I think the biggest problem facing consumers it that...
1.) They want an awesome X - whatever X is. 2.) Is is sufficiently complex, there are only one or two companies that provide X. 3.) All companies selling X are d-bags.
You want an awesome console for gaming/media that doesn't involve the complexity of a PC? You have three options, Xbox 360, PS3, don't have a console.
Sony has a history of doing some really crappy things. The rootkit they installed was pretty horrible, I just read the wikipedia on it and realized it was much worse than I had previously known.
Microsoft has a history of doing some really crappy things. This is slashdot, so I don't feel the need to elaborate.
So, what's the 'right' thing to do? Creating a console and games are far beyond the means of virtually all of us. If you buy a PS3 - you are supporting Sony who is a d-bag. If you buy an Xbox 360 - you are supporting MS who is also a d-bag. Not having one is, of course, an option - but it's not a very good one. Even if *you* are willing to forgo the console, you know you are in the extreme minority. There are enough people who will pay, regardless of what the company has done, and they'll continue their ways. You just won't have any awesome next gen console.
Maybe I'm alone in this; but I always feel like I'm being *judged* by the human tellers.
They see my accounts, the balances, they look at me, can reasonably estimate my age and in a split second they decide if I'm a good customer or a bad customer (and by extension a good person or a bad one).
Maybe it's silly? I don't know...
I distinctly remember going into my bank and asking to sit down with an investment guy. I wanted to come up with a savings/investment/retirement solution that I would follow from now until forever. Eventually, this could be large sums of money. At the time, the teller asked for my debit card, to pull up my information. She took one look at the screen and my ~$300 (combined between my checking and savings account) and handed me a fold-out pamphlet on 'How to Save Money'.
I admit, I was fully extended on a house flip project I was doing. But I went to the bank because I was expecting a reasonably large sum of money to come my way in the next few weeks when the house sold.
A few weeks later, the house was sold and now I had a check for ~60k. This time, all I did was go up to the teller to make a deposit, I didn't even *ask*, but they 'invited me' to sit down with one of their personal financial advisors *right now*. Truthfully, I was surprised because I didn't really think 60k would be enough for them to bat an eye at. Anyway, I declined. Later I switched banks, but I have a feeling my experience would be similar at the new bank.
There wasn't any information that Sony had that wasn't publicly available at the local assessor's office....except my password and my credit card number.
Passwords should be unique, that's a non-issue. Credit Card numbers are considered confidential; but they aren't *that* confidential. It's printed right on the card.
So yeah, it is largely a non-issue. And once the PSN is back up 99.9% of people will go back to using it exactly how they used to.
I never said anything that downplayed the seriousness of the security breach. I'm not a fan of Sony or PSN. I deeply regret my one purchase I made. Sony can DIAF for all I care.
What I did say was that *I* would not be cancelling my *credit* card until either I have written confirmation from Sony that my credit card number was stolen or until I saw a fraudulent charge.
That's *me*. In *my* situation. If you used a debit card, your situation might be different. Personally, I do monitor my credit card activity in near real-time. I get text alerts whenever a purchase is made (or attempted). But, even before that, I considered it prudent to check your activity regularly.
This Sony hack isn't the only security breech that has ever existed. And many aren't nearly so public. So, regardless, it's good to monitor your card's activity.
In my case, in my situation, I'm not going to preemptively cancel my card and get a new one when it's no more work to wait for a charge and then cancel. There is a chance I won't get any charges on my card and it will save me the time of getting a new one. The chance of that happening might be small, but it is greater than 0. Thus, it is in my best interest to wait.
Yes, it does it passed on to the merchant. But it is still a hassle for the credit card company. And maybe, just maybe, when enough merchants have enough fraud they'll say, 'Umm, ya know what, this isn't working'.
Maybe I'm just an optimist....but if something is causing enough pain, someone will fix it. We *can* do so much better than our credit card system.
As soon as Sony notifies me that my card has been compromised, I'll notify my bank. I don't have time to read the blog of every company I do business with. All I know is that, when I try to log into PSN, it says they are down for maintenance.
I'm not concerned that someone at the bank is going to spend hours tracking down my online identity to find my Slashdot posts and show that I had reason to expect my card info was stolen.
The reason there is a '2' in CV2 is because there is already a CV1.
The CV1 is encoded on the magnetic strip. When you swipe it, more information than just the credit card number is passed along.
