You are looking at the problem wrong. It's not that I mind you installing Firefox but what about the next person who asks, or the person after them? At what point do you say no? I can't just make up arbitrary numbers and say X number of users can install Firefox. A lot of things in IT are all or nothing for that very reason, not because they just want to be nasty.
That thing you did with the MS symbol was fucking awesome./sarcasm
I'm curious what would you like us to infer from your usage? It's harder to type anyway, unless you're an uber l33t typer too.
"Imagine working for a company that is tolerated, at best, in many social circles. Imagine being a computer science graduate, going to a class reunion, telling people you work for Microsoft, and watching your former classmates slowly back away as if you'd just told them you had a venereal disease."
Yeah, it's that bad.
I cannot defend Microsoft's questionable business practices but, as a place to work I doubt it's that bad. As long as I work with good people, management is tolerable, enjoy my job, and my children and wife are taken care of then why does it matter what your old college "buddies" think. I'd tell them, FUCK YOU!! Who goes to those things anyways? Probably full of sad, single people.
And the comment about the Zune...
"Tyler Welch, a Zune marketing guy, seemed to understand that there's a delicate balance between satisfying the movie and music companies enough that they'll sell content for online devices and giving customers the unrestricted use and copying freedoms they demand. And instead of giving some sort of flip or PR-speak canned response, he admitted that he had no ready way to solve the conflict between these competing constituencies and that this is something it's going to take a long time to work out."
Well no shit, I could have told him that. It's quite clear that the ball is in the **AA's court. Another comment:
"I'm sure Vista is wonderful. I'm sure XBox is great, too. A Microsoft person said so."
Zing!! He really stuck it to the man there. What about the other couple million people who have spoken with their wallets?
About the avoiding of questions. This is not an uncommon practice when outsiders are asked to tour a company. Think of it as preemptive damage control. The last thing they need is a rogue marketing guy to start spouting his opinion on random questions, especially ones not related to marketing. It's kind of like asking a White House tour guide how our current lobbying system is ruining our government.
It's pretty disingenuous of you to not mention all that players get for their $50 (only $6/month mind you, cheap bastard). A unified friends list, common UI's for online games, and anti-cheating (one of the biggest advantages) measures. You are correct that Sony will be offering their "online service" for free but can you really call it a service when it doesn't do anything for you? If you and I know each other and we are playing different games, Microsoft's service will allow me to send you an invite or better yet we can start our own chat session across games. What does Sony have? Nothing. No video chat, no voice chat...only text messages but only if you know the person's tag for that particular game because of course every single online game you play with the PS3 is out there by itself. These features may not seem like much but they add a lot to the experience. Is not really fair to make a comparison between a feature rich service like what Live offers and some half-assed implementation that was shipped out the door just so they can say "ME TOO".
I blame it on our slow ass hard drives. I figure POSTing is about as fast as we can expect...low level hardware stuff I suppose. What eats up the most time when booting my machine is past the BIOS gibberish and once the WinXP logo appears. Hence, the hybrid drives we are starting to see show up.
Is there anyone with a fast SCSI or RAID setup who can chime in?
Please don't muddy the facts with your weak comparisons. The memory in the PS3 isn't off the shelf DDR-2 memory. As I understand it the PS3 has 512mb of RAM....256mb XDR and 256mb GDDR3. Trying to compare that with your run of the mill memory is a little misleading. Apparantly though it does suck for general purpose computing, equivalent to a PIII 800 or something close. I wouldn't put the limitation on the hardware though. Software needs to be written to take advantage of it's capabilities. And remember, the original Xbox had only 64mb of RAM and it ran Xbox Media Center wonderfully.
...your comment piqued my interest. Whenever people start predicting the fall of the American Economy (offshoring, outsourcing) thoughts like yours cross my head. On a macro level industries like this replace our lost jobs overseas. I believe we are on the virge, a couple decades or so, of a BioMed Age and America and a select few other countries are on the forefront of these new technologies. The field is very young and we have just scratched the surface. If done right outsourcing, whatever, can be a good thing as it raises the bar for all of us and we can sell all our expensive bio stuff to the new middle class countries. Wishfull thinking?
I just read your link about the trade deficit. It seems to imply that the problem with our trade deficit lies solely with the countries we trade with. They're the ones imposing the VAT on goods going in and out of their country. Why is that our fault? What is Buchanan's fix? An "equalizing fee"? Two wrongs make a right now? Sounds dumb to me. My opinion is, it's all cyclical. By offering me cheap imported goods it gives me more buying power for stuff that IS beneficial to the United States. I have more money to go out to eat, go to the movies, buy a nice new TV from my LOCAL electronics store, or pay my neigbor kid $20 to mow my lawn so he can go spend money at the movies, etc.
