I want to be able to open my case and see what shits inside it, and I don't want to have to use a fucking laptop harddrive in a non-portable computer!
When the "non-portable" computer is 6.5"x6.5"x2", it's not unreasonable to expect it to have a laptop harddrive... especially when it comes with a CD-ROM also. I mean, there's only so much physical space that they're working with, here.
If you want a normal-sized HD, you can buy the regular iMac or the G5.
The window controls in MacOS were much better in OS 9. The window resizing controls were on the right hand side of the window next to each other, and the close control was on the left hand side of the window. Meaning that it was very very hard to click a close control by accident. That is a good thing. In MacOS X, I click the close button by accident all the time because it's about a tenth of an inch from minimize. Pain in the ass.
So if you're going to talk about MacOS X, only talk about the things that Apple *improved* in the OS X interface, not the things they made worse.
1) WoW is available in stores again. Amazon.com shipped mine out about a week and a half ago and their site still reads "ships in less than 24 hours."
2) In some states, you can't return software because of state law. For instance, Washington State. You can gripe about that all you want, but it's not the publisher's fault, and it's not the retailer's fault, it's a state law. Until the law changes, you can bet that retailers will follow it to the letter. (This used to be a fun one to explain to customers when I worked at OfficeMax. No, sir, you can't return that because I would be violating state law to take it back. You can imagine how well that went over.)
3) Most games that are online-only allow you to play with no CD in the drive. Others remove the copy protection when the first patch comes out (I believe Unreal Tourney 2004 did this). But I agree that all online-only games *should* allow you to play with no CD without exception.
Wrong wrong wrong. Macintosh WOW runs from the same CD set as Windows WOW... go grab your box and look at the system requirements. The CDs are no different between the two platforms. Therefore, if "Apple versions of the game" are shipping, so are Windows versions (it's all the same thing.)
Anyway, Blizzard *was* keeping new copies from being sold for a couple weeks, but now they no longer are. Amazon.com ships them out now within 24 hours. (Check the site for yourself.)
At my place of work, we *tried* to buy Ad-Aware for about a month. Nobody at their sales address would ever send us any emails back. So we gave up and just started installing the Microsoft anti-spyware solution even though it's still beta.
Ad-Aware might be great software, but they're a terrible business.
Isn't it better to contain and store the radioactive material in known locations than to just spew it into the air and let it fall where it may like coal and oil plants do? (And yes, coal and oil plants produce radioactive byproduct, more of it than any nuclear power plant does.)
You're the kind of person holding us back. Do some research on nuclear power and you'll see that it is 100% better than coal/oil power in EVERY WAY. You get more power from less plants, you release less radiation into the air, you spend less money per megawatt, you require fewer staff, etc etc etc. Better in every way.
The obligatory "oh, Europe is so great, you Americans are so fucked up" post, coming to you today care of Sweden. If you're going to post these at least try to be a little less smug and a little more creative, since we've all read it 20,000 times before.
The problem is that the name of the company, the actual name they file taxes under, is "Click Ok To Continue." Verisign simply game the company a certificate for their own name-- they verified it by using a phone bill and calling the number on the bill.
The US Government created copyright law, not Adobe. Adobe just makes use of laws that existed before the company was even founded.
In addition, if half the people who pirated software and movies because they're cheapskates actually wrote letters to their lawmakers, copyright laws might be changed. But they don't, because they don't care about "right" and "wrong" in the matter, they just care about "I want it free, waaaah."
Irrelevant. Whether or not Adobe is raking in the dough because of piracy, the act of piracy is STILL WRONG.
Like you said, legally, it's black and white. It's a civil offense to pirate software. Period. It doesn't matter WHY you pirate it, or whether the company is better-off because of it.
Like you didn't know going in that cell phone ringer tones (towns) were a complete and total rip-off? If you think paying $3 for a 30-second clip of tinny-sounding music is a good deal, I got a bridge to sell you, buddy.
But carrying both a personal cell and a "on-call" cell from work would be ridiculous. If you carry two cells, and you're happy with that, bully for you. I wouldn't.
A pager on the other hand is smaller than my car keys. I don't mind carrying it around.
