The only reason for buying an XBOX 360 I can think of is when they include a year's worth of crack or meth. You know that two thirds of those consoles die within a year or two. You know that after three years, the thing is out of warranty and you're out of luck. You know that it's damn loud. You know there's a few consoles out there that last much longer, make less noise, cost less money and don't require a serverfarm-sized air condition to not overheat. And you know there's a tremendous array of laptop and desktop computers that can run PC versions of most console games and much much more, including every piece of USB equipment ever made in the last decade.
Now, what's the kicker on the 360 to throw all that aside?
You paid a large sum for the 360, voided your warranty only hoping it's going to help but being sure that if it dies, you are out on 300 bucks or more?
Can anyone tell me what exactly makes these games for the 360 so extremely appealing? Are they as addictive as it seems, on par with the most addictive MMORPGs? Is it worse than weed or what?
If you have a notebook, then well, effectively your whole PC dies. But I can buy a new one from a hundred different manufacturers or even Virtual PC for Mac, but I can't tell first hand if that thing is any good.
A hundred different manufacturers with different design philosophies and quality assurance levels. From no-name bottom-of-the-drawer-overheat-in-Siberian-winter to waterproof Toughbooks and throw-around-enabled MgAl-roll-caged Thinkpads and similar models.
Price difference is going to be an order of magnitude, but if you have cash, you can select between cheap laptops running decent games and bullet-proof laptops running decent games. No amount of cash can buy a RROD-proof XBOX 360 and 65% of them will cost you time and frustration. Thanks, but I'll pass on that:)
Well, you do have an ebay account, don't you? Or a flea market somewhere near?
What's holding you back from cutting your losses and dump all those games you played through half a dozen times.
It's not going to make you rich, but at least you have some money and peace of mind or the chance to buy a different console with fresh games. Console games have much higher resale values than PC games, you're not losing an arm and leg doing that. Unless you're one of the last to sell his 360, that is.
I had a laptop from Acer that failed after 2 years. Two Acer laptops of friends have failed in the same timeframe. Nobody lost more than a couple of bytes due to regular backups and emergency data extraction. Still, I wouldn't even buy as much as a USB cable from Acer ever again. I think, life is too short to worry about flaky equipment, emergency backups, mail-in repairs, waiting for the UPS or Fedex guy or forum research about the reason for the damn thing to fail again. If you are willing to buy a single game for a console that can croak on you at any given moment, I think you did got suckered:)
No, I ask Joe Sixpack about the government upholding binding contracts between any businesses or private persons or punishing those who constantly violate the rules.
A company that sells Internet access and made a contract with Joe Sixpack damn well needs to enable him to access the Internet, not "The Web", not "authorized websites run by trusted partners" but the thing they promised in ads and contracts.
That is no regulation but fraud prevention. And IF they have it in long legalese on page 35 of their 60-page "acceptable use terms agreed upon after reading the first letter", it's still fraud, because a reasonable person, a group of peers if you will, probably thinks that, too.
And I seriously doubt Joe Sixpack will make a liberal argument for the right to scam. Honest contracts for trivial services don't have 30 pages in arial-condensed 4pt and honest contracts don't include clauses that make the other contract partner puke or clench their fists. As I don't drink beer, I can only guess what Joe Sixpack thinks about it, but I have the impression that honesty, truth and fair-pay-fair-service are pretty high on his list of priorities.
I would dare to guess that about 49 in hundred people have a lower than average skill in any given game, while another 49 percent has a higher than average skill.
That doesn't tell us anything about motivation and fun, as millions of low-skilled people playing football and soccer, quake and counter-strike can attest.
When the game mechanics are manipulated to alleviate "skill" with "time invested" it's either because of the need to collect more monthly fees or out of a kindergarten worldview, where "everyone wins a prize in any competition to not be sad".
A highly talented, highly skilled player should always be able to beat the low skilled no matter how many hours those mouse potatoes have been dabbling away. BTW, a well-made game that rewards time invested much more than skill or talent possessed will always have a huge addictive potential.
