I'm not talking about bundled applications, I'm talking about available applications.
Look, I likee Linux. I like KDE. But the range of polished, consumer-oriented software for Linux is not the same as that for Windows.
Plus, the "wireless/drivers" issues is really a big deal for consumer applications, especially when you don't have nearly as straightforward support for (for instance) common printers. And, sure, you say, that's the hardware manufacturer's fault for not supplying Linux drivers with nice installers. But its not a matter of whose fault it is, what matters the experience the consumer has.
And, yeah, a lot of it is stuff that is entirely dependent on Windows market dominance being self-reinforcing, which sucks. But for many consumers, its not worth being part of the wedge in the hopes of changing that.
Um, why? Yes, most people who really need decades old newspaper articles are doing serious research, and would be willing to go to a physical archive. OTOH, they'd probably be happier to be able to do research from their desk, just like serious users of scientific journals, who would use a library or their own dead-tree copies of the journals if they had to, often prefer to use online access where its available.
Serious researchers do, like other people, appreciate convenience like the ability to search text, and the ability to work from your desk rather than hunt through physical archives.
Unless you abandon anonymity and use something like digital certificates that have some kind of identity verification behind them, and ban abusers. Of course, that creates barriers to participation. But, if you can't hold people accountable for breaking the rules of a forum, and you let all the billions of people on Earth, or at least any of them that can find an internet connection, use the forum anonymously, then there will be abuse.
...first everyone's complaining that at the price Sony is selling the PS3, no one is going to buy it.
Then everyone's complaining that there aren't going to be enough for people to buy.
Personally, I think the price issue was never going to be a real problem; the delays in getting large number of consoles to market, though, I think could really hurt them in this console generation.
I dunno, I've used Macs (though rarely in the last few years), Windows PCs, Linux boxes and others; I think many Linuxes are as easy to use as Windows or MacOS, but lack in similarly easy to use application software for a lot of what desktop users want to do, though.
But printers and scanners and such used to not include such cables.
When I bought a printer (years ago) that had parallel and USB, it only included a parallel cable.
When I bought a printer more recently that supported USB and ethernet, it only included a USB cable.
I think the rule with printers is that they are only packaged with the cable I don't want, if the printer supports more than one cable.
Personally, I don't mind that much. Its sort of like "batteries not included", (or, now that I use pretty much all rechargeables, when cheap non-rechargeables are included, as seems to be more common these days.) Its impossible to please everybody, but not including an HDMI cable isn't a big deal.
Well, yes, personal experience that isn't a structured controlled scientific study is "anecdotal evidence". OTOH, complaining about people making predictions based on it is kind of silly in this kind of context.
I doubt that many people who don't have a HDTV would get a PS3 because I can't really distinguish its advantages over the 360 other than offering a blu-ray player and maybe slightly better graphics.
People with PS2's, especially with more than one game-playing person in the household might see a significant advantage over the XBox 360 that has nothing to do with graphics: the PS3 will let them play their PS2 library, and they can go hook up their PS2 to another TV and share the existing game library. Plus have a machine that will play the latest and greatest stuff.
But wait! when you get it home you find out it doesn't work like you were told/thought it would...
Smart retailers will be reminding people about the HDMI cable before they leave the store: its more profit for the store, and its less disappointment from customers who might have not realized they needed it for maximum performance. Really, I've never known electronics retailers to not be enthusiastic at trying to sell add-ons like that with big-ticket electronics items.
The point is you are spending 600 on the better of the two to get the extra features which already is a bit of cash, not including any games or extra controllers. So by the end of it you can be up to about 800 with a few games, and an extra controller. Since they offer two diffrent models, one with HMDI and one without you would expect there to be digital cables for the one that includes it as an extra 100 feature.
No, I'd expect it to have HDMI support and a 60 gig rather than 20 gig hard drive, like the specs sheet says, for the extra $100, not an HDMI cable, a PSP for use as a remote, or anything else the spec sheet doesn't say is different between the two.
