So your anecdotal evidence says that the drivers have not improved? Umm... You just admitted that an updated driver was better than the original for your x800. That's improvement, buddy.
As for the 9600... That's 1 card. And a mobile one at that. And then you admit that the new Vista drivers are better. Who do you think wrote those? Hint: It wasn't really MS, no matter what the signing says. They probably helped under contract, but they didn't do it all.
Don't let the fact that ATI's XP drivers are still not as good as nVidia's blind you from the fact that ATI's drivers HAVE improved dramatically over the last few years.
Last I checked, Circuit City and BestBuy both had restocking fees. I haven't bought computer components from them in a great long time because of it. And I mean even the unit is defective they had a restocking fee. Total BS. Granted, they may have changed this policy since then. But they may change it back at any time, too. I just take my business elsewhere. 'Once burned, twice shy.' I think that's the expression.
That is, of course, assuming you can get their 'customer service' (ha) to take the return at all. I must say, I have -tried- to shop there a few times in the last year. But getting someone's attention for a question is nearly impossible, and when you do, they have no idea. Or don't carry the product. I bought my last 2 TVs at Circuit City because they ignored me (first time) and actually told me to get out of the way (second time.)
So where are these people shopping? Just about anywhere. I'm guessing the reason that you have reasonable retailers is that you live nowhere near Florida. It seems to be an epidemic down here. Even Office Depot, which has corporate shoving customer service down their employees throats constantly, has trouble with actually helping the customer nicely. (I used to work for them. Corporate really DID try very hard to make sure we had everything we need to make a customer happy, and that we would. Can lead a horse to water and all that...)
Also, while rude, your other replier has a point. Quite a few people who bought hardware to upgrade for Vista did so before Vista came out. That really IS their problem, though, as that's a bonehead move. Would you buy a car stereo for the new car you're buying in a couple months? No, you'd get the car first, and then the stereo.
Never buy the accessories before the product. Or you'll end up with problems like this. (Or worse, you may not buy the product and be stuck with useless accessories.)
lol I dunno anymore. The TV commercial I just saw tonight showed both freaking logos. (I was fast-forwarding, yay for DVR!)
And honestly, I don't care about them. I've never liked either company and my entire family has had more problems with both of them, especially AT&T, that it'll be a miracle (or a travesty, maybe) if we're ever a customer of theirs again.
I've heard bad things about T-Mobile, and the local customer service sucks pretty bad, but... ah well. How do you choose between evils? If my mother hadn't signed the entire family into 2-yr contracts to get free phones that she'll probably never use, I'd probably try MetroPCS since they have unlimited calling cheaper than I pay right now.
That has nothing to do with 'third party devices'. To a cellular provider, ALL phones are third party.
And NO phone that works on Sprint can be moved to Cingular. They are completely incompatible. On the other hand, if your phone is unlocked, you can freely move to AT&T (now Cingular anyhow, ugh) and T-Mobile, and quite a few very tiny companies on the same system. Metro-PCS in Central Florida is on it, I believe. (Not real sure, though.)
The 'problem with these devices' is not 'finding a carrier' but instead 'knowing which carriers they work with'.
Take my advice: Buy the phone to fit the carrier, don't find a carrier to fit the phone. You'll be a LOT happier that way.
They can't GET their money back. The box is open, and the retailer won't give the money back for a 'working' product. nVidia won't admit the product does not work. They actively deny any problems and delete any attempt to talk about it off their servers.
These customers have done all they should have to. nVidia is clearly screwing their customers on this one.
I have not owned a non-nVidia video card for years. I have never owned an ATI. Why? Because nVidia's drivers were SO much better, even though their hardware was inferior. The opposite is now true, if you use Vista. (I don't yet... Doubt I will for quite a long time.) ATI's drivers have gotten MUCH better in the past 5 years, and their hardware is still top notch. nVidia has now proven that they no longer know how to write stable drivers, and their hardware is inferior.
I am NOT looking forward to my next card being an ATI, but unless nVidia gets really smart, really quick, that's what's going to happen. And I'm planning to purchase all new hardware pretty soon, too. -sigh-
(I worked for PC Repair shops for years, so I have some experience with the quality of each manufacturers' past products.)
