I'm thinking of sites like my company runs. Users have accounts, but some users signed up through Facebook connect. Though they have full accounts and can log in with their email address and a password they setup, I would expect many would only try to login through Facebook.
This isn't a huge problem for us (only a small percentage of our users sign up this way right now), but what if your site got a huge chunk of your signups that way. You could be cut off from 1/3 or 1/2 your user base while something like this is going on. Imagine what that could do to an e-commerce site.
And you have no control over it. FB is back up, but they could be down for 2 days and there wouldn't be much you could do. If my commercial ISP is down for 2 days, I have a recourse. If FB goes down... the money I lost is just gone.
Basically, FB is almost a single point of failure for some sites because of all the FB integration they offer. It annoys me, and this is one of the reasons. But the people who push "we need FB integration" usually don't consider this kind of thing. I'd imagine a lot of people got a rude surprise today when their sites started to feel slow as heck because of the like button iframes.
Re:Why is this news?
on
Facebook Is Down
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· Score: 5, Informative
Well, for one thing it's a mistake by a big technology company, one that we generally like to hate. That's either interesting (because they try very hard to prevent such things with redundancy), or funny (because we don't like them). That makes it post-worthy.
But even if you don't use FB, you were probably effected. Those little FB Like buttons have been spreading around like a contagious pox, but they're built on iframes and javascript. That meant that when FB went down, all the sites with those dynamic little buttons had a page element that basically had to time out to finish rendering. If you put the button at the top of your page, your other javascript may not run until the FB JS either ran or timed out.
Net effect? FB going down slowed down a lot of other sites.
Introducing external dependencies you don't control on top of your business critical process can work out so well for people. I'm sure this kind of thing was considered by everyone during the recent "Let's add a like button" craze.
Don't forget sites where many of their users only login through Facebook Connect. That entire chunk of their user population may have been cut off during the outage.
I always heard they did that not to cut costs, but to put the sales people who came in off their game, to make them uncomfortable and break their confidence, so Walmart could negotiate a better deal easily.
The one at my local store works pretty well, but I'm almost positive it's been tuned in the year+ its been deployed.
It's still not terribly smart. If you take an item out of a bag (or remove the bag), it will complain. If you put it back, it will shut up. If you immediately take it out again... it does nothing and happily accepts it.
It's convenient, but I hate the things on principal. My store used to have 8 lanes, which could all be staffed at busy times, with 2 or 3 lines staffed at nearly all times. Now there are 3 normal lanes and 2 self checkout lanes (2 machines in each lane).
Before, I could go in basically any time of the year and almost never see a line more than 2 carts deep. Now, thanks to the self checkouts (one of which seems to be malfunctioning about 10% of the time), I've seen lines 4 deep on weeknights, not even holidays.
They're not as fast as the machines the checkout people use. They turn my shopping experience from something the store controls to a piece of software. They've increased the lines.
While they do work well when you're buying a handful of things, for any real amount of groceries they can be terrible. So when lots of people need to buy a lot... everything gets backed up.
If you use a 3rd party client, they can't show you as many ads.
Thus, it's in their best interest if they can get you to use the site when you want to look at a quick update, or at least to try to prevent new users from moving onto other clients.
Well one of the problems with powerlines is that you need high power to get the signal the distances you want, the lines are lossy because they weren't designed for the frequencies, and the fact they are just long pieces of wire makes them ideal antennas.
If you're only broadcasting to your house, the power could be a lot lower. The fact that the "antennas" are smaller, turn more, and inside walls would help some too.
The main thing to note (based on what I read of this study) is that it doesn't make you better at making decisions, it makes you faster (without loss of quality).
Basically, video games have the same effect as a job that forces you to make lots of decisions really fast. It just exercises the "make decisions" part of the brain, where as reading or watching TV or painting a wall probably doesn't.
Actually, I would expect this to almost be used as proof against violent games. After all, violent games make people violent (an accepted truth by those making these kinds of claims), and video games make you faster at making decisions (this study)... so ergo video games make people violently snap and kill people faster than normal people.
