I think you've got a particularly good analysis and counter-argument here, and mostly I agree with you. It did get me thinking about some ways in which I could see Ebert's point of view, to an extent. While I am of the opinion video games *can* be art, I think that they're generally complex enough it's almost inevitable the art is interspersed with a lot of stuff that's not really art. It'd be easy for someone like Ebert to grasp onto the idea that "hey, there's non-artistic stuff here" and thus conclude the whole medium isn't art if parts of it aren't. Gamers, on the other hand will just tune out the non-artistic components as being universal to almost any game, and intensely focus their appreciation on the components that really speak to them -- the artistic parts.
First and foremost, there tends to be a LOT to any video game, particularly when you're talking sprawling RPG's, deep FPS's, complex strategy games, and the like. Even in the most artistic of them (immersive story, fantastic art, powerful emotional content), those aspects only play a part, and often a smallish part at that. You may have four or five hours of the best story ever told, accompanied by the best visuals you've ever seen, but there's still another 20 hours of mundane things like inventory management, running around to get from place to place, strategizing, and stuff like that. Gamers for the most part tune that out as just part of the game. It's generally reflex to run, shoot, jump, change equipment, or whatever. It's so mundane it almost doesn't exist, unless the interface is so bad it gets in the way you just tune it out. What the gamer remembers, and what they'll tell their friends, is the unusual and artistic stuff that catches their attention. Characters, scenery, plot twists, interaction... artistic stuff.
Somebody who isn't used to gaming is going to get REALLY bogged down by the huge portions of the game that just aren't that artistic. Honestly, the "art" in a typical FPS isn't the act of shooting someone. Especially not when you're doing it thousands of times in a single game. Shooting is repetitive. It's a challenge or obstacle, but it's not art. Likewise jumping around in Braid, running from zone to zone, isn't really art. I'd argue that solving the puzzles aren't so much art, either. They're challenging, interesting, and immensely satisfying when you solve them, but not really art. The inspired backdrops and the plot twists -- yeah, absolutely, that's art.
Overall, some of it is, some of it isn't. Compare that to a movie, where it's designed to be art all the way through. Or a painting, or sculpture. There's no non-art components. I think Ebert's real sticking point is he's used to his art being ALL art, and he has no ability to perceive or accept something with fragments of art interspersed in other stuff as still being art.
Trying and failing to think of a good analogy for how we could break up traditional art and insert mundane work into it, to make it comparable to the video game experience. Maybe a child who can watch ten minutes of movie for each chore they complete. Instead of completing all their chores and watching the whole movie, they alternate one chore and ten minutes of movie... and we're debating whether their entire "chores + movie watching" experience is art or not.
On top of all this, Ebert clearly doesn't get computer games, and that comes through in a way that's really frustrating for gamers. I think this is as jarring as anything, and it's very difficult to get past those sour notes. If he's that wrong in his basic understanding of game function, how can he possibly be right about anything else he's saying about them? Dismissing the key to the entire Braid experience as the equivalent of taking back a move in chess sounds just plain addled. I've got more sympathy for dismissing an FPS as "just one more brainless shooting gallery," in that I can see why he thinks another opportunity to do some shooting isn't new, innovative, or particularly artistic, because it's not. But as I've already noted, the shooting isn't where the art exists in those types of games.
Other signs of cheating: When you get a student that does A+ work on programming assignments, but fails the exam (not always the case, but usually).
I would have been one of the exceptions here. Had a sold A going into the final, and did so badly on it that I ended up with a C for the semester. Blame it on senioritis, and an honors thesis that was falling apart. Everything was simple enough along the way, and I just kind of lost it at the end. Gotta love it when your exam comes back with comments like "yes, technically this works, but nobody in their right mind would ever do it this way!"
In a sense, it is in the Constitution. It is the natural result of a winner-take-all voting system where voters' preferences are distributed like a bell curve.
I would argue this only really applies as long as people are brainwashed into thinking of the entire range of political opinions as a single line. Why does it have to only be left and right? Why not a 2-dimensional map, with left, right, top, and bottom? Then you'd have room for a nice pie chart, into which three or four wedges would fit nicely. Sure, the parties would still squabble and squeeze each other, but four parties duking it out for ascendancy from election to election would be more interesting than two.
My personal proposal would be to split the social/moral aspects of the parties (keep that left and right) and put financial tendencies on the up/down scale. Here in the states Republicans have tried to continue to lay claim to fiscal responsibility because it was a traditional value of the right, but that clearly hasn't really been the case for decades and it's ridiculous that the current implications are "put up with Republican moral values if you value your money" or "take liberal moral values and accept they'll tax and spend everything you have."
(Like the way I pay tax: the correct amount straight out of my paycheque every month.)
Well, I try to pay as close to the right amount as possible. But I haven't had a year in the last decade that was even moderately consistent with the one before it. I've had three different jobs, my wife's had 2, we've moved, then moved again when we bought a house. I started a home business on the side that varies tremendously from month to month, she gets a little freelance money sometimes. Put all that together, and getting within 2k of the "right" number is nearly a miracle. And that's without acknowledging changes to the tax code.
Does everyone else lead such boring, consistent lives (just joking about boring) they can actually determine the right amount of taxes most of the time?
