I am actually extremely familiar with the economics of video game consoles. I am well aware that they are sold at a loss; but I just picked a random article, i could have said a 400 dollar laptop computer.. or a whole lot of other things. That stated it wouldn't seem to be a strange analogy; cable shouldn't be making money on the boxes they should be making money on the cable access.
why do video games take a loss on consoles? several reasons: (the basis of which depends on how you define "a loss") the amount of money spent developing the consoles is too much for them to reasonably get out of a consumer per console. They recoup this money from software devs through licensing. XBox was the most notorious of all for this as they took 10$ for every single game sold, a new high. ps2 took around 6 from what i recall from my college class that hit on this. That said they usually still have a magic number of sales by which they do recoup their costs. unless you are referring to actual cost to produced the hardware itself is greater than they sell for and they can never recover which I surmise finally happened with the xbox/ps2 generation.
technically you could say that audio cd's from bands are sold at a loss too... until you look at the cost amortized out for the number produced. There is always some magic number of copies they have to sell to break even from the costs of recording/advertising/producing/etc. according to another post iphones are "sold at a loss" since they put "150 million into the research"
if people dont buy the console; they cant and wont buy the software. Video game consoles have competition which is the difference. If you dont want a 600 dollar ps3 you can get a 400 dollar one, or 250 dollar wii (or fall back to your computer). Cable should follow the same model, and sell boxes at a loss, but there is a key difference. Cable knows you don't have a choice: 9 times out of 10 you have one provider in your area for cable. If you dont want OTA or satellite (or cant have satellite) you have no choice.. which frees them to try to collect as much as they want on the cable boxes. the other half is for fake advertising so they can say the price is cheaper than it is; if you are required to have a digital cable box from them and it costs 6.95 monthly for said box; give the box for free and increase the digital price by 6.95.. so instead of having your bill read "basic cable acces = 40; digital cable = 10, equipment = 6.95" it can say "basic cable access = 40, digital cable = 16.95" and now you can hide the cost the same way you hide the digital cost...
this all goes back to the rampant BS and fraud that cable industry is allowed to get away with. i saw a tv spot for TW the other day that asked a satellite guy who was in love with the ice fishing channel how much he pays. he responds "about 30 a month" TW responds that plans start at 20 a month (which is definately BS)... the funny part? on the last frame of the spot TW says "plans starting at 39.95 a month". does the BBB ever watch the ads anymore for crap like this?
(a little bit OT for this blurb but still valid as a good aside here): complain all you want about similar stuff with cars and cellphones; but i've seen a spot for a $XX lease for a car + xx tax title and license etc and walked into a dealer (in Ma.) and actually gotten that deal. didn't get a "oh yes but the steering wheel costs extra" or "you have to pay through our credit service which surcharges you 6bucks a month". the funniest one in cars is that Toyota doesn't include floormats standard at all; which everyone buys anyways.
at another point, although I've never used the ondemand crap much, there is a difference between that and tivo/dvr. My parents for example started using ondemand to get movies because it got cheaper than blockbuster. they dont buy movie channels, and if you tivo a movie off "movie channels" they are edited for content and have commercials which you have to skip over.. sometimes you dont want to have to fa
no they shouldn't and they still shouldn't. people refuse to take personal responsibility for being stupid that is the problem. What you are suggesting is exactly the kind of complaint everyone makes at mmorpgs that refuse to let people sell their accounts and goods for $. I dont care who it protects all this does is restrict your freedoms. You should be able to do whatever you want with your money; just like with ebay if cooks are dumb enough to pay 100 L$ for a coupon for 1 L$ then that is their problem.
I understand the fraudulent atm thing; but it sounds like the real problem was that there werent any 'REAL' banks. That and the fact that people don't bother to check the things for certificates or anything like that.
you know of course what this also means? the next step will be the us govt taxing people on second life income even if it never leaves the game. I'm really not sure what I think of this one.. and are people going to circumvent it by not promising a return but alluding to one? also this seems to kill off iou's and tips and loans from anyone but banks which again I dont like.
im sure people will circumvent this one way or another; join my club for X dollars and if you leave in a year we will refund you your money and give you some extra for trying us out...
i compare this to real life; do you deposit your money into shady looking atm's that dont operate and appear unlike one from a bank? probably not. but if you're one of those people who cashes their checks at supermarkets and pays out the percentage I guess you wont have to learn better now about what you blindly do with your money.
neither; we pay them for cable tv. if they create a barrier such as a needed box to provide themselves with security they should have to shoulder the burden and provide the box for free. Do you have to pay the phone company for a special box to use their phone lines? do you have to pay the power company for special box? do you pay the water company for a special box? no you dont.
as long as you need the box to obtain all of the features that they provide and advertise as part of their offering the box should free. That they charge for the box and seperately for the remote is even more absurd.
I won't buy it because I have no guarantee that they wont change the boxes out the next day. And oh wait who decided that those boxes were 400? oh right the cable company gets to, because they have no competition and no one buys them. How is it that this stupid cable box is 400 when for that same amount you could buy a basic desktop computer? You could buy a PS3 for that price; and last I checked the PS3 was significantly more complicated to produce, and more powerful.. And they are often 6 a month, and then another dollar a month for the remote... and then another chunk for them to come out and give you the box, and then another box for everytv in your house.
This is only made more assanine by the extremely outrageous rates they charge for setup and installation of service. I moved into an apartment complex that was already wired for cable; all the had to do was flick a switch, hand me the cable box and cable modem. If i could have done it myself I would have; instead i have to wait till they can come out; and pay them about 150 dollars to do nothing which took about 45 minutes. Why is it that a "cable guy" who 9 times out of 10 hasn't even been to college is providing me with roughly an hours worth of work that is somehow "more expensive" than an hours worth of my work at my job; which I had to attain a top tier college degree for?
Its not just the box; its the box and the other crapload of fees they associate with it. Oh you want us to hook up the box? more $ please. oh you want a remote for it? well you can buy a universal which wont have every feature of our remote since we have some special buttons, or you can rent ours for yep more $. Thanks to cable boxes the channel labelling features of tv's are useless. honestly having cable my tv remote is basically never used; the only thing i programmed my universal remote to use from it is power on / off, menu, up/down/left/right/enter for the settings, and input switch.
a cable card installer? whats the training for that? "this is the slot, you put the card here"?... why do you need someone to put a card in a slot for you? a friend just got an hdtv and a cable card for it; it has a slot on the front face. Worked like a charm; i was even able to watch the infamous cowboys/panthers and pats/giants games on the "NFL NETWORK" on the darn thing.
I dont think it proves a damn thing; because the cable companies have been going at great length not to comply with that theyve been asked to, and doing so as slowly as humanly possible. "It just goes to show that, yet again, attempting to regulate the free market just doesn't work" this is statement couldnt be more invalid. The cable companies dont exist in a free market. In a free market the cable company would provide one thing; the cable. Anyone could create a device to be used to connect to it; they dont allow that. in fact they formed a monopoly of sorts because the user has no choice, and there is no competition. what can you choose other than the one cable provider in your town, the non existent other cable provider? not renting or buying a box from them? renting or buying a box from someone else? and that isnt what makes a monopoly anyhow; its the practices for exclusion. "lets create a box and legally not allow anyone else to make them" "lets make it so that cable ready tv's cant be cable ready anymore" "lets offer only a crippled version to those who look to third party
theres a larger problem that you are missing; a. they should offer a NO os system and let you put on it what you will. b. the largest problems they encounter from the linux world is the fact that they put system features that not just don't work under linux but break it. If you offer linux on a product it should work on the product; that means the wireless cards should be supported by the Linux OS that Dell offers; and that dell should steer towards using components that are linux friendly..
its no different probably from a lot of the heat they will get in regards to vista/xp up and downgrades. You try to change and you can't find the drivers you need for the version because they only gave a CD for one version; and they don't provide a quality list of the named components in YOUR machine and which driver you should be getting.. i remember doing a search with my express tag back in the day and was offered a large amount of different video drivers for many different cards that even seemingly had the same name. sigh.
the problem seems to be more a tip toeing issue; if you say one word to them that indicates anything (software inclusive) is non-stock (which aside from music, data files, and emails is pretty much everything) they will likely try to say "we dont support that app" and they try to persuade you to think that it has anything to do with anything or that it alleviates them from supporting the stuff THEY put there. case in point: they advertise lots of room for expansion in the pci bays... except they wont support anything there; if are slapping in something simple like a regular sound card, or network card you are usually ok... but when you have a network card, a wireless card, and a sound card there... and you need to add a new card that cant share an IRQ you might run into problems becuase the merry go round game doesnt work; the slots (at least back in 2000-2002) werent hard coded to an irq and reserving didnt quite work; and random things get bounced around and leave some unused or will share an irq with your new device instead of with someother device you could care less about... this is problematic when you try to add something to say take advantage of the hard drive bays, or specialized sound card for digital audio or video capturing / activities... its funny because on an older machine with an older bios you actually could do some of these things... like turn off the LPT and com ports you waste irqs on becuase your printer mouse and keyboard are usb... sad that there are still only 16 irqs still, several never available to user at all. And this was all under WindowsME in the pre XP days; (me did better on this and the audio drivers needed than 98sr2... tho XP fixed a whole lot of it and it all worked properly and better than it ever had; the only irony being that in order to install the software and drivers for the hardware you had to copy the setup cd to a local folder so that you could have the machine lie to the executable and say that it wasnt XP because they decided to hardcode not letting it work normally on XP whcih didnt exist when it was made..
