That isn't really true. The Finnish Consumer Complaints board investigated and came to the conclusion that they feel Sony should pay €100 in compensation for removing the feature.
They are not a court body and their 'judgements' have no legal power. They are simply a consumer rights lobby group.
Why are they useless? Why would the Airforce have any need to update those consoles? It's not like they need those consoles to be able to play GT5 and any bugs to be patched would be patched in Linux.
That would be all well and good... Except Sony never really marketed the feature. A few odd quotes from Sony and some more detailed spec sheets from tech shows mentioning it are not in themselves marketing. It was never treated as a core feature by Sony and certainly wasn't marketed as such, the vast vast majority of users didn't know anything about it.
Then there's the fact you were and still are able to use the Other OS feature on PS3s, you just can't update it (which means no PSN and a restricted library of games you can play). Courts accept that products can have limited lifetimes when it comes to support and Sony are more than entitled to release games for the PS3 that customers can't play on certain console configurations. The most obvious example of this would be PS Move only games. If you want to play those, you have to hand over more money for the Move kit and have to possibly mess around with your AV setup which was fine up until then.
A convincing argument for both of these wasn't presented to courts and ultimately it's the courts who decide if there's a case to answer for.
UK laws sadly only cover vague "reasonable" time frames.
It's become fairly common for retailers to only offer between 1 and 6 months for components before forcing you to deal with the manufacturers unless you buy an extended warranty. Not to mention, retailers are far more likely to pull "wear and tear" or "faulty installation" excuses on you and give you hassle.
Yep, had a OCZ drive fail after 3 months. First time I've had a drive that wasn't DOA fail before at least 2-3 years of usage
It wasn't even one of those gradual fails you tend to get with HDDs where they tend to start getting faults for a while before failing, giving you a chance to get the data off of it and order a replacement. One day it was working normally, next day, wasn't even recognised by the bios.
Just to add insult to injury, OCZ have an awful returns policy, had to pay to get it send recorded delivery to the Netherlands. Cost me £20. Going to be a few years before I take the plunge again and I won't be buying OCZ. Paying premium prices for something so unreliable, isn't on, especially given how much of an impact a sudden drive failure has on just about every type of user.
The WIMP environment was the design revolution. A lot of what Macs offered over PARC was simply down to Apple's product being 2nd generation with Xerox having already done the hard stuff.
Apple didn't do anything outstanding, they just did it slightly faster. One of the things Apple gets praised about was its auto-updating windows (window updates were done through buttons in PARC). Are you telling me that wasn't an obvious step and that had it not been for Apple, we'd still click a button every time we wanted to update a window? Likewise drag and drop was a fairly obvious feature.
Apple's GUI 'innovations' were overblown, they simply used Xerox's work to give themselves a head start over the more sluggish PARC team, releasing their second generation product to compete with a first generation one.
If it was so friendly and Xerox were so happy to let Apple do what they did, Xerox wouldn't have sued Apple.
Not to mention that the higher centre of gravity in SUVs makes them very prone to flipping and the fact that if you hit a smaller car in them, the smaller car will generally have a very bad time (to compound things, the car doing the hitting is most often the car that is to blame for the accident)
Not true as I found out. There's some quirk in how they provide their service than means some random routers won't work with O2. Hours of headscratching before I find messages posted in loads of places saying the router I'd got didn't work with O2 at all.
Changing the MAC address is only if you don't want to wait for O2 to re-allocate your IP.
This has been incredibly annoying for me. Originally it was supposed to be in my region last November, then March, now it's due for March next year. Even considering that, I've no way of knowing if they're going to roll it out to my cabinet.
Also annoying is that most of the LLU companies don't yet offer fibre services. O2/Be have been pretty great, no noticable throttling, no bandwidth limits, best uptime I've experienced from a broadband provider but they don't have any plans at the moment to offer fibre. Still, at least it means I won't be forced to use their awful router which they randomly remote into and reset my DNS settings (O2's DNS servers are shockingly bad).
With a poor enough sampling method, sample size is irrelevant. As an example: how useful would a survey for "The most popular breed of dog in America" if you asked 1000 people who were all attending the "international poodle lovers convention"?
Your last sentence probably explains the conclusion of the OFCOM inquiry. Few people get especially bothered by DRM, if they know it exists at all but lots would be affected by drops in budget for programs or for more expensive licencing deals.
OFCOM is not a democracy. It is obligated to do what it deems to be the best decision, not the most popular one.
