But you'll have to pay VAT on your purchases. Maybe you've managed to avoid this so far, but companies like DHL will send you a bill and I think these days keep hold of the goods until you pay it.
Once you pay this, there's often very little difference in the cost of electronic goods. I, and many other I know have found this out to their cost.
Yes, some products do still work out cheaper, but not by a big margin, especially when you consider the higher shipping costs and longer wait. OK, so I've had goods arrive from the US in a couple of days, and also US companies who've charged me less for shipping than others in the UK, but that's pretty rare.
The amount of money ploughed into advertising the Blu-Ray version of "Casino Royale" was phenominal. It's also a damn good movie, so it's hardly surprising that it sold well.
Also, with the lack of decent games, movie playback is one of the few things that PS3 owners can fully utilise their shiny new console for.
You can't build exactly the same PC with Windows (XP Media) as the hard drive is 320Gb instead of 250Gb, but the FreeDOS version comes out at $40 cheaper. My guess is that at trade price and in quantity, the extra disk space will only be around $10, which gives us a rough price of $30 for a copy of Windows XP Media Center.
Dell were quizzed over this a while ago, when they began offering these machines, but they're in an awkward position as for contractual reasons they can't reveal how much they pay Microsoft per copy of Windows. I'm fairly certain that's why they don't allow you the option to compare apples to apples (as opposed to "Apples") as it were.
I know that after quite a battle a few individuals have managed to get their money back from Dell for copies of Windows they didn't want but were forced to buy. If my memory serves me correctly, they were refunded just over $50, but I suspect that would be a price they'll have agreed with Microsoft to mask the real per unit price they pay.
Truly embracing Open Source would mean them to give you the option of chosing "No Operating System" when you pick the parts for your machine, but I really can't see that happening anytime soon.
I read a quote from Darl somewhere a good while ago saying that in all honesty, when they started their legal endeavours, they fully expected IBM to just buy them out. Guess IBM decided that it'd be more fun to bury them. Big time. And in the long-run of course, the case has actually done a good deal to strengthen the GNU/Linux community.
Even without a buyout, those involved in this nonsense have actually made a good deal of money - the lawyers, Darl and the other execs (who are on hefty salaries) who have done rather well from all this, thank you very much. The people I feel sorry for the actual engineers at SCO, as there can be no doubt the company won't come out the other end of this in any fit state to carry on. It used to be a damn good little company, providing a good product at sensible prices. Now look at them. They're just a bad joke.
Think I'm just going to wait until someone can decide what the criteria are for judging who wins a contest like this before I try and make my predictions. Some thoughts...
Microsoft have had a full year selling the Xbox 360, which overall has undeniably been very succesful. It's online service is highly regarded, and we're now starting to get games which are pushing the console. In all those respects, it's a winner. However, they're still losing money on each unit sold, and they're backing one of two Hi-Def standards, and it may be the loser, but at least they've made it optional, so if it fails it's not going to taint the machine as a games console. If I was a serious gamer, I'd already have an Xbox 360. People know exactly what it can do, and whether they want one or not. Very few people will buy an Xbox 360 and be disappointed, it's already relatively mature and lack of novel user interfaces aside, the others are going to be playing catch-up for the next two years.
No matter what anyone says, Sony have made a phenominal number of mistakes with the PS3. However, many simply boil down to marketing goofs, and a "they'll want what we tell them" attitude which has certainly made them no friends. They're using the console to push other technologies of their own, and that is by far their biggest risk, and also the thing that's likely to keep the component price of the console high for longer. All that said, once the less than stellar launch is forgotten (that'll be around January), there's stock on the shelves, and we start seeing well written games which make use of the phenominally powerful hardware (probably in around a years time), and after whichever price drop brings the high-end console down to around half of its launch price, I'll probably get one. However, I suspect there'll be many people who are disappointed with what the machine achieves within its first 12 months of public life. It's the sort of console that if you owned one you'd want to show it off and shout about. It's a nice looking piece of consumer electronics and there are going to be some impressive looking games, but it's very much like the flash cars you see at shows (you know? The ones that cost more than your house) that you want to just stare at. You'd try and encourage a friend to buy one, so you could go for a spin in it every now and again, but you'd never consider buying it yourself, even if you could afford it.
