If I were them I wouldn't care so much about how many people downloaded the game and more about how many people actively use it. Some people may download it for collection purpose only or just for a quick trial. Those probably aren't really "lost sale".
What I would do is add into the game some online gameplay element (can be as simple as a high score list or a trophy system) and let the client software report whether the user was registered with an official cd-key or not. Of course you could just let the client send that information to the server for no specific reason but then people would complain it's a privacy violation.
The problem is deeper than that. You can't be sure that the application is not running. Any application you install could register an "intend" listener that would automatically wake up the application when for example an SMS or a Call is received. Or every 10 minutes.. or for whatever other reason.
The fact is the Android platform gives the user zero control on what an application can do once it is installed. Authorization are set at installation time and definitive.
You are correct. Sadly this is a design flaw that was probably understood as a feature by Google with hope it would force all network to come up with unlimited data plan.
More precisely you have absolutely no control on which applications does what on the network once they are installed. Authorization to use the network (any network type, wifi, 3g, edge etc.) is given at installation time and is unrevocable.
This is a terrible mistake. By definition the environment of a mobile phone will change, people will travel, some carrier do not have unlimited data plan. It's obvious that at some point someone will connect a G1 to another network than t-mobile and pay for that mistake.
When I travel, sometime for extended period of time, I use local SIM cards to avoid paying roaming fees to my operator (not t-mobile). I had to turn off 3g connections by deleting all APN entries to make sure that no applications would use those network.
There is Another niceness which this time is T-Mobile US fault and not google's that didn't get any exposure. The MyFaves application that is hidden deep inside the contact manager needs to update it's status by automatically sending SMS to T-Mobile. When the phone is used on another network than T-Mobile the application bugs and starts sending SMS every few minutes potentially costing a fortune to the owner. There is no way to remove it for the retards at T-Mo decided the best way to implements the feature was to butcher the default contact provider (the "library" that every other application uses to read the contact list) of the android codebase instead of creating a standalone application.
Some smart people at xda-developer (http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=448) have found a way around it for the lucky few who have one of the original firmware that can be rooted and upgraded with a custom image.
For other people even if they have received their unlock code from T-Mobile, if they have tried to put another SIM they might end up with a very ugly bill at the end of the month.
According to their website a Garmin Etrex costs 99USD and works on AA battery which you can replace while trekking in the desert... If you ever go in the desert get that one instead of an iphone. You'll thank me:)
d) They're not going to use the crappy GPS receiver of an iphone. If they needed a GPS they can buy a decent garmin for half the price at an official retailer store. http://www8.garmin.com/cgi-bin/dealers.pl?country=Egypt
For the little I know of Egypt I will assume that someone didn't get a decent baksheesh...
Try to go there you'll be surprised how many luxury cars you'll see on the streets of Cairo. Sure they are outnumbered by the patched up car DIY style from another era but new cars they do have. And if you knew how high the import taxes are on car in Egypt you'd guess that the people who bought them got tons of money.. Always remember that not everyone is poor in a poor country.
I stopped reading when I realized the author believed the MVC pattern was the one and only true way and that PHP was the only "web programming" language.
The authors is confusing architecture issues with language issues. Javascript has serious shortcoming, xmlhttp blows due to left and right incompatibilities, and PHP's API design by committee makes it a chores to work with but seriously I can't see the difference between a full blown "AJAX" interface doing JSON call to a web-service and a fat client doing RPC call with CORBA or some proprietary tcp/ip interface*.
Aside from the fact that all this is nothing more than a rape of the HyperText Transfer Protocol and the HyperText Markup Language which were never designed for it in the first place there is absolutely nothing new. If anything xml rpc at least helps bringing the architecture almost back in sync with what we already had 30 years ago with fat clients...
If I still had them around I'd get my CS book from 15 years ago and show you that all the patterns you need are already in there.
I agree with paragraph 1 and 2 but how exactly do you think google chrome is going to do anything about the issue? So far it's nothing more than yet another browser with a slightly faster javascript engine in some corner case.
