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I am hoping they can fix the very long outstanding security bug for the Thunderbird chat - enable the ability for people to use plugins like OTR in Thunderbird chat. So far It is like they are dragging their feet on it/don't want encryption/privacy is not a priority:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=779052
https://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/otr_support_in_instant_messaging_chat
https://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/deleting_chat_conversations_or_going_off_the_record

I am hoping they can fix the very long outstanding security bug for the Thunderbird chat - enable the ability for people to use plugins like OTR in Thunderbird chat. So far It is like they are dragging their feet on it/don't want encryption/privacy is not a priority:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=779052
https://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/otr_support_in_instant_messaging_chat
https://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/deleting_chat_conversations_or_going_off_the_record

I haven't tried Minecraft myself (I was turned off by the DRM). But I've read a lot of online discussions where someone claims there is online activation and they can't play while the server is down, and other people quickly come on to say it's not that bad. But it seems like there is DRM and while you can play single player offline, you cannot connect to servers even if they are local LAN. If that's true, it sounds disingenuous to say there is no DRM.

See: https://getsatisfaction.com/mojang/topics/why_is_there_drm_in_this_game_when_it_is_advertised_as_drm_free

Are you saying otherwise?

Oh, ok, my bad! Thanks for that clarification.

RR2 on OS X controlled via an iOS device, however, still requires both your mac and your phone/tablet to be on the same wifi network (source), very likely to handle the otherwise (relatively) high latency of an internet connection. This makes Google's work still relevant, given they're looking at users that may not be physically located together.

Also wanted to mention that Kaltura is pretty much the list of online video collaboration once we can either get it implemented on a VPS or hosted. (new YouTube editor is also surprisingly good for a web video editor) Currently we are running on a decent HostGator VPS with CloudFlare and MaxCDN, and I recently got a free trial node from VPS.NET to try new Wordpress configs on as well as examine moving from a single HostGator to a cloud VPS model. - HEX

I can't get this to sound not like a plug, so deal with it, they're the example I know.

I recommend something similar to Get Satisfaction. It's not free, but depending on your project you might already have budget for it. It has a bunch of social media things that I don't really care about, but it allows for other users to respond and ask questions. Hell, you can select a little frowny face when writing comments. It does have basic community rating stuff for responses and reports and whathaveyou.

Also, "bug" isn't going to mean anything to regular users. Users have problems. They want to be able to go to the website, click support, and write a complaint.

Users aren't going to go search to see if it's already there, so do the search for them after they write their complaint. I think this a key part of it. They don't want to be aloooone.

Also, if a single user has a bug, you're pretty much screwed anyway unless you have some sort of automated dump, or if they're technically literate. Best thing you can do is try to organize it so all the vague bug reports of the same thing are bunched together. From that you can (maybe) extract some usable information.

Check out Mojang's Get Satisfaction.

Look, you can put in 'you suck' and you get a link to someone already saying it

I can't get this to sound not like a plug, so deal with it, they're the example I know.

I recommend something similar to Get Satisfaction. It's not free, but depending on your project you might already have budget for it. It has a bunch of social media things that I don't really care about, but it allows for other users to respond and ask questions. Hell, you can select a little frowny face when writing comments. It does have basic community rating stuff for responses and reports and whathaveyou.

Also, "bug" isn't going to mean anything to regular users. Users have problems. They want to be able to go to the website, click support, and write a complaint.

Users aren't going to go search to see if it's already there, so do the search for them after they write their complaint. I think this a key part of it. They don't want to be aloooone.

Also, if a single user has a bug, you're pretty much screwed anyway unless you have some sort of automated dump, or if they're technically literate. Best thing you can do is try to organize it so all the vague bug reports of the same thing are bunched together. From that you can (maybe) extract some usable information.

Check out Mojang's Get Satisfaction.

Look, you can put in 'you suck' and you get a link to someone already saying it

I can't get this to sound not like a plug, so deal with it, they're the example I know.

I recommend something similar to Get Satisfaction. It's not free, but depending on your project you might already have budget for it. It has a bunch of social media things that I don't really care about, but it allows for other users to respond and ask questions. Hell, you can select a little frowny face when writing comments. It does have basic community rating stuff for responses and reports and whathaveyou.

Also, "bug" isn't going to mean anything to regular users. Users have problems. They want to be able to go to the website, click support, and write a complaint.

Users aren't going to go search to see if it's already there, so do the search for them after they write their complaint. I think this a key part of it. They don't want to be aloooone.

Also, if a single user has a bug, you're pretty much screwed anyway unless you have some sort of automated dump, or if they're technically literate. Best thing you can do is try to organize it so all the vague bug reports of the same thing are bunched together. From that you can (maybe) extract some usable information.