The other key problem with parent is that there are two different crowds of people saying this. The guy who says he will reinstall from scratch probably isn't the one calling with the stupid support issue; they are the ones who discover things like the directMedia/destroyer problem.
If they added some notes to the configurator like "this card or option is problematic or lacks open source drivers under linux" etc they might be minimally better off.
probably will be laughed out of the courtroom since you have to have a. consent to it on facebook, and provide the information to access your account. blockbuster isnt making the disclosure choide; they are allowing you to choose to have it disclosed.
if anything i dont see how this much different than netflix and bbuster having rss feeds for each persona nd their queue that dont require any authorization afaik
call me crazy but i dont see how this will do anything at all to them. one way or the other. especially since you could also do this through their own websites (netflix and bbuster) if you knew the email your friend used to register and they accepted an invite to share
you should know that Vista is not optimal for anyone right now. Why else would all the companies be reverting to selling XP again? The fact of the matter is that this laptop isn't exactly geared for hardcore gaming no matter WHICH OS is on it.
For the record installing or not installing Linux isn't an answer to what computer I should buy; Linux as of my last count is still just an operating system that runs on surprise a computer. That said I still agree with your point that was behind it: i love linux; and yes there is some gaming on it; but until the situation gets better I keep an XP partition around for serious gaming.
Buying a Dell with Vista? come on Dell hasn't been a good choice since 2000 or so. Seeing as these are the kind of people who might actually need tech support i cant endorse a company that puts you on 2 hour wait to speak to some guy in India.
I dont get how you can say that everything they said is correct when they made some blatant errors.. There are more than 3 versions of vista out and there always have been. Also as a point of logic, how could you disagree with it if it was correct? You cant disagree with a fact; you can disagree with an opinion. His opinion about gaming is something that can be disagreed upon, both sides have some truth, although I tend to side with them on the gaming issue.
Suggesting that everyone who needs something powerful needs dual core, 1 gig of ram and Vista is a bit suspect. A 3 ghz single core can still hold its own weight. maybe not with vista but runs XP and linux just fine. mac osX ran just fine on single core until they switched over to intel.
while your point is valid it doesnt refute or support what the parent said in actuality; 9 out of 10 people who are the diamond in the rough kid who gets that amazing job out of high school are "nerds like us" who have been doing this stuff prior to this class, will be too busy playing around with the software on their own during class to pay attention, and probably took this class simply to get the credit for something they already are good at. Or they will like it and will end up spending a lot of time on it. Expecting some kid to walk out of this class as a 'webdesign god' with a hefty portfolio is very naive. Its like expecting a kid to leave the chemsitry class and invent a new substance tomorrow. do the woodshop kids drop out and become carpenters tomorrow?
its a high school class; if they are that INSPIRED by this then they will go on to do a lot more of it on their own to develop said 'kick ass' portfolio. Which tool they use to produce it becomes irrelevant at some point. but it might be better to encourage them to use one they can legally afford to get and use. as opposed to enticing them with tools they need but cant afford, and then yelling at them when they go and take them anyways cough cough torrents cough cough
the problem with too many high school tech classes is they dont teach concepts or intelligence; they teach memorization and stupidity. They do this by teaching WORD instead of word processing. EXCEL instead of spreadsheets. ACCESS instead of databases (how access counts as a DB is beyond me having played with oracle/sql/mysql in college, but i guess a good start for lesser mortals and myself)
one of the great learning occasions for me was that despite using pc's for pretty much everything else (at home for pleasure and schoolwork) the technology class that taught all of these things was taught on macs using clarisworks. This forced most me and most others to focus on the concepts and not the idiosyncracies; because we didnt have as much of a stake in those. We focused on understanding functionality more than shortcuts. That said most of the shortcuts we focused on were globally useful ones; things like using control/shift/alt while clicking to select various things. The concept of cut copy and paste, what tools exist and should be used. etc...
Compare this to a Computer Science course in both high school and first year college where a chunk is spent just on "which button and icon to click on to create the right project in this years Visual Studio version" (because they seem to altenate back and forth between two of them) rather than the general habits of how to use a debugger and what you generally are trying to do. even something as simple and intelligent as using a Binary Search (referring to where you set the break points) to narrow it down when you have no idea whats wrong (as is the case often for beginners)
throw the same college students in front of gdb and theyd be hopelessly lost for hours becuase they didnt learn why the clicked what, they just know "thats the button i'm supposed to click so i just click it cuz..."
While applicable directly its more pertinent to a non immediate application which I thing is what causes people to actually understand abstractly and conceptually what they were trying to learn... good thing i dont have to go write a paper on this write now:-)
maybe instead of worrying about "what to waste your money on this girl for the holidays" you could get her a freaking book and teach her to read. I'd be willing to bet that would be a far better investment of your money and payoff into her future.
honestly if she can't read how is she supposed to figure out how to play all the games? I'll never understand people who spoil the kids so blatantly on such garbage. I love video games don't get me wrong; but I wasn't handed them, and I certainly didn't get them before I could read. Whats funnier is handing this moderately expensive handhold console to a 6 yearold. Maybe a better idea for a pre-reader would be to get a home console?
Sorry i just find it hilarious and disgusting the amount of kids 10 and under I encounter with cell phones (often fancier than mine and loaded with games), video ipods, psp's and nintendo ds's. Do people really have nothing better to waste their money on? Honestly put some in the bank or in the kids college fund and let it grow. Maybe its one less shiny toy today; but it will likely pay of in the future.
the parent to your post seems to again gloss over the "bundled" copies with his new hardware as well.
All I was expressing was a curiosity; I'm aware everyone doesnt upgrade everytime, but lots of people (and companies) do.
i'd concede that with the far more infrequent windows updates most windows users are likely to inevitably upgrade or move on to another os... but picking and choosing which OSX upgrades to purchase is just as arbitrary as choosing to not upgrade to vista.
Honestly how many people really bothered to buy win98 after having bought 95? i'd imagine many said for how little changed i'll wait a little longer.. some of the pour souls bought ME instead some got lost and got 2000; and others waited for XP
this just shows how many factors there are...
as an aside how does pirated software figure into original posts totals?
I'm not a windows fan; i've moved off several years ago and I'm probably going to move to a mac by years end; the point is they both have their costs and love to screw you for a buck. the mac store wanted 700 for a 2 gig memeory chip upgrade in a macbook pro... either way you're going to pay money somewhere down the line
no im not. Thanks for not reading, Im saying exactly the opposite. MOST WINDOWS USERS DONT BUY A BOXED COPY. they get one bundled with their system (and I'd venture a guess many more "recycle" the copy between every computer they own) Think about this for a minute, and maybe try to RTFC
this "study" attempts to gauge the popularity of the two os's based on boxed copy sales, which is flawed. Thats what I am pointing out.
since that is clearly too complex an example here is an easier one you might be able to understand: it would be like going back to '92 and gauging the popularity of Super Mario World as compared to Any other game based upon box sales... which ignores the fact that the game is bundled with the vast majority of systems sold.
that ibm will demonstrate social responsibility again and make license fees so high for this that no one bothers to license it and we dont lose the ability to skip over a commercial in a dvd.
i dont buy dvds in general (save for absolute favorites office space, three amigos, band of brothers and the matrix 10 dvd set.. ) , but if i did and was forced to watch a commercial everytime i played the thing I'd be rather annoyed.
