It's kind of ironic that SQL won't run on Vista when Vista was originally slated to have a file system BASED ON SQL. They must have had some serious issues with that file system:)
Not only did they fuck up with EQ, but I think what they did with Star Wars Galaxies is an even more glaring error on their part. Is there a more well known brand name than Star Wars? If SWG has been less ambitious in its design and more focused on fun and content, it would have easily eclipsed WoW's subscribership, particularly considering that Lucas was putting out EPS1,2 and 3 right at the time when SWG should have been riding the wave of Star Wars awareness. It was an interesting game in the begining being skill based and all but it was buggy and difficult to maintain. It eventually collapsed under it's own weight and got scaled back massively to the point that the setting was the same but the gameplay was COMPLETELY different from when it first launched. Not a good way to hang onto their already dwindling subscriber base. Seriouly though, SOE certainly has the technical expertise to handle a game as big as WoW and they've come into contact with the licenses that have the mass awareness. I think that it's really just a matter of time before they have a WoW competitor. YES, SOE has a terrible reputation but that rep is limited to the gamer community. WoW sized numbers of players would drown out the anti SOE crowd. Except on the message boards of course:)
Marvel Comics and DC Comics are both developing MMOs (independantly of course). One of them could provide the magical combonation of mainstream gameplay and a high profile license. Either of them are much bigger than World of Warcraft in terms of name recognition although comic book based themes might work against them a bit:)
Blizzard has been really lax in adding new content, and fixing bugs. If they are going to average a major update once every 2 years, customers will start to leave for other games.
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What amount of new content would they need to provide to keep you happy? They average a major patch about every 2 months and those patches add new dungeons, world events, equipment, and improvements to one or two classes. It's not like they've added nothing to the game because they've been laboring away at The Burning Crusade.
I don't see any problem for this device to have the range of several train cars.
Ever been on a commuter train car? They're a big tin can. Sometimes cell phone reception is an issue. "several" train cars range woul dbe impressive but not likely. "To the other end of the train car" would probably be more realistic and adequate.
I have to say that I like the idea of being able to mobile DJ to people around me or listen in on their broadcasts if only for the random entertainment value. As long as it doesn't significantly impact battery life that is:)
- I don't see how the case you linked to supports your argument. In that case, the government issued a subpeona to a bank to obtain a customer's financial records and the customer attempted to prevent the bank from handing them over by sighting prevous case law. The court ruled against their arguement. Note the presence of a subpeona. This is indicates due process and is exactly what the Bush administration is NOT doing in the case of this financial records database.
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"If you are going to be such a smartass that you won't even read a byline, I can't help you. The article was an AP story carried by Fox. AP is of course left-leaning (by American political standards). The reality is that several congressmen who are on their respective intel committees did call the newspapers asking them not to run the story (I actually saw this on a news report).
Hey, you sighted the article, not me. I searched for references to congressmen trying to intervene and came up empty. Your version of reality is, as yet, unsubstantiated. Whether or not the AP is left leanng is debatable, but even if they are, that does not make what they've written here automatically false. I sighted seperate 2 examples of Bush agents trying to kill the story, you've sighted exactly none.
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Again, if you can't see the irony in placing a privacy right (nowhere articulated in the Constitution) above the very property right the privacy concerns (clearly articulated in the Constitution) then I can't help you. That the left distrusts the government completely, except to take away and redistribute my property is another irony that you may fail to grasp.
Again though, whether you like it or not, it's still an apples and oranges scenario. To pass a tax, that tax is at least examined and signed off on by congress and the President before it goes into effect. It's that checks and ballances thing that Bush finds so constraining. Those bank records belong to someone, if the government has good reason to look at them, they need to let someone know. NOT necessarily their owner, but someone with some oversight power (like the FISA court for example) needs to OK it.
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As far as warrants go, the Fourth Amendment doesn't say all searchs have to have warrants, just that searches not be unreasonable. I'll bet the framers would be all for intercepting the international calls of enemies of the Republic without warrants (the Clinton adminstration actually did searches without warrants, in the FBI spy case). Perhaps liberals believe that we would need a warrant to listen to a call Adolf Hitler made to agents in America in 1944? This is a war, not a law enforcemnent investigation people!
