Lets see... my home theatre has a dock, my alarm clock has a dock, then i have a charger in the office at home and another at work, plus one in my car, along with the ipod connector for the stereo in both my car and my wifes car.
So I've got uh... 7. Now I wouldn't be on the hook for 7 adapters... I'd need an adapter for the stereo, alarm clock, and for the 2 cars. I'll assume the phone comes with a wall charger so that takes care of the charger at the office.
Plus I'd need to buy a new car charger, and a 2nd wall charger for at home.
So I'd be on the hook for a total of 4 adapters and 2 new chargers (car + wall). That would actually add up to quite a bit.
But... I bought a Galaxy S3 this month. (I was pretty confident the iphone 5 wasn't going to wow me, and I was right.) The micro-USB charger situation wasn't bad at all... my wife's last phone was a blackberry so we've already got a few of them.
Admittedly I've still lost the ability to use my phone with the home theatre, alarm clock, and cars... but I've pulled an old ipod nano out of a drawer as a pretty much permanent fixture for the alarm clock. And I've made another old 4th gen 32GB ipod as a permanent fixture in my car. My wife already used her own nano with her car so that's more or less covered - I just can't use my phone. And the home theatre... its not a feature we used much anyway as I have an HTPC setup as well.
I.e., this very well may be unreasonble if extrapolated to thousands of songs,
No. Its unreasonable even at 24 songs. That's enough to ruin the average persons life. A person who did not profit in any significant way from the act, against an entity who was not harmed in any significant way from the act.
We're talking small claims level profit to the defendant ($24), small claims level of harm to the plaintiff (unquantified but even if her sharing ratio was a very exceptional 10:1 that would still top out at a whopping $240... how is hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines reasonable? Should she be punished on top of the "harm" sure...
Applying the Williams standard, we conclude that an award of $9,250 per each of twenty-four works is not âoeso severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable.â
The award of $9,250 is not really the issue. In fact, that would be an arguably reasonable punishment for the alleged infringement.
The issue is counting each file as a separate infringement and multiplying $9,250 by 24.
Using kazaa or whatever it was to infringe and being convicted should be a singular crime, not 24 separate crimes.
When I ripped my 800+ disc CD collection I ended up with upwards of 9000 tracks. When I installed a filesharing app that by default pointed at my music folder I am apparently on the hook for 9000 separate crimes @ $9250 each?
Lets see: this court apparently thinks it would be "reasonable" to fine me 83 million dollars for that.
. If you took an iPhone 4S and had a perfectly silent room with a trained speaker, and an 802.11n connection to a local server to do the decoding and searching, you could get the same results
That's speculation at best. My experience with Siri is that its not that good. Ever. The results would only match the demonstration if siri was simply scripted to give those answers to those questions. (which is something siri is known to do -- give scripted answers to particular questions).
Plus apple has been known to just outright fake things too:
my kids are in a semester system. one month at christmas off, one at spring break, one in summer... same number of days as the "traditional method" without the big gap in summer. works just fine imo.
Had I been playing this ArenaNet game I would have thought that was the case.
Uh. No. This is not Wing Commander privateer where iron is bought low on a mining asteroid and generates a modest profit when resold at a refinery world.
This is more on par with buying iron low at the mining asteroid, selling it for a modest profit at the refinery, then noticing the refiner is listing the raw iron you just sold it for half what you paid at the asteroid. So you buy it all back, and then notice the refinery will pay you their original purchase price to buy it all back... so you sell it back to them at enourmous profit without any travel or risk at all.
Then you see they are again selling it a fraction of the price you just sold it to them... so you stand there and repeat until you are wealthy enough to buy the refining world outright. Meanwhile telling yourself that there was nothing wrong with this because buying low and selling high and being a trader is a legitimate mechanic.
So, all those people who lose power to storms might just think that the cloud can lose power in storms.
Anything that interferes with the internet between you and the service disrupts your ability to use the service. Weather impacts on internet links both big and small all the time. Are the actual computers running the service likely to go down? No... but a lightning strike on their internet connection... or yours... or any link between you will make them as good as down.
