Ballmer is trolling. It's what he does. The only difference between Ballmer and some dumbass AC here on Slashdot is that being an asshole made Ballmer a billionaire.
That said, yes, a big part of the price of an Apple is the brand. So what? That's valuable to some people, and it has been very profitable for Apple.
If it wasn't still a problem, nobody would still bring it up. It wasn't unusual for my work laptop to blue screen when I woke it from suspend in the mornings, or just reboot outright. This machine was sold with Vista Business. Since putting Ubuntu on it, the problem has disappeared.
You're not alone. I read recently that Apple is among the worst major PC manufacturers in terms of hardware reliability. The OS is great, but I'd never buy one of the computers. I guess it's a good thing you can build Hackintoshes now.
No, the third is free because regardless of whether she got it free, the first two would have cost the same. They may have overcharged for those two, but they would still be overcharging if you didn't get the third one for no additional cost. That makes the third one free.
Here's some simple math for you in case you don't get it. If 5 + 5 = 5 + 5 + x = 10, solve for x.
I don't know if I would say "Pro-Confederate", since the Unification War wasn't about slavery (and there are indications in the show that slavery continued well after the Alliance victory on outlying worlds), but more anti-imperialism and with a very strong slant towards libertarianism. I didn't realise how similar it was to Heinlein's work until I read the frontier stories in Time Enough For Love, and that's definitely worth a read if you're a Firefly fan. You can skip the last section of the book, where Lazarus Long travels back in time. It gets a little weird.
Also, the anti-Christian angle is pretty much just Mal, and I'm sure it would have been covered in later episodes. If you watch the beginning of the pilot, you'll notice him take a crucifix necklace and kiss it, IIRC. This indicates that he was probably religious and lost his faith when they lost the war. Joss Whedon is a noted atheist, but he's always come across fairly liberal and non-preachy about it. In contrast to the captain's angry atheism, Inara was a Buddhist, and there was also Book, the preacher with the shady past. Too bad we never got to see their stories play out.
But yeah, there's a lot more depth there than is to be expected from Fox. It's no wonder they canned it.
I use both, and while Mandriva is very good, I'd still give the nod to Ubuntu. Mandriva is probably the best distro in town for use on netbooks, though. My Eee 701 and 1000HA both run great with a full DE and compiz turned on.
I skipped straight from Gutsy to Intrepid, so I'm not totally familiar with Hardy. That said, in Intrepid, updates are basically listed by severity. Important, recommended, etc. And you can configure it to handle updates in your preferred manner, similar to Windows Update. It is, unfortunately, not in the most obvious place (in Synaptic, under Settings->Repositories->Updates tab, rather than in the Update Manager where it belongs), but you can have it install security updates without confirmation, download updates and notify you, or notify only. You can also set the schedule it uses to check for updates. I agree that it is not in the most convenient place, but once found it's no more difficult than managing Windows Update's settings.
Because Ubuntu has been the one to make the biggest strides towards user-friendliness. There are others who have come a long way in this regard as well, but Ubuntu stands at the front of the pack. It's probably the easiest to use, it has probably the largest amount of available pre-compiled software, it has a large user community. I could go on, but this is basically why Ubuntu gets the nod when people try to get newbies to try Linux. More advanced Linux users have their own personal preferences, but I don't know how many of them would put the proverbial Joe Sixpack on a Gentoo system, for example.
I have one in my side pocket most of the day, it fits fine, and they're dress slacks. I just don't put anything else in that pocket and shift it when I sit or crouch. It's a non-issue.
You've clearly never actually used one of the Nokia tablets. They're plenty usable at their size and they fit easily in a pocket. I've gotten a lot more mileage out of mine than I expected when I bought it, and it's become an indispensable tool for managing the network at work. They are, without a doubt, exactly what foxxo was asking for.
If you click the centre button on the dpad when the cursor is in a text field, it brings up a larger, more thumb-friendly on screen keyboard. Much nicer when typing more than a few words, such as for a slashdot reply.
The N800 also has the advantage of taking regular SDHC cards, rather than the miniSD used in the N810. The full size ones are cheaper, and the N800 can hold 2 of them. And they can be set up as part of the root file system, if you're technically inclined. Plus miniSD cards can be a pain to find in decent capacities, they're kind of the red-headed stepchild of the SD family.
The on screen keyboard on the N800 is not bad either. Obviously not as good as a physical kb but more than adequate. It's tough to go wrong either way, though, as they're both excellent devices. Definitely the best handhelds available for their purpose.