Thus, when you swipe the card, the # and the CV1 are used to determine that the card is legit. When you buy online the card # and the CV2 is used. Even if you purchase a magnetic strip writer you couldn't duplicate the original card's data because the CV1 data is unknown.
I'm not saying there aren't ways around it. But I am saying there are some barriers. A combination of luck, your card provider and who ends up with your data is going to determine whether or not you see a charge on your card.
I'm sure we'll never see any actual data on how many credit card numbers were stored verse how many get used; but I'm fairly certain it will be less than 100%
Sony had my credit card and, thus far, no charges. As soon as I get one, I'll notify my CC company.
The only way someone would end up on your credit score is if someone established a new line of credit in your name. That's identity theft. Getting a new credit card would not prevent that in any way.
Your credit card company is not going to report a fraudulent charge as you not paying your bill.
Our current credit/debit/electronic payment system it *horribly insecure*. My World Of Warcraft account has more security around it than my life savings. And nobody seems to have a problem with it.
I've had fraudulent charges appear. I went down to my bank and I said, 'Yes that charge is fraud. Now, tell me, how can I NEVER have this happen again?'
The guy stared at me like I was crazy. 'What?'
I said, 'What security solutions do you offer to secure my card?'
And he looked confused. 'Umm, well, we issue you a new card....with a new number'.
But the fact remains, every time I go to a restaurant and pay with my credit card the lady swiping my card has all the information she needs to buy whatever she wants. That's by design. That is how the current system works.
I said, 'How about a dual-factor authorization? Can I get a fob that generates a 5-6 digit keycode that needs to be entered along with my credit card number? So that, whenever I pay for something, it's only valid for 10 minutes or something?'
He said....'Ummm, no'
I said, 'How about limitations on the location? I only want to use this card in town. I don't travel very often. Can you make it so that this card only works in $MYCITY unless I log into the website and update it, for the rare case when I do travel?'
And he said, 'Uhhhhh, no, I don't think we can do that'.
And I said, 'Okay. Well, I really only want to use this card to pay bills. I only have 5 or 6 bills and they are due each month (well, one is due every 3 months, but still). Can I make a whitelist of companies that are authorized to bill my account and have any other attempt immediately declined?'
And he said, 'No.'
And I said, 'Okay - well, how about you just have an automated voice system where my cell phone rings every time someone tries to use my card and if I don't press '1' it is denied'
And he, now visibly annoyed, said 'No'.
Businesses are in the business of staying in business. They want money. That's what they do. As long as customers are willing to jump through hoops to make their antiqued systems work, that is what they will do. Seriously, I have more control over SPAM in my inbox than who is authorized to bill me for hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Because people are content with this system. And when it goes wrong, the sit on hold, wait in line, get a new card, and spend hours on the phone updating information.
Make it *the banks* problem. They are far more likely to fix their problem than they are to fix your problem.
You aren't liable for fraudulent charges. And until Sony sends you a certified letter stating that your credit card was compromised you don't know that your card was. I'll just wait until I see a fraudulent charge, then make a 10 minute phone call and have a new card/number mailed out to me. The biggest pain is updating the reoccurring bills/payments.
Even if they had access to your credit card number you don't know what they are going to do with it. Sell it? Maybe. Or maybe they are just using this to piss off Sony. And, according to Sony, they only have the credit card #s - not the CVV or CV2 code. So, it would be reasonably difficult to make a purchase.
I'll alert Capital One as soon as I see a fraudulent charge.
I'm not surprised by this anymore, but I still find it annoying.
First, people tell me how great XYZ network is. In this case Sony. I say something like, 'But how will you play if the internet goes down? Or if their servers go down? Or what if Sony goes out of business?
And people call me 'crazy' and 'stupid'. I can point to very specific examples of this exact thing happening in the past, but that was always 'so long ago' and 'not applicable' anymore.
Next, inevitably, something goes wrong. The server is down. The company closes shop. There is a bug in the DRM. Something. And all of a sudden these people are freakin out. "OH MY GOD! I COULD NOT LOG IN!!!! I PAID FOR THIS GAME AND I COULDN'T PLAY AND I WANT *COMPENSATION!!!!!*' And they complain, on line. I doubt any of them call the company. I doubt any of them write letters. And I *know* none of them change their habits. They complain and threaten, 'I'll never buy another XYZ product again'. But it's empty and hollow. And as soon as the servers are up; they forget, return to the games.