You can easily get a TiVo HD (maybe refurbished) for that much. Dual HD tuners, supports Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and more. You get the DVR function which is big.
A used PS3 would cost less than that, you'd get the BluRay/Netflix/Playstation Store/games.
I think the Roku was, at $100, a great price point. If I hadn't had my TiVo (which could do NetFlix) I would have happily bought one to watch NetFlix on my TV. Since they've dropped the price, it's even better now. The Apple TV is $100 now too. And even though both aren't the normal component shape, they're both small and can stack on top of things, making them easy to fit somewhere.
If Twitter would just let you attach a URL to each tweet as metadata (like the user name or time it was sent), no one would need any of these stupid URL shortening services. Think! URLs that would work next year when 3 of those services disappear.
I know Twitter was designed with the limitations of SMS in mind, but most recent phones seem to support longer multi-part SMS messages, and most people seem to use a twitter client on their phone now instead of the SMS gateway.
Fix the root problem, don't apply another band-aid. By making all the links go through Twitter as a passthrough, they could get this marketing data they want.
Really? I read that line as a worry of a massive unexpected cost. If you can automate a whole factory, and then the UPS guy says he gets injured on your premises, you can lose 20 million easy.
No one would run a factory that was, even with the supposed horrible conditions, in the US. The labor costs alone (even if you only paid minimum wage or less) would be staggering. You'd replace as many people as possible with robots to keep costs down.
But then someone decides to sue you for something ridiculous, and your legal bills are huge. You settle or spend years spending tons of defend it. Or maybe it's a real issue, but instead of the $30k for medical bills and more for pain and suffering, they get some some like $10 million that is completely out of line relative to their injury.
His view sounds rather sane to me. And the last pages of the article point out just how good Foxcon is compared to many other Chinese employers. Conditions there don't sound anywhere near as bad as some of the stuff that when on in the US during the industrial revolution.
If it's wrong to put data outside of partitioned space, what are these user spaces apps doing writing there? I can see a pretty good case for boot loaders doing this (the comment below about the 4 partition limit is one). Why is a copyright/licensing program writing there (which is what Flexnet seems to be)?
What's to prevent one of these programs from overwriting the data another makes? How would you like it if every time you ran NewSuperGameWithDRM, Photoshop lost it's license and forced you to phone home to reconfirm it?
It's not a troll, and it's not a copy and paste. I wrote "Then I saw a game on sale for my PSP that I wanted to play", and that's what happened. When Patapon 2 came out, I didn't bother, and hadn't gotten around to playing it. The price drop to $8 was on the Playstation blog) on the 16th as a "Back to School" deal.
My PS3 controller seems to pair with my MacBook Pro 2010 when I plug it in, or at least lose it's PS3 pairing. It's perfectly reproducible for me.
My internet connection is a 6Mbps (see later in the post) DSL line. That was my experience, and Ars Technica had a simmilar experience with slow download speeds and the problem of firmware updates.
I understand firmware needs to complete or my device will brick, but I want to do the update on the AC adapter. I haven't run into a device that isn't happy to have the AC for a firmware update before. I did notice it doesn't need to be full. It was happy at the 70% or so my new batter was when I opened it.
Sony has lost a lot of credibility in my eyes due to recent experiences.
I bought a PS3 a few months ago, and it's quite a nice machine... but it has some really odd decisions. You have to have the system on to charge the controllers by plugging them into the system. If you plug them into your laptop instead, they seem to unregister with the system and you have to pair them back up.
Then I decided to buy a game from PSN. I needed the latest firmware, which took a few minutes to download and a few minutes to install. Then I downloaded the game, which would only transfer at about 1.5Mbps, since Sony's servers are slow. Then the game had to install. All told it took 2.5 hours to play, mostly because of the slow download.
Then I saw a game on sale for my PSP that I wanted to play. Patapon 2, only a download. So I went and bought a memory stick for my PSP to hold the game (since my model was from when all games were on discs and they only gave 32MB memory sticks). So I download the new firmware, try to install it... nope. The battery has to be charged.
My battery didn't charge, it's dead because it's 5 years old and never used. Having the system plugged into the wall isn't enough, you have to have a charged battery too.
