Actually, the recent Sony Playstation 3 adds seemed sort of like that as well: "This is the PS3. Everyone knows what this thing is anyhow, so we can just throw random images at you (a baby doll, a Rubik's Cube, crows and eggs, etc), because we're just so damned cool."
It worked for the PS2, which came complete with an advertising campaign that was targetted at the LSD abuser crowd and a slogan that might as well have been randomly generated.
I love those ads. They advertise features that people won't get with the Home Basic version - which is what a lot of people are going to buy. Quite a number of people ought to be pissed when they find out that their 229 Euro OS doesn't even play DVDs if they don't pay again for an upgrade.
True. Reverse engineering can be extremely annoying. Even if you have a simple ASCII file with one value per line you might not be able to find out what all values do. If even systematic corruption (changing a value in the file, then loading it in the program and seeing what changed) does not yield any information about a value there are several possible scenarios: The value could be an unused rudiment from an earlier version of the format. It could be some kind of checksum or an internal setting that affects the document in a non-obvious way. It could be padding.
You might get away with one or two unknown values in a simple format, but it stops being fun once you have more complex binary formats and documentation* lines like "$0x0005e4 (1B): Perhaps a section count? I have no idea, but setting it to anything but 0x07 crashes the program when loading the file".
And that's just data formats. Protocols are much worse as you have to deal with unexpected replies you've never seen before etc.
* Documentation generated by the reverse engineering team, not original format documentation
And that includes federal scientists; I think the bigger problem is not that they aren't being allowed to say anything, but that we have federal scientists working on global warming in the first place! Since when has global warming been a major security issue to our nation?
You're right. Federal research should be solely confined to things that are an immediate security threat because we all know that nations have no other concerns, especially not long-term ones.
Well, if you put motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plan you get a much higher amount of motherfucking emissions. While motherfucking is not as bad, greenhouse-wise, as CO2, it's still pretty motherfucking bad.
Yeah, because once someone has dealt with Hollywood everything they ever have made and ever will make immediately becomes completely unrealistic. That's why someone who has worked on Terminator 3 can never create an almost-realistic-looking rendering of water being poured into a glass. It's also why Hollywood actors don't quite look like real human beings.
There, it's proven: Mac users do automatically have good taste.;)
By the way, there's one thing I'd really like to see - VLC not dropping frames like there is no tomorrow when the Thunderbird icon starts hopping. That alone would be a major improvement... That or closing Thunderbird before watching something.
By the way (again), do Intel Macs have a system load of 2+ when mdimport indexes something? I'd guess that problem still exists since I think mdimport is mostly an I/O hog.
Of course they sell these to OEMs. There is a market outside the USA and at least in Europe mobiles and carriers are coupled less tightly than in the States. IIRC in Germany the apex of coupling is that you can get a phone for one Euro if you sign into an X month contract. After the contract's out you can continue using the phone (and indeed I do use a Nokia 6210 we got via contract; it runs on prepaid now).
If they only sold to carriers that'd mean that they make it very hard to sell these in Europe.
Actually, wha not just add Bluetooth functionality to the terminal and take the phone out of the loop altogether?
I'm one of those folks who think that mobile phones (need to be on all the time) and mobile computers (should be in standby when you don't need them) don't make a good package. Why not put everything on portable storage and use terminals with or without an own OS? You start the terminal, you connect your storage, your OS is loaded. If a mobile is supposed to be able to pull that off an energy-efficient 1 GHz box will do it as well. When you don't work on it it can serve as an answering machine or a PVR or whatever.
True. Despite me having to resolder a contact on the DC-in board* and replacing the hard drive once my G4 iBook is still going strong (okay, except for the cables of the power adapter finally succumbing to the abuse I put them through**). The only reason I will upgrade to a MBP once Leopard is out is because the notebook has become my main work machine and 1024x768 is a bit too small for that. Oh, and I could use x86 compatibility.