If the company values you, they should compensate you accordingly. There should already be policies/reviews in place to adjust your compensation equal to your value. If they are doing any less, they are, quite literally, ripping you off because they think they can get away with it.
"Joe's productivity is up and he's learned a lot since his last review....he is easily worth an additional 5%; but the economy is in the crappier and a lot of people are worried about losing their job, let's just tell him he did a good job, times are tough and give him a 2% raise. We'll tell him it's more than most people got and emphasis how awesome he is."
Assume Joe started at 50k....after five years of that, and Joe is earning significantly less than what he could make elsewhere (54 vs 60). And, they company has saved 16k by underpaying him. Joe finds another job that will pay him 60k and he tells his boss he's leaving and they counter and say, 'Well, we like you so much, we want you to stay. We'll let you do more work and we will pay you 60k.
If Joe accepts, he's still out 16k because his company underpaid him for those years. And it is incredibly likely his next review will follow the same pattern as his others. And, it's very likely he'll get additional work dumped on him along with his raise; such that he is working longer hours for the same (or less) pay.
I So much this. I don't understand why people don't just do this by default.
It's really easy. You can get software that makes the entire process (essentially) transparent to you as an end user. Drag files into your folder and, bam, auto-encrypted. Long before I heard of any problems with DropBox, I would have bet money that at some time in the future....
1.) A DropBox employee would access someone's files 2.) A hacker would find a vulnerability that gives him access to someone's files 3.) Some malware is written that reads or access files off of Dropbox
Your data isn't safe. Ever. History has proven this. It's fairly routine for me to get an e-mail from some company (bank, credit card, legit-type companies, big companies) saying that they or someone they farm data out to, has been hacked and that some of my information has been leaked. It's almost a guarantee these days.
Dropbox is awesome, I use it all the time. But I encrypt everything I put on it. It's not a 100% perfect solution but it's significantly better than not doing it.
Most casual conversation is pretty imprecise. We use the context to infer meaning *all the time*. Being 'technically' right, while also painfully wrong is generally considered a bad thing, particularly outside the trolly-goodness of the internet.
"Say no to drugs" is simply easier to say than "Say no to illegal, dangerous drugs unless you've been medically evaluated by a professional doctor (licensed by the AMA and in good standing with the licensing board) and then only take the prescribed drug in the prescribed amount."
Oddly enough, both my wife and I have had *zero* trouble getting all of our medical records faxed without any confirmation of who we were. I find the whole medical record thing to be absolutely absurd, given how easy it was.
I wasn't even 100% sure what doctor I went to as a child, so I actually called a few places.
"Hi, yeah, I think I might have been a patient here, about 20 years ago.....I'm leaving the country and was told one thing I should do is consolidate all of my medical records in one place; could you fax over any records I've got? My name? Yeah - it's '$MYNAME'. Oh you found me? Yeah - that's my Mother and Father. Cool, yeah, the fax number here is $FAXNUMBER'
I called a few places that I'd gone to over the years, not a single problem. I didn't have to provide any information.
It's wonderful idea - providing a place where anyone can create and share. But here is the thing; the vast majority of us are very social creatures. We want to 'fit in'. Even if we want to be different from the mainstream; we strive to fit into our well defined, conforming social circle (see goth kids).
People don't want to just listen to music. They want to listen to the *same* music as their friends. They want to talk about the band. The little girls all want to crush on the same boy band members. The high school kids want to go to a show and see NAME_OF_BAND_PEOPLE_KNOW.
When confronted with 1,000 really amazing songs, people as a whole, are going to latch onto a handful, declare it the best, mock people who don't like their choice, and then latter, declare that those handful of songs are 'old and busted'. The nature of how we, as a people, enjoy things means we're always going to seek out ways to establish a few 'groups' we choose to be apart of. Music is very strongly associated with identity (for reasons I don't understand). This is why a song that was literally topping the charts last year is never played this year.
The same is true of fashion.
Anyway, you'll never have a utopia where people create great music and other people enjoy it without the confines of a media label. Sure, you can remove the media label; but people are going to ACTIVELY SEEK OUT something or someone else to tell them what is good.
I wrote a piece of software. Originally, just for my own personal use. It didn't do a lot, but it did a very specific task, pretty well. I showed it to some friends and they said, 'Oh yeah, that's cool' (that's most people's response when you show them something). What was surprising though, was that I actually had a few people ask for copies. That was rare for me. I write a lot of crap that I think is cool, and people tell me it's cool, but rarely does anyone ask for it.
