The most expensive phone they do for an upgrade contract is the Sony Ericsson W950i. You can look at shop.orange.co.uk and see for yourself. It has 4GB memory (they say up to 4,000 songs) and touch screen navigation so it's not that dissimilar to an iPhone and is one of the phones that Apple will be competing with. The upgrade price goes from £50-£250 depending on the contract you're on. I expect my contract puts me close to the £50 end of that. And the iPhone is still much more expensive than the W950i. Without or any special deals, an unlocked W950i costs £387.99 direct from Sony Ericsson. In contrast, presuming you could buy an iPhone without contract, you might expect to pay upwards of £500-600. Even if you factor in a very generous contract discount, you're still in the range of £200-300.
Apple and the mobile telco's can only sell the iPhone at a price the market will bear. Expecting people with contracts like me who are used to paying £50 extra to get the best mobile phone Orange has to offer, to pay £250-£350 instead just doesn't cut it. The thing is, that's pretty much what Apple's trying to do in the US. £350 doesn't cut it in the UK, but $499 is equally ridiculous in the US. Customers are pretty much used to getting a phone free with service. Even the most expensive smartphones rarely crack $200 with a contract. Apple has priced the iPhone very, very high in the US and it's hard to imagine the situation being any different in the UK.
Basically, the reason I said the phone won't drop below £250 is because the iPod costs £259. Apple is apparently very concerned that the cell phones will cannibalize their iPod sales because the iPod's price doesn't include a service discount. You saw this with the Motorola iTunes phones, where they set an artificial cap on the number of songs to avoid competing with the Mini and shuffle. They want to price the iPhone as a set up from the iPod, not a replacement.
First off, let's make this clear: I am only talking about fixing small, obvious factual problems in articles that you come across in the normal course of using Wikipedia. From the original post: "I have seen it say hilliary clintion way a republican and the elephant population had triples in 6 months."
It is ridiculously silly to complain about such errors instead of simply fixing them. If problems of such a scale motivate you to write a few thousand words on the subject here, you have sufficient motivation to correct the error. If taking two minutes out of your life is an incredible inconvenience, surely the time spent bitching about it can only be more inconvenient. It is easier to fix such small problems than to complain about them.
You do not have a responsibility to Wikipedia to remove factual errors. You have a responsibility to yourself to solve problems that bother you. If factual errors on Wikipedia bother you, you have a responsibility to fix them. If they do not bother you, they are not a problem. The method you have chosen to solve your problem (complaining about it on Slashdot) is incredibly ineffective, I'm afraid.
From the other side of the relationship, I must again repeat that Wikipedia is not an entity capable of having responsibilities. Wikipedia is not Jimbo Wales, ArbCom, or even the Wikimedia Foundation. It is nothing more than the collection of the contributions of its editors. It is an inanimate object. It has no more responsibility to be accurate than the paper Britannica is printed on.
Finally, your vague anecdotes, your opinion on the rulings of ArbCom, and your unsubstantiated claims as to the nature of the unnamed editors steamrolled by evil yet equally unnamed admins, are all completely worthless to me. {{fact}} does not assert that you are wrong; it requests that you provide evidence. Lacking such evidence, I have no reason to trust your characterization of past events.
To bring it back to the original comment that started this tirade against ArbCom: Being bold does not get you banned. Being bold has nothing to do with overriding other editors because you "know" you're right. Being bold has nothing to do with dispute resolution. Being bold means making changes when you have no reason to believe others will object. Even if others do object, no sensible editor or admin will hold you responsible for your ignorance. Persisting and attempting to override the objections of others, even if you happen to be right, is not being bold, it's being stubborn, and for that you can be banned.
The specific policy page you're looking for is Wikipedia:Username. Very recently, the policy was changed so that non-Latin names are no longer blockable, yet still discouraged. (See this older version of the policy from December for comparison.) A lot of this has to do with the new policy to unify usernames across all Wikimedia projects and languages. Read the talk page for discussion.
You've failed to answer the question. Why do I have a responsibility to Wikipedia when Wikipedia has no responsibility to me? You have a responsibility to fix Wikipedia because you want it to change. If you don't want that responsibility, then you can accept Wikipedia as it is and move along. To repeat: Wikipedia is not an entity capable of having responsibilities to you or anyone.
