Re:TV episodes from BitTorrent
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As an aside, having watched american adverts and english adverts, i notice a huge difference in approach. Correct me if i'm wrong, but in the US an advert treats you like a moron who will buy anything cause a guy with white perfect teeth say's it will change your life.
Yes, because, gosh, we don't have any ads like that on UK TV, do we?
Give me a break. For every witty tango or yellow pages ad, there are 10s of crap ones that are just like the ones you describe. Just because some car manufacturer spends a lot of money trying to sell you a lifestyle, doesn't mean it's an ad I want to watch, or that it appeals to my 'sense of intellectual superiority'. In addition let me just say Currys, Dixons, Linda Barker, DFS, Yes Car Credit, any advert for cleaning products, Asda, Safeway, etc. Let's call those exhibit A.
There are stacks of ads on UK TV that are just "This exists! Buy it!" ads. They aren't fun to watch.
From my experience of American TV ads, it's more in what's being advertised (or the ratios). My reactions were that the most common US ads are about pain killers, car financing (that was how I learned that US cars are never advertised with the ticket price - it's always "$X down, and $Y per month!"), personal injury lawyers (although we have that in the UK now too, yay, sarcasm ends) and anything that involves the phrase "America's Favourite {Product/Service}", or an attempt to include the word 'America' in the product/service name (e.g. AmeriHealth, etc).
That last one is weird. I know of the stereotype that Americans love their country blindly, but I didn't realise just how much the US marketing companies rely on it. Then again, judging a country on their TV ads is a risky proposition, because you're assuming the population buy into everything the ads say. As I said, it's more interesting and meaningful to look at what is being advertised.
The oddest ad I saw in the US was an infomercial for the Orlimar Trimetal Golf Club (or similar - pretty sure it was that, they said the name about a zillion times while I was packing in the hotel room). It was based purely on the fact that if you're no good at golf, then your career is over because your boss will think you're worthless. If you accepted that tenet, the infomercial made perfect sense. I didn't:-)
And one of the cleverest ads I ever saw was from the US - the Pepsi ad set in the future where a teacher is showing children round some ruined buildings, and one of them finds a classic Coke glass bottle and asks what it is. The teacher says something like "I have absolutely no idea." Inspired:-)
In summary, I'm British, and I don't like watching adverts. Luckily, I have a Tivo, which helps out greatly with this.
I accept there may be people in the UK who like watching ads, but they're probably from the set of people who tune channel 1 on their TV set to ITV, and call magazines 'books'.
Damn, there's that intellectual superiority again:)
I wonder what Jak&Daxter does when the disc is glitchy and it can't load fast enough?
Actually, that's an interesting question. If you move too fast to a new segment in J&D, and it can't be loaded before you get to it, the game makes the character trip up and fall over, so it has some more time to load:)
I think this was done in J&D, but possibly it was in J&D II.
I hear David Braben is working on a sequal to Elite, I'm sure it will be very tighly coded. I think perhaps it will be a long time coming though - if, dare I say it ever.
When did you hear that? Must have been a while ago, because two sequels have already been developed and released. Quite a long time ago, too.
I'd tend to agree (as I did in my other comment, in fact) - I've written a small Windows utility that is basically a 'whereis' database because I got so fed up of Explorer taking years to find a file. It basically scans the file system (filenames only) and builds a very simple index (you schedule it to run nightly or whatever).
I was using my home-grown platform independent library for the file access, and was starting to worry a bit about how much overhead this would add to the index building - it was taking 3-4 mins to build a list of all the files on my hard disc. My library was nice and easy to use, and worked fine for the average app, but for something that almost exclusively scans directories, I was bit concerned about some of the veneers/string copying etc that was going on.
I stopped worrying about this altogether when I noticed that if I built an index, it took ~4 minutes. If I immediately rebuilt the index, it took about 10-15 seconds. In other words, the second time, the disk catalogues had been cached in RAM by NT, so all I was seeing the second time was how long it took my app to build an index file. In other words, disc access dwarfed anything that my OS independent lib was adding to the process. Now if you imagine that you're looking at the contents of the files too, well, the maths is pretty obvious there, I think.
I sort of doubt that Google Desktop is that tied to Windows. It no doubt has some ties - but I think the 'rebuilding from the ground up' thing is possibly a bit of spin.