So, I hooked up my roommate and a coworker. They started using it. What was even more shocking to me, a few weeks later they *still* used it. Now I had something I created that people wanted, and that was useful enough that people were still using it. My girlfriend said, 'Why don't you sell it!'.
I spent some more time making it customizable and user friendly. I put together help screens and a tutorial on how to use it. I purchased a domain name, setup an account with Google Checkout, got some web-hosting and spent some time building a website. It wasn't the best website in the world - but it wasn't the worst either. I even made some videos showing it in use. I was asking $5 for my software.
I did, however, want to add *one* more piece of functionality. At the time, I wasn't doing it to stop pirates or anything like that; I was doing it because I wanted to see if people were really using my product. In order for the software to work, the user needed to be online anyway; so I added some very basic logging to it. When it was running, it would connect to my webserver and say, 'IP address started the program' and when they stopped running it, it would say 'IP address ended the program'. It doesn't work 'in the background' or anything, so this gave me a very accurate report of who was using my software. I thought it would be cool.
I didn't advertise, or market or anything. I don't know how Google found the site, but eventually, I started to get traffic. And then I got my first sale. $4.55 after Google took it's cut. Closer to $3.75 after taxes. Sales started to trickle in, about one every two weeks at first. Then ~one every week. It was really exciting. The website had Google Analytics hooked up so I could see the various countries (I was shocked to see how much international traffic I was getting). I even had a few international sales.
After a few months, I hit the '15 sales' milestone. I had nearly $70 dollars for my ~120 hours worth of work. Not exactly making it big, but I had a nice warm and fuzzy. I started day dreaming about how my 'next' little project could be even better. I had a bunch of ideas for things I could write, niche markets sure, but truly useful things that worked. If I had a lot of these products for sale, and if I kept getting sales long after I stopped development; with some luck, this could be a serious stream of income. Eventually, maybe I could do it full time and quit my day job.
I expected sales to pick up. But instead they stalled. I didn't understand. I thought maybe my program wasn't as useful as my friends and I thought. But all the customers I spoke with had nothing but good things to say. So, I checked the logs. I was shocked! At this point, I had some 17 sales; but there were more than 14 people actively using my software. I guess that could be possible, but it wasn't the type of software you'd run all the time. I did some more looking and, granted, unique IP addresses doesn't always equal unique people; but over the nearly 9 months, over 650 different IP addresses were recorded using my software.
*Someone* who wasn't me, had been distributing my application for free! I've heard people say that increases in piracy lead to increases in sales. I didn't see it. My app was never very popular, I wasn't able to find a torrent on any of the popular torrent sites I'm familiar with; but I did find a link to download it on some German website. Presumably, it was available other places as well.
Having said that, long before I read this, I realized that anything I put into my Dropbox folder would be visible by *OTHER PEOPLE*. After all, the data is being stored on a server that I don't own. In this day and age, anything that is out of your hands is likely to be stolen, sold or lost by whatever company you are dealing with.
Dropbox is great for storing crap that is either....
1.) Not personal (my collection of.mp3s - I don't care if the world can access them) 2.) Personal, but trivial (pictures of my home renovations....I don't care if the world can access them) 3.) Encrypted
If you want to store your important tax documents or scans of your birth certificate or whatever else; cool. Go for it. But you'd better encrypt the heck out of it.
As much as people hate to admit it, the ratio of actual innovators to implementors is STAGGERING. Even really great, successful, smart people, haven't contributed anything of value to the knowledgebase of the field. That's not a bad thing. Most college professors, even with their published papers in magazines nobody reads and their awards haven't. Even most really successful developers and architects aren't doing anything other than implementing best-practice solutions to really common problems.
The real test shouldn't be whether or not you look for 'new ways to solve problems' but whether you *can* find *better* ways to solve problems or whether you can find solutions to problems that haven't already been solved. The number of people who can honestly say they've accomplished either of those things is unbelievably slim.
The world needs a lot more guys who can lay tile using best practice materials and approaches than the world needs guys in a lab trying to invent a better mortar.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the biggest problem facing consumers it that...
1.) They want an awesome X - whatever X is.
2.) Is is sufficiently complex, there are only one or two companies that provide X.
3.) All companies selling X are d-bags.
You want an awesome console for gaming/media that doesn't involve the complexity of a PC? You have three options, Xbox 360, PS3, don't have a console.
