Even though we all like to look at IBM as the hero of Linux and their cool chips... a little competition from Motorola can only be good for us consumers!
I used to work in the Health Care biz, and for all of our enterprise reporting (including reports sent out to customers as well as internal use) we used Actuate. http://www.actuate.com/
The good: Actuate is a very robust, powerful report generating machine. It is relatively simple to get the basics, but some more of the advanced features and such might take some time to get. The real plus is that it natively generates DHTML, Excel, and PDF - and does a good job with each.
The bad: This monster is written around a very old (maybe version 3?) visual basic engine. As a result there is some quirky behavior and such. I believe it is ridiculously expensive to purchase as well, so that may end up being prohibitive for you.
I don't really know how well it would fit your needs, and I certainly am not trying to pitch it, just that I hadn't heard of it when I got hired on, and I think it is a relatively unknown product that can do some pretty great things. I know a lot of the state agencies are using it, as well as several big banks, healthcare and even Yahoo! uses it for their clients. It certainly wouldn't hurt to check it out.
So, in that seven months time it just so happens that I have moved, as probably numerous individuals which leads to a higher probability of people not cashing their checks which means that the RIAA is out only $0.37 for the stamp....
Is it really possible that they delayed this as long as possible knowing that, statistically speaking, a larger portion of the checks would remain uncashed and their penalty be lessened? What a load of crap, I just hope the new tennants are nice enough to forward on the checks...
One of the reasons I bought a gamecube was some of the exclusive titles... well, and the fact I am a fanboy....
OK, in all seriousness that is allowed on Slashdot, every company is going to try to get exclusive titles because it drives sales not only of their consoles, but of the game itself. EA Sports are almost always cross platform, and sell quite well. For the sake of arguing, let say that by going PS2 exclusive, they would sell twice as many titles for the PS2, since no one would buy for the PC, XBOX, Gamecube.... but they are still going to sell fewer titles (maybe?) than combined across all platforms.
Publishers and Console Makers: exclusivity is generally looked at as a good thing by the big boys (Sony, MS, Nintendo) partly because it is hard to measure how sales would have differed. Besides, exclusivity helps with branding (can you name a very famous plumber?)... I think for the big pubishers like EA, it is a bad thing as they will likely not get the same number of sales.
Developers: Then again, for the small shop that is trying to produce a hit, getting exclusivity could very well mean a first party contract which means big bucks and success for the developers - or going cross platform crushes their budget and they go out of business. Who knows... any additional insight?
Gamers: Quite frankly some games are better suited to PC vs. console, and others better suited differently. It is certainly more of a gray area between consoles, and I think it boils down to individual gaming preferences. Do I enjoy game x on the PS2 or gamecube more? Generally the differences are pretty minimal, though games that are exclusive generally push the limits of the system a little bit more, and seem a bit more polished - but that is not always the case either. In the end, I would say it is somewhat of a wash for the heavy gamer since he is likely to own at least two or three consoles... but for the casual gamer it can certainly leave them high and dry.
You know, there is a Mandrake the Magician movie that released last year (check IMDB since I am too lazy)...
But still, my view on this whole thing is that king & hearst are really the ones who are diluting Mandrakes trademark and business. If anything, Mandrake should be counter-suing them (or some similar sort of legal action) for all the non-sense and lost money that are a result of these repeated law suits.
Besides, there are other good examples as have been mentioned such as the plant Mandrake. If anything, King should be paying Mandrake for putting their crap-tastic comic back on the news pages.
I can understand the need for them to protect their trademarks, and I really don't have all the information at my finger tips to perhaps understand some nuances of the case, but this really sounds and smells like a rat trying to get his greedy little paws on whatever is available. I really don't see this as trademark protection (particularly the transfer of the domains(s)) - instead they are trying to capitalize on the brand that is now Mandrake Linux - thus a good opportunity for Mandrake to sue them back, and hopefully retain their rights.