And they just feel weird and reek of grinding and jobless dropouts.
That's the usual difference between skill vs. level as the character base. Skill based means YOUR skill, level based mean YOUR freetime. Both concepts need adjustments or alternatives so the "disadvantaged" (low skillers or low freetimers) don't get mauled up too much.
If I had anything to say, I would offload all low-skilled, high-freetime gamers to WoW and not deal with any of them. Game mechanics to protect those mouse-potatoes are only needed in a politically-correct "everyone-gets-a-prize" kindergarten environment which I absolutely detest. A game can be fun without having skill, but an ultra-hard to find "Death Maul +15" to reward months of mindless grinding is totally unwarranted IMHO.
People with high skill should be rewarded, no matter if they've invested much or few of their freetime. That would be the most realistic aspect of a realistic-looking game and people get an incentive to either develop skills or look elsewhere. That almost eliminates griefers, as no one without skill should be able to successfully troll the whole pack and people with skills and troll-attitude are rare enough and can't be reasonably distinguished from other high-skillers.
They are dismantling our society, in case you didn't notice. Honest police work is punished when directed at lower and lowest-class OR upper and top-class people while nickel-and-diming of middle class is encouraged.
While the definition of "firearm" is pretty straightforward to include a deadly weapon that can kill over a distance of more than a kilometer, I seriously doubt that you, me or anyone else could draw a solid, non-disputable boundary around "social networks".
Is a hotmail account serving social functions? I think so. Is it connected to a network of some sort? Well, yes. Is it a "social network"?
What about a Slashdot account? What about Adult-Friend-Finder and its cousins? What about platforms like World of Warcraft?
What of that is a "social network" and why do we treat them differently than a physical, brick-and-mortar tennis club? Or a mobile phone? There are SMS dating services for them as well.
Do we ban sex offenders from there, too? Do we cut off Internet access for sex offenders?
The way I see it, sex offenders are the lowest hanging target for politicians to present themselves to be "tough-on-crime". Nobody can say anything good about sex offenders so we can tax, imprison and legalize them to hell - can we?
No matter if they're on the sex offender list for petty "crimes" they did in college or heavy violent rape, they should do their time in prison, locked up for as long as the judge ordered and then they're free humans again.
Cases with Capital Punishment don't need to be discussed here, but other than that the sentence should fit the crime and could carry several decades of imprisonment in extreme cases. After that, they're either still dangerous - and we could as well throw away the key - or they're free humans again.
Either we regard them as humans or we don't. We can do either, but it tells a lot about us "innocents" as well.
"If you a part of a criminal gang and the police obtains incriminating documents, telling the rest of your gang will enable them to destroy their own compromised data before the cops arrive. That is the logic behind this law."
And then:
"The alternative is to lock up everybody where incriminating documents have been found until the case is over, so they cannot communicate the news. That is the logic behind this idea, which would mean no calls to a lawyer therefore being declared unconstitutional for decades."
One suspected criminal is arrested and the police has to catch all other pieces of evidence before the rest of the gang destroys them. Nobody would declare that law is unable to keep up with that and nobody would ever dare to abolish due process, in dubio pro reo and all that which make the primary and most important differences between Law Enforcement under the Rule of Law and the Mafia themselves.
Simply because documents are electronic and not paper should not change one iota of due process. Criminals have been able to destroy evidence since the dawn of mankind and definetly since the dawn of Western democracies, when we decided to rather let some of the guilty be unpunished than to punish any single innocent.
Forcing suspects to incriminate themselves is organized thuggery, not law enforcement.