Why is it my problem that Wikipedia is full of mistakes, half-truths, lies and omissions? It's your problem because you are bothered by it. If you are not bothered by it, it ceases to be problem. If the article on some obscure video game character says his essential color is red when it's supposed to be blue, I don't give a shit. If the article on Hilliary Clinton says she's a Republican, I do care and I'll fix it when I see it.
Do I have any say as to whether I accept being an unpaid slave? Aside from the distinction between giving back to a website that offers free content to you and actual slavery, yes you do. You can browse Wikipedia and simply accept that from time to time, you may see vandalism, poorly-written articles, and inaccurate statements. You can buy a copy of Britannica or Encarta. You can browse away to any other website. What you can't do is complain that you haven't been given what you've been promised, because no one promised you anything.
I've seen lots of people get banned for writing something that is demonstrably true that pissed off an administrator. This needs a {{fact}} tag. I'm sure you're leaving out how these editors were trying to add inflammatory or POV material, ignored all requests to stop, refused well-meaning compromises, and repeatedly edit warred to get their version in. Even so, if you can tell me how to get banned by adding verifiable, NPOV material in one edit, I will make that edit and we will see if I get banned.
Arbitration or any conflict resolution is a sick joke on Wikipedia. I don't believe I said you should take a simple factual error to dispute resolution. I said that if you see something plainly wrong on Wikipedia -- like the elephant population tripling -- click the edit link and fix it. The people who end up at ArbCom are personally obsessed with obscure topics, trying to force their views on everyone else. They are the personification of stubborn.
It ISN'T my responsibility to fix Wikipedia. If the model is broken, then its broken. You think it's broken because it doesn't conform to your idea of what it should be. If you wish it to conform, you are making it your responsibility. That drive for Wikipedia to be something other than it is did not exist before you willed it. "Wikipedia" is not trying to be perfect or even better, because it cannot try to do anything.
See, the $499/$599 US figures require a 2 year contract with Cingular. They haven't announced a price for the iPhone without contract and it seems it won't be available at all without one. Therefore, that £387 figure already includes the presumed service provider discount. The "real" cost without contract, presuming you can buy it without one, would be somewhere in the neighborhood of £387+£220 = £607.
I will be very surprised if the iPhone-with-contract debuts in the UK for less than £350, and very, very surprised if it ever drops below £250.
Here is the regulation in question, Bowling Green State University's Information Technology Services Network and Computer Policies:
22. Anonymous use, or use of pseudonyms on a computer system or computer network to escape responsibility. No person shall use a computer system or computer network anonymously or use pseudonyms to attempt to escape from prosecution of laws or regulations, or otherwise to escape responsibility for their actions. As I read it, using Tor to evade responsibility is against the rules, using it for research purposes is not. It's a matter of intent, which is a pain because they can't look at the network traffic and determine your intent. So they knocked on this guy's door, asked him a few questions, and it sounds like they bought his story and left him alone. They requested that he not spread the word about Tor because no doubt a campus full of students using Tor would be a headache for them.
Asking is reasonable. Forcing him to wouldn't be. The network is there to allow the professor to do research which helps him do his job. The IT staff has no business telling the professor how to do that. So long as the professor isn't using excessive resources, and barring a subpoena or court order, they shouldn't care what protocols the professor uses. This is relying on forgiveness rather than simply asking permission. I'm sure the university has a procedure on the books to request a specific, temporary exemption from school policies to conduct bona-fide research. The important factor is oversight: the university still has the authority and responsibility to tell a professor no if the request is not reasonable.
Since when is it my responsibility to fix Wikipedia? Since day-frigging-one! Your mistake is in regarding Wikipedia as an entity with goals or responsibilities. Wikipedia is simply the collection of the input of its users, of which you are one. If you want something on Wikipedia to change, it is up to you to do something about it.
You don't get banned for being bold. You don't even get banned for being a dick. You get banned for being stubborn. Doing something stupid once almost never results in a ban. Doing something stupid repeatedly after being asked to stop will get you banned.
If you put enough random data together, you're bound to see patterns every once in a while. I bet you didn't know God scribbled pictures in the Bible, too.
Thank you for your suggestion! When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the Edit this page link at the top. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes -- they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome.
----
Seriously though, when you see a problem like that fix it yourself. You think Wikipedia sucks? Then help it not suck by clicking that edit link every once in a while. Why is such a big deal when -- dear god no -- something on the Internet isn't 100% accurate? Websites from Slashdot to CNN get shit wrong all the time and you have no option to correct them.
