IF you're serious, be sure to tell them why when you cancel it. I'm sure Amazon would love to print off reams of e-mails like yours and show them to the publishers who are demanding these ridiculous DRM restrictions.
Very astute of you to make the comparison between iTunes/iPod/iPhone creating the market for digital music and the resulting consumer demand that allowed them to drop DRM.
It does indeed sound just like Amazon's Kindle creating the market for E-Books and the resulting consumer demand (and default of enabled) resulting in Text-To-Speech being standard on all E-Books and E-Book readers.
...
Oh wait, or were you trying to say there's something wrong with the iPhone and Kindle?
AFAIK Amazon clearly wants to have text-to-speech enabled for all books. It's the publishers (and their threat to remove works if speech is enabled) you should be mad at. Amazon is trying their damnedest to make a compelling ebook product, and like Apple with iTunes, trying to drag the publisher's kicking and screaming onto the internet.
Like music, I expect once the market is there, people will demand the functionality (or pirate for it, or sue for it) and it will become commonplace.
If Amazon took a high and mighty moral stand, they would just be killing the market (and their own business opportunity) and letting another eBook maker who WILL compromise their morals take over the market.
At least we know Amazon is trying to open things up as much as they can.
That's a great point, and really drives to the heart of the problem with this stuff. Someone needs to start suing for misleading advertising, whatever laws cover that.
I'm sure they have a TOS that says they can come by and bang your mom whenever they want, but hopefully the courts will call BS on that.
To be somewhat fair to Amazon (and Apple, and so on) they're not exactly the boogeymen here. Obviously Amazon thinks automated text-to-speech isn't a "performance" and should be included and allowed in all works. But the content owners are saying "disable text to speech or we pull our works". Just like the music labels with DRM.
We know for a fact that the content owner's are serious - they think they have a monopoly, and would rather make their content unavailable than to make it available in the form customers want.
Perhaps Amazon is even sitting back praying that a customer will sue them for disabling/removing text-to-speech so that they can point their finger at a court when telling the publishers "We can't disable text to speech".
I don't think "empty calories" refers to meat, typically. Like you said, meat provides all the proteins you need. The burgers are one of the few (relatively) healthy things at McDonalds.
But what about a the giant sodas? Do you think drinking 600 calories of sugar is a nutritious way to get those calories on a daily basis? (presumably you're only eating ~2,000 calories a day, right?)
Likewise for various refined carbs or deep fried foods. Potatoes aren't that bad, but if you eat 1200 calories of which 600 are sugar-water and 600 are deep fried potatoes, that's 3/5 of your daily calories without getting complete proteins or many vitamins.
This is what the idea of "empty calories" refers to. You're going to get those calories regardless of what you eat. It's preferable to get those calories by eating foods that have nutrition in them beyond simple calories. Eg. meat, beans, fruit, and whole grains.
If you really disagree with the "empty calories" idea, go ahead and get 100% of your calories from soda for a few weeks and let us know how that works out for you.
I don't disagree though that the GP was mumbling some fairly incrompehensible newage nonsense. I think he may have been implying that soda is typically 600 calories ON TOP OF your healthy 2,000 calorie diet, and thus those extra 600 calories will stick around as fat.
Pretty interesting! I think the biggest problem with McDonald's is the deep fried foods, and those are bad for all the same reasons anywhere you go. That and the 2-liter soda cups. Surprisingly, the sandwhiches (burgers) are really not that bad for you at McDonalds.
Check out the movie Super Size Me. There's a guy he meets who eats 2+ McDonald's burgers every day. Tall skinny guy. Doesn't eat the fries or soda, just the burgers.
Meanwhile the filmmaker is puking after a day or two of eating supersized fries and sodas for every meals.
Worse yet, every Panera I've been to has seating problems, especially around lunch and dinner times. You look around and no one has any food, or at most a drink. Sure, they may have eaten lunch an hour ago, but now they're sitting there with a laptop or newspaper or text book. And I have to sit on their "fireplace" to eat my lunch.
I guess you've never tried to use wireless internet at public places before?
They wouldn't randomly block your mac entirely - they would start serving you a "You've been here too long, get lost" webpage regardless of what address you tried to visit.
Or perhaps "please enter your receipt number to connect for another 15 minutes".