So this is somewhat offtopic, but being in the ask slashdot section it seems to squeeze in barely...
But why is it that no matter what question gets asked, if the question is not phrased with the word google in it somewhere, someone is bound to flame away ranting about why they should have just used google in the first place (I guess with about a million plus viewers someone is bound to be in a bad mood on any given day).
On the other hand, they could very well ask a question that was probably answered very well by a trip to google, but they are just curious as to what the slashcrowd (tm) thinks/uses/wishes.... in which case couldn't they all do us a favor and include some of the resources they found, perhaps as a second paragraph of the original question (similar to book reviews, slashback, etc...)
Of course, I fall in the third bucket where I rant for the sake of ranting.
You know what I considered doing when reading this - use it as my SSH gateway and/or firewall... it would probably beat out an old box and certainly consumes a lot less power...
Where I work, cameras are strictly prohibited, and basically under no circumstances can I ever bring one inside the building - and a camera phone would be much worse.
That being said, they are wary of even plain old vanilla cell phones and PDA's, though you can get those cleared with a little paperwork. Bottom line - I will probably never buy a phone that has a camera built in, and quite frankly think that it is really just kind of a gimmicky thing that will probably be used for more bad purposes than good, but that may just be the cynic in me.
Quite frankly, I wish bluetooth was more prominent in cell phones - I would definitely use that a lot more - and not just for internet access, just syncing contacts and content - and a lot of stuff that doesn't fit on my SIM card that I may want to easily transport between phones. I have a hard time believing they can put a camera on a cell phone for a substantially different cost than putting BT hardware.
Me personally, when I was shopping for a console back a couple of years, it was down to an xbox or a gamecube, and one of the factors that weighed heavily on my mind was less moving parts. The xbox having a hard drive meant it was statistically more likely to have a hardware failure before the cube was.
Not that it was a huge part of my decision making process, but I certainly considered it seeing as how I am not a big time gamer anymore, and expect the $300+ I plop down for a console, games, controllers, etc... to last me a good long time.
Having never read him before, I can't be 100% sure of the above title, but I can say that I won't be visiting his ruminitions on society anytime soon. I think he is a loud-mouth moron.
I can't see a good reason why he would want a linker to link the.net environment and runtime into a single executable. That is just plain nuts. Yeah, I would rather have my users download a 30MB file instead of a 20MB runtime and a couple hundred K app... and his part on ranting of all the updates he needed to do - well, just further proof he is not staying on top of taking care of his system. The.NET runtime should not have required him to install anything else besides the runtime. He is clearly clueless when it comes to system administration (or writing untrue things to try to get more people up in arms) if he really wants a linked executable he can drop on a box with no other expectations.
At the end of the day, the question he should have asked would have been something more analgous to the java compiling goodness in gcc to generate native code and not java byte code. That I could seem some benefits to, but really he should just be programming in Delphi or C++ Builder (not all that different from.NET - written by the same guy after all).
I stand behind my classification as Joel as an absolute moron. He is nothing more than a bad journalist trying to get people up in arms with his so called facts and loads of ranting.
They mentioned the word in passing, but I think for the kernel to provide this will be a huge benefit on many levels - and immediate benefits could be seen in projects like udev and the HAL stuff that is going on.
Besides, machines are getting to resemble the big iron of yesterday enough that you can (and a large number of people do) run multiple OS's on a single machine. Having an underlying architecture to better support those goals would be a great thing.
To a certain degree, it is like the evolution from a shared memory space to a virtual memory space - one of the greatest features was protection. Virtualize the entire OS (wow!) and you can run your different server apps on the same machine without the risks of one nuking the other.
Emulation has a ton of cool things going on right now. With a swift boost from an OS designed to virtualize the hardware it would make it trivial to have multiple copies of the OS running at very near full speed with complete access to the hardware.