Here's an SF alternative for you. A society decides research can be advanced by putting people into situations other than their current society (perhaps one where computer games don't exist so they get more done?). They could drop people into equivalents of the turn of the 20th century to see what else might have come out of that age (was Einstein's discovery special to him, or inevitable?), or in some futuristic or oddly changed modern world, to see what good minds would come up with in that alternate scenario. Not just pure science, but social sciences, too. And obviously not just the person inside the virtual world, but the people running and observing these virtual worlds would be able to compose their own theories.
Most of society goes on being normal while a few thousand or tens of thousands of people live out lives in completely nonexistent worlds.
My "hobby" of sorts is programming a web-based game on evenings and weekends and holidays. It's hands-down the most fun thing I've ever done, and there's no way I could code 8 hours straight. Thankfully the game requires I wear a lot of hats: creative writing, strategic planning, image manipulation, and other stuff on top of coding. So on a good day if I put in close to 8 hours of work, I may only be coding for 2, which turns out about right. Enough to be satisfying, not so much I feel my brain is melting.
What gets me is the tedium of error checking, mostly. I may have to do slightly more of that than what most coders face, since the web-based nature of the game means users can insert just about any darn thing they please. It may be 30 minutes of putting together the framework, an hour of cleanup and error protection, and then half an hour of testing to make sure it does what I want it to do -- not sure if most of you consider that "coding" or not, either. Heck, a lot of purists don't consider PHP to be coding in the first place, I suspect.
There is one thing worse than a bad password, and that is one that needs to be written down on a post-it note.
If you're talking at work, sure, maybe I agree with you. At home, I find it's not possible. Occasionally I simply forget one, if I don't use it much (for instance, the password I use to log in and pay my trash bill once a quarter). But mostly I find I've got to write those things down to share with my wife. I keep them around in case something happens to me, and she ever needs to know them. Weighing the odds of someone breaking into my house and finding that one piece of paper against the odds one of the two of us will need it, writing the password down is the clear winner hundreds of times over.
Ha! Piece of cake. This is why I simply decrement my passwords! I started at 12345, and now I'm down to 11235. Still got eleven thousand more to go before I have to start over.
Which is weaker, no repeating characters or an environment where half the passwords are "aaaaaaaa"?
That's probably a bit of a false dichotomy--I doubt half of all users would pick "aaaaaaaa" if you allow repeating characters. (That rule does, however, stop people from using "password" as their password, which might be a good thing.) I'd say a more sensible rule is "don't let a letter repeat three times in a row" which would eliminate the really bad example of "aaaaaaaa" but still allow for almost all words or phrases.
Personally, I'd have more trouble counting out 8 a's accurately than I would typing out some standard English word. Counting keystrokes takes up a lot more brain power (for me at least), and is a lot more likely to end up being off by 1, than a word or catch-phrase would be.
I was under the impression that the -vast- majority of compromised passwords were due to either social engineering (Hey, this is "Bill from IT", I need your password to fix that "performance issue" you're having) or sheer neglect on the part of the the user (password on a post-it on the monitor). Am I mistaken?
Scenarios like stealing passwords from post-its are certainly possible, but I'd guess as a percentage of all stolen passwords it's insignificant to being at the point of near zero. Most people don't have access to the physical space of the person they're trying to hack. I'd argue most successful password stealing is done remotely, against victims the target doesn't even know.
The big ones are going to be things like dictionary attacks against a login page where it can guess stupendously stupid/common passwords, or by exploiting a weakness in the system, or a virus/spyware with keylogger--all of these techniques bypassing the user entirely. If you count phishing as social engineering then that may be up there, but not the way you describe it.
Now, if you have a specific account you want to break into, the things you suggest may be among your best bets to get into that one account. But if you want to steal a few million accounts, you're doing to be doing something a lot more automated. For every guy out there breaking into a co-worker's account because of a monitor stickie, there's a virus capturing thousands of usernames and passwords at once.
Speaking as an entrepreneur, and the founder or co-founder of multiple online businesses, there is nothing I would love more than tempting one of the big fish into offering me my desired lifetime's earnings for one of my startups. I'd sell in an instant, no matter how much love and devotion had gone into the business. That's kind of the jackpot for most of us serial startup folks. (Being the owner of a moderately successful enterprise is a very distant second, though acceptable, option.)
Funny thing is, the very next thing I'd do after selling one business is start up another one. And that one I'd just do for fun, and I don't think anything would tempt me to sell the second business, other than eventually getting tired of it and wanting to devote myself to something else.
No kidding. With my 35th birthday only a month behind Microsoft's, this is not the kind of analysis I want to hear. For one thing, this is the first time anyone has ever called me middle aged -- I really thought that was a 40's or 50's thing. NOT 35.
Maybe companies age at a different scale? How many years is 35 in corporation years? And are those the same as LLC years or S-corps years?
Well, I can tell you about the web design business I started with a couple of friends, where we landed one job, did the site, and the customer kept making changes and never got around to paying us the measly $300 we asked her for. Then I moved to another state and we broke up.