That's all true, but most people never used any of the capabilities of their dumbphones, save for music players and cameras. Another part of the distinction between the NA and Eurasian markets is that until fairly recently, anything you wanted to do with your phone besides talk&text cost an arm and a leg. It still does compared to Europe (the situation in Canada is especially bad), but it has improved as of late, and the iPhone has had some role in this. For example, I had a browser on my old Moto, but at around $5/MB, I was in no hurry to use it, and the screen on it was small and low-res anyway. The iPhone was obviously not first to do most of the things it does, or even the best, but when you consider the market it came into, it's not hard to see how it gained such slavish devotion. There just was not any real competition here in the consumer market at the time, and the big carriers were happy to keep it that way.
I think a big part of it is how things were in the American/Canadian phone market when the iPhone was released. In Europe and Asia, smartphones and featurephones are a lot more common. The iPhone sells respectably in those markets, but it never exploded like it did over here, mainly because it doesn't really do anything new. But over here, where dumbphones rule and the Razr was the hottest phone to come along in ages, it was like a revelation. Smartphones were mainly blocky business phones when the iPhone came along, and there wasn't really a market for high end featurephones when so many people would just get whatever decent looking LG or Moto came free with their contract. The iPhone is very much like the iPod that preceded it; nothing special in terms of features or hardware, but it's stylish, and the UI is fairly intuitive. It's so successful here because it was the first to convince North American consumers on a broad scale that they needed these features. And just like the iPod, those features were on preceding devices, and the ones to come out since have improved even further, but people will still make vague and undefined excuses for why Apple's product is superior.
If this story had come out at this time last year, I might have believed it. As it stands, I don't think Android is going to conquer much of anything. So far there have only been two phones to come from a major handset manufacturer. There are supposedly tons on the way this year from Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and others but none of them have shown anything at all yet. And on top of that, the phones to come from HTC have been pretty uninspiring. I want to see Android take off, it looks to offer just about everything I want from a phone OS, but I'm not waiting forever for there to be a handset worth owning with it. Right now, I'm planning on getting an E71, and down the road I might grab either the Omnia HD or the N86 as a second phone. Symbian/S60 isn't perfect, but it's here now, it works, and the hardware it runs on is excellent. The members of the Open Handset Alliance can't say that yet, and that's a damn shame.
Honestly, there's some pretty great Canadian TV, but it's pretty rare for it to come from the CBC. If the CBC were more like the BBC and focused on making good television that just happened to be Canadian instead of pushing some distorted vision of Canadiana on everyone, I might not be so pissed about it getting tax money.
I'm still bitter that they canned Twitch City, though.
And it's "multicultural", which makes the CBC-types feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Now if only you could find some way of making Albertans look like assholes, you could slot it between Little Mosque on the Prairie and Wild Roses and we'll have another show that nobody watches but gets government funding.
No. I worked for Microsoft tech support and I can tell you that we were not allowed to push customer issues back to the OEMs unless we could be reasonably sure that the issue was with either the hardware or something specific to the OEM's configuration. On top of that, I regularly received calls from customers who were told by HP or Dell or whoever to call MS because it wasn't an issue on their end. The OEMs may or may not offer decent Windows support, but they're under no obligation to. All of the companies involved have strict support boundaries, and if something appears to be an issue with something one of the other parties is responsible for, the support call basically ends there.
No, this is notable because it's an open admission that WinCE can't cut it.
Not really. Someone can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, development was well underway when Danger got bought by MS. That means it was likely cheaper to just continue doing what they were doing rather than scrap the work and start again using Microsoft's stuff. Not to say that something like that would have been unheard of, but it would have delayed a product that they wanted to get out the door. The real test will be whether the next iteration of this hardware runs this same OS or whether it comes with WinMo/WinCE.
Except most PC DRM schemes make it difficult to lend a friend a physical copy of the game without making them (and later, yourself when you get it back) jump through a bunch of hoops. And in some of the worse cases of DRM, it's almost immoral for you to lend it to them in the first place, knowing what kind of junk will get installed on their system with hooks deep into the kernel. They want to prevent people from just copying things outright, fine, but find a way to do it without getting in the way of all the rights we've had as a consumer that DON'T involve copyright infringement.
You know what I miss? Shareware. That seemed to work pretty good for trying out games. You got a decent chunk of the final game available for free (or close to it), and then if you wanted the full game you bought it. There was no demo, no 20 minutes of the games highlights which wind up being the best part of the full game, none of that bullshit. It was the game, and if you liked it enough to play the whole thing then you bought it. Why can't game developers go back to that model? I thought it worked pretty well. It made John Carmack & friends millionaires.
I like buying CDs for most of the reasons you listed, but honestly at this point I'm just tired of having them around. My CD collection is fucking massive and it just sits in boxes in my apartment taking up space since everything has been ripped for my convenience. I would like it if some of these music sites would start selling FLAC files, CD quality without all the bullshit.
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No they aren't. They're people, without the qualifier. Some are good, and some are bad.