Oh, I don't mean to say that there's never a time that 'you' is more rude, or less considering, or more forceful... I just don't think that completely removing it from the language is a good idea. You start to sound like an automaton and that you don't care about the person at all.
'The account' is much less personal than 'your account', and not a bit more confrontational.
'You failed to respond' is quite a bit more confrontational than 'there was no response to our notice.'
I guess I'm trying to say that the problem is not the word 'you', but rather how the customer is being spoken to.
It's like that '5 forbidden phrases' movie that has been shown at every customer service job I've ever worked at. 'You'll need to' is okay, but 'you'll have to' is rude. WTF? Maybe in 1 particularly area, but that's not a blanket statement no matter what they want to think. Even worse, the sentence can be completely reconstructed and remove the rude elements of both of those phrases, and they don't even attempt to talk about that. The statement is something like 'You'll have to send $5 to this address to buy that back-issue.' 'If you send $5 to this address, we'll send you that back-issue.' is MUCH MUCH less rude.
I hate that movie, btw... It's just so wrong in so many ways.
Don't forget that what they say is not what the mean, or even the truth, necessarily. They cannot say 'Oh yeah, the DS rules and screw all the other consoles' because they'll violate several agreements and people won't buy the already-existing and soon-to-exist games for those systems after they've said that. Sometimes when someone protests too violently, you should take the protest with more than a grain of salt. 'quick to point out' is a good indicator of this.
Blackboard is not going Open Source. They are merely stating that they will never sue an Open Source project that uses their patented stuff. Since that has previously stopped any FOSS projects from existing to duplicate Blackboard's product, this could mean a lot to the FOSS community and someone may actually create something now.
It doesn't matter what Blackboard does and does not have in their product, only that the stuff that others can now 'do it right' in Open Source without litigation worries.
Or at least, that's what they were aiming at. From what I can tell, their lawyers took their 'good deed' and shredded it, replacing it with legal BS that means they're pretty much where they started.
Flushed Away didn't have that 'Wallace and Gromit' feel to it that even Chicken Run had. The video, the audio, the plot... All of it -felt- different.
Don't get me wrong. I love the movie and so did my entire family.
But if you advertise something as 'from the creators of Wallace and Gromit' you've put an image into peoples' heads before they've even seen the movie. No matter how good it is, if it doesn't match that image, they'll be somewhat disappointed.
Having said that, I think the real issue was that they spend 5x too much money making the movie. Why spent an extra $120mil if you're just going to imitate the $30mil version? It's crazy. Even if you gross $500mil, you've STILL wasted $120mil no matter how you look at it.
This doesn't really fit with 'slow news day' because this IS news we'd expect to see here. That tag is reserved for things that really don't belong on this site at all, and especially not the front page.
A major IT producer making a screwup this big is definitely 'news for nerds, stuff that matters' no matter who you're a fanboy for.
Come to central Florida. We've got plenty here. I recently took a picture of a shelf at Target with the PS3 cabinet jammed full and the Wii cabinet absolutely empty, side by side. I think it's on my home PC. I should have posted it. Ah well.
Actually, I -would- be terribly upset about that. There's a good chance the book is ruined, and I've have to first find, and then buy another copy to continue reading. Same with the coffee.
Maybe I would be more upset about the ebook reader... But then, I'd be more careful with it, too.
I agree there's ego aspect... But I find that a huge collection of physical objects that have only 1/10th their original value to be a massive storage problem in an already cluttered living space. Ebooks have 0 resale value (because they're so easily copied and stolen) but they also take up almost no physical room. (Gotta count a portion of the medium they live on.)
And last, when using a Palm or PocketPC for a book reader, it's also a multi-function device. A book is good only for reading.
Indeed, the proprietary ebook-readers DO all suck. DRM is the biggest reason.
I refuse to buy one of these devices or any ebooks that are DRM-infested.
Instead, I buy a lot of books from baen.com. Jim Baen started the website on a bet. Giving away one of his books on it turned into making it the best selling book he had. Apparently, people that read the book for free would then buy it for one of several reasons, including: Wanted the hard copy, loved it so much they just wanted to support him, etc, etc.
The success of this convinced him to make it permanent and I read a LOT of the free books on there, and purchased a sequels to the ones I read. Lately, I've been buying the 'webscriptions' books starting from the first months. You get quite a good discount by buying the bundles like that, and in general, the books on that site are good.