Or the time I got into the business of a web site that would rate fine restaurants in large cities. We started in Chicago where we lived, and one of the partners insisted on spending $600 on flashy business cards (glossy, with embossed silver ink in the company name--1000 cards for each of the three founders. I used 2 of mine, total. Still have the other 998 because I'm a packrat). Then we stumbled along for a year putting together the site and doing legal stuff, only to realize that not a single restaurant wanted to pay for our services, primarily because no other restaurants were already customers. How do you get customers without having customers? There's probably a good answer, but about that time (2001) Zagat's got a few million in venture capital to go online and do everything we were doing and more. So we closed up shop, settled our bills (of which the business cards represented about 75%), and that was that.
There's also the web site about nothing that a friend and I started with the idea we'd make a mint selling people themselves (if we're nothing, anything we sell had to come from the visitor, right?), but we got so bogged down in artistic philosophy and bad puns (nothing's better! nothing to lose! much ado about nothing...) that we never even built the site.
I also once wrote a novel, which remains unpublished. I think it's a good novel. A distant family connection who works in editing gave it decent marks. Somehow I've never gotten around to polishing it up and actually submitting the darn thing anywhere.
I worked for some other guys, out of their basement, over the course of a year as they tried to start a "help people build online stores" franchise. The only customer was some neighbors who agreed to try it when we gave them the kit for free, and who then never did a thing with it. Literally zero minutes spent trying to use our stuff. Not that I blame them.
Same guys hired me to write a book for their online darts store. Book never sold any copies. They had a plan to offer it as a bonus reward for large orders, but then sold the darts store. Come to think of it, that might not be entirely a failure. Except one of the two guys had to give up his part-time basement job and start commuting an hour and a half each way every day, and I'd call that a pretty big disappointment on his part.
Same guys also had me start another online store. It sold some product, but the credit card fees were so ridiculous after a few months we realized we were actually losing money on every sale, so that had to go.
Then they started a dog frisbees store. Business was good, but the hosting company was so messed up when we tried to cancel a few other domains they simply canceled everything, and then held the site name hostage for thousands of dollars when we wanted it back.
Then they tried some other frisbee stores. Despite bountiful volumes of sales, neither they nor the shipper bothered to keep track of actual sales or profits--for a few months they kept all the money that came in, and then the shipper realized he was supposed to be getting reimbursed for the cost of shipping and the original cost of the frisbees he was buying to ship on their behalf. So he started keeping all of the money that came in, to make up for back payments, trying to calculate what was owed by weighing the stack of printed invoices and guessing at the number of pieces of paper and the average sales value. Last I heard, it had been 3 years, and they still hadn't gotten back up to even.
... so, uh, yeah. I think that's why we don't hear about most of those failed business stories.
Zuckerberg and Anderson are not rich because they had vision to bring human contact to the internet.
Zuckerberg and Anderson are rich because they realized that most internet users cannot or will not learn to use use their computers well enough to handle an email application, an IM application, a news reader, and a web browser, and that most internet users are not online for content but for mindless entertainment.
Ah, you're both right. Honestly, I think the real key is, in the interim what counts as "human contact" has changed. Half of the ground was made up by the internet. Broadband has allowed us to take in a lot more a lot faster, and also put up a lot more. It's not just words, it's picture, it's videos, it's sound. You can play games together. (I can't tell you what a joy it was the first time I could play scrabble with my brother 1000 miles away, for instance. Nevermind skyping with my 93-year-old grandmother.) There's a lot more real contact to be had now than there was then.
I think the other half has been made up by people becoming willing to loosen the definition of "human contact." Particularly for younger people who have grown up with it, the digital interface IS contact with someone else. I'm not quite middle aged, and have adjusted some. I still don't think anything tops being there in person, but I can feel pretty connected from my web contacts. I've got "friends" I've never met in person and don't ever expect to. I've had business partners, or business clients, who I've never met in person -- though I don't think I've ever done business without at least one phone call.
I'm pretty skeptical of the estimate, too. I learned proper typing technique, spend large portions of my days typing, and I still can't usually get over 80 wpm (corrected) in a test. I can't imagine leaving out a few fingers and speeding things up any. A few months back the entire IT department took a typing test, mostly out of a spirit of friendly competition, and I was by far the fastest typist of the group, too. One other hit about 65 wpm, and the rest were under 40. These are all professionals (not all properly trained, but most of us don't really hunt and peck), and our group average was probably closer to 35.
Exactly! Ad blocking is entirely a security issue for me. I've heard too many stories of computers picking up viruses from reputable sites, and I've seen it happen in person. It doesn't matter how much I want to support a site. Unless I know I can trust every single person who advertises with them (and I simply can't), then I'd rather block ads than take any chances.
Because the word "natural" is a lot shorter and less awkward than using "non-human-caused-" every time? You can argue semantics all you want, but it's a useful distinction to make, and it's clear enough to most of us.
May not be true anymore, but just a few years ago the university I used to work for switched from IE to Firefox in the student labs, and on staff computers. We went from having a major virus outbreak every semester and minor outbreaks every month or two, to having zero major outbreaks and just a few minor ones here and there. That most definitely led to huge savings for us.
IE 8 may not be as bad, but I always felt it was too integrated into Windows to avoid being a security risk.
I've suffered through something similar to your second case. There's a bulletin board software out there which doesn't support certain characters in the password. Such as the @ character. Thing is, it TAKES your password just fine. Then it throws out the characters it doesn't like. Your real password is what's left over. I don't even remember what it took to give me the intuitive leap to try typing the password without the @ to see what would happen, but then it let me log in and use the board. Think I reinstalled the software twice first, though. Talk about a waste of time.
