If it's a for-profit company, it's nearly certain that something screwy is going on. Profit is more important than ethics.

Or you could rent it for $1.50.. Anything that I bought really only got watched once anyway.

Again, just because it's popular (owing to the marketing machine, not the quality of the product) doesn't mean it's good. It's become a standard despite its cost because of lock-in.

I didn't say that cost and convenience don't mean anything to me. What I'm saying is that I'd like to have the ability to watch high-quality video at home, and if the format dies because people don't give a shit about what they watch (because they're lazy, stupid, and cheap, in that order) then I can't do that until the streaming formats improve - which they're not going to if the content companies know they can put total shit in front of the mouth breathers and they'll still pay for it.

The geek is only fooling himself when he claims that Microsoft isn't consistently delivering top-tier marketing and salesmanship.

FTFY.

Just because something is popular doesn't make it any good. See Apple products, Wal-Mart, etc. All are wildly popular, despite some obvious shortcomings.

My argument stands. If people gave a shit about quality they'd overcome those issues.

The reason nobody's buying Blu-Ray isn't soley because of the annoying DRM and non-skippable content and other generally user-hostile 'features' of the format. The average consumer doesn't give a shit about that (and will have no idea what DRM even is.) The reason is that they don't care about the quality loss in streaming content. How they can't see (on a big TV anyway) that the Blu-Ray looks 100% better than what you get from Netflix streaming boggles my mind, personally. When there's a movie that I want to see in good quality (think Man of Steel, Frozen, etc, just to name a couple recent ones) I go to Redbox to get the Blu-Ray. It looks better. Unfortunately, people don't give a shit.

The war on picture/sound quality has, sadly, been won by the apathetic side. (Witness the demise of multichannel audio, DVD-Audio and SACD. Most people think a stereo 128-bit .mp3 file sounds fine. It doesn't.) I'll be renting Blu-Rays until streaming formats (and the necessary bandwidth) are available at the same bitrate as a Blu-Ray. But, the way things are going, BD will die and we'll be stuck with streaming movies that look like Tetris on a big screen. Another case of the consumer wanting 'cheap/convenient' over 'good', aka the Wal-Mart effect.

Sounds like nobody wants to live there. Wonder why that is..

Rather than actually deal with the truth, you just accuse the man of unethical conduct.

Percentage-wise, it's a pretty safe assumption.

That makes you a lying piece of fanboy shit.

Not if he's right.

With MS, they can go to MS and MS will bend over backwards to help them.

What color is the sky on your planet?

Well, they can try to find someone who is competent, but who do they go to and how do they find out?

You imply it's easier to find someone to support your MS stuff than it is to find someone to support your FLOSS stuff. I am skeptical of that; there's a lot of MS support out there, true, but the vast majority of it sucks in my experience.

And, I know this is going to get modded down by FLOSS fanboys and I don't care. You fuckers need to hear the truth.

Your version of it, probably not.

Go fuck yourselves.

Hypocrisy. Complain about someone being a troll by trolling yourself. Shouldn't you be in math class?

How dare they compete so unfairly! It's like they think the quality of the product matters.

The quality of the product only matters until they achieve lock-in. After that, they don't care if the program even runs.

Only in the US is it considered normal for the receiver to pay for incoming messages and calls.

Why do you hate America?

What is reasonable for people to expect generally only tangentially has anything to do with what they actually DO expect. Sometimes you need to punch people in the face to get their attention, then kick them in the balls to get them to do the right thing.

Eye for an eye, etc. And "convicted" does not mean "guilty".

The difference is that what they may actually have done may or may not be a capital offense.

It's more ethical, cheaper, and more just to not execute your own citizens. Let the bastards rot, sure. If the family wants revenge they can go see what the asshole's turned into in the lifer block.

Contrary to common perception, you need a design not only for waterfall, but for agile development too.

And the problem is that the design for Agile is usually something like "This is what we're doing today, do what we say and shut up. Tomorrow we'll do something completely different, do what we say and shut up. No, we're not going to pay for changes, we like Agile because we don't have to do anything, just shut up and code." In my experience, this is the only half of Agile that actually gets implemented; the part where the business has to pay for changes, thus giving them incentive to think things through ahead of time and give adequate specs, is unpopular with the MBAs (as it requires them to do actual work and not drink lattes and play golf all day), so the coders get all of the drawbacks of Agile with none of the benefits.

The API and specs should be done before a single line of code is written, and compared to other APIs and specs to ensure its compatibility. So you should have lots of small designs instead of one big book.

And if you can document ONE case of that actually happening in the real world, go collect your Nobel.

Because there never was a design, and the coder isn't interested in discovering logical faults, just in getting an "approved" and move on.

The programmer frequently has no incentive to discover logical faults. They get punished for "not being a team player" and "asking too many obvious questions." They have incentive to make it someone else's problem through the approval process; however, even then it's the coder's fault even when it isn't the coder's fault.