Exactly... At first blush, as someone in IT, my gut would be a resounding "yes".
One of the big "risk factors" I attach to cloud and any offsite solutions is that they are by definition only accessible when internet connectivity is established.
Generally the ONLY time my office internet access goes down is during bad weather. Snow, wind, lightning can take down internet. My choices here are satellite, ADSL, and fixed point-to-point wireless. And all 3 are disrupted by enough snow, wind, rain, and lightning. All of which happen here enough to ensure that weather not merely "may" affect any cloud services we use, but absolutely "WILL".
And that's just my local internet, and doesn't get into the only slightly more abstract premise that wherever the offsite computing is actually taking place can also be hit with severe weather.
Good point; I guess its not the best example. I'm sure she would have preferred it be "normal" for purely cosmetic reasons.
Her comment about not missing it was more in the context of things like balance, walking, running - she hasn't noticed its absence having affected her ability to function.
You know, #7 out of like 153 or something is pretty damn good.
Which is why i said the US is undeniably a very nice place to live. Nothing on the top 10 is a hell hole.
And perhaps they don't want to have to live in Canada, which honestly, is not strange given the fact that it even farther north than places like New York and Minnesota. Or learn to speak Swedish.
Perhaps, but that doesn't really change anything. (And as an aside the weather on Canada's west coast is far nicer than that of new york and minnesota.)
Point is, the US may very well objectively beat any other place on the planet, particularly for someone who is already an American.
I suppose if you define your criteria narrowly and perversely enough. Sure. I mean a 1984 Datsun is the best car in the world if your criteria is "value for money" and you already own one vs any other car you would have to buy. Espcially if you add to the criteria that you don't want to learn how to adjust the seats in another car... while,hell! -- your Datsun is already set up for you. Man what a car!
If you can stand to live in Canada, usually though a lifetime acclimation to the conditions.
Which conditions are those? Living with the metric system? Seriously... what are you on about... ?
Your fellow Americans are evacuating cities right now as Isaac bears down on them, while the interior is suffering one of the worst droughts on record.
But hey, we get it, anything is better than living in Winnipeg, amirite?
America may not have all the freedoms I'd like, but it sure as hell beats any other place on this planet!
That must be why it is ranked #7 *
Not that I think the precise rankings of any given country are indisputably correct; the important take away is that:
a) The USA is undeniably a very good place to live on this planet.
b) The USA does NOT "sure as hell beats any other place on this planet!" There are a number of other very good places to live on this planet; several of them arguably better than the USA.
Speaking as a circumcised male, I have never felt a loss for a bit of useless skin.
Meh. I know a girl missing her 4th toe on one foot that says the same thing. The fact that you don't miss it doesn't mean we should go around cutting them off.
Most of the women I've talked to about it say they find foreskins to be "ooky" anyways, particularly the ones that enjoy fellatio.
And that constitutes a reason to remove it on all infants across the board? That some girls who sucked a bunch of dicks, who probably got used to circumcised dicks then later found an uncircumcised one's foreskin a bit "ooky". It boggles the mind. You know, some of them find the loose skin around your testicles a bit ooky too...
If you want a circumcision go for it. As far as I'm concerned its in the same arena as nipple piercing and what not. Your body, your choice.
But to make it a mandated medical procedure based on this is insanity.
The rationale they are using for this procedure is roughly on par with extracting your teeth because brushing them and flossing them and caring for them is a lot of work. They get infected a need all kinds of expensive attention if you don't keep them clean... and sometimes even if you do they still break sometimes or come out crooked. What an expensive mess... for something we don't need. All our nutrition requirements can be met by food in pill and shake form anyways.
And besides some guys who got used to having their dicks sucked and gummed on by toothless whores find chicks with teeth... ooky.
on 1 Flashdrives are too small for this (quick find me a flashdrive in the Terabyte range that would not cost more than the computer)
The recovery partition tends to be smaller than a DVD. 4GB-8GB flash drives run under $10 at retail. I'm pretty sure an OEM gets them for even less.