This movie beats the alternative of having new actors being crammed into old star trek timelines while trying to keep everything straight - including technology which is necessarily going to look incredibly different for new-kirk than old-kirk. Unless they really want to go back to using cheap plastic props.
But really these are both bad alternatives. Instead of beating the dead horse, why can't we get a new and compelling sci fi show with new characters? The answer is, of course, that studios would rather beat a dead horse than take risks.
As consumers, any rehash of star trek is an absolute failure. For studios it's riskless money-printing. The only way this going to change is if us crowds stop showing up to the terrible remakes and sequels, and START showing up to the new properties before they get moved to end-of-life timeslots on friday nights.
It sounds like he saw a size difference between the partition and the disk size (maybe even the built in Dell/HP restore partition) and assumed it was because of the trojan.
Addendum: I'd much rather hear that they multiply beta chances by the number of games on your account, as I don't relish the idea of having 12 different battle.net accounts to keep track of.
Especially if they complete their plans to compete with Steam and offer buddy-list/chat functionality through battle.net accounts.
Heh...I really *should* give em away since I already have a beta SC2 key from Blizzcon last year:)
Why do I have so many? WC2, WC2 battle chest (to get TCPIP multiplayer), WC3, Diablo2, D2 expansion, SC2, SC2 expansion. Most of those games are X2 keys because I got a copy for my wife (girlfriend at the time) to play with me a bit.
In addition, 6 WOW accounts between us (including ~4 expansion keys). This is due to dual-boxing and Recruit-a-Friend accounts, plus a botched RAF signup that they wouldn't refund.
If they let me make a separate account for each expansion key...woo boy =D
On the plus side, that means if you create a separate b.net account for each cd-key (and oh boy do I have a lot of em) you increase your chances of getting into the beta.
1- Any time there's a new feature you need to code a version with and without it, or you're cutting out the bulk of users still on the old version of code. PHP's more gradual approach is no different.
2- Magic Quotes wasn't in version 1 i'd bet, but it was in there by the time php became popular.
3- It's the implementation not the feature. If they enable it by default they'll have to stick with the implementation and maintain backwards compatibility. If they slow acceptance a bit, they have a chance to make changes without effecting as many users. For instance changing argument order before it would majorly break backwards compatibility and become an idiotic thing to change.
I'm not that familiar with PHP's unicode behavior, but this is generally the Right Way to phase in new features.
Version X: does not have feature
Version X+1: feature is optional, developers can start coding apps with it, and also maintain apps that do not yet support it
Version X+2: feature is default, developers can still maintain apps that do not yet support it
Version X+3(or later, if ever): feature is mandatory, apps that do not use the feature must be upgraded or run on unsupported old versions.
Magic quotes was an unfortunate feature that existed when the language was first created. Their phaseout plan for Magic Quotes is identical to their phase-in plan for Unicode support.
This sort of phased plan also has the major advantage of not making a feature mandatory or default before it's been well tested and determined to indeed be worth keeping around and making mandatory.
The list of features being deprecated is very small. And these are "features" that people have been universally panned and avoided for years. Back in PHP 5 these "features" were disabled by default.
PHP 6 is just finally (years later) hitting the Off switch for good.
The apps affected by this will be:
1) Apps developed 4+ years ago
2) Apps developed 4 years ago by teams with zero experience in PHP who did zero research, or intentionally ignored best practices being used and recommended everywhere.
Most apps that need to be changed for these features are vulnerable to variable overwriting and sql injection, and always have been. Best case, these apps tend to MAGICALLY add 2-4 backslashes to any form input you put a quote into. Adding more every time you resubmit the form. You should've seen the number of backslashes in some people's names at a previous job where I got to fix these poor practices...
There are some new features in php 5 and php 6, but besides some worst offenders (magic quotes and registered globals) are entirely backwards compatible with PHP 4 code.
I had the pleasure of upgrading a Large website from PHP 4 to PHP 5 and it was honestly quite trivial. 5 to 6 will be the same, except for removing the option of turning magic quotes and registered globals back on. But you fixed it the right way from 4 to 5 by not using them anymore anyway, riiiight?:)
PHP has been VERY careful about breaking features, and have essentially openly mocked the people who suggest they "fix" PHP's functions by randomly swapping argument order on functions that have been working just fine for years.