It doesn't do anything than IE, Firefox and Safari can't already do.
So in short, instead of optimizing their primary and widely used compiler used by hundred of thousands of people every day (AS3) they created a better compiler for a language most people will never use to write flash apps just to show that if they wanted to put some their mind to it they could do something better for AS3.. kind of annoying.;)
Hey you're lucky at least it's still in english they could have gone for grande, venti, vidi, vici or whatnot.. Lucky us no one would do something that stupid..:)
Re:I haven't followed the whole Android business,
on
T-Mobile G1 Rooted
·
· Score: 1
Rooted means you get root access you were not supposed to get. A local root exploit (local user becomes root) is less annoying than a remote root exploit. But it is still considered rooted. And yes, it counts if it is just due to a configuration error.
So here we have a device for which you, the buyer, does not have root access. Someone found a way, via a (most probably forgotten) setuid telnetd to access the device as root. You did not have root access before. You have root access now against the will of the manufacturer. The machine has been rooted.
I was forcefully baptized when I was 2 months old and my parents dragged me to sunday school and forced me through 1st communion.. I don't consider myself a catholic, most of it sounds like crap to me. Which matters? That I was forced to say a few ave maria and our father or that I really can't give a damn about it thirty years later?
For what it's worth, I had a Muslim friend who was going to a catholic school because his parent thought the education was better in that particular school. He's still a Muslim even though he has been tutored by catholic nuns. I also met a couple of people who were born and raised catholic and turned to Islam when they grew older. Religion is about what you believe in, not really what school you attended. There's a good verse in the Coran (or was it an Hadith) that say something along the line of "If someone calls himself a muslim and you call him an infidel you are in fact the infidel" (because it's for god to judge who is a pious man and who is not etc.. etc..).
I can't remember any election being polluted by religion the way it is in the US.
French for example (Disclaimer:I am) have a very high level of respect for public figures' religion and private life (wife, kids, mistresses...).
Our politician are not better than yours but at least we don't have to suffer through blatantly racist arguments during their campaign which by the way are way shorter... 2 years is madness..
Public display of racism or religious intolerance would lend you in jail or at least get you a hefty fine to pay. NGO's are quick to sue for that kind of things, I guess they've been like that since shortly after WWII. I wonder why...
Oh and we also have a powerful socialist party and many many communist and marxist or affiliated party who regularly get elected to mayor's or parliamentary position so we have good healthcare and decent retirement funds...:) The drawback is that we have overwhelmingly powerful union that can paralyze the country on a whim. France should probably be in the Guinness for highest number of "preventive strike" per year. (Not with bombs, with banners..)
What else?
We tend to be more pro-palestinian than israelian although it's not as clear-cut or even important as in the US.
We do have our own weird religious sect that perform mass suicide from time to time or thinks cloning is the solution to every issue but Scientology is not recognized as a religion. At least not everywhere..
We have a much larger choice of beers particularly in Germany and Belgium and we can say dirty words on tv without being censored:)
I've heard Canada is nice also and it may be closer for you.;)
And you get C# which is actually a much nicer language than J++ ever was, integrate way better with Microsoft platform (for some it does matter) and gave a much needed kick in sun's behind who realized it was finally time to update Java with some interesting features. Both are now alive and kicking.
What was your point?
Let's imagine that your organization uses a few different applications. For example a core banking, a loan management, credit card management, call center, billing etc..
Now let's say that you would like to be able to do "fun" stuff when something "cool" happens in one of those applications. For example, when someone default on a loan payment you'd like the core banking to flag the account as "dangerous", block his credit card, cancel his vip status in the CRM, the call center will generate an automated call to connect you to a customer service rep from the debt collection department that will menace you with the word foreclosure.
The first way to do that is to create many one-to-one relationship between all those application.
"onpaymentdefaultduedate" in the loan management you could call successively each API of each application to "make it" do whatever it is that needs to be done. So the loan management will need to know about the crm, the call center, the billing etc...