I'll openly admit however, that my personal enthusiasm is for Nintendo's Wii. But then I'm not a hardcore gamer, and what excites me may well not excite the next man in line. I think the technology is easily good enough to give me games which are visually stunning, that sound good, are innovative (which is something I've come to appreciate more as I get older) and are fun to play. When I get around to buying a Wii in the New Year, I think it's also very likely I'll start getting Virtual Console games on a regular basis, as I'm of an age that I remember them the first time around, and there are a good handful of full games which I'll be looking to pick up when they launch. Nintendo have a good business plan, which all but ignores the other two players. It's practical, manageable, and it also means that they make money every step of the way, instead of losing a lot now, and trying to claw it back over time. The Wii does not set itself against the competition, simply alongside. It doesn't promise the earth, and then struggle to deliver, because all along Nintendo have played down what the machine is capable of and re-itterated that it's all about the games. Until the DS showed how effective that strategy can be, I doubt anyone believed them.
What it should really boil down to is which consoles are of interest to us personally, and that will ultimately depend on which game genres and series appeal to us, and how strongly they are represented on each platform. Let's not forget that the PC is now a very strong gaming platform, much more so than when the last generation of consoles launched, and that will divert some
...to everyone that Sony are only releasing the bare minimum number of consoles to keep the public's interest in their latest console?
At launch they're losing so much on each unit sold that they're no doubt just waiting to build demand before starting larger (and therefore lower cost per unit) runs of the necessary high cost components.
Have you tried doing the things you're asking of Linux in Windows?
Have you tried to gain access to the data on a Linux partition from within Windows? It's actually pretty difficult.
When people install GNU/Linux on a Windows box they expect it to automatically set up a dual boot option and configure itself so the two continue to work perfectly and in harmony. Have you tried installing Windows on a machine which already has Linux on it? It just zaps things so you have a job getting access to your GNU/Linux install.
Windows now comes with an ever decreasing number of commandline utilities, but with GNU/Linux the opposite is true. When it comes to configuration, how easy is it to edit the all-important Windows registry when you can't boot into Windows itself? Bloody hard is the answer, unless you're prepared to pay for suitable third party tools.
Most Windows tutorials don't explain what's going on under the hood either. They explain how to use the GUI, and that's your lot, so you should probably only be comparing them to KDE or GNOME tutorials. It's all very superficial stuff.
Commandline work is always going to be the domain of those who know what they're actually doing, and not the casual user. Perhaps all we need to do is hide all the options and programs that require a decent level of technical expertise in the same way that Windows does.
This is something which has always annoyed me. The idea that all hardware just works in Windows is utter nonsense, but something that Microsoft does all it can to perpetuate. For example:
When someone installs a new graphics card in a Windows machine, after a restart they are invariably presented with a basic VGA resolution, 256 colour display until they install whatever drivers come with the card. This seems perfectly acceptable, and in fact is. However, when someone either installs GNU/Linux on an existing machine, or installs a new graphics card in such a machine, they seem to think that it should just work. This seems to be the case for supposedly professional tech journalists as much as average end-users. The number of times I've read a review of a new GNU/Linux distribution that included something along the lines of "the wireless adapter in my laptop wasn't picked up and had to be installed manually" is just insane, they seem to forget that they had to install drivers for exactly the same card when they originally installed the hardware.
It's therefore strange that having to install drivers seems a cause for much alarm and complaint. Granted, the installation process in Windows will often be slicker and more suitable for non-technical users, you have to do pretty much the same thing no matter what OS you're running.
Something else to remember is that the people who develop hardware drivers for GNU/Linux are invariably the developers themselves. The people who develop hardware drivers for Windows are the invariably hardware manufacturers, not Microsoft. The difference in the amount of work required to achieve the same result is phenominal, which is why it's good to see that some hardware manuafacturers are now developing drivers themselves. It's just a shame that they often just release them via the Internet only and don't ship them on a CD with the Windows drivers that come with the hardware itself.
They may not be available to the general public yet, but these guys have actually played with the respective controllers, so it's hardly speculation, and with production lead times being what they are, they'll have been playing with actual release revisions of the hardware and not just protoypes as those who made pretty much the same comments months ago were.