The only thing I can think of they've broken is MAGIC_QUOTES and registered globals. Both are Very Bad Things that it was important they do away with. Any sane PHP code will react to their removal by simply removing a few chunks of good that were necessary to route around those features on servers that had them enabled.
"Affordable housing" refers to making houses cheaply. Not banks giving out loans to people who clearly can't afford them and counting on AIG insurance to bail them out.
Yeah. The problem wasn't giving loans to "poor" people. The problem was giving out too high of loans, with too little down, and no evidence of employment capable of paying the mortgage.
8-9 years ago (or do we have to go back farther?) your person with $30k annual salary and poor/no credit history would have to put down 20% to get a loan for a $140k home.
Instead, 4-5 years ago that person was getting an interest-only 3-year ARM for a $300k home that cost them $20k out of their $30k salary.
This drove house prices up, so they may have even bought the same $140k home, but paid $300k for it.
And then they lost their job, the ARM adjusted up, or all of the above at the same time.
Had nothing to do with the government "forcing" anyone to loan to poor people. Had everything to do with greedy lenders lying to get people into homes, and AIG lying that they could realistically insure it all.
Exactly. As long as its not meant to be or treated as anything more than a band-aid, this is a good thing. The answer when something doesn't work in the VM should be "petition the software maker to upgrade it to Windows 7".
By letting the VM solve 75%+ of these apps, the motivation and pressure will exist to get the other 25% ugpraded, and let them deprecate XP for good.
The lack of deaths in the US is promising. The flu is being reported as much milder outside Mexico. Not to jump the gun too much, but it's possible the deadliest strain of the flu killed itself off by being too severe. Leaving a much weaker (but higher fitness from an evolutionary perspective) version to make its way around the world.
Slashdot Mirror
IF you're serious, be sure to tell them why when you cancel it. I'm sure Amazon would love to print off reams of e-mails like yours and show them to the publishers who are demanding these ridiculous DRM restrictions.
Very astute of you to make the comparison between iTunes/iPod/iPhone creating the market for digital music and the resulting consumer demand that allowed them to drop DRM.
It does indeed sound just like Amazon's Kindle creating the market for E-Books and the resulting consumer demand (and default of enabled) resulting in Text-To-Speech being standard on all E-Books and E-Book readers.
Oh wait, or were you trying to say there's something wrong with the iPhone and Kindle?
AFAIK Amazon clearly wants to have text-to-speech enabled for all books. It's the publishers (and their threat to remove works if speech is enabled) you should be mad at. Amazon is trying their damnedest to make a compelling ebook product, and like Apple with iTunes, trying to drag the publisher's kicking and screaming onto the internet.
Like music, I expect once the market is there, people will demand the functionality (or pirate for it, or sue for it) and it will become commonplace.
If Amazon took a high and mighty moral stand, they would just be killing the market (and their own business opportunity) and letting another eBook maker who WILL compromise their morals take over the market.
At least we know Amazon is trying to open things up as much as they can.
That's a great point, and really drives to the heart of the problem with this stuff. Someone needs to start suing for misleading advertising, whatever laws cover that.
I'm sure they have a TOS that says they can come by and bang your mom whenever they want, but hopefully the courts will call BS on that.
To be somewhat fair to Amazon (and Apple, and so on) they're not exactly the boogeymen here. Obviously Amazon thinks automated text-to-speech isn't a "performance" and should be included and allowed in all works. But the content owners are saying "disable text to speech or we pull our works". Just like the music labels with DRM.
We know for a fact that the content owner's are serious - they think they have a monopoly, and would rather make their content unavailable than to make it available in the form customers want.
Perhaps Amazon is even sitting back praying that a customer will sue them for disabling/removing text-to-speech so that they can point their finger at a court when telling the publishers "We can't disable text to speech".
I don't think "empty calories" refers to meat, typically. Like you said, meat provides all the proteins you need. The burgers are one of the few (relatively) healthy things at McDonalds.
But what about a the giant sodas? Do you think drinking 600 calories of sugar is a nutritious way to get those calories on a daily basis? (presumably you're only eating ~2,000 calories a day, right?)