You can "bet" all you like about the framers' intentions and you may even be right. I'll bet that the framers' heads would spin over the idea of electronic banking but it didn't exist at the time so we, or Congress, the Prez, and the Courts are left to determine how the contitution is applied to them but warrants, or at least meeting the criteria of a warrant, are the standard on how evidence is collected in investigation like these. Remember FISA courts have been in place since the late 70's to handle situations like this, only now FISA isn't good enough for Bush and he doesn't care to work with Congress to retool it for our new post 9/11 era.
BTW, Hitler? come on, you can do better than that. Taking the most extreme example you can think of to support your argument doesn't speak at all to the situation at hand.
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Well, not sure what eveidence you have of this, since every intelligence agency in the world thought Saddam had WMD, and since Saddam himself was doing everything he could to make the world think he had them. When the CIA Director, a Clinton appointee tells the President that WMDs are "a slam dunk," you can't blame Bush for lying. But that's the lefty mantra - don't let th
Yes, the courts have said that many kinds of evidence collection are legal, as long as warrants are obtained before or sometime after the collection of evidence has taken place. Geez, the FISA court will even grant warrants AFTER THE FACT as long as the search and collecton is carried out in a way that meets the criteria needed to obtain the warrant in the first place.
In the end, like Mark Felt informing on Nixon, these leaks wouldn't occur and people would question these prorams if Bush was trusted and the programs were carried out in a fashion that was legally justifiable and above suspicion.
It is well-settled in constitutional law that a warrant is not required to obtain bank records. Your post is completely ignorant to this fact.
Someone may wish to inform congress of this fact because several congressmen, including one quoted in the fair and ballanced (tm) Fox News article you link to below. I'd like to see some evidence that my bank records are not subject to the same protections that other evidence collected against me would be. I'm not saying you're not correct but not even Stuart Levy mentions that fact when defending this program. If what you say is true, that would be an easy trump card for them to play in defending this program.
Funny how the anti-Bush left has no problems with my tax dollars being taken away by the government and redistributed. It's just my money's privacy that they care about? So my privacy interest in my finances is more important than my property interest therein? What nonsense.
There is not just a conern about "your money's privacy" there is a concern about your and my privacy in total. Levying a tax is not the same as snooping through your financial transactions and it's very prejudicial to suggest otherwise. These two things are apples and oranges.
And it has been reported that Congress did, in fact, have oversight of this program. AP reports that Congress was briefed. In fact, several members of Congress called newspapers to plead with them not to publish it (do a simple Google news search for crissakes). Seems the members of Congress aren't too quick to stand up and admit to being briefed until they do some polling on it. - Victory is born of 1000 fathers; defeat is but an orphan.
Yes, I see that congress was informed. In the article you site, it says: "He (Snow) said Congress had been briefed on the program."
Note that it doesn't say what agency of with authority over the White House is checking to see that they're carrying out this program in a manner that is contitutionally compliant because, in this case, briefed means that the White House is telling them what they're doing but no one is able to check their statements against the facts, just like in the domestic wiretapping program. Briefed does not equal oversite. Oversite means that someone in charge is watching and verifying they're doing their jobs properly and honestly.
Also, I'd like to point out that I did do a Google search on the topic. I was entirely unable to find any statements leading me to believe that any members of congress asked the press not to run the story. I was, however, able to find plenty of ink about how the White House asked them not to run the story. From the very article you pointed us to:
"Treasury Department officials spent 90 minutes Thursday meeting with the newspaper's reporters, stressing the legality of the program and urging the paper to not publish a story on the program, McManus said in a telephone interview.
The New York Times and Los Angeles Times quoted their editors as defending their decision to publish the financial data tracking effort despite being asked by the administration to withhold publication." http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,200733,00.html
Last I cheked, neither Treasury Secretary John Snow nor "Treasury Department officials" were congressmen or agents answering directly to congress.
I seriously think some of you either 1) want to lose this struggle against terror or 2) are incredibly naive about the fact that al Qaeda wants to nuke your as
"Do your reasearch and don't believe everything you read in the papers. This program DID have congretional oversight and is perfectly leagal as a practical extention of the Patriot Act."
Show me the article that verifies this claim. The interview I heard yesterday with Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levy mentioned nothing of the sort. This program, like a startling number of Bush's post 9/11 "anti terrorist" intelligence initiatives, has NO court oversight. Levy described a situation in which SWIFT agents and "an outside auditing firm" could monitor database searches in real time and could halt the search if they felt it was suspect or needed further justification from the government. That's it. If your name is on a list of suspected terrorist / collaborators, correctly or incorrectly, the the White House has given itself the privledge of sifting through your financial data. And your phone calls. And god knows what else we don't know about. And it all happens without the courts being aware.
