They seem to mind it more then Comcast simply shaping-out certain types of traffic. They mind it more then the infamous "you used too much unlimited bandwidth, so we're cutting you off without warning" letters that used to go out.
Its really not as big a deal as either of these things. Being up front about how much traffic you're actually paying for is good. It means that when this competition appears in the market, they can offer up different pricing models. The current system of everybody paying the same rate no matter what their usage is sucks for everybody except the top 5% of users.
What I'd like to see is straight up metered usage, like power. Pay $10/month for the connection, then $0.50/GB or something. The people running BitTorrent 24/7 downloading every movie in existence will then have to pay their own way instead of paying the same rate as grandma chatting on MSN.
Its time for people to wake up and get realistic. Unlimited connections exist in very few places. What we can get instead is straightforward payment for the traffic we use, or lies and pretending to be unlimited while they actively interfere with traffic they don't like (or simply cut off people who use too much).
ISP's cant actually offer "unlimited" access to everybody, unless you want to start paying $300/month for home Internet. Its not realistic. People will do things like P2P that just eat up way too much traffic. They have two ways of dealing with the problem:
1. Charge people for how much network capacity they actually use, ie: this. This is how gas, electricity, and other things are portioned out, and I haven't heard many people complianing about how its unfair.
2. Start trying to get rid of some of the traffic. See: Comcast screwing with P2P.
Of the two, I like this a lot better. My mom can pay for a little bit of network capacity, I can pay for a lot, and we both get what we paid for.
Seems like an obvious piece of advice, but try to find the courses other people are avoiding. There's always one or two out there, things that scare off most of the other students. When I was in Unviersity (last year), one of the courses like that was the fourth year OS course. It was optional and scary by many peoples standards (since the goal was to learn how to write a kernel, not a GUI Java app), but was also one of the best courses around.
If you have free time, you might also want to consider working on an open source project. There's lots of them out there that would welcome more help and aren't super complicated. You can learn a lot from working on one (both in coding and in dealing with other developers), and it looks really good on a resume.
That's not to say that Java is all bad. With a good teacher and a good curriculum, it's absolutely possible to teach core concepts in Java (or any language, really). You have to be merciless about banning standard library usage such as collections, and teach your students the theory behind those data structures. People understand theory best when they can actually see it in practice, so you have to have your students implement their own linked lists, doubly linked lists, trees, etc. With Java it's an uphill battle getting people to ignore the standard libraries for "academic" purposes, but it's possible to do. They did this when I was learning. The early courses were in Java, but most of the standard classes were off limits. So if you wanted to use a Linked List, you had to build one.
While I thought it was a major PITA at the time, it was probably for the best. At least now I have some idea about what the thing actually does when I use it.
You're right. For what this machine is aimed at doing, I think Linux is up to the job. Believe me, I won't feel much sense of loss at telling my parents they don't need to spend $200 on Windows the next time they get a new computer.
Thats all fine and dandy (and moderator friendly), but really bears no relation to what I said.
What I said is that PC Magazine isn't capable of reviewing this PC in the context of how a grandmother is going to use it. I didn't say anything about Linux being hard to use or Windows being easy to use. I didn't say anything about admin tasks at all. In fact, I hardly said anything about the computer in question.
My point is that if you want a fair review of how well this computer does what its intended to do, you need to bring in the correct audience and get THEM to review it.
For the target audience of the magazine, the rating is mostly correct. Its not a very good system for those people.
But for grandma? Do you really trust PC Magazine to be *capable* of reviewing something the way your grandmother would see it, rather then how a full time PC user would? Its a similar problem when someone like 1up does a review of a "casual" focused game. The review is meaningless because who the game is aimed at and who the review is aimed at are completely different markets.
The only way to review this thing properly is to give it to someone in the Walmart crowd who doesn't use a PC very much now, and see how they do with it. Unfortunately, I don't know of a magazine that does that sort of review.
Well, the paper the stock is printed on (if they still printed stocks) is worth more then the Zimbabwe dollar, so you could probably get a sandwich there if you had a few million shares.
I've known that AV software doesn't work very well for quite a while. Its really nothing new. It is nice to have someone doing tests that I can shove in peoples faces, though.