This coupled with the fact that piracy is rampant in South Korea, and since last year Microsoft has not allowed a number of updates to copies of Windows that haven't passed WGA validation. BS. Microsoft still provides security updates to unvalidated installations.
They don't, but IIS has no way of knowing. Even if the features are never used, a certain amount of initialization is required in order to make them available. Apache doesn't have a lot of that functionality by default, so it's favored by the very limited example here. Since most websites aren't single static pages, actual Apache usage may not be that different than IIS.
But if you accept the standard metric that one bug happens, on average, for every twenty lines of code (that is, a 5% bug rate), then more calls implies more code, which implies more potential security vulnerabilities. That's also a particularly vulnerable assumption. It's not necessarily true that more calls mean more code. It seems likely that Microsoft has more developers working in parallel than Apache, so they may value more modular code. That is, Microsoft's code between calls may be more sparse, passing off to another layer functionality that Apache would implement in line.
It was also pointed out in the comments to the original article (way back in April) that IIS implements a lot more functionality out of the box. Some of those system calls may relate to setting up the environment for CGI or other things that aren't really needed when serving up a single static page. Add in a few Apache modules to do something interesting and the graphs may end up looking very similar.
I'm not really saying Windows & IIS are more secure than Linux & Apache, just that using these graphs to come to any kind of meaningful conclusion is impossible.
So being consistently restrained by stupid DRM restrictions is a good thing for users? WTF?
Zune got bit because the "squirt" feature is one of the prominent selling points of the player. If it doesn't work with your music, then people feel ripped off. So long as Apple is open that most of the iTunes music is DRM-encumbered, the only "inconsistency" is being occasionally surprised by extra functionality. That can't hurt Apple and it's good for users.
The point was that the iPhone costs more than Video iPod in the US, so it's almost certain that the same will be true in the UK.
To determine the expected price of the UK iPhone, I assumed a constant GBP:USD ratio based on the price of the 80gb Video iPod in both markets. I said the iPod costs £269, but I think that was a typo. Apple's UK store lists it at £259, which includes VAT. Apple's US store sells the same 80gb iPod for $349. Jobs' keynote said the 4gb will sell for $499 with a 2-year contract.
Of course that's only the roughest of estimates. If you use a different Apple product for a baseline, you'll get slightly different figures. The exact price will have a lot to do with what sort of arrangement Apple works out with the UK carrier.
If you read past the headline, the heart of the article is not about the technological changes in Vista, but the behavior of common criminals. The forensics guys know from past experience that people don't bother to use all of the features available to them. Even if they do, seizing the computer itself (hopefully while it's on and the user is logged in) means they can do whatever the user would do to access the data.
A USB key is a neat trick to keep the wife away from your pr0n collection, but it won't do you much good if the FBI can force you to hand it over.
But for every one Google there are a hundred other companies that just want someone to maintain a shopping cart. Getting back to the original Ask Slashdot topic, I would venture to guess that your type of work is exactly the sort of "usual business applications" that the submitter is bored with. It's sort of like the difference between a car mechanic and an automotive engineer. The mechanic may be very experienced and really good at his job, but there's no way he would get hired as an engineer. Similarly, it may be hard to land a job doing the more interesting Google-type stuff if your experience is in maintaining shopping carts. A CS degree could go a long way to bridging that gap to a more rewarding career.
I think you're also underestimating the positions available in serious software development. Yes, pretty much every company these days needs people to run their website and do IT/IS stuff, but the companies that develop software as their business probably hire the majority of CS grads. There are a lot of them too, including companies that ship their software as part of another product and aren't known as software companies.
Even though it's not just Google, they are hiring. I seriously considered working there myself. You may have heard that they were ranked the best company to work for by Fortune. If you check out the full list, you'll see quite a few more that engage in more than just maintaining shopping carts.
You're talking about Cal Poly, right? I graduated last year as a CPE. My impression of CS there was that it was actually pretty light on the math compared to what I've heard about other universities. SE actually has more math prereqs than CS in the latest catalog.
That being said, Blizzards time to cash in on the StarCraft name has got to be running out. I think they've been too busy counting all that cash from WoW to work on any new games for a while.
Seriously though, with the subscription model being so profitable, it's hard to imagine Blizzard taking their focus off of WoW for a while yet. Although, once they're done milking WoW, I think the logical next step is with Diablo rather than StarCraft. Diablo could be adapted fairly easily to an MMO format as WoW's successor, though Blizzard would surely put their typical genre-defying twist on it. That way they can migrate all of their current WoW addicts and keep charging for subscriptions. StarCraft on the other hand doesn't seem to lend itself to a format that would require a subscription.