I had my parents on a service in Utah where the provider basically had a high gain omni with an amp and blasted the air with their signal (still not sure how legal it all really is, but no one complains so the FCC doesn't really care)... then a directional dish-like receiver on the client end to connect. It worked OK, but was very testy due to wind blowing and it was also during the height of the blaster worm which very much so wrecked havoc over their wireless nodes.
I guess the lesson I took from this is, you can probably do it the least expensively using 802.11b gear, but service just wasn't that great. You may want to seriously consider 900Mhz as it isn't quite as fussy as the 2.4Ghz stuff. Even though it probably won't be as fast, your customers will probably be happier.
They are said to only work with version 5, but I have had no ill effects of using them with IE6.
And lastly, I don't think there is any one single tool that will do all the DHTML goodness you need (particularly if you are trying to validate it against multiple browsers). While you can separate DHTML out into JavaScript, the DOM, etc... each one really needs a separate tool to deal with it properly. No reason there couldn't be one good tool, just I have yet to see any I like as much as the few I use regularly.
A download version of Mandrake Linux, consisting entirely of Open Source software, will continue to be released, provided without cost, and supported.
This is great news in my opinion. Any company that won't offer a "preview" of their product (like ISO's of a downloadable version in this case) will never earn my bucks. This is imperative if they hope to get me to join the club, buy the boxed set, etc. Besides, what I really want is a DVD so I don't have to swap CD's, so if I like the ISO's enough, there is a fair chance I will buy their power pack and get the DVD.
What I want at least as much as a replacable battery is for the MP3 player to just show up as removeable storage... that way it is easier to have it be cross platform, and the software can simply read and write it like a file system because it is.
There are a few players out there that support this - and here is to hoping (even though it is in vain) that Apple makes this dream come true.
While not entirely on-topic, I use this little tidbit to disable flash while I am surfing, only flipping it back on when I absolutely need to (like for watching the latest Strong Bad Email)
For that matter, their site claims to offer a 30 day free trial for download, but I couldn't find anything other than a passing reference to that, on their web or ftp site.
Granted, they have crossover office going and some other commercialized apps, so they rightfully should be able to charge for their product, but if they advertise a trial let me check it out. I can tell you right now, even for $30 I won't even give it a look.
As of version 1.1 Xandros didn't support (claimed it wouldn't even install) on a system that was multi-processor, or even on a newer P4 system with Hyperthreading enabled. Any ideas if these issues are addressed in version 2.0?
I can't see a good reason for not having something like that working at this stage in the game.
Having actually read the article (last night on my notebook connected through wifi wishing for a tablet to read on instead) - the article mentions that bandwidth did play an important part in the test. While not perfect at 1000Mb, it was substantially better than 11Mb.... that could also be related to a PC with a better rendering backend, but who knows....
This device isn't meant to stream video (though for almost $1000 it should!). My other complaint is that it at 6lbs and a 14-15" screen, it is too bulky for the intended use. The smaller one is much more appealing to me, but at the price I certainly won't be getting either.
Why can't they just put Windows Mobile 2003 on it instead, give you full PDA capabilities, and use the terminal services client that is part of the package... I mean come on people!
Any bets on which major distro will be next? Better yet, instead of point spreads on professional sporting events - Vegas should be taking bets on which distro (or well established free software org) gets rooted next...
First Debian, now Gentoo... Slackware perhaps? Maybe install a spam-bot on a knoppix image?
You know, I am certainly of the opinion that children should be "protected" or "discouraged" from purchasing "questionable" material. That is just my ethical standpoint - and really I think it should be the parents policing not the stores or governments... but I digress...
The real point of this post is to point out my more firm belief that less government intervention is certainly a good thing - particularly in relatively trivial issues such as these. The feds and locals are already far too involved in my life and decisions that I make. I would much rather see this as an initiative started as stores grouped together or a group of angry parents convinced the stores to separate the games out instead of uncle sam forcing them to do so.
So what treasure did he leave behind? Hwo much experience? Etc.??? And yes I read the linked articles and none of them mention anything... and if he dropped nothing then that sucks almost as bad as Sony resetting the zone...