This is probably true, crazy as it seems. I once replaced the startup screen on an old mac with one of those bomb pictures and a "This computer will self destruct" message in my high school journalism office. All the other kids were fine with it, but a random secretary came in to borrow the computer one day and about started a bomb scare alert until we could talk her down.
Hm. I didn't have any trouble canceling. They had a spot right on the control panel where I could cancel. I think they were a little trouble getting a verification, but the cancel request went through right away.
Funny thing with them is they took their time actually shutting off the services, even after they stopped billing me. I had a neglected site that I never got around to setting up on the new host, and 1and1 kept that site up for nearly a year before they finally decided to turn it off.
That's not unlike my own experience. The main difference being that while all the big questions really weighed on me for a decade or two--from early teens to late 20s--at some point I stopped asking myself the questions so much, and with that a lot of the burden seemed to lift. When I was younger I really hammered on them, and I'm talking daily. Sometimes hours a day. I'd ask complete strangers what they thought the meaning of life was, and I would refuse to respect anyone who said they'd never thought about it.
I'm not sure what the tipping point was for me in my late 20s. A lot of things sort of happened all at about the same time. Might just be age and maturity. Might have been that around that time I decided to follow a dream even though it meant tearing up a bunch of my life. Might have been finding the first really good job of my life and extending from that experiencing a sort of financial peace for the first time. That's also about the time I discovered a great passion for beer, which maybe shouldn't be overlooked. Mostly, I think I have to credit meeting my wife -- even after 7 years I can tell I'm a little nutty when she's not around, and I tend to feel pretty solid when she is. Couldn't tell you how that works, though. Maybe it's all of those things, put together, too.
The questions are still there, if I open them up. And I do let them out into the air every now and then just to see how things are looking. Mostly I shrug after a bit and put them back, still no wiser than I was as a teenager. But I don't find them pressing the the same way. They're curious, and occasionally I have a twinge of "what if I'm doing it all wrong and wasting everything?" Mostly though my mild "life is what you make of it" philosophy seems to carry the day. True to that word, I spend an awful lot of time trying to make things out of life, and generally find some deep satisfaction from the process.
Tech support is the reason I left 1 and 1. When things were running smoothly, everything was fine, but when things went bad, they were incredibly frustrating.
Example: email went down once. I submitted a support ticket, with the subject that email wasn't working, and filled in the rest as best I could. Got a reply saying the rest of the form wasn't filled in properly, and refusing to talk to me until I got it right. So I go looking up account details, finally get everything right, and submit again. Their reply: we're experiencing a DDOS attack and all email is running slow. But they couldn't tell me that the first time??
Honestly, bad tech support is the reason I've left a lot of hosts. One kept having sites go down repeatedly, and rather than telling people what was going on, they just started deleting forum messages and then stopped responding to all support requests for a few weeks.
Another (Aplus, got to be the worst host ever) shut the company off for being overdue on payments... except we weren't. When we called to clear things up, the tech just kept yelling "the computer doesn't lie!" and then hung up on us. The next tech said there was no problem and turned the site back on immediately. These are also the jerks who insisted you couldn't transfer a domain (as registrar) either two months before or after a domain was due for renewal. Oh, and when we finally got around to leaving them and said "cancel all web sites except for X" they went ahead and canceled all web sites, and demanded a $200 fee for us to buy back a functioning business web site.
Way back in the day I used Earthlink, and I left them when they conveniently forgot that I'd signed a lifetime contract with them. They canceled that plan 2 years later (some lifetime, huh?), didn't tell me, and just started charging me double. They also sent out an "over quota" notice on the Friday of a 3-day weekend, with the warning I'd be disabled on that Monday. Naturally, I was traveling that weekend and didn't get the message or have time to fix things before I was locked out.
Dreamhost I've heard very good things about, but I personally was turned off by their misleading advertising on the front page, where you only get the good rate for signing ridiculously long contracts, and the default rate is nearly twice that.
And to answer the original question, I don't think it's possible to find a host that you're going to be with forever, starting small and growing over the years. My experience has been that shops which specialize in cheap, small sites don't do so well when your needs grow, or the pricing isn't right. Contrariwise, places that are good for managing large dedicated servers don't want to mess with handfuls of small, cheap sites, or charge too much for them. I've grown a personal business (game) site through 4 hosts, going from super cheapo in early development, getting kicked off for processor use and upgrading to slightly less cheap, getting kicked off for processor use again and going to a more powerful reserved, to eventually needing a pair of dedicated servers. Had to switch hosts every time, because my old host never offered the right thing for the next step up at the right price, and I couldn't ever afford to jump two steps at once.
Still, it wasn't ever really that big of a deal to make those upgrades, and I think I saved a ton of money by being willing to put up with that little extra work (one or two hectic days, roughly once every six months).
These days I'm getting by with a Hostgator account for some small, personal sites (fairly cheap, one password snafu a year ago annoyed me, but they've been reliable otherwise -- literally never needed to talk to tech support in 3 years) and a Liquid Web account for my dedicated servers (very good price, though I've had to deal with some hit or miss on the tech support. Main objection being if I contact them at the wrong time the tech will select a case and then go home for the night, leaving me hanging for 16 hours if I don't follow up).
