"They don't have the proficiency with computers that most of us have. "
It has nothing to do with that. If you look at my other post, the Diebold activation systems were crashing (they crashed twice in 15 minutes while I waited), and when they crashed, they were producing results that made it look like people who had not yet voted actually did vote.
So blame people, but voting machines that crash seem to be a problem, regardless of who is in charge.
I'm a skeptic, but if that's the bugs that I see, then I know the hidden bugs are 10 times worse. It's a fiasco as far as I'm concerned.
I showed up at the polling place, very smallish in a local elementary school. I knew there were problems because the line was out the door, yet none of the voting booths were busy.
By the time it got to me, they inserted, the card into the "activation" station, and then they said something like "Oh, the system has crashed again", and they called over the election official. They timed it until it came up and it seemed to be a few minutes. They inserted my card again. They told me "Oh, the system said you already voted" and they called over the election official.
They ran to the back of the auditorium looking in a big manual. After 10 minutes, they came back and said "The manual is missing the part where it tells us what to do now. You can wait until we get it figured out, fill out a provisional ballet, or come back later". I opted for a provisional ballot which means that your vote is no longer a secret vote, and it takes 5-10 minutes to do, because you have to fill out two forms, and sign in two places.
I checked out the equipment while I was waiting, and sure enough it was Diebold. When I see this equipment in use, I feel like I might was well take my vote and throw it in the trash. Based on the errors that I saw for other people while I was waiting, the chances of a meaningful result in the primary seem somewhat in doubt.
We have a very good punch-card system in Montgomery county (nothing like the chad based system in florida) which produced a nice computer card that was obvious if it was correct when it was done and then you dumped it in a ballot box, ensuring anonymity and also making sure your vote was going to be counted as cast.
I find out that people won't calling what they did by the proper name:
LYING
Pretexting? It sounds so much nicer, like what a kid would do to talk to their friends on a cell phone. And I blame the press for buying into it and reporting it rather than saying "Patricia Dunn lied to the phone company to fraudulently obtain phone records".
"$14.99 is still cheaper than the cost of 2 people to see a movie at the theater"
Sure. And it would be a great deal if they were selling you a movie that was currently in the theaters. But these sound like movies that are currently available for purchase or rental at any store. And since it will take a lot of time to download around 1GB of movie data, you might as well buy the movie from the supermarket or rent it from the rental place next door.
At least if you buy the thing, you can sell it, or more likely let your friends borrow it.
But $15 for a film that most people can only watch sitting at your PC for a limited amount of time? Who thought that was a great idea?
Here's the really dumb part. Unlike music, movies are a natural for rental, because you watch once and you're done. So can justify $1/song on the basis of you're going to enjoy it a long time in the car, the house, the PC, the iPod. But people will rightfully see this as a rental, and a very expensive one to boot. That they can only watch on their PC. Or have media PC's connected to the 50" plasma suddenly become popular?
Perhaps I'm a bit naïve, but it seems obvious to me that jumping on some website hosted in some third-world country and giving them my credit card so I can play poker through some system controlled by the website against God-knows-who just seems like an invitation to get ripped off.
To a certain degree isn't that the point? It's one thing for a meat packing plant to have unclean food; as a consumer you have an expectation of goodness based on the fact that you have no way to identify if the food is wholesome based on any examination of the product (except in the most obvious cases).
On the other hand, if something is so obviously wrong then shouldn't there be an expectation and assumption of risk? I realize this is a fine line and maybe not so obvious in every case. But if you go to "joesgamblingsalon.ag" and it asks for a lot of personal questions to gamble, then shouldn't you at some point ask a lot of questions? If a man walks up to you on the street and says "You can play 3 card monty, just give me your credit card number", you'd run away. I don't get why it's any different on the internet.
I don't want you to interpret this to mean that criminals shouldn't be caught and prosecuted, nor am I saying that government has no role. But to somehow think that the government should even try to stop any harm from coming to people is shortsighted. It's not only impossible, but more importantly, it takes resources away from the things that a government is capable of doing, such as inspecting food, building bridges, providing militias for defense.
The problem is that the games are too expensive for a handheld system by about 25%.