They are also all absolutely DRM-free and available in several open formats including RTF, TXT, PDB, and HTML.
As a bonus, which I didn't know beforehand, with each order they have an offer to give a free copy of the same webscription bundle to a free. You just enter an email address and it sends them (and you, also) the information. Unfortunately, I don't know many people who love to read, and fewer who love to read ebooks. But I've been using it as a way to advertise baen.com to my friends.
Jim Baen died a while back, unfortunately. But the people running his site have not only continued in his tradition, but improved on it. The site has recently seen improvements and the entire store has been revamped. The webscription offer also came afterwards. I had been afraid they'd close it instead.
You claim there are no 'comfy' reader devices for ebooks, and I totally disagree.
I've been using Palm and PocketPC devices to read ebooks for years. While the device costs a lot, and the books don't cost much less, I still far prefer them to physical books. Why?
Bookmarks.
I long ago found the 'best' bookmark for physical books. It's a device that clips to the back page of the book, and has an arm that holds the page. As you flip pages, it automatically moves to the next page. This device isn't perfect, though, as it's possible to hold the book wrong so that it flexes and loses the page. And dropping it is almost certain to lose the page. And the device doesn't work well on think books, hardbacks, and many others. And it sometimes tears pages.
Ebook readers all have a built-in bookmarking system. You just put the device in standby. The good ones even store the place if you reboot the whole system. And can do it for multiple books.
Add to that the ability to store many, many books, even if they have have numerous pictures in full color, and you've got a far superior reading device.
Most of the newer programs also have a variety of fonts and font sizes.
The only downside I've found, other than price, is the need to recharge the battery. Most PDAs have a cradle (or you can buy one) and that makes it easy to just set it down and have it charge while you aren't reading.
No, I think the biggest reason people haven't adopted ebooks is that it's too expensive, and it's 'different', something the human race just doesn't seem to do well with.
I agree that no trial means no customer for me as well, but how did you get burnt on Saga of Ryzom? It was open beta, then free trials for like 2 months. Then a year later, they introduced 2 week trials again and never took them away.
By the way, you really should have played early Beta. It was an amazing game, even without a lot of the 'promised' features like proper harvesting and clothes dyeing. They ruined it about halfway through beta because they got greedy and felt the need to prevent people from levelling up so fast by 'abusing' the spell mechanics they themselves created. (Healers could heal the entire group forever if they knew how, and everyone worked together.)
I was truly hoping that open source buyout would happen. Ah well.
If you think computers (and compilers) don't have a sense of humor, you've never programmed. I can't count the number of times I've been coding and random nonsense errors start happening, and rebooting was the solution to the problem, not bad code. I just -know- it's laughing at me every time that happens. (Granted, it's only ever happened to me on Windows, but I haven't done much Linux programming in C.)
Sounds like something you need to post more details about. Get it loud and proud on the frontpage of Slashdot and help all the other nerds out there that are having the same problem. Maybe there's even a lawyer (I was going to write shady lawyer, but redundancy is wasteful) that will be willing to start a class-action lawsuit and give you each $.10 back, but publicizing the evils of MS in the meantime.
"There is a huge difference between knowing how to make something "go" and how it works internally."
Not if it's poorly designed. While this is typically a software problem, firmware in a device is software, too. So hardware can also have this problem. If the device is not 'black box' enough, then it may require excessive information to make the device's driver.
"Am I so naive to think that most schools don't have at least some access to broadband and a CD burner somewhere in the building, or among the staff/community?"
Yeah, I'm afraid so. While I can't truly speak for 'most schools', the ones where I grew up are quite unlikely to have even dialup in the school, let alone broadband internet. The library at the school MIGHT have some form of internet for research purposes only.
That doesn't mean they couldn't just go home and burn it on their home computer, of course. But this is more than just distributing it to them. This is making it EASY for them, and showing how it can help the school.
Re:Um...what did Slashdot have to do with it?
on
Microsoft Retracts Patent
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· Score: 3, Interesting
When Slashdot did the 'bringing to light', it was Saturday. The developers 'brought it to light' for their crowd on Friday. To 'bring it to light' means that you've made some portion, usually a significant portion, of a group of people aware of it. The majority of the Slashdot crowd did NOT know about this before it was announced on Saturday, so it WAS 'brought to light'.