While it is all good and well that they bonded together to put the smack down on him, is there anything unfathomably cool to show for it?
I read the page referenced in the above post - Zelda Classic - and I had a great idea...
Add $15 or so to the subscription and send out a demo disc (or bonus disc?) each month - like what they have in the stores already. It shouldn't cost them more than about $1 each month as they are already making the discs....
Basically for me, that would rock. Then I don't have to look like a doofus at Target kicking the little kids off so I can check out the latest demos and movies...
Just as with the original XBox, there were plans to use AMD chips, at least that is what most of the speculation on the internet said, up until they announced the specs and low and behold Intel had "won" the contract instead.
I could very easily see this deal with IBM as a backdoor sneaky tatic to get nVidia hardware under the hood again, especially with their cozy arrangements as of late. For that matter, AMD and IBM are also in bed so it wouldn't be surprising at all the see ATI booted and AMD/NV offering becoming the real guts of the console. IBM would be the fab for the chips and assembly for the mainboard... heck they might even just roll the whole thing and take a cool percentage.
Off the wall? Perhaps. But I think this xb0x0r war is far from over. There are no published specs and these talks of industry deals are by no means what the final product will necessarily be.
iTunes is lacking in a brick-and-mortar placement. It might show up on a magazine cover or something, but by Napster having these cards at the checkout of a grocery store line, it opens up marketing potential (people just seeing it helps it be regonized) and also people tend to throw additional things in their cart while they wait to check out. Why do you think they have both sides of the checkout isle lined with various "convenience" items. It isn't uncommon to grab a pack of gum, candy bar, lighter - whatever.
Granted we are talking about ~1 dollar instead of ~15, but still this could definitely be a good business move for Napster.
Slashdot Mirror
Even though we all like to look at IBM as the hero of Linux and their cool chips... a little competition from Motorola can only be good for us consumers!
I used to work in the Health Care biz, and for all of our enterprise reporting (including reports sent out to customers as well as internal use) we used Actuate. http://www.actuate.com/
The good: Actuate is a very robust, powerful report generating machine. It is relatively simple to get the basics, but some more of the advanced features and such might take some time to get. The real plus is that it natively generates DHTML, Excel, and PDF - and does a good job with each.
The bad: This monster is written around a very old (maybe version 3?) visual basic engine. As a result there is some quirky behavior and such. I believe it is ridiculously expensive to purchase as well, so that may end up being prohibitive for you.
I don't really know how well it would fit your needs, and I certainly am not trying to pitch it, just that I hadn't heard of it when I got hired on, and I think it is a relatively unknown product that can do some pretty great things. I know a lot of the state agencies are using it, as well as several big banks, healthcare and even Yahoo! uses it for their clients. It certainly wouldn't hurt to check it out.
So, in that seven months time it just so happens that I have moved, as probably numerous individuals which leads to a higher probability of people not cashing their checks which means that the RIAA is out only $0.37 for the stamp....
Is it really possible that they delayed this as long as possible knowing that, statistically speaking, a larger portion of the checks would remain uncashed and their penalty be lessened? What a load of crap, I just hope the new tennants are nice enough to forward on the checks...
One of the reasons I bought a gamecube was some of the exclusive titles... well, and the fact I am a fanboy....
... I think for the big pubishers like EA, it is a bad thing as they will likely not get the same number of sales.
OK, in all seriousness that is allowed on Slashdot, every company is going to try to get exclusive titles because it drives sales not only of their consoles, but of the game itself. EA Sports are almost always cross platform, and sell quite well. For the sake of arguing, let say that by going PS2 exclusive, they would sell twice as many titles for the PS2, since no one would buy for the PC, XBOX, Gamecube.... but they are still going to sell fewer titles (maybe?) than combined across all platforms.