What sony should have done to make this whole PSP idea stick:
1) Give away UMD movies when you buy a Sony DVD. This might cost them a little revenue up front, but it would give people a reason to buy the DVD, and get a lot of people used to UMD movies. Once the format was established, they could then charge $10 for a movie. But they started out of the chute at $20-25 per movie. Senseless.
2) Make the thing hacker friendly. Stop trying so hard to lock people out of the thing with firmware upgrades.
3) Make the games $30 each. Take less on each game. Establish a market, then raise the price.
Really, the problem was that Sony hyped the PSP to the roof, then they read their own hype and believed it. I've never seen anything like it.
Meanwhile, over in nintendo land, they're keeping their nose to the grindstone and systematically upgrading their handheld platform to little fanfare.
I went over to this blog to read about what must've been biting social commentary on the nature or a profession and how it fundamentally changes our outlook. Instead, there was two paragraphs on how their baby is cute, and how they're not great gardners. And is this considered interesting?
I was kinda up in arms after congress voted to let the telcos charge us extra to look at this stuff, but after looking at that blog, I think they made the right choice. The net shouldn't be neutral.
I've written my congressmen and senators about these issues (I live in Maryland), and their response to me was basically "The issue is very complicated and you probably don't understand all sides of the issue".
No, not joking.
So I feel like we're screwed because citizens no longer have access to government. Oh sure, we nominally have access, but we're patronized because government feels we aren't citizens, we're consumers with money, and it's best if we spend it with whatever cartel is fueling these guys pockets.
"There is absolutely no possibility that it's something like an AT&T monitoring system to make sure that its employees are not committing fraud, hackers are not abusing the network, etc..."
Obviously, you're being sarcastic, but assuming you're right, it would not be difficult for an officer of the court to validate what you're saying.
I mean, this case could be over in 1 day if AT&T wants to cooperate, open the door and let the court look.
Of course, if there is in fact a legitimate warrant to look at the data, this could be handled behind closed doors in a 1 hour meeting. Same would be true if this was a trade-secret agreement.
Of course, if AT&T was assisting without a legitimate warrant, then my expectation is that people in the administration, NSA, and AT&T would be prosecuted.
Why Verzion in the U.S. for $5 has unlimited SMS between Verizon customers. I know my daughter's bill for messages has dropped from $$$ per month to $5 and all her friends switched to Verizon to use this plan. I basically saved her allowance.
Yeah, that's happened to Comcast in the last 12 or so months.
They used to be reasonably good about making appointments, keeping them, and double checking that everything was okay. And then out of the blue, they basically decided to give up on customer service.
I had a comcast cable internet service out of commission for a month. They kept insisting they had already been there and it already worked, but I had a feeling it was just so the trouble ticket never looked like it was open more than a day or two. Oh, and getting them to pay me back for the month of service was an exercise in corporate double-speak. After 2 weeks of this, even the supervisor told me that I'd been treated badly, but there was nothing she could do. Everybody *cared*, but comcast has set up their systems so that even their employees. Or so every one of their employees claimed.
Coicidentally around the same time, Verizion started offering FIOS in our area. Wasn't much of a choice.
Afterwards when I dropped, comcast called me back. I said "Well, you had the service down for a month". The offered me 3 months free. What good is "free" if they don't care if your service works? I asked if he would commit comcast to getting problems fixed in a timely manner. He declined and hung up.
A good portion of the people I know (including my family) have had the pleasure of a broken ipod. My battery and hard drive failed, my daughter's battery failed, my wife's display died.
I mean, we keep buying them, but based on the price, they should be a lot more reliable.
Apple makes nice computers, but for the most part, it's worth getting the extended warranty from Apple, because you'll use it. At least once.
I can't believe people are getting that excited about the name of a console.
I mean, is "Playstation" a brilliant name? Does "Xbox" really inspire you? Is "Gamecube" marketing genius? Is N64 the name that makes you want to play? Dreamcast? Saturn? Genesis? Super Nintendo (talk about a dumb name!).
I guess if we go by success, the greatest names in videogames are:
2600
Nintendo Entertainment System
Playstation
Because once you saw 2600, you said "yeah, that's the name I want!" and you bought it.