Consider that Mac OS is getting Spotlight soon, and GD will have to compete with that. Now, one thing Mac users don't like (and this works the other way too, come to that) is shoddy ports of Windows products that 'just about' run on Mac OS, but don't really use the idioms of the platform. So if Mr Google says "We had to rebuild it from the ground up becuase your Macs are so special and lovely!" then they might view it more kindly.
Just a thought. Most Mac users wouldn't fall for that trick, but I'm guessing the ones that do will be the more vocal ones, who will spread the word (i.e. the sort of people who use the phrase 'user experience' without a trace of irony).
I'm sure this book has a market - I've met plenty of Mac users who I'm guessing would lap it up. I've also met Mac users who would find it mildly interesting but still roll their eyes at the pointless infatuation of it all. Still others would not understand it at all - their computer is just a tool that they have a love/hate relationship with (yes, even Mac users can hate their computers!)
I'm going out on a limb here, but I'd say that most people who use Macs/PCs/whatever are just normal people trying to get something done or have fun. The (at least perceived) higher price of Macs will lead some Mac users to be affected by cognitive dissonance which they feel the need to externalise:-), but again I'd say that was the minority.
Like some slashdot users (I certainly hesitate to say 'most'), I've used a wide variety of systems/GUIs on a day-to-day basis, and I've found that the single most important factor in whether someone will like a system is "What are they used to?"
As someone who's used Windows for a few years now, switching to Mac OS (when I do for various tasks) is midly disorienting and slightly annoying. However, I'm brave enough to admit that this is because of me, not because of any inherent characteristic of Windows or Mac OS. Pre Mac OS X, I would have said that Windows NT had the edge (Win9X is another matter) for me, purely because of the robustness. Now, I find them both much of a muchness for most purposes. I continue to use Windows because it's what I'm used to, and not all of the software/devices I use are available for Macs. (Plus, I want to play Half-Life 2.)
To re-emphasise: I've developed shipping shrink-wrapped products on both Windows and Mac OS, so this is not some "I tried Mac OS for 10 days and boy did it suck" sort of rant.
Mac OS has some great stuff in it - for example, it is an endless source of annoyance to me that Windows still does not have anything remotely like the Location Manager - with the preponderance of laptops these days, I would have thought that was a must, but there you go. I imagine the reaction of most Windows laptop users on hearing what the location manager does would be "What a great idea - why doesn't Windows do that, ffs?"
On the down side, I don't really like the Finder and Mac OS window management in general. I can bear them, but the old Chooser was horrible, I thought. Those are things that I genuinely think are worse than Windows, rather than just something I'm not used to. I fully understand that other people may prefer the Finder - personally, I hated having to scrabble around on the desktop all the time to find the icon of a drive that had just been silently mounted - YMMV. Whereas the old argument of single menu bars vs. a menu on each app window is something that doesn't really bother me much - I can live with either system without really noticing any problems.
As Mac users are in the minority (sorry), it seems like human nature to view the behaviour of certain noisy individuals in that group as representative of the whole group. I'm sure we've all met Mac users who believe that the very fact that they use a Mac somehow indicates they are more creative than someone who doesn't. I once worked somewhere where, when machines were being purchased, I was told that a certain group of people would have to have Macs, because "they were creative". They were, to be brutally honest, no more creative than I was, and to do their job they needed to use email, a web browser and a word processor. Given that they used Microsoft products for all of these purposes on their Mac, I struggled to understand how using a PC would impact their performance in the creativity department. Note that I have (nor had) no objection to them using Macs at all - my objection is to the justification on 'creative' grounds, rather than the truth, which is "It's what I'm used to." That is a perfectly valid reason for wanting to use a particular platform
Re:and a slightly more cynical view...
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 1
Take the extra money you would blow on a powerbook and buy yourself a nice Sony laptop.
See, and you were doing so well up until that point! Everything else seemed like reasonable comments on a product you had used, and then you go and recommend a Sony laptop.
I would actively discourage anyone I know from buying a Sony laptop. They're chock full of proprietary stuff (the powered firewire ports they added to their laptops a while back beggared belief), are unreliable, have poor build quality, have poor support when new versions of Windows come out, and the spares are astronomically expensive (tip: when the product is EOL'd - which doesn't take long - the accessories become 'spares' - the practical result of which is that they now cost about twice as much).