2 is more to provide a way to A sell more stuff B ensure that this stuff is Updated Properly
In practice a lot of it is that. It doesn't have to be. The OEM program was originally envisioned with something greater in mind. Where people would buy a brand X because the OEM had made something actually compelling instead of revolting.
Ok... i gotta ask... how much bandwidth are you getting for that price? How much latency? Can you stream through it or is it choppy as shit?
I see these VPN services out there, and I've got to figure that if they have even a few 10s of thousands of users they'd need some pretty heavy duty infrastructure to deliver useful service... so what is the business model? How does it really work? Can they really turn a profit, deliver the service they claim to deliver at a level of performance that is actually impressive?
I can totally see a web proxy being able to do it. But netflix and hulu steaming? major torrenting? etc... that sucks down the bandwidth.
Except I've never seen any of this "OEM differentiator" software which wasn't complete shit.
Well, if you read the next sentece you wrote you'd see that I tend to agree with you.
But in theory that differentiator software is why people would choose a Sony over a Toshiba or vice-versa. And if an OEMs got their act together and did a decent job of it, it could be.
So, tell me again, how does this crap actually benefit them again?
It doesn't. We agree. But it could.
I remember a while back (early XP years... circa 2002-03) one of them actually had really a good OEM network manager for example that you manage network configurations for different locations (static ip on wireless at location A, dynamic ip on ethernet at location b, etc, etc... ) It was genuinely better than what you got by default from Microsoft.
The two problems were that they didn't make a brand defining feature -- Customers didn't realize this was a Toshiba (or whatever) feature and that if they bought an HP it was going to be totally different. So they'd buy an HP it was totally different and after a while they'd fall back to the microsoft one because at least it was the same everywhere. If they KNEW it was a Toshiba exclusive feature they might have bought a Toshiba next time round...
Which wouldn't have mattered because of the 2nd problem. The manufacturers couldn't stick to anything anyway... so even if the customer did buy another toshiba they had switched wifi and lan chipsets in the interim and replaced the network manager from the previous model with something else anyway.
And the 3rd problem was that this helter skelter of versions meant that instead of a single continually improved and refined network manager you ended up with 43 different ones all thrown hastily together, and 42 of them were discontinued.
In another example, Sony was bundling an iphoto equivalent application for a while, that was actually more or less on par with iphoto. But they too did a shitty job both of maintaining it and of making it a defining characteristic and reason to buy a Sony. I knew someone who was using it and was very happy with it... and then they bought a new computer and were completely lost because it wasn't a sony and it wasn't available. And it wouldn't have mattered if they had bought a Sony anyway because sony had discontinued and forgotten it too.
The potential to differentiate and build brand loyalty by product differentiation is there. The OEMS are just complete fuckups at doing it.
It needs to be supported and maintained and advertised and maintained and did I mention it needs to be maintained?
1 design the system with a smallish second harddrive that can be removed (move the recovery thing to this device)
Flash drives are already gradually moving to this role.
2 move the value add programs to some sort of "ap store"
Meh. You don't understand the economics of the outright bloatware. And the true value add stuff is the OEM differentiator stuff -- not preinstalling that stuff would be a counter productive as Apple not installing Mail.app.
Granted, I never use that software, because I don't find it terribly good, and the fact that its only available from one OEM doesn't help it. But then... I don't use Mail.app either.
3 have the parts manual on the backup drive
The website is fine.
4 MAKE SURE YOUR STORE WEBSITE CAN RECOGNIZE A LOGIN FROM YOUR COMPUTER : if i hit the HP store website it should automatically know that i am using an HP product and give me options that are compatible with that system.
They actually aren't bad at this - and a number of OEMs do this, but it needs features like java and/or activex or other browser add-ins to work... and of course people like you likely refuse to have those enabled or even installed.;)
Go read their apple - psystar case coverage. You'd think they'd all been given ipad's for christmas. In any case, groklaw may seem to be biased in a given case coverage, based on their sense of the case itself... but they don't seem to have bias for the company.
no doubt they will just release a "server only" motherboard that doesn't have any protection and is a complete copy of the desktop except something like the BIOS will boot up and say "Server BIOS".