Sony has a history of doing some really crappy things. The rootkit they installed was pretty horrible, I just read the wikipedia on it and realized it was much worse than I had previously known.
Microsoft has a history of doing some really crappy things. This is slashdot, so I don't feel the need to elaborate.
So, what's the 'right' thing to do? Creating a console and games are far beyond the means of virtually all of us. If you buy a PS3 - you are supporting Sony who is a d-bag. If you buy an Xbox 360 - you are supporting MS who is also a d-bag. Not having one is, of course, an option - but it's not a very good one. Even if *you* are willing to forgo the console, you know you are in the extreme minority. There are enough people who will pay, regardless of what the company has done, and they'll continue their ways. You just won't have any awesome next gen console.
I'm guessing you are joking right?
I think it would be very easy to kill yourself without those things.
Dammed if you do, dammed if you don't.
I need those things.
Maybe I'm alone in this; but I always feel like I'm being *judged* by the human tellers.
They see my accounts, the balances, they look at me, can reasonably estimate my age and in a split second they decide if I'm a good customer or a bad customer (and by extension a good person or a bad one).
Maybe it's silly? I don't know...
I distinctly remember going into my bank and asking to sit down with an investment guy. I wanted to come up with a savings/investment/retirement solution that I would follow from now until forever. Eventually, this could be large sums of money. At the time, the teller asked for my debit card, to pull up my information. She took one look at the screen and my ~$300 (combined between my checking and savings account) and handed me a fold-out pamphlet on 'How to Save Money'.
I admit, I was fully extended on a house flip project I was doing. But I went to the bank because I was expecting a reasonably large sum of money to come my way in the next few weeks when the house sold.
A few weeks later, the house was sold and now I had a check for ~60k. This time, all I did was go up to the teller to make a deposit, I didn't even *ask*, but they 'invited me' to sit down with one of their personal financial advisors *right now*. Truthfully, I was surprised because I didn't really think 60k would be enough for them to bat an eye at. Anyway, I declined. Later I switched banks, but I have a feeling my experience would be similar at the new bank.
There wasn't any information that Sony had that wasn't publicly available at the local assessor's office....except my password and my credit card number.
Passwords should be unique, that's a non-issue.
Credit Card numbers are considered confidential; but they aren't *that* confidential. It's printed right on the card.
So yeah, it is largely a non-issue. And once the PSN is back up 99.9% of people will go back to using it exactly how they used to.
Who said anything about trusting Sony?
Whoa there cowboy...
I never said anything that downplayed the seriousness of the security breach. I'm not a fan of Sony or PSN. I deeply regret my one purchase I made. Sony can DIAF for all I care.
What I did say was that *I* would not be cancelling my *credit* card until either I have written confirmation from Sony that my credit card number was stolen or until I saw a fraudulent charge.
That's *me*. In *my* situation. If you used a debit card, your situation might be different. Personally, I do monitor my credit card activity in near real-time. I get text alerts whenever a purchase is made (or attempted). But, even before that, I considered it prudent to check your activity regularly.
This Sony hack isn't the only security breech that has ever existed. And many aren't nearly so public. So, regardless, it's good to monitor your card's activity.
In my case, in my situation, I'm not going to preemptively cancel my card and get a new one when it's no more work to wait for a charge and then cancel. There is a chance I won't get any charges on my card and it will save me the time of getting a new one. The chance of that happening might be small, but it is greater than 0. Thus, it is in my best interest to wait.
Yes, it does it passed on to the merchant. But it is still a hassle for the credit card company. And maybe, just maybe, when enough merchants have enough fraud they'll say, 'Umm, ya know what, this isn't working'.
Maybe I'm just an optimist....but if something is causing enough pain, someone will fix it. We *can* do so much better than our credit card system.
As soon as Sony notifies me that my card has been compromised, I'll notify my bank. I don't have time to read the blog of every company I do business with. All I know is that, when I try to log into PSN, it says they are down for maintenance.
I'm not concerned that someone at the bank is going to spend hours tracking down my online identity to find my Slashdot posts and show that I had reason to expect my card info was stolen.
I don't see how getting a new card # will help with the address/name/birthdate information.
The reason there is a '2' in CV2 is because there is already a CV1.
The CV1 is encoded on the magnetic strip. When you swipe it, more information than just the credit card number is passed along.
Thus, when you swipe the card, the # and the CV1 are used to determine that the card is legit. When you buy online the card # and the CV2 is used. Even if you purchase a magnetic strip writer you couldn't duplicate the original card's data because the CV1 data is unknown.
