That sounds to me pretty much like the Steam business model.

The amount of money Valve's got out of me by putting games on sale for 40%, 20% or even 10% of their normal sale price is ridiculous; most of them I wouldn't have bought if not for the sales. When digital media is concerned, once it is made there is no cost beyond server maintenance etc. If you have normal pricing most of the time the early adopters will pay and you will get normal sales numbers and make a moderate amount money. Lower the price later on and people will be more likely to pay and seeing as it's not the new hotness it can only drive interest. Have a sale at 10% normal cost and you maybe get 100x the number of normal sales, so 10x the normal income from the cheap-skates and impulse-buyers. I don't have a link to the actual stats, but from what I've read about the profit margins on steam sales, my figures are fairly conservative.

Of course games and movies aren't the same - you don't have quite the same "new hotness" factor with movies, so sales would have to be less extreme, but other than that it's pretty much the same and the lower price of movies compared to games would more than make up for it anyway.

I may be wrong, but to me it seems that logically a "checkuser" cannot establish innocence in any way.

As far as I understand it, it checks IPs and other info from servers, so basically allows you to see who a person is. It can tell you if someone has the same IP or is the same user on an ISP at best. The problem is that this can change.

If two accounts have the same info, then it is either the same person, or two different people using the same account on the same ISP (like to people in one house sharing a connection). If other evidence is there, then it is pretty good evidence that one account is a sock-puppet or a meat-puppet. If someone changes ISP, their IP and other identifying info will be different. As a result, if it come up negative for IP etc there are two possibilities: sock-puppet using a different connection (a friends, wi-fi hotspot etc) or an innocent. Therefore, a check-user cannot establish innocence, only guilt, since negative result != different person. Should "negative" users be given the benefit of the doubt? Probably. If further evidence presents itself (sock-puppet-like behavior continues to happen), then no.

I'm fairly sure laws regarding grievous bodily harm override EULAs, but I may be wrong. Guess I was just being a bit crazy

I really don't think you mean literally there. That would likely be illegal.

It would seem I also missed the fact that you were the parent just now...damn the lack of an edit button.

I did. Perhaps I didn't phrase my post clearly enough (I was in a hurry). I wasn't using the numbers from the article, I was trying to explain why percentages don't matter when it comes to how much money you save. I was using a different hypothetical scenario. All I was trying to do was show that two different scenarios can save a different percentage of the initial usage (for that car), the actual saving in gallons/dollars/environmental impact is the same.

The parent to my post seemed to think that it was about percentage difference (which it could be if you take the overall use by both cars, but not on a per-car basis) not absolute volume of petrol (gas) saved. Notice that I never mentioned the figures from the article, only hypothetical figures which were chosen purely because they would both give a saving of 2 gallons per 100 miles. In MPG of those examples would obviously translate to 20mpg -> ~33.34mpg and ~14.29mpg -> 20mpg.

Looking at the parent again now, I think I may have misread it the first time, so my post was kinda pointless anyway (as I said I was in a hurry, so I obviously read it too quickly or something).

The question still has nothing to do with percentages or proportions of the initial value. Going from 5gallons/100miles to 3gallons/100miles saves 2 gallons, and saves 40% of the fuel used initially. Going from 7gallons/100miles to 5gallons/100miles saves 2 gallons, and saves ~28.6% of the fuel used initially. The first cuts the percentage by much more, but the actual petrol (gas) saved is the same, so the price difference and the pollution difference are the same. Percentages like that are only useful when comparing two things with the same initial value (since both are essentially calibrated to the same scale).

Probably by asking "But will it run Crysis?"

I don't really care if you like it. Unless you can convince me that my gripes are invalid or that they are outweighed by the positives (they would have to be significantly outweighed) the point is moot. I don't care if you can add a clickwheel for the iPhone, since it isn't supposed to be used that way (it's a smartphone, not a dedicated music player) and the fact that you can add your own controls doesn't make the UI better.

You can easily get a cheap IrDA dongle for under $30. In fact my TV tuner came with an IrDA receiver and a remote and it only cost £50 (about $75), so the remote and receiver probably cost me about £5-7 (~$8-10).

