the internet - and especially block youtube, funnyordie, nbc, facebook etc. If you want to goof off and watch Tina Fey do it at home. Unfettered web access leads to ridiculous losses of productivity.
No, it keeps us in our cubes where we can be found, rather than sneaking around or in the janitor closet bonking the secretary, or drinking in the bathroom, etc. As you said initially, people who want to screw off, will.
I suspect visual quality/price is the actual issue. I've wandered through my local Fry's, eying bluray (and the price tag). The displays they have are always great and make it look drool worthy.
But then I look outside of Fry's at "bluray in the field". What I see in a lot of cases are very high definition compression artifacts. Personally I just don't know why I want to see compression artifacts in high def. Go outside the prepared clips at your local A/V store, and buy actual movies you want to see and quality varies wildly. With many/most I've seen I don't think bluray is remotely worth it.
I'm not an insider, I don't know if the compression is required to fit on the disc, or if the publishers just don't want to put out the best stuff...but I'm not sure why I want to pay all that money for it.
It's been in common usage in American English for at least as long as I've been alive as well.
Maybe the meaning is slightly different, we would vet people for corporate positions, but we sometimes vet software for suitability in a process. Either way it's a try before you buy idea, rather than a definitive selection.
Vet is a perfectly cromulent word. A word I loathe more, is "tap", which is increasingly a slang for sex, and also choosing someone to a position. One could say "McCain tapped Palin for VP position", and not be sure if we need to reread the Kama Sutra, if he was merely physically getting her attention or if she was being chosen for a job.
That just might be a simplification...maybe. In most of those cases if the guys at Q had thought of and tested X they would not have failed.
Even as engineers, living, eating and breathing the subject matter, things get overlooked. Particularly when we're solving a hard problem, solve the hard problem and go get drunk, but do not step back and thing about the big picture. Particularly when you're on a schedule, particularly when you are projected managed to death, particularly when your job has been divide and conquered to atoms for you, as is so often the case in the corporate world.
Organic chemistry is not necessary for any of those problems, nor is there anything in that subject that would have saved the day. Usually bad stuff happens when "safe" assumptions are made in a hurry. It's a big issue many of us face when doing our job.
It's not that we lack the skill or the tools, it's that we are not encouraged to use them. Doctors, in my experience, suffer from the same types of problems.
There are some really great stories in the Silmarillion, unfortunately it's in a style of writing that's more akin to an academic textbook than a pleasure read.
The problem is that he's trying to create a mythology for a fantasy world. Traditionally the old greek mythology I'm familiar with relied upon the reader to know and accept certain facts as being in evidence, and thus the stories proceeded straight into explaining how those truths came to be, and that's the most fun part. For Tolkien's world, we have no frame of reference, so he has to set the stage in gory detail.
I don't feel very robbed reading what Christopher Tolkien produced (though I get a headache at times, but that was true with LOTR), I believe he's really just cleaning his Dad's work and making it edible, and I think he's done a decent job (at least insofar as the Silmarillion is concerned).
Now Brian Herbert...another story. I'm not even sure Frank Herbert's Dune sequels were that great, I'm not sure why this continues on. I guess I was less enthralled with the Universe of Dune which seemed bland, as I was with the story of Dune.
Do you think it's likely that someone would steal or rape your dog? I know where he's been. Not if they knew what I knew about him.
Apparently shooting dogs is standard police procedure in some places. I may not be guilty of something, but I might shoot back in that circumstance.
My cats, they can have. Nothing says sweet, sweet revenge by stepping into a pile of something at 3am while trying to blindly navigate to the bathroom.
Well I don't know if I buy his rationalization, but I do believe it's plausible. Our employers know the price of their designs, but usually not the value of it. I love to look at all the designs my company does and learn from them, it's how I design better systems for us. That whole learning from the mistakes of others thing. I fear the shockwave that may come out of this is more technology companies segmenting designs and locking them down to "eyes only". I see it happening from time to time, and it's terrible, particularly for quality.
Retaining said designs after my present employment, while illegal, I think is morally gray. Using them, or planning to use them for the new employer, particularly in the hopes to "get ahead" is absolutely immoral. I don't know how AMD is, but I suspect they are petrified of anything coming out of Intel that isn't in wetware. That's a surefire way to get your ass fired, at least where I work.