Granted, if it were your mate from down the pub telling you the same thing then you'd be quite right being sceptical, but I don't think so in this case.
I don't think defending yourself and business against defamatory comments counts as a personal obsession.
Don't instantly jump to the defense of the underdog here, money or no money, hurricane victim or not, it's entirely possible that she has been rightly punished here.
The courts costs will have been paid for by the plaintiff, so it wasn't a waste of taxpayer's money at all. And there was obviously enough evidence presented to convince the court that the defendent had behaved illegally.
I'd say if anything, that the lesson to be leaned here is that not having enough money to pay such an award isn't a way of avoiding legal action if you comit a crime.
If I were to go going round saying that a major international bank are fraudsters with intent of punishing them for charging me when I went overdrawn, then I'll get sued. I'd deserve it. It'd be entirely my own stupid fault, and not having any money to pay whatever they were awarded wouldn't save me.
I'm sure you'd see things very differently if someone started an Internet campaign accusing you of being a paedophile, especially if they were targetting these comments at the parents of children at the local junior school where your own kids study. My guess is that would motivate you to do something, and you'd not just sit back and consider it reasonable comment or an acceptable freedom of speech.
Assuming of course that you aren't a paedophile, you'd want to defend yourself and counter these accusations. If the person spreading these untruths was persistent and uncooperative, then eventually you'd be left with very few options other than taking legal action. It would be about clearing your name, and not about getting large sums of cash from someone, so I'm sure you'd carry on even if you knew your accuser had no money. Maybe your accuser was even thinking that having no money would stop them being sued in the first place, who knows?
This case has very little to do with freedom of speech. If you write something down, whether it's on paper or on the Internet (which has the potential to do *way* more damage) you potentially leave yourself open to libel. It's been proven in a court of law that this woman's comments amounted to libel, and she is being punished for them. She's brought it upon herself, and not just been a victim of someone who simply took a dislike to her.
Everyone seems to be assuming had the defendant made it to court, then it would have made a difference to the outcome. But with such a large award being made, I'm guessing that it was a very obvious case of wrong-doing, and the outcome would probably have been the same.
The award figure may seem stupidly high, but we don't know all the details and evidence presented, or the actual damage done to this woman's business and reputation as a result of the campaign. That said, it was also well known that if the case *was* won, there'd be little or no money actaully paid over anyway, so there is always the possibility that the award was high to prove a point rather than being a realistic figure, but we simply don't know.
Lets hope they make plenty of these available - Mayhem In Monsterland, Creatures II, Paradroid, Sanxion (they'll need to somehow make sure you can hear the loading music), Wizball, Apple Cider Spider, Archon, Thunderbirds (the original Firebird one), Monty On The Run, Ghostbusters, Impossible Mission, IK+, Sentinel, Spy vs Spy (the Island one), H.E.R.O., Aztec Challenge and Thrust. I'd buy them all, and presumably they'll only be a few GBP each too.
Think I've just gone from my plan of picking up a Wii when I'm in my local Game and can just grab it from the shelf, to pre-ordering.
Unfortunately, everyone must have been rushing to try and get a physical copy at the pre-order price, and the webshop's been closed due to the heavy traffic.