Who puts a stop to programs like this if it's being abused? The "gang of 8" senators that had been informed about the domestic wiretapping program have admitted that the reports they get about that program don't go into any great detail. Are we just supposed to trust the Bush White House to say, "Gee, we've sepped over the line here, please shut us down?" These are the same people that selectively chose intellegence reports that supported their desire to invade Iraq. Once they got their, they retroactively changes their justifications for being there and then capped it all by saying "Well, is it a bad thing that Sahdam is gone? Would you prefer he be in power?"
This is a democracy with explicit checks and ballances between the three branches of government setup to prevent precisely what is occuring. Why should we trust him to be the final arbitar of what programs are legal and which would be overstepping his bounds within the law when he and his team have shown such a knack for the creative justification of every questionable looking program they've enacted that has come to light?
[blockquote] Why don't companies announce immediately when they have been forced to do something by the government against their will (like Google)?[/blockquote]
Given the Bush administration's behavior regarding these sorts of activities, likely the companies are threatened with federal prosecution if they reveal the attempt because it would the "terrorists" hints about how we're trying to track them down. It's more than convenient that these hints to the "terrorists" are also hints to the public that the White House is trampling our civil rights and evading oversight YET AGAIN.
Even if Blu-Ray fails miserably, the fact that the drive is in the ps3 still gives developers a -lot- more room to work with. I've gone over this with a few people, I'm not convinced Sony is using this as a Blu-Ray DVD player vehicle for market penetration or anything like that. I think they were on-board with Blu-Ray and want to take advantage of their new format's obscene storage space to give themselves room to work for the next 5 years or so. Meaning if XB360 decides to add a HD-DVD add-on developers can't -count on- your system having it, so they still need to code for the lowest common denominator, and put their games on DVD, meanwhile Sony will have a lot more room built in standard, so their coders can constantly count on having that extra room..
Sure, a BR DVD player is a great bonus, but I'm not convinced it was the primary reason for their decision to use a BR drive.
I might be inclined to agree except that Sony has been touting the PS3 as the cheapest BR player on the market and calling it a good value for that alone. I would hope that Sony would know that NO ONE bought their DVD player because of the (then) massive storage capacity of DVDs. They bought them because they offered massive picture and audio quality upgrades compared to VHS and they were reasonably priced, even at launch they weren't outrageously expensive.
XB360 devs could very easily be sure that the targeted users had HD-DVDs by simply making the game Hd-DVD only. Just like for the console it self, good games will drive the peripheral sales. If some compelling titles that require HD size storage capacity hit the market, the demand for the drives will follow.
And Sony could simply Add an HD-DVD drive if BR fails, but if not, then you already have your Blu Ray player without another upgrade/bulky attachment.
Yup, that's true. But why would I be down with paying ANOTHER $200 for an HD add-on for the PS3 when I already paid at least $200 more than every console on the market for the privledge of getting the then cheapest BR player on the market, a premium feature I couldn't opt out of and is now (nearly) useless? I could have just gone out and bought a 360 and eventually paid the same price for a player that I know will be worth something.
It doesn't matter to me who wins in the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle. Why? Because regular DVD's look great!
THIS is what bugs me most about the PS3 and SOny's BR bundling. Is ANYONE clammoring for a higher quality replacement for DVD? DVD hasn't been around all that long and it looks great. It took off because the players started off at a fairly reasonable price and they looked worlds better than VHS. I can't imaging that either HD-DVD or BR will be an improvement of that magnitude.
Sony isn't doing anything but boxing out the younger end of the Playstation market by pricing them out of a PS3.
HOw is it any more proprietary then Toshiba's HD-DVD (or whomever the designing company is)? This isn't a rhetorical question, I just don't know how.
Both techs seem to be upgrades with associated licensing fees for the tech. Do DVD's lack any licensing fee's to whomever originally designed it?
Well, it's a little flabbergasting that Sony is pushing yet another home grown format after a history of repeated failures. Frankly, the Playstation is soooo important to Sony that I'm surprised they'd risk it to establish a new format that people aren't asking for. Ars Technica posted a good article that basically attributed the price difference between the PS3 and the XBOX360 to the BR player inside. That's a pretty crazy thing if you think about it: they're risking the most successful console franchise in history solely to force an unrequested technology on their customers. Say what you want about Microsoft, but they made the right decision here by making the obvious decision. They're giving people what they want and making it possible to add on HD-DVD later as an option if their customers would like it. If HD-DVD doesn't take off, MS could always produce a BR add on or notBR market didn't take off either. Sony is doing nothing more than taking advantage of Playstation's dedicated fans.