If he wanted to impress his new employer, he'd study the designs, find their strength and flaws, and help them build a better processor. That's vicious, competitive and absolutely legal and moral. Anyone who has ever worked with Intel (in particular, not that they are alone) knows what they make isn't exactly the pristine icon of perfection wall street likes to believe. They NEED a competitor to out innovate them, not someone to copy their junk verbatim.
I agree that sometimes the tests that we endure in the technology field (not just IT, but engineering too) are demeaning, but look at the other side:
Do you want to work in a place where any moron can get in, and get paid whatever wage you are asking? I don't have time or money to sit in class learning something new, and I can't get direct experience in everything in this lifetime. I rely on my coworkers to directly or indirectly distill knowledge and pass it on. The reverse is also true.
That, plus "years of experience" doesn't means as much as "practical experience". In my present company you can live here for 10 years as a EE and never design a single thing although it's in your title. You can do well for yourself going to meetings, and getting vendors to fix your problems for you. I would not want to hire these people as engineers, what they do I do not need. I would give them the benefit of the doubt on an interview to see if they have any creative problem solving skills to apply, but since I have the benefit of working with them, most do not. I know for a fact many of them apply to design engineering jobs. This is why you need some sort of interview barrier.
The real complaint about technical hiring practices should be giving interviews based on "skill experience" rather than on adaptability and character traits. As an example, one can document 10 years of experience with ethernet networking, but not get called for jobs he applies to for fibre channel networking. I'm making this example up, but in my industry (digital design) I see the same stupidity. I can change my resume to basically lie, and get calls I didn't get when being honest. If you ask me this kills your applicant pool, and reduces the quality of person you hire. You may get someone with "experience", but you've shrunk your search to a small group of people who may or may not be the kind of person you want...he just can show experience on paper and may be able to tell you some impressive things about his topic (but not really understand them).
This is where the evil starts. Then, because you know people lie on resumes, you have to give the difficult interview, to see if this person really has X years of experience on Y technology, assuming you yourself have that experience (and you may not, you are after all, trying to hire someone to another role that is open). Then, even if you give the job, you're still not sure, so in most places I've worked you put him on double secret probation for the first 6 months to 1 year to see if he "fits in to his role". If you let him go, in my experience, it's usually not because he lacked role experience, but because he wasn't the kind of person you wanted. But it's hard for you to tell so buh-bye-now.
All could be avoided by hiring the person, and not the narrow role he will fill. Test character traits and attitude (amidst a broad technical backdrop), not whether he knows some obscure facet about . I'd gladly take a smart guy who knows about, say, dc-dc switching design and throw him in a job that requires microprocessor based design, than I would take someone who claims to have worked on "PowerPC" for 20 years but really means he's project managed other vendors PowerPC boards for 20 years.
It would serve as a good reminder to corporate interests, domestic and abroad, that they operate at the will of the citizens of countries that protect them. That is part of what those taxes are funding. Yarr, avast ye maties, plunder me some big iron and NAS!
While I think Google's intentions here are probably good in the "freedom of speech" department, I'd rather see them addressing the root cause preventing them from maintaining servers on shore. Taxes they can't fix, but we pride ourselves on being a "free country". What do they need us, as citizens, to do to protect their interests?
Not true, if you release an OS with your system you "have" to test it, along with all the drivers for each hardware configuration you offer. At larger PC vendors a lot of time and money is spent on this test phase, and a lot of issues are found. The bar is a lot lower for consumer grade stuff, but the testing does still happen. This is why you can't always find the exact combo of hardware you want, for the exact flavor of OS you want.
In order to deliver the cheapest, fastest, greenest, whateverist, people do tend to deviate from Intel's reference design for a given platform. They deviate from other IC vendor reference designs as well, to, in theory, provide a better end user experience, more integration, etc.
The result is that a stock OSes (linux, windows, or "other") may not necessarily work as well, unless/until patches are sent upstream and accepted by whatever OS community is responsible. I am personally aware of a number of OS bugs in both Linux and Windows, found during this testing, that are corrected with the OS shipped with the product by the mfg, that are not yet part of the mainstream OS release. They will be released in a service pack or hotfix, update, etc. at some point, but OS release schedules rarely correlate with hardware releases. Sometimes they never are in the OS release and are in registry changes etc. YMMV.