Picture the scene, two Sony PR guys Joe and Bob are walking along the corridor and into one of the rooms in the engineering department:
Joe: "We have a problem." Bob: "We have lots of problems, which one specifically." Joe: "You know, the PS3 one." Bob: "Ah, yeah. I was thinking that we could maybe start shouting about how the Wii is going to be a little more expensive than people were hoping. That might make us feel a bit better." Joe: "I was thinking that too, but I just wish we could find something newsworthy and positive that we could spoon feed the press. You know, the tabloids that have no real idea about tech. Something that would make a good headline. Something involving babies, or cute animals, or people who are ill, and something that makes shelling out $600 for a games console when people are starving in many areas of the world, seem like a positive and socially responsible thing to do." Bob: "How on earth are we going to do that? That just smacks of effort, and you know that anytime we try stuff it just goes horribly wrong. We end up making people hate us, and I've come to realise that it's just best we don't do anything else ever again. I say we just go throw rocks at the ducks in the park again. That was fun." Joe: "Hey look at Bill, he's mesmerised. What's that on his screen?" Bill: "Oh, hi guys. I'm just looking at this protein molecule rotating slowly on my monitor." Bob: "Hey, that's purdy" Joe: "What's it all about?" Bill: "Well, you know SETI@home, well this is pretty much the same thing, but with fewer aliens and more proteins. You can download it for free, and whilst the only reason I have it is for the pretty pictures it makes on my screen, it's supposed to be helping clever people off somewhere understand proteins, and maybe help to one day cure some disease or something." Bob: "Yeah, it is pretty." Joe: "Hold on! I've got it!" Bill: "What?" Joe: "Well, ideally we need something that we haven't had to develop ourselves, 'cause, you know, we tend to screw up pretty much everything we touch these days." Bob: "Aha." Joe: "Well, we haven't developed this, and this is like, helping the world become a better place or something." Bob: "Okay. Your point being?" Joe: "We could hitch a ride on the development and infrastructure hard work put in by these guys, compile a version for Cell, ship it with the PS3 and get press release out saying we're saving the planet. And children, and animals." Bill: "But, you'd have to keep the thing on 24 hours a day, and that would actually be damaging the planet by consuming large amounts of electricity." Joe: "Shut up you and go get the coffees in." Bill: "OK." Joe: "Anyway, as I was saying........."
Yup, you're absolutely right, we want quality entertainment, however what Sony seem to be preparing to offer us is some overpriced, overhyped, problem ridden piece of hardware, which is hedging its bets on at least two seriously risky components - BluRay and Cell - which may well crash and burn, and have to compete with a number of perfectly viable alternatives with major industry backing.
We've got the Xbox360 in our hands, so no risk there. You know what it does and you either want it or you don't.
There's now so much information, so many good reviews, and so much anticipation for the Wii, that in combination with the low price point and guaranteed exclusive titles, mean Nintendo and its potential customers are on very solid ground indeed.
Sony have a lot of problems to overcome right now bringing the PS3 to market, and as far as I can see, they've brought it all upon themselves. Forget fanboyism and infighting, this is out and out ridicule.
Entertainment - yes. Paying good money and still having to cross your fingers and hope that luck is on your side and your new console isn't going to be a major disapointment, that it will have decent games that are in some way better than those released for a console retailing at half the price, and that it won't end up being just a box full of expensive proprietary hardware with no future - no thank you.
....to find some good news when they're making a big thing about being able to your old PS2 memory cards. Especially when you consider that you need to buy an adapter, and that you can't use the data on the card as such, only a virtual version of it copied to the machine's HD. Therefore what this *actually* means that you in fact *can't* use your old cards, you can only convert the data, assuming you're prepared to shell out for another piece of optional hardware, and I dread to think how much these adapters are going to cost.
This is hardly a major positive for the PS3, but they're trying desperately to dressing it up as one.
If you've got a memory card with game data on, then I'd say it's more than a little likely that you've also got a PS2. Why not just save yourself the effort (and additional cost) and run your old saved games on that?
People don't tend to get genuinely enthusiastic about such thing unless there's a good reason, and I have to say that I have a similar level of enthusiasm for Python, although it's much less sexual than you are suggesting.
I've no need for such a framework myself, but out of general curiosity I've had a good look at what it offers, and it does indeed appear to be a good fit to make light work of some very common web application development requirements.
Because most of the other bindings I've seen are pretty simple wrappers, and often direct tranlsations of the C++ library, you should just grab yourself a copy of the original wxWidgets book, which has been around now for a year or so:
It's very comprehensive, well written, and even for wxPython, which at times tends to do things a little differently, I was happily using this until a couple of months ago when my copy of the wxPython book reviewed here arrived.
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But you'll have to pay VAT on your purchases. Maybe you've managed to avoid this so far, but companies like DHL will send you a bill and I think these days keep hold of the goods until you pay it.
Once you pay this, there's often very little difference in the cost of electronic goods. I, and many other I know have found this out to their cost.
Yes, some products do still work out cheaper, but not by a big margin, especially when you consider the higher shipping costs and longer wait. OK, so I've had goods arrive from the US in a couple of days, and also US companies who've charged me less for shipping than others in the UK, but that's pretty rare.