Likewise for various refined carbs or deep fried foods. Potatoes aren't that bad, but if you eat 1200 calories of which 600 are sugar-water and 600 are deep fried potatoes, that's 3/5 of your daily calories without getting complete proteins or many vitamins.
This is what the idea of "empty calories" refers to. You're going to get those calories regardless of what you eat. It's preferable to get those calories by eating foods that have nutrition in them beyond simple calories. Eg. meat, beans, fruit, and whole grains.
If you really disagree with the "empty calories" idea, go ahead and get 100% of your calories from soda for a few weeks and let us know how that works out for you.
I don't disagree though that the GP was mumbling some fairly incrompehensible newage nonsense. I think he may have been implying that soda is typically 600 calories ON TOP OF your healthy 2,000 calorie diet, and thus those extra 600 calories will stick around as fat.
Pretty interesting! I think the biggest problem with McDonald's is the deep fried foods, and those are bad for all the same reasons anywhere you go. That and the 2-liter soda cups. Surprisingly, the sandwhiches (burgers) are really not that bad for you at McDonalds.
Check out the movie Super Size Me. There's a guy he meets who eats 2+ McDonald's burgers every day. Tall skinny guy. Doesn't eat the fries or soda, just the burgers.
Meanwhile the filmmaker is puking after a day or two of eating supersized fries and sodas for every meals.
Worse yet, every Panera I've been to has seating problems, especially around lunch and dinner times. You look around and no one has any food, or at most a drink. Sure, they may have eaten lunch an hour ago, but now they're sitting there with a laptop or newspaper or text book. And I have to sit on their "fireplace" to eat my lunch.
I guess you've never tried to use wireless internet at public places before?
They wouldn't randomly block your mac entirely - they would start serving you a "You've been here too long, get lost" webpage regardless of what address you tried to visit.
Or perhaps "please enter your receipt number to connect for another 15 minutes".
I was in an instance last weekend and a guy has to go AFK because of the baby crying. Came back and said
"Wife took over, have a newborn"
I jokingly asked if he was still at the hospital:
"Yep, wifi on a laptop. Baby was born 9:00 server time"
This movie beats the alternative of having new actors being crammed into old star trek timelines while trying to keep everything straight - including technology which is necessarily going to look incredibly different for new-kirk than old-kirk. Unless they really want to go back to using cheap plastic props.
But really these are both bad alternatives. Instead of beating the dead horse, why can't we get a new and compelling sci fi show with new characters? The answer is, of course, that studios would rather beat a dead horse than take risks.
As consumers, any rehash of star trek is an absolute failure. For studios it's riskless money-printing. The only way this going to change is if us crowds stop showing up to the terrible remakes and sequels, and START showing up to the new properties before they get moved to end-of-life timeslots on friday nights.
You are correct. I don't believe him.
It sounds like he saw a size difference between the partition and the disk size (maybe even the built in Dell/HP restore partition) and assumed it was because of the trojan.
Addendum: I'd much rather hear that they multiply beta chances by the number of games on your account, as I don't relish the idea of having 12 different battle.net accounts to keep track of.
Especially if they complete their plans to compete with Steam and offer buddy-list/chat functionality through battle.net accounts.
She went to Blizzcon too, but I can't pretend she's as into the nerdy games as I am. Might sell her SC2 key on ebay to buy clothes/furniture ;)
Heh...I really *should* give em away since I already have a beta SC2 key from Blizzcon last year :)
Why do I have so many?
WC2, WC2 battle chest (to get TCPIP multiplayer), WC3, Diablo2, D2 expansion, SC2, SC2 expansion. Most of those games are X2 keys because I got a copy for my wife (girlfriend at the time) to play with me a bit.
In addition, 6 WOW accounts between us (including ~4 expansion keys). This is due to dual-boxing and Recruit-a-Friend accounts, plus a botched RAF signup that they wouldn't refund.
If they let me make a separate account for each expansion key...woo boy =D
On the plus side, that means if you create a separate b.net account for each cd-key (and oh boy do I have a lot of em) you increase your chances of getting into the beta.
1- Any time there's a new feature you need to code a version with and without it, or you're cutting out the bulk of users still on the old version of code. PHP's more gradual approach is no different.
2- Magic Quotes wasn't in version 1 i'd bet, but it was in there by the time php became popular.