It may be that some PC vendors are choosing to absorb these costs because Microsoft has been rubbing everyone the wrong way. Lenovo clearly doesn't wish to be one, except perhaps in markets where there's a different expectation of quality & support or where piracy is acceptable.
1) I'm not sure why people seem to believe the cost of producing a good should determine the selling price...
I do. In a healthy, competitive environment this situation would not occur for long. Competition would squeeze the ridiculous margins out (because anyone could still make great money by undercutting you).
The fact that this is not happening, and price is being determined by something other than cost to deliver and operate, suggests that consumers are being abused.
There's no real competition in the cell phone world. This plus the lack of any real differentiation in services highlights it clearly.
Or maybe a showy issue that most americans can identify with, will help non-technical americans realize how badly monopolies are robbing them? You know, and I know, that the cost of sending a text message is so incredibly small charging any amount of money beyond voice service is essentially highway robbery. But many people think it's new, and thus must be a huge complicated thing.
Yeah, text messages themselves are stupid secondary problems. But waking people up, and forcing them out of the idiocy of news tv talking heads, and forcing them into the cognitive dissonance caused when they realize businesses are hurting them because capitalism ISN'T working as designed... that helps a lot. Otherwise it sounds like a bunch of pompous academics in suits talkin fancy words and talkin smack about god and the president.
I meant that no one will be sent to jail for breaking the contract. Courts can do very many painful things, but it's not against the law to break a contract. Ignoring the court can get you sent to jail.
I've never seen an R&D contract so straightforward that a court could easily rule as you suggest. IANAL but the ones we had on staff didn't really stress over it too much. Normally both parties can't or won't deliver what they thought they could deliver when they wrote the contract, making it likely the court will hurt both parties. There's risk, but it seems like how business is done for R&D. I can't imagine contracting a company to deliver a video game you never wrote before is any more certain.
Breaching a contract isn't against the law (unless you contract with the gov't) but good contracts always have penalties.
The question that developers can't answer is whether potentially breaching a contract costs more than it returns. To take that risk requires someone at the top and his gaggle of lawyers (or a renegotiation of the contract, which may not be cheap, especially for a successful game).
The whole thing is a mess, but the word does need to get out that DRM is unacceptable, and refusing to buy the product is about the only way that bothers the bottom line.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact doesn't even have the american accent.
Your nerd credentials are hereby revoked. Slashdot bylaws section 12, paragraph 23: to post here you must have at least one half disassembled and operable PC within 100ft of you at all times.
Instant +1 karma if run the system without any mechanical structure at all, beyond FR4 and off the shelf PSUs/HDs.
One caveat, flash memory is not as reliable of a storage medium as some believe, particularly as densities increase, particularly as they use smaller and smaller processes. Depending on the specific technology, and the level of error correction built into it, optical (even with dust and scratches) is more robust. Flash is great for sneaker net, or the family vacation pictures, but I'm not sure it's suitable for anything you care about.
As long as the market driving this media is digital photography, the concern about the occasional bit being flipped isn't going to change anything. Flipping a bit on almost anything else, is catastrophic.
But he may have a point about being able to play only one MMOG at a time, and how carefully us users are going to analyze it before we even pay a single dollar.
I'd even go as far as saying that downloading continuously at max capacity is somewhat immoral in itself, so long as you know that you are using far more than everyone else _and_ that it causes congestion problems. You are like the person founding a car wash next to the canal and saying that the contract stated unlimited access.
Some of us are paying for 3Mbps down/ 384kbps up, I see nothing immoral about actually using it. If the business did not anticipate that people would use what they pay a a premium on, then the business needs to change. We're not here to second guess them, if they offer a service, expect us to use it. They absolutely have, and always have had, the ability to regulate our bandwidth to the contracted rate. You won't get a penny more than you pay for.
It's very easy to caclulate the total "bytes" needed to accomodate this, although it's misleading to do so. Unlike your reservoir model, the actual limitation is the flow rate through the pipe, not the "available bytes". At certain times of the day the flow rate might be maxed out and they start dropping packets. More importantly they already have the models to know what they need to do to meet their capacity demands. No one can drain the reservoir, unless someone is selling a product he can't deliver on. Who wants to start that class action suit? Count me in.