I'm not saying there aren't ways around it. But I am saying there are some barriers. A combination of luck, your card provider and who ends up with your data is going to determine whether or not you see a charge on your card.
I'm sure we'll never see any actual data on how many credit card numbers were stored verse how many get used; but I'm fairly certain it will be less than 100%
Sony had my credit card and, thus far, no charges. As soon as I get one, I'll notify my CC company.
The only way someone would end up on your credit score is if someone established a new line of credit in your name. That's identity theft. Getting a new credit card would not prevent that in any way.
Your credit card company is not going to report a fraudulent charge as you not paying your bill.
Quite the contrary....
Our current credit/debit/electronic payment system it *horribly insecure*. My World Of Warcraft account has more security around it than my life savings. And nobody seems to have a problem with it.
I've had fraudulent charges appear. I went down to my bank and I said, 'Yes that charge is fraud. Now, tell me, how can I NEVER have this happen again?'
The guy stared at me like I was crazy. 'What?'
I said, 'What security solutions do you offer to secure my card?'
And he looked confused. 'Umm, well, we issue you a new card....with a new number'.
But the fact remains, every time I go to a restaurant and pay with my credit card the lady swiping my card has all the information she needs to buy whatever she wants. That's by design. That is how the current system works.
I said, 'How about a dual-factor authorization? Can I get a fob that generates a 5-6 digit keycode that needs to be entered along with my credit card number? So that, whenever I pay for something, it's only valid for 10 minutes or something?'
He said....'Ummm, no'
I said, 'How about limitations on the location? I only want to use this card in town. I don't travel very often. Can you make it so that this card only works in $MYCITY unless I log into the website and update it, for the rare case when I do travel?'
And he said, 'Uhhhhh, no, I don't think we can do that'.
And I said, 'Okay. Well, I really only want to use this card to pay bills. I only have 5 or 6 bills and they are due each month (well, one is due every 3 months, but still). Can I make a whitelist of companies that are authorized to bill my account and have any other attempt immediately declined?'
And he said, 'No.'
And I said, 'Okay - well, how about you just have an automated voice system where my cell phone rings every time someone tries to use my card and if I don't press '1' it is denied'
And he, now visibly annoyed, said 'No'.
Businesses are in the business of staying in business. They want money. That's what they do. As long as customers are willing to jump through hoops to make their antiqued systems work, that is what they will do. Seriously, I have more control over SPAM in my inbox than who is authorized to bill me for hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Because people are content with this system. And when it goes wrong, the sit on hold, wait in line, get a new card, and spend hours on the phone updating information.
Make it *the banks* problem. They are far more likely to fix their problem than they are to fix your problem.
That seems a little extreme.
You aren't liable for fraudulent charges. And until Sony sends you a certified letter stating that your credit card was compromised you don't know that your card was. I'll just wait until I see a fraudulent charge, then make a 10 minute phone call and have a new card/number mailed out to me. The biggest pain is updating the reoccurring bills/payments.
Even if they had access to your credit card number you don't know what they are going to do with it. Sell it? Maybe. Or maybe they are just using this to piss off Sony. And, according to Sony, they only have the credit card #s - not the CVV or CV2 code. So, it would be reasonably difficult to make a purchase.
I'll alert Capital One as soon as I see a fraudulent charge.
I'm not surprised by this anymore, but I still find it annoying.
First, people tell me how great XYZ network is. In this case Sony. I say something like, 'But how will you play if the internet goes down? Or if their servers go down? Or what if Sony goes out of business?
And people call me 'crazy' and 'stupid'. I can point to very specific examples of this exact thing happening in the past, but that was always 'so long ago' and 'not applicable' anymore.
Next, inevitably, something goes wrong. The server is down. The company closes shop. There is a bug in the DRM. Something. And all of a sudden these people are freakin out. "OH MY GOD! I COULD NOT LOG IN!!!! I PAID FOR THIS GAME AND I COULDN'T PLAY AND I WANT *COMPENSATION!!!!!*' And they complain, on line. I doubt any of them call the company. I doubt any of them write letters. And I *know* none of them change their habits. They complain and threaten, 'I'll never buy another XYZ product again'. But it's empty and hollow. And as soon as the servers are up; they forget, return to the games.
Rinse. Repeat.
Quite the opposite, I find it horribly insulting.
