Major Nelson (aka Larry Hryb) is the Xbox Live Director of Programming. He's also the main community liason for Xbox and runs a personal blog and does weekly podcasts. He's a really great, genuine guy (I've met him on a couple of occasions), and he really is interested in trying to give gamers what they want. Think of him as the human face of the Borg, kinda like 7 of 9 but not as curvacious.
But you say you want support, that's why you're paying. Hate to break it to you, but an OEM license of XP doesn't buy you any useful support. Neither does a $700 VS license. Microsoft, like everyone else, charges for support contracts.
Windows yes, Office not usually. But that's the same in the US - you get Works if you're "lucky" but I've never seen Office as anything but an extra-cost option for consumer PCs.
Tesco are the largest supermarket chain in the country. Their primary business is food and groceries, but they led the charge into other product types (clothes, music, etc) in a similar way to Walmart in the US - all of the major UK supermarket chains have followed suit. In terms of target market, I'd say they aim right to the middle. Asda (owned by Walmart) is (IMHO) cheaper and sells lower quality stuff. Waitrose is a higher end, more expensive brand. Tesco sit with Sainsbury right in the middle ground. They sell all the major third party brands as well as their own lower cost brands.
I have no idea who the major shareholders are, but I'm sure you can find out with a little digging, they are a publically traded company. Charity, recycling etc - well they do as much as they need to maintain a good public image, but they don't have any reputation for being particularly good or bad in that regard. I'm unaware of any particular hatred of Tesco (certainly nothing of the scale as often directed towards Walmart) - in particular remember that there's nowhere near the scope for bad labour practises in the UK compared to the US. A lot of the benefits provided by US employers are provided by the state in the UK. One thing I have heard complaints about is them using their buying power to extract concessions from suppliers, but that's capitalism and happens with all big companies.
Yes, mince is called hamburger in the US. Kind of like ground pork in the UK is usually called sausage meat even though it can be used for more than just sausages. So the summary was translating for the USians as mince doesn't really mean much as a noun here.
My cable connection in my last 2 apartments (NYC and NJ) has been more reliable than the POTS landline. Which is why I don't have one of those anymore. Really - phone networks just aren't that reliable in my experience, you'll always want a backup for real resiliance, and my cell works just fine for that.
And when I compare our VOIP service with Vongage, I use the following facts. You have a different definition of "fact" from me.
"Vonage requires an internet connection, we do not" Fine, Vonage requires an internet hookup. If you don't have one, Vonage isn't for you. Next!
"Vonage routes their calls over the public internet, which may result in poorer quality or dropped calls, we route calls over our private cable network" Never had a dropped call on Vonage. Never had bad line quality. I've been using it for 2 years now, it's been more reliable than my old POTS line.
"Vonage has a national 911 call center, we route 911 locally in your county" False. In almost all cases 911 calls are routed automatically to your local emergency center, the Vonage center is used only in exceptional cases where this is impossible. What do YOU do when you can't route to the county? Do you even HAVE a call centre to handle that? Stop spreading FUD.
"We are a local call center, where with Vonage, you may get routed to a call center in East India" I've called Vonage once, and the person I spoke to didn't sound Indian. But then I'm not a racist ass who thinks only Americans are capable of telling me to restart my router.
My Vonage sound quality is far better than my cellphone (not really surprising) and not discernably different from a landline. It's also considerably more reliable than the PoS landline I had from Verizon for a year before switching.
"Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just lost the picture, but what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has apparently been taken over -- 'conquered' if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."
Huh? You got that all backwards - Glide was based on OpenGL, not the other way around. Glide died because because 3Dfx died, and because Direct3D was compatible with far more devices. OpenGL on the other hand is far from dead, and is still supported by all major card manufacturers. OpenGL is also, contrary to popular myth, fully supported in Windows.
More and more people are less and less willing to sacrifice for our country. You say that like it's a bad thing. People shouldn't be willing to blindly sacrifice for their country (whichever country that happens to be) they should be willing to sacrifice for what they believe is _right_. Most people are citizens of a particular country entirely by accident - it's where they happened to be born. Why should I hold any specific allegience based on a geographical and biological coincidence?