This isn't the biggest problem though. AV software is actively harmful. Aside from dramatically slowing down EVERYTHING, it can flat out break stuff. Norton in particular is notorious for screwing things up, to the point that if someone asks me about a problem with their computer now, my first answer is always "uninstall Norton."
Running the gambit from games being intolerably slow to programs crashing to drivers inexplicably failing to install (even after turning Norton off), to date "uninstall Norton" has never failed to fix the problem.
(Really, Norton and the virus makers themselves aren't much different, in that both of them prey on the computer illiterate.)
They did. Unfortunately the list is decided by reader votes, and despite getting the lifetime achievement award in the hope that it'd stop getting reader votes, it still topped the list.
This move makes no sense. PlaysForSure devices/stores are not compatible with Zune devices/stores, but they'll both carry the same logo? This defeats the entire point of the PlaysForSure branding in the first place: that any device and any store with the branding will work together.
"but to provide additional value to Gold subscribers"
The problem is that no actual value was added. A gold subscripion pre-update is exactly the same as one post-update. No features were added, and nothing was changed. Demos are available at the same time they were before.
Adding value typically requires adding something that wasn't there previously.
(Not that gold actually is a value to begin with. "For only the cost of a game a year, you can actually use the multiplayer part of the games you bought! As opposed to PC and PS3 players, who can use that part without paying anything extra...")
There was an interview once where they said that player position is done on the client because in a laggy environment, the game degrades to unplayable much faster if its done on the server.
If its on the client, I can always have the appearance of moving no matter how laggy my connection is. When Lord of the Rings Online gets laggy, my character takes two steps forward, then stops, then takes two steps, then stops... its awful.
No no no, see its only the general public who shouldn't have anything to hide.
Remember, if the Government wants to hide stuff, its "national security." If the Government also wants to illegally wiretap everybody, its "national security." If the Government wants to send you to Syria to be tortured or lock you up for years with no evidence, its "national security."
But if you question the Government, you're a threat to "national security."
Thats my experience too. Want a game but didn't pre-order? Sorry, you should pre-order. (I've been told this.) Try pre-ordering? Sorry, so did everybody else.
Yet for some strange reason, Future Shop down the street somehow manages to have copies on a shelf that I can walk in and buy, without planning two months in advance.
From TFA: "Preorders are only taken when their allotment can be guaranteed. I cannot stress this enough. There are burps in the system here and there, but for every one or two preorder gaffes you read about online there are literally thousands of beneficial ones. Preorders do not cost any additional fee (only a base 5 dollar deposit) and are fully (though reluctantly) refundable for cash at any time. Yes, cancelled preorders count against the employee ringing it in and they will be reluctant, but it is your right to cancel for cash refund if you choose to and they can't decline it."
Care to explain then how my local EB took several times more orders for the collectors edition of Burning Crusade then it was actually getting?
You know that based on what? A game like that might sell well to parents of little kids. The "casual" gaming market is actually pretty big, and a lot of it is on the PC. It just doesn't garner much press.
Far as I can tell, pretty much nobody is actually playing Manhunt 2.
The tax in question (the GST) already exists as a 6% (formerly 7%) sales tax, all the money goes to the Federal Government.
The goal of the campaign is to take 1/6th of the revenue from the tax and give it to Municipal governments. So they don't want a new tax, they want to shift what the existing tax pays for.
The thing to keep in mind is that North America is the 360's strongest territory. Comparatively its less dominant in Europe, and pretty weak in Japan. If Sony can gain some market share in those two areas, they can come back at NA from a stronger position. Their current method of selling a more expensive system with fewer games in Microsoft's backyard sure isn't working.
Also, Europe didn't really get a price cut like NA did, they got annoying bundles instead. This move will help them there, for sure.
I don't think they've given up on the NA market at all, but their strategy has been so poorly executed thus far that going back and focusing on easier markets for a while is probably a good idea. They can come back at NA later with a lower price, more games, and rumble included.
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People sure do mind bandwidth caps, don't they?
They seem to mind it more then Comcast simply shaping-out certain types of traffic. They mind it more then the infamous "you used too much unlimited bandwidth, so we're cutting you off without warning" letters that used to go out.