Why do you assume those are mutually exclusive options? As you just pointed out, there are already plenty of ways to circumvent DRM. Would it REALLY kill them to sell music online that isn't crippled? They sell it in the stores that way, and every attempt to cripple it has resulted in loss of business and/or lawsuits. Why are online sales treated differently?
The answer is simple, actually. The bully hasn't had his nose sufficiently bloodied yet. Until someone can prove that they've lost money from DRM,and get them to accept it, they will continue to make horrendously stupid business decisions.
Every shred of DRM has failed. None of it has helped protect their business. And they still make money hand over fist. Imagine what would happen if they priced their products correctly and gained the rest of the market that they've been missing.
So now, why are you tolerating DRM? Admit to yourself that you're tolerating it in the short-term and I'll agree with you. At this moment in time, you gain a fairly-easy, legal way to purchase online. (We'll just ignore the fact that it's easier and cheaper to get the music illegally, and that you can do what you want with it easier by that method.) In the long run, if they don't figure out the truth, someone else will beat them to it.
For instance, I don't believe there's any law against reselling music, and it's been proven that it's okay to rip your own music. So an enterprising individual could 'buy' CDs wholesale, rip one of them and then for each online sale of the CD he makes in MP3 format, throw a disc in the trash. Or better yet, make 'compilations' of other artists' music and pay them legally. Then instead of selling it in CD format, sell it in MP3. (Via the rip method, if the law is stupid enough to require it.)
There's plenty of ways around the system and still staying legal. Nobody has bothered yet because they don't see the market. It won't be long now.
Slashdot Mirror
So your anecdotal evidence says that the drivers have not improved? Umm... You just admitted that an updated driver was better than the original for your x800. That's improvement, buddy.
As for the 9600... That's 1 card. And a mobile one at that. And then you admit that the new Vista drivers are better. Who do you think wrote those? Hint: It wasn't really MS, no matter what the signing says. They probably helped under contract, but they didn't do it all.
Don't let the fact that ATI's XP drivers are still not as good as nVidia's blind you from the fact that ATI's drivers HAVE improved dramatically over the last few years.
Last I checked, Circuit City and BestBuy both had restocking fees. I haven't bought computer components from them in a great long time because of it. And I mean even the unit is defective they had a restocking fee. Total BS. Granted, they may have changed this policy since then. But they may change it back at any time, too. I just take my business elsewhere. 'Once burned, twice shy.' I think that's the expression.
That is, of course, assuming you can get their 'customer service' (ha) to take the return at all. I must say, I have -tried- to shop there a few times in the last year. But getting someone's attention for a question is nearly impossible, and when you do, they have no idea. Or don't carry the product. I bought my last 2 TVs at Circuit City because they ignored me (first time) and actually told me to get out of the way (second time.)
So where are these people shopping? Just about anywhere. I'm guessing the reason that you have reasonable retailers is that you live nowhere near Florida. It seems to be an epidemic down here. Even Office Depot, which has corporate shoving customer service down their employees throats constantly, has trouble with actually helping the customer nicely. (I used to work for them. Corporate really DID try very hard to make sure we had everything we need to make a customer happy, and that we would. Can lead a horse to water and all that...)
Also, while rude, your other replier has a point. Quite a few people who bought hardware to upgrade for Vista did so before Vista came out. That really IS their problem, though, as that's a bonehead move. Would you buy a car stereo for the new car you're buying in a couple months? No, you'd get the car first, and then the stereo.
Never buy the accessories before the product. Or you'll end up with problems like this. (Or worse, you may not buy the product and be stuck with useless accessories.)
lol I dunno anymore. The TV commercial I just saw tonight showed both freaking logos. (I was fast-forwarding, yay for DVR!)
... ah well. How do you choose between evils? If my mother hadn't signed the entire family into 2-yr contracts to get free phones that she'll probably never use, I'd probably try MetroPCS since they have unlimited calling cheaper than I pay right now.
And honestly, I don't care about them. I've never liked either company and my entire family has had more problems with both of them, especially AT&T, that it'll be a miracle (or a travesty, maybe) if we're ever a customer of theirs again.