For all you know, the 9 people may have been members of the "McRib appreciation club" and they could've eaten at Taco Bells but wanted to eat at McDonalds whereas the 1 had allergies which meant Taco Bell was the only option for him, it was that or he wouldn't be able to eat lunch.
A more apt example is sewage treatment plants. No one ever wants to have one near them so if you went by that, you couldn't build a sewage treatment plant anywhere. Eventually planners have to ignore dissenting voices and listen to everyone to find the least worst option and get the plant built.
How exactly does this show bias on the BBC? It was a matter that directly and primarily affected their programming. They were always going to have to pick a viewpoint and stick by it. If being in favour of DRM was a biased viewpoint, so is being against. As the whole issue centred around them, they couldn't pick the middle ground either.
The BBC is more than willing to be incredibly critical of itself, if you'd have seen their coverage of the Hutton Inquiry, you would've known that. I've never seen any news agency quite so willing to cover news stories that damn themselves.
Yeah, why doesn't the BBC hold itself to the values upon which America was founded! It's like they don't think the constitution applies to them or something!
Guess the UK's population is smaller than I thought given that only 432 people responded. Not only that, as most people generally wouldn't have known about it, let alone cared enough to write a letter, it's probably safe to assume only a strong feeling, unrepresentative minority responded. You don't have to be a statistician to know that the figures given there are largely worthless.
On the organisation side of things, the only organisation listed which likely doesn't strongly favour Free Software is the RNIB who objected on the ground it could interfere with tools blind or partially sighted people use to enjoy TV.
However, even if the statistics of people opposed did genuinely reflect the wider population it would still be moot. OFCOM does not rule based on numbers supporting or opposing, it rules on the arguments or complaints submitted. If numbers alone were enough, every time the tabloids whipped up "outrage" over two people of the same sex kissing etc. the program would be banned.
Either they've changed the algorithm recently or it doesn't work in the same way because putting stuff in quotes still gives me search results that don't contain that term.
When I'm searching I don't want Google guessing which words I really care about.
This kinda thing is fine when it's just ignoring "the", "and", "a" or including plural terms but now they're leaving out nouns and adjectives if they're not common enough. It was annoying enough having to stick a + in front of every word, now they've got rid of + and replaced it with quotation marks which don't seem to force search results to contain that word quite so strictly.
I'm constantly searching for rare, obscure films and books and it's annoying as hell getting results that have nothing to do with what I'm really searching for.
Don't get me started on "the following terms only appear in links pointing to this page". When has that ever been useful except to owners of link farms and fake review sites?
£16K salary after 3 years. Sole developer of an enterprise level PHP tool. Sole PHP coder full stop.
Not bad enough? I'm currently working at home because my pay is going to be 2 weeks late and I now can't afford the petrol.
And now for the real kicker to top it off? I've overheard them talking to each other about version 2.0 of the product, they've not mentioned this to me and the guy who basically is in charge of new development hasn't spoken to me in months. I've overheard them talking to a friend who handles outsourcing and 'Belarus' was mentioned a few times.
Still, I've now got strong Drupal development skills and looking at job sites, Drupal is gold dust at the moment so when the inevitable does happen or if I'm able to build up a financial cushion. I shouldn't do too bad.
tldr: if you're a nice guy, you get fucked. Don't leave in a nasty way (try to ensure they've a replacement, ask new bosses if they will be ok with you offering occasional tech support if they need it) but being loyal and nice will get you screwed 95% of the time as a coder because small businesses don't realise how good they have it with you.
Perhaps I should do an art exhibit consisting of a cheque for $1mill and say "this should be at all trials where someone is accused of fraud or embezzelment!".
We haven't been a society where the physical size of something, or even the workmanship of the product represents its financial value. Modern artists of all people should know that.
South-East. Suprisingly sucky for graduate jobs as Brighton has 2 major universities flooding it. After being on the Dole for a long time, I had to take whatever I could (I actually got this job applying for a general office job but my boss noticed my CV was very techie and he gave me a development job instead).
That said, at least I've now got a nice long list of skills through this job. Nicest skill I've learnt was Drupal development. Comparitively uncommon (not taught in unis) yet highly sought after and well paid. Bodes a lot better for less of a soul destroying experience this time around on the dole.
After being unemployed for 9 months as a Comp Science grad, here's my experience of a typical job ad:
Junior Web admin - £18,000
Required Skills:
HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, AJAX, Java, Apache, SQL, C, VB.net, ASP, Active Directory, Microsoft Small Business Server, our obscure CMS, Photoshop, Flash.