99% of the time items that produce video signals come with the cables, items that receive said signals do not. This is just the way the market seems to have worked things out.
Actually, IME, most things that support more than one output mode (for instance, composite and S-video) come only with the worst cable.) And that's not just for video; the PS2, for instance, didn't include optical audio cables, though its supported them. The PS3 seems par for the course here in not including HDMI cables, even though it has HDMI capability.
I get that we have more CO2 in the air than at any point in history. Yay. Now what? I understand that cutting back on the use of fossil fuels will decrease the amount we are putting in the air. La dee da. How it got there is irrelevant. The real question, to end all questions, is how can we clean the existing CO2 out of the air to bring it back to reasonable levels?
My understanding is that natural processes (i.e., plants) will do much of that if the emissions levels are adequately reduced; at any rate, reducing emissions gives us more time to work on that problem.
Hey, I live in Canada... Up here global warming sounds like kind of a nice idea, unless you like shoveling snow...;)
Dear Canada:
There's nearly 300 million of us Americans, and global warming is going to make our land less pleasant and your land more pleasant. Plus, you'll be one of the last places with lots of oil left to burn. I mean, look what we did to Iraq, and we didn't even want their land. Still like the idea of global warming?
. A quick look through MuniWireless [muniwireless.com] shows that many cities or localities are either putting up wireless or are thinking of it, both in the US and internationally.
Yes, but are people who would otherwise get a broadband line likely to use wireless instead, or is it mostly going to be used by people to get fallback access with their laptop when away from their broadband line, and by people who would have otherwise settled for dial-up?
Is it really competing with broadband lines, or is it supplementary?
Should we praise technology that helps Project Gutenberg run out of pre-1923 books faster?
Yes.
Once all notable pre-1923 books are scanned, OCR'd, and cleaned up, then what does PG do?
I dunno. Continue (as they have already been) getting some newer material. Provide access to the old stuff. Improve search facilities. Buy out rights to existing copyrighted material. Fund expeditions to find lost pre-1923 manuscripts. Lobby for better copyright laws.
meh. a _screenshot_ contains perfectly regular characters
Is that really true with modern displays, with font smoothing, and freely resizable proportional fonts with variable kerning, etc.? Mapping from a vector-defined font with those kinds of variables to on-screen pixels, I'd expect something less than perfect regularity, though I'd expect that at commonly used sizes and resolutions, its not something that would be noticeable to a user. OCR software, on the other hand...
A blind and deaf person can read braille just as well as a blind person:-)
Most blind people, IIRC, can't read braille at all—its rather hard to learn and getting substantial material in braille is incredibly bulky, and and other ways of replacing printed information (i.e., audio) are cheaper and more accessible; given the lack of competing alternatives, I'd hope blind-and-deaf people (on average) were better at reading braille than blind people, though I have no idea if that's actually that case.
If enough people did complain they could have an impact.
Well, yeah, though more likely to be the case if the harms are prevented rather than allowed to occur and then complained about where the cost of changing the way business is done and the associated disruption becomes a line that the access providers can sell the regulators to avoid change.
Which is why some of us are yelling now to put rules in place to prevent it, rather than waiting till rather predictable action is taken to do something about it.
Your points about broadband wireless are well-taken, but its not yet established as a viable competitor, and its not clear that it will be any time soon.
Chain of title is not always clear; insurance for the chain of title (which doesn't seem applicable here, the purported seller did in fact have good title, which is what insurance covers, the person posing as his authorized agent was not, in fact, his agent) can and does pay out in some instances (and, more importantly, title insurers work to assure that ambiguities are cleared up before the transaction, which is their main useful function.)
He claimed he knew the owner/vendor.
That's an outright lie.
How do you know? Its quite possible the scammer worked up a relationship with him in advance. Knowing someone personally, and having been told that they have a particular name (with ID to prove it) doesn't, particularly if they are executing a well-planned scam, prevent them from actually being someone else.