Problem is that the next time you add a fancy new application (SMS harassment gateway for example) or upgrade an existing one (API change yeah!) you'll need to upgrade all the applications that have a one-one relationship. Which mean bringing on board the vendors of each and every applications for top dollars. Plus after a few years, everyone will have forgotten how the things even works. The vendor does not provide version 2 customization and you'll have to upgrade everything to version 7.3.56 and retrain your staff because the interface has changed and you can't expect the tellers to figure it out by themselves.
The second option is to add a middleware that will "sit" in the middle of all your other application (hence "middleware") and connect all the applications together using a publisher/subscriber model.
In that architecture, the loan application does not know about any other application than the MQ. Whenever you start defaulting it will simply send a message ("loandefaulted userid=12 amount=345.5") to the message queue and the MQ will in turn dispatch it to whatever other applications has register an interest for it by saying something like "subscribe to event loandefaulted from loanapplication". Many applications can register to the same event.
That way the CRM can flag you, the call center can call you, legal can sue you and the SMS reminder volley can begin. All of that without any applications having to care about the brand or specific implementation (J2EE or.NET?) of the other application.
Of course this is a bit simplistic but cover 80% of the purpose of an MQ: loose coupling of application via an event based mechanism.
Add to that option such as guaranteed reliability, prioritization of message, security and more complexe workflow of messages with multiple "queries" and "answers" and maybe you'll get a rough idea of why a MQ is a better design that "hard coupling" of n-application (sometime).
Of course since once you've chosen a MQ and adapted all your applications to use it you're basically tied forever and ever to your MQ vendor who hold you by the balls and can continuously rape you over and over with astronomical maintenance fee since you now have a single coordinated point of failure that can and will eventually take everything down at some point. But hey, you're a big bank you can take it.. or at least you could until a month ago but whatever...
Call center is productivity oriented, probably more so than any other activities, and most call center manager can't see further away than AHT (average handling time) and conversion rate/h. It is akin to chain factory work. You have agent working from home, so I assume that they are using either their own pc for the CTI application or a company provided thin client (citrix maybe?).
In any case, they are home, and unless you have installed tracking software and forces them to leave their webcam turned on how do you know what they are doing? Reading a book, watching tv, breast feeding the little one, etc. I guess you don't and rely on your production report to award incentive to your agents and that so far it worked. Your company has already relinquished a lot of control to shave on the expense of renting and furnishing a hangar in suburbia so another forum is not going to change much on your production ratio issue.
Point 1: Some of them are probably already browsing other website and chatting with their friends online giving them an opportunity to do it in an environment controlled by the company can only be a benefit. They'll spend more time focused on their work and the company.
Point 2: Use other metrics to convince upper mgt, what is your current agent turnover? Can you reduce it by fostering a sense of community into your work-alone-at-home-for-a-soulless-company employees? By how much? What is the cost of training a new one?
Point 3: Are you an inbound CC (where quality matters) or are you selling predatory housing loans and credit card (where volume matters)? Can a "community" effect produce an across the board effect of raising the quality of your services without cost. I.E do you expect your agent to learn trick of the trade from one another which will increase either their quality of services or their conversion rate?
Point 4: Most agents don't like their job so expect a lot of ranting on your forum. Don't forget to clarify the posting policy with management and your agents or you'll be in trouble when one of them gets fired for complaining too loudly on the forum and sinks everyone else moral, shoot the turnover sky high and the productivity way low.
I have never heard of a company monitoring the coffee room with camera and mics to hear the dirty jokes made on management so I really believe you should lobby for some partial anonymity. I let you figure out how to implement the "partial" part. And yes you should check with the lawyers...:)
Slashdot Mirror
If I were them I wouldn't care so much about how many people downloaded the game and more about how many people actively use it. Some people may download it for collection purpose only or just for a quick trial. Those probably aren't really "lost sale".
What I would do is add into the game some online gameplay element (can be as simple as a high score list or a trophy system) and let the client software report whether the user was registered with an official cd-key or not. Of course you could just let the client send that information to the server for no specific reason but then people would complain it's a privacy violation.