Publishers and Console Makers: exclusivity is generally looked at as a good thing by the big boys (Sony, MS, Nintendo) partly because it is hard to measure how sales would have differed. Besides, exclusivity helps with branding (can you name a very famous plumber?)
Developers: Then again, for the small shop that is trying to produce a hit, getting exclusivity could very well mean a first party contract which means big bucks and success for the developers - or going cross platform crushes their budget and they go out of business. Who knows... any additional insight?
Gamers: Quite frankly some games are better suited to PC vs. console, and others better suited differently. It is certainly more of a gray area between consoles, and I think it boils down to individual gaming preferences. Do I enjoy game x on the PS2 or gamecube more? Generally the differences are pretty minimal, though games that are exclusive generally push the limits of the system a little bit more, and seem a bit more polished - but that is not always the case either. In the end, I would say it is somewhat of a wash for the heavy gamer since he is likely to own at least two or three consoles... but for the casual gamer it can certainly leave them high and dry.
You know, there is a Mandrake the Magician movie that released last year (check IMDB since I am too lazy)...
But still, my view on this whole thing is that king & hearst are really the ones who are diluting Mandrakes trademark and business. If anything, Mandrake should be counter-suing them (or some similar sort of legal action) for all the non-sense and lost money that are a result of these repeated law suits.
Besides, there are other good examples as have been mentioned such as the plant Mandrake. If anything, King should be paying Mandrake for putting their crap-tastic comic back on the news pages.
I can understand the need for them to protect their trademarks, and I really don't have all the information at my finger tips to perhaps understand some nuances of the case, but this really sounds and smells like a rat trying to get his greedy little paws on whatever is available. I really don't see this as trademark protection (particularly the transfer of the domains(s)) - instead they are trying to capitalize on the brand that is now Mandrake Linux - thus a good opportunity for Mandrake to sue them back, and hopefully retain their rights.
So this is somewhat offtopic, but being in the ask slashdot section it seems to squeeze in barely...
But why is it that no matter what question gets asked, if the question is not phrased with the word google in it somewhere, someone is bound to flame away ranting about why they should have just used google in the first place (I guess with about a million plus viewers someone is bound to be in a bad mood on any given day).
On the other hand, they could very well ask a question that was probably answered very well by a trip to google, but they are just curious as to what the slashcrowd (tm) thinks/uses/wishes.... in which case couldn't they all do us a favor and include some of the resources they found, perhaps as a second paragraph of the original question (similar to book reviews, slashback, etc...)
Of course, I fall in the third bucket where I rant for the sake of ranting.
You know what I considered doing when reading this - use it as my SSH gateway and/or firewall... it would probably beat out an old box and certainly consumes a lot less power...
Just a thought.
Where I work, cameras are strictly prohibited, and basically under no circumstances can I ever bring one inside the building - and a camera phone would be much worse.
That being said, they are wary of even plain old vanilla cell phones and PDA's, though you can get those cleared with a little paperwork. Bottom line - I will probably never buy a phone that has a camera built in, and quite frankly think that it is really just kind of a gimmicky thing that will probably be used for more bad purposes than good, but that may just be the cynic in me.
Quite frankly, I wish bluetooth was more prominent in cell phones - I would definitely use that a lot more - and not just for internet access, just syncing contacts and content - and a lot of stuff that doesn't fit on my SIM card that I may want to easily transport between phones. I have a hard time believing they can put a camera on a cell phone for a substantially different cost than putting BT hardware.
Me personally, when I was shopping for a console back a couple of years, it was down to an xbox or a gamecube, and one of the factors that weighed heavily on my mind was less moving parts. The xbox having a hard drive meant it was statistically more likely to have a hardware failure before the cube was.
Not that it was a huge part of my decision making process, but I certainly considered it seeing as how I am not a big time gamer anymore, and expect the $300+ I plop down for a console, games, controllers, etc... to last me a good long time.
Having never read him before, I can't be 100% sure of the above title, but I can say that I won't be visiting his ruminitions on society anytime soon. I think he is a loud-mouth moron.