Hypothetical example - people refusing to participate in a forced draft because they disagree with the conflict they're being drafted into _are_ sacrificing - usually their freedom - to do what they feel is right. I respect them much more than someone who goes along and signs up, because although in disagreement, they don't have the conviction to stand up for themselves.
Since when was judging candidates on their qualifications a problem? When I'm hiring I look for evidence of a candidate's skills and capabilities. If they have no work experience (they're interns after all) then all I have to go on is their school work. Which school they're at says a lot about the quality of the education they will be getting.
Yes COD has recently been knocked off the top spot, but since launch (nearly a year ago) COD has been top pretty much every week. If you add all that up, then it's certainly been the overall most popular.
So, I don't count charity, unless it is something huge, like a public corporation giving away more than 1% of revenue to charity. I didn't find the value of the contribution to see if it passes my (admitedly arbitrary) threshhold. No value was quoted, for a number of reasons including the simple fact that until you try to sell something you never know it's true value. Anyway, I googled around a bit for the costs of land in southern Chile and got a cost of around $5000 US per acre. Extrapolating that, the Terra Del Fuego reserve would be worth $3.4B. Now I'm not claiming any great accuracy in my back-of-the-envelope calculations but I think it's clear we're talking considerable sums here, and, as I mentioned, it's primarily in lost-opportunity costs not actual cash. That makes it harder to get tax benefits. Of course GS didn't do this purely for alturistic reasons, but I'm not so cynical as to completely ignore the benefit of an donation just because the benefactor also gained some good publicity from it.
Here's one which sprung to mind right away - Goldman Sachs came into posession of a vast tract of pristine wilderness in Chile. Rather than selling it to developers they donated it to a wildlife charity who are now managing it as a 680,000 acre nature preserve. I can assure you the cost (both in direct expense and lost profit opportunity) of this was far from trivial, and certainly no-one would have even noticed if they'd gone the conventional route and liquidated the asset through a sale.
I sympathise with what you say, and on a simple capitalist level it makes perfect sense. But there's an important issue of scale. Compared with how many users overall use a site like target.com I imagine the percentage who would require special consideration in the design is pretty tiny. So in reality the site operators would lose money - but not much - probably less than it would cost to do a redesign. This isn't like allowing black people in your store because that's a much larger population and therefore a much larger economic incentive.
But if every site chose to do nothing (and why would they - it's not a big enough market to care about) you'd end up with disabled people having few if any choices for online shopping - which in many cases is probably a lot more convenient/possible for them than visiting B&M stores.
So whilst the stores have saved a few dollars, a good number of people have had their lives significantly inconvenienced. In a purely capitalist dog-eat-dog world we'd not care, but I like to think that the fact we do care is what makes us a little more human - concern for our fellow man and all that. The cost to the bottom lines of the big corps is tiny, the impact it will have on people's lives much larger.
Sure they can, they just can't come back. Same has applied in the rest of the world for ever. I'm all for slamming the ignorance of the current administration but not requiring passports for places like Mexico and Canada was a weird loophole that it makes sense to close.
Putting aside the myth that smoking pot is legal in Amsterdam (it isn't), your argument still seems flawed to me.
Take the example of a US citizen who goes to Amsterdam, legally buys some pot, and then flies back to the US with it. Posession of the pot is illegal in the US, and so he committed a crime on US soil. But the seller in Amsterdam "facilitated" the crime by providing it to him in the first place. So now the dutch cafe owner can be arrested in the US? That hardly seems fair.
So it's OK for them to know where I shop, what I buy, where I go and who I talk to but not OK for others to know the same about them? What's data mining got to do with anything? This is about spying and fraud.
They think it's OK to read through employee email and listen in on their phone calls but God help the poor slob who does it to a member of the board? Come on - if you make calls or send emails from company devices on company time you have no right to expect privacy, particularly in the time of SOX compliance. Everything I send has to be recorded, by law, in case it's needed in court. If you were to RTFA (or even RTFS) you'd see that the problem here is the hiring of a private security company to obtain personal phone records from someone's home lines. That's not OK, ever.
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Major Nelson (aka Larry Hryb) is the Xbox Live Director of Programming. He's also the main community liason for Xbox and runs a personal blog and does weekly podcasts. He's a really great, genuine guy (I've met him on a couple of occasions), and he really is interested in trying to give gamers what they want. Think of him as the human face of the Borg, kinda like 7 of 9 but not as curvacious.