Next thing you know theyll start interjecting dvds with commercial interruptions that you cant skip..
while this tells us what BOXED OS was bought; it doesnt tell us what OS is used... or bought unboxed.
How many times has anyone you know bought a boxed version of windows? for me thats 0. I have only ever gotten it with a brand new computer. How many times are windows upgrades even feasibly runnable on the machine running the predecessor? 9 times out of time the person who has a machine capable of this is a/. type who built it themself and will throw linux on it.
ok there are fps kiddies out there; but how many of them bother to buy a boxed windows? obv they sell but I feel like throughout my life i see a lot more people buying new osX versions where as the windows crowd says whatever...
think about it, since XP came out in 2002, whats the rush been? nothing. osX however has released multiple new versions... if you total that up together i wonder if that reaches the bloated cost of vista?
i dunno. but what i do know is that this is a useless statistic. we cant imply meaning to stats that they dont describe. its like saying there were more wii's sold this year than 360's... couldnt the fact that a lot of people bought them last year be a factor?
this study as presented in the article is a quality POS.
they fail to demonstrate significant control, any decent hypothesis, or results as to the findings. and while im sure they withheld some of this because its a brief article, some of they things they do say seem to be troubling.
Major problems? sample size; the first thing you learn in stat. methods is that if your sample size is inadequate, and misrepresents the population at large your results are not translatable to the world at large. They admit the population is tiny; and they also suggest that their method of experimentation is shaky at best.
mastery level: having an iPhone for a month doesn't necessarily constitute significant use or mastery. It will vary with peoples usage of the keyboard on it. Some people will type more on it in a day than many do in a week. this is challenging because I've had a cellphone for at least 6 years (granted never a fullkeyboard style one) and I've sent a total of maybe 3 text messages. The experience I have is mostly from entering peoples info into the phone; which of course i check carefully as i enter it.
The selection itself would likely present problems you would have to have several different controlled groups
- never used an iphone or a fullkeyed phone (I'll leave out the non full-key cellphones for this discussion) for extensive text messaging - moderate usage of just one (2 more groups) - moderate usage of prior to moderate iphone usage (1 more group)
even your control group (never used anything) will end up being fragmented to overcome ordering effects a portion will have to use the iphone first and then the alternative (testing them immediately when given and then retested after decided significant amount of usage has occurred) a portion will have to use the alternative first and then the iphone (same as above) and a third group who are just given the pretests for both
this ends up requiring A LOT of people. hooray for factorial experimentation and simultaneous between/within group fun.
as always there is a very large problem of "no Joe Average" for this kind of ui/human factors stuff forcing you to have to deal with the varied experience levels that people have.
bottom line is that I don't know that 1 month is as significant a legup as they make it out to be.
Because they are private corporations. They are a company, and they have employees. Students pay for the service they provide: education. You could argue that those involved with the research should get their name on the patent and have some of the patent rights... but saying it should be public domain is absolutely ABSURD. why should the public get it? FTR Northeastern is one of the nation's largest PRIVATE colleges.
to your second point; no and no. Most research is performed by grad students and faculty. A lot of the funding comes from independant contracts, corporate sponsorships, research grants, etc. I'm sure some student money may trickle down; but there are lots of builidings, and professors salaries, and sports to be paid for. not to mention the presidents salary.
Next you are going to tell me that because the students pay for x and x that they should have more control over administrative policy, etc... (note that I actually think this is a more reasonable request).
If you want to fight for this for public schools thats one thing; take it up with your state; but it wont ever happen. Why should Joe public benefit from my work or the schools work (without my / its consent)?
"I am failing to see a case where a University-funded discovery shouldn't be in the public domain, or at least any patents that come of them should be freely available for all to use." How about every single case? what gives you any right to be entitled to anything that is developed at if you didnt go there? (I'm not even going to bother to get into the case where you did and still shouldnt have any rights to it) Why in the world should they be freely availible to the general public use, and what standing do you possibly have to make that request? Aside from "it would be nice" and that whole advancement for everyone junk.
Why do you think research universities spend the effort and money they do on research and not on the students education? Because they make money to fund everything else and gain notoriety and prominence. (much to the dismay of students such as myself a couple years ago)
What you are saying is almost as bad as saying that anyone who holds stock in a company should have free usage of any and all patents the company has developed.
sounds like the real problem here is poor reviewing, and not that the patent itself really needs to be changed. More annoying i would imagine is that after you edit to get around this "stopping point" they finally will bring up the next one.. just a hunch
you are comparing apples to oranges. You should compare running Linux on a Mac to running osX server on a mac; not to a pc. We are talking abuot a software change here, not hardware. Hardware on mac is also a known, as they are all pretty much the same...
my larger question is how many people running rackmount servers even put video cards or X servers on them. Since your example mentioned rackmount servers i thought i would speak to that. But lets say that you did, why do you care what resolution the display is on that machine? It's a server, you can always log into it from a workstation to perform the maintenance right? I guess if you dont allow ssh or vnc/rdp for root you run into a problem, and I cant say I'm familiar with ms server at all.
Intel graphics chipsets have some known resolution problems even on laptops for widescreen resolutions and although you arent in a widescreen problem, you should have him check out i915resolution as you can use it to override video modes:-). I'm sure there are reasons for it but to me it seems counterintuitive to put or need such a high res display on a rackmount server... I'd assume stash it in a rack in a lab (or closet lol) and go connect to it from your desk via the network. I thought ubuntu server didn't even install X or kde or gnome by default.
One place I used to work used osX servers a lot becaused back then they were still Power based, and our middleware product was for an embedded realtime os running on you guessed it power chips (multiple per node, multi node per system of course), and it was handy to be able to actually run and debug locally on some machines. most devs werent going to switch to macs, but it made sense for some of the servers for this usage, and you might as well kill two birds with one stone and get the same Xserve's to use for actually being server servers i suppose.
I'll get more excited when i can run regular osX in a virtual machine. at that point ill slap together a mac / xserve system for personal use with physical partiosns setup as vms for linux/winxp/macosx so that no matter which I boot into (probably linux, possibly osx, probably not xp) i can access any of them as a VM and see the same hard drive and files:-)
Although in some form I agree with you I'm not sure how far the trolling goes.... besides how many Laptop hard drives have hundreds of gigs of data? I've never had one that was more than 120 gig, most sold and which I encounter are 80. Yes there are larger, but I know at my workplace the corporate issue thinkpads are all on the 80gig mark; the t42p's and the t60p's.
Why is this pertinent? These are the same laptops that many college students end up with. A large amount of them have deals with ibm and now lenovo, I know RPI did and still does, I still have my 2002 t30 (third hard drive, one factory dead in 2002, one manual replaced in 2006 post warranty acts as a gentoo MythPVR sitting ontop of my cable box), and my 2004 t42 (first 80g motor died within a year, made fulltime switch to linux on it in 2006, drive got corrupted in early 07 but is back up and mostly ok although after 4 replacements of the plastic palm area from cracking the latest bunch well after warranty its days may be numbered as well). Seems odd that my ancient although somewhat upgraded (256 extra ram to get up to 512, a 120gig, 300 gig and 400 gig hard drive replacing the 40 gig drive) dell '00 XPS 1ghz desktop is outliving both of them. Granted I stopped using it for FPS and started using it almost exclusively as a linux file server (that dual boots / physical vm's into windowsXP for use of my OmniIO/Delta66 digital recording interface [i.e. one of those drives is exclusively for the resulting midi, wav and project files]) but still seems sorta odd.
back to my main point, I'd also question whether you can buy 4 laptop hd's for the price of vista and I'm by all means for sticking it to MS. Desktop hd's are heading to the ramen price segment but laptop ones are still fairly costly. More importantly there is more to the cost than just swapping the drive out and putting a new one in.. we arent talking about some random data drive that is a brainless copy over. this is the primary hard drive for a laptop and 9/10 people (if not worse) don't have a connector to connect a laptop HD to a desktop or a second laptop and thereby copy one drives contents over to another. Its bad enough to replace the batteries on laptops as frequently as we do, but ahard drive as well? not such a good sign. If these were failing desktop drives it would be more surprising but almost less important; throw raid, cheap drives and a usb enclosure at it and problem solved.