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I think you've got a particularly good analysis and counter-argument here, and mostly I agree with you. It did get me thinking about some ways in which I could see Ebert's point of view, to an extent. While I am of the opinion video games *can* be art, I think that they're generally complex enough it's almost inevitable the art is interspersed with a lot of stuff that's not really art. It'd be easy for someone like Ebert to grasp onto the idea that "hey, there's non-artistic stuff here" and thus conclude the whole medium isn't art if parts of it aren't. Gamers, on the other hand will just tune out the non-artistic components as being universal to almost any game, and intensely focus their appreciation on the components that really speak to them -- the artistic parts.
... artistic stuff.
... and we're debating whether their entire "chores + movie watching" experience is art or not.
First and foremost, there tends to be a LOT to any video game, particularly when you're talking sprawling RPG's, deep FPS's, complex strategy games, and the like. Even in the most artistic of them (immersive story, fantastic art, powerful emotional content), those aspects only play a part, and often a smallish part at that. You may have four or five hours of the best story ever told, accompanied by the best visuals you've ever seen, but there's still another 20 hours of mundane things like inventory management, running around to get from place to place, strategizing, and stuff like that. Gamers for the most part tune that out as just part of the game. It's generally reflex to run, shoot, jump, change equipment, or whatever. It's so mundane it almost doesn't exist, unless the interface is so bad it gets in the way you just tune it out. What the gamer remembers, and what they'll tell their friends, is the unusual and artistic stuff that catches their attention. Characters, scenery, plot twists, interaction
Somebody who isn't used to gaming is going to get REALLY bogged down by the huge portions of the game that just aren't that artistic. Honestly, the "art" in a typical FPS isn't the act of shooting someone. Especially not when you're doing it thousands of times in a single game. Shooting is repetitive. It's a challenge or obstacle, but it's not art. Likewise jumping around in Braid, running from zone to zone, isn't really art. I'd argue that solving the puzzles aren't so much art, either. They're challenging, interesting, and immensely satisfying when you solve them, but not really art. The inspired backdrops and the plot twists -- yeah, absolutely, that's art.
Overall, some of it is, some of it isn't. Compare that to a movie, where it's designed to be art all the way through. Or a painting, or sculpture. There's no non-art components. I think Ebert's real sticking point is he's used to his art being ALL art, and he has no ability to perceive or accept something with fragments of art interspersed in other stuff as still being art.
Trying and failing to think of a good analogy for how we could break up traditional art and insert mundane work into it, to make it comparable to the video game experience. Maybe a child who can watch ten minutes of movie for each chore they complete. Instead of completing all their chores and watching the whole movie, they alternate one chore and ten minutes of movie
On top of all this, Ebert clearly doesn't get computer games, and that comes through in a way that's really frustrating for gamers. I think this is as jarring as anything, and it's very difficult to get past those sour notes. If he's that wrong in his basic understanding of game function, how can he possibly be right about anything else he's saying about them? Dismissing the key to the entire Braid experience as the equivalent of taking back a move in chess sounds just plain addled. I've got more sympathy for dismissing an FPS as "just one more brainless shooting gallery," in that I can see why he thinks another opportunity to do some shooting isn't new, innovative, or particularly artistic, because it's not. But as I've already noted, the shooting isn't where the art exists in those types of games.
Other signs of cheating: When you get a student that does A+ work on programming assignments, but fails the exam (not always the case, but usually).
I would have been one of the exceptions here. Had a sold A going into the final, and did so badly on it that I ended up with a C for the semester. Blame it on senioritis, and an honors thesis that was falling apart. Everything was simple enough along the way, and I just kind of lost it at the end. Gotta love it when your exam comes back with comments like "yes, technically this works, but nobody in their right mind would ever do it this way!"
In a sense, it is in the Constitution. It is the natural result of a winner-take-all voting system where voters' preferences are distributed like a bell curve.
I would argue this only really applies as long as people are brainwashed into thinking of the entire range of political opinions as a single line. Why does it have to only be left and right? Why not a 2-dimensional map, with left, right, top, and bottom? Then you'd have room for a nice pie chart, into which three or four wedges would fit nicely. Sure, the parties would still squabble and squeeze each other, but four parties duking it out for ascendancy from election to election would be more interesting than two.
My personal proposal would be to split the social/moral aspects of the parties (keep that left and right) and put financial tendencies on the up/down scale. Here in the states Republicans have tried to continue to lay claim to fiscal responsibility because it was a traditional value of the right, but that clearly hasn't really been the case for decades and it's ridiculous that the current implications are "put up with Republican moral values if you value your money" or "take liberal moral values and accept they'll tax and spend everything you have."
(Like the way I pay tax: the correct amount straight out of my paycheque every month.)
Well, I try to pay as close to the right amount as possible. But I haven't had a year in the last decade that was even moderately consistent with the one before it. I've had three different jobs, my wife's had 2, we've moved, then moved again when we bought a house. I started a home business on the side that varies tremendously from month to month, she gets a little freelance money sometimes. Put all that together, and getting within 2k of the "right" number is nearly a miracle. And that's without acknowledging changes to the tax code.
Does everyone else lead such boring, consistent lives (just joking about boring) they can actually determine the right amount of taxes most of the time?