I've heard bad things about T-Mobile, and the local customer service sucks pretty bad, but
That has nothing to do with 'third party devices'. To a cellular provider, ALL phones are third party.
And NO phone that works on Sprint can be moved to Cingular. They are completely incompatible. On the other hand, if your phone is unlocked, you can freely move to AT&T (now Cingular anyhow, ugh) and T-Mobile, and quite a few very tiny companies on the same system. Metro-PCS in Central Florida is on it, I believe. (Not real sure, though.)
The 'problem with these devices' is not 'finding a carrier' but instead 'knowing which carriers they work with'.
Take my advice: Buy the phone to fit the carrier, don't find a carrier to fit the phone. You'll be a LOT happier that way.
They can't GET their money back. The box is open, and the retailer won't give the money back for a 'working' product. nVidia won't admit the product does not work. They actively deny any problems and delete any attempt to talk about it off their servers.
These customers have done all they should have to. nVidia is clearly screwing their customers on this one.
I have not owned a non-nVidia video card for years. I have never owned an ATI. Why? Because nVidia's drivers were SO much better, even though their hardware was inferior. The opposite is now true, if you use Vista. (I don't yet... Doubt I will for quite a long time.) ATI's drivers have gotten MUCH better in the past 5 years, and their hardware is still top notch. nVidia has now proven that they no longer know how to write stable drivers, and their hardware is inferior.
I am NOT looking forward to my next card being an ATI, but unless nVidia gets really smart, really quick, that's what's going to happen. And I'm planning to purchase all new hardware pretty soon, too. -sigh-
(I worked for PC Repair shops for years, so I have some experience with the quality of each manufacturers' past products.)
Oh, I don't mean to say that there's never a time that 'you' is more rude, or less considering, or more forceful... I just don't think that completely removing it from the language is a good idea. You start to sound like an automaton and that you don't care about the person at all.
'The account' is much less personal than 'your account', and not a bit more confrontational.
'You failed to respond' is quite a bit more confrontational than 'there was no response to our notice.'
I guess I'm trying to say that the problem is not the word 'you', but rather how the customer is being spoken to.
It's like that '5 forbidden phrases' movie that has been shown at every customer service job I've ever worked at. 'You'll need to' is okay, but 'you'll have to' is rude. WTF? Maybe in 1 particularly area, but that's not a blanket statement no matter what they want to think. Even worse, the sentence can be completely reconstructed and remove the rude elements of both of those phrases, and they don't even attempt to talk about that. The statement is something like 'You'll have to send $5 to this address to buy that back-issue.' 'If you send $5 to this address, we'll send you that back-issue.' is MUCH MUCH less rude.
I hate that movie, btw... It's just so wrong in so many ways.
I tried to determine if you are serious or joking, and I think you are actually serious.
I have never heard of this, and I can find nothing on Google about it. Can you back this up with evidence? (The 'you' is confrontational bit, I mean.)
Don't forget that what they say is not what the mean, or even the truth, necessarily. They cannot say 'Oh yeah, the DS rules and screw all the other consoles' because they'll violate several agreements and people won't buy the already-existing and soon-to-exist games for those systems after they've said that. Sometimes when someone protests too violently, you should take the protest with more than a grain of salt. 'quick to point out' is a good indicator of this.
You need a better dictionary.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/prepend
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/append
Yes, prepend is 'slang' as are all new words before they get officially adopted.
Yes, append can mean 'attach' and not just to the end.
But don't forget you're on a nerd site and any programmer worth his salt will immediately think 'add to the end of' if you say 'append'.
You get a few points for the technicality, but you lose quite a few more for not speaking the local lingo.
Blackboard is not going Open Source. They are merely stating that they will never sue an Open Source project that uses their patented stuff. Since that has previously stopped any FOSS projects from existing to duplicate Blackboard's product, this could mean a lot to the FOSS community and someone may actually create something now.
It doesn't matter what Blackboard does and does not have in their product, only that the stuff that others can now 'do it right' in Open Source without litigation worries.
Or at least, that's what they were aiming at. From what I can tell, their lawyers took their 'good deed' and shredded it, replacing it with legal BS that means they're pretty much where they started.
Flushed Away didn't have that 'Wallace and Gromit' feel to it that even Chicken Run had. The video, the audio, the plot... All of it -felt- different.