UMD can only be played on the PSP, and only on the PSP's display.
Blu-ray Discs can be played on any BD player (when they're shortly available), and on any display. (With varying resolutions.)
Any attempt to compare the two is either misinformed or biased.
The comparison is completely valid in its point: studios will support what sells. If BL doesn't get traction, studios won't produce content for it. If the PSP sold like Gameboys, UMD movies would probably still be made by all of the original supports and other come latelies. Support now / = support later.
Whether or not the test is dubious is debatable, but the test you suggest doesn't have much application to the average user. How many FPS Far Cry turns out on a Core Duo on Windows XP is much more meaningful to Joe Six Pack when he wants to see which gives him more bang for his buck.
I have to disagree. The BTO comparison is valid because most people aren't going to place an order for a new MacBook and then take it straight to another computer store to get upgrades installed. Even if your assertion is true, it doesn't change the fact that there is a significant price premium placed on the COLOR of the CASE. The same upgrades in either machine will still cost you the same amount of proportion of extra $$$ whether or not you get them from Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
It's kind of ironic that SQL won't run on Vista when Vista was originally slated to have a file system BASED ON SQL. They must have had some serious issues with that file system :)
I like the warning that they can ONLY ship them via UPS ground as they mess with aircraft navigational systems.
This website would be great if you were a high school science teacher but it looks like they sell a lot of potentially scary stuff...
That website looks cheap enough to be a fake but extensive enough to be real.
Is that a sister site to The Wall Street Journal or the Gartner Group? :)
Not only did they fuck up with EQ, but I think what they did with Star Wars Galaxies is an even more glaring error on their part. Is there a more well known brand name than Star Wars? If SWG has been less ambitious in its design and more focused on fun and content, it would have easily eclipsed WoW's subscribership, particularly considering that Lucas was putting out EPS1,2 and 3 right at the time when SWG should have been riding the wave of Star Wars awareness. It was an interesting game in the begining being skill based and all but it was buggy and difficult to maintain. It eventually collapsed under it's own weight and got scaled back massively to the point that the setting was the same but the gameplay was COMPLETELY different from when it first launched. Not a good way to hang onto their already dwindling subscriber base. Seriouly though, SOE certainly has the technical expertise to handle a game as big as WoW and they've come into contact with the licenses that have the mass awareness. I think that it's really just a matter of time before they have a WoW competitor. YES, SOE has a terrible reputation but that rep is limited to the gamer community. WoW sized numbers of players would drown out the anti SOE crowd. Except on the message boards of course :)
Marvel Comics and DC Comics are both developing MMOs (independantly of course). One of them could provide the magical combonation of mainstream gameplay and a high profile license. Either of them are much bigger than World of Warcraft in terms of name recognition although comic book based themes might work against them a bit :)
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What amount of new content would they need to provide to keep you happy? They average a major patch about every 2 months and those patches add new dungeons, world events, equipment, and improvements to one or two classes. It's not like they've added nothing to the game because they've been laboring away at The Burning Crusade.
Ever been on a commuter train car? They're a big tin can. Sometimes cell phone reception is an issue. "several" train cars range woul dbe impressive but not likely. "To the other end of the train car" would probably be more realistic and adequate.
I have to say that I like the idea of being able to mobile DJ to people around me or listen in on their broadcasts if only for the random entertainment value. As long as it doesn't significantly impact battery life that is
It's a remarkable testament to the state of our society today that the Clinton's boner smooching scandal seems so quaint now.
I agree. Who the hell sells a product by saying "we're as good or worse than our competitor"?
As a Fox News fact checker?
- I don't see how the case you linked to supports your argument. In that case, the government issued a subpeona to a bank to obtain a customer's financial records and the customer attempted to prevent the bank from handing them over by sighting prevous case law. The court ruled against their arguement. Note the presence of a subpeona. This is indicates due process and is exactly what the Bush administration is NOT doing in the case of this financial records database.