The iBook (once I have a replacement power adapter) will probably go to my parents or my brother. No reason to throw it away.
* Apple should develop something that keeps people from trying to walk through power cords. MagSafe is nice, but I'm thinking more along the lines of barbed wire...
** Just because notebook backpacks have a little pouch for you to store the power adapter in doesn't mean the cables won't break from you doing so.
Linux box: Hi, I'm a Linux box. Windows box: And I'm a Windows box. Linux, I'm going to f**ing bury you. Linux box: You and which army? Windows box: Well, I've got Steve Ballmer. He can throw chairs pretty hard. Linux box: That's scary alright, but as for killitude, I've got Hans Reiser. Windows box: Ah- I- I'm going to go somewhere else then, okay?
One more reason to love Linux: Because if you don't we'll sic Hans on you.
Another incredibly useful popup: "Drive E:, which contains only one file, which takes up all space and which is probably not going to be deleted as it's the pagefile, has little free space. Since having no free space on a partition dedicated to only hosting the fixed-size pagefile is a grave condition which probably renders you unable to do any work at all I will tell you again in five minutes."
The greatest thing about the "low space" popups is that a) they really come back after five minutes and b) the only way to get rid of them is to edit the Registry and turn off low space detection for all hard drives. Thank you, Microsoft!
Only in countries where EULAs are legally binding. In Germany, for example, EULAs are only valid if they are presented to you prior to purchase - thus, under their EULA as it is implemented now, Microsoft has exactly those rights they have without it.
I was writing a paper, on Vista. Then suddenly the computer was like "beepbeepbeepbeepbeep" and I was like: "...huh?" And then like, half of my paper was gone. It was a really good paper. And I had to write it again and I had to do it fast so it wasn't as good, which is kind of... a bummer.
My name is Jesus_666 and I'm a student.
The attitude is "it's technically possible to put it on a mobile to I will pay for being able to do so". Some people would buy anything if it's for the mobile, even if that means they have to get a $5/mo subscription.
Their webmail uses unencrypted web pages, so you can't use it from wireless hot-spots. Or pretty much anywhere you don't trust the intermediate ISP(s). It probably isn't safe to use anywhere but from home, so what's the point?
Then why use it? I have no idea whether T-Online offers mail and I don't care - with the freemailers trying to outdo each other in terms of features and with SSL/TLS-secured POP3/SMTP/IMAP servers being the standard (as well as HTTPS-secured webmail interfaces) there's no real reason to tie your mail account to anyone who wants to do anything but provide you with a mail account.
11. Months later you decide to upgrade to the next version of RedHat/Fedora and those packages you installed from source/third-party repositories generate conflicts with those from the upgrade that leave the system in a barely-usable state where it's easiest to just wipe the entire OS and reinstall.
The incompleteness of the official repos and the breakage that occurs when upgrading a system that uses anything besides official packages was what turned me off Fedora. Now I have just as much fun with Gentoo, just with better package management (and no breakage due to upgrades).
True. I am delaying a laptop purchase right now, but that's just because I don't want to buy an Apple laptop immediately before a new version of OS X comes out again. I had enough fun with using 10.3 in a Java 1.5-centric university to wait out a couple months for the next version. But that's arguably an Apple-user-who-doesn't-want-to-buy-retail-OS X-specific problem.
Generally speaking, if you don't plan on relying on a proprietary system there's not much to hold out for, unless $HARDWARE with $FEATURE comes out $SOON and you really want/need $FEATURE.
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Actually, the recent Sony Playstation 3 adds seemed sort of like that as well: "This is the PS3. Everyone knows what this thing is anyhow, so we can just throw random images at you (a baby doll, a Rubik's Cube, crows and eggs, etc), because we're just so damned cool."
It worked for the PS2, which came complete with an advertising campaign that was targetted at the LSD abuser crowd and a slogan that might as well have been randomly generated.