I'll concede your main point but instead of your answer, i'd simply rescind it to +3 or so:-) lets save the flogging for whoever really is behind this
If that was the case than why is this article especially pertinent to ubuntu wouldnt it be pertinent to all? any chance a class action against the hard drive makers will come of this?
not really because you don't KNOW he did it.. that is the point of the legal system. If they find everything on his computer and arent smart enough to ask him to produce the purchased album for everything you are still wrong tho. Law works on provable facts, and beyond a shadow of a doubt. if they can't prove you did something then they cant prove it; which means they shouldnt have sued you, and you shouldnt be punished. Calling it a technicality is like saying Im not guilty of murder on a technicality, the technicality being that I didnt commit the murder.
Remember they dont have to prove that he used the internet. they just have to prove he engaged in illegal redistribution. the reason internet is central to this is that without that external way of knowing it occured they would have no more insight or reason to sue him than any random guy they were trying to catch with mix tapes or exchaning cds
its not a contract, you didnt sign it. time and time again shrink wrapped contracts like that have been thrown out and invalidated in court. If you wwatch a football or baseball game on tv, they tell you that all "written or verbal accounts of the game....." are property of the league and you need their permission to record it.. This is blatantly false, and oversteps fair use.
it hasnt been tested in court because it hasnt needed to be tested. In any event if they are going to change a policy they are going to have to notify you of the changes. You pay money for a service if they dont provide it they get sued.
Did you not just read how verizon wireless got sued for using the word "UNLIMITED" in a contract when they turned around a cut off users who exceeded a bandwidth and used more text messages and other things than they were magically allowed to by some invisible cap?
Whats more a problem here that you dont seem to register is that they arent simply cutting you off by a bandwidth usage. They are falsifying data and sending to it you, in the process misrepresenting themselves as someone else. Last time I checked that could either be a felony or violation of the DMCA oddly enough.
If you read it, than you should realize how much bullshit it is and how much of a waste it is. People every day sign waivers like this at ski resorts and amuseparks and such, and still sue them. Heck if forced licenses like this worked why wouldnt i have one on my door that says be entering my dwelling you forfeit any and all rights to sue me for injuries that occur on my premises.... why would people be allowed to (and win) sue after getting injured WHILE tresspassing.
"I must give them 24/7/365 access if they ask".... um no you don't. You can refuse access at any time that is inconvenient to you. What if you go on vacation, you are supposed to magically let them in or let them brake into your house. No. They can request access but like anyone else they don't get cart blanche access to your home. The police dont even have that and they are gov' affiliated.
"They're not required to actually provide me with any services during a billing period and I still need to pay." Again incorrect, you take them to court. They can't charge you for nothing at all. Like anything else you could force them to prove services were rendered and hold out payment until that was done.
What makes your claim of this funnier is how heavily these two service industries are regulated (cable based especially) by the gov't.
"they've got all the bases covered.. trust me" I am certain that they dont, and frankly if you haven't noticed I don't trust you, not at all. IANAL, and YANAL, but you dont seem to have a clue either. it sounds like you are exactly the brain dead kind of person they want, the kind that listens and believes every word that comes from their mouths.
In all seriousness, the contracts say that they have the right to change them at any time without notice... Do you really think that gives them the legal right to one day decide to change the billing right to 100x the current price while witholding service or that you are no longer allowed to allow non subscribers watch cable on your tv? Or even better that they now have the right to break into your home and beat you with a stick over the head while taking your money?
well if you go and do a legit bittorrent download, like say a linux distro you could join the class without a question i would think. IANAL but in this case it seems like they should have to pay out to anyone who uses their service since they are fraudulently not providing the service they are supposed to. it doesnt matter what you are downloading, its irrelevant to the case.
and there are much more than 5 users. Basically all linux distros are now hosted via torrents, and virtually everything VMware hosts for virtual appliances. Its a lot more than 5 users. That isnt even remotely the point however. They are violating a contract, invading your privacy and technically they are misrepresenting themselves willfully as well.
It would be one thing if they were at least only doing this to people who were the bandwidth pigs first, or that and were sending notices. but they are just doing it in blanket form.
and for you morons out there who still dont get it, two wrongs dont make a right. a protocol is a protocol, do you ban cdr drives because you can duplicate a cd with it? honestly from a non commercial usage standpoint what does anyone ever do with a standalone cd duplicator do?
a. You don't charge equipment fees? thats odd considering I have to pay 6-10 dollars a month for equipment; renting a cable box, id have to check with my parents but unless it recently changed we had to pay for a remote.. you could buy it but the next day a new box could be deployed that didnt support the remote so that was sort of moot. I really have no need to borrow a hard drive from you I'd be happy to put my own into the cable box in whatever form you need be it ide, scsi, or sata. Hard drives are cheap and I wouldnt mind being able to have a bigger capacity anyhow, especially since the only documented way to get stuff off is through recording to a vcr or capture card. While I understand your point about the DVR fee, my mind would tell me that people might use tivo for a multitude of reasons, maybe they dont want digital cable, if you dont have an hd tv or a digital surround system connected to the box what is "digital service" really giving you? To me that makes sense in the same way buying an aftermarket part for me car does. Sure the dealer gave me a radio but i wanted a different one with more features. But if I pay to have a 6 disc changer dealer installed I dont have to pay them every other month when i swap out the carosel of discs do I?
b. Define broken. For the longest time all I wanted to be able to do was record one show while watching another, and this was with a VCR. What were my options? Buy second cable box (absurd), pay you to install an ab switch or something like that, now I can do this with your dvr on digital cable. what did I end up doing then? i sent the cable from the wall direct to the vcr so that it could do its tuning which would allow me to record the non scrambled channels (which didnt include comedy central, cartoon network, or sci-fi) while I watched tv. the vcr antenna out then went to the cable box allowing my tv to watch whatever it wanted to. if i really wanted to record something on the scrambled channels or watch a non scrambled while recording scrambled I swapped the wiring around. but it was a pain.
In college I was trying to get into the whole PVR thing, turning my computer into a vcr for me.. Problem is I only had and felt like paying for one cable box and now everything was scrambled. I got lucky one summer and was in an area where they only scrambled the absolute premium stuff like hbo cinemax etc; which was fine by me, and I just used a splitter so i could feed multiple tuners on the machine. Now I'm back in the normal land and if I want to be able to get the same dvr capabilites as the cable box does I'd have to pay for multiple boxes.
It stand to reason that most of the people who would really care about the luxury of recording all this stuff are usually people who likely pay for some premium channel liked hbo or a sports package, and dont want to have to miss anything on that channel. The drawbacks about being able to record some channels simultaneously and not others is annoying and absurd.
My biggest complaint and barrier here is that a. every different cable provider (at least until recnetly incase its no longer allowed) did scrambling a little differently and had their own policies and methods on it. Some worked with cable ready tvs some didnt. To create an independant product you'd have to figure out and design it to work on every single one.. even if you just picked one to work on nothing was stopping the cable company from changing how they did it the next day. This was perennially a reason provided to stay with the cable companies remotes, cable modems and boxes: because we will upgrade it for free when we replace it and make the old one incompatible. Buy your own and you'd be SOL when it stopped working.
What would solve that problem? really simple in my eyes, design the cable box so that the descramble or decompression or whatever happens first, and then the output from there (which is also fed
that is entirely the problem, and frankly if you wouldnt sell me any box you provide your business is retarted.
the point is that we as consumers shuold have a choice and viable alternatives to paying the outlandish fees that "you" charge while still getting the service we provide.
the whole pay you 6+ bucks a month for the box thing is getting old. the box should either be free or we should be able to buy it from and others. There are no good devices because everytime one was created YOU found a way to make it not work.
first there was cable ready tvs... wait i want my money so lets scramble everything so that they have to have a box then there was the whole lets only scramble some channels thing which was slightly better.. then digital came out, and the whole one-way two-way problem was created. its a load of bull crap.
and there is conveniant lockout to prevent other boxes from recording multiple things simultaneously without seperate boxes.
frankly the cable companies are right up there with M$ in my book.. except they are allowed to post fraudulent adds all the time... "no hidden charges just XX a month" oh wait but if you want to to actually watch it youll need a cable box a remote and to pay some other silly fees even though we said no hidden fees.