And so Nintendo calls it "Wii". So what? Does the name of a console affect your desire to buy and/or play the thing? I can imagine saying "dumb name" and then you're done with it, but it sounds like a lot of folks are obsessing over the name.
"MS could have had a much more effective launch by sellng a single $350 unit"
True, but MS wanted a console they could claim was $299. It was clear from looking at the pricing that the "basic" unit was just to get you in the door; the component cost of going from the "basic" to the "deluxe" was so high that most people were going to spring for $400 even though they only intended on spending $300.
Re:Yes, I do remember that. It was different.
on
Viiv Falls Flat
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· Score: 1
The link you had was an interesting *editorial*, but it still had no insight on what types of DRM will be enabled under VIIV.
I'm not disagreeing with the guy's opinion, but that doesn't make it insightful.
If you live in a city with a significant traffice problem, you'll note a couple things:
1) Where you live has a huge influence - if you live on one side of the river or the other, the bridge may be the limiting factor
2) The time of year makes a big difference and has a huge impact on traffic - during the summer, you can leave later, but during the school year, you have to beat the school buses, because they determine when parents leave for work (mom/dad can't leave until the bus picks up the kids)
3) Traffic will vary based on things that are hard to determine because the system of traffic is so complex as to defy simply analysis
4) Your speed has a huge impact. If traffic moving, you can cut/thrust in and out of traffic and probably save 5-10 minutes over times when traffic is creeping along
5) Things vary tremendously during the week, month, year.
To make this analysis anything like meaningful, you'd need to track each person's origin/destination/time of departure/time of arrival and then make a model to determine optimum leaving times based on day of year and origin/destination. And of course, you'd need real-time information on accidents, weather variables and road closings to complete this model. I suspect we will have this information within the next 10-20 years as cell phones are tracked and we have real-time information about road conditions available centrally.
I suspect for most people who commute in their cars and have some flexibility, they've done a crude test and understand when they need to leave. For some people, they don't have that kind of flexibility. If your boss says you must come in at 8 and leave at 4, then that's your commute time. If your boss says "be in before 9" then you have the flexiblity.
But this guy driving into work and timing it for a few weeks and then trying to come up with a general model for everybody? Might as well use a Ouija board, because it's going to be just as accurate as this analysis.
"He bitched big time about paying over a hundred dollars a ticket for 2 tickets to see Paul McCartney, but he went anyway on McCartney's last US tour."
He could have gotten the sheet music from the "Band on the Run" album and gone to the local nursing home and paid guy there to sing the songs. It would've been about the same. And if he really missed Paul, he could have just stared at an old beatles picture.
"surely the reason you can't call Californian sparkling wines is because Champagne is a trademark?"
California sparkling wines are called champagne, despite the fact they are not from Champagne (here's just an example) http://www.korbel.com/default.aspx. Just google for "Champagne" and "California".
There is an French and EU law (or directive) that says champagne must come from Champagne, although this rules has no effect outside the EU.
I'm not going to be buying a whole lot of $30+ movies.
The media needs to come down to $15-18. That's when it will take off. Perhaps it's more expensive because of the novelty, but in 12 months, they'd better get those prices down or these disks are doomed.
Programs should not access to "per-user settings", they should only have access to Per-User/Per Application. An Application should only be able to change it's own settings, not the setting of an entire user's registry space.
This way, removing registry entries would be easier. You simply delete the node that an application has access to an *poof* it's gone. The program should not have access to anything outside its own little sandbox that the OS defines, not the application.
Look, it's not worth arguing that the registry is a good design... we wouldn't be having this conversation if there was no problem. But I hope MS is breaking compatibility on this little gem in Vista, because if they don't, I'm not sure Vista will offer the ability to fend off badly written (and malicious)programs from hijacking the registry easily, just as they do in XP/2000/NT.
Slashdot Mirror
"They don't have the proficiency with computers that most of us have. "
It has nothing to do with that. If you look at my other post, the Diebold activation systems were crashing (they crashed twice in 15 minutes while I waited), and when they crashed, they were producing results that made it look like people who had not yet voted actually did vote.
So blame people, but voting machines that crash seem to be a problem, regardless of who is in charge.