I don't know anyone with a Sony laptop who would like another one. Of course, the plural of anecdote is not data, and YMMV, but I've heard all the Sony laptop anecdotes I need to.
The whole idea of Tivo is to watch stuff on MY schedule!
I can agree with that. I have a movie on my Tivo that I recorded on 15th March, 2002. I'll get around to watching it when I want to - I happen to like John Cusack movies, and I'll watch it for the first time when I'm in the right mood:-).
"Look at you, browser: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you look through my pr0n. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal corporation?"
I don't know if the P4 at work has hyperthreading. I keep meaning to check, but keep forgetting.
In terms of raw throughput, then yes, I believe a 2GHz P4 is faster than an 800MHz P3. Even Intel would have to work hard to screw up that much.
As for G4s, I'd have to change the OS and most of the programs I use, limit the software I can run, and discard half of my devices because they're unsupported, and that's not something I'm looking to do right now.
I don't shun AMD - I just couldn't find any decent AMD SMP boards for sale in the UK (that didn't cost a fortune). A lot of retailers here (I'm assuming you're in the US...) don't stock Tyan boards, let alone their SMP boards.
However, I noticed Insight now stock the board you mention, and for less than 200ukp...hmmm:)
Bear in mind that a lot of people run more than one program at a time, so apps don't have to be multi-threaded for you to see an advantage. I have a dual CPU system, and it always seems to me to be more responsive than a single CPU system - there just seem to be fewer lockups where the PC seems not to respond for a few seconds. It may only be a second or two, but it's what I find annoying.
My system is only a dual 800MHz Pentium III system, but it usually feels more responsive than the single CPU 2GHz Pentium 4 system I use at work.
I'm about to upgrade to a new PC, and it seems SMP is even harder to buy now - seems like I have to buy Xeons, get special (i.e. expensive) server motherboards and PSUs, etc., so I'll probably end up getting a single CPU system, but I'm kind of worried I'll end up with a system that feels slow, even if it's 3GHz. I can't really justify the extra expense of SMP with a new system. Oh well.
I am a developer, so I do run CPU-intensive tasks like compilers/linkers, which may affect my findings. While building projects at work, it's pretty sluggish if I try to do anything else on my PC - whereas at home on the 'slower' system, I can browse the web, read email, etc, without noticing any real slowdown.
One reliable way to speed up a system is to buy shedloads of RAM, of course. For the current cost of RAM, getting a gig or two of RAM makes a huge difference (for the stuff I do, anyway).
I've lived in England all my life, and have lived in Sussex, Devon, Wiltshire, and London. Not once have I lived in a house with a cellar. I have two friends that I know who have lived in a house with a cellar/basement, and one of those lives in Toronto.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but in spite of that:-) I believe the original poster's statement is generally true.
IE 1.0? Not sure about that. I remember installing NT4 (original edition CD) on a PC once, and using IE3 (I think) to go to the MS web site to get some updates. The site plain didn't work in that default OS browser - had to use another machine to download the patches so I could get IE4 or 5, etc, and actually access the MS website in a sane way.
Well, I bought one of the original launch devices, so I'm guessing that was v1.
Some bits were clunky, but it worked pretty well for me. The restrictions were usually hardware centric (screens were not great) rather than software. My main annoyances with CE are Microsoft's prediliction for dropping support. For example, the original HP device I bought could still be used today if you wanted to; it's quite capable. But just you try syncing it with Windows 2000 or later - it's just not supported. So you can't back it up, print anything out, or do anything useful like that.
I emailed the CE product manager about that, and pointed out that Palm's software still supported every Palm Pilot they'd ever made. He replied telling me to be reasonable, because the hardware I was talking about was four years old, and couldn't expect it to be supported any more, and why didn't I just buy a new CE device?
But that just made me sure I never wanted to buy a TV/PVR/anything I expect longevity for that ran MS software. I believe the AutoPC initiative stalled because the car manufacturers (not surprisingly) wanted a guarantee of 10 years+ support from MS, which MS were not keen to supply.
But I got a lot of useful work done on that original CE device - I used to write a lot on it.
If I remember correctly, another reason for the lawsuit going ahead (or it was at least cited during the case) was that on a number of occasions, said cups of too hot coffee had been accidentally dropped into customer's cars by the drive-in servers as they passed them to the customer.