Check out Mojang's Get Satisfaction.

Look, you can put in 'you suck' and you get a link to someone already saying it

I'd love to know where you're getting regular updates from. My Stanza stopped working months ago when iOS5 came out - along with just about everyone else's:

http://getsatisfaction.com/stanza/topics/ios_5_issues

Stanza does not work in iOS5. I used it almost every day for years for reading ebooks and when I updated to iOS5 on my iPod Touch it immediately stopped working.

Their "support" forum is full of people having the same problem:

http://getsatisfaction.com/stanza/topics/ios_5_issues

My iPod Touch is now a useless lump. I don't take it anywhere anymore because I can't read on it, which turns out to be the only thing I used it for. I now just read on my Android phone while I wait to find an e-ink reader that doesn't have DRM'ed books.

• Protects your privacy and doesn’t track you.. donttrack.us
• Gives back to free and open source software. http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/help-me-start-a-foss-tithing-movement.html
• Is partially open source... https://github.com/duckduckgo
• Gives really awesome results... https://duck.co/topic/wow-queries-that-showcase-ddg

In many cases, outsourcing support to your user community is feasible. Here's an interesting experiment: the next time you ask a co-worker about how to do pivot tables in Excel, or how to fill in your expense claim in SAP, or how to clear a jammed printer, also ask them where they learned the answer? Very often the answer is: "I googled it" or "a colleague told me". That is called peer support, and companies are discovering that you can boost its effects by facilitating it. My client has gotten very good results with Yammer (a corporate Twitter-lookalike), and we are now starting a trial with GetSatisfaction, another peer support tool which helps with finding relevant answers provided to previous questions.

This is not going to replace help desks completely, but initial results show that for the easier (tier 1 and 2) questions, answers are more accurate and come faster from peers. However, all this has absolutely nothing to do with "going mobile" or "the cloud", as JPL's IT CTO suggests.

I hate Mozilla's designers. First they screwed up Firefox 4 (still have not upgraded).

Then they did this to Thunderbird:
http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/thunderbird_5_default_theme_on_windows_7_looks_like_a_pile_of_emesis

Now this crap? Have they actually found out what they're users want/expect or are they just playing about with the lead designer's theme of the day?

Good point: http://getsatisfaction.com/americanselect/topics/font_infringement

... increases is content disappearing for no reason. For example UMG has disabled all songs longer than a certain amount 8+ months ago (which affects a lot people listening to classical and jazz, but not only, for example try to listen to the 2112 album by Rush on spotify...) and it hasn't been fixed yet

http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/long_songs_are_missing

I love the idea of spotify and would sign up in a heartbeat even at $30/month, but not with this kind of issues where a record company can arbitrarily mess with your account and you have no recourse.

No, the devs had said that their servers are running at max capacity.

I get this in the front page:

"Announcement: We will lift the facebook account verification for model viewing by monday. You guys are right: it's plain dumb. We are not trying to spam you! "

http://getsatisfaction.com/3dtubeme/topics/how_to_view_models_without_a_facebook_account

http://getsatisfaction.com/3dtubeme/topics/im_using_firefox_4_and_still_cant_see_a_3d_model_anywhere_what_should_i_do

I don't know if WebOS is an App-bound cellphone platform, but there needs to be more awareness that we're quietly being FRAGMENTED with products coming out exclusively for expensive and always-on-the-internet smartphones platforms. Funny, because we spent 10 years caving into ditching modems, buying routers, paying for broadband and internal cabling and routers and already pay for cheaper internet service than what it costs to run a barely smart cellphone today.

All that for what? As soon as companies went mainstream pushing apps a couple years ago, market forces are constantly pushing us to not only have web access, but buy a connected cellphone for apps (both connected and disconnected). Because ticket information, game times, schedules and so on are no longer cheaper to develop for a WWW audience. What happened?

Apparently the PC as a legal ad service is no longer a goldmine, and I find it bittersweet that even Microsoft, who thrives on Windows sales, has given us NO choice when it comes to their proprietary, scannable tag system for their own desktop OS. If webOS delivers a friendly app market that is compatible with Android's or Apple's, then it would be trivial to see the benefits of not having to bother friends who have access to the aforementioned phones.

I can suspect that an App provides many benefits
apps have been abusing customer privacy by collecting names, location, address book and gps data
apps want to advertise to your friends (especially the facebook games)
apps can have their own ad-streaming code, ignoring all your browser's restrictions on popups, blocking, etc

I made a big blog post about using Firefox 4 and a bunch of other things you can do to help make it better. Most of you in this crowd can skip to Item 3, I wrote it for users who are not technical.
http://bryanquigley.com/uncategorized/try-the-new-firefox-beta

Or in just one sentence, turn on the surveys to automatically submit, and install/run Grafx Bot - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/200733/.