So I had to buy a new battery. Then I got the firmware installed, downloaded the 250MB game in about a half hour, then it installed for 5 minutes. Now I can finally play it.
These are not ideal customer experiences. I understand the new firmware requirement (especially on my PSP which was about 3 years behind). But my 360 seems to handle the process much better, and downloads games at the fastest speed my internet connection supports. My DS Lite is 3+ years old, can sit on the shelf for months and months and yet the battery will still take a charge.
Sony never had smoothest interfaces, but things haven't always been this bad.
In wireless there is enough competition, the barriers of entry are much lower, anybody with some money can buy/rent a few pieces of land and install their own cell towers.
I was going to moderate in this discussion. Forget it.
How is there enough competition? Is that why text message prices have gone up, despite costs to send them going down? Is that why AT&T has been spending less on their (famously bad) network lately, despite traffic being up at least 40%? Does that sound like something you do when you're in tight competition?
And what's this low barriers to entry stuff? Putting up cell towers is expensive as hell, and it's hard to get the land to put towers up (which is one reason it's hard to cover cities). Then you have to have a spectrum license, phones that work with your chunk of spectrum, backhaul.... And no one is going to sign up with a carrier that only has 2 or 3 towers.
Or are you talking about being an MVNO? Because those, even those that were arms of the big guys, have done so well over the last few years. The only carrier that seems to have entered the market recently is Wal*Mart, who is an MVNO (they don't have their own towers), and they have hundreds of billions they can spend to do it.
So if a company builds network infrastructure by itself without any help from any government, shouldn't it be able to sell a service with a contract that explicitly discriminates against anything they wish?
It's a legal contract, the government should stay out of it. But that's not the situation. We have 2-4 big companies, who move in concert (text message price raises are an example) and use their resources to keep new players out of the market (contracts, spectrum license auctions are bid up, etc). They have an oligopoly which they actively try to keep in place to stifle competition.
The government should keep it's hands off the free market. But wireless and consumer internet access are no where near free markets for the vast majority of people, so it's the government's job to come in and protect citizens. Sometimes an industry or market needs a kick in the rear to get it moving. Sometimes that comes from inside (foreign cars during the oil crisis pushed the direction of Detroit), and sometimes it has to come from outside (the AT&T breakup).
Ah, but each individual item is marked with the discount that applies to it, so that's OK. Now if they were all marked "up to 50% off" but you didn't find out what the discount was until after you'd bought it, that would be a problem.
No, my point with that was that since most American's don't really have a choice of provider, the market can't fix this since at best you can switch to someone else who is lying to you in the same way.
If I sold toilet bowl cleaner tablets that hang in the tank, and say they are good for "up to 1000 flushes", would it be OK if they worked for only 500 flushes for the majority of people, and the rated amount for less than 5%? No one would accept that.
When other industries advertise something (the weight in a bag of food, or of some raw material) they are advertising mean, and they have a lot of quality control to keep close to that number. Too much and they lose money, too little and people stop buying or they get sued for false advertising.
But that doesn't happen in broadband. They think it's OK for the speed to be way less than the rated, but it is almost never higher (let alone by 50%). But I have two choices right now. I have DSL that maxes out at 6mbps, and cable that is supposed to go to 24mbps. But if the top cable tier delivers 8, what am I supposed to do? It's the fastest available.
When bags of concrete mix turn out to be light, contractors stop buying because they are being ripped off and can buy another brand. The free market works there. Broadband has so little competition in most places (the majority of americans only have 2 choices, many only have one) that the options are usually "pay and suck up the false advertising" or "have no broadband at all".
They aren't selling 24 and delivering 21, they are selling 24 and delivering 12. That's not a "not always quite there", that's "complete exaggeration."
Do you think Doritos would be allowed to sell bags as "up to a pound" when they averaged 9oz and some had quite a bit less? The big problem is it's one way. When you are promised Xmbps, you get some number, Y, where Y<= X. I would be amazed if more than 1% of the broadband population got higher than their rated speed. If it was a real normal distribution, or when you called to sign up they told you "you can expect to get X most of the time".