I think a large element of that lawsuit was of the form "serving people scalding coffee is stupid and dangerous - we've asked you nicely not to do it, now we're telling you."
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, because, gosh, we don't have any ads like that on UK TV, do we?
Give me a break. For every witty tango or yellow pages ad, there are 10s of crap ones that are just like the ones you describe. Just because some car manufacturer spends a lot of money trying to sell you a lifestyle, doesn't mean it's an ad I want to watch, or that it appeals to my 'sense of intellectual superiority'. In addition let me just say Currys, Dixons, Linda Barker, DFS, Yes Car Credit, any advert for cleaning products, Asda, Safeway, etc. Let's call those exhibit A.
There are stacks of ads on UK TV that are just "This exists! Buy it!" ads. They aren't fun to watch.
From my experience of American TV ads, it's more in what's being advertised (or the ratios). My reactions were that the most common US ads are about pain killers, car financing (that was how I learned that US cars are never advertised with the ticket price - it's always "$X down, and $Y per month!"), personal injury lawyers (although we have that in the UK now too, yay, sarcasm ends) and anything that involves the phrase "America's Favourite {Product/Service}", or an attempt to include the word 'America' in the product/service name (e.g. AmeriHealth, etc).
That last one is weird. I know of the stereotype that Americans love their country blindly, but I didn't realise just how much the US marketing companies rely on it. Then again, judging a country on their TV ads is a risky proposition, because you're assuming the population buy into everything the ads say. As I said, it's more interesting and meaningful to look at what is being advertised.
The oddest ad I saw in the US was an infomercial for the Orlimar Trimetal Golf Club (or similar - pretty sure it was that, they said the name about a zillion times while I was packing in the hotel room). It was based purely on the fact that if you're no good at golf, then your career is over because your boss will think you're worthless. If you accepted that tenet, the infomercial made perfect sense. I didn't :-)
And one of the cleverest ads I ever saw was from the US - the Pepsi ad set in the future where a teacher is showing children round some ruined buildings, and one of them finds a classic Coke glass bottle and asks what it is. The teacher says something like "I have absolutely no idea." Inspired :-)
In summary, I'm British, and I don't like watching adverts. Luckily, I have a Tivo, which helps out greatly with this.
I accept there may be people in the UK who like watching ads, but they're probably from the set of people who tune channel 1 on their TV set to ITV, and call magazines 'books'.
Damn, there's that intellectual superiority again :)
Actually, that's an interesting question. If you move too fast to a new segment in J&D, and it can't be loaded before you get to it, the game makes the character trip up and fall over, so it has some more time to load :)
I think this was done in J&D, but possibly it was in J&D II.
When did you hear that? Must have been a while ago, because two sequels have already been developed and released. Quite a long time ago, too.
How many rods per hogshead does your car get?
No.
No, they're definitely not missiles.
I was using my home-grown platform independent library for the file access, and was starting to worry a bit about how much overhead this would add to the index building - it was taking 3-4 mins to build a list of all the files on my hard disc. My library was nice and easy to use, and worked fine for the average app, but for something that almost exclusively scans directories, I was bit concerned about some of the veneers/string copying etc that was going on.
I stopped worrying about this altogether when I noticed that if I built an index, it took ~4 minutes. If I immediately rebuilt the index, it took about 10-15 seconds. In other words, the second time, the disk catalogues had been cached in RAM by NT, so all I was seeing the second time was how long it took my app to build an index file. In other words, disc access dwarfed anything that my OS independent lib was adding to the process. Now if you imagine that you're looking at the contents of the files too, well, the maths is pretty obvious there, I think.
I sort of doubt that Google Desktop is that tied to Windows. It no doubt has some ties - but I think the 'rebuilding from the ground up' thing is possibly a bit of spin.
Consider that Mac OS is getting Spotlight soon, and GD will have to compete with that. Now, one thing Mac users don't like (and this works the other way too, come to that) is shoddy ports of Windows products that 'just about' run on Mac OS, but don't really use the idioms of the platform. So if Mr Google says "We had to rebuild it from the ground up becuase your Macs are so special and lovely!" then they might view it more kindly.
Just a thought. Most Mac users wouldn't fall for that trick, but I'm guessing the ones that do will be the more vocal ones, who will spread the word (i.e. the sort of people who use the phrase 'user experience' without a trace of irony).