Digital crimes are hard to prove as they were and easy enough to incriminate the innocent, with USB sticks of only a few grams and millimeters capable of holding hundreds of thousands of the most grotesque and heineous pictures known to man - and no humanly way for the defendant to prove they're not his/her own. -
Now imagine - a tiny USB stick found in your jacket after arrest. - a 4gig blob of/dev/random but an extension.gpg on it. - you facing 2 years of jail for not revealing a password neither you nor God ever knew because neither you nor Bruce Schneier can prove it is random and NOT encrypted data.
or even without intervention of a malicious police officer who framed you because he's after your wife
- you are the suspect of some crime, for whatever reasons, but you are innocent. - police search and seize your property, lawfully and with a legal warrant. - police finds a nondescript CD-R, hidden deep in your closet that contains data that looks suspicious AND encrypted - it really IS encrypted data which you yourself encrypted. It is raunchy, but harmless (read: legal) stuff from college times. - you produced this material several years ago, while in college in Alpha Beta Gamma frat and wanted to never ever have your roommates watch it. - you kept the CD for sentimental reasons and summarily forgot the password and the fact that it ever existed. It was just sitting in the bottom drawer and went along the other stuff when you moved. - you really forgot the password, in fact, you didn't remember that you even had the CD at all
- when the district attorney presents this CD as exhibit XY, you remember what it was and become nervous because your wife and kids are in the courtroom. You still don't remember the password as it was really long. - the judge noticed you became nervous and will now never believe any story you tell unless you present the password as proof. - result: you are innocent, but you are probably facing a 2 year non-commutable sentence for not revealing the password
Now you have to write limericks on bathroom stalls again. The only difference is the size and origin of your audience, but that may depend on the bathroom.
If you could make an easy living simply trading stock, everyone would do it. Really, the stock market would be full of people trying to make a quick buck out of nothing. And half of them go broke while the other thrives. The stock market is at worst a lottery or pyramid scheme, but it doesn't bankrupt poor hard working joes if they're working for honest and truthful companies. Or companies that are too small to survive on the publc trade floor.
But other than that, do you think anyone can tell the "real" value from the "perceived" value of anything as comples as a publicly traded enterprise? If the real and perceived values differed, who would NOT cash in on the margin?
The UK was so big in 1910, that the sun never set in the empire. In the last years, the UK politics seem so dim that many people ask themselves if the sun now even glimpses on the remaining isles.
I for one mark all these stories with a "crazykingdom" tag. Not because of the Brits, but because of their politics and their leaders. They hit rock bottom a decade ago but kept on digging. Really, a megalomaniac ISP disconnecting suspected filesharers at the first hint of trouble, is among the least of Britains problems. It's just a symptom of the entire ruling caste, with iron hand to the Britons on one side, with ever forgiving grace to all other sides.
I'm not a Brit, but I feel so sorry for you but I'm thankful that you will serve as a warning example to the rest of The "Free" West, where everyone is free to pay taxes or milk social security, but shut the hell up on any other issues.
100 terrorists can carry out the same amount of damage as 1,000, 100,000 or 1 million. And because we never get the last 0.1%, we should give up and stop trying. AT ALL.
Talk about a binary choice fallacy...
Well, you are right, hardware is a fast moving target and every piece of equipment has its flaws.
Which brings us to the next part of the equation: when software is accepted to be unreliable, and hardware is only software made with wires and/or silicon, we also get unreliable hardware.
The more flaws we accept, the more flaws we get, because making flawless computing costs money and the last 0.2 of perfection cost as much as 0.8 of the final product. But nowhere else are people willing to accept mediocre products or those that don't work at all from the beginning.
Of course hardware is a moving target, but so is the road, the environment cars navigate routinely without losing their engine. Concrete is different everywhere, but my drill still manages to make a hole in it, everytime.
My software, on the other hand, sometimes doesn't manage to boot up - at all - on my work notebook where nothing really changes except the weather. The hardware doesn't change and is tested to work ok. The software is the same every day of the week and with no admin access, I sure don't change anything. Yet 0.05 of all startups produce a black screen, because some of its tools believes to have detected an external monitor and then it locks up when I'm trying to switch it back before actually connecting a monitor to it.
I know of the Halting Problem and all that, but computers should not lock up except in ultra-rare cases.
Maybe that's the real point where Microsoft is to blame: setting a world-wide standard for low quality software, damaging expectations well beyond the OS market up to the point where no customer is allowed to expect software that works flawlessly.