.net environment and runtime into a single executable. That is just plain nuts. Yeah, I would rather have my users download a 30MB file instead of a 20MB runtime and a couple hundred K app... and his part on ranting of all the updates he needed to do - well, just further proof he is not staying on top of taking care of his system. The .NET runtime should not have required him to install anything else besides the runtime. He is clearly clueless when it comes to system administration (or writing untrue things to try to get more people up in arms) if he really wants a linked executable he can drop on a box with no other expectations.
.NET - written by the same guy after all).
I can't see a good reason why he would want a linker to link the
At the end of the day, the question he should have asked would have been something more analgous to the java compiling goodness in gcc to generate native code and not java byte code. That I could seem some benefits to, but really he should just be programming in Delphi or C++ Builder (not all that different from
I stand behind my classification as Joel as an absolute moron. He is nothing more than a bad journalist trying to get people up in arms with his so called facts and loads of ranting.
They mentioned the word in passing, but I think for the kernel to provide this will be a huge benefit on many levels - and immediate benefits could be seen in projects like udev and the HAL stuff that is going on.
Besides, machines are getting to resemble the big iron of yesterday enough that you can (and a large number of people do) run multiple OS's on a single machine. Having an underlying architecture to better support those goals would be a great thing.
To a certain degree, it is like the evolution from a shared memory space to a virtual memory space - one of the greatest features was protection. Virtualize the entire OS (wow!) and you can run your different server apps on the same machine without the risks of one nuking the other.
Emulation has a ton of cool things going on right now. With a swift boost from an OS designed to virtualize the hardware it would make it trivial to have multiple copies of the OS running at very near full speed with complete access to the hardware.
I had my parents on a service in Utah where the provider basically had a high gain omni with an amp and blasted the air with their signal (still not sure how legal it all really is, but no one complains so the FCC doesn't really care)... then a directional dish-like receiver on the client end to connect. It worked OK, but was very testy due to wind blowing and it was also during the height of the blaster worm which very much so wrecked havoc over their wireless nodes.
I guess the lesson I took from this is, you can probably do it the least expensively using 802.11b gear, but service just wasn't that great. You may want to seriously consider 900Mhz as it isn't quite as fussy as the 2.4Ghz stuff. Even though it probably won't be as fast, your customers will probably be happier.
For IE, I have found the Microsoft Web Developer Accessories a great help - especially if I can't remember document.form1.....
They are said to only work with version 5, but I have had no ill effects of using them with IE6.
And lastly, I don't think there is any one single tool that will do all the DHTML goodness you need (particularly if you are trying to validate it against multiple browsers). While you can separate DHTML out into JavaScript, the DOM, etc... each one really needs a separate tool to deal with it properly. No reason there couldn't be one good tool, just I have yet to see any I like as much as the few I use regularly.
4) Free as in 'Libre' and Free as in 'Beer'!
A download version of Mandrake Linux, consisting entirely of Open Source software, will continue to be released, provided without cost, and supported.
This is great news in my opinion. Any company that won't offer a "preview" of their product (like ISO's of a downloadable version in this case) will never earn my bucks. This is imperative if they hope to get me to join the club, buy the boxed set, etc. Besides, what I really want is a DVD so I don't have to swap CD's, so if I like the ISO's enough, there is a fair chance I will buy their power pack and get the DVD.
What I want at least as much as a replacable battery is for the MP3 player to just show up as removeable storage... that way it is easier to have it be cross platform, and the software can simply read and write it like a file system because it is.
There are a few players out there that support this - and here is to hoping (even though it is in vain) that Apple makes this dream come true.
While not entirely on-topic, I use this little tidbit to disable flash while I am surfing, only flipping it back on when I absolutely need to (like for watching the latest Strong Bad Email)
0 0}
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-4445535400
Disable Flash:
"Compatibility Flags" = 0x400
Enable:
"Compatibility Flags" = 0x0
Enjoy your somewhat more advertising free world.