Here's an SF alternative for you. A society decides research can be advanced by putting people into situations other than their current society (perhaps one where computer games don't exist so they get more done?). They could drop people into equivalents of the turn of the 20th century to see what else might have come out of that age (was Einstein's discovery special to him, or inevitable?), or in some futuristic or oddly changed modern world, to see what good minds would come up with in that alternate scenario. Not just pure science, but social sciences, too. And obviously not just the person inside the virtual world, but the people running and observing these virtual worlds would be able to compose their own theories.
Most of society goes on being normal while a few thousand or tens of thousands of people live out lives in completely nonexistent worlds.
My "hobby" of sorts is programming a web-based game on evenings and weekends and holidays. It's hands-down the most fun thing I've ever done, and there's no way I could code 8 hours straight. Thankfully the game requires I wear a lot of hats: creative writing, strategic planning, image manipulation, and other stuff on top of coding. So on a good day if I put in close to 8 hours of work, I may only be coding for 2, which turns out about right. Enough to be satisfying, not so much I feel my brain is melting.
What gets me is the tedium of error checking, mostly. I may have to do slightly more of that than what most coders face, since the web-based nature of the game means users can insert just about any darn thing they please. It may be 30 minutes of putting together the framework, an hour of cleanup and error protection, and then half an hour of testing to make sure it does what I want it to do -- not sure if most of you consider that "coding" or not, either. Heck, a lot of purists don't consider PHP to be coding in the first place, I suspect.
There is one thing worse than a bad password, and that is one that needs to be written down on a post-it note.
If you're talking at work, sure, maybe I agree with you. At home, I find it's not possible. Occasionally I simply forget one, if I don't use it much (for instance, the password I use to log in and pay my trash bill once a quarter). But mostly I find I've got to write those things down to share with my wife. I keep them around in case something happens to me, and she ever needs to know them. Weighing the odds of someone breaking into my house and finding that one piece of paper against the odds one of the two of us will need it, writing the password down is the clear winner hundreds of times over.
(3) Incremented passwords
Ha! Piece of cake. This is why I simply decrement my passwords! I started at 12345, and now I'm down to 11235. Still got eleven thousand more to go before I have to start over.
Which is weaker, no repeating characters or an environment where half the passwords are "aaaaaaaa"?
That's probably a bit of a false dichotomy--I doubt half of all users would pick "aaaaaaaa" if you allow repeating characters. (That rule does, however, stop people from using "password" as their password, which might be a good thing.) I'd say a more sensible rule is "don't let a letter repeat three times in a row" which would eliminate the really bad example of "aaaaaaaa" but still allow for almost all words or phrases. Personally, I'd have more trouble counting out 8 a's accurately than I would typing out some standard English word. Counting keystrokes takes up a lot more brain power (for me at least), and is a lot more likely to end up being off by 1, than a word or catch-phrase would be.
I was under the impression that the -vast- majority of compromised passwords were due to either social engineering (Hey, this is "Bill from IT", I need your password to fix that "performance issue" you're having) or sheer neglect on the part of the the user (password on a post-it on the monitor). Am I mistaken?
Scenarios like stealing passwords from post-its are certainly possible, but I'd guess as a percentage of all stolen passwords it's insignificant to being at the point of near zero. Most people don't have access to the physical space of the person they're trying to hack. I'd argue most successful password stealing is done remotely, against victims the target doesn't even know.
The big ones are going to be things like dictionary attacks against a login page where it can guess stupendously stupid/common passwords, or by exploiting a weakness in the system, or a virus/spyware with keylogger--all of these techniques bypassing the user entirely. If you count phishing as social engineering then that may be up there, but not the way you describe it.
Now, if you have a specific account you want to break into, the things you suggest may be among your best bets to get into that one account. But if you want to steal a few million accounts, you're doing to be doing something a lot more automated. For every guy out there breaking into a co-worker's account because of a monitor stickie, there's a virus capturing thousands of usernames and passwords at once.
Speaking as an entrepreneur, and the founder or co-founder of multiple online businesses, there is nothing I would love more than tempting one of the big fish into offering me my desired lifetime's earnings for one of my startups. I'd sell in an instant, no matter how much love and devotion had gone into the business. That's kind of the jackpot for most of us serial startup folks. (Being the owner of a moderately successful enterprise is a very distant second, though acceptable, option.)
Funny thing is, the very next thing I'd do after selling one business is start up another one. And that one I'd just do for fun, and I don't think anything would tempt me to sell the second business, other than eventually getting tired of it and wanting to devote myself to something else.
No kidding. With my 35th birthday only a month behind Microsoft's, this is not the kind of analysis I want to hear. For one thing, this is the first time anyone has ever called me middle aged -- I really thought that was a 40's or 50's thing. NOT 35.
Maybe companies age at a different scale? How many years is 35 in corporation years? And are those the same as LLC years or S-corps years?
Well, I can tell you about the web design business I started with a couple of friends, where we landed one job, did the site, and the customer kept making changes and never got around to paying us the measly $300 we asked her for. Then I moved to another state and we broke up.
...) that we never even built the site.
... so, uh, yeah. I think that's why we don't hear about most of those failed business stories.