It's in every software-for-hire contract, in every EULA, everywhere: software cannot be expected to work without occasionally but serious bugs.
The problem is not that the software industry states that, but that all customers accept that without a second thought, because they never experienced software that did not crash sometimes.
Because of this, we have grown accustomed to paying for software at a quality level we would sue the pants and cry havoc, pitchfork and torches for every other manufacturer in every other trade. But for software, even catastrophic blunders, we simply breathe deeply, reboot and curse silently.
There were games that on a vanilla standard Windows installation did nothing but crash until a month and well over five emergency patches. Sure, people were clamoring in every forum for a fix, but almost no one returned the product as utterly defective, reclaiming money and compensation for efforts. There are games that NEVER worked but people still tried for months to fix them, producing unofficial patches or similar. No one would ever bother for any other stuff defective from-the-factory and I think that's party the fault of Microsoft.
Why can't all notebook keyboards just be standardized as desktop ones? I find it ridiculous that they're not decided on where to really put Del and Fn keys after all these years. Only the auto industry is worse with them never being able to standardize reverse gear position on stick shifts. Every make does that differently and when you're driving a lot of different rental cars, it's horrible.
The price tag is absolutely equivalent to other business class notebooks, while reliability and durability is a tad higher, but I'm biased since I own one.
I will not pay an arm and a leg for my notebook, but I also cannot afford unreliable, flimsy or otherwise sensitive mobile computers. Any computer that unexpectedly breaks down while I'm on a business trip costs me much much more than everything I can ever save on cheaper models. 400-500 bucks more for a rock solid model is a lot, but it's chump change compared to even one unplanned flight trip to a customer, partner or office location.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, a lot of people love their crack and would buy another pipe even if it meant murdering a dozen cops to get it.
The only reason for buying an XBOX 360 I can think of is when they include a year's worth of crack or meth. You know that two thirds of those consoles die within a year or two. You know that after three years, the thing is out of warranty and you're out of luck. You know that it's damn loud. You know there's a few consoles out there that last much longer, make less noise, cost less money and don't require a serverfarm-sized air condition to not overheat. And you know there's a tremendous array of laptop and desktop computers that can run PC versions of most console games and much much more, including every piece of USB equipment ever made in the last decade.
Now, what's the kicker on the 360 to throw all that aside?
You paid a large sum for the 360, voided your warranty only hoping it's going to help but being sure that if it dies, you are out on 300 bucks or more?
Can anyone tell me what exactly makes these games for the 360 so extremely appealing? Are they as addictive as it seems, on par with the most addictive MMORPGs? Is it worse than weed or what?
If you have a notebook, then well, effectively your whole PC dies. But I can buy a new one from a hundred different manufacturers or even Virtual PC for Mac, but I can't tell first hand if that thing is any good.
A hundred different manufacturers with different design philosophies and quality assurance levels. From no-name bottom-of-the-drawer-overheat-in-Siberian-winter to waterproof Toughbooks and throw-around-enabled MgAl-roll-caged Thinkpads and similar models.
Price difference is going to be an order of magnitude, but if you have cash, you can select between cheap laptops running decent games and bullet-proof laptops running decent games. No amount of cash can buy a RROD-proof XBOX 360 and 65% of them will cost you time and frustration. Thanks, but I'll pass on that :)
Well, you do have an ebay account, don't you? Or a flea market somewhere near?
What's holding you back from cutting your losses and dump all those games you played through half a dozen times.
It's not going to make you rich, but at least you have some money and peace of mind or the chance to buy a different console with fresh games. Console games have much higher resale values than PC games, you're not losing an arm and leg doing that. Unless you're one of the last to sell his 360, that is.
I had a laptop from Acer that failed after 2 years. Two Acer laptops of friends have failed in the same timeframe. Nobody lost more than a couple of bytes due to regular backups and emergency data extraction. Still, I wouldn't even buy as much as a USB cable from Acer ever again. I think, life is too short to worry about flaky equipment, emergency backups, mail-in repairs, waiting for the UPS or Fedex guy or forum research about the reason for the damn thing to fail again. If you are willing to buy a single game for a console that can croak on you at any given moment, I think you did got suckered :)
No, I ask Joe Sixpack about the government upholding binding contracts between any businesses or private persons or punishing those who constantly violate the rules.