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I am actually extremely familiar with the economics of video game consoles. I am well aware that they are sold at a loss; but I just picked a random article, i could have said a 400 dollar laptop computer.. or a whole lot of other things. That stated it wouldn't seem to be a strange analogy; cable shouldn't be making money on the boxes they should be making money on the cable access.
why do video games take a loss on consoles? several reasons: (the basis of which depends on how you define "a loss")
the amount of money spent developing the consoles is too much for them to reasonably get out of a consumer per console. They recoup this money from software devs through licensing. XBox was the most notorious of all for this as they took 10$ for every single game sold, a new high. ps2 took around 6 from what i recall from my college class that hit on this. That said they usually still have a magic number of sales by which they do recoup their costs. unless you are referring to actual cost to produced the hardware itself is greater than they sell for and they can never recover which I surmise finally happened with the xbox/ps2 generation.
technically you could say that audio cd's from bands are sold at a loss too... until you look at the cost amortized out for the number produced. There is always some magic number of copies they have to sell to break even from the costs of recording/advertising/producing/etc. according to another post iphones are "sold at a loss" since they put "150 million into the research"
if people dont buy the console; they cant and wont buy the software. Video game consoles have competition which is the difference. If you dont want a 600 dollar ps3 you can get a 400 dollar one, or 250 dollar wii (or fall back to your computer). Cable should follow the same model, and sell boxes at a loss, but there is a key difference. Cable knows you don't have a choice: 9 times out of 10 you have one provider in your area for cable. If you dont want OTA or satellite (or cant have satellite) you have no choice.. which frees them to try to collect as much as they want on the cable boxes. the other half is for fake advertising so they can say the price is cheaper than it is; if you are required to have a digital cable box from them and it costs 6.95 monthly for said box; give the box for free and increase the digital price by 6.95.. so instead of having your bill read "basic cable acces = 40; digital cable = 10, equipment = 6.95" it can say "basic cable access = 40, digital cable = 16.95" and now you can hide the cost the same way you hide the digital cost...
this all goes back to the rampant BS and fraud that cable industry is allowed to get away with. i saw a tv spot for TW the other day that asked a satellite guy who was in love with the ice fishing channel how much he pays. he responds "about 30 a month" TW responds that plans start at 20 a month (which is definately BS)... the funny part? on the last frame of the spot TW says "plans starting at 39.95 a month". does the BBB ever watch the ads anymore for crap like this?
(a little bit OT for this blurb but still valid as a good aside here):
complain all you want about similar stuff with cars and cellphones; but i've seen a spot for a $XX lease for a car + xx tax title and license etc and walked into a dealer (in Ma.) and actually gotten that deal. didn't get a "oh yes but the steering wheel costs extra" or "you have to pay through our credit service which surcharges you 6bucks a month". the funniest one in cars is that Toyota doesn't include floormats standard at all; which everyone buys anyways.
at another point, although I've never used the ondemand crap much, there is a difference between that and tivo/dvr. My parents for example started using ondemand to get movies because it got cheaper than blockbuster. they dont buy movie channels, and if you tivo a movie off "movie channels" they are edited for content and have commercials which you have to skip over.. sometimes you dont want to have to fa
no they shouldn't and they still shouldn't. people refuse to take personal responsibility for being stupid that is the problem. What you are suggesting is exactly the kind of complaint everyone makes at mmorpgs that refuse to let people sell their accounts and goods for $. I dont care who it protects all this does is restrict your freedoms. You should be able to do whatever you want with your money; just like with ebay if cooks are dumb enough to pay 100 L$ for a coupon for 1 L$ then that is their problem.
I understand the fraudulent atm thing; but it sounds like the real problem was that there werent any 'REAL' banks. That and the fact that people don't bother to check the things for certificates or anything like that.
you know of course what this also means? the next step will be the us govt taxing people on second life income even if it never leaves the game. I'm really not sure what I think of this one.. and are people going to circumvent it by not promising a return but alluding to one? also this seems to kill off iou's and tips and loans from anyone but banks which again I dont like.
im sure people will circumvent this one way or another; join my club for X dollars and if you leave in a year we will refund you your money and give you some extra for trying us out...
i compare this to real life; do you deposit your money into shady looking atm's that dont operate and appear unlike one from a bank? probably not. but if you're one of those people who cashes their checks at supermarkets and pays out the percentage I guess you wont have to learn better now about what you blindly do with your money.
neither; we pay them for cable tv. if they create a barrier such as a needed box to provide themselves with security they should have to shoulder the burden and provide the box for free. Do you have to pay the phone company for a special box to use their phone lines? do you have to pay the power company for special box? do you pay the water company for a special box? no you dont.
as long as you need the box to obtain all of the features that they provide and advertise as part of their offering the box should free. That they charge for the box and seperately for the remote is even more absurd.
I won't buy it because I have no guarantee that they wont change the boxes out the next day. And oh wait who decided that those boxes were 400? oh right the cable company gets to, because they have no competition and no one buys them. How is it that this stupid cable box is 400 when for that same amount you could buy a basic desktop computer? You could buy a PS3 for that price; and last I checked the PS3 was significantly more complicated to produce, and more powerful.. And they are often 6 a month, and then another dollar a month for the remote... and then another chunk for them to come out and give you the box, and then another box for everytv in your house.
This is only made more assanine by the extremely outrageous rates they charge for setup and installation of service. I moved into an apartment complex that was already wired for cable; all the had to do was flick a switch, hand me the cable box and cable modem. If i could have done it myself I would have; instead i have to wait till they can come out; and pay them about 150 dollars to do nothing which took about 45 minutes. Why is it that a "cable guy" who 9 times out of 10 hasn't even been to college is providing me with roughly an hours worth of work that is somehow "more expensive" than an hours worth of my work at my job; which I had to attain a top tier college degree for?
Its not just the box; its the box and the other crapload of fees they associate with it. Oh you want us to hook up the box? more $ please. oh you want a remote for it? well you can buy a universal which wont have every feature of our remote since we have some special buttons, or you can rent ours for yep more $.
Thanks to cable boxes the channel labelling features of tv's are useless. honestly having cable my tv remote is basically never used; the only thing i programmed my universal remote to use from it is power on / off, menu, up/down/left/right/enter for the settings, and input switch.
a cable card installer? whats the training for that? "this is the slot, you put the card here"?... why do you need someone to put a card in a slot for you? a friend just got an hdtv and a cable card for it; it has a slot on the front face. Worked like a charm; i was even able to watch the infamous cowboys/panthers and pats/giants games on the "NFL NETWORK" on the darn thing.
I dont think it proves a damn thing; because the cable companies have been going at great length not to comply with that theyve been asked to, and doing so as slowly as humanly possible. "It just goes to show that, yet again, attempting to regulate the free market just doesn't work" this is statement couldnt be more invalid. The cable companies dont exist in a free market. In a free market the cable company would provide one thing; the cable. Anyone could create a device to be used to connect to it; they dont allow that. in fact they formed a monopoly of sorts because the user has no choice, and there is no competition. what can you choose other than the one cable provider in your town, the non existent other cable provider? not renting or buying a box from them? renting or buying a box from someone else? and that isnt what makes a monopoly anyhow; its the practices for exclusion. "lets create a box and legally not allow anyone else to make them" "lets make it so that cable ready tv's cant be cable ready anymore" "lets offer only a crippled version to those who look to third party
theres a larger problem that you are missing; a. they should offer a NO os system and let you put on it what you will.
b. the largest problems they encounter from the linux world is the fact that they put system features that not just don't work under linux but break it.
If you offer linux on a product it should work on the product; that means the wireless cards should be supported by the Linux OS that Dell offers; and that dell should steer towards using components that are linux friendly..
its no different probably from a lot of the heat they will get in regards to vista/xp up and downgrades. You try to change and you can't find the drivers you need for the version because they only gave a CD for one version; and they don't provide a quality list of the named components in YOUR machine and which driver you should be getting.. i remember doing a search with my express tag back in the day and was offered a large amount of different video drivers for many different cards that even seemingly had the same name. sigh.
the problem seems to be more a tip toeing issue; if you say one word to them that indicates anything (software inclusive) is non-stock (which aside from music, data files, and emails is pretty much everything) they will likely try to say "we dont support that app" and they try to persuade you to think that it has anything to do with anything or that it alleviates them from supporting the stuff THEY put there. case in point: they advertise lots of room for expansion in the pci bays... except they wont support anything there; if are slapping in something simple like a regular sound card, or network card you are usually ok... but when you have a network card, a wireless card, and a sound card there... and you need to add a new card that cant share an IRQ you might run into problems becuase the merry go round game doesnt work; the slots (at least back in 2000-2002) werent hard coded to an irq and reserving didnt quite work; and random things get bounced around and leave some unused or will share an irq with your new device instead of with someother device you could care less about... this is problematic when you try to add something to say take advantage of the hard drive bays, or specialized sound card for digital audio or video capturing / activities... its funny because on an older machine with an older bios you actually could do some of these things... like turn off the LPT and com ports you waste irqs on becuase your printer mouse and keyboard are usb... sad that there are still only 16 irqs still, several never available to user at all. And this was all under WindowsME in the pre XP days; (me did better on this and the audio drivers needed than 98sr2... tho XP fixed a whole lot of it and it all worked properly and better than it ever had; the only irony being that in order to install the software and drivers for the hardware you had to copy the setup cd to a local folder so that you could have the machine lie to the executable and say that it wasnt XP because they decided to hardcode not letting it work normally on XP whcih didnt exist when it was made..