No, I am saying that not all people who read slashdot have a dislike of Microsoft. Sorry for the confusion.
...it's more like 16-bit shades of grey.
I'm sure this book has a market - I've met plenty of Mac users who I'm guessing would lap it up. I've also met Mac users who would find it mildly interesting but still roll their eyes at the pointless infatuation of it all. Still others would not understand it at all - their computer is just a tool that they have a love/hate relationship with (yes, even Mac users can hate their computers!)
I'm going out on a limb here, but I'd say that most people who use Macs/PCs/whatever are just normal people trying to get something done or have fun. The (at least perceived) higher price of Macs will lead some Mac users to be affected by cognitive dissonance which they feel the need to externalise :-), but again I'd say that was the minority.
Like some slashdot users (I certainly hesitate to say 'most'), I've used a wide variety of systems/GUIs on a day-to-day basis, and I've found that the single most important factor in whether someone will like a system is "What are they used to?"
As someone who's used Windows for a few years now, switching to Mac OS (when I do for various tasks) is midly disorienting and slightly annoying. However, I'm brave enough to admit that this is because of me, not because of any inherent characteristic of Windows or Mac OS. Pre Mac OS X, I would have said that Windows NT had the edge (Win9X is another matter) for me, purely because of the robustness. Now, I find them both much of a muchness for most purposes. I continue to use Windows because it's what I'm used to, and not all of the software/devices I use are available for Macs. (Plus, I want to play Half-Life 2.)
To re-emphasise: I've developed shipping shrink-wrapped products on both Windows and Mac OS, so this is not some "I tried Mac OS for 10 days and boy did it suck" sort of rant.
Mac OS has some great stuff in it - for example, it is an endless source of annoyance to me that Windows still does not have anything remotely like the Location Manager - with the preponderance of laptops these days, I would have thought that was a must, but there you go. I imagine the reaction of most Windows laptop users on hearing what the location manager does would be "What a great idea - why doesn't Windows do that, ffs?"
On the down side, I don't really like the Finder and Mac OS window management in general. I can bear them, but the old Chooser was horrible, I thought. Those are things that I genuinely think are worse than Windows, rather than just something I'm not used to. I fully understand that other people may prefer the Finder - personally, I hated having to scrabble around on the desktop all the time to find the icon of a drive that had just been silently mounted - YMMV. Whereas the old argument of single menu bars vs. a menu on each app window is something that doesn't really bother me much - I can live with either system without really noticing any problems.
As Mac users are in the minority (sorry), it seems like human nature to view the behaviour of certain noisy individuals in that group as representative of the whole group. I'm sure we've all met Mac users who believe that the very fact that they use a Mac somehow indicates they are more creative than someone who doesn't. I once worked somewhere where, when machines were being purchased, I was told that a certain group of people would have to have Macs, because "they were creative". They were, to be brutally honest, no more creative than I was, and to do their job they needed to use email, a web browser and a word processor. Given that they used Microsoft products for all of these purposes on their Mac, I struggled to understand how using a PC would impact their performance in the creativity department. Note that I have (nor had) no objection to them using Macs at all - my objection is to the justification on 'creative' grounds, rather than the truth, which is "It's what I'm used to." That is a perfectly valid reason for wanting to use a particular platform
See, and you were doing so well up until that point! Everything else seemed like reasonable comments on a product you had used, and then you go and recommend a Sony laptop.
I would actively discourage anyone I know from buying a Sony laptop. They're chock full of proprietary stuff (the powered firewire ports they added to their laptops a while back beggared belief), are unreliable, have poor build quality, have poor support when new versions of Windows come out, and the spares are astronomically expensive (tip: when the product is EOL'd - which doesn't take long - the accessories become 'spares' - the practical result of which is that they now cost about twice as much).
I don't know anyone with a Sony laptop who would like another one. Of course, the plural of anecdote is not data, and YMMV, but I've heard all the Sony laptop anecdotes I need to.
Or, in the immortal words of The Young Ones:
"Quick, Neil - call the Fire Brigade!"
"But you said they were fascists, Rik."
"Well never mind about that now!"
Because all the people who read slashdot don't fit into your narrow definition?
The victims of lesbian rape may disagree with you.
And I may be offtopic.
I can agree with that. I have a movie on my Tivo that I recorded on 15th March, 2002. I'll get around to watching it when I want to - I happen to like John Cusack movies, and I'll watch it for the first time when I'm in the right mood :-).