Or the time I got into the business of a web site that would rate fine restaurants in large cities. We started in Chicago where we lived, and one of the partners insisted on spending $600 on flashy business cards (glossy, with embossed silver ink in the company name--1000 cards for each of the three founders. I used 2 of mine, total. Still have the other 998 because I'm a packrat). Then we stumbled along for a year putting together the site and doing legal stuff, only to realize that not a single restaurant wanted to pay for our services, primarily because no other restaurants were already customers. How do you get customers without having customers? There's probably a good answer, but about that time (2001) Zagat's got a few million in venture capital to go online and do everything we were doing and more. So we closed up shop, settled our bills (of which the business cards represented about 75%), and that was that.
There's also the web site about nothing that a friend and I started with the idea we'd make a mint selling people themselves (if we're nothing, anything we sell had to come from the visitor, right?), but we got so bogged down in artistic philosophy and bad puns (nothing's better! nothing to lose! much ado about nothing
I also once wrote a novel, which remains unpublished. I think it's a good novel. A distant family connection who works in editing gave it decent marks. Somehow I've never gotten around to polishing it up and actually submitting the darn thing anywhere.
I worked for some other guys, out of their basement, over the course of a year as they tried to start a "help people build online stores" franchise. The only customer was some neighbors who agreed to try it when we gave them the kit for free, and who then never did a thing with it. Literally zero minutes spent trying to use our stuff. Not that I blame them.
Same guys hired me to write a book for their online darts store. Book never sold any copies. They had a plan to offer it as a bonus reward for large orders, but then sold the darts store. Come to think of it, that might not be entirely a failure. Except one of the two guys had to give up his part-time basement job and start commuting an hour and a half each way every day, and I'd call that a pretty big disappointment on his part.
Same guys also had me start another online store. It sold some product, but the credit card fees were so ridiculous after a few months we realized we were actually losing money on every sale, so that had to go.
Then they started a dog frisbees store. Business was good, but the hosting company was so messed up when we tried to cancel a few other domains they simply canceled everything, and then held the site name hostage for thousands of dollars when we wanted it back.
Then they tried some other frisbee stores. Despite bountiful volumes of sales, neither they nor the shipper bothered to keep track of actual sales or profits--for a few months they kept all the money that came in, and then the shipper realized he was supposed to be getting reimbursed for the cost of shipping and the original cost of the frisbees he was buying to ship on their behalf. So he started keeping all of the money that came in, to make up for back payments, trying to calculate what was owed by weighing the stack of printed invoices and guessing at the number of pieces of paper and the average sales value. Last I heard, it had been 3 years, and they still hadn't gotten back up to even.
Or start 100 businesses. You can get it over with quicker if you start them all at the same time.
Also, you can rant all you want about IE6, and I'll mostly agree with you, but this exploit also affects IE7, and that's not nearly so old.
Zuckerberg and Anderson are not rich because they had vision to bring human contact to the internet.
Zuckerberg and Anderson are rich because they realized that most internet users cannot or will not learn to use use their computers well enough to handle an email application, an IM application, a news reader, and a web browser, and that most internet users are not online for content but for mindless entertainment.
Ah, you're both right. Honestly, I think the real key is, in the interim what counts as "human contact" has changed. Half of the ground was made up by the internet. Broadband has allowed us to take in a lot more a lot faster, and also put up a lot more. It's not just words, it's picture, it's videos, it's sound. You can play games together. (I can't tell you what a joy it was the first time I could play scrabble with my brother 1000 miles away, for instance. Nevermind skyping with my 93-year-old grandmother.) There's a lot more real contact to be had now than there was then.
I think the other half has been made up by people becoming willing to loosen the definition of "human contact." Particularly for younger people who have grown up with it, the digital interface IS contact with someone else. I'm not quite middle aged, and have adjusted some. I still don't think anything tops being there in person, but I can feel pretty connected from my web contacts. I've got "friends" I've never met in person and don't ever expect to. I've had business partners, or business clients, who I've never met in person -- though I don't think I've ever done business without at least one phone call.
I'm pretty skeptical of the estimate, too. I learned proper typing technique, spend large portions of my days typing, and I still can't usually get over 80 wpm (corrected) in a test. I can't imagine leaving out a few fingers and speeding things up any. A few months back the entire IT department took a typing test, mostly out of a spirit of friendly competition, and I was by far the fastest typist of the group, too. One other hit about 65 wpm, and the rest were under 40. These are all professionals (not all properly trained, but most of us don't really hunt and peck), and our group average was probably closer to 35.
Exactly! Ad blocking is entirely a security issue for me. I've heard too many stories of computers picking up viruses from reputable sites, and I've seen it happen in person. It doesn't matter how much I want to support a site. Unless I know I can trust every single person who advertises with them (and I simply can't), then I'd rather block ads than take any chances.
Because the word "natural" is a lot shorter and less awkward than using "non-human-caused-" every time? You can argue semantics all you want, but it's a useful distinction to make, and it's clear enough to most of us.
IE 8 may not be as bad, but I always felt it was too integrated into Windows to avoid being a security risk.
I've suffered through something similar to your second case. There's a bulletin board software out there which doesn't support certain characters in the password. Such as the @ character. Thing is, it TAKES your password just fine. Then it throws out the characters it doesn't like. Your real password is what's left over. I don't even remember what it took to give me the intuitive leap to try typing the password without the @ to see what would happen, but then it let me log in and use the board. Think I reinstalled the software twice first, though. Talk about a waste of time.