Its really not as big a deal as either of these things. Being up front about how much traffic you're actually paying for is good. It means that when this competition appears in the market, they can offer up different pricing models. The current system of everybody paying the same rate no matter what their usage is sucks for everybody except the top 5% of users.
What I'd like to see is straight up metered usage, like power. Pay $10/month for the connection, then $0.50/GB or something. The people running BitTorrent 24/7 downloading every movie in existence will then have to pay their own way instead of paying the same rate as grandma chatting on MSN.
Its time for people to wake up and get realistic. Unlimited connections exist in very few places. What we can get instead is straightforward payment for the traffic we use, or lies and pretending to be unlimited while they actively interfere with traffic they don't like (or simply cut off people who use too much).
ISP's cant actually offer "unlimited" access to everybody, unless you want to start paying $300/month for home Internet. Its not realistic. People will do things like P2P that just eat up way too much traffic. They have two ways of dealing with the problem:
1. Charge people for how much network capacity they actually use, ie: this. This is how gas, electricity, and other things are portioned out, and I haven't heard many people complianing about how its unfair.
2. Start trying to get rid of some of the traffic. See: Comcast screwing with P2P.
Of the two, I like this a lot better. My mom can pay for a little bit of network capacity, I can pay for a lot, and we both get what we paid for.
Seems like an obvious piece of advice, but try to find the courses other people are avoiding. There's always one or two out there, things that scare off most of the other students. When I was in Unviersity (last year), one of the courses like that was the fourth year OS course. It was optional and scary by many peoples standards (since the goal was to learn how to write a kernel, not a GUI Java app), but was also one of the best courses around.
If you have free time, you might also want to consider working on an open source project. There's lots of them out there that would welcome more help and aren't super complicated. You can learn a lot from working on one (both in coding and in dealing with other developers), and it looks really good on a resume.
You're right. For what this machine is aimed at doing, I think Linux is up to the job. Believe me, I won't feel much sense of loss at telling my parents they don't need to spend $200 on Windows the next time they get a new computer.
Thats all fine and dandy (and moderator friendly), but really bears no relation to what I said.
What I said is that PC Magazine isn't capable of reviewing this PC in the context of how a grandmother is going to use it. I didn't say anything about Linux being hard to use or Windows being easy to use. I didn't say anything about admin tasks at all. In fact, I hardly said anything about the computer in question.
My point is that if you want a fair review of how well this computer does what its intended to do, you need to bring in the correct audience and get THEM to review it.
For the target audience of the magazine, the rating is mostly correct. Its not a very good system for those people.
But for grandma? Do you really trust PC Magazine to be *capable* of reviewing something the way your grandmother would see it, rather then how a full time PC user would? Its a similar problem when someone like 1up does a review of a "casual" focused game. The review is meaningless because who the game is aimed at and who the review is aimed at are completely different markets.
The only way to review this thing properly is to give it to someone in the Walmart crowd who doesn't use a PC very much now, and see how they do with it. Unfortunately, I don't know of a magazine that does that sort of review.
Well, the paper the stock is printed on (if they still printed stocks) is worth more then the Zimbabwe dollar, so you could probably get a sandwich there if you had a few million shares.
I've known that AV software doesn't work very well for quite a while. Its really nothing new. It is nice to have someone doing tests that I can shove in peoples faces, though.
This isn't the biggest problem though. AV software is actively harmful. Aside from dramatically slowing down EVERYTHING, it can flat out break stuff. Norton in particular is notorious for screwing things up, to the point that if someone asks me about a problem with their computer now, my first answer is always "uninstall Norton."
Running the gambit from games being intolerably slow to programs crashing to drivers inexplicably failing to install (even after turning Norton off), to date "uninstall Norton" has never failed to fix the problem.
(Really, Norton and the virus makers themselves aren't much different, in that both of them prey on the computer illiterate.)
They did. Unfortunately the list is decided by reader votes, and despite getting the lifetime achievement award in the hope that it'd stop getting reader votes, it still topped the list.
So its back.
There's a change, he'll be a CGI annoying sidekick instead of an annoying sidekick.