I'm a skeptic, but if that's the bugs that I see, then I know the hidden bugs are 10 times worse. It's a fiasco as far as I'm concerned.
I live in Montgomery County
I showed up at the polling place, very smallish in a local elementary school. I knew there were problems because the line was out the door, yet none of the voting booths were busy.
By the time it got to me, they inserted, the card into the "activation" station, and then they said something like "Oh, the system has crashed again", and they called over the election official. They timed it until it came up and it seemed to be a few minutes. They inserted my card again. They told me "Oh, the system said you already voted" and they called over the election official.
They ran to the back of the auditorium looking in a big manual. After 10 minutes, they came back and said "The manual is missing the part where it tells us what to do now. You can wait until we get it figured out, fill out a provisional ballet, or come back later". I opted for a provisional ballot which means that your vote is no longer a secret vote, and it takes 5-10 minutes to do, because you have to fill out two forms, and sign in two places.
I checked out the equipment while I was waiting, and sure enough it was Diebold. When I see this equipment in use, I feel like I might was well take my vote and throw it in the trash. Based on the errors that I saw for other people while I was waiting, the chances of a meaningful result in the primary seem somewhat in doubt.
We have a very good punch-card system in Montgomery county (nothing like the chad based system in florida) which produced a nice computer card that was obvious if it was correct when it was done and then you dumped it in a ballot box, ensuring anonymity and also making sure your vote was going to be counted as cast.
This new system did nothing except make a mess.
I find out that people won't calling what they did by the proper name:
LYING
Pretexting? It sounds so much nicer, like what a kid would do to talk to their friends on a cell phone. And I blame the press for buying into it and reporting it rather than saying "Patricia Dunn lied to the phone company to fraudulently obtain phone records".
"$14.99 is still cheaper than the cost of 2 people to see a movie at the theater"
Sure. And it would be a great deal if they were selling you a movie that was currently in the theaters. But these sound like movies that are currently available for purchase or rental at any store. And since it will take a lot of time to download around 1GB of movie data, you might as well buy the movie from the supermarket or rent it from the rental place next door.
At least if you buy the thing, you can sell it, or more likely let your friends borrow it.
But $15 for a film that most people can only watch sitting at your PC for a limited amount of time? Who thought that was a great idea?
Here's the really dumb part. Unlike music, movies are a natural for rental, because you watch once and you're done. So can justify $1/song on the basis of you're going to enjoy it a long time in the car, the house, the PC, the iPod. But people will rightfully see this as a rental, and a very expensive one to boot. That they can only watch on their PC. Or have media PC's connected to the 50" plasma suddenly become popular?
True, but all of them seem to have one thing in common: money donated to re-election funds of congressmen.
So is the earth revolving around the sun.
Do you agree with the Pope about those damned blasphemers Copernicus and Galileo?
To a certain degree isn't that the point? It's one thing for a meat packing plant to have unclean food; as a consumer you have an expectation of goodness based on the fact that you have no way to identify if the food is wholesome based on any examination of the product (except in the most obvious cases).
On the other hand, if something is so obviously wrong then shouldn't there be an expectation and assumption of risk? I realize this is a fine line and maybe not so obvious in every case. But if you go to "joesgamblingsalon.ag" and it asks for a lot of personal questions to gamble, then shouldn't you at some point ask a lot of questions? If a man walks up to you on the street and says "You can play 3 card monty, just give me your credit card number", you'd run away. I don't get why it's any different on the internet.
I don't want you to interpret this to mean that criminals shouldn't be caught and prosecuted, nor am I saying that government has no role. But to somehow think that the government should even try to stop any harm from coming to people is shortsighted. It's not only impossible, but more importantly, it takes resources away from the things that a government is capable of doing, such as inspecting food, building bridges, providing militias for defense.
The problem is that the games are too expensive for a handheld system by about 25%.
What sony should have done to make this whole PSP idea stick:
1) Give away UMD movies when you buy a Sony DVD. This might cost them a little revenue up front, but it would give people a reason to buy the DVD, and get a lot of people used to UMD movies. Once the format was established, they could then charge $10 for a movie. But they started out of the chute at $20-25 per movie. Senseless.