I stand corrected. I actually have a SLVR myself, I just don't have any music purchased from Apple. I've even got a iTunes gift card from an Apple recruiting event that I haven't bothered to use. To me, if a song's worth having, it's worth having as an MP3.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, the reason I said the phone won't drop below £250 is because the iPod costs £259. Apple is apparently very concerned that the cell phones will cannibalize their iPod sales because the iPod's price doesn't include a service discount. You saw this with the Motorola iTunes phones, where they set an artificial cap on the number of songs to avoid competing with the Mini and shuffle. They want to price the iPhone as a set up from the iPod, not a replacement.
First off, let's make this clear: I am only talking about fixing small, obvious factual problems in articles that you come across in the normal course of using Wikipedia. From the original post: "I have seen it say hilliary clintion way a republican and the elephant population had triples in 6 months."
It is ridiculously silly to complain about such errors instead of simply fixing them. If problems of such a scale motivate you to write a few thousand words on the subject here, you have sufficient motivation to correct the error. If taking two minutes out of your life is an incredible inconvenience, surely the time spent bitching about it can only be more inconvenient. It is easier to fix such small problems than to complain about them.
You do not have a responsibility to Wikipedia to remove factual errors. You have a responsibility to yourself to solve problems that bother you. If factual errors on Wikipedia bother you, you have a responsibility to fix them. If they do not bother you, they are not a problem. The method you have chosen to solve your problem (complaining about it on Slashdot) is incredibly ineffective, I'm afraid.
From the other side of the relationship, I must again repeat that Wikipedia is not an entity capable of having responsibilities. Wikipedia is not Jimbo Wales, ArbCom, or even the Wikimedia Foundation. It is nothing more than the collection of the contributions of its editors. It is an inanimate object. It has no more responsibility to be accurate than the paper Britannica is printed on.
Finally, your vague anecdotes, your opinion on the rulings of ArbCom, and your unsubstantiated claims as to the nature of the unnamed editors steamrolled by evil yet equally unnamed admins, are all completely worthless to me. {{fact}} does not assert that you are wrong; it requests that you provide evidence. Lacking such evidence, I have no reason to trust your characterization of past events.
To bring it back to the original comment that started this tirade against ArbCom: Being bold does not get you banned. Being bold has nothing to do with overriding other editors because you "know" you're right. Being bold has nothing to do with dispute resolution. Being bold means making changes when you have no reason to believe others will object. Even if others do object, no sensible editor or admin will hold you responsible for your ignorance. Persisting and attempting to override the objections of others, even if you happen to be right, is not being bold, it's being stubborn, and for that you can be banned.
The specific policy page you're looking for is Wikipedia:Username. Very recently, the policy was changed so that non-Latin names are no longer blockable, yet still discouraged. (See this older version of the policy from December for comparison.) A lot of this has to do with the new policy to unify usernames across all Wikimedia projects and languages. Read the talk page for discussion.
See, the $499/$599 US figures require a 2 year contract with Cingular. They haven't announced a price for the iPhone without contract and it seems it won't be available at all without one. Therefore, that £387 figure already includes the presumed service provider discount. The "real" cost without contract, presuming you can buy it without one, would be somewhere in the neighborhood of £387+£220 = £607.
I will be very surprised if the iPhone-with-contract debuts in the UK for less than £350, and very, very surprised if it ever drops below £250.
to escape responsibility. No person shall use a computer system or computer
network anonymously or use pseudonyms to attempt to escape from prosecution of
laws or regulations, or otherwise to escape responsibility for their actions. As I read it, using Tor to evade responsibility is against the rules, using it for research purposes is not. It's a matter of intent, which is a pain because they can't look at the network traffic and determine your intent. So they knocked on this guy's door, asked him a few questions, and it sounds like they bought his story and left him alone. They requested that he not spread the word about Tor because no doubt a campus full of students using Tor would be a headache for them.
You don't get banned for being bold. You don't even get banned for being a dick. You get banned for being stubborn. Doing something stupid once almost never results in a ban. Doing something stupid repeatedly after being asked to stop will get you banned.
The other post beat me by two minutes. When I saw the article, there were no responses.
If you put enough random data together, you're bound to see patterns every once in a while. I bet you didn't know God scribbled pictures in the Bible, too.