Finally, I highly doubt that banning exports of these items to NK is really going to hurt any of these industries. How many people in NK even know what a Segway is or a Harley for that matter? Hey look! The sky is falling!!!
It's ironic. The RIAA is suing all these illegal file sharers not becuase they do the most damage to their bottom line but because they are relatively easy to catch and require little resources to accomplish the job. Rather than try to quash the bootleg markets, which are HUGE in the big cities, they go after little Timmie in the hopes that they will scare the masses away from downloading their stuff. Unfortunately for them people look at getting sued like the look at getting caught drunk driving, it'll never happen to them. Put simply, the downloaders are an easy target. If they were really concerned they would be mounting a huge campaign to close all the illicit goods markets on the streets but that would cost to much money.
Thank you. I was thinking the same thing. "Look at me, I'm so leet I don't need a cell phone. I'm, like, totally fighting the establishment, man" What a tool. On a side note, I just recently got a cell phone in the last year. It has come in handy on more than one occasion and guess what, when I don't want to talk with people I *gasp* turn the phone off. It's like magic.
If it's like the rest of their VCAST service it won't be the YouTube you're familiar with. They will be screened videos that they have deemed copyright-free and probably won't allow you to search YouTube's site.
I'll concede that they pulled a switch on me with my "mp3" phone (it actually only plays WMA's) but they still allow me to set my own songs as ring tones. As far as cost goes, if you factor the VCAST cost over the course of a month of $15 that makes it about.000005787 cents per second. If the video takes 30 seconds to download that comes to about.0001736 cents for the video.
I know this is some real fuzzy math. I just think it is humorous that people are so quick to shoot something down when they don't have all the facts. About the wallpaper, put your own damn picture on there that you took with the phone. If that isn't kosher then transfer an appropriate picture from you computer on to a micro SD card and load it up that way. Shoot, pictures are for noobs anyway, I have a video shot with my home video camera loaded as my background wallpaper.
I subscribe to VCAST, I really enjoy the Comedy Central clips they have on there (Daily Show, Colbert, South Park). I can not view videos if I am not in an EVDO area. That said, a 3-4 minute video buffers and starts playing within 5 seconds or so. Video qualtiy appears to be slightly below NTSC when viewed on such a small screen. The $15 may not be worth it to some but it has been for me. News updates from the major networks, weather reports, sports updates (fox, espn, and some others), and they also have a comedy channel full of great clips. The VCAST service also allows me to connect my cell phone to my laptop and achieve at least dial up speeds for free. You have to pony up for the "high-speed" service though.
I don't think he is worried about his HD content showing up on Youtube (most of it isn't really worth watching w/o HD).Youtube is not a media replacement in my mind, more like a supplement. It's great for showing someone last weeks SNL skit or some weird commercial that was just on tv. Unfortunately though when I think of nice HD content with great surround sound, I do NOT think of Youtube.
Well, I have Vista RC2 running on a PIII 1ghz w/ 768mb RAM laptop. Works just fine for me. It's not as snappy as my C2D desktop but what do you expect.
Ohh that's right. EVERYONE reads the AVS forums. Hey people, I've got a boner. Oh sorry, that's not really news...my pants have known about it for a few minutes now. Didn't you get the memo?
I think the primary problem with boot times are hard drives and their incremental speed improvements relative to other computer components. I think we're doing pretty good considering the amount of data that needs to be loaded. Granted software has become a bit bloated but think how much more you can do with today's modern OS's compared to MS-DOS. Hopefully hybrid drives eliminate the problem. Besides, my new Core2Duo HTPC runs all my applications (Photoshop, Adobe Premier, and games of course) with great speed. In fact the only time it EVER seems slow is when doing large read/writes to the hard drive.
What makes you the "knower of all people's desires"? I DON'T want Google as my homepage. It's a cheap marketing trick to "get people in the door". It doesn't necesarilly bother me but when I go to my parents house and they've got toolbars out the whazzoo and "opt-out" components all over the place.
Spoken like a person with no vision. It's the same thing that stunted Xerox...granted they're doing fine now even though the missed the boat in the 70's.