A company that sells Internet access and made a contract with Joe Sixpack damn well needs to enable him to access the Internet, not "The Web", not "authorized websites run by trusted partners" but the thing they promised in ads and contracts.
That is no regulation but fraud prevention. And IF they have it in long legalese on page 35 of their 60-page "acceptable use terms agreed upon after reading the first letter", it's still fraud, because a reasonable person, a group of peers if you will, probably thinks that, too.
And I seriously doubt Joe Sixpack will make a liberal argument for the right to scam. Honest contracts for trivial services don't have 30 pages in arial-condensed 4pt and honest contracts don't include clauses that make the other contract partner puke or clench their fists. As I don't drink beer, I can only guess what Joe Sixpack thinks about it, but I have the impression that honesty, truth and fair-pay-fair-service are pretty high on his list of priorities.
I would dare to guess that about 49 in hundred people have a lower than average skill in any given game, while another 49 percent has a higher than average skill.
That doesn't tell us anything about motivation and fun, as millions of low-skilled people playing football and soccer, quake and counter-strike can attest.
When the game mechanics are manipulated to alleviate "skill" with "time invested" it's either because of the need to collect more monthly fees or out of a kindergarten worldview, where "everyone wins a prize in any competition to not be sad".
A highly talented, highly skilled player should always be able to beat the low skilled no matter how many hours those mouse potatoes have been dabbling away. BTW, a well-made game that rewards time invested much more than skill or talent possessed will always have a huge addictive potential.
And they just feel weird and reek of grinding and jobless dropouts.
That's the usual difference between skill vs. level as the character base. Skill based means YOUR skill, level based mean YOUR freetime. Both concepts need adjustments or alternatives so the "disadvantaged" (low skillers or low freetimers) don't get mauled up too much.
If I had anything to say, I would offload all low-skilled, high-freetime gamers to WoW and not deal with any of them. Game mechanics to protect those mouse-potatoes are only needed in a politically-correct "everyone-gets-a-prize" kindergarten environment which I absolutely detest. A game can be fun without having skill, but an ultra-hard to find "Death Maul +15" to reward months of mindless grinding is totally unwarranted IMHO.
People with high skill should be rewarded, no matter if they've invested much or few of their freetime. That would be the most realistic aspect of a realistic-looking game and people get an incentive to either develop skills or look elsewhere. That almost eliminates griefers, as no one without skill should be able to successfully troll the whole pack and people with skills and troll-attitude are rare enough and can't be reasonably distinguished from other high-skillers.
They are dismantling our society, in case you didn't notice. Honest police work is punished when directed at lower and lowest-class OR upper and top-class people while nickel-and-diming of middle class is encouraged.
It's proles and untouchables vs. we the people.
Your palm is not a chick, never was.
While the definition of "firearm" is pretty straightforward to include a deadly weapon that can kill over a distance of more than a kilometer, I seriously doubt that you, me or anyone else could draw a solid, non-disputable boundary around "social networks".
Is a hotmail account serving social functions? I think so.
Is it connected to a network of some sort? Well, yes.
Is it a "social network"?
What about a Slashdot account?
What about Adult-Friend-Finder and its cousins?
What about platforms like World of Warcraft?
What of that is a "social network" and why do we treat them differently than a physical, brick-and-mortar tennis club? Or a mobile phone? There are SMS dating services for them as well.
Do we ban sex offenders from there, too? Do we cut off Internet access for sex offenders?
The way I see it, sex offenders are the lowest hanging target for politicians to present themselves to be "tough-on-crime". Nobody can say anything good about sex offenders so we can tax, imprison and legalize them to hell - can we?
No matter if they're on the sex offender list for petty "crimes" they did in college or heavy violent rape, they should do their time in prison, locked up for as long as the judge ordered and then they're free humans again.