2 years experience a must!
If the impossibly long list of skills doesn't put off the graduate (some of which are impossible to learn on your own due to the setup they need), the experience they require will do (should be illegal to advertise a junior position as requiring professional experience). Companies are completely unwilling to take on staff and help them gain the skills they need. They way all those skills, which only an experienced dev will have, then they want to pretend it's an entry level position so they can pay a highly skilled job the same as they pay people who answer telephones and type data into spreadsheets.
There are companies which do offer genuine on the job training and proper graduate jobs, mostly large tech companies, but these literally get hundreds of applicants (Jobsite.co.uk show application stats which is especially soul destroying). Meanwhile all the other companies which make no effort on this front moan to the government that there's a skills shortage (which they're one of the causes of) and try to get them to attract some Eastern European developers and the problem gets worse.
But then, I'm a bit bitter as I've ended up as the sole web developer in my company (who's earning £16,000 a year after 3 years) and is currently on the verge of losing my job as it's going to be outsourced to Bulgaria. Of course they haven't told me this yet but I've overheard phonecalls they didn't want me to hear, I've been pulled off of active development work and have been doing heavy documentation work and reports on improvements needed. Guess they think I'm stupid and haven't noticed. Perhaps I am stupid for not leaving, just worried that I'll spend another 6 months on the dole which would bankrupt me this time.
Generally, any site where that's happened probably not going to be well publicised.
But it's not exactly a huge stretch to believe there have been at least 3 instances where.uk sites have been shut down for hosting child porn for example. To narrow the harm down to 'consumer harm', it's not a huge stretch to believe that there have been 3 instances of phishing sites being shut down either.
I can't give specific examples of any of these things because neither the victims, or the police would want these things to be made public and papers are more likely to report "paedophile ring closed down" than "www.ilikelittlechildren.co.uk" closed down for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Plenty of replacement parts out there. I replaced the blu ray diode on mine.
That isn't really true. The Finnish Consumer Complaints board investigated and came to the conclusion that they feel Sony should pay €100 in compensation for removing the feature.
They are not a court body and their 'judgements' have no legal power. They are simply a consumer rights lobby group.
Why are they useless? Why would the Airforce have any need to update those consoles? It's not like they need those consoles to be able to play GT5 and any bugs to be patched would be patched in Linux.
That would be all well and good... Except Sony never really marketed the feature. A few odd quotes from Sony and some more detailed spec sheets from tech shows mentioning it are not in themselves marketing. It was never treated as a core feature by Sony and certainly wasn't marketed as such, the vast vast majority of users didn't know anything about it.
Then there's the fact you were and still are able to use the Other OS feature on PS3s, you just can't update it (which means no PSN and a restricted library of games you can play). Courts accept that products can have limited lifetimes when it comes to support and Sony are more than entitled to release games for the PS3 that customers can't play on certain console configurations. The most obvious example of this would be PS Move only games. If you want to play those, you have to hand over more money for the Move kit and have to possibly mess around with your AV setup which was fine up until then.
A convincing argument for both of these wasn't presented to courts and ultimately it's the courts who decide if there's a case to answer for.
UK laws sadly only cover vague "reasonable" time frames.
It's become fairly common for retailers to only offer between 1 and 6 months for components before forcing you to deal with the manufacturers unless you buy an extended warranty. Not to mention, retailers are far more likely to pull "wear and tear" or "faulty installation" excuses on you and give you hassle.
Yep, had a OCZ drive fail after 3 months. First time I've had a drive that wasn't DOA fail before at least 2-3 years of usage
It wasn't even one of those gradual fails you tend to get with HDDs where they tend to start getting faults for a while before failing, giving you a chance to get the data off of it and order a replacement. One day it was working normally, next day, wasn't even recognised by the bios.
Just to add insult to injury, OCZ have an awful returns policy, had to pay to get it send recorded delivery to the Netherlands. Cost me £20. Going to be a few years before I take the plunge again and I won't be buying OCZ. Paying premium prices for something so unreliable, isn't on, especially given how much of an impact a sudden drive failure has on just about every type of user.
The WIMP environment was the design revolution. A lot of what Macs offered over PARC was simply down to Apple's product being 2nd generation with Xerox having already done the hard stuff.