Don't get me wrong. I love the movie and so did my entire family.
But if you advertise something as 'from the creators of Wallace and Gromit' you've put an image into peoples' heads before they've even seen the movie. No matter how good it is, if it doesn't match that image, they'll be somewhat disappointed.
Having said that, I think the real issue was that they spend 5x too much money making the movie. Why spent an extra $120mil if you're just going to imitate the $30mil version? It's crazy. Even if you gross $500mil, you've STILL wasted $120mil no matter how you look at it.
This doesn't really fit with 'slow news day' because this IS news we'd expect to see here. That tag is reserved for things that really don't belong on this site at all, and especially not the front page.
A major IT producer making a screwup this big is definitely 'news for nerds, stuff that matters' no matter who you're a fanboy for.
Come to central Florida. We've got plenty here. I recently took a picture of a shelf at Target with the PS3 cabinet jammed full and the Wii cabinet absolutely empty, side by side. I think it's on my home PC. I should have posted it. Ah well.
Actually, I -would- be terribly upset about that. There's a good chance the book is ruined, and I've have to first find, and then buy another copy to continue reading. Same with the coffee.
Maybe I would be more upset about the ebook reader... But then, I'd be more careful with it, too.
I agree there's ego aspect... But I find that a huge collection of physical objects that have only 1/10th their original value to be a massive storage problem in an already cluttered living space. Ebooks have 0 resale value (because they're so easily copied and stolen) but they also take up almost no physical room. (Gotta count a portion of the medium they live on.)
And last, when using a Palm or PocketPC for a book reader, it's also a multi-function device. A book is good only for reading.
Indeed, the proprietary ebook-readers DO all suck. DRM is the biggest reason.
I refuse to buy one of these devices or any ebooks that are DRM-infested.
Instead, I buy a lot of books from baen.com. Jim Baen started the website on a bet. Giving away one of his books on it turned into making it the best selling book he had. Apparently, people that read the book for free would then buy it for one of several reasons, including: Wanted the hard copy, loved it so much they just wanted to support him, etc, etc.
The success of this convinced him to make it permanent and I read a LOT of the free books on there, and purchased a sequels to the ones I read. Lately, I've been buying the 'webscriptions' books starting from the first months. You get quite a good discount by buying the bundles like that, and in general, the books on that site are good.
They are also all absolutely DRM-free and available in several open formats including RTF, TXT, PDB, and HTML.
As a bonus, which I didn't know beforehand, with each order they have an offer to give a free copy of the same webscription bundle to a free. You just enter an email address and it sends them (and you, also) the information. Unfortunately, I don't know many people who love to read, and fewer who love to read ebooks. But I've been using it as a way to advertise baen.com to my friends.
Jim Baen died a while back, unfortunately. But the people running his site have not only continued in his tradition, but improved on it. The site has recently seen improvements and the entire store has been revamped. The webscription offer also came afterwards. I had been afraid they'd close it instead.
Whoa, DRM rant. Heh.
You claim there are no 'comfy' reader devices for ebooks, and I totally disagree.
I've been using Palm and PocketPC devices to read ebooks for years. While the device costs a lot, and the books don't cost much less, I still far prefer them to physical books. Why?
Bookmarks.
I long ago found the 'best' bookmark for physical books. It's a device that clips to the back page of the book, and has an arm that holds the page. As you flip pages, it automatically moves to the next page. This device isn't perfect, though, as it's possible to hold the book wrong so that it flexes and loses the page. And dropping it is almost certain to lose the page. And the device doesn't work well on think books, hardbacks, and many others. And it sometimes tears pages.
Ebook readers all have a built-in bookmarking system. You just put the device in standby. The good ones even store the place if you reboot the whole system. And can do it for multiple books.
Add to that the ability to store many, many books, even if they have have numerous pictures in full color, and you've got a far superior reading device.
Most of the newer programs also have a variety of fonts and font sizes.
The only downside I've found, other than price, is the need to recharge the battery. Most PDAs have a cradle (or you can buy one) and that makes it easy to just set it down and have it charge while you aren't reading.
No, I think the biggest reason people haven't adopted ebooks is that it's too expensive, and it's 'different', something the human race just doesn't seem to do well with.