Cases with Capital Punishment don't need to be discussed here, but other than that the sentence should fit the crime and could carry several decades of imprisonment in extreme cases. After that, they're either still dangerous - and we could as well throw away the key - or they're free humans again.
Either we regard them as humans or we don't. We can do either, but it tells a lot about us "innocents" as well.
Replacing "keys" with "incriminating documents":
"If you a part of a criminal gang and the police obtains incriminating documents, telling the rest of your gang will enable them to destroy their own compromised data before the cops arrive. That is the logic behind this law."
And then:
"The alternative is to lock up everybody where incriminating documents have been found until the case is over, so they cannot communicate the news. That is the logic behind this idea, which would mean no calls to a lawyer therefore being declared unconstitutional for decades."
One suspected criminal is arrested and the police has to catch all other pieces of evidence before the rest of the gang destroys them. Nobody would declare that law is unable to keep up with that and nobody would ever dare to abolish due process, in dubio pro reo and all that which make the primary and most important differences between Law Enforcement under the Rule of Law and the Mafia themselves.
Simply because documents are electronic and not paper should not change one iota of due process. Criminals have been able to destroy evidence since the dawn of mankind and definetly since the dawn of Western democracies, when we decided to rather let some of the guilty be unpunished than to punish any single innocent.
Forcing suspects to incriminate themselves is organized thuggery, not law enforcement.
Digital crimes are hard to prove as they were and easy enough to incriminate the innocent, with USB sticks of only a few grams and millimeters capable of holding hundreds of thousands of the most grotesque and heineous pictures known to man - and no humanly way for the defendant to prove they're not his/her own. -
Now imagine /dev/random but an extension .gpg on it.
- a tiny USB stick found in your jacket after arrest.
- a 4gig blob of
- you facing 2 years of jail for not revealing a password neither you nor God ever knew because neither you nor Bruce Schneier can prove it is random and NOT encrypted data.
or even without intervention of a malicious police officer who framed you because he's after your wife
- you are the suspect of some crime, for whatever reasons, but you are innocent.
- police search and seize your property, lawfully and with a legal warrant.
- police finds a nondescript CD-R, hidden deep in your closet that contains data that looks suspicious AND encrypted
- it really IS encrypted data which you yourself encrypted. It is raunchy, but harmless (read: legal) stuff from college times.
- you produced this material several years ago, while in college in Alpha Beta Gamma frat and wanted to never ever have your roommates watch it.
- you kept the CD for sentimental reasons and summarily forgot the password and the fact that it ever existed. It was just sitting in the bottom drawer and went along the other stuff when you moved.
- you really forgot the password, in fact, you didn't remember that you even had the CD at all
- when the district attorney presents this CD as exhibit XY, you remember what it was and become nervous because your wife and kids are in the courtroom. You still don't remember the password as it was really long.
- the judge noticed you became nervous and will now never believe any story you tell unless you present the password as proof.
- result: you are innocent, but you are probably facing a 2 year non-commutable sentence for not revealing the password
Hands up who thinks that's a good law.
Now you have to write limericks on bathroom stalls again. The only difference is the size and origin of your audience, but that may depend on the bathroom.
Let's hope they never advertise guns to people using IE6. Our hospitals would collapse under an avalanche of patients with holes in their feet.
Which either means that this is the only thing Bing ever cares about or its data source is shorter than my list of groceries.
Except that being an engineer isn't easy in the least. Which is the primary reason for people becoming marketing droids, BTW :)
You can't cheat an honest man.
If you could make an easy living simply trading stock, everyone would do it. Really, the stock market would be full of people trying to make a quick buck out of nothing. And half of them go broke while the other thrives. The stock market is at worst a lottery or pyramid scheme, but it doesn't bankrupt poor hard working joes if they're working for honest and truthful companies. Or companies that are too small to survive on the publc trade floor.
But other than that, do you think anyone can tell the "real" value from the "perceived" value of anything as comples as a publicly traded enterprise? If the real and perceived values differed, who would NOT cash in on the margin?