Apple didn't do anything outstanding, they just did it slightly faster. One of the things Apple gets praised about was its auto-updating windows (window updates were done through buttons in PARC). Are you telling me that wasn't an obvious step and that had it not been for Apple, we'd still click a button every time we wanted to update a window? Likewise drag and drop was a fairly obvious feature.
Apple's GUI 'innovations' were overblown, they simply used Xerox's work to give themselves a head start over the more sluggish PARC team, releasing their second generation product to compete with a first generation one.
If it was so friendly and Xerox were so happy to let Apple do what they did, Xerox wouldn't have sued Apple.
Not to mention that the higher centre of gravity in SUVs makes them very prone to flipping and the fact that if you hit a smaller car in them, the smaller car will generally have a very bad time (to compound things, the car doing the hitting is most often the car that is to blame for the accident)
Not true as I found out. There's some quirk in how they provide their service than means some random routers won't work with O2. Hours of headscratching before I find messages posted in loads of places saying the router I'd got didn't work with O2 at all.
Changing the MAC address is only if you don't want to wait for O2 to re-allocate your IP.
This has been incredibly annoying for me. Originally it was supposed to be in my region last November, then March, now it's due for March next year. Even considering that, I've no way of knowing if they're going to roll it out to my cabinet.
Also annoying is that most of the LLU companies don't yet offer fibre services. O2/Be have been pretty great, no noticable throttling, no bandwidth limits, best uptime I've experienced from a broadband provider but they don't have any plans at the moment to offer fibre. Still, at least it means I won't be forced to use their awful router which they randomly remote into and reset my DNS settings (O2's DNS servers are shockingly bad).
Just in time for the cheap, ultra efficient solar panels that will be available then
With a poor enough sampling method, sample size is irrelevant. As an example: how useful would a survey for "The most popular breed of dog in America" if you asked 1000 people who were all attending the "international poodle lovers convention"?
Your last sentence probably explains the conclusion of the OFCOM inquiry. Few people get especially bothered by DRM, if they know it exists at all but lots would be affected by drops in budget for programs or for more expensive licencing deals.
OFCOM is not a democracy. It is obligated to do what it deems to be the best decision, not the most popular one.
For all you know, the 9 people may have been members of the "McRib appreciation club" and they could've eaten at Taco Bells but wanted to eat at McDonalds whereas the 1 had allergies which meant Taco Bell was the only option for him, it was that or he wouldn't be able to eat lunch.
A more apt example is sewage treatment plants. No one ever wants to have one near them so if you went by that, you couldn't build a sewage treatment plant anywhere. Eventually planners have to ignore dissenting voices and listen to everyone to find the least worst option and get the plant built.
How exactly does this show bias on the BBC? It was a matter that directly and primarily affected their programming. They were always going to have to pick a viewpoint and stick by it. If being in favour of DRM was a biased viewpoint, so is being against. As the whole issue centred around them, they couldn't pick the middle ground either.
The BBC is more than willing to be incredibly critical of itself, if you'd have seen their coverage of the Hutton Inquiry, you would've known that. I've never seen any news agency quite so willing to cover news stories that damn themselves.
Yeah, why doesn't the BBC hold itself to the values upon which America was founded! It's like they don't think the constitution applies to them or something!
Guess the UK's population is smaller than I thought given that only 432 people responded. Not only that, as most people generally wouldn't have known about it, let alone cared enough to write a letter, it's probably safe to assume only a strong feeling, unrepresentative minority responded. You don't have to be a statistician to know that the figures given there are largely worthless.
On the organisation side of things, the only organisation listed which likely doesn't strongly favour Free Software is the RNIB who objected on the ground it could interfere with tools blind or partially sighted people use to enjoy TV.
However, even if the statistics of people opposed did genuinely reflect the wider population it would still be moot. OFCOM does not rule based on numbers supporting or opposing, it rules on the arguments or complaints submitted. If numbers alone were enough, every time the tabloids whipped up "outrage" over two people of the same sex kissing etc. the program would be banned.
Doesn't Tegra have major heat issues that stop it from being in anything smaller than tablets?
Both Sony and Nintendo considered using it for their new consoles but the heat and power usage apparently made them turn away from it.
Either they've changed the algorithm recently or it doesn't work in the same way because putting stuff in quotes still gives me search results that don't contain that term.
When I'm searching I don't want Google guessing which words I really care about.
This kinda thing is fine when it's just ignoring "the", "and", "a" or including plural terms but now they're leaving out nouns and adjectives if they're not common enough. It was annoying enough having to stick a + in front of every word, now they've got rid of + and replaced it with quotation marks which don't seem to force search results to contain that word quite so strictly.
