There's a whole lot of *woosh* in this subthread.

He sounds like he escaped from QVC or a low budget infomercial or something. "Order now at the low price of $16.95 and receive this free ..."

So fix malware probably ultimately caused by downloading and trusting a random executable by downloading and trusting a random executable? Would be a lot easier to feel safe about something open source.

Access to the demo was really very limited - you either had to own Borderlands or to have pre-ordered DNF. This is hardly encouraging people to try before they buy.

I'd say the review embargo in Europe wasn't exactly much in the spirit of openness either...

It's fairly obvious that despite recent interviews and other press, and despite the length of time it's been in their possession, Gearbox had very little to do with this game. If you watch the unreleased 2009 trailer for the game, which is part of the extras for the game but is available on YouTube, you can see that it's barely changed at all since then.

Arguably they could and should have improved upon all these various awful aspects, if they were taking over development and putting their name on it, but it seems they did nothing much except help get it in a box in some vaguely functional form. Somehow I doubt Take Two were too welcoming to the idea of an extra 6 months or a year spent on polishing it up.

For some carriers / manufacturer combinations, sure, though it could also be argued that Android users are at least generally free to update their ROMs themselves with newer versions, as most of the handsets seem to have a fairly thriving, reasonably low barrier to entry ROM ecosystem. Besides, even the casual user can easily replace one of the major vectors for attack: the browser.

Meanwhile, it's pretty grating that Apple have relatively little reason or excuse for their behaviour. There's very little divergence in their models and there are only a very few of them so it's only saving them the inconvenience of disabling new features and testing on the earlier iPhones. Safari / WebKit frequently has new security issues yet you can't replace the core browser engine there, IIRC, because of Apple's policies.

Having owned a 3G, which my girlfriend since inherited, but having now migrated to a Samsung Galaxy S, I know which situation I'm happier with personally.

Except that Apple arbitrarily stop supporting older every few releases, even for bug fixes as far as I'm aware; eg. they dropped iPhone 3G support in the most recent iOS update. That model is less than 3 years old and I suspect plenty of people are still using them. Hell, a quick Google suggests you can still buy one if you like.

One of the things I like about Slashdot is that amongst the typically informed discussion about a story there's often at least one comment providing critical updates or corrections to the original information.

Sadly this often doesn't turn up until after a couple of hundred posts based on the lack of that information and almost without fail the story itself remains unchanged, proudly maintaining its glaring omission.

Hey, he only said 'measured in hours'. That's 192 hours and 264,552 hours respectively :)

This isn't really true at all of Visual Studio apart from using a few specific features. I have never needed to run it as administrator for C++ development apart from for initial setup of a couple of add-ins.

In fact, I don't recall using any application on either Vista or Windows 7 that didn't correctly function unless it was run as administrator. I think Incredibuild briefly required it for legacy reasons when Vista was first around but that was soon fixed when we complained. I wonder how widespread this really is.

I'm so tired of this absurd argument that piracy is somehow ok because the original copy is intact. No-one will produce digital content if there is no way of making money from it, just as no-one would make tangible goods if there was no profit in it one way or another. Theft is a crime because you're taking something wrongfully. Legally and morally it's just as wrongful whether the item is tangible or not. Someone has worked hard to create it and wants to be paid for you to use it. This is no different from any other form of trade through human history. Whether the corporations deserve the cut they're getting or if they're screwing the real creators is a different argument, and the RIAA and MPAA can absolutely go fuck themselves with their current tactics, but swapping money for someone else's produce is simply how our society works.

It doesn't really have much to do with an individual insult though. (Well, maybe it does in this specific case - naturally I haven't bothered RTFA - but it doesn't in general.) Enough people trolling or generally behaving disruptively can quickly reduce a forum's signal to noise ratio below anything useful. I guess you haven't spent much time looking at, or more likely despairing at, the WoW forums, for example.

Where are those figures from? I haven't seen them before and they're pretty damning. Seeing where and how it dropped between those extremes would be interesting too.

Try BBC 6Music. It's consistently brilliant and probably has the greatest variety of music you'll hear anywhere, with little to no repetition within a day. No idea about streaming availability outside the UK though.

On the one hand I preferred it down there. On the other I just spent a few weeks with the recent couple of betas getting used to looking up instead of down when I moused over anything and now it's probably going to take at least another couple to retrain myself!