If the company values you, they should compensate you accordingly. There should already be policies/reviews in place to adjust your compensation equal to your value. If they are doing any less, they are, quite literally, ripping you off because they think they can get away with it.
"Joe's productivity is up and he's learned a lot since his last review....he is easily worth an additional 5%; but the economy is in the crappier and a lot of people are worried about losing their job, let's just tell him he did a good job, times are tough and give him a 2% raise. We'll tell him it's more than most people got and emphasis how awesome he is."
Assume Joe started at 50k....after five years of that, and Joe is earning significantly less than what he could make elsewhere (54 vs 60). And, they company has saved 16k by underpaying him. Joe finds another job that will pay him 60k and he tells his boss he's leaving and they counter and say, 'Well, we like you so much, we want you to stay. We'll let you do more work and we will pay you 60k.
If Joe accepts, he's still out 16k because his company underpaid him for those years. And it is incredibly likely his next review will follow the same pattern as his others. And, it's very likely he'll get additional work dumped on him along with his raise; such that he is working longer hours for the same (or less) pay.
Maybe I'm just cynical.
I So much this. I don't understand why people don't just do this by default.
It's really easy. You can get software that makes the entire process (essentially) transparent to you as an end user. Drag files into your folder and, bam, auto-encrypted. Long before I heard of any problems with DropBox, I would have bet money that at some time in the future....
1.) A DropBox employee would access someone's files
2.) A hacker would find a vulnerability that gives him access to someone's files
3.) Some malware is written that reads or access files off of Dropbox
Your data isn't safe. Ever. History has proven this. It's fairly routine for me to get an e-mail from some company (bank, credit card, legit-type companies, big companies) saying that they or someone they farm data out to, has been hacked and that some of my information has been leaked. It's almost a guarantee these days.
Dropbox is awesome, I use it all the time. But I encrypt everything I put on it. It's not a 100% perfect solution but it's significantly better than not doing it.
Not really.
Most casual conversation is pretty imprecise. We use the context to infer meaning *all the time*. Being 'technically' right, while also painfully wrong is generally considered a bad thing, particularly outside the trolly-goodness of the internet.
"Say no to drugs" is simply easier to say than "Say no to illegal, dangerous drugs unless you've been medically evaluated by a professional doctor (licensed by the AMA and in good standing with the licensing board) and then only take the prescribed drug in the prescribed amount."
Oddly enough, both my wife and I have had *zero* trouble getting all of our medical records faxed without any confirmation of who we were. I find the whole medical record thing to be absolutely absurd, given how easy it was.
I wasn't even 100% sure what doctor I went to as a child, so I actually called a few places.
"Hi, yeah, I think I might have been a patient here, about 20 years ago.....I'm leaving the country and was told one thing I should do is consolidate all of my medical records in one place; could you fax over any records I've got? My name? Yeah - it's '$MYNAME'. Oh you found me? Yeah - that's my Mother and Father. Cool, yeah, the fax number here is $FAXNUMBER'
I called a few places that I'd gone to over the years, not a single problem. I didn't have to provide any information.
I wonder if I could sue and win some $$$?
It doesn't work.
It's wonderful idea - providing a place where anyone can create and share. But here is the thing; the vast majority of us are very social creatures. We want to 'fit in'. Even if we want to be different from the mainstream; we strive to fit into our well defined, conforming social circle (see goth kids).
People don't want to just listen to music. They want to listen to the *same* music as their friends. They want to talk about the band. The little girls all want to crush on the same boy band members. The high school kids want to go to a show and see NAME_OF_BAND_PEOPLE_KNOW.
When confronted with 1,000 really amazing songs, people as a whole, are going to latch onto a handful, declare it the best, mock people who don't like their choice, and then latter, declare that those handful of songs are 'old and busted'. The nature of how we, as a people, enjoy things means we're always going to seek out ways to establish a few 'groups' we choose to be apart of. Music is very strongly associated with identity (for reasons I don't understand). This is why a song that was literally topping the charts last year is never played this year.
The same is true of fashion.
Anyway, you'll never have a utopia where people create great music and other people enjoy it without the confines of a media label. Sure, you can remove the media label; but people are going to ACTIVELY SEEK OUT something or someone else to tell them what is good.
I can. I'm a developer. Piracy hurt me.
I wrote a piece of software. Originally, just for my own personal use. It didn't do a lot, but it did a very specific task, pretty well. I showed it to some friends and they said, 'Oh yeah, that's cool' (that's most people's response when you show them something). What was surprising though, was that I actually had a few people ask for copies. That was rare for me. I write a lot of crap that I think is cool, and people tell me it's cool, but rarely does anyone ask for it.