Not even that it. it will just be labelled an enthusiast board, and be an exact copy of the desktop bios except secure boot is user programmable, and all the settings are wide open. It might have to forego its "windows 8 logo certification" but they know enthusiasts will know exactly why.
Linux desktops will be readily available well into the foreseeable future.
The problem though is that an awful LOT of us got our first taste of linux and BSD and so forth by installing it on our "last years Dell". And that route to Linux may be dying out, because it may be very very difficult to get Linux to run on your "old PC or Mac" in the not too distant future, unless you had the foresight to buy "Linux ready".
The purpose of arbitration is to avoid punitive(etc) damages in court
That presupposes going to court is even an option, which it is when normal arbitration fails. We can all agree that arbitration tends to be a reasonable step to try and settle before going to court.
"Binding Arbitration" is a whole other animal. There is no risk of the company being taken to court, because the aribtration is BINDING. That is the entire problem here. You can't take the case to court if binding arbitration is unsatisfactory.
Once upon a time I "lost" my bike (or it got stolen for a joyride or kicks or whatever motivates some people... and then found abandoned by someone else later). In any case, it was fairly valuable, and good fortune it turned up with the Police.
So I show up, show some ID, and they have me make and sign a statement that the bike is mine.
I didn't exactly feel that I was the victim of extortion. Was I "coerced"? Sure, in the sense that the police weren't giving me the bike back unless I formally claimed it, sure absolutely. But to characterize that as "extortion"? That's out of line.
For the record, I meant coercion in the literal sense (as in by definition) and not necessarily the kind that warrants prosecution
If you meant coercion, in the literal sense, fine.
Firstly, that sort of coercion is precisely the same sort of coercion that McDonald's puts you through to obtain a Burger. You have to order here, pay there, and pick up over there. If you want your order, you go to the second window.
While you try to portray a rational conversation between Apple and Gizmodo, the articles printed at the time of the incident and the comments of the prosecutor who decided not to pursue the matter indicate otherwise.
I wouldn't go that far. I readily agree that Gizmodo was doing its level best to exploit the event for all the publicity it was worth.
However, even so, Gizmodo's request that apple formally claim the device was reasonable. I've recovered lost/stolen property before, and its not at all unusual or unreasonable to have to show ID and sign a statement claiming ownership of it.
The fact that this would give Gizmodo something to crow about as news and even the fact that this is largely why Gizmodo was even doing it doesn't really change things. Its distasteful and exploitive... and on par with half the things you see in a tabloid.
Celebrities don't get to avoid having their mugshots taken when they get arrested just because they know the tabloids will plaster those unflattering pics all over their pages for profits.
Similarly Apple shouldn't get to reclaim lost property with a SWAT team and police raid just because they know that issuing a statement claiming ownership would be simultaneously humiliating and will give the webtabloids a bunch of juicy fodder.
In hindsight by the way, I think Gizmodo miscalculated. They would have "won" had they formally turned the iphone over to the police. The situation there i If it wasn't claimed wihin X days, then it belongs to Gizmodo. And of course, when Apple claimed it, they ABSOLUTELY would have had to document it, and unless I'm mistaken it would have been a matter of public record, and they'd have gotten their story.
Although perhaps the way it went down was even better fodder for the news industry. Apple raiding companies for lost prototypes on what are at best flimsy pretenses is far better news fodder than anything anyone could have cooked up.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets see... my home theatre has a dock, my alarm clock has a dock, then i have a charger in the office at home and another at work, plus one in my car, along with the ipod connector for the stereo in both my car and my wifes car.
So I've got uh... 7. Now I wouldn't be on the hook for 7 adapters... I'd need an adapter for the stereo, alarm clock, and for the 2 cars. I'll assume the phone comes with a wall charger so that takes care of the charger at the office.
Plus I'd need to buy a new car charger, and a 2nd wall charger for at home.
So I'd be on the hook for a total of 4 adapters and 2 new chargers (car + wall). That would actually add up to quite a bit.