The amount of money ploughed into advertising the Blu-Ray version of "Casino Royale" was phenominal. It's also a damn good movie, so it's hardly surprising that it sold well.
Also, with the lack of decent games, movie playback is one of the few things that PS3 owners can fully utilise their shiny new console for.
You can't build exactly the same PC with Windows (XP Media) as the hard drive is 320Gb instead of 250Gb, but the FreeDOS version comes out at $40 cheaper. My guess is that at trade price and in quantity, the extra disk space will only be around $10, which gives us a rough price of $30 for a copy of Windows XP Media Center.
Dell were quizzed over this a while ago, when they began offering these machines, but they're in an awkward position as for contractual reasons they can't reveal how much they pay Microsoft per copy of Windows. I'm fairly certain that's why they don't allow you the option to compare apples to apples (as opposed to "Apples") as it were.
I know that after quite a battle a few individuals have managed to get their money back from Dell for copies of Windows they didn't want but were forced to buy. If my memory serves me correctly, they were refunded just over $50, but I suspect that would be a price they'll have agreed with Microsoft to mask the real per unit price they pay.
Truly embracing Open Source would mean them to give you the option of chosing "No Operating System" when you pick the parts for your machine, but I really can't see that happening anytime soon.
...for the Wii-mote/Nunchuck combination.
In fact, I'm more excited by this than I was by the prospect of having light-sabre battles. Not that I'll be holding my breath.
Oh, that was OldSCO. Back in the days when they had a fine x86 Unix distribution that I used to install on half a dozen servers a week.
I read a quote from Darl somewhere a good while ago saying that in all honesty, when they started their legal endeavours, they fully expected IBM to just buy them out. Guess IBM decided that it'd be more fun to bury them. Big time. And in the long-run of course, the case has actually done a good deal to strengthen the GNU/Linux community.
Even without a buyout, those involved in this nonsense have actually made a good deal of money - the lawyers, Darl and the other execs (who are on hefty salaries) who have done rather well from all this, thank you very much. The people I feel sorry for the actual engineers at SCO, as there can be no doubt the company won't come out the other end of this in any fit state to carry on. It used to be a damn good little company, providing a good product at sensible prices. Now look at them. They're just a bad joke.
Think I'm just going to wait until someone can decide what the criteria are for judging who wins a contest like this before I try and make my predictions. Some thoughts...
Microsoft have had a full year selling the Xbox 360, which overall has undeniably been very succesful. It's online service is highly regarded, and we're now starting to get games which are pushing the console. In all those respects, it's a winner. However, they're still losing money on each unit sold, and they're backing one of two Hi-Def standards, and it may be the loser, but at least they've made it optional, so if it fails it's not going to taint the machine as a games console. If I was a serious gamer, I'd already have an Xbox 360. People know exactly what it can do, and whether they want one or not. Very few people will buy an Xbox 360 and be disappointed, it's already relatively mature and lack of novel user interfaces aside, the others are going to be playing catch-up for the next two years.
No matter what anyone says, Sony have made a phenominal number of mistakes with the PS3. However, many simply boil down to marketing goofs, and a "they'll want what we tell them" attitude which has certainly made them no friends. They're using the console to push other technologies of their own, and that is by far their biggest risk, and also the thing that's likely to keep the component price of the console high for longer. All that said, once the less than stellar launch is forgotten (that'll be around January), there's stock on the shelves, and we start seeing well written games which make use of the phenominally powerful hardware (probably in around a years time), and after whichever price drop brings the high-end console down to around half of its launch price, I'll probably get one. However, I suspect there'll be many people who are disappointed with what the machine achieves within its first 12 months of public life. It's the sort of console that if you owned one you'd want to show it off and shout about. It's a nice looking piece of consumer electronics and there are going to be some impressive looking games, but it's very much like the flash cars you see at shows (you know? The ones that cost more than your house) that you want to just stare at. You'd try and encourage a friend to buy one, so you could go for a spin in it every now and again, but you'd never consider buying it yourself, even if you could afford it.