The UK was so big in 1910, that the sun never set in the empire. In the last years, the UK politics seem so dim that many people ask themselves if the sun now even glimpses on the remaining isles.
I for one mark all these stories with a "crazykingdom" tag. Not because of the Brits, but because of their politics and their leaders. They hit rock bottom a decade ago but kept on digging. Really, a megalomaniac ISP disconnecting suspected filesharers at the first hint of trouble, is among the least of Britains problems. It's just a symptom of the entire ruling caste, with iron hand to the Britons on one side, with ever forgiving grace to all other sides.
I'm not a Brit, but I feel so sorry for you but I'm thankful that you will serve as a warning example to the rest of The "Free" West, where everyone is free to pay taxes or milk social security, but shut the hell up on any other issues.
100 terrorists can carry out the same amount of damage as 1,000, 100,000 or 1 million. And because we never get the last 0.1%, we should give up and stop trying. AT ALL. Talk about a binary choice fallacy...
MS Comic Sans to the rescue! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Well, you are right, hardware is a fast moving target and every piece of equipment has its flaws. Which brings us to the next part of the equation: when software is accepted to be unreliable, and hardware is only software made with wires and/or silicon, we also get unreliable hardware. The more flaws we accept, the more flaws we get, because making flawless computing costs money and the last 0.2 of perfection cost as much as 0.8 of the final product. But nowhere else are people willing to accept mediocre products or those that don't work at all from the beginning. Of course hardware is a moving target, but so is the road, the environment cars navigate routinely without losing their engine. Concrete is different everywhere, but my drill still manages to make a hole in it, everytime. My software, on the other hand, sometimes doesn't manage to boot up - at all - on my work notebook where nothing really changes except the weather. The hardware doesn't change and is tested to work ok. The software is the same every day of the week and with no admin access, I sure don't change anything. Yet 0.05 of all startups produce a black screen, because some of its tools believes to have detected an external monitor and then it locks up when I'm trying to switch it back before actually connecting a monitor to it. I know of the Halting Problem and all that, but computers should not lock up except in ultra-rare cases.
Maybe that's the real point where Microsoft is to blame: setting a world-wide standard for low quality software, damaging expectations well beyond the OS market up to the point where no customer is allowed to expect software that works flawlessly. It's in every software-for-hire contract, in every EULA, everywhere: software cannot be expected to work without occasionally but serious bugs. The problem is not that the software industry states that, but that all customers accept that without a second thought, because they never experienced software that did not crash sometimes. Because of this, we have grown accustomed to paying for software at a quality level we would sue the pants and cry havoc, pitchfork and torches for every other manufacturer in every other trade. But for software, even catastrophic blunders, we simply breathe deeply, reboot and curse silently. There were games that on a vanilla standard Windows installation did nothing but crash until a month and well over five emergency patches. Sure, people were clamoring in every forum for a fix, but almost no one returned the product as utterly defective, reclaiming money and compensation for efforts. There are games that NEVER worked but people still tried for months to fix them, producing unofficial patches or similar. No one would ever bother for any other stuff defective from-the-factory and I think that's party the fault of Microsoft.
And you don't disable computer support entirely with this?
Why can't all notebook keyboards just be standardized as desktop ones? I find it ridiculous that they're not decided on where to really put Del and Fn keys after all these years. Only the auto industry is worse with them never being able to standardize reverse gear position on stick shifts. Every make does that differently and when you're driving a lot of different rental cars, it's horrible.
The price tag is absolutely equivalent to other business class notebooks, while reliability and durability is a tad higher, but I'm biased since I own one. I will not pay an arm and a leg for my notebook, but I also cannot afford unreliable, flimsy or otherwise sensitive mobile computers. Any computer that unexpectedly breaks down while I'm on a business trip costs me much much more than everything I can ever save on cheaper models. 400-500 bucks more for a rock solid model is a lot, but it's chump change compared to even one unplanned flight trip to a customer, partner or office location.