The real issue is the networks are horribly out of date, since there has never really been a push to give customers better service, only service to more customers. The question they want to get answered is "who is going to fund upgrades?" because in a monopoly, you don't take the cost of upgrades out of your net profits, you make customers pay. On this I can't blame them, why should they suffer just to deliver a product that won't deliver a single extra dollar?
No, karma doesn't count, that they've been robbing us for half a century has been long forgotten, at least by them.
This is exactly why we have to bail out the lazy bankers who couldnt be bothered to risk check their own assets, and the lazier mortgage holders who want to waste time reading about britney rather than working so their families arent kicked out.
Have you considered suicide? Your viewpoint on the world is so outrageously negative, that I see no room for love, happiness or hope. I wonder if you need a doctor.
Isn't it more likely bankers did their risk assessment, but did it incorrectly, or believed the assessment was incorrect? Isn't it more likely that those who held the mortgages thought they could flip the house, or make the payments? I think it's far more likely that these individuals made decisions with risks they thought they could handle, but with very little in the way of a safety net. They gambled and lost. Dumb perhaps, but not corrupt.
This wont be popular at slashdot, but I genuinely think workplaces should have a whitelist approach to the internet - and especially block youtube, funnyordie, nbc, facebook etc. If you want to goof off and watch Tina Fey do it at home. Unfettered web access leads to ridiculous losses of productivity.
No, it keeps us in our cubes where we can be found, rather than sneaking around or in the janitor closet bonking the secretary, or drinking in the bathroom, etc. As you said initially, people who want to screw off, will.
I suspect visual quality/price is the actual issue. I've wandered through my local Fry's, eying bluray (and the price tag). The displays they have are always great and make it look drool worthy.
But then I look outside of Fry's at "bluray in the field". What I see in a lot of cases are very high definition compression artifacts. Personally I just don't know why I want to see compression artifacts in high def. Go outside the prepared clips at your local A/V store, and buy actual movies you want to see and quality varies wildly. With many/most I've seen I don't think bluray is remotely worth it.
I'm not an insider, I don't know if the compression is required to fit on the disc, or if the publishers just don't want to put out the best stuff...but I'm not sure why I want to pay all that money for it.
A lot of people who post to slashdot would seem to be from places without a 1g reference.
It's still goofy. Screenshots of an OS are as worthless as screenshots of a car. Who cares what it looks like, does it run well?
It's been in common usage in American English for at least as long as I've been alive as well.
Maybe the meaning is slightly different, we would vet people for corporate positions, but we sometimes vet software for suitability in a process. Either way it's a try before you buy idea, rather than a definitive selection.
Vet is a perfectly cromulent word. A word I loathe more, is "tap", which is increasingly a slang for sex, and also choosing someone to a position. One could say "McCain tapped Palin for VP position", and not be sure if we need to reread the Kama Sutra, if he was merely physically getting her attention or if she was being chosen for a job.
That's just what Google wants us to believe, since clearly someone has caught on to the conspiracy!
That just might be a simplification...maybe. In most of those cases if the guys at Q had thought of and tested X they would not have failed.
Even as engineers, living, eating and breathing the subject matter, things get overlooked. Particularly when we're solving a hard problem, solve the hard problem and go get drunk, but do not step back and thing about the big picture. Particularly when you're on a schedule, particularly when you are projected managed to death, particularly when your job has been divide and conquered to atoms for you, as is so often the case in the corporate world.
Organic chemistry is not necessary for any of those problems, nor is there anything in that subject that would have saved the day. Usually bad stuff happens when "safe" assumptions are made in a hurry. It's a big issue many of us face when doing our job.
It's not that we lack the skill or the tools, it's that we are not encouraged to use them. Doctors, in my experience, suffer from the same types of problems.
There are some really great stories in the Silmarillion, unfortunately it's in a style of writing that's more akin to an academic textbook than a pleasure read.