But... I bought a Galaxy S3 this month. (I was pretty confident the iphone 5 wasn't going to wow me, and I was right.) The micro-USB charger situation wasn't bad at all... my wife's last phone was a blackberry so we've already got a few of them.
Admittedly I've still lost the ability to use my phone with the home theatre, alarm clock, and cars... but I've pulled an old ipod nano out of a drawer as a pretty much permanent fixture for the alarm clock. And I've made another old 4th gen 32GB ipod as a permanent fixture in my car. My wife already used her own nano with her car so that's more or less covered - I just can't use my phone. And the home theatre... its not a feature we used much anyway as I have an HTPC setup as well.
I.e., this very well may be unreasonble if extrapolated to thousands of songs,
No. Its unreasonable even at 24 songs. That's enough to ruin the average persons life. A person who did not profit in any significant way from the act, against an entity who was not harmed in any significant way from the act.
We're talking small claims level profit to the defendant ($24), small claims level of harm to the plaintiff (unquantified but even if her sharing ratio was a very exceptional 10:1 that would still top out at a whopping $240... how is hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines reasonable? Should she be punished on top of the "harm" sure...
Should she be financially ruined over it? Absurd.
Applying the Williams standard, we conclude that an award of $9,250 per each of twenty-four works is not âoeso severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable.â
The award of $9,250 is not really the issue. In fact, that would be an arguably reasonable punishment for the alleged infringement.
The issue is counting each file as a separate infringement and multiplying $9,250 by 24.
Using kazaa or whatever it was to infringe and being convicted should be a singular crime, not 24 separate crimes.
When I ripped my 800+ disc CD collection I ended up with upwards of 9000 tracks. When I installed a filesharing app that by default pointed at my music folder I am apparently on the hook for 9000 separate crimes @ $9250 each?
Lets see: this court apparently thinks it would be "reasonable" to fine me 83 million dollars for that.
. If you took an iPhone 4S and had a perfectly silent room with a trained speaker, and an 802.11n connection to a local server to do the decoding and searching, you could get the same results
That's speculation at best. My experience with Siri is that its not that good. Ever. The results would only match the demonstration if siri was simply scripted to give those answers to those questions. (which is something siri is known to do -- give scripted answers to particular questions).
Plus apple has been known to just outright fake things too:
http://i.imgur.com/huWri.jpg
(sorry about the goofy link, but its worth checking out.)
my kids are in a semester system. one month at christmas off, one at spring break, one in summer... same number of days as the "traditional method" without the big gap in summer. works just fine imo.
Had I been playing this ArenaNet game I would have thought that was the case.
Uh. No. This is not Wing Commander privateer where iron is bought low on a mining asteroid and generates a modest profit when resold at a refinery world.
This is more on par with buying iron low at the mining asteroid, selling it for a modest profit at the refinery, then noticing the refiner is listing the raw iron you just sold it for half what you paid at the asteroid. So you buy it all back, and then notice the refinery will pay you their original purchase price to buy it all back... so you sell it back to them at enourmous profit without any travel or risk at all.
Then you see they are again selling it a fraction of the price you just sold it to them... so you stand there and repeat until you are wealthy enough to buy the refining world outright. Meanwhile telling yourself that there was nothing wrong with this because buying low and selling high and being a trader is a legitimate mechanic.
So, all those people who lose power to storms might just think that the cloud can lose power in storms.
Anything that interferes with the internet between you and the service disrupts your ability to use the service. Weather impacts on internet links both big and small all the time. Are the actual computers running the service likely to go down? No... but a lightning strike on their internet connection... or yours... or any link between you will make them as good as down.
Exactly... At first blush, as someone in IT, my gut would be a resounding "yes".
One of the big "risk factors" I attach to cloud and any offsite solutions is that they are by definition only accessible when internet connectivity is established.
Generally the ONLY time my office internet access goes down is during bad weather. Snow, wind, lightning can take down internet. My choices here are satellite, ADSL, and fixed point-to-point wireless. And all 3 are disrupted by enough snow, wind, rain, and lightning. All of which happen here enough to ensure that weather not merely "may" affect any cloud services we use, but absolutely "WILL".