I assume you don't have kids and don't need to share your computer with other family members.
The problem is deeper than that. You can't be sure that the application is not running. Any application you install could register an "intend" listener that would automatically wake up the application when for example an SMS or a Call is received. Or every 10 minutes.. or for whatever other reason.
The fact is the Android platform gives the user zero control on what an application can do once it is installed. Authorization are set at installation time and definitive.
You are correct. Sadly this is a design flaw that was probably understood as a feature by Google with hope it would force all network to come up with unlimited data plan.
More precisely you have absolutely no control on which applications does what on the network once they are installed. Authorization to use the network (any network type, wifi, 3g, edge etc.) is given at installation time and is unrevocable.
This is a terrible mistake. By definition the environment of a mobile phone will change, people will travel, some carrier do not have unlimited data plan. It's obvious that at some point someone will connect a G1 to another network than t-mobile and pay for that mistake.
When I travel, sometime for extended period of time, I use local SIM cards to avoid paying roaming fees to my operator (not t-mobile). I had to turn off 3g connections by deleting all APN entries to make sure that no applications would use those network.
There is Another niceness which this time is T-Mobile US fault and not google's that didn't get any exposure. The MyFaves application that is hidden deep inside the contact manager needs to update it's status by automatically sending SMS to T-Mobile. When the phone is used on another network than T-Mobile the application bugs and starts sending SMS every few minutes potentially costing a fortune to the owner. There is no way to remove it for the retards at T-Mo decided the best way to implements the feature was to butcher the default contact provider (the "library" that every other application uses to read the contact list) of the android codebase instead of creating a standalone application.
Some smart people at xda-developer (http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=448) have found a way around it for the lucky few who have one of the original firmware that can be rooted and upgraded with a custom image.
For other people even if they have received their unlock code from T-Mobile, if they have tried to put another SIM they might end up with a very ugly bill at the end of the month.
cheap? where cheap?
:)
According to their website a Garmin Etrex costs 99USD and works on AA battery which you can replace while trekking in the desert... If you ever go in the desert get that one instead of an iphone. You'll thank me
Your SAT phone probably has a better GPS chip than your iphone. :)
d) They're not going to use the crappy GPS receiver of an iphone. If they needed a GPS they can buy a decent garmin for half the price at an official retailer store. http://www8.garmin.com/cgi-bin/dealers.pl?country=Egypt
For the little I know of Egypt I will assume that someone didn't get a decent baksheesh...
Try to go there you'll be surprised how many luxury cars you'll see on the streets of Cairo. Sure they are outnumbered by the patched up car DIY style from another era but new cars they do have. And if you knew how high the import taxes are on car in Egypt you'd guess that the people who bought them got tons of money.. Always remember that not everyone is poor in a poor country.
I stopped reading when I realized the author believed the MVC pattern was the one and only true way and that PHP was the only "web programming" language.
The authors is confusing architecture issues with language issues. Javascript has serious shortcoming, xmlhttp blows due to left and right incompatibilities, and PHP's API design by committee makes it a chores to work with but seriously I can't see the difference between a full blown "AJAX" interface doing JSON call to a web-service and a fat client doing RPC call with CORBA or some proprietary tcp/ip interface*.
Aside from the fact that all this is nothing more than a rape of the HyperText Transfer Protocol and the HyperText Markup Language which were never designed for it in the first place there is absolutely nothing new. If anything xml rpc at least helps bringing the architecture almost back in sync with what we already had 30 years ago with fat clients...
If I still had them around I'd get my CS book from 15 years ago and show you that all the patterns you need are already in there.
(* CORBA is dead thanks god! )
I agree with paragraph 1 and 2 but how exactly do you think google chrome is going to do anything about the issue? So far it's nothing more than yet another browser with a slightly faster javascript engine in some corner case. It doesn't do anything than IE, Firefox and Safari can't already do.