And in related news, I also would love to see Duck Duck Go be included as one of the search engines...
http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla/topics/include_duck_duck_go_as_option_by_default_in_search_box

Thunderbirds incorporation of windows search is very ugly. There was thousands of files in profile folder Inbox.mozmsgs and I was wondering why my backup process was so slow. But is it a poor implementation of Windows Search in Thunderbird, or is it a poorly written API for anything but Microsofts programs?

http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/thousands_of_files_in_profile_folder_inbox_mozmsgs

I managed to screw up the link:

Requesting purge of accounts

'It would be nice to side with Google here, but they do exactly the same on YouTube. Apply restrictions that content producers require.'

Indeed. Playing around with the new Apple TV yesterday, I found that the full-length programmes on UK Channel 4's YouTube channels (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/4oDDocumentaries ) aren't accessible with this device even from the UK (they're geographically blocked as well, of course). In this case (basically the same problem iPhone users have with these videos) it seems to be a combination of the usual short-sighted DRM policy from the provider (which fondly imagines serving their stuff only as flv via rtmp makes it 'secure' - presumably they haven't tried RTMPDump!), and Apple's well-known refusal to provide Flash support:

http://getsatisfaction.com/channel4/topics/create_a_iphone_app_for_4od

With this sort of nonsense going on all the time, it seems like the only thing you can plug into a TV and make full use of all the (freely and legally!) available content is a media PC with a conventional browser.

If you're using Linux or Windows, I would go with Boxee. It does all of the Hulu/Netflix/Pandora/ESPN360/etc. content, and has finally become genuinely stable enough for everyday use, even for my mildly non-technical wife, who has to keep TV rolling for 2 kids on demand.

Actually, Netflix does not work at all under linux, including via Boxee. That's a function of Netflix's choice of Sliverlight as its DRM lock-in. Moonlight still isn't there....

Hulu has been a major cat-and-mouse game with Boxee, and on Linux, the game hasn't been going well for Boxee. Most shows won't play through the first commercial break.

I finally gave up with Ubuntu and migrated my Boxee system to WinXP. It's a single-processor Amd Athlon 3200 XP, which typically renders video fine. In XP, Hulu and Netflix run poorly through Boxee with consistent choppiness. Running Hulu and Netflix through a web browser on the system works fine.

I really like Boxee and will likely upgrade to a multi-core processor as people using that architecture aren't encountering the same performance issues.

Seth

Anyway, my upgrade was moderately smooth, I had several issues, which were mostly caused by Ubuntu not gracefully handling changes I had made behind its back, but nothing I couldn't work around YMMV.

1. boot failure.

Cause: Grub entries were updated to use the UUID of my root partition, but Ubuntu picked the 'wrong' partition because I have two roots (backup) and one of them was corrupted (I didn't say it was a GOOD backup...)

Solution: Manually correct grub entries (This is the most questionable fix, I happen to have mucked around in the grub internals and done semi-embedded grub installs, so I'm quite a bit more expert at this than most.)

Reason it's my fault: I have a completely non-standard partition layout that confused the upgrader, also it warned me about the changes during the upgrade but I ignored the warnings.

2. Mozilla apps would not start

Cause: I use several Mozilla apps (Firefox, Thunderbird, Songbird), and install from tarballs, the update finally removed libsdtc++.so.5 (which was obsoleted a year or more ago.) and all the Mozilla apps depend on it.

Workaround: Downloaded a .deb containing libstdc++.so.5 and installed it until I get around to updating all my Mozilla installs.

Reason it's my fault: I intentionally maintain my Mozilla installs manually, so it's my responsibility to do the maintenance on them, I assume the Mozilla apps Ubuntu ship with Karmic don't have this problem.

3. Songbird still wouldn't boot after the libstdc++.so.5 fix.

Cause: The gstreamer libs that ship with Songbird somehow conflict with the ones shipped with Ubuntu... maybe? See here for discussion, also where I found the solution after about 5 minutes of searching.

Workaround: Do "export LD_BIND_NOW=1" before launching Songbird. On one hand this is an expert fix and I don't expect most people to know what it does, on the other hand I got it off an official help forum, so YMMVBPNBM.

4. Sound would not play.

Cause: Changes to audio stack caused upgrade process to mute audio.