The other key problem with parent is that there are two different crowds of people saying this. The guy who says he will reinstall from scratch probably isn't the one calling with the stupid support issue; they are the ones who discover things like the directMedia/destroyer problem.
If they added some notes to the configurator like "this card or option is problematic or lacks open source drivers under linux" etc they might be minimally better off.
probably will be laughed out of the courtroom since you have to have a. consent to it on facebook, and provide the information to access your account. blockbuster isnt making the disclosure choide; they are allowing you to choose to have it disclosed.
if anything i dont see how this much different than netflix and bbuster having rss feeds for each persona nd their queue that dont require any authorization afaik
call me crazy but i dont see how this will do anything at all to them. one way or the other. especially since you could also do this through their own websites (netflix and bbuster) if you knew the email your friend used to register and they accepted an invite to share
you should know that Vista is not optimal for anyone right now. Why else would all the companies be reverting to selling XP again?
The fact of the matter is that this laptop isn't exactly geared for hardcore gaming no matter WHICH OS is on it.
For the record installing or not installing Linux isn't an answer to what computer I should buy; Linux as of my last count is still just an operating system that runs on surprise a computer. That said I still agree with your point that was behind it: i love linux; and yes there is some gaming on it; but until the situation gets better I keep an XP partition around for serious gaming.
Buying a Dell with Vista? come on Dell hasn't been a good choice since 2000 or so. Seeing as these are the kind of people who might actually need tech support i cant endorse a company that puts you on 2 hour wait to speak to some guy in India.
I dont get how you can say that everything they said is correct when they made some blatant errors.. There are more than 3 versions of vista out and there always have been. Also as a point of logic, how could you disagree with it if it was correct? You cant disagree with a fact; you can disagree with an opinion. His opinion about gaming is something that can be disagreed upon, both sides have some truth, although I tend to side with them on the gaming issue.
Suggesting that everyone who needs something powerful needs dual core, 1 gig of ram and Vista is a bit suspect. A 3 ghz single core can still hold its own weight. maybe not with vista but runs XP and linux just fine. mac osX ran just fine on single core until they switched over to intel.
while your point is valid it doesnt refute or support what the parent said in actuality; 9 out of 10 people who are the diamond in the rough kid who gets that amazing job out of high school are "nerds like us" who have been doing this stuff prior to this class, will be too busy playing around with the software on their own during class to pay attention, and probably took this class simply to get the credit for something they already are good at. Or they will like it and will end up spending a lot of time on it. Expecting some kid to walk out of this class as a 'webdesign god' with a hefty portfolio is very naive. Its like expecting a kid to leave the chemsitry class and invent a new substance tomorrow. do the woodshop kids drop out and become carpenters tomorrow?
..."
:-)
its a high school class; if they are that INSPIRED by this then they will go on to do a lot more of it on their own to develop said 'kick ass' portfolio. Which tool they use to produce it becomes irrelevant at some point. but it might be better to encourage them to use one they can legally afford to get and use. as opposed to enticing them with tools they need but cant afford, and then yelling at them when they go and take them anyways cough cough torrents cough cough
the problem with too many high school tech classes is they dont teach concepts or intelligence; they teach memorization and stupidity. They do this by teaching WORD instead of word processing. EXCEL instead of spreadsheets. ACCESS instead of databases (how access counts as a DB is beyond me having played with oracle/sql/mysql in college, but i guess a good start for lesser mortals and myself)
one of the great learning occasions for me was that despite using pc's for pretty much everything else (at home for pleasure and schoolwork) the technology class that taught all of these things was taught on macs using clarisworks. This forced most me and most others to focus on the concepts and not the idiosyncracies; because we didnt have as much of a stake in those. We focused on understanding functionality more than shortcuts. That said most of the shortcuts we focused on were globally useful ones; things like using control/shift/alt while clicking to select various things. The concept of cut copy and paste, what tools exist and should be used. etc...
Compare this to a Computer Science course in both high school and first year college where a chunk is spent just on "which button and icon to click on to create the right project in this years Visual Studio version" (because they seem to altenate back and forth between two of them) rather than the general habits of how to use a debugger and what you generally are trying to do. even something as simple and intelligent as using a Binary Search (referring to where you set the break points) to narrow it down when you have no idea whats wrong (as is the case often for beginners)
throw the same college students in front of gdb and theyd be hopelessly lost for hours becuase they didnt learn why the clicked what, they just know "thats the button i'm supposed to click so i just click it cuz
While applicable directly its more pertinent to a non immediate application which I thing is what causes people to actually understand abstractly and conceptually what they were trying to learn... good thing i dont have to go write a paper on this write now
maybe instead of worrying about "what to waste your money on this girl for the holidays" you could get her a freaking book and teach her to read. I'd be willing to bet that would be a far better investment of your money and payoff into her future.
honestly if she can't read how is she supposed to figure out how to play all the games? I'll never understand people who spoil the kids so blatantly on such garbage. I love video games don't get me wrong; but I wasn't handed them, and I certainly didn't get them before I could read. Whats funnier is handing this moderately expensive handhold console to a 6 yearold. Maybe a better idea for a pre-reader would be to get a home console?
Sorry i just find it hilarious and disgusting the amount of kids 10 and under I encounter with cell phones (often fancier than mine and loaded with games), video ipods, psp's and nintendo ds's. Do people really have nothing better to waste their money on? Honestly put some in the bank or in the kids college fund and let it grow. Maybe its one less shiny toy today; but it will likely pay of in the future.
exactly. thanks for nailing it on the button.
the parent to your post seems to again gloss over the "bundled" copies with his new hardware as well.
All I was expressing was a curiosity; I'm aware everyone doesnt upgrade everytime, but lots of people (and companies) do.
i'd concede that with the far more infrequent windows updates most windows users are likely to inevitably upgrade or move on to another os... but picking and choosing which OSX upgrades to purchase is just as arbitrary as choosing to not upgrade to vista.
Honestly how many people really bothered to buy win98 after having bought 95? i'd imagine many said for how little changed i'll wait a little longer.. some of the pour souls bought ME instead some got lost and got 2000; and others waited for XP
this just shows how many factors there are...
as an aside how does pirated software figure into original posts totals?
I'm not a windows fan; i've moved off several years ago and I'm probably going to move to a mac by years end; the point is they both have their costs and love to screw you for a buck. the mac store wanted 700 for a 2 gig memeory chip upgrade in a macbook pro... either way you're going to pay money somewhere down the line
no im not. Thanks for not reading, Im saying exactly the opposite. MOST WINDOWS USERS DONT BUY A BOXED COPY. they get one bundled with their system (and I'd venture a guess many more "recycle" the copy between every computer they own)
Think about this for a minute, and maybe try to RTFC
this "study" attempts to gauge the popularity of the two os's based on boxed copy sales, which is flawed. Thats what I am pointing out.
since that is clearly too complex an example here is an easier one you might be able to understand: it would be like going back to '92 and gauging the popularity of Super Mario World as compared to Any other game based upon box sales... which ignores the fact that the game is bundled with the vast majority of systems sold.
that ibm will demonstrate social responsibility again and make license fees so high for this that no one bothers to license it and we dont lose the ability to skip over a commercial in a dvd.
i dont buy dvds in general (save for absolute favorites office space, three amigos, band of brothers and the matrix 10 dvd set.. ) , but if i did and was forced to watch a commercial everytime i played the thing I'd be rather annoyed.