I'll openly admit however, that my personal enthusiasm is for Nintendo's Wii. But then I'm not a hardcore gamer, and what excites me may well not excite the next man in line. I think the technology is easily good enough to give me games which are visually stunning, that sound good, are innovative (which is something I've come to appreciate more as I get older) and are fun to play. When I get around to buying a Wii in the New Year, I think it's also very likely I'll start getting Virtual Console games on a regular basis, as I'm of an age that I remember them the first time around, and there are a good handful of full games which I'll be looking to pick up when they launch. Nintendo have a good business plan, which all but ignores the other two players. It's practical, manageable, and it also means that they make money every step of the way, instead of losing a lot now, and trying to claw it back over time. The Wii does not set itself against the competition, simply alongside. It doesn't promise the earth, and then struggle to deliver, because all along Nintendo have played down what the machine is capable of and re-itterated that it's all about the games. Until the DS showed how effective that strategy can be, I doubt anyone believed them.
What it should really boil down to is which consoles are of interest to us personally, and that will ultimately depend on which game genres and series appeal to us, and how strongly they are represented on each platform. Let's not forget that the PC is now a very strong gaming platform, much more so than when the last generation of consoles launched, and that will divert some
...to everyone that Sony are only releasing the bare minimum number of consoles to keep the public's interest in their latest console?
At launch they're losing so much on each unit sold that they're no doubt just waiting to build demand before starting larger (and therefore lower cost per unit) runs of the necessary high cost components.
Have you tried doing the things you're asking of Linux in Windows?
Have you tried to gain access to the data on a Linux partition from within Windows? It's actually pretty difficult.
When people install GNU/Linux on a Windows box they expect it to automatically set up a dual boot option and configure itself so the two continue to work perfectly and in harmony. Have you tried installing Windows on a machine which already has Linux on it? It just zaps things so you have a job getting access to your GNU/Linux install.
Windows now comes with an ever decreasing number of commandline utilities, but with GNU/Linux the opposite is true. When it comes to configuration, how easy is it to edit the all-important Windows registry when you can't boot into Windows itself? Bloody hard is the answer, unless you're prepared to pay for suitable third party tools.
Most Windows tutorials don't explain what's going on under the hood either. They explain how to use the GUI, and that's your lot, so you should probably only be comparing them to KDE or GNOME tutorials. It's all very superficial stuff.
Commandline work is always going to be the domain of those who know what they're actually doing, and not the casual user. Perhaps all we need to do is hide all the options and programs that require a decent level of technical expertise in the same way that Windows does.
This is something which has always annoyed me. The idea that all hardware just works in Windows is utter nonsense, but something that Microsoft does all it can to perpetuate. For example:
When someone installs a new graphics card in a Windows machine, after a restart they are invariably presented with a basic VGA resolution, 256 colour display until they install whatever drivers come with the card. This seems perfectly acceptable, and in fact is. However, when someone either installs GNU/Linux on an existing machine, or installs a new graphics card in such a machine, they seem to think that it should just work. This seems to be the case for supposedly professional tech journalists as much as average end-users. The number of times I've read a review of a new GNU/Linux distribution that included something along the lines of "the wireless adapter in my laptop wasn't picked up and had to be installed manually" is just insane, they seem to forget that they had to install drivers for exactly the same card when they originally installed the hardware.
It's therefore strange that having to install drivers seems a cause for much alarm and complaint. Granted, the installation process in Windows will often be slicker and more suitable for non-technical users, you have to do pretty much the same thing no matter what OS you're running.
Something else to remember is that the people who develop hardware drivers for GNU/Linux are invariably the developers themselves. The people who develop hardware drivers for Windows are the invariably hardware manufacturers, not Microsoft. The difference in the amount of work required to achieve the same result is phenominal, which is why it's good to see that some hardware manuafacturers are now developing drivers themselves. It's just a shame that they often just release them via the Internet only and don't ship them on a CD with the Windows drivers that come with the hardware itself.
They may not be available to the general public yet, but these guys have actually played with the respective controllers, so it's hardly speculation, and with production lead times being what they are, they'll have been playing with actual release revisions of the hardware and not just protoypes as those who made pretty much the same comments months ago were.
Granted, if it were your mate from down the pub telling you the same thing then you'd be quite right being sceptical, but I don't think so in this case.
Not necessarily. From what I've read it's quite likely she'd have lost anyway, even if she'd turned up with a truckload of highly paid lawyers.