Solution: Unmute audio. (This would have been far more obvious if I used a "normal" window manager that has a volume panel widget, I use ion3)

So, as you can see I did have some issues, but they were mostly self-inflicted, and I had little problem fixing them or working around them. (Spent something like 30 minutes post-upgrade sorting out the issues.)

P.S. Tried to end with "My 2 cents", but with "cents" rendered symbolically... Unicode didn't work, the html escape sequence for it didn't work, tried to use brackets in a previous P.S., and the html escape sequence for them didn't work either...

This is a common problem for the Dell XPS line. The authentication chip in the power adapter is connected to the motherboard by what amounts to an antenna. Both ends of the circuitry are known to fry at the slightest power surge or EMP. It's not that I literally *couldn't* fix the computer, but it doesn't make fiscal sense for me to buy a $200-$300 motherboard, then spend hours replacing it. His first Dell ended up with the GPU failure that's also well-documented. In both cases, we're talking internal hardware failures that isn't a 2-minute job like RAM or a hard drive. Even if I were to take matters into my own hands, there's not a chance that Dell would honor the warranty on either machine if I had manipulated the guts of the machine.

It's not beneath me to ask for help. I did call Applecare and did go to the Apple store. When I told them the problem, they're like "send it back to us", giving me no guarantee of data integrity. When it came time to do a disk image, the only two answers I got were "Time Machine backs up your photos and documents but I'm not sure what it does with your system files" from the "geniuses" at the Genius Bar, and "We don't officially support that, but you can check our forums" from the phone techs. That's how I found out about Carbon Copy Cloner, which I did try, albeit unsuccessfully.

The experience as I shared it is exactly how it went down. This chain of events happened last week, before the GP ever posed the question. It was never my intention to carry out an ad hominem attack on the GP. He asked the question regarding a specific example of something that took longer to do on a Mac than on a PC. I perfectly accept that a large portion of it is because of my unfamiliarity with the platform. That's no secret and I've admitted to that in my other response as well. However, I have no ill-intent toward the GP. I am not looking to embarrass him. I'm not looking to diminish him in the eyes of others. To the contrary, I will be taking a closer look at Time Machine and CCC. I'm also going to look into adding a Mac Mini to the budget for next fiscal year with the intent of trying all the different things listed here and hopefully learning how to better maintain the platform. If admitting my own fault and doing something to rectify it at the suggestion of the GP is embarrassing to him/her, then I apologize as such. But i have been accused of being a liar, an idiot, and intentionally committing libel the GP, none of which are true.

OpenCandy was removed from Miro two months ago after user complaints.

Hi All,

We're going to remove OpenCandy from our installer next week. Thanks for pushing back on this.

We still think the core idea of open source projects promoting one another is a great one, and we'll continue to support and promote other FOSS projects whenever possible.

~Jesse

Also from that post:

OpenCandy is a a software recommendation engine that we added recently in order to suggest other free and open source software to our users. You can find out about the organization at www.opencandy.com.

I wasn't aware that it permanently left their recommendation engine on the user's machine after running it. We'll look into that right now and fix it as soon as possible.

You quoted one source, not multiple

How about if I quote MS's own Live Labs team? Or perhaps another source or yet another one? or one more?

Just because you may not want to hear the news does not mean that it does not exist.

the credit card companies know that payments to certain entities are for scam crap

Like iTunes (look for this one to be taken down soon from your friends at Apple), iTunes, and iTunes.

I've bothered to ask this question to the Visible.net SEO company and they've bothered to reply on their blog.

Basically, they said they're just recommending you the same things you can find on this page and saying that the Attorney General didn't care about their happy customers (which have no idea that they got just a few tips for thousands of dollars). To me, that's like being charged for stealing and saying "But why won't you listen to other people I've come in contact with, because I never stole from them? I'm also confident that I don't steal, either and I really believe myself!"

Here's their GetSatisfaction page.

They have already responded to this point.

The problem isn't that comcast doesn't know about issues its customers are having.

It's that they don't actually fix the problems that customers have in a timely manner.

They have been making a noticeable effort to improve customer service though. They actively monitor and handle issues on http://getsatisfaction.com/comcast as well. It's not as responsive as online chat, but you'll get set up with someone above the unplug-it-for-15-seconds level. Often, they'll even give YOU a call.

Maybe they do care after all.

http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla/topics/why_cant_i_download_firefox_3

http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/twitter_refuses_to_uphold_terms_of_service

There are many people posting in this thread, some more ardently than others. Good points are dotted here and there. Of particular note are the two replies from Twitter employees. It's interesting how neither of them pull the "we have no obligation according to the TOS" card and how neither of them make any move to discredit the complaint.

Is silence tantamount to agreement, in this case?