2) Make the thing hacker friendly. Stop trying so hard to lock people out of the thing with firmware upgrades.
3) Make the games $30 each. Take less on each game. Establish a market, then raise the price.
Really, the problem was that Sony hyped the PSP to the roof, then they read their own hype and believed it. I've never seen anything like it.
Meanwhile, over in nintendo land, they're keeping their nose to the grindstone and systematically upgrading their handheld platform to little fanfare.
I went over to this blog to read about what must've been biting social commentary on the nature or a profession and how it fundamentally changes our outlook. Instead, there was two paragraphs on how their baby is cute, and how they're not great gardners. And is this considered interesting?
I was kinda up in arms after congress voted to let the telcos charge us extra to look at this stuff, but after looking at that blog, I think they made the right choice. The net shouldn't be neutral.
I've written my congressmen and senators about these issues (I live in Maryland), and their response to me was basically "The issue is very complicated and you probably don't understand all sides of the issue".
No, not joking.
So I feel like we're screwed because citizens no longer have access to government. Oh sure, we nominally have access, but we're patronized because government feels we aren't citizens, we're consumers with money, and it's best if we spend it with whatever cartel is fueling these guys pockets.
I'm disgusted.
I'm sure Symantec isn't trying to raise cash to cover this (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/18/15322 56&from=rss) little problem...
"There is absolutely no possibility that it's something like an AT&T monitoring system to make sure that its employees are not committing fraud, hackers are not abusing the network, etc..."
Obviously, you're being sarcastic, but assuming you're right, it would not be difficult for an officer of the court to validate what you're saying.
I mean, this case could be over in 1 day if AT&T wants to cooperate, open the door and let the court look.
Of course, if there is in fact a legitimate warrant to look at the data, this could be handled behind closed doors in a 1 hour meeting. Same would be true if this was a trade-secret agreement.
Of course, if AT&T was assisting without a legitimate warrant, then my expectation is that people in the administration, NSA, and AT&T would be prosecuted.
Why Verzion in the U.S. for $5 has unlimited SMS between Verizon customers. I know my daughter's bill for messages has dropped from $$$ per month to $5 and all her friends switched to Verizon to use this plan. I basically saved her allowance.
Yeah, that's happened to Comcast in the last 12 or so months.
c le/2006/04/27/AR2006042701906.html
They used to be reasonably good about making appointments, keeping them, and double checking that everything was okay. And then out of the blue, they basically decided to give up on customer service.
I had a comcast cable internet service out of commission for a month. They kept insisting they had already been there and it already worked, but I had a feeling it was just so the trouble ticket never looked like it was open more than a day or two. Oh, and getting them to pay me back for the month of service was an exercise in corporate double-speak. After 2 weeks of this, even the supervisor told me that I'd been treated badly, but there was nothing she could do. Everybody *cared*, but comcast has set up their systems so that even their employees. Or so every one of their employees claimed.
I guess it shows that customer service is expensive, and in the name of profits, any company will screw you to the wall when there's big money involved http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
Coicidentally around the same time, Verizion started offering FIOS in our area. Wasn't much of a choice.
Afterwards when I dropped, comcast called me back. I said "Well, you had the service down for a month". The offered me 3 months free. What good is "free" if they don't care if your service works? I asked if he would commit comcast to getting problems fixed in a timely manner. He declined and hung up.
A good portion of the people I know (including my family) have had the pleasure of a broken ipod. My battery and hard drive failed, my daughter's battery failed, my wife's display died.
I mean, we keep buying them, but based on the price, they should be a lot more reliable.
Apple makes nice computers, but for the most part, it's worth getting the extended warranty from Apple, because you'll use it. At least once.
I can't believe people are getting that excited about the name of a console.
I mean, is "Playstation" a brilliant name? Does "Xbox" really inspire you? Is "Gamecube" marketing genius? Is N64 the name that makes you want to play? Dreamcast? Saturn? Genesis? Super Nintendo (talk about a dumb name!).
I guess if we go by success, the greatest names in videogames are:
2600
Nintendo Entertainment System
Playstation
Because once you saw 2600, you said "yeah, that's the name I want!" and you bought it.