Good for you. I'm a sysadmin. Strangely, you don't find too many Macs as servers.
Not when you consider Apple's bi-polar position on providing servers (although they seemed to have settled down now) and their lousy support compared to their competitors.
For what it's worth, I sysadmin a bunch of Windows XP boxes at a hospital where we couldn't run MacOS even if we wanted. And I've always just downloaded a 100k utility to set Windows 2000 or 98 or whatnot to change the time based on an NTP server... that seems easier to me than editing the registry. (Of course, XP has a GUI for that setting.)
Uh. Ok, but how does this refute any of the points I made about pagers, again?
It's a lovely story, but I have no clue where you're going with it... or did you have a pager with you in the Venetian which didn't work at the same time your cell did or something?
BTW, Casinos are well-known for sparing no expense... I wouldn't be surprised if they installed cell equipment indoors specifically to provide service to customers. I could be wrong, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Holy shit, a week? What phone do you have? My Motorola v180 battery runs down after about 72 hours of standby, and about 5 hours of talk-time. (I don't know what the manual claims it does, that's my real-world experience.) Even if you consider "normal usage" just standby, a week's pretty impressive I have to admit.
I mean, for Christ's sake, to change basic application parameters, I'm stuck going into the frigging registry editor, while on a *nix box, we have text configuration files, and I can't grab my favorite text editor, alter the settings, kill -HUP the daemon and away we go. I find that Windows and its kazillion GUI frontends and horrific registry are far complex, and the look-alike tools starting to pop up for Samba, MySQL and the like for X on *nix machines are repeating this awful arrangement.
If you're in the Registry Editor, either what you're doing is not a "basic application parameter," or you're going about changing it in about the worst possible way. "Man, my car ran out of gas! I had to remove the fuel filter, pump gas back INTO the tank, then quickly replace the filter before it all ran onto the pavement again."
In any case, your Unix way of doing things doesn't sound any better to me. But what do I know? I'm a MacOS user.
Windows ME was the first product Microsoft released that you would have been stupid to pay money for.
2000 -> XP added Remote Desktop, System Restore, better theme support if you care about that, Windows Firewall, better IE security (with SP2), and is generally faster and more stable. I think 2000 -> XP is actually a quite worthwhile upgrade, but of course you're welcome to disagree.
The only petitions that work are those that have some legal weight behind them. For instance, in Washington State, you can actually create a new state law (initiative) by filling a petition with 20,000 signatures. As long as those signatures are Washington State residents, of course.
For stuff like this, the best you can do is write the decision makers an email about the issue and what you feel. A petition won't mean jack to them, especially an internet one where 2/3rds of the names could be fake and nobody would know.
I doubt it. Commercial entities will always prevail on the marketing side. Technically superior solutions are constantly being left in the dusk by the effect of bad marketing.
Well... ok... if you feel that way.
But how can we know for sure until Linux is actually technically superior? Right now, you can't even copy and paste correctly!
Pagers are less reliable with worse coverage. And in many cases, a cell phone is simply cheaper. With a cell phone, you are talking with the person (or can be), so you instantly know if they are aware of a problem and when they'll be in a position to fix it.
I don't know where you live (or what pager company you use), but here (in Western Washington State) pagers have much, much, much better coverage than cells. Not only that, but they keep working even while in parking garages or in the center of large buildings where cellphones almost always lose signal.
Pagers also have much better battery life, lasting 3-4 weeks on a single AA battery. You'll rarely miss a page because the battery is dead-- but a cell battery won't even last a full day.
Not to mention that no doubt the vast majority of your staff already carries around a cell phone. Carrying around a cell and a pager is not that weird, but carrying around two cells would be very strange.
I agree with your other points... overtime watching doesn't help with salaried employees, and 5-year-old computers are older than you think, but pagers are definately a better idea than cell phones.
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Kind of off-topic but:
I want to be able to open my case and see what shits inside it, and I don't want to have to use a fucking laptop harddrive in a non-portable computer!
When the "non-portable" computer is 6.5"x6.5"x2", it's not unreasonable to expect it to have a laptop harddrive... especially when it comes with a CD-ROM also. I mean, there's only so much physical space that they're working with, here.