Next thing you know theyll start interjecting dvds with commercial interruptions that you cant skip..
while this tells us what BOXED OS was bought; it doesnt tell us what OS is used... or bought unboxed.
/. type who built it themself and will throw linux on it.
How many times has anyone you know bought a boxed version of windows? for me thats 0. I have only ever gotten it with a brand new computer. How many times are windows upgrades even feasibly runnable on the machine running the predecessor? 9 times out of time the person who has a machine capable of this is a
ok there are fps kiddies out there; but how many of them bother to buy a boxed windows? obv they sell but I feel like throughout my life i see a lot more people buying new osX versions where as the windows crowd says whatever...
think about it, since XP came out in 2002, whats the rush been? nothing.
osX however has released multiple new versions... if you total that up together i wonder if that reaches the bloated cost of vista?
i dunno. but what i do know is that this is a useless statistic. we cant imply meaning to stats that they dont describe.
its like saying there were more wii's sold this year than 360's... couldnt the fact that a lot of people bought them last year be a factor?
this study as presented in the article is a quality POS.
they fail to demonstrate significant control, any decent hypothesis, or results as to the findings. and while im sure they withheld some of this because its a brief article, some of they things they do say seem to be troubling.
Major problems?
sample size; the first thing you learn in stat. methods is that if your sample size is inadequate, and misrepresents the population at large your results are not translatable to the world at large. They admit the population is tiny; and they also suggest that their method of experimentation is shaky at best.
mastery level: having an iPhone for a month doesn't necessarily constitute significant use or mastery. It will vary with peoples usage of the keyboard on it. Some people will type more on it in a day than many do in a week. this is challenging because I've had a cellphone for at least 6 years (granted never a fullkeyboard style one) and I've sent a total of maybe 3 text messages. The experience I have is mostly from entering peoples info into the phone; which of course i check carefully as i enter it.
The selection itself would likely present problems
you would have to have several different controlled groups
- never used an iphone or a fullkeyed phone (I'll leave out the non full-key cellphones for this discussion) for extensive text messaging
- moderate usage of just one (2 more groups)
- moderate usage of prior to moderate iphone usage (1 more group)
even your control group (never used anything) will end up being fragmented to overcome ordering effects
a portion will have to use the iphone first and then the alternative (testing them immediately when given and then retested after decided significant amount of usage has occurred)
a portion will have to use the alternative first and then the iphone (same as above)
and a third group who are just given the pretests for both
this ends up requiring A LOT of people. hooray for factorial experimentation and simultaneous between/within group fun.
as always there is a very large problem of "no Joe Average" for this kind of ui/human factors stuff forcing you to have to deal with the varied experience levels that people have.
bottom line is that I don't know that 1 month is as significant a legup as they make it out to be.
Because they are private corporations. They are a company, and they have employees. Students pay for the service they provide: education. You could argue that those involved with the research should get their name on the patent and have some of the patent rights... but saying it should be public domain is absolutely ABSURD. why should the public get it? FTR Northeastern is one of the nation's largest PRIVATE colleges.
to your second point; no and no. Most research is performed by grad students and faculty. A lot of the funding comes from independant contracts, corporate sponsorships, research grants, etc. I'm sure some student money may trickle down; but there are lots of builidings, and professors salaries, and sports to be paid for. not to mention the presidents salary.
Next you are going to tell me that because the students pay for x and x that they should have more control over administrative policy, etc... (note that I actually think this is a more reasonable request).
If you want to fight for this for public schools thats one thing; take it up with your state; but it wont ever happen. Why should Joe public benefit from my work or the schools work (without my / its consent)?
"I am failing to see a case where a University-funded discovery shouldn't be in the public domain, or at least any patents that come of them should be freely available for all to use."
How about every single case? what gives you any right to be entitled to anything that is developed at if you didnt go there? (I'm not even going to bother to get into the case where you did and still shouldnt have any rights to it) Why in the world should they be freely availible to the general public use, and what standing do you possibly have to make that request? Aside from "it would be nice" and that whole advancement for everyone junk.
Why do you think research universities spend the effort and money they do on research and not on the students education? Because they make money to fund everything else and gain notoriety and prominence. (much to the dismay of students such as myself a couple years ago)
What you are saying is almost as bad as saying that anyone who holds stock in a company should have free usage of any and all patents the company has developed.
sounds like the real problem here is poor reviewing, and not that the patent itself really needs to be changed. More annoying i would imagine is that after you edit to get around this "stopping point" they finally will bring up the next one.. just a hunch
you are comparing apples to oranges. You should compare running Linux on a Mac to running osX server on a mac; not to a pc. We are talking abuot a software change here, not hardware. Hardware on mac is also a known, as they are all pretty much the same...
:-). I'm sure there are reasons for it but to me it seems counterintuitive to put or need such a high res display on a rackmount server... I'd assume stash it in a rack in a lab (or closet lol) and go connect to it from your desk via the network. I thought ubuntu server didn't even install X or kde or gnome by default.
:-)
my larger question is how many people running rackmount servers even put video cards or X servers on them. Since your example mentioned rackmount servers i thought i would speak to that. But lets say that you did, why do you care what resolution the display is on that machine? It's a server, you can always log into it from a workstation to perform the maintenance right? I guess if you dont allow ssh or vnc/rdp for root you run into a problem, and I cant say I'm familiar with ms server at all.
Intel graphics chipsets have some known resolution problems even on laptops for widescreen resolutions and although you arent in a widescreen problem, you should have him check out i915resolution as you can use it to override video modes
One place I used to work used osX servers a lot becaused back then they were still Power based, and our middleware product was for an embedded realtime os running on you guessed it power chips (multiple per node, multi node per system of course), and it was handy to be able to actually run and debug locally on some machines. most devs werent going to switch to macs, but it made sense for some of the servers for this usage, and you might as well kill two birds with one stone and get the same Xserve's to use for actually being server servers i suppose.
I'll get more excited when i can run regular osX in a virtual machine. at that point ill slap together a mac / xserve system for personal use with physical partiosns setup as vms for linux/winxp/macosx so that no matter which I boot into (probably linux, possibly osx, probably not xp) i can access any of them as a VM and see the same hard drive and files
Although in some form I agree with you I'm not sure how far the trolling goes.... besides how many Laptop hard drives have hundreds of gigs of data? I've never had one that was more than 120 gig, most sold and which I encounter are 80. Yes there are larger, but I know at my workplace the corporate issue thinkpads are all on the 80gig mark; the t42p's and the t60p's.
:-)
Why is this pertinent? These are the same laptops that many college students end up with. A large amount of them have deals with ibm and now lenovo, I know RPI did and still does, I still have my 2002 t30 (third hard drive, one factory dead in 2002, one manual replaced in 2006 post warranty acts as a gentoo MythPVR sitting ontop of my cable box), and my 2004 t42 (first 80g motor died within a year, made fulltime switch to linux on it in 2006, drive got corrupted in early 07 but is back up and mostly ok although after 4 replacements of the plastic palm area from cracking the latest bunch well after warranty its days may be numbered as well). Seems odd that my ancient although somewhat upgraded (256 extra ram to get up to 512, a 120gig, 300 gig and 400 gig hard drive replacing the 40 gig drive) dell '00 XPS 1ghz desktop is outliving both of them. Granted I stopped using it for FPS and started using it almost exclusively as a linux file server (that dual boots / physical vm's into windowsXP for use of my OmniIO/Delta66 digital recording interface [i.e. one of those drives is exclusively for the resulting midi, wav and project files]) but still seems sorta odd.
back to my main point, I'd also question whether you can buy 4 laptop hd's for the price of vista and I'm by all means for sticking it to MS. Desktop hd's are heading to the ramen price segment but laptop ones are still fairly costly. More importantly there is more to the cost than just swapping the drive out and putting a new one in.. we arent talking about some random data drive that is a brainless copy over. this is the primary hard drive for a laptop and 9/10 people (if not worse) don't have a connector to connect a laptop HD to a desktop or a second laptop and thereby copy one drives contents over to another. Its bad enough to replace the batteries on laptops as frequently as we do, but ahard drive as well? not such a good sign. If these were failing desktop drives it would be more surprising but almost less important; throw raid, cheap drives and a usb enclosure at it and problem solved.