This is probably true, crazy as it seems. I once replaced the startup screen on an old mac with one of those bomb pictures and a "This computer will self destruct" message in my high school journalism office. All the other kids were fine with it, but a random secretary came in to borrow the computer one day and about started a bomb scare alert until we could talk her down.
Hm. I didn't have any trouble canceling. They had a spot right on the control panel where I could cancel. I think they were a little trouble getting a verification, but the cancel request went through right away.
Funny thing with them is they took their time actually shutting off the services, even after they stopped billing me. I had a neglected site that I never got around to setting up on the new host, and 1and1 kept that site up for nearly a year before they finally decided to turn it off.
That's not unlike my own experience. The main difference being that while all the big questions really weighed on me for a decade or two--from early teens to late 20s--at some point I stopped asking myself the questions so much, and with that a lot of the burden seemed to lift. When I was younger I really hammered on them, and I'm talking daily. Sometimes hours a day. I'd ask complete strangers what they thought the meaning of life was, and I would refuse to respect anyone who said they'd never thought about it.
I'm not sure what the tipping point was for me in my late 20s. A lot of things sort of happened all at about the same time. Might just be age and maturity. Might have been that around that time I decided to follow a dream even though it meant tearing up a bunch of my life. Might have been finding the first really good job of my life and extending from that experiencing a sort of financial peace for the first time. That's also about the time I discovered a great passion for beer, which maybe shouldn't be overlooked. Mostly, I think I have to credit meeting my wife -- even after 7 years I can tell I'm a little nutty when she's not around, and I tend to feel pretty solid when she is. Couldn't tell you how that works, though. Maybe it's all of those things, put together, too.
The questions are still there, if I open them up. And I do let them out into the air every now and then just to see how things are looking. Mostly I shrug after a bit and put them back, still no wiser than I was as a teenager. But I don't find them pressing the the same way. They're curious, and occasionally I have a twinge of "what if I'm doing it all wrong and wasting everything?" Mostly though my mild "life is what you make of it" philosophy seems to carry the day. True to that word, I spend an awful lot of time trying to make things out of life, and generally find some deep satisfaction from the process.
Tech support is the reason I left 1 and 1. When things were running smoothly, everything was fine, but when things went bad, they were incredibly frustrating.
... except we weren't. When we called to clear things up, the tech just kept yelling "the computer doesn't lie!" and then hung up on us. The next tech said there was no problem and turned the site back on immediately. These are also the jerks who insisted you couldn't transfer a domain (as registrar) either two months before or after a domain was due for renewal. Oh, and when we finally got around to leaving them and said "cancel all web sites except for X" they went ahead and canceled all web sites, and demanded a $200 fee for us to buy back a functioning business web site.
Example: email went down once. I submitted a support ticket, with the subject that email wasn't working, and filled in the rest as best I could. Got a reply saying the rest of the form wasn't filled in properly, and refusing to talk to me until I got it right. So I go looking up account details, finally get everything right, and submit again. Their reply: we're experiencing a DDOS attack and all email is running slow. But they couldn't tell me that the first time??
Honestly, bad tech support is the reason I've left a lot of hosts. One kept having sites go down repeatedly, and rather than telling people what was going on, they just started deleting forum messages and then stopped responding to all support requests for a few weeks.
Another (Aplus, got to be the worst host ever) shut the company off for being overdue on payments
Way back in the day I used Earthlink, and I left them when they conveniently forgot that I'd signed a lifetime contract with them. They canceled that plan 2 years later (some lifetime, huh?), didn't tell me, and just started charging me double. They also sent out an "over quota" notice on the Friday of a 3-day weekend, with the warning I'd be disabled on that Monday. Naturally, I was traveling that weekend and didn't get the message or have time to fix things before I was locked out.
Dreamhost I've heard very good things about, but I personally was turned off by their misleading advertising on the front page, where you only get the good rate for signing ridiculously long contracts, and the default rate is nearly twice that.
And to answer the original question, I don't think it's possible to find a host that you're going to be with forever, starting small and growing over the years. My experience has been that shops which specialize in cheap, small sites don't do so well when your needs grow, or the pricing isn't right. Contrariwise, places that are good for managing large dedicated servers don't want to mess with handfuls of small, cheap sites, or charge too much for them. I've grown a personal business (game) site through 4 hosts, going from super cheapo in early development, getting kicked off for processor use and upgrading to slightly less cheap, getting kicked off for processor use again and going to a more powerful reserved, to eventually needing a pair of dedicated servers. Had to switch hosts every time, because my old host never offered the right thing for the next step up at the right price, and I couldn't ever afford to jump two steps at once.
Still, it wasn't ever really that big of a deal to make those upgrades, and I think I saved a ton of money by being willing to put up with that little extra work (one or two hectic days, roughly once every six months).
These days I'm getting by with a Hostgator account for some small, personal sites (fairly cheap, one password snafu a year ago annoyed me, but they've been reliable otherwise -- literally never needed to talk to tech support in 3 years) and a Liquid Web account for my dedicated servers (very good price, though I've had to deal with some hit or miss on the tech support. Main objection being if I contact them at the wrong time the tech will select a case and then go home for the night, leaving me hanging for 16 hours if I don't follow up).