Running XP in a VM on linux will require less resources than Vista?? You should get that thing you're smoking checked it's probably weed.
open source != free
So in short, instead of optimizing their primary and widely used compiler used by hundred of thousands of people every day (AS3) they created a better compiler for a language most people will never use to write flash apps just to show that if they wanted to put some their mind to it they could do something better for AS3.. kind of annoying. ;)
Use the "Off" button when you're out for a movie, on a date with your girlfriend or having a beer with your buddies.
It will improve your social life, relieve some stress and you might stop looking like a pedantic ass.
Hey you're lucky at least it's still in english they could have gone for grande, venti, vidi, vici or whatnot.. Lucky us no one would do something that stupid.. :)
Rooted means you get root access you were not supposed to get. A local root exploit (local user becomes root) is less annoying than a remote root exploit. But it is still considered rooted. And yes, it counts if it is just due to a configuration error.
So here we have a device for which you, the buyer, does not have root access. Someone found a way, via a (most probably forgotten) setuid telnetd to access the device as root. You did not have root access before. You have root access now against the will of the manufacturer. The machine has been rooted.
I was forcefully baptized when I was 2 months old and my parents dragged me to sunday school and forced me through 1st communion.. I don't consider myself a catholic, most of it sounds like crap to me. Which matters? That I was forced to say a few ave maria and our father or that I really can't give a damn about it thirty years later?
For what it's worth, I had a Muslim friend who was going to a catholic school because his parent thought the education was better in that particular school. He's still a Muslim even though he has been tutored by catholic nuns. I also met a couple of people who were born and raised catholic and turned to Islam when they grew older. Religion is about what you believe in, not really what school you attended. There's a good verse in the Coran (or was it an Hadith) that say something along the line of "If someone calls himself a muslim and you call him an infidel you are in fact the infidel" (because it's for god to judge who is a pious man and who is not etc.. etc..).
Come live with us in western europe!
:)
:)
;)
I can't remember any election being polluted by religion the way it is in the US.
French for example (Disclaimer:I am) have a very high level of respect for public figures' religion and private life (wife, kids, mistresses...).
Our politician are not better than yours but at least we don't have to suffer through blatantly racist arguments during their campaign which by the way are way shorter... 2 years is madness..
Public display of racism or religious intolerance would lend you in jail or at least get you a hefty fine to pay. NGO's are quick to sue for that kind of things, I guess they've been like that since shortly after WWII. I wonder why...
Oh and we also have a powerful socialist party and many many communist and marxist or affiliated party who regularly get elected to mayor's or parliamentary position so we have good healthcare and decent retirement funds...
The drawback is that we have overwhelmingly powerful union that can paralyze the country on a whim. France should probably be in the Guinness for highest number of "preventive strike" per year. (Not with bombs, with banners..)
What else?
We tend to be more pro-palestinian than israelian although it's not as clear-cut or even important as in the US.
We do have our own weird religious sect that perform mass suicide from time to time or thinks cloning is the solution to every issue but Scientology is not recognized as a religion. At least not everywhere..
We have a much larger choice of beers particularly in Germany and Belgium and we can say dirty words on tv without being censored
I've heard Canada is nice also and it may be closer for you.
And you get C# which is actually a much nicer language than J++ ever was, integrate way better with Microsoft platform (for some it does matter) and gave a much needed kick in sun's behind who realized it was finally time to update Java with some interesting features. Both are now alive and kicking.
What was your point?
Ok, I'll try.
.NET?) of the other application.
Let's imagine that your organization uses a few different applications. For example a core banking, a loan management, credit card management, call center, billing etc..
Now let's say that you would like to be able to do "fun" stuff when something "cool" happens in one of those applications. For example, when someone default on a loan payment you'd like the core banking to flag the account as "dangerous", block his credit card, cancel his vip status in the CRM, the call center will generate an automated call to connect you to a customer service rep from the debt collection department that will menace you with the word foreclosure.