Of course, its quite possible the notary was a part of the scam, or sloppy; its also quite possibly he was scammed along with everyone else.
Up to this point I agree, but not here. While access providers may try to force content providers to pay them thus double dipping I know I would sream to high heaven if my ISP were to throttle a website I wanted to visit because the content provider didn't pay my access provider, and sure many others would too. I, er we, are paying for our bandwidth and I never agreed to have any of the bandwidth I paid for to be throttled. Such actives could lead people to switch to an access provider that doesn't do this. Of course, unfortunately many people don't have a choice as to who they get broadband access from.
Yes, some people would scream to high heaven. Of course, as you note, lots of people have limited choices as to broadband providers, so screaming to high heaven might not have much effect on the providers bottom lines.
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I'm not talking about bundled applications, I'm talking about available applications.
Look, I likee Linux. I like KDE. But the range of polished, consumer-oriented software for Linux is not the same as that for Windows.
Plus, the "wireless/drivers" issues is really a big deal for consumer applications, especially when you don't have nearly as straightforward support for (for instance) common printers. And, sure, you say, that's the hardware manufacturer's fault for not supplying Linux drivers with nice installers. But its not a matter of whose fault it is, what matters the experience the consumer has.
And, yeah, a lot of it is stuff that is entirely dependent on Windows market dominance being self-reinforcing, which sucks. But for many consumers, its not worth being part of the wedge in the hopes of changing that.
Um, why? Yes, most people who really need decades old newspaper articles are doing serious research, and would be willing to go to a physical archive. OTOH, they'd probably be happier to be able to do research from their desk, just like serious users of scientific journals, who would use a library or their own dead-tree copies of the journals if they had to, often prefer to use online access where its available.
Serious researchers do, like other people, appreciate convenience like the ability to search text, and the ability to work from your desk rather than hunt through physical archives.
Unless you abandon anonymity and use something like digital certificates that have some kind of identity verification behind them, and ban abusers. Of course, that creates barriers to participation. But, if you can't hold people accountable for breaking the rules of a forum, and you let all the billions of people on Earth, or at least any of them that can find an internet connection, use the forum anonymously, then there will be abuse.
...first everyone's complaining that at the price Sony is selling the PS3, no one is going to buy it.
Then everyone's complaining that there aren't going to be enough for people to buy.
Personally, I think the price issue was never going to be a real problem; the delays in getting large number of consoles to market, though, I think could really hurt them in this console generation.
I dunno, I've used Macs (though rarely in the last few years), Windows PCs, Linux boxes and others; I think many Linuxes are as easy to use as Windows or MacOS, but lack in similarly easy to use application software for a lot of what desktop users want to do, though.
Well, yes, personal experience that isn't a structured controlled scientific study is "anecdotal evidence". OTOH, complaining about people making predictions based on it is kind of silly in this kind of context.
...I mean, heck, with an MS operating system, "ready" is something like SP2. (joking. mostly.)
Actually, IME, most things that support more than one output mode (for instance, composite and S-video) come only with the worst cable.) And that's not just for video; the PS2, for instance, didn't include optical audio cables, though its supported them. The PS3 seems par for the course here in not including HDMI cables, even though it has HDMI capability.
Great, now what I am going to do with all these FORTRAN programmers I was collecting? Buy a classified ad, "free to good home"?
While I might quibble with some details, I think you are essentially correct; I was mistaken.
Because an "alpha geek" is defined as someone who behaves as described.
Chain of title is not always clear; insurance for the chain of title (which doesn't seem applicable here, the purported seller did in fact have good title, which is what insurance covers, the person posing as his authorized agent was not, in fact, his agent) can and does pay out in some instances (and, more importantly, title insurers work to assure that ambiguities are cleared up before the transaction, which is their main useful function.)
That's a nice theory.
Its not the real estate law applicable in Quebec (or most of the United States), though.