And that's just my local internet, and doesn't get into the only slightly more abstract premise that wherever the offsite computing is actually taking place can also be hit with severe weather.
Good point; I guess its not the best example. I'm sure she would have preferred it be "normal" for purely cosmetic reasons.
Her comment about not missing it was more in the context of things like balance, walking, running - she hasn't noticed its absence having affected her ability to function.
You know, #7 out of like 153 or something is pretty damn good.
Which is why i said the US is undeniably a very nice place to live. Nothing on the top 10 is a hell hole.
And perhaps they don't want to have to live in Canada, which honestly, is not strange given the fact that it even farther north than places like New York and Minnesota. Or learn to speak Swedish.
Perhaps, but that doesn't really change anything. (And as an aside the weather on Canada's west coast is far nicer than that of new york and minnesota.)
Point is, the US may very well objectively beat any other place on the planet, particularly for someone who is already an American.
I suppose if you define your criteria narrowly and perversely enough. Sure. I mean a 1984 Datsun is the best car in the world if your criteria is "value for money" and you already own one vs any other car you would have to buy. Espcially if you add to the criteria that you don't want to learn how to adjust the seats in another car... while,hell! -- your Datsun is already set up for you. Man what a car!
If you can stand to live in Canada, usually though a lifetime acclimation to the conditions.
Which conditions are those? Living with the metric system? Seriously... what are you on about... ?
Your fellow Americans are evacuating cities right now as Isaac bears down on them, while the interior is suffering one of the worst droughts on record.
But hey, we get it, anything is better than living in Winnipeg, amirite?
Cosmetics has nothing to do with the finding, actually. You don't even need to read TFA to figure that out..
The post isn't addressing the argument in the TFA. It is addressing the argument in the post it replied to.
why the fuck is this +5???
I figure it was the "toothless whores" that put it over the top, but no one will ever know for sure.
America may not have all the freedoms I'd like, but it sure as hell beats any other place on this planet!
That must be why it is ranked #7 *
Not that I think the precise rankings of any given country are indisputably correct; the important take away is that:
a) The USA is undeniably a very good place to live on this planet.
b) The USA does NOT "sure as hell beats any other place on this planet!" There are a number of other very good places to live on this planet; several of them arguably better than the USA.
(* http://www.businessinsider.com/oecd-better-life-index-2011-5?op=1)
Speaking as a circumcised male, I have never felt a loss for a bit of useless skin.
Meh. I know a girl missing her 4th toe on one foot that says the same thing. The fact that you don't miss it doesn't mean we should go around cutting them off.
Most of the women I've talked to about it say they find foreskins to be "ooky" anyways, particularly the ones that enjoy fellatio.
And that constitutes a reason to remove it on all infants across the board? That some girls who sucked a bunch of dicks, who probably got used to circumcised dicks then later found an uncircumcised one's foreskin a bit "ooky". It boggles the mind. You know, some of them find the loose skin around your testicles a bit ooky too...
If you want a circumcision go for it. As far as I'm concerned its in the same arena as nipple piercing and what not. Your body, your choice.
But to make it a mandated medical procedure based on this is insanity.
The rationale they are using for this procedure is roughly on par with extracting your teeth because brushing them and flossing them and caring for them is a lot of work. They get infected a need all kinds of expensive attention if you don't keep them clean... and sometimes even if you do they still break sometimes or come out crooked. What an expensive mess... for something we don't need. All our nutrition requirements can be met by food in pill and shake form anyways.
And besides some guys who got used to having their dicks sucked and gummed on by toothless whores find chicks with teeth... ooky.
$12 billion in market capitalization loss says Samsung shareholders and the market agree with you and the jury.
Is that how you think the market works?
on 1 Flashdrives are too small for this (quick find me a flashdrive in the Terabyte range that would not cost more than the computer)
The recovery partition tends to be smaller than a DVD. 4GB-8GB flash drives run under $10 at retail. I'm pretty sure an OEM gets them for even less.