The first way to do that is to create many one-to-one relationship between all those application. "onpaymentdefaultduedate" in the loan management you could call successively each API of each application to "make it" do whatever it is that needs to be done. So the loan management will need to know about the crm, the call center, the billing etc...
Problem is that the next time you add a fancy new application (SMS harassment gateway for example) or upgrade an existing one (API change yeah!) you'll need to upgrade all the applications that have a one-one relationship. Which mean bringing on board the vendors of each and every applications for top dollars. Plus after a few years, everyone will have forgotten how the things even works. The vendor does not provide version 2 customization and you'll have to upgrade everything to version 7.3.56 and retrain your staff because the interface has changed and you can't expect the tellers to figure it out by themselves.
The second option is to add a middleware that will "sit" in the middle of all your other application (hence "middleware") and connect all the applications together using a publisher/subscriber model.
In that architecture, the loan application does not know about any other application than the MQ. Whenever you start defaulting it will simply send a message ("loandefaulted userid=12 amount=345.5") to the message queue and the MQ will in turn dispatch it to whatever other applications has register an interest for it by saying something like "subscribe to event loandefaulted from loanapplication". Many applications can register to the same event. That way the CRM can flag you, the call center can call you, legal can sue you and the SMS reminder volley can begin. All of that without any applications having to care about the brand or specific implementation (J2EE or
Of course this is a bit simplistic but cover 80% of the purpose of an MQ: loose coupling of application via an event based mechanism. Add to that option such as guaranteed reliability, prioritization of message, security and more complexe workflow of messages with multiple "queries" and "answers" and maybe you'll get a rough idea of why a MQ is a better design that "hard coupling" of n-application (sometime).
Of course since once you've chosen a MQ and adapted all your applications to use it you're basically tied forever and ever to your MQ vendor who hold you by the balls and can continuously rape you over and over with astronomical maintenance fee since you now have a single coordinated point of failure that can and will eventually take everything down at some point.
But hey, you're a big bank you can take it.. or at least you could until a month ago but whatever...
Clearer?
And it's soooo web 3.0.. go for it. :)
Burn karma, burn..
why am i anonymous, I did not check the box...
Call center is productivity oriented, probably more so than any other activities, and most call center manager can't see further away than AHT (average handling time) and conversion rate/h. It is akin to chain factory work. You have agent working from home, so I assume that they are using either their own pc for the CTI application or a company provided thin client (citrix maybe?).
:)
In any case, they are home, and unless you have installed tracking software and forces them to leave their webcam turned on how do you know what they are doing? Reading a book, watching tv, breast feeding the little one, etc. I guess you don't and rely on your production report to award incentive to your agents and that so far it worked. Your company has already relinquished a lot of control to shave on the expense of renting and furnishing a hangar in suburbia so another forum is not going to change much on your production ratio issue.
Point 1: Some of them are probably already browsing other website and chatting with their friends online giving them an opportunity to do it in an environment controlled by the company can only be a benefit. They'll spend more time focused on their work and the company.
Point 2: Use other metrics to convince upper mgt, what is your current agent turnover? Can you reduce it by fostering a sense of community into your work-alone-at-home-for-a-soulless-company employees? By how much? What is the cost of training a new one?
Point 3: Are you an inbound CC (where quality matters) or are you selling predatory housing loans and credit card (where volume matters)? Can a "community" effect produce an across the board effect of raising the quality of your services without cost. I.E do you expect your agent to learn trick of the trade from one another which will increase either their quality of services or their conversion rate?
Point 4: Most agents don't like their job so expect a lot of ranting on your forum. Don't forget to clarify the posting policy with management and your agents or you'll be in trouble when one of them gets fired for complaining too loudly on the forum and sinks everyone else moral, shoot the turnover sky high and the productivity way low.
I have never heard of a company monitoring the coffee room with camera and mics to hear the dirty jokes made on management so I really believe you should lobby for some partial anonymity. I let you figure out how to implement the "partial" part. And yes you should check with the lawyers...
I trust my kids. I don't trust yours. :)