Not having enough money to pay for lawyers and any eventual sum awarded to the plaintiff shouldn't mean you can act unlawfully and get away with it.
It would appear that these comments were very specifically targetted.
I don't believe she did care about the money, she was simply doing what she had to in able to clear her name and reputation.
Whether she was guilty of defamation or not, the defendant brought this whole legal situation upon herself by way of her actions.
I don't think defending yourself and business against defamatory comments counts as a personal obsession.
Don't instantly jump to the defense of the underdog here, money or no money, hurricane victim or not, it's entirely possible that she has been rightly punished here.
The courts costs will have been paid for by the plaintiff, so it wasn't a waste of taxpayer's money at all. And there was obviously enough evidence presented to convince the court that the defendent had behaved illegally.
I'd say if anything, that the lesson to be leaned here is that not having enough money to pay such an award isn't a way of avoiding legal action if you comit a crime.
If I were to go going round saying that a major international bank are fraudsters with intent of punishing them for charging me when I went overdrawn, then I'll get sued. I'd deserve it. It'd be entirely my own stupid fault, and not having any money to pay whatever they were awarded wouldn't save me.
Of course she wants the publicity - she wants to clear her name, and needs to do it publically.
I'm sure you'd see things very differently if someone started an Internet campaign accusing you of being a paedophile, especially if they were targetting these comments at the parents of children at the local junior school where your own kids study. My guess is that would motivate you to do something, and you'd not just sit back and consider it reasonable comment or an acceptable freedom of speech.
Assuming of course that you aren't a paedophile, you'd want to defend yourself and counter these accusations. If the person spreading these untruths was persistent and uncooperative, then eventually you'd be left with very few options other than taking legal action. It would be about clearing your name, and not about getting large sums of cash from someone, so I'm sure you'd carry on even if you knew your accuser had no money. Maybe your accuser was even thinking that having no money would stop them being sued in the first place, who knows?
This case has very little to do with freedom of speech. If you write something down, whether it's on paper or on the Internet (which has the potential to do *way* more damage) you potentially leave yourself open to libel. It's been proven in a court of law that this woman's comments amounted to libel, and she is being punished for them. She's brought it upon herself, and not just been a victim of someone who simply took a dislike to her.
Everyone seems to be assuming had the defendant made it to court, then it would have made a difference to the outcome. But with such a large award being made, I'm guessing that it was a very obvious case of wrong-doing, and the outcome would probably have been the same.
The award figure may seem stupidly high, but we don't know all the details and evidence presented, or the actual damage done to this woman's business and reputation as a result of the campaign. That said, it was also well known that if the case *was* won, there'd be little or no money actaully paid over anyway, so there is always the possibility that the award was high to prove a point rather than being a realistic figure, but we simply don't know.
Lets hope they make plenty of these available - Mayhem In Monsterland, Creatures II, Paradroid, Sanxion (they'll need to somehow make sure you can hear the loading music), Wizball, Apple Cider Spider, Archon, Thunderbirds (the original Firebird one), Monty On The Run, Ghostbusters, Impossible Mission, IK+, Sentinel, Spy vs Spy (the Island one), H.E.R.O., Aztec Challenge and Thrust. I'd buy them all, and presumably they'll only be a few GBP each too.
Think I've just gone from my plan of picking up a Wii when I'm in my local Game and can just grab it from the shelf, to pre-ordering.
Unfortunately, everyone must have been rushing to try and get a physical copy at the pre-order price, and the webshop's been closed due to the heavy traffic.
Picture the scene, two Sony PR guys Joe and Bob are walking along the corridor and into one of the rooms in the engineering department:
Joe: "We have a problem."
Bob: "We have lots of problems, which one specifically."
Joe: "You know, the PS3 one."
Bob: "Ah, yeah. I was thinking that we could maybe start shouting about how the Wii is going to be a little more expensive than people were hoping. That might make us feel a bit better."
Joe: "I was thinking that too, but I just wish we could find something newsworthy and positive that we could spoon feed the press. You know, the tabloids that have no real idea about tech. Something that would make a good headline. Something involving babies, or cute animals, or people who are ill, and something that makes shelling out $600 for a games console when people are starving in many areas of the world, seem like a positive and socially responsible thing to do."