If you want a normal-sized HD, you can buy the regular iMac or the G5.
The window controls in MacOS were much better in OS 9. The window resizing controls were on the right hand side of the window next to each other, and the close control was on the left hand side of the window. Meaning that it was very very hard to click a close control by accident. That is a good thing. In MacOS X, I click the close button by accident all the time because it's about a tenth of an inch from minimize. Pain in the ass.
So if you're going to talk about MacOS X, only talk about the things that Apple *improved* in the OS X interface, not the things they made worse.
1) WoW is available in stores again. Amazon.com shipped mine out about a week and a half ago and their site still reads "ships in less than 24 hours."
2) In some states, you can't return software because of state law. For instance, Washington State. You can gripe about that all you want, but it's not the publisher's fault, and it's not the retailer's fault, it's a state law. Until the law changes, you can bet that retailers will follow it to the letter. (This used to be a fun one to explain to customers when I worked at OfficeMax. No, sir, you can't return that because I would be violating state law to take it back. You can imagine how well that went over.)
3) Most games that are online-only allow you to play with no CD in the drive. Others remove the copy protection when the first patch comes out (I believe Unreal Tourney 2004 did this). But I agree that all online-only games *should* allow you to play with no CD without exception.
Wrong wrong wrong. Macintosh WOW runs from the same CD set as Windows WOW... go grab your box and look at the system requirements. The CDs are no different between the two platforms. Therefore, if "Apple versions of the game" are shipping, so are Windows versions (it's all the same thing.)
Anyway, Blizzard *was* keeping new copies from being sold for a couple weeks, but now they no longer are. Amazon.com ships them out now within 24 hours. (Check the site for yourself.)
At my place of work, we *tried* to buy Ad-Aware for about a month. Nobody at their sales address would ever send us any emails back. So we gave up and just started installing the Microsoft anti-spyware solution even though it's still beta.
Ad-Aware might be great software, but they're a terrible business.
Isn't it better to contain and store the radioactive material in known locations than to just spew it into the air and let it fall where it may like coal and oil plants do? (And yes, coal and oil plants produce radioactive byproduct, more of it than any nuclear power plant does.)
You're the kind of person holding us back. Do some research on nuclear power and you'll see that it is 100% better than coal/oil power in EVERY WAY. You get more power from less plants, you release less radiation into the air, you spend less money per megawatt, you require fewer staff, etc etc etc. Better in every way.
I liked the opening of Enterprise. I thought it was inspirational. The rest of the series was crap, but the opening credits I appreciated.
;)
We HAVE come a long way, you know.
The obligatory "oh, Europe is so great, you Americans are so fucked up" post, coming to you today care of Sweden. If you're going to post these at least try to be a little less smug and a little more creative, since we've all read it 20,000 times before.
That's basically serialization, and yes it's a very good technique to use in C++.
Use the HD to store files?
Only a few games.
Use the HD as a virtual memory/texture cache?
Almost all Xbox games, except crappy PS2 ports. That's where the HD in the Xbox shines, as swap space.
See this link:
i d= 11666348
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=139348&c
The problem is that the name of the company, the actual name they file taxes under, is "Click Ok To Continue." Verisign simply game the company a certificate for their own name-- they verified it by using a phone bill and calling the number on the bill.
The US Government created copyright law, not Adobe. Adobe just makes use of laws that existed before the company was even founded.
In addition, if half the people who pirated software and movies because they're cheapskates actually wrote letters to their lawmakers, copyright laws might be changed. But they don't, because they don't care about "right" and "wrong" in the matter, they just care about "I want it free, waaaah."
Irrelevant. Whether or not Adobe is raking in the dough because of piracy, the act of piracy is STILL WRONG.
Like you said, legally, it's black and white. It's a civil offense to pirate software. Period. It doesn't matter WHY you pirate it, or whether the company is better-off because of it.
Like you didn't know going in that cell phone ringer tones (towns) were a complete and total rip-off? If you think paying $3 for a 30-second clip of tinny-sounding music is a good deal, I got a bridge to sell you, buddy.
Holy crap yeah. ORAC and Avon are probably the two best characters on TV. Servalan was so campy it almost caused physical pain, though...