But you say you want support, that's why you're paying. Hate to break it to you, but an OEM license of XP doesn't buy you any useful support. Neither does a $700 VS license. Microsoft, like everyone else, charges for support contracts.
Windows yes, Office not usually. But that's the same in the US - you get Works if you're "lucky" but I've never seen Office as anything but an extra-cost option for consumer PCs.
Tesco are the largest supermarket chain in the country. Their primary business is food and groceries, but they led the charge into other product types (clothes, music, etc) in a similar way to Walmart in the US - all of the major UK supermarket chains have followed suit. In terms of target market, I'd say they aim right to the middle. Asda (owned by Walmart) is (IMHO) cheaper and sells lower quality stuff. Waitrose is a higher end, more expensive brand. Tesco sit with Sainsbury right in the middle ground. They sell all the major third party brands as well as their own lower cost brands.
I have no idea who the major shareholders are, but I'm sure you can find out with a little digging, they are a publically traded company. Charity, recycling etc - well they do as much as they need to maintain a good public image, but they don't have any reputation for being particularly good or bad in that regard. I'm unaware of any particular hatred of Tesco (certainly nothing of the scale as often directed towards Walmart) - in particular remember that there's nowhere near the scope for bad labour practises in the UK compared to the US. A lot of the benefits provided by US employers are provided by the state in the UK. One thing I have heard complaints about is them using their buying power to extract concessions from suppliers, but that's capitalism and happens with all big companies.
Yes, mince is called hamburger in the US. Kind of like ground pork in the UK is usually called sausage meat even though it can be used for more than just sausages. So the summary was translating for the USians as mince doesn't really mean much as a noun here.
It would get about 1 room around here...
Look at your firewall/NAT. Those are the same symptoms I've had once or twice when my router has forgotten the Vonage port forward rules.
My cable connection in my last 2 apartments (NYC and NJ) has been more reliable than the POTS landline. Which is why I don't have one of those anymore. Really - phone networks just aren't that reliable in my experience, you'll always want a backup for real resiliance, and my cell works just fine for that.
And when I compare our VOIP service with Vongage, I use the following facts.
You have a different definition of "fact" from me.
"Vonage requires an internet connection, we do not"
Fine, Vonage requires an internet hookup. If you don't have one, Vonage isn't for you. Next!
"Vonage routes their calls over the public internet, which may result in poorer quality or dropped calls, we route calls over our private cable network"
Never had a dropped call on Vonage. Never had bad line quality. I've been using it for 2 years now, it's been more reliable than my old POTS line.
"Vonage has a national 911 call center, we route 911 locally in your county"
False. In almost all cases 911 calls are routed automatically to your local emergency center, the Vonage center is used only in exceptional cases where this is impossible. What do YOU do when you can't route to the county? Do you even HAVE a call centre to handle that? Stop spreading FUD.
"We are a local call center, where with Vonage, you may get routed to a call center in East India"
I've called Vonage once, and the person I spoke to didn't sound Indian. But then I'm not a racist ass who thinks only Americans are capable of telling me to restart my router.
My Vonage sound quality is far better than my cellphone (not really surprising) and not discernably different from a landline. It's also considerably more reliable than the PoS landline I had from Verizon for a year before switching.
"Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just lost the picture, but what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has apparently been taken over -- 'conquered' if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."
I have no idea :)
Huh? You got that all backwards - Glide was based on OpenGL, not the other way around. Glide died because because 3Dfx died, and because Direct3D was compatible with far more devices. OpenGL on the other hand is far from dead, and is still supported by all major card manufacturers. OpenGL is also, contrary to popular myth, fully supported in Windows.
You should strive to be a better educated fanboy.
More and more people are less and less willing to sacrifice for our country.
You say that like it's a bad thing. People shouldn't be willing to blindly sacrifice for their country (whichever country that happens to be) they should be willing to sacrifice for what they believe is _right_. Most people are citizens of a particular country entirely by accident - it's where they happened to be born. Why should I hold any specific allegience based on a geographical and biological coincidence?
Hypothetical example - people refusing to participate in a forced draft because they disagree with the conflict they're being drafted into _are_ sacrificing - usually their freedom - to do what they feel is right. I respect them much more than someone who goes along and signs up, because although in disagreement, they don't have the conviction to stand up for themselves.