For that matter, their site claims to offer a 30 day free trial for download, but I couldn't find anything other than a passing reference to that, on their web or ftp site.
Granted, they have crossover office going and some other commercialized apps, so they rightfully should be able to charge for their product, but if they advertise a trial let me check it out. I can tell you right now, even for $30 I won't even give it a look.
As of version 1.1 Xandros didn't support (claimed it wouldn't even install) on a system that was multi-processor, or even on a newer P4 system with Hyperthreading enabled. Any ideas if these issues are addressed in version 2.0?
I can't see a good reason for not having something like that working at this stage in the game.
Having actually read the article (last night on my notebook connected through wifi wishing for a tablet to read on instead) - the article mentions that bandwidth did play an important part in the test. While not perfect at 1000Mb, it was substantially better than 11Mb.... that could also be related to a PC with a better rendering backend, but who knows....
This device isn't meant to stream video (though for almost $1000 it should!). My other complaint is that it at 6lbs and a 14-15" screen, it is too bulky for the intended use. The smaller one is much more appealing to me, but at the price I certainly won't be getting either.
Why can't they just put Windows Mobile 2003 on it instead, give you full PDA capabilities, and use the terminal services client that is part of the package... I mean come on people!
Any bets on which major distro will be next? Better yet, instead of point spreads on professional sporting events - Vegas should be taking bets on which distro (or well established free software org) gets rooted next...
First Debian, now Gentoo... Slackware perhaps? Maybe install a spam-bot on a knoppix image?
You know, I am certainly of the opinion that children should be "protected" or "discouraged" from purchasing "questionable" material. That is just my ethical standpoint - and really I think it should be the parents policing not the stores or governments... but I digress...
The real point of this post is to point out my more firm belief that less government intervention is certainly a good thing - particularly in relatively trivial issues such as these. The feds and locals are already far too involved in my life and decisions that I make. I would much rather see this as an initiative started as stores grouped together or a group of angry parents convinced the stores to separate the games out instead of uncle sam forcing them to do so.
So what treasure did he leave behind? Hwo much experience? Etc.??? And yes I read the linked articles and none of them mention anything... and if he dropped nothing then that sucks almost as bad as Sony resetting the zone...
While it is all good and well that they bonded together to put the smack down on him, is there anything unfathomably cool to show for it?
I read the page referenced in the above post - Zelda Classic - and I had a great idea...
Add $15 or so to the subscription and send out a demo disc (or bonus disc?) each month - like what they have in the stores already. It shouldn't cost them more than about $1 each month as they are already making the discs....
Basically for me, that would rock. Then I don't have to look like a doofus at Target kicking the little kids off so I can check out the latest demos and movies...
Just as with the original XBox, there were plans to use AMD chips, at least that is what most of the speculation on the internet said, up until they announced the specs and low and behold Intel had "won" the contract instead.
I could very easily see this deal with IBM as a backdoor sneaky tatic to get nVidia hardware under the hood again, especially with their cozy arrangements as of late. For that matter, AMD and IBM are also in bed so it wouldn't be surprising at all the see ATI booted and AMD/NV offering becoming the real guts of the console. IBM would be the fab for the chips and assembly for the mainboard... heck they might even just roll the whole thing and take a cool percentage.
Off the wall? Perhaps. But I think this xb0x0r war is far from over. There are no published specs and these talks of industry deals are by no means what the final product will necessarily be.
iTunes is lacking in a brick-and-mortar placement. It might show up on a magazine cover or something, but by Napster having these cards at the checkout of a grocery store line, it opens up marketing potential (people just seeing it helps it be regonized) and also people tend to throw additional things in their cart while they wait to check out. Why do you think they have both sides of the checkout isle lined with various "convenience" items. It isn't uncommon to grab a pack of gum, candy bar, lighter - whatever.
Granted we are talking about ~1 dollar instead of ~15, but still this could definitely be a good business move for Napster.