But my parents have 12 or 15mbps cable internet. During normal hours (even early afternoon) it is almost never faster than about 8mbps, and that's with multiple downloads coming from what I assume to be a CDN, because most sites aren't anywhere near that. Over the last 5-6 years, the top speed you could reach on their cable line has dropped as more people have signed on, but the advertised speed (and the price) have both increased. They have a medium package since there is no point trying to get more on an oversubscribed line.
I, on the other hand, pay for 6mbps DSL, and get almost exactly 6. I like getting what I pay for, and if I could only get 3, I'd pay for that service level.
If your "up to" only applies to 5% of your customers, you're scamming them. If it was 30%, I think we'd all be a lot more forgiving.
That's the problem the students have. My reading has it going like this:
4+3+2=()+2
OK, I'll add those
9=()+2
OK, the answer to the first part was 9, so put that in the blank in part B
(9)+2
Now I can get an answer
9+2=11
The answer is 11
They're taking the blank as a "fill in the answer from the previous part", working the equation from left to right, instead of understanding that the right side is related to the left, and not "part B" of the problem.
This makes perfect sense to me. Helping my little sister with her homework just a few years ago, I would manipulate equations (like moving something to the other side or dividing both sides by two) and she would say you couldn't do that, so I'd have to tell her you could and then give examples that show it was correct. Her teacher didn't get the point that the equation is a whole across, she saw it as two separate things with a symbol in between. But she could usually get the right answers by memorizing the 3 or 4 steps for solving that kind of problem the teacher gave her. But if the problem has a trick in it or isn't formatted right... the students don't know what to do and intuit (incorrectly) how they are supposed to do it.
Don't forget, the Concord was '70s technology. Even 90s technology could have done better.
The thing wasn't cheap, but there was no other option on Earth. There simply wasn't (and isn't) a way to get between NY and London faster. You can't buy a supersonic jet, and the military won't let you borrow one.
Call me back when they fix the depth of field issue. The whole scene needs to be in focus so that when my eyes aren't looking at precisely what the director wants, my eyes don't try to focus on something that can't be focused on.
Then Ebert is really against 3D because of how much darker the picture is, when normal movies are already projected too darkly half the time.
At this point, it still seems to be a gimmick. I remember reading that 3D ticket sales had fallen from 85% (or so) of ticket sales in some of the earlier 3D movies this year to ~40%. Clearly, people are realizing that it's usually a scam for an extra $5 from you.
Cameron worked on it for 10+ years. Nolan explicitly fought against making Inception 3D because he didn't think it would work. There is no way the no-name director of American Pie 7: Bagpipe Retreat is going to do 3D well.
Good point. I'd assume that to be able to hook into page rendering and pulling multiple pages it would have to be in webkit, but I suppose it could be some sort of layer in Safari its self, using all the various webkit notification callbacks.
It's a great feature in Safari, and I'd imagine that having something like it would make the Kindle browser much better for reading articles on the web.
I don't follow that. The Kindle is a reading device. They took an update from Safari that makes reading web pages easier. They improved it's reading abilities. That doesn't make it a more general purpose tablet.
If they add a touch screen, that will make it more of a "tablet in training". Refining a feature that was already there? Seems like a stretch.
That said, those new cheaper Kindles look really enticing, and the fact they have this mode only makes it more interesting.
Why is your right to acquire something more important than his right to control his creation?
While someone's right to their own creation is pretty well established (after all, that's the purpose of copyright), where does the idea that people should have to either sell you something or let you take it come from?
It seems like just because something isn't physical (has no marginal cost), people argue that a creator's rights don't apply.
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I'm thinking of sites like my company runs. Users have accounts, but some users signed up through Facebook connect. Though they have full accounts and can log in with their email address and a password they setup, I would expect many would only try to login through Facebook.
This isn't a huge problem for us (only a small percentage of our users sign up this way right now), but what if your site got a huge chunk of your signups that way. You could be cut off from 1/3 or 1/2 your user base while something like this is going on. Imagine what that could do to an e-commerce site.