I'll concede your main point but instead of your answer, i'd simply rescind it to +3 or so
lets save the flogging for whoever really is behind this
If that was the case than why is this article especially pertinent to ubuntu wouldnt it be pertinent to all? any chance a class action against the hard drive makers will come of this?
not really because you don't KNOW he did it.. that is the point of the legal system. If they find everything on his computer and arent smart enough to ask him to produce the purchased album for everything you are still wrong tho. Law works on provable facts, and beyond a shadow of a doubt. if they can't prove you did something then they cant prove it; which means they shouldnt have sued you, and you shouldnt be punished. Calling it a technicality is like saying Im not guilty of murder on a technicality, the technicality being that I didnt commit the murder.
Remember they dont have to prove that he used the internet. they just have to prove he engaged in illegal redistribution.
the reason internet is central to this is that without that external way of knowing it occured they would have no more insight or reason to sue him than any random guy they were trying to catch with mix tapes or exchaning cds
a congressmen who actually knows something about technology and says something intelligents:
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/25/164247&from=rss
its not a contract, you didnt sign it. time and time again shrink wrapped contracts like that have been thrown out and invalidated in court. If you wwatch a football or baseball game on tv, they tell you that all "written or verbal accounts of the game ....." are property of the league and you need their permission to record it.. This is blatantly false, and oversteps fair use.
.... um no you don't. You can refuse access at any time that is inconvenient to you. What if you go on vacation, you are supposed to magically let them in or let them brake into your house. No. They can request access but like anyone else they don't get cart blanche access to your home. The police dont even have that and they are gov' affiliated.
it hasnt been tested in court because it hasnt needed to be tested. In any event if they are going to change a policy they are going to have to notify you of the changes. You pay money for a service if they dont provide it they get sued.
Did you not just read how verizon wireless got sued for using the word "UNLIMITED" in a contract when they turned around a cut off users who exceeded a bandwidth and used more text messages and other things than they were magically allowed to by some invisible cap?
Whats more a problem here that you dont seem to register is that they arent simply cutting you off by a bandwidth usage. They are falsifying data and sending to it you, in the process misrepresenting themselves as someone else. Last time I checked that could either be a felony or violation of the DMCA oddly enough.
If you read it, than you should realize how much bullshit it is and how much of a waste it is. People every day sign waivers like this at ski resorts and amuseparks and such, and still sue them. Heck if forced licenses like this worked why wouldnt i have one on my door that says be entering my dwelling you forfeit any and all rights to sue me for injuries that occur on my premises.... why would people be allowed to (and win) sue after getting injured WHILE tresspassing.
"I must give them 24/7/365 access if they ask"
"They're not required to actually provide me with any services during a billing period and I still need to pay." Again incorrect, you take them to court. They can't charge you for nothing at all. Like anything else you could force them to prove services were rendered and hold out payment until that was done.
What makes your claim of this funnier is how heavily these two service industries are regulated (cable based especially) by the gov't.
"they've got all the bases covered.. trust me"
I am certain that they dont, and frankly if you haven't noticed I don't trust you, not at all. IANAL, and YANAL, but you dont seem to have a clue either.
it sounds like you are exactly the brain dead kind of person they want, the kind that listens and believes every word that comes from their mouths.
In all seriousness, the contracts say that they have the right to change them at any time without notice... Do you really think that gives them the legal right to one day decide to change the billing right to 100x the current price while witholding service or that you are no longer allowed to allow non subscribers watch cable on your tv? Or even better that they now have the right to break into your home and beat you with a stick over the head while taking your money?
I'm thinking no
well if you go and do a legit bittorrent download, like say a linux distro you could join the class without a question i would think. IANAL but in this case it seems like they should have to pay out to anyone who uses their service since they are fraudulently not providing the service they are supposed to. it doesnt matter what you are downloading, its irrelevant to the case.
and there are much more than 5 users. Basically all linux distros are now hosted via torrents, and virtually everything VMware hosts for virtual appliances. Its a lot more than 5 users. That isnt even remotely the point however. They are violating a contract, invading your privacy and technically they are misrepresenting themselves willfully as well.
It would be one thing if they were at least only doing this to people who were the bandwidth pigs first, or that and were sending notices. but they are just doing it in blanket form.
and for you morons out there who still dont get it, two wrongs dont make a right. a protocol is a protocol, do you ban cdr drives because you can duplicate a cd with it? honestly from a non commercial usage standpoint what does anyone ever do with a standalone cd duplicator do?
I liked some of your points and wanted to respond
a. You don't charge equipment fees?
thats odd considering I have to pay 6-10 dollars a month for equipment; renting a cable box, id have to check with my parents but unless it recently changed we had to pay for a remote.. you could buy it but the next day a new box could be deployed that didnt support the remote so that was sort of moot. I really have no need to borrow a hard drive from you I'd be happy to put my own into the cable box in whatever form you need be it ide, scsi, or sata. Hard drives are cheap and I wouldnt mind being able to have a bigger capacity anyhow, especially since the only documented way to get stuff off is through recording to a vcr or capture card. While I understand your point about the DVR fee, my mind would tell me that people might use tivo for a multitude of reasons, maybe they dont want digital cable, if you dont have an hd tv or a digital surround system connected to the box what is "digital service" really giving you? To me that makes sense in the same way buying an aftermarket part for me car does. Sure the dealer gave me a radio but i wanted a different one with more features. But if I pay to have a 6 disc changer dealer installed I dont have to pay them every other month when i swap out the carosel of discs do I?
b. Define broken. For the longest time all I wanted to be able to do was record one show while watching another, and this was with a VCR. What were my options? Buy second cable box (absurd), pay you to install an ab switch or something like that, now I can do this with your dvr on digital cable. what did I end up doing then? i sent the cable from the wall direct to the vcr so that it could do its tuning which would allow me to record the non scrambled channels (which didnt include comedy central, cartoon network, or sci-fi) while I watched tv. the vcr antenna out then went to the cable box allowing my tv to watch whatever it wanted to. if i really wanted to record something on the scrambled channels or watch a non scrambled while recording scrambled I swapped the wiring around. but it was a pain.
In college I was trying to get into the whole PVR thing, turning my computer into a vcr for me.. Problem is I only had and felt like paying for one cable box and now everything was scrambled. I got lucky one summer and was in an area where they only scrambled the absolute premium stuff like hbo cinemax etc; which was fine by me, and I just used a splitter so i could feed multiple tuners on the machine.
Now I'm back in the normal land and if I want to be able to get the same dvr capabilites as the cable box does I'd have to pay for multiple boxes.
It stand to reason that most of the people who would really care about the luxury of recording all this stuff are usually people who likely pay for some premium channel liked hbo or a sports package, and dont want to have to miss anything on that channel. The drawbacks about being able to record some channels simultaneously and not others is annoying and absurd.
My biggest complaint and barrier here is that a. every different cable provider (at least until recnetly incase its no longer allowed) did scrambling a little differently and had their own policies and methods on it. Some worked with cable ready tvs some didnt. To create an independant product you'd have to figure out and design it to work on every single one.. even if you just picked one to work on nothing was stopping the cable company from changing how they did it the next day. This was perennially a reason provided to stay with the cable companies remotes, cable modems and boxes: because we will upgrade it for free when we replace it and make the old one incompatible. Buy your own and you'd be SOL when it stopped working.
What would solve that problem? really simple in my eyes, design the cable box so that the descramble or decompression or whatever happens first, and then the output from there (which is also fed
"we'll sell you any box we provide"
that is entirely the problem, and frankly if you wouldnt sell me any box you provide your business is retarted.
the point is that we as consumers shuold have a choice and viable alternatives to paying the outlandish fees that "you" charge while still getting the service we provide.
the whole pay you 6+ bucks a month for the box thing is getting old. the box should either be free or we should be able to buy it from and others. There are no good devices because everytime one was created YOU found a way to make it not work.
first there was cable ready tvs... wait i want my money so lets scramble everything so that they have to have a box
then there was the whole lets only scramble some channels thing which was slightly better..
then digital came out, and the whole one-way two-way problem was created.
its a load of bull crap.
and there is conveniant lockout to prevent other boxes from recording multiple things simultaneously without seperate boxes.
frankly the cable companies are right up there with M$ in my book.. except they are allowed to post fraudulent adds all the time... "no hidden charges just XX a month" oh wait but if you want to to actually watch it youll need a cable box a remote and to pay some other silly fees even though we said no hidden fees.
LOL wow that was the best answer ever someone please mod that up