I don't exactly know what you mean by "a Tag program" but windows indexes files so they can be searched in much the same way as in OS X, allowing for the examples you gave (file type, file name, contents for certain file types etc). For the language thing you can use any character you want in windows filenames (other than those used by the filesytem such as slashes). If you want to search using Chinese characters you can. The only way in which languages aren't supported in that way is in the UI, and you can download language packs to do that (although I think it may be restricted to business/enterprise and ultimate editions).

Regardless, giving examples of things which do work does not negate the things that don't, so saying that "It just works" is still false. I don't deny that there are good things in Apple software or bad things in Microsoft software (in fact other than their OS most MS stuff is awful IMHO), just that the "It just works" claim is false (and other things such as their UI being simpler or better etc). Oh, and WE don't live in America. Maybe you do, but I live in the UK; don't make assumptions. Long live competition. Quick end to fanboys, zealots and evangelists.

Perhaps a UI or visual settings tab. There are other things which could go in there as well, such as the "keep mini player on top of all other windows" and "keep film window on top of all other windows". Wouldn't hurth them to add a few more options to the video player either (like UI timeout)

Well I'm no software engineer, but I get your point. not really the kind of thing that needs to be hidden away though.

I don't think that the amount of stuff it does is a problem. The problem is that the UI wasn't designed for it so they have just tacked on the additional features and options to the original UI. Things that made sense before don't due to awkward groupings and ambiguous labelling. That, and the UI was designed with far fewer options in mind.

That isn't the part of the UI I dislike. When it comes to that specific function it is laid out pretty much in the same way as Apples file browser (Finder I think its called), which works fine. It's when you have to do more complicated things that problems arise. For example the import settings are accessed from a button next to the "When you insert a CD:" dropdown. This makes some sense certainly and I can see the logic behind it (grouping similar functions together) but the import settings aren't a subset of "When you insert a CD:" as you can import at other times and the settings effect file conversions as well. If anything it would be better the other way around (with the import settings in a tab and "When you insert a CD:" as a dropdown within the tab), although it would probably be best if they were separated (dropdown where it is now, import options as a tab). The Advanced tab is another one. Why are simple UI options such as full screen visualisers and system tray icons in there? Those are not advanced options (they aren't basic either, but that is certainly not where I think they should be). As for the "Get info" screen, it's just a mess. It used to be OK but as they have added more options it just got less and less intuitive. The fact that there are multiple tabs filled with options, with one labelled "options" is a prime example. There is a video tab that has fields only applicable to TV shows (rather than music videos or films).

There are other examples I could give but I really don't want to list every single gripe I have with a piece of software. Most of this stuff I am used to so can work around, but it certainly doesn't "just work" from a UI perspective. You shouldn't have to work around confusing UI elements...not that it's the only culprit of course. I'm looking at you Photoshop.

This^. To be fair a lot of my post was spent pointing out that I'm not speaking from ignorance, so I may have gone on a bit.

I tried aTunes a while back, but had similar problems that I had in iTunes. It seems to have the same kind of song/file browser but the menus weren't any better than Apple's (different, but no better) so I didn't see the point in migrating my entire library. As for rockbox, I really don't want a drag-and-drop interface, unless you can drag-and-drop your whole library and/or individual playlists.

Agreed. I dislike most Apples interfaces. They certainly look clean which makes people think they're simple, but once you get into it they aren't any more intuitive than most Windows programs (and a lot less than some). The iPod I like (click wheel version I mean, not iPod Touch) but I dislike their OSs UI and the iPhone/iPod Touch UI. I use iTunes on Windows because I have an iPod, but wouldn't out of choice (there may be iTunes alternatives that work with iPods but I am yet to find a good one...next music player I get won't be an iPod anyway) and the UI works well enough, but is far from intuitive. The only other Apple software I use is Safari, which I use for testing websites and nothing more. That said, I am fairly familiar with a lot of Mac stuff since my dad (who I work with) uses one and I am essentially the administrator (I fulfill the role of "tech guy", among other things). Some of their stuff does "just work" but much of it doesn't, and is not really any better than Windows programs (some are good, some aren't). Even as a Mac guy, my dad doesn't use a lot of Apple software beyond small widgets (calculator, stickies etc) and the email app.