The problem is that he's trying to create a mythology for a fantasy world. Traditionally the old greek mythology I'm familiar with relied upon the reader to know and accept certain facts as being in evidence, and thus the stories proceeded straight into explaining how those truths came to be, and that's the most fun part. For Tolkien's world, we have no frame of reference, so he has to set the stage in gory detail.
I don't feel very robbed reading what Christopher Tolkien produced (though I get a headache at times, but that was true with LOTR), I believe he's really just cleaning his Dad's work and making it edible, and I think he's done a decent job (at least insofar as the Silmarillion is concerned).
Now Brian Herbert...another story. I'm not even sure Frank Herbert's Dune sequels were that great, I'm not sure why this continues on. I guess I was less enthralled with the Universe of Dune which seemed bland, as I was with the story of Dune.
Do you think it's likely that someone would steal or rape your dog? I know where he's been.
Not if they knew what I knew about him.
Apparently shooting dogs is standard police procedure in some places. I may not be guilty of something, but I might shoot back in that circumstance.
My cats, they can have. Nothing says sweet, sweet revenge by stepping into a pile of something at 3am while trying to blindly navigate to the bathroom.
killing my bad moderations...it's too easy to click the wrong button....
Well I don't know if I buy his rationalization, but I do believe it's plausible. Our employers know the price of their designs, but usually not the value of it. I love to look at all the designs my company does and learn from them, it's how I design better systems for us. That whole learning from the mistakes of others thing. I fear the shockwave that may come out of this is more technology companies segmenting designs and locking them down to "eyes only". I see it happening from time to time, and it's terrible, particularly for quality.
Retaining said designs after my present employment, while illegal, I think is morally gray. Using them, or planning to use them for the new employer, particularly in the hopes to "get ahead" is absolutely immoral. I don't know how AMD is, but I suspect they are petrified of anything coming out of Intel that isn't in wetware. That's a surefire way to get your ass fired, at least where I work.
If he wanted to impress his new employer, he'd study the designs, find their strength and flaws, and help them build a better processor. That's vicious, competitive and absolutely legal and moral. Anyone who has ever worked with Intel (in particular, not that they are alone) knows what they make isn't exactly the pristine icon of perfection wall street likes to believe. They NEED a competitor to out innovate them, not someone to copy their junk verbatim.
I don't know about that, but I would definitely shoot to kill to protect my dog.
I agree that sometimes the tests that we endure in the technology field (not just IT, but engineering too) are demeaning, but look at the other side:
Do you want to work in a place where any moron can get in, and get paid whatever wage you are asking? I don't have time or money to sit in class learning something new, and I can't get direct experience in everything in this lifetime. I rely on my coworkers to directly or indirectly distill knowledge and pass it on. The reverse is also true.
That, plus "years of experience" doesn't means as much as "practical experience". In my present company you can live here for 10 years as a EE and never design a single thing although it's in your title. You can do well for yourself going to meetings, and getting vendors to fix your problems for you. I would not want to hire these people as engineers, what they do I do not need. I would give them the benefit of the doubt on an interview to see if they have any creative problem solving skills to apply, but since I have the benefit of working with them, most do not. I know for a fact many of them apply to design engineering jobs. This is why you need some sort of interview barrier.
The real complaint about technical hiring practices should be giving interviews based on "skill experience" rather than on adaptability and character traits. As an example, one can document 10 years of experience with ethernet networking, but not get called for jobs he applies to for fibre channel networking. I'm making this example up, but in my industry (digital design) I see the same stupidity. I can change my resume to basically lie, and get calls I didn't get when being honest. If you ask me this kills your applicant pool, and reduces the quality of person you hire. You may get someone with "experience", but you've shrunk your search to a small group of people who may or may not be the kind of person you want...he just can show experience on paper and may be able to tell you some impressive things about his topic (but not really understand them).
This is where the evil starts. Then, because you know people lie on resumes, you have to give the difficult interview, to see if this person really has X years of experience on Y technology, assuming you yourself have that experience (and you may not, you are after all, trying to hire someone to another role that is open). Then, even if you give the job, you're still not sure, so in most places I've worked you put him on double secret probation for the first 6 months to 1 year to see if he "fits in to his role". If you let him go, in my experience, it's usually not because he lacked role experience, but because he wasn't the kind of person you wanted. But it's hard for you to tell so buh-bye-now.