Ballmer is trolling. It's what he does. The only difference between Ballmer and some dumbass AC here on Slashdot is that being an asshole made Ballmer a billionaire.
That said, yes, a big part of the price of an Apple is the brand. So what? That's valuable to some people, and it has been very profitable for Apple.
If it wasn't still a problem, nobody would still bring it up. It wasn't unusual for my work laptop to blue screen when I woke it from suspend in the mornings, or just reboot outright. This machine was sold with Vista Business. Since putting Ubuntu on it, the problem has disappeared.
You're not alone. I read recently that Apple is among the worst major PC manufacturers in terms of hardware reliability. The OS is great, but I'd never buy one of the computers. I guess it's a good thing you can build Hackintoshes now.
No, the third is free because regardless of whether she got it free, the first two would have cost the same. They may have overcharged for those two, but they would still be overcharging if you didn't get the third one for no additional cost. That makes the third one free.
Here's some simple math for you in case you don't get it.
If 5 + 5 = 5 + 5 + x = 10, solve for x.
Must be recent, because I updated Java on a machine earlier this week and it still asked about the Yahoo toolbar.
I don't know if I would say "Pro-Confederate", since the Unification War wasn't about slavery (and there are indications in the show that slavery continued well after the Alliance victory on outlying worlds), but more anti-imperialism and with a very strong slant towards libertarianism. I didn't realise how similar it was to Heinlein's work until I read the frontier stories in Time Enough For Love, and that's definitely worth a read if you're a Firefly fan. You can skip the last section of the book, where Lazarus Long travels back in time. It gets a little weird.
Also, the anti-Christian angle is pretty much just Mal, and I'm sure it would have been covered in later episodes. If you watch the beginning of the pilot, you'll notice him take a crucifix necklace and kiss it, IIRC. This indicates that he was probably religious and lost his faith when they lost the war. Joss Whedon is a noted atheist, but he's always come across fairly liberal and non-preachy about it. In contrast to the captain's angry atheism, Inara was a Buddhist, and there was also Book, the preacher with the shady past. Too bad we never got to see their stories play out.
But yeah, there's a lot more depth there than is to be expected from Fox. It's no wonder they canned it.
I use both, and while Mandriva is very good, I'd still give the nod to Ubuntu. Mandriva is probably the best distro in town for use on netbooks, though. My Eee 701 and 1000HA both run great with a full DE and compiz turned on.
I skipped straight from Gutsy to Intrepid, so I'm not totally familiar with Hardy. That said, in Intrepid, updates are basically listed by severity. Important, recommended, etc. And you can configure it to handle updates in your preferred manner, similar to Windows Update. It is, unfortunately, not in the most obvious place (in Synaptic, under Settings->Repositories->Updates tab, rather than in the Update Manager where it belongs), but you can have it install security updates without confirmation, download updates and notify you, or notify only. You can also set the schedule it uses to check for updates. I agree that it is not in the most convenient place, but once found it's no more difficult than managing Windows Update's settings.
Because Ubuntu has been the one to make the biggest strides towards user-friendliness. There are others who have come a long way in this regard as well, but Ubuntu stands at the front of the pack. It's probably the easiest to use, it has probably the largest amount of available pre-compiled software, it has a large user community. I could go on, but this is basically why Ubuntu gets the nod when people try to get newbies to try Linux. More advanced Linux users have their own personal preferences, but I don't know how many of them would put the proverbial Joe Sixpack on a Gentoo system, for example.
I have one in my side pocket most of the day, it fits fine, and they're dress slacks. I just don't put anything else in that pocket and shift it when I sit or crouch. It's a non-issue.
You've clearly never actually used one of the Nokia tablets. They're plenty usable at their size and they fit easily in a pocket. I've gotten a lot more mileage out of mine than I expected when I bought it, and it's become an indispensable tool for managing the network at work. They are, without a doubt, exactly what foxxo was asking for.
If you click the centre button on the dpad when the cursor is in a text field, it brings up a larger, more thumb-friendly on screen keyboard. Much nicer when typing more than a few words, such as for a slashdot reply.
The N800 also has the advantage of taking regular SDHC cards, rather than the miniSD used in the N810. The full size ones are cheaper, and the N800 can hold 2 of them. And they can be set up as part of the root file system, if you're technically inclined. Plus miniSD cards can be a pain to find in decent capacities, they're kind of the red-headed stepchild of the SD family.
:)
The on screen keyboard on the N800 is not bad either. Obviously not as good as a physical kb but more than adequate. It's tough to go wrong either way, though, as they're both excellent devices. Definitely the best handhelds available for their purpose.
(Typed out on my N800.