I agree that no trial means no customer for me as well, but how did you get burnt on Saga of Ryzom? It was open beta, then free trials for like 2 months. Then a year later, they introduced 2 week trials again and never took them away.
By the way, you really should have played early Beta. It was an amazing game, even without a lot of the 'promised' features like proper harvesting and clothes dyeing. They ruined it about halfway through beta because they got greedy and felt the need to prevent people from levelling up so fast by 'abusing' the spell mechanics they themselves created. (Healers could heal the entire group forever if they knew how, and everyone worked together.)
I was truly hoping that open source buyout would happen. Ah well.
I dunno, I think the lameness filter caught that one pretty well.
This issue had NOTHING to do with choice of OS. It only had to do with Windows and what could be done about hardware-change-invalidation of it.
I love Linux. If it played all my Windows games, Kubuntu would be the only OS on my system. But that has nothing to do with this issue.
If you think computers (and compilers) don't have a sense of humor, you've never programmed. I can't count the number of times I've been coding and random nonsense errors start happening, and rebooting was the solution to the problem, not bad code. I just -know- it's laughing at me every time that happens. (Granted, it's only ever happened to me on Windows, but I haven't done much Linux programming in C.)
For those unaware, that 'card manufacturer' is Creative Labs.
s px
http://preview.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.a
Sounds like something you need to post more details about. Get it loud and proud on the frontpage of Slashdot and help all the other nerds out there that are having the same problem. Maybe there's even a lawyer (I was going to write shady lawyer, but redundancy is wasteful) that will be willing to start a class-action lawsuit and give you each $.10 back, but publicizing the evils of MS in the meantime.
"There is a huge difference between knowing how to make something "go" and how it works internally."
Not if it's poorly designed. While this is typically a software problem, firmware in a device is software, too. So hardware can also have this problem. If the device is not 'black box' enough, then it may require excessive information to make the device's driver.
"Am I so naive to think that most
schools don't have at least some access to broadband and a CD burner somewhere in the building, or among the
staff/community?"
Yeah, I'm afraid so. While I can't truly speak for 'most schools', the ones where I grew up are quite unlikely to have even dialup in the school, let alone broadband internet. The library at the school MIGHT have some form of internet for research purposes only.
That doesn't mean they couldn't just go home and burn it on their home computer, of course. But this is more than just distributing it to them. This is making it EASY for them, and showing how it can help the school.
When Slashdot did the 'bringing to light', it was Saturday. The developers 'brought it to light' for their crowd on Friday. To 'bring it to light' means that you've made some portion, usually a significant portion, of a group of people aware of it. The majority of the Slashdot crowd did NOT know about this before it was announced on Saturday, so it WAS 'brought to light'.
Happy?
Why do you assume those are mutually exclusive options? As you just pointed out, there are already plenty of ways to circumvent DRM. Would it REALLY kill them to sell music online that isn't crippled? They sell it in the stores that way, and every attempt to cripple it has resulted in loss of business and/or lawsuits. Why are online sales treated differently?
The answer is simple, actually. The bully hasn't had his nose sufficiently bloodied yet. Until someone can prove that they've lost money from DRM,and get them to accept it, they will continue to make horrendously stupid business decisions.
Every shred of DRM has failed. None of it has helped protect their business. And they still make money hand over fist. Imagine what would happen if they priced their products correctly and gained the rest of the market that they've been missing.
So now, why are you tolerating DRM? Admit to yourself that you're tolerating it in the short-term and I'll agree with you. At this moment in time, you gain a fairly-easy, legal way to purchase online. (We'll just ignore the fact that it's easier and cheaper to get the music illegally, and that you can do what you want with it easier by that method.) In the long run, if they don't figure out the truth, someone else will beat them to it.
For instance, I don't believe there's any law against reselling music, and it's been proven that it's okay to rip your own music. So an enterprising individual could 'buy' CDs wholesale, rip one of them and then for each online sale of the CD he makes in MP3 format, throw a disc in the trash. Or better yet, make 'compilations' of other artists' music and pay them legally. Then instead of selling it in CD format, sell it in MP3. (Via the rip method, if the law is stupid enough to require it.)
There's plenty of ways around the system and still staying legal. Nobody has bothered yet because they don't see the market. It won't be long now.