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Hey, you sighted the article, not me. I searched for references to congressmen trying to intervene and came up empty. Your version of reality is, as yet, unsubstantiated. Whether or not the AP is left leanng is debatable, but even if they are, that does not make what they've written here automatically false. I sighted seperate 2 examples of Bush agents trying to kill the story, you've sighted exactly none.
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Again though, whether you like it or not, it's still an apples and oranges scenario. To pass a tax, that tax is at least examined and signed off on by congress and the President before it goes into effect. It's that checks and ballances thing that Bush finds so constraining. Those bank records belong to someone, if the government has good reason to look at them, they need to let someone know. NOT necessarily their owner, but someone with some oversight power (like the FISA court for example) needs to OK it.
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You can "bet" all you like about the framers' intentions and you may even be right. I'll bet that the framers' heads would spin over the idea of electronic banking but it didn't exist at the time so we, or Congress, the Prez, and the Courts are left to determine how the contitution is applied to them but warrants, or at least meeting the criteria of a warrant, are the standard on how evidence is collected in investigation like these. Remember FISA courts have been in place since the late 70's to handle situations like this, only now FISA isn't good enough for Bush and he doesn't care to work with Congress to retool it for our new post 9/11 era.
BTW, Hitler? come on, you can do better than that. Taking the most extreme example you can think of to support your argument doesn't speak at all to the situation at hand.
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Yes, the courts have said that many kinds of evidence collection are legal, as long as warrants are obtained before or sometime after the collection of evidence has taken place. Geez, the FISA court will even grant warrants AFTER THE FACT as long as the search and collecton is carried out in a way that meets the criteria needed to obtain the warrant in the first place.
In the end, like Mark Felt informing on Nixon, these leaks wouldn't occur and people would question these prorams if Bush was trusted and the programs were carried out in a fashion that was legally justifiable and above suspicion.
Someone may wish to inform congress of this fact because several congressmen, including one quoted in the fair and ballanced (tm) Fox News article you link to below. I'd like to see some evidence that my bank records are not subject to the same protections that other evidence collected against me would be. I'm not saying you're not correct but not even Stuart Levy mentions that fact when defending this program. If what you say is true, that would be an easy trump card for them to play in defending this program.
There is not just a conern about "your money's privacy" there is a concern about your and my privacy in total. Levying a tax is not the same as snooping through your financial transactions and it's very prejudicial to suggest otherwise. These two things are apples and oranges.
Yes, I see that congress was informed. In the article you site, it says:
"He (Snow) said Congress had been briefed on the program."
Note that it doesn't say what agency of with authority over the White House is checking to see that they're carrying out this program in a manner that is contitutionally compliant because, in this case, briefed means that the White House is telling them what they're doing but no one is able to check their statements against the facts, just like in the domestic wiretapping program. Briefed does not equal oversite. Oversite means that someone in charge is watching and verifying they're doing their jobs properly and honestly.
Also, I'd like to point out that I did do a Google search on the topic. I was entirely unable to find any statements leading me to believe that any members of congress asked the press not to run the story. I was, however, able to find plenty of ink about how the White House asked them not to run the story. From the very article you pointed us to:
"Treasury Department officials spent 90 minutes Thursday meeting with the newspaper's reporters, stressing the legality of the program and urging the paper to not publish a story on the program, McManus said in a telephone interview.
The New York Times and Los Angeles Times quoted their editors as defending their decision to publish the financial data tracking effort despite being asked by the administration to withhold publication."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,200733,00.html
"But he (John Snow) was unhappy that the program's existence was revealed in news accounts. The Bush administration tried to talk reporters out of running the story."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5507145
Last I cheked, neither Treasury Secretary John Snow nor "Treasury Department officials" were congressmen or agents answering directly to congress.
"Do your reasearch and don't believe everything you read in the papers. This program DID have congretional oversight and is perfectly leagal as a practical extention of the Patriot Act."
Show me the article that verifies this claim. The interview I heard yesterday with Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levy mentioned nothing of the sort. This program, like a startling number of Bush's post 9/11 "anti terrorist" intelligence initiatives, has NO court oversight. Levy described a situation in which SWIFT agents and "an outside auditing firm" could monitor database searches in real time and could halt the search if they felt it was suspect or needed further justification from the government. That's it. If your name is on a list of suspected terrorist / collaborators, correctly or incorrectly, the the White House has given itself the privledge of sifting through your financial data. And your phone calls. And god knows what else we don't know about. And it all happens without the courts being aware.