I'm constantly searching for rare, obscure films and books and it's annoying as hell getting results that have nothing to do with what I'm really searching for.
Don't get me started on "the following terms only appear in links pointing to this page". When has that ever been useful except to owners of link farms and fake review sites?
£16K salary after 3 years. Sole developer of an enterprise level PHP tool. Sole PHP coder full stop.
Not bad enough? I'm currently working at home because my pay is going to be 2 weeks late and I now can't afford the petrol.
And now for the real kicker to top it off? I've overheard them talking to each other about version 2.0 of the product, they've not mentioned this to me and the guy who basically is in charge of new development hasn't spoken to me in months. I've overheard them talking to a friend who handles outsourcing and 'Belarus' was mentioned a few times.
Still, I've now got strong Drupal development skills and looking at job sites, Drupal is gold dust at the moment so when the inevitable does happen or if I'm able to build up a financial cushion. I shouldn't do too bad.
tldr: if you're a nice guy, you get fucked. Don't leave in a nasty way (try to ensure they've a replacement, ask new bosses if they will be ok with you offering occasional tech support if they need it) but being loyal and nice will get you screwed 95% of the time as a coder because small businesses don't realise how good they have it with you.
BT earmarked my town for Fibre to the Cabinet last November, now their current plans say it's going to be March. Deeply irritating.
That said, I'm incredibly close to my cabinet so when I finally do get it, I should get great speeds, 30mb+ hopefully.
Perhaps I should do an art exhibit consisting of a cheque for $1mill and say "this should be at all trials where someone is accused of fraud or embezzelment!".
We haven't been a society where the physical size of something, or even the workmanship of the product represents its financial value. Modern artists of all people should know that.
South-East. Suprisingly sucky for graduate jobs as Brighton has 2 major universities flooding it. After being on the Dole for a long time, I had to take whatever I could (I actually got this job applying for a general office job but my boss noticed my CV was very techie and he gave me a development job instead).
That said, at least I've now got a nice long list of skills through this job. Nicest skill I've learnt was Drupal development. Comparitively uncommon (not taught in unis) yet highly sought after and well paid. Bodes a lot better for less of a soul destroying experience this time around on the dole.
After being unemployed for 9 months as a Comp Science grad, here's my experience of a typical job ad:
... Wow, this turned into a really long post...
Junior Web admin - £18,000
Required Skills:
HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, AJAX, Java, Apache, SQL, C, VB.net, ASP, Active Directory, Microsoft Small Business Server, our obscure CMS, Photoshop, Flash.
2 years experience a must!
If the impossibly long list of skills doesn't put off the graduate (some of which are impossible to learn on your own due to the setup they need), the experience they require will do (should be illegal to advertise a junior position as requiring professional experience). Companies are completely unwilling to take on staff and help them gain the skills they need. They way all those skills, which only an experienced dev will have, then they want to pretend it's an entry level position so they can pay a highly skilled job the same as they pay people who answer telephones and type data into spreadsheets.
There are companies which do offer genuine on the job training and proper graduate jobs, mostly large tech companies, but these literally get hundreds of applicants (Jobsite.co.uk show application stats which is especially soul destroying). Meanwhile all the other companies which make no effort on this front moan to the government that there's a skills shortage (which they're one of the causes of) and try to get them to attract some Eastern European developers and the problem gets worse.
But then, I'm a bit bitter as I've ended up as the sole web developer in my company (who's earning £16,000 a year after 3 years) and is currently on the verge of losing my job as it's going to be outsourced to Bulgaria. Of course they haven't told me this yet but I've overheard phonecalls they didn't want me to hear, I've been pulled off of active development work and have been doing heavy documentation work and reports on improvements needed. Guess they think I'm stupid and haven't noticed. Perhaps I am stupid for not leaving, just worried that I'll spend another 6 months on the dole which would bankrupt me this time.
Generally, any site where that's happened probably not going to be well publicised.
.uk sites have been shut down for hosting child porn for example. To narrow the harm down to 'consumer harm', it's not a huge stretch to believe that there have been 3 instances of phishing sites being shut down either.
But it's not exactly a huge stretch to believe there have been at least 3 instances where
I can't give specific examples of any of these things because neither the victims, or the police would want these things to be made public and papers are more likely to report "paedophile ring closed down" than "www.ilikelittlechildren.co.uk" closed down for example.