All could be avoided by hiring the person, and not the narrow role he will fill. Test character traits and attitude (amidst a broad technical backdrop), not whether he knows some obscure facet about . I'd gladly take a smart guy who knows about, say, dc-dc switching design and throw him in a job that requires microprocessor based design, than I would take someone who claims to have worked on "PowerPC" for 20 years but really means he's project managed other vendors PowerPC boards for 20 years.
It would serve as a good reminder to corporate interests, domestic and abroad, that they operate at the will of the citizens of countries that protect them. That is part of what those taxes are funding. Yarr, avast ye maties, plunder me some big iron and NAS!
While I think Google's intentions here are probably good in the "freedom of speech" department, I'd rather see them addressing the root cause preventing them from maintaining servers on shore. Taxes they can't fix, but we pride ourselves on being a "free country". What do they need us, as citizens, to do to protect their interests?
Not true, if you release an OS with your system you "have" to test it, along with all the drivers for each hardware configuration you offer. At larger PC vendors a lot of time and money is spent on this test phase, and a lot of issues are found. The bar is a lot lower for consumer grade stuff, but the testing does still happen. This is why you can't always find the exact combo of hardware you want, for the exact flavor of OS you want.
In order to deliver the cheapest, fastest, greenest, whateverist, people do tend to deviate from Intel's reference design for a given platform. They deviate from other IC vendor reference designs as well, to, in theory, provide a better end user experience, more integration, etc.
The result is that a stock OSes (linux, windows, or "other") may not necessarily work as well, unless/until patches are sent upstream and accepted by whatever OS community is responsible. I am personally aware of a number of OS bugs in both Linux and Windows, found during this testing, that are corrected with the OS shipped with the product by the mfg, that are not yet part of the mainstream OS release. They will be released in a service pack or hotfix, update, etc. at some point, but OS release schedules rarely correlate with hardware releases. Sometimes they never are in the OS release and are in registry changes etc. YMMV.
It may be that some PC vendors are choosing to absorb these costs because Microsoft has been rubbing everyone the wrong way. Lenovo clearly doesn't wish to be one, except perhaps in markets where there's a different expectation of quality & support or where piracy is acceptable.
1) I'm not sure why people seem to believe the cost of producing a good should determine the selling price...
I do. In a healthy, competitive environment this situation would not occur for long. Competition would squeeze the ridiculous margins out (because anyone could still make great money by undercutting you).
The fact that this is not happening, and price is being determined by something other than cost to deliver and operate, suggests that consumers are being abused.
There's no real competition in the cell phone world. This plus the lack of any real differentiation in services highlights it clearly.
Amen.
Or maybe a showy issue that most americans can identify with, will help non-technical americans realize how badly monopolies are robbing them? You know, and I know, that the cost of sending a text message is so incredibly small charging any amount of money beyond voice service is essentially highway robbery. But many people think it's new, and thus must be a huge complicated thing.
Yeah, text messages themselves are stupid secondary problems. But waking people up, and forcing them out of the idiocy of news tv talking heads, and forcing them into the cognitive dissonance caused when they realize businesses are hurting them because capitalism ISN'T working as designed... that helps a lot. Otherwise it sounds like a bunch of pompous academics in suits talkin fancy words and talkin smack about god and the president.
I meant that no one will be sent to jail for breaking the contract. Courts can do very many painful things, but it's not against the law to break a contract. Ignoring the court can get you sent to jail.
I've never seen an R&D contract so straightforward that a court could easily rule as you suggest. IANAL but the ones we had on staff didn't really stress over it too much. Normally both parties can't or won't deliver what they thought they could deliver when they wrote the contract, making it likely the court will hurt both parties. There's risk, but it seems like how business is done for R&D. I can't imagine contracting a company to deliver a video game you never wrote before is any more certain.
Breaching a contract isn't against the law (unless you contract with the gov't) but good contracts always have penalties.
The question that developers can't answer is whether potentially breaching a contract costs more than it returns. To take that risk requires someone at the top and his gaggle of lawyers (or a renegotiation of the contract, which may not be cheap, especially for a successful game).
The whole thing is a mess, but the word does need to get out that DRM is unacceptable, and refusing to buy the product is about the only way that bothers the bottom line.