So, I hooked up my roommate and a coworker. They started using it. What was even more shocking to me, a few weeks later they *still* used it. Now I had something I created that people wanted, and that was useful enough that people were still using it. My girlfriend said, 'Why don't you sell it!'.
I spent some more time making it customizable and user friendly. I put together help screens and a tutorial on how to use it. I purchased a domain name, setup an account with Google Checkout, got some web-hosting and spent some time building a website. It wasn't the best website in the world - but it wasn't the worst either. I even made some videos showing it in use. I was asking $5 for my software.
I did, however, want to add *one* more piece of functionality. At the time, I wasn't doing it to stop pirates or anything like that; I was doing it because I wanted to see if people were really using my product. In order for the software to work, the user needed to be online anyway; so I added some very basic logging to it. When it was running, it would connect to my webserver and say, 'IP address started the program' and when they stopped running it, it would say 'IP address ended the program'. It doesn't work 'in the background' or anything, so this gave me a very accurate report of who was using my software. I thought it would be cool.
I didn't advertise, or market or anything. I don't know how Google found the site, but eventually, I started to get traffic. And then I got my first sale. $4.55 after Google took it's cut. Closer to $3.75 after taxes. Sales started to trickle in, about one every two weeks at first. Then ~one every week. It was really exciting. The website had Google Analytics hooked up so I could see the various countries (I was shocked to see how much international traffic I was getting). I even had a few international sales.
After a few months, I hit the '15 sales' milestone. I had nearly $70 dollars for my ~120 hours worth of work. Not exactly making it big, but I had a nice warm and fuzzy. I started day dreaming about how my 'next' little project could be even better. I had a bunch of ideas for things I could write, niche markets sure, but truly useful things that worked. If I had a lot of these products for sale, and if I kept getting sales long after I stopped development; with some luck, this could be a serious stream of income. Eventually, maybe I could do it full time and quit my day job.
I expected sales to pick up. But instead they stalled. I didn't understand. I thought maybe my program wasn't as useful as my friends and I thought. But all the customers I spoke with had nothing but good things to say. So, I checked the logs. I was shocked! At this point, I had some 17 sales; but there were more than 14 people actively using my software. I guess that could be possible, but it wasn't the type of software you'd run all the time. I did some more looking and, granted, unique IP addresses doesn't always equal unique people; but over the nearly 9 months, over 650 different IP addresses were recorded using my software.
*Someone* who wasn't me, had been distributing my application for free! I've heard people say that increases in piracy lead to increases in sales. I didn't see it. My app was never very popular, I wasn't able to find a torrent on any of the popular torrent sites I'm familiar with; but I did find a link to download it on some German website. Presumably, it was available other places as well.
I'm a big fan of Dropbox.
Having said that, long before I read this, I realized that anything I put into my Dropbox folder would be visible by *OTHER PEOPLE*. After all, the data is being stored on a server that I don't own. In this day and age, anything that is out of your hands is likely to be stolen, sold or lost by whatever company you are dealing with.
Dropbox is great for storing crap that is either....
1.) Not personal (my collection of .mp3s - I don't care if the world can access them)
2.) Personal, but trivial (pictures of my home renovations....I don't care if the world can access them)
3.) Encrypted
If you want to store your important tax documents or scans of your birth certificate or whatever else; cool. Go for it. But you'd better encrypt the heck out of it.
As much as people hate to admit it, the ratio of actual innovators to implementors is STAGGERING. Even really great, successful, smart people, haven't contributed anything of value to the knowledgebase of the field. That's not a bad thing. Most college professors, even with their published papers in magazines nobody reads and their awards haven't. Even most really successful developers and architects aren't doing anything other than implementing best-practice solutions to really common problems.
The real test shouldn't be whether or not you look for 'new ways to solve problems' but whether you *can* find *better* ways to solve problems or whether you can find solutions to problems that haven't already been solved. The number of people who can honestly say they've accomplished either of those things is unbelievably slim.
Last time I checked, nobody said anything about HTML.....
ASP
ASP.NET
PHP
PERL
C
Flash
Javascript
AJAX
Java
Coldfusion
Silverlight
etc....
The world needs a lot more guys who can lay tile using best practice materials and approaches than the world needs guys in a lab trying to invent a better mortar.