Who puts a stop to programs like this if it's being abused? The "gang of 8" senators that had been informed about the domestic wiretapping program have admitted that the reports they get about that program don't go into any great detail. Are we just supposed to trust the Bush White House to say, "Gee, we've sepped over the line here, please shut us down?" These are the same people that selectively chose intellegence reports that supported their desire to invade Iraq. Once they got their, they retroactively changes their justifications for being there and then capped it all by saying "Well, is it a bad thing that Sahdam is gone? Would you prefer he be in power?"
This is a democracy with explicit checks and ballances between the three branches of government setup to prevent precisely what is occuring. Why should we trust him to be the final arbitar of what programs are legal and which would be overstepping his bounds within the law when he and his team have shown such a knack for the creative justification of every questionable looking program they've enacted that has come to light?
[blockquote] Why don't companies announce immediately when they have been forced to do something by the government against their will (like Google)?[/blockquote]
Given the Bush administration's behavior regarding these sorts of activities, likely the companies are threatened with federal prosecution if they reveal the attempt because it would the "terrorists" hints about how we're trying to track them down. It's more than convenient that these hints to the "terrorists" are also hints to the public that the White House is trampling our civil rights and evading oversight YET AGAIN.
I might be inclined to agree except that Sony has been touting the PS3 as the cheapest BR player on the market and calling it a good value for that alone. I would hope that Sony would know that NO ONE bought their DVD player because of the (then) massive storage capacity of DVDs. They bought them because they offered massive picture and audio quality upgrades compared to VHS and they were reasonably priced, even at launch they weren't outrageously expensive.
XB360 devs could very easily be sure that the targeted users had HD-DVDs by simply making the game Hd-DVD only. Just like for the console it self, good games will drive the peripheral sales. If some compelling titles that require HD size storage capacity hit the market, the demand for the drives will follow.
Yup, that's true. But why would I be down with paying ANOTHER $200 for an HD add-on for the PS3 when I already paid at least $200 more than every console on the market for the privledge of getting the then cheapest BR player on the market, a premium feature I couldn't opt out of and is now (nearly) useless? I could have just gone out and bought a 360 and eventually paid the same price for a player that I know will be worth something.
THIS is what bugs me most about the PS3 and SOny's BR bundling. Is ANYONE clammoring for a higher quality replacement for DVD? DVD hasn't been around all that long and it looks great. It took off because the players started off at a fairly reasonable price and they looked worlds better than VHS. I can't imaging that either HD-DVD or BR will be an improvement of that magnitude.
Sony isn't doing anything but boxing out the younger end of the Playstation market by pricing them out of a PS3.
Well, it's a little flabbergasting that Sony is pushing yet another home grown format after a history of repeated failures. Frankly, the Playstation is soooo important to Sony that I'm surprised they'd risk it to establish a new format that people aren't asking for. Ars Technica posted a good article that basically attributed the price difference between the PS3 and the XBOX360 to the BR player inside. That's a pretty crazy thing if you think about it: they're risking the most successful console franchise in history solely to force an unrequested technology on their customers. Say what you want about Microsoft, but they made the right decision here by making the obvious decision. They're giving people what they want and making it possible to add on HD-DVD later as an option if their customers would like it. If HD-DVD doesn't take off, MS could always produce a BR add on or notBR market didn't take off either. Sony is doing nothing more than taking advantage of Playstation's dedicated fans.
The comparison is completely valid in its point: studios will support what sells. If BL doesn't get traction, studios won't produce content for it. If the PSP sold like Gameboys, UMD movies would probably still be made by all of the original supports and other come latelies. Support now / = support later.
Whether or not the test is dubious is debatable, but the test you suggest doesn't have much application to the average user. How many FPS Far Cry turns out on a Core Duo on Windows XP is much more meaningful to Joe Six Pack when he wants to see which gives him more bang for his buck.
Read up the thread a little. You can up the config on the middle tier MacBook to match the Blackbook's spec AND IT'S AT LEAST $150 MORE EXPENSIVE.
Congrats, you are "most" Apple users then. BTO costs aren't the issue, the steep premium for cosmetic features is.
I have to disagree. The BTO comparison is valid because most people aren't going to place an order for a new MacBook and then take it straight to another computer store to get upgrades installed. Even if your assertion is true, it doesn't change the fact that there is a significant price premium placed on the COLOR of the CASE. The same upgrades in either machine will still cost you the same amount of proportion of extra $$$ whether or not you get them from Apple.