That's all true, but most people never used any of the capabilities of their dumbphones, save for music players and cameras. Another part of the distinction between the NA and Eurasian markets is that until fairly recently, anything you wanted to do with your phone besides talk&text cost an arm and a leg. It still does compared to Europe (the situation in Canada is especially bad), but it has improved as of late, and the iPhone has had some role in this. For example, I had a browser on my old Moto, but at around $5/MB, I was in no hurry to use it, and the screen on it was small and low-res anyway. The iPhone was obviously not first to do most of the things it does, or even the best, but when you consider the market it came into, it's not hard to see how it gained such slavish devotion. There just was not any real competition here in the consumer market at the time, and the big carriers were happy to keep it that way.
I think a big part of it is how things were in the American/Canadian phone market when the iPhone was released. In Europe and Asia, smartphones and featurephones are a lot more common. The iPhone sells respectably in those markets, but it never exploded like it did over here, mainly because it doesn't really do anything new. But over here, where dumbphones rule and the Razr was the hottest phone to come along in ages, it was like a revelation. Smartphones were mainly blocky business phones when the iPhone came along, and there wasn't really a market for high end featurephones when so many people would just get whatever decent looking LG or Moto came free with their contract. The iPhone is very much like the iPod that preceded it; nothing special in terms of features or hardware, but it's stylish, and the UI is fairly intuitive. It's so successful here because it was the first to convince North American consumers on a broad scale that they needed these features. And just like the iPod, those features were on preceding devices, and the ones to come out since have improved even further, but people will still make vague and undefined excuses for why Apple's product is superior.
If this story had come out at this time last year, I might have believed it. As it stands, I don't think Android is going to conquer much of anything. So far there have only been two phones to come from a major handset manufacturer. There are supposedly tons on the way this year from Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and others but none of them have shown anything at all yet. And on top of that, the phones to come from HTC have been pretty uninspiring. I want to see Android take off, it looks to offer just about everything I want from a phone OS, but I'm not waiting forever for there to be a handset worth owning with it. Right now, I'm planning on getting an E71, and down the road I might grab either the Omnia HD or the N86 as a second phone. Symbian/S60 isn't perfect, but it's here now, it works, and the hardware it runs on is excellent. The members of the Open Handset Alliance can't say that yet, and that's a damn shame.
You're wasting your effort. His mind is made up. If you doubt it, look at his sig.
Honestly, there's some pretty great Canadian TV, but it's pretty rare for it to come from the CBC. If the CBC were more like the BBC and focused on making good television that just happened to be Canadian instead of pushing some distorted vision of Canadiana on everyone, I might not be so pissed about it getting tax money.
I'm still bitter that they canned Twitch City, though.
And it's "multicultural", which makes the CBC-types feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Now if only you could find some way of making Albertans look like assholes, you could slot it between Little Mosque on the Prairie and Wild Roses and we'll have another show that nobody watches but gets government funding.
No. I worked for Microsoft tech support and I can tell you that we were not allowed to push customer issues back to the OEMs unless we could be reasonably sure that the issue was with either the hardware or something specific to the OEM's configuration. On top of that, I regularly received calls from customers who were told by HP or Dell or whoever to call MS because it wasn't an issue on their end. The OEMs may or may not offer decent Windows support, but they're under no obligation to. All of the companies involved have strict support boundaries, and if something appears to be an issue with something one of the other parties is responsible for, the support call basically ends there.
No, this is notable because it's an open admission that WinCE can't cut it .
Not really. Someone can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, development was well underway when Danger got bought by MS. That means it was likely cheaper to just continue doing what they were doing rather than scrap the work and start again using Microsoft's stuff. Not to say that something like that would have been unheard of, but it would have delayed a product that they wanted to get out the door. The real test will be whether the next iteration of this hardware runs this same OS or whether it comes with WinMo/WinCE.
Except most PC DRM schemes make it difficult to lend a friend a physical copy of the game without making them (and later, yourself when you get it back) jump through a bunch of hoops. And in some of the worse cases of DRM, it's almost immoral for you to lend it to them in the first place, knowing what kind of junk will get installed on their system with hooks deep into the kernel. They want to prevent people from just copying things outright, fine, but find a way to do it without getting in the way of all the rights we've had as a consumer that DON'T involve copyright infringement.
You know what I miss? Shareware. That seemed to work pretty good for trying out games. You got a decent chunk of the final game available for free (or close to it), and then if you wanted the full game you bought it. There was no demo, no 20 minutes of the games highlights which wind up being the best part of the full game, none of that bullshit. It was the game, and if you liked it enough to play the whole thing then you bought it. Why can't game developers go back to that model? I thought it worked pretty well. It made John Carmack & friends millionaires.
I like buying CDs for most of the reasons you listed, but honestly at this point I'm just tired of having them around. My CD collection is fucking massive and it just sits in boxes in my apartment taking up space since everything has been ripped for my convenience. I would like it if some of these music sites would start selling FLAC files, CD quality without all the bullshit.