I agree that 500W is a little much, but according to this page the 360 takes 145W. I'd imagine the PS3 to be similar.
No, it isn't 30% more expensive. Go look up "sales tax" and "VAT".
Since when was judging candidates on their qualifications a problem? When I'm hiring I look for evidence of a candidate's skills and capabilities. If they have no work experience (they're interns after all) then all I have to go on is their school work. Which school they're at says a lot about the quality of the education they will be getting.
Yes COD has recently been knocked off the top spot, but since launch (nearly a year ago) COD has been top pretty much every week. If you add all that up, then it's certainly been the overall most popular.
The 20D isn't really sub-$1000, for example J&R still have it listed at $1100, and B&H have it at $990. These figures are before tax & shipping.
So, I don't count charity, unless it is something huge, like a public corporation giving away more than 1% of revenue to charity. I didn't find the value of the contribution to see if it passes my (admitedly arbitrary) threshhold.
No value was quoted, for a number of reasons including the simple fact that until you try to sell something you never know it's true value. Anyway, I googled around a bit for the costs of land in southern Chile and got a cost of around $5000 US per acre. Extrapolating that, the Terra Del Fuego reserve would be worth $3.4B. Now I'm not claiming any great accuracy in my back-of-the-envelope calculations but I think it's clear we're talking considerable sums here, and, as I mentioned, it's primarily in lost-opportunity costs not actual cash. That makes it harder to get tax benefits. Of course GS didn't do this purely for alturistic reasons, but I'm not so cynical as to completely ignore the benefit of an donation just because the benefactor also gained some good publicity from it.
Here's one which sprung to mind right away - Goldman Sachs came into posession of a vast tract of pristine wilderness in Chile. Rather than selling it to developers they donated it to a wildlife charity who are now managing it as a 680,000 acre nature preserve. I can assure you the cost (both in direct expense and lost profit opportunity) of this was far from trivial, and certainly no-one would have even noticed if they'd gone the conventional route and liquidated the asset through a sale.
I sympathise with what you say, and on a simple capitalist level it makes perfect sense. But there's an important issue of scale. Compared with how many users overall use a site like target.com I imagine the percentage who would require special consideration in the design is pretty tiny. So in reality the site operators would lose money - but not much - probably less than it would cost to do a redesign. This isn't like allowing black people in your store because that's a much larger population and therefore a much larger economic incentive.
But if every site chose to do nothing (and why would they - it's not a big enough market to care about) you'd end up with disabled people having few if any choices for online shopping - which in many cases is probably a lot more convenient/possible for them than visiting B&M stores.
So whilst the stores have saved a few dollars, a good number of people have had their lives significantly inconvenienced. In a purely capitalist dog-eat-dog world we'd not care, but I like to think that the fact we do care is what makes us a little more human - concern for our fellow man and all that. The cost to the bottom lines of the big corps is tiny, the impact it will have on people's lives much larger.
Sure they can, they just can't come back. Same has applied in the rest of the world for ever. I'm all for slamming the ignorance of the current administration but not requiring passports for places like Mexico and Canada was a weird loophole that it makes sense to close.
Putting aside the myth that smoking pot is legal in Amsterdam (it isn't), your argument still seems flawed to me.
Take the example of a US citizen who goes to Amsterdam, legally buys some pot, and then flies back to the US with it. Posession of the pot is illegal in the US, and so he committed a crime on US soil. But the seller in Amsterdam "facilitated" the crime by providing it to him in the first place. So now the dutch cafe owner can be arrested in the US? That hardly seems fair.
So it's OK for them to know where I shop, what I buy, where I go and who I talk to but not OK for others to know the same about them?
What's data mining got to do with anything? This is about spying and fraud.
They think it's OK to read through employee email and listen in on their phone calls but God help the poor slob who does it to a member of the board?
Come on - if you make calls or send emails from company devices on company time you have no right to expect privacy, particularly in the time of SOX compliance. Everything I send has to be recorded, by law, in case it's needed in court. If you were to RTFA (or even RTFS) you'd see that the problem here is the hiring of a private security company to obtain personal phone records from someone's home lines. That's not OK, ever.