3- It's the implementation not the feature. If they enable it by default they'll have to stick with the implementation and maintain backwards compatibility. If they slow acceptance a bit, they have a chance to make changes without effecting as many users. For instance changing argument order before it would majorly break backwards compatibility and become an idiotic thing to change.
I'm not that familiar with PHP's unicode behavior, but this is generally the Right Way to phase in new features.
Version X: does not have feature
Version X+1: feature is optional, developers can start coding apps with it, and also maintain apps that do not yet support it
Version X+2: feature is default, developers can still maintain apps that do not yet support it
Version X+3(or later, if ever): feature is mandatory, apps that do not use the feature must be upgraded or run on unsupported old versions.
Magic quotes was an unfortunate feature that existed when the language was first created. Their phaseout plan for Magic Quotes is identical to their phase-in plan for Unicode support.
This sort of phased plan also has the major advantage of not making a feature mandatory or default before it's been well tested and determined to indeed be worth keeping around and making mandatory.
That's one way to put it, and not entirely wrong.
The list of features being deprecated is very small. And these are "features" that people have been universally panned and avoided for years. Back in PHP 5 these "features" were disabled by default.
PHP 6 is just finally (years later) hitting the Off switch for good.
The apps affected by this will be:
1) Apps developed 4+ years ago
2) Apps developed 4 years ago by teams with zero experience in PHP who did zero research, or intentionally ignored best practices being used and recommended everywhere.
Most apps that need to be changed for these features are vulnerable to variable overwriting and sql injection, and always have been. Best case, these apps tend to MAGICALLY add 2-4 backslashes to any form input you put a quote into. Adding more every time you resubmit the form. You should've seen the number of backslashes in some people's names at a previous job where I got to fix these poor practices...
There are some new features in php 5 and php 6, but besides some worst offenders (magic quotes and registered globals) are entirely backwards compatible with PHP 4 code.
I had the pleasure of upgrading a Large website from PHP 4 to PHP 5 and it was honestly quite trivial. 5 to 6 will be the same, except for removing the option of turning magic quotes and registered globals back on. But you fixed it the right way from 4 to 5 by not using them anymore anyway, riiiight? :)
You must be confused, are you thinking of Perl?
PHP has been VERY careful about breaking features, and have essentially openly mocked the people who suggest they "fix" PHP's functions by randomly swapping argument order on functions that have been working just fine for years.
The only thing I can think of they've broken is MAGIC_QUOTES and registered globals. Both are Very Bad Things that it was important they do away with. Any sane PHP code will react to their removal by simply removing a few chunks of good that were necessary to route around those features on servers that had them enabled.
"Affordable housing" refers to making houses cheaply. Not banks giving out loans to people who clearly can't afford them and counting on AIG insurance to bail them out.
Yeah. The problem wasn't giving loans to "poor" people. The problem was giving out too high of loans, with too little down, and no evidence of employment capable of paying the mortgage.
8-9 years ago (or do we have to go back farther?) your person with $30k annual salary and poor/no credit history would have to put down 20% to get a loan for a $140k home.
Instead, 4-5 years ago that person was getting an interest-only 3-year ARM for a $300k home that cost them $20k out of their $30k salary.
This drove house prices up, so they may have even bought the same $140k home, but paid $300k for it.
And then they lost their job, the ARM adjusted up, or all of the above at the same time.
Had nothing to do with the government "forcing" anyone to loan to poor people. Had everything to do with greedy lenders lying to get people into homes, and AIG lying that they could realistically insure it all.
Seriously, the only place I've ever heard Second Life mentioned is in news articles.
I get the distinct impression that they have a good marketing team, and very very few Actual users.
Exactly. As long as its not meant to be or treated as anything more than a band-aid, this is a good thing. The answer when something doesn't work in the VM should be "petition the software maker to upgrade it to Windows 7".
By letting the VM solve 75%+ of these apps, the motivation and pressure will exist to get the other 25% ugpraded, and let them deprecate XP for good.
The lack of deaths in the US is promising. The flu is being reported as much milder outside Mexico. Not to jump the gun too much, but it's possible the deadliest strain of the flu killed itself off by being too severe. Leaving a much weaker (but higher fitness from an evolutionary perspective) version to make its way around the world.