Just the other day I overheard some surveyors talking about how great these new technologies could be. Imagine being able to have a mobile electronic 3-d map of the site being surveyed. I think Microsoft is looking forward to a point where all these services are integrated and is treating this as a building block to that goal...a proof of concept if you will. Imagine construction for huge new office park or commercial center. The architects, surveyors, city officials, contructions dudes, etc. could all be updated to changes on the fly using a Windows Live "off the shelf" solution.
This may not be practical at this time and I'm not smart enough to think of the intricicies but to say Microsoft is wasting their time by investing in something that doesn't have a market right now is the type of thinking that hinders true innovation.
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You are looking at the problem wrong. It's not that I mind you installing Firefox but what about the next person who asks, or the person after them? At what point do you say no? I can't just make up arbitrary numbers and say X number of users can install Firefox. A lot of things in IT are all or nothing for that very reason, not because they just want to be nasty.
Yeah, I can't speak for Vista. I was just trying to keep everything in context.
I'm curious what would you like us to infer from your usage? It's harder to type anyway, unless you're an uber l33t typer too.
"Imagine working for a company that is tolerated, at best, in many social circles. Imagine being a computer science graduate, going to a class reunion, telling people you work for Microsoft, and watching your former classmates slowly back away as if you'd just told them you had a venereal disease." Yeah, it's that bad.
I cannot defend Microsoft's questionable business practices but, as a place to work I doubt it's that bad. As long as I work with good people, management is tolerable, enjoy my job, and my children and wife are taken care of then why does it matter what your old college "buddies" think. I'd tell them, FUCK YOU!! Who goes to those things anyways? Probably full of sad, single people.
And the comment about the Zune...
"Tyler Welch, a Zune marketing guy, seemed to understand that there's a delicate balance between satisfying the movie and music companies enough that they'll sell content for online devices and giving customers the unrestricted use and copying freedoms they demand. And instead of giving some sort of flip or PR-speak canned response, he admitted that he had no ready way to solve the conflict between these competing constituencies and that this is something it's going to take a long time to work out."
Well no shit, I could have told him that. It's quite clear that the ball is in the **AA's court. Another comment:
"I'm sure Vista is wonderful. I'm sure XBox is great, too. A Microsoft person said so."
Zing!! He really stuck it to the man there. What about the other couple million people who have spoken with their wallets?
About the avoiding of questions. This is not an uncommon practice when outsiders are asked to tour a company. Think of it as preemptive damage control. The last thing they need is a rogue marketing guy to start spouting his opinion on random questions, especially ones not related to marketing. It's kind of like asking a White House tour guide how our current lobbying system is ruining our government.
It's pretty disingenuous of you to not mention all that players get for their $50 (only $6/month mind you, cheap bastard). A unified friends list, common UI's for online games, and anti-cheating (one of the biggest advantages) measures. You are correct that Sony will be offering their "online service" for free but can you really call it a service when it doesn't do anything for you? If you and I know each other and we are playing different games, Microsoft's service will allow me to send you an invite or better yet we can start our own chat session across games. What does Sony have? Nothing. No video chat, no voice chat...only text messages but only if you know the person's tag for that particular game because of course every single online game you play with the PS3 is out there by itself. These features may not seem like much but they add a lot to the experience. Is not really fair to make a comparison between a feature rich service like what Live offers and some half-assed implementation that was shipped out the door just so they can say "ME TOO".
Is there anyone with a fast SCSI or RAID setup who can chime in?
NO!!!!...you posted as AC.
I'll get you next time AC!!
Please don't muddy the facts with your weak comparisons. The memory in the PS3 isn't off the shelf DDR-2 memory. As I understand it the PS3 has 512mb of RAM....256mb XDR and 256mb GDDR3. Trying to compare that with your run of the mill memory is a little misleading. Apparantly though it does suck for general purpose computing, equivalent to a PIII 800 or something close. I wouldn't put the limitation on the hardware though. Software needs to be written to take advantage of it's capabilities. And remember, the original Xbox had only 64mb of RAM and it ran Xbox Media Center wonderfully.
...your comment piqued my interest. Whenever people start predicting the fall of the American Economy (offshoring, outsourcing) thoughts like yours cross my head. On a macro level industries like this replace our lost jobs overseas. I believe we are on the virge, a couple decades or so, of a BioMed Age and America and a select few other countries are on the forefront of these new technologies. The field is very young and we have just scratched the surface. If done right outsourcing, whatever, can be a good thing as it raises the bar for all of us and we can sell all our expensive bio stuff to the new middle class countries. Wishfull thinking?
And ironicaly your funny comment was modded informative.