2 is more to provide a way to A sell more stuff B ensure that this stuff is Updated Properly
In practice a lot of it is that. It doesn't have to be. The OEM program was originally envisioned with something greater in mind. Where people would buy a brand X because the OEM had made something actually compelling instead of revolting.
Ok... i gotta ask... how much bandwidth are you getting for that price? How much latency? Can you stream through it or is it choppy as shit?
I see these VPN services out there, and I've got to figure that if they have even a few 10s of thousands of users they'd need some pretty heavy duty infrastructure to deliver useful service... so what is the business model? How does it really work? Can they really turn a profit, deliver the service they claim to deliver at a level of performance that is actually impressive?
I can totally see a web proxy being able to do it. But netflix and hulu steaming? major torrenting? etc... that sucks down the bandwidth.
It's Goliath... and unlike the biblical parable, a few rocks will not down this beast.
Fortunately it's likely to collapse under its own weight sooner or later anyway. Nothing grows at that rate indefinitely.
Except I've never seen any of this "OEM differentiator" software which wasn't complete shit.
Well, if you read the next sentece you wrote you'd see that I tend to agree with you.
But in theory that differentiator software is why people would choose a Sony over a Toshiba or vice-versa. And if an OEMs got their act together and did a decent job of it, it could be.
So, tell me again, how does this crap actually benefit them again?
It doesn't. We agree. But it could.
I remember a while back (early XP years... circa 2002-03) one of them actually had really a good OEM network manager for example that you manage network configurations for different locations (static ip on wireless at location A, dynamic ip on ethernet at location b, etc, etc... ) It was genuinely better than what you got by default from Microsoft.
The two problems were that they didn't make a brand defining feature -- Customers didn't realize this was a Toshiba (or whatever) feature and that if they bought an HP it was going to be totally different. So they'd buy an HP it was totally different and after a while they'd fall back to the microsoft one because at least it was the same everywhere. If they KNEW it was a Toshiba exclusive feature they might have bought a Toshiba next time round...
Which wouldn't have mattered because of the 2nd problem. The manufacturers couldn't stick to anything anyway... so even if the customer did buy another toshiba they had switched wifi and lan chipsets in the interim and replaced the network manager from the previous model with something else anyway.
And the 3rd problem was that this helter skelter of versions meant that instead of a single continually improved and refined network manager you ended up with 43 different ones all thrown hastily together, and 42 of them were discontinued.
In another example, Sony was bundling an iphoto equivalent application for a while, that was actually more or less on par with iphoto. But they too did a shitty job both of maintaining it and of making it a defining characteristic and reason to buy a Sony. I knew someone who was using it and was very happy with it... and then they bought a new computer and were completely lost because it wasn't a sony and it wasn't available. And it wouldn't have mattered if they had bought a Sony anyway because sony had discontinued and forgotten it too.
The potential to differentiate and build brand loyalty by product differentiation is there. The OEMS are just complete fuckups at doing it.
It needs to be supported and maintained and advertised and maintained and did I mention it needs to be maintained?
1 design the system with a smallish second harddrive that can be removed (move the recovery thing to this device)
Flash drives are already gradually moving to this role.
2 move the value add programs to some sort of "ap store"
Meh. You don't understand the economics of the outright bloatware. And the true value add stuff is the OEM differentiator stuff -- not preinstalling that stuff would be a counter productive as Apple not installing Mail.app.
Granted, I never use that software, because I don't find it terribly good, and the fact that its only available from one OEM doesn't help it. But then... I don't use Mail.app either.
3 have the parts manual on the backup drive
The website is fine.
4 MAKE SURE YOUR STORE WEBSITE CAN RECOGNIZE A LOGIN FROM YOUR COMPUTER : if i hit the HP store website it should automatically know that i am using an HP product and give me options that are compatible with that system.
They actually aren't bad at this - and a number of OEMs do this, but it needs features like java and/or activex or other browser add-ins to work... and of course people like you likely refuse to have those enabled or even installed. ;)
I assumed he meant Carli's eyesight wasn't bad. Nothing else made sense.