I love those ads. They advertise features that people won't get with the Home Basic version - which is what a lot of people are going to buy. Quite a number of people ought to be pissed when they find out that their 229 Euro OS doesn't even play DVDs if they don't pay again for an upgrade.
True. Reverse engineering can be extremely annoying. Even if you have a simple ASCII file with one value per line you might not be able to find out what all values do. If even systematic corruption (changing a value in the file, then loading it in the program and seeing what changed) does not yield any information about a value there are several possible scenarios: The value could be an unused rudiment from an earlier version of the format. It could be some kind of checksum or an internal setting that affects the document in a non-obvious way. It could be padding.
You might get away with one or two unknown values in a simple format, but it stops being fun once you have more complex binary formats and documentation* lines like "$0x0005e4 (1B): Perhaps a section count? I have no idea, but setting it to anything but 0x07 crashes the program when loading the file".
And that's just data formats. Protocols are much worse as you have to deal with unexpected replies you've never seen before etc.
* Documentation generated by the reverse engineering team, not original format documentation
Kreationism. It's a KDE project. ;)
And that includes federal scientists; I think the bigger problem is not that they aren't being allowed to say anything, but that we have federal scientists working on global warming in the first place! Since when has global warming been a major security issue to our nation?
You're right. Federal research should be solely confined to things that are an immediate security threat because we all know that nations have no other concerns, especially not long-term ones.
Well, if you put motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plan you get a much higher amount of motherfucking emissions. While motherfucking is not as bad, greenhouse-wise, as CO2, it's still pretty motherfucking bad.
How are they going to come up with $16 for a CD anyway?
Stealing. Muggery. Blackmail. There are many morally superior alternatives to copyright infringement.
Yeah, because once someone has dealt with Hollywood everything they ever have made and ever will make immediately becomes completely unrealistic. That's why someone who has worked on Terminator 3 can never create an almost-realistic-looking rendering of water being poured into a glass. It's also why Hollywood actors don't quite look like real human beings.
;)
...and that Windows XP running XCOM:UFO Defence
;)
There, it's proven: Mac users do automatically have good taste.
By the way, there's one thing I'd really like to see - VLC not dropping frames like there is no tomorrow when the Thunderbird icon starts hopping. That alone would be a major improvement... That or closing Thunderbird before watching something.
By the way (again), do Intel Macs have a system load of 2+ when mdimport indexes something? I'd guess that problem still exists since I think mdimport is mostly an I/O hog.
Of course they sell these to OEMs. There is a market outside the USA and at least in Europe mobiles and carriers are coupled less tightly than in the States. IIRC in Germany the apex of coupling is that you can get a phone for one Euro if you sign into an X month contract. After the contract's out you can continue using the phone (and indeed I do use a Nokia 6210 we got via contract; it runs on prepaid now).
If they only sold to carriers that'd mean that they make it very hard to sell these in Europe.
Actually, wha not just add Bluetooth functionality to the terminal and take the phone out of the loop altogether?
I'm one of those folks who think that mobile phones (need to be on all the time) and mobile computers (should be in standby when you don't need them) don't make a good package. Why not put everything on portable storage and use terminals with or without an own OS? You start the terminal, you connect your storage, your OS is loaded. If a mobile is supposed to be able to pull that off an energy-efficient 1 GHz box will do it as well. When you don't work on it it can serve as an answering machine or a PVR or whatever.
True. Despite me having to resolder a contact on the DC-in board* and replacing the hard drive once my G4 iBook is still going strong (okay, except for the cables of the power adapter finally succumbing to the abuse I put them through**). The only reason I will upgrade to a MBP once Leopard is out is because the notebook has become my main work machine and 1024x768 is a bit too small for that. Oh, and I could use x86 compatibility.
The iBook (once I have a replacement power adapter) will probably go to my parents or my brother. No reason to throw it away.
* Apple should develop something that keeps people from trying to walk through power cords. MagSafe is nice, but I'm thinking more along the lines of barbed wire...