{{sofixit}}
Thank you for your suggestion! When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the Edit this page link at the top. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes -- they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page , or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome.
----
Seriously though, when you see a problem like that fix it yourself. You think Wikipedia sucks? Then help it not suck by clicking that edit link every once in a while. Why is such a big deal when -- dear god no -- something on the Internet isn't 100% accurate? Websites from Slashdot to CNN get shit wrong all the time and you have no option to correct them.
They don't, but IIS has no way of knowing. Even if the features are never used, a certain amount of initialization is required in order to make them available. Apache doesn't have a lot of that functionality by default, so it's favored by the very limited example here. Since most websites aren't single static pages, actual Apache usage may not be that different than IIS.
It was also pointed out in the comments to the original article (way back in April) that IIS implements a lot more functionality out of the box. Some of those system calls may relate to setting up the environment for CGI or other things that aren't really needed when serving up a single static page. Add in a few Apache modules to do something interesting and the graphs may end up looking very similar.
I'm not really saying Windows & IIS are more secure than Linux & Apache, just that using these graphs to come to any kind of meaningful conclusion is impossible.
So being consistently restrained by stupid DRM restrictions is a good thing for users? WTF?
Zune got bit because the "squirt" feature is one of the prominent selling points of the player. If it doesn't work with your music, then people feel ripped off. So long as Apple is open that most of the iTunes music is DRM-encumbered, the only "inconsistency" is being occasionally surprised by extra functionality. That can't hurt Apple and it's good for users.
Obviously, the solution is to code everything as a single function. Then the graph will look very nice and tidy.
The point was that the iPhone costs more than Video iPod in the US, so it's almost certain that the same will be true in the UK.
To determine the expected price of the UK iPhone, I assumed a constant GBP:USD ratio based on the price of the 80gb Video iPod in both markets. I said the iPod costs £269, but I think that was a typo. Apple's UK store lists it at £259, which includes VAT. Apple's US store sells the same 80gb iPod for $349. Jobs' keynote said the 4gb will sell for $499 with a 2-year contract.
£259/$349 = 0.74212 £/$
0.74212 £/$ * $499 = £370.32
Of course that's only the roughest of estimates. If you use a different Apple product for a baseline, you'll get slightly different figures. The exact price will have a lot to do with what sort of arrangement Apple works out with the UK carrier.
If you read past the headline, the heart of the article is not about the technological changes in Vista, but the behavior of common criminals. The forensics guys know from past experience that people don't bother to use all of the features available to them. Even if they do, seizing the computer itself (hopefully while it's on and the user is logged in) means they can do whatever the user would do to access the data.
A USB key is a neat trick to keep the wife away from your pr0n collection, but it won't do you much good if the FBI can force you to hand it over.
I think you're also underestimating the positions available in serious software development. Yes, pretty much every company these days needs people to run their website and do IT/IS stuff, but the companies that develop software as their business probably hire the majority of CS grads. There are a lot of them too, including companies that ship their software as part of another product and aren't known as software companies.
Even though it's not just Google, they are hiring. I seriously considered working there myself. You may have heard that they were ranked the best company to work for by Fortune. If you check out the full list, you'll see quite a few more that engage in more than just maintaining shopping carts.
Two seconds of Googling reveals that Florida State University offers a Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering online. Geez, you're lazy.
I don't know which government at which level you work for, but the US federal government most definitely has a glass ceiling for people without degrees. See the OPM's Qualification Standards for General Schedule Positions, Professional and Scientific Positions. It's pretty hard to get above a GS-12 without at least a four-year degree.
You're talking about Cal Poly, right? I graduated last year as a CPE. My impression of CS there was that it was actually pretty light on the math compared to what I've heard about other universities. SE actually has more math prereqs than CS in the latest catalog.
Seriously though, with the subscription model being so profitable, it's hard to imagine Blizzard taking their focus off of WoW for a while yet. Although, once they're done milking WoW, I think the logical next step is with Diablo rather than StarCraft. Diablo could be adapted fairly easily to an MMO format as WoW's successor, though Blizzard would surely put their typical genre-defying twist on it. That way they can migrate all of their current WoW addicts and keep charging for subscriptions. StarCraft on the other hand doesn't seem to lend itself to a format that would require a subscription.
I stand corrected. I actually have a SLVR myself, I just don't have any music purchased from Apple. I've even got a iTunes gift card from an Apple recruiting event that I haven't bothered to use. To me, if a song's worth having, it's worth having as an MP3.