And so Nintendo calls it "Wii". So what? Does the name of a console affect your desire to buy and/or play the thing? I can imagine saying "dumb name" and then you're done with it, but it sounds like a lot of folks are obsessing over the name.
"MS is in dire need of a Halo for the 360 to sell on"
But they will; they're saving that for when the PS3 launches.
They learned this trick from Sony, who launched Final Fantasy VIII on the day the Dreamcast launched to take the shine off Sega.
"or if he decided on it himself."
If you've ever heard Scott speak publically, he's very quick on his feet (and very funny).
He probably came up with it on his own.
It's really too bad; he was one of the leaders from the start of the computer & network revolution. I hope Sun does well.
"MS could have had a much more effective launch by sellng a single $350 unit"
True, but MS wanted a console they could claim was $299. It was clear from looking at the pricing that the "basic" unit was just to get you in the door; the component cost of going from the "basic" to the "deluxe" was so high that most people were going to spring for $400 even though they only intended on spending $300.
The link you had was an interesting *editorial*, but it still had no insight on what types of DRM will be enabled under VIIV.
I'm not disagreeing with the guy's opinion, but that doesn't make it insightful.
If you live in a city with a significant traffice problem, you'll note a couple things:
1) Where you live has a huge influence - if you live on one side of the river or the other, the bridge may be the limiting factor
2) The time of year makes a big difference and has a huge impact on traffic - during the summer, you can leave later, but during the school year, you have to beat the school buses, because they determine when parents leave for work (mom/dad can't leave until the bus picks up the kids)
3) Traffic will vary based on things that are hard to determine because the system of traffic is so complex as to defy simply analysis
4) Your speed has a huge impact. If traffic moving, you can cut/thrust in and out of traffic and probably save 5-10 minutes over times when traffic is creeping along
5) Things vary tremendously during the week, month, year.
To make this analysis anything like meaningful, you'd need to track each person's origin/destination/time of departure/time of arrival and then make a model to determine optimum leaving times based on day of year and origin/destination. And of course, you'd need real-time information on accidents, weather variables and road closings to complete this model. I suspect we will have this information within the next 10-20 years as cell phones are tracked and we have real-time information about road conditions available centrally.
I suspect for most people who commute in their cars and have some flexibility, they've done a crude test and understand when they need to leave. For some people, they don't have that kind of flexibility. If your boss says you must come in at 8 and leave at 4, then that's your commute time. If your boss says "be in before 9" then you have the flexiblity.
But this guy driving into work and timing it for a few weeks and then trying to come up with a general model for everybody? Might as well use a Ouija board, because it's going to be just as accurate as this analysis.
"He bitched big time about paying over a hundred dollars a ticket for 2 tickets to see Paul McCartney, but he went anyway on McCartney's last US tour."
He could have gotten the sheet music from the "Band on the Run" album and gone to the local nursing home and paid guy there to sing the songs. It would've been about the same. And if he really missed Paul, he could have just stared at an old beatles picture.
"surely the reason you can't call Californian sparkling wines is because Champagne is a trademark?"
California sparkling wines are called champagne, despite the fact they are not from Champagne (here's just an example) http://www.korbel.com/default.aspx. Just google for "Champagne" and "California".
There is an French and EU law (or directive) that says champagne must come from Champagne, although this rules has no effect outside the EU.
I'm not going to be buying a whole lot of $30+ movies.
The media needs to come down to $15-18. That's when it will take off. Perhaps it's more expensive because of the novelty, but in 12 months, they'd better get those prices down or these disks are doomed.
"and per-user settings go in HKEY_USERS\{SID}"
Programs should not access to "per-user settings", they should only have access to Per-User/Per Application. An Application should only be able to change it's own settings, not the setting of an entire user's registry space.
This way, removing registry entries would be easier. You simply delete the node that an application has access to an *poof* it's gone. The program should not have access to anything outside its own little sandbox that the OS defines, not the application.
Look, it's not worth arguing that the registry is a good design... we wouldn't be having this conversation if there was no problem. But I hope MS is breaking compatibility on this little gem in Vista, because if they don't, I'm not sure Vista will offer the ability to fend off badly written (and malicious)programs from hijacking the registry easily, just as they do in XP/2000/NT.