** Just because notebook backpacks have a little pouch for you to store the power adapter in doesn't mean the cables won't break from you doing so.
People interested in technology are Hackers.
No, those are tech geeks. Hackers are people who are interested in (and preferably very good at) tinkering with stuff.
Linux box: Hi, I'm a Linux box.
Windows box: And I'm a Windows box. Linux, I'm going to f**ing bury you.
Linux box: You and which army?
Windows box: Well, I've got Steve Ballmer. He can throw chairs pretty hard.
Linux box: That's scary alright, but as for killitude, I've got Hans Reiser.
Windows box: Ah- I- I'm going to go somewhere else then, okay?
One more reason to love Linux: Because if you don't we'll sic Hans on you.
Okay, that one was way tasteless. I apologize.
Irish and Welsh, yes. Low German, no (unlike both Gnome and KDE, although their translation efforts aren't that fr along yet).
Another incredibly useful popup: "Drive E:, which contains only one file, which takes up all space and which is probably not going to be deleted as it's the pagefile, has little free space. Since having no free space on a partition dedicated to only hosting the fixed-size pagefile is a grave condition which probably renders you unable to do any work at all I will tell you again in five minutes."
The greatest thing about the "low space" popups is that a) they really come back after five minutes and b) the only way to get rid of them is to edit the Registry and turn off low space detection for all hard drives. Thank you, Microsoft!
Only in countries where EULAs are legally binding. In Germany, for example, EULAs are only valid if they are presented to you prior to purchase - thus, under their EULA as it is implemented now, Microsoft has exactly those rights they have without it.
Win two contests and save up $50,000. In space nobody can hear him scream.
Radio star, webma star... I think I'm seeing a pattern there.
Myspace has a very real use: Weird Al posts his videos there. OTOH, that makes Myspace the most bloated artist homepage ever.
You think so? Let me tell you a little story:
I was writing a paper, on Vista. Then suddenly the computer was like "beepbeepbeepbeepbeep" and I was like: "...huh?" And then like, half of my paper was gone. It was a really good paper. And I had to write it again and I had to do it fast so it wasn't as good, which is kind of... a bummer.
My name is Jesus_666 and I'm a student.
The attitude is "it's technically possible to put it on a mobile to I will pay for being able to do so". Some people would buy anything if it's for the mobile, even if that means they have to get a $5/mo subscription.
Their webmail uses unencrypted web pages, so you can't use it from wireless hot-spots. Or pretty much anywhere you don't trust the intermediate ISP(s). It probably isn't safe to use anywhere but from home, so what's the point?
Then why use it? I have no idea whether T-Online offers mail and I don't care - with the freemailers trying to outdo each other in terms of features and with SSL/TLS-secured POP3/SMTP/IMAP servers being the standard (as well as HTTPS-secured webmail interfaces) there's no real reason to tie your mail account to anyone who wants to do anything but provide you with a mail account.
You forgot:
11. Months later you decide to upgrade to the next version of RedHat/Fedora and those packages you installed from source/third-party repositories generate conflicts with those from the upgrade that leave the system in a barely-usable state where it's easiest to just wipe the entire OS and reinstall.
The incompleteness of the official repos and the breakage that occurs when upgrading a system that uses anything besides official packages was what turned me off Fedora. Now I have just as much fun with Gentoo, just with better package management (and no breakage due to upgrades).
True. I am delaying a laptop purchase right now, but that's just because I don't want to buy an Apple laptop immediately before a new version of OS X comes out again. I had enough fun with using 10.3 in a Java 1.5-centric university to wait out a couple months for the next version. But that's arguably an Apple-user-who-doesn't-want-to-buy-retail-OS X-specific problem.
Generally speaking, if you don't plan on relying on a proprietary system there's not much to hold out for, unless $HARDWARE with $FEATURE comes out $SOON and you really want/need $FEATURE.