Bob: "How on earth are we going to do that? That just smacks of effort, and you know that anytime we try stuff it just goes horribly wrong. We end up making people hate us, and I've come to realise that it's just best we don't do anything else ever again. I say we just go throw rocks at the ducks in the park again. That was fun."
Joe: "Hey look at Bill, he's mesmerised. What's that on his screen?"
Bill: "Oh, hi guys. I'm just looking at this protein molecule rotating slowly on my monitor."
Bob: "Hey, that's purdy"
Joe: "What's it all about?"
Bill: "Well, you know SETI@home, well this is pretty much the same thing, but with fewer aliens and more proteins. You can download it for free, and whilst the only reason I have it is for the pretty pictures it makes on my screen, it's supposed to be helping clever people off somewhere understand proteins, and maybe help to one day cure some disease or something."
Bob: "Yeah, it is pretty."
Joe: "Hold on! I've got it!"
Bill: "What?"
Joe: "Well, ideally we need something that we haven't had to develop ourselves, 'cause, you know, we tend to screw up pretty much everything we touch these days."
Bob: "Aha."
Joe: "Well, we haven't developed this, and this is like, helping the world become a better place or something."
Bob: "Okay. Your point being?"
Joe: "We could hitch a ride on the development and infrastructure hard work put in by these guys, compile a version for Cell, ship it with the PS3 and get press release out saying we're saving the planet. And children, and animals."
Bill: "But, you'd have to keep the thing on 24 hours a day, and that would actually be damaging the planet by consuming large amounts of electricity."
Joe: "Shut up you and go get the coffees in."
Bill: "OK."
Joe: "Anyway, as I was saying........."
Yup, you're absolutely right, we want quality entertainment, however what Sony seem to be preparing to offer us is some overpriced, overhyped, problem ridden piece of hardware, which is hedging its bets on at least two seriously risky components - BluRay and Cell - which may well crash and burn, and have to compete with a number of perfectly viable alternatives with major industry backing.
We've got the Xbox360 in our hands, so no risk there. You know what it does and you either want it or you don't.
There's now so much information, so many good reviews, and so much anticipation for the Wii, that in combination with the low price point and guaranteed exclusive titles, mean Nintendo and its potential customers are on very solid ground indeed.
Sony have a lot of problems to overcome right now bringing the PS3 to market, and as far as I can see, they've brought it all upon themselves. Forget fanboyism and infighting, this is out and out ridicule.
Entertainment - yes. Paying good money and still having to cross your fingers and hope that luck is on your side and your new console isn't going to be a major disapointment, that it will have decent games that are in some way better than those released for a console retailing at half the price, and that it won't end up being just a box full of expensive proprietary hardware with no future - no thank you.
Aye, fair comment.
....to find some good news when they're making a big thing about being able to your old PS2 memory cards. Especially when you consider that you need to buy an adapter, and that you can't use the data on the card as such, only a virtual version of it copied to the machine's HD. Therefore what this *actually* means that you in fact *can't* use your old cards, you can only convert the data, assuming you're prepared to shell out for another piece of optional hardware, and I dread to think how much these adapters are going to cost.
This is hardly a major positive for the PS3, but they're trying desperately to dressing it up as one.
If you've got a memory card with game data on, then I'd say it's more than a little likely that you've also got a PS2. Why not just save yourself the effort (and additional cost) and run your old saved games on that?
People don't tend to get genuinely enthusiastic about such thing unless there's a good reason, and I have to say that I have a similar level of enthusiasm for Python, although it's much less sexual than you are suggesting.
I've no need for such a framework myself, but out of general curiosity I've had a good look at what it offers, and it does indeed appear to be a good fit to make light work of some very common web application development requirements.
Because most of the other bindings I've seen are pretty simple wrappers, and often direct tranlsations of the C++ library, you should just grab yourself a copy of the original wxWidgets book, which has been around now for a year or so:
1 /qid=1152602802/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-8482942-0491367?i e=UTF8.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0131473816/sr=8-
It's very comprehensive, well written, and even for wxPython, which at times tends to do things a little differently, I was happily using this until a couple of months ago when my copy of the wxPython book reviewed here arrived.