"Talk a lot, don't you?"
"Look at you, browser: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you look through my pr0n. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal corporation?"
I don't know if the P4 at work has hyperthreading. I keep meaning to check, but keep forgetting.
In terms of raw throughput, then yes, I believe a 2GHz P4 is faster than an 800MHz P3. Even Intel would have to work hard to screw up that much.
As for G4s, I'd have to change the OS and most of the programs I use, limit the software I can run, and discard half of my devices because they're unsupported, and that's not something I'm looking to do right now.
I don't shun AMD - I just couldn't find any decent AMD SMP boards for sale in the UK (that didn't cost a fortune). A lot of retailers here (I'm assuming you're in the US...) don't stock Tyan boards, let alone their SMP boards.
:)
However, I noticed Insight now stock the board you mention, and for less than 200ukp...hmmm
Bear in mind that a lot of people run more than one program at a time, so apps don't have to be multi-threaded for you to see an advantage. I have a dual CPU system, and it always seems to me to be more responsive than a single CPU system - there just seem to be fewer lockups where the PC seems not to respond for a few seconds. It may only be a second or two, but it's what I find annoying.
My system is only a dual 800MHz Pentium III system, but it usually feels more responsive than the single CPU 2GHz Pentium 4 system I use at work.
I'm about to upgrade to a new PC, and it seems SMP is even harder to buy now - seems like I have to buy Xeons, get special (i.e. expensive) server motherboards and PSUs, etc., so I'll probably end up getting a single CPU system, but I'm kind of worried I'll end up with a system that feels slow, even if it's 3GHz. I can't really justify the extra expense of SMP with a new system. Oh well.
I am a developer, so I do run CPU-intensive tasks like compilers/linkers, which may affect my findings. While building projects at work, it's pretty sluggish if I try to do anything else on my PC - whereas at home on the 'slower' system, I can browse the web, read email, etc, without noticing any real slowdown.
One reliable way to speed up a system is to buy shedloads of RAM, of course. For the current cost of RAM, getting a gig or two of RAM makes a huge difference (for the stuff I do, anyway).
I've lived in England all my life, and have lived in Sussex, Devon, Wiltshire, and London. Not once have I lived in a house with a cellar. I have two friends that I know who have lived in a house with a cellar/basement, and one of those lives in Toronto.
:-) I believe the original poster's statement is generally true.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but in spite of that
IE 1.0? Not sure about that. I remember installing NT4 (original edition CD) on a PC once, and using IE3 (I think) to go to the MS web site to get some updates. The site plain didn't work in that default OS browser - had to use another machine to download the patches so I could get IE4 or 5, etc, and actually access the MS website in a sane way.
Can't resist it... :-)
Well, I bought one of the original launch devices, so I'm guessing that was v1.
Some bits were clunky, but it worked pretty well for me. The restrictions were usually hardware centric (screens were not great) rather than software. My main annoyances with CE are Microsoft's prediliction for dropping support. For example, the original HP device I bought could still be used today if you wanted to; it's quite capable. But just you try syncing it with Windows 2000 or later - it's just not supported. So you can't back it up, print anything out, or do anything useful like that.
I emailed the CE product manager about that, and pointed out that Palm's software still supported every Palm Pilot they'd ever made. He replied telling me to be reasonable, because the hardware I was talking about was four years old, and couldn't expect it to be supported any more, and why didn't I just buy a new CE device?
But that just made me sure I never wanted to buy a TV/PVR/anything I expect longevity for that ran MS software. I believe the AutoPC initiative stalled because the car manufacturers (not surprisingly) wanted a guarantee of 10 years+ support from MS, which MS were not keen to supply.
But I got a lot of useful work done on that original CE device - I used to write a lot on it.
As someone who used a couple of CE devices a fair bit before v5 of WinCE, I'm curious to know how you define 'non-functional'?
Poorly, I suspect.
If I remember correctly, another reason for the lawsuit going ahead (or it was at least cited during the case) was that on a number of occasions, said cups of too hot coffee had been accidentally dropped into customer's cars by the drive-in servers as they passed them to the customer.
I think a large element of that lawsuit was of the form "serving people scalding coffee is stupid and dangerous - we've asked you nicely not to do it, now we're telling you."
imho, of course.