Nah, my job will never be offshored. I work in IT. ;-)
Finally, I highly doubt that banning exports of these items to NK is really going to hurt any of these industries. How many people in NK even know what a Segway is or a Harley for that matter? Hey look! The sky is falling!!!
It's ironic. The RIAA is suing all these illegal file sharers not becuase they do the most damage to their bottom line but because they are relatively easy to catch and require little resources to accomplish the job. Rather than try to quash the bootleg markets, which are HUGE in the big cities, they go after little Timmie in the hopes that they will scare the masses away from downloading their stuff. Unfortunately for them people look at getting sued like the look at getting caught drunk driving, it'll never happen to them. Put simply, the downloaders are an easy target. If they were really concerned they would be mounting a huge campaign to close all the illicit goods markets on the streets but that would cost to much money.
Thank you. I was thinking the same thing. "Look at me, I'm so leet I don't need a cell phone. I'm, like, totally fighting the establishment, man" What a tool. On a side note, I just recently got a cell phone in the last year. It has come in handy on more than one occasion and guess what, when I don't want to talk with people I *gasp* turn the phone off. It's like magic.
If it's like the rest of their VCAST service it won't be the YouTube you're familiar with. They will be screened videos that they have deemed copyright-free and probably won't allow you to search YouTube's site.
I know this is some real fuzzy math. I just think it is humorous that people are so quick to shoot something down when they don't have all the facts. About the wallpaper, put your own damn picture on there that you took with the phone. If that isn't kosher then transfer an appropriate picture from you computer on to a micro SD card and load it up that way. Shoot, pictures are for noobs anyway, I have a video shot with my home video camera loaded as my background wallpaper.
I subscribe to VCAST, I really enjoy the Comedy Central clips they have on there (Daily Show, Colbert, South Park). I can not view videos if I am not in an EVDO area. That said, a 3-4 minute video buffers and starts playing within 5 seconds or so. Video qualtiy appears to be slightly below NTSC when viewed on such a small screen. The $15 may not be worth it to some but it has been for me. News updates from the major networks, weather reports, sports updates (fox, espn, and some others), and they also have a comedy channel full of great clips. The VCAST service also allows me to connect my cell phone to my laptop and achieve at least dial up speeds for free. You have to pony up for the "high-speed" service though.
I don't think he is worried about his HD content showing up on Youtube (most of it isn't really worth watching w/o HD).Youtube is not a media replacement in my mind, more like a supplement. It's great for showing someone last weeks SNL skit or some weird commercial that was just on tv. Unfortunately though when I think of nice HD content with great surround sound, I do NOT think of Youtube.
Well, I have Vista RC2 running on a PIII 1ghz w/ 768mb RAM laptop. Works just fine for me. It's not as snappy as my C2D desktop but what do you expect.
I don't see what is so funny. When would you prefer they ship it?
...because the USA is the only country with greedy people residing in it's borders. Get a grip. Just curious, what EU country are you from?
Ohh that's right. EVERYONE reads the AVS forums. Hey people, I've got a boner. Oh sorry, that's not really news...my pants have known about it for a few minutes now. Didn't you get the memo?
I think the primary problem with boot times are hard drives and their incremental speed improvements relative to other computer components. I think we're doing pretty good considering the amount of data that needs to be loaded. Granted software has become a bit bloated but think how much more you can do with today's modern OS's compared to MS-DOS. Hopefully hybrid drives eliminate the problem. Besides, my new Core2Duo HTPC runs all my applications (Photoshop, Adobe Premier, and games of course) with great speed. In fact the only time it EVER seems slow is when doing large read/writes to the hard drive.
Well....ummm....uhhhh....yeah.
What makes you the "knower of all people's desires"? I DON'T want Google as my homepage. It's a cheap marketing trick to "get people in the door". It doesn't necesarilly bother me but when I go to my parents house and they've got toolbars out the whazzoo and "opt-out" components all over the place.
Just the other day I overheard some surveyors talking about how great these new technologies could be. Imagine being able to have a mobile electronic 3-d map of the site being surveyed. I think Microsoft is looking forward to a point where all these services are integrated and is treating this as a building block to that goal...a proof of concept if you will. Imagine construction for huge new office park or commercial center. The architects, surveyors, city officials, contructions dudes, etc. could all be updated to changes on the fly using a Windows Live "off the shelf" solution.
This may not be practical at this time and I'm not smart enough to think of the intricicies but to say Microsoft is wasting their time by investing in something that doesn't have a market right now is the type of thinking that hinders true innovation.