I've heard of this new thing called a... a... shoot, what was that word...
Oh yeah, a "joke." Perhaps the grandparent poster was demonstrating one of those! How droll.
But carrying both a personal cell and a "on-call" cell from work would be ridiculous. If you carry two cells, and you're happy with that, bully for you. I wouldn't.
A pager on the other hand is smaller than my car keys. I don't mind carrying it around.
Good for you. I'm a sysadmin. Strangely, you don't find too many Macs as servers.
Not when you consider Apple's bi-polar position on providing servers (although they seemed to have settled down now) and their lousy support compared to their competitors.
For what it's worth, I sysadmin a bunch of Windows XP boxes at a hospital where we couldn't run MacOS even if we wanted. And I've always just downloaded a 100k utility to set Windows 2000 or 98 or whatnot to change the time based on an NTP server... that seems easier to me than editing the registry. (Of course, XP has a GUI for that setting.)
Uh. Ok, but how does this refute any of the points I made about pagers, again?
It's a lovely story, but I have no clue where you're going with it... or did you have a pager with you in the Venetian which didn't work at the same time your cell did or something?
BTW, Casinos are well-known for sparing no expense... I wouldn't be surprised if they installed cell equipment indoors specifically to provide service to customers. I could be wrong, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Holy shit, a week? What phone do you have? My Motorola v180 battery runs down after about 72 hours of standby, and about 5 hours of talk-time. (I don't know what the manual claims it does, that's my real-world experience.) Even if you consider "normal usage" just standby, a week's pretty impressive I have to admit.
I mean, for Christ's sake, to change basic application parameters, I'm stuck going into the frigging registry editor, while on a *nix box, we have text configuration files, and I can't grab my favorite text editor, alter the settings, kill -HUP the daemon and away we go. I find that Windows and its kazillion GUI frontends and horrific registry are far complex, and the look-alike tools starting to pop up for Samba, MySQL and the like for X on *nix machines are repeating this awful arrangement.
If you're in the Registry Editor, either what you're doing is not a "basic application parameter," or you're going about changing it in about the worst possible way. "Man, my car ran out of gas! I had to remove the fuel filter, pump gas back INTO the tank, then quickly replace the filter before it all ran onto the pavement again."
In any case, your Unix way of doing things doesn't sound any better to me. But what do I know? I'm a MacOS user.
Windows ME was the first product Microsoft released that you would have been stupid to pay money for.
2000 -> XP added Remote Desktop, System Restore, better theme support if you care about that, Windows Firewall, better IE security (with SP2), and is generally faster and more stable. I think 2000 -> XP is actually a quite worthwhile upgrade, but of course you're welcome to disagree.
The only petitions that work are those that have some legal weight behind them. For instance, in Washington State, you can actually create a new state law (initiative) by filling a petition with 20,000 signatures. As long as those signatures are Washington State residents, of course.
For stuff like this, the best you can do is write the decision makers an email about the issue and what you feel. A petition won't mean jack to them, especially an internet one where 2/3rds of the names could be fake and nobody would know.
I doubt it. Commercial entities will always prevail on the marketing side. Technically superior solutions are constantly being left in the dusk by the effect of bad marketing.
Well... ok... if you feel that way.
But how can we know for sure until Linux is actually technically superior? Right now, you can't even copy and paste correctly!
Pagers are less reliable with worse coverage. And in many cases, a cell phone is simply cheaper. With a cell phone, you are talking with the person (or can be), so you instantly know if they are aware of a problem and when they'll be in a position to fix it.
I don't know where you live (or what pager company you use), but here (in Western Washington State) pagers have much, much, much better coverage than cells. Not only that, but they keep working even while in parking garages or in the center of large buildings where cellphones almost always lose signal.
Pagers also have much better battery life, lasting 3-4 weeks on a single AA battery. You'll rarely miss a page because the battery is dead-- but a cell battery won't even last a full day.
Not to mention that no doubt the vast majority of your staff already carries around a cell phone. Carrying around a cell and a pager is not that weird, but carrying around two cells would be very strange.
I agree with your other points... overtime watching doesn't help with salaried employees, and 5-year-old computers are older than you think, but pagers are definately a better idea than cell phones.