Compaq? They were bought out by HP years ago.
Since the site is fairly anti-apple
Go read their apple - psystar case coverage. You'd think they'd all been given ipad's for christmas. In any case, groklaw may seem to be biased in a given case coverage, based on their sense of the case itself... but they don't seem to have bias for the company.
no doubt they will just release a "server only" motherboard that doesn't have any protection and is a complete copy of the desktop except something like the BIOS will boot up and say "Server BIOS".
Not even that it. it will just be labelled an enthusiast board, and be an exact copy of the desktop bios except secure boot is user programmable, and all the settings are wide open. It might have to forego its "windows 8 logo certification" but they know enthusiasts will know exactly why.
Linux desktops will be readily available well into the foreseeable future.
The problem though is that an awful LOT of us got our first taste of linux and BSD and so forth by installing it on our "last years Dell". And that route to Linux may be dying out, because it may be very very difficult to get Linux to run on your "old PC or Mac" in the not too distant future, unless you had the foresight to buy "Linux ready".
The purpose of arbitration is to avoid punitive(etc) damages in court
That presupposes going to court is even an option, which it is when normal arbitration fails. We can all agree that arbitration tends to be a reasonable step to try and settle before going to court.
"Binding Arbitration" is a whole other animal. There is no risk of the company being taken to court, because the aribtration is BINDING. That is the entire problem here. You can't take the case to court if binding arbitration is unsatisfactory.
I did not mean a condescending tone towards you.
Fair enough. I'll drop the stick.
Once upon a time I "lost" my bike (or it got stolen for a joyride or kicks or whatever motivates some people ... and then found abandoned by someone else later). In any case, it was fairly valuable, and good fortune it turned up with the Police.
So I show up, show some ID, and they have me make and sign a statement that the bike is mine.
I didn't exactly feel that I was the victim of extortion. Was I "coerced"? Sure, in the sense that the police weren't giving me the bike back unless I formally claimed it, sure absolutely. But to characterize that as "extortion"? That's out of line.
For the record, I meant coercion in the literal sense (as in by definition) and not necessarily the kind that warrants prosecution
If you meant coercion, in the literal sense, fine.
Firstly, that sort of coercion is precisely the same sort of coercion that McDonald's puts you through to obtain a Burger. You have to order here, pay there, and pick up over there. If you want your order, you go to the second window.
Secondly, you literally wrote "extortion", not "coercion".
"Sounds like extortion to me."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3064047&cid=41080477
While you try to portray a rational conversation between Apple and Gizmodo, the articles printed at the time of the incident and the comments of the prosecutor who decided not to pursue the matter indicate otherwise.
I wouldn't go that far. I readily agree that Gizmodo was doing its level best to exploit the event for all the publicity it was worth.
However, even so, Gizmodo's request that apple formally claim the device was reasonable. I've recovered lost/stolen property before, and its not at all unusual or unreasonable to have to show ID and sign a statement claiming ownership of it.
The fact that this would give Gizmodo something to crow about as news and even the fact that this is largely why Gizmodo was even doing it doesn't really change things. Its distasteful and exploitive ... and on par with half the things you see in a tabloid.
Celebrities don't get to avoid having their mugshots taken when they get arrested just because they know the tabloids will plaster those unflattering pics all over their pages for profits.
Similarly Apple shouldn't get to reclaim lost property with a SWAT team and police raid just because they know that issuing a statement claiming ownership would be simultaneously humiliating and will give the webtabloids a bunch of juicy fodder.
In hindsight by the way, I think Gizmodo miscalculated. They would have "won" had they formally turned the iphone over to the police. The situation there i If it wasn't claimed wihin X days, then it belongs to Gizmodo. And of course, when Apple claimed it, they ABSOLUTELY would have had to document it, and unless I'm mistaken it would have been a matter of public record, and they'd have gotten their story.
Although perhaps the way it went down was even better fodder for the news industry. Apple raiding companies for lost prototypes on what are at best flimsy pretenses is far better news fodder than anything anyone could have cooked up.