This move makes no sense. PlaysForSure devices/stores are not compatible with Zune devices/stores, but they'll both carry the same logo? This defeats the entire point of the PlaysForSure branding in the first place: that any device and any store with the branding will work together.
Somebody at Microsoft has lost their minds.
"but to provide additional value to Gold subscribers"
The problem is that no actual value was added. A gold subscripion pre-update is exactly the same as one post-update. No features were added, and nothing was changed. Demos are available at the same time they were before.
Adding value typically requires adding something that wasn't there previously.
(Not that gold actually is a value to begin with. "For only the cost of a game a year, you can actually use the multiplayer part of the games you bought! As opposed to PC and PS3 players, who can use that part without paying anything extra...")
I disagree, he's succeeding brilliantly at being funny.
I mean, "They have fought the War on Drugs with skill, so why not the War on Piracy?"
How can you not break out in hysterical laughter at that?
There was an interview once where they said that player position is done on the client because in a laggy environment, the game degrades to unplayable much faster if its done on the server.
If its on the client, I can always have the appearance of moving no matter how laggy my connection is. When Lord of the Rings Online gets laggy, my character takes two steps forward, then stops, then takes two steps, then stops... its awful.
No no no, see its only the general public who shouldn't have anything to hide.
Remember, if the Government wants to hide stuff, its "national security." If the Government also wants to illegally wiretap everybody, its "national security." If the Government wants to send you to Syria to be tortured or lock you up for years with no evidence, its "national security."
But if you question the Government, you're a threat to "national security."
From TFA:
"The widespread backlash took NPD games researchers by surprise."
And "Honestly, it was terribly naive of me to think that we could simply stop providing these after giving them freely for a year."
Anybody else find it funny that a market research firm was surprised by reaction to changes in its market?
A lot of movies also put little things in the end credits now to make it more interesting for people to stay, so its not all bad.
Thats my experience too. Want a game but didn't pre-order? Sorry, you should pre-order. (I've been told this.)
Try pre-ordering? Sorry, so did everybody else.
Yet for some strange reason, Future Shop down the street somehow manages to have copies on a shelf that I can walk in and buy, without planning two months in advance.
From TFA: "Preorders are only taken when their allotment can be guaranteed. I cannot stress this enough. There are burps in the system here and there, but for every one or two preorder gaffes you read about online there are literally thousands of beneficial ones. Preorders do not cost any additional fee (only a base 5 dollar deposit) and are fully (though reluctantly) refundable for cash at any time. Yes, cancelled preorders count against the employee ringing it in and they will be reluctant, but it is your right to cancel for cash refund if you choose to and they can't decline it."
Care to explain then how my local EB took several times more orders for the collectors edition of Burning Crusade then it was actually getting?
You know that based on what? A game like that might sell well to parents of little kids. The "casual" gaming market is actually pretty big, and a lot of it is on the PC. It just doesn't garner much press.
Far as I can tell, pretty much nobody is actually playing Manhunt 2.
Remember, countries are expected to honor signed agreements. Unless they're no longer convenient to the US, of course.
Say, how's that effort to impose DMCA style laws on the rest of the world going?
I haven't heard of any free alternatives to Xbox live. How do you tell your Xbox to go play on some other (free) network?
The tax in question (the GST) already exists as a 6% (formerly 7%) sales tax, all the money goes to the Federal Government.
The goal of the campaign is to take 1/6th of the revenue from the tax and give it to Municipal governments. So they don't want a new tax, they want to shift what the existing tax pays for.
The thing to keep in mind is that North America is the 360's strongest territory. Comparatively its less dominant in Europe, and pretty weak in Japan. If Sony can gain some market share in those two areas, they can come back at NA from a stronger position. Their current method of selling a more expensive system with fewer games in Microsoft's backyard sure isn't working.
Also, Europe didn't really get a price cut like NA did, they got annoying bundles instead. This move will help them there, for sure.
I don't think they've given up on the NA market at all, but their strategy has been so poorly executed thus far that going back and focusing on easier markets for a while is probably a good idea. They can come back at NA later with a lower price, more games, and rumble included.