And you have no control over it. FB is back up, but they could be down for 2 days and there wouldn't be much you could do. If my commercial ISP is down for 2 days, I have a recourse. If FB goes down... the money I lost is just gone.
Basically, FB is almost a single point of failure for some sites because of all the FB integration they offer. It annoys me, and this is one of the reasons. But the people who push "we need FB integration" usually don't consider this kind of thing. I'd imagine a lot of people got a rude surprise today when their sites started to feel slow as heck because of the like button iframes.
Well, for one thing it's a mistake by a big technology company, one that we generally like to hate. That's either interesting (because they try very hard to prevent such things with redundancy), or funny (because we don't like them). That makes it post-worthy.
But even if you don't use FB, you were probably effected. Those little FB Like buttons have been spreading around like a contagious pox, but they're built on iframes and javascript. That meant that when FB went down, all the sites with those dynamic little buttons had a page element that basically had to time out to finish rendering. If you put the button at the top of your page, your other javascript may not run until the FB JS either ran or timed out.
Net effect? FB going down slowed down a lot of other sites.
Introducing external dependencies you don't control on top of your business critical process can work out so well for people. I'm sure this kind of thing was considered by everyone during the recent "Let's add a like button" craze.
Don't forget sites where many of their users only login through Facebook Connect. That entire chunk of their user population may have been cut off during the outage.
I always heard they did that not to cut costs, but to put the sales people who came in off their game, to make them uncomfortable and break their confidence, so Walmart could negotiate a better deal easily.
The one at my local store works pretty well, but I'm almost positive it's been tuned in the year+ its been deployed.
It's still not terribly smart. If you take an item out of a bag (or remove the bag), it will complain. If you put it back, it will shut up. If you immediately take it out again... it does nothing and happily accepts it.
It's convenient, but I hate the things on principal. My store used to have 8 lanes, which could all be staffed at busy times, with 2 or 3 lines staffed at nearly all times. Now there are 3 normal lanes and 2 self checkout lanes (2 machines in each lane).
Before, I could go in basically any time of the year and almost never see a line more than 2 carts deep. Now, thanks to the self checkouts (one of which seems to be malfunctioning about 10% of the time), I've seen lines 4 deep on weeknights, not even holidays.
They're not as fast as the machines the checkout people use. They turn my shopping experience from something the store controls to a piece of software. They've increased the lines.
While they do work well when you're buying a handful of things, for any real amount of groceries they can be terrible. So when lots of people need to buy a lot... everything gets backed up.
If you use a 3rd party client, they can't show you as many ads.
Thus, it's in their best interest if they can get you to use the site when you want to look at a quick update, or at least to try to prevent new users from moving onto other clients.
Well one of the problems with powerlines is that you need high power to get the signal the distances you want, the lines are lossy because they weren't designed for the frequencies, and the fact they are just long pieces of wire makes them ideal antennas.
If you're only broadcasting to your house, the power could be a lot lower. The fact that the "antennas" are smaller, turn more, and inside walls would help some too.
The main thing to note (based on what I read of this study) is that it doesn't make you better at making decisions, it makes you faster (without loss of quality).
Basically, video games have the same effect as a job that forces you to make lots of decisions really fast. It just exercises the "make decisions" part of the brain, where as reading or watching TV or painting a wall probably doesn't.
Actually, I would expect this to almost be used as proof against violent games. After all, violent games make people violent (an accepted truth by those making these kinds of claims), and video games make you faster at making decisions (this study)... so ergo video games make people violently snap and kill people faster than normal people.
You can easily get a TiVo HD (maybe refurbished) for that much. Dual HD tuners, supports Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and more. You get the DVR function which is big.
A used PS3 would cost less than that, you'd get the BluRay/Netflix/Playstation Store/games.
I think the Roku was, at $100, a great price point. If I hadn't had my TiVo (which could do NetFlix) I would have happily bought one to watch NetFlix on my TV. Since they've dropped the price, it's even better now. The Apple TV is $100 now too. And even though both aren't the normal component shape, they're both small and can stack on top of things, making them easy to fit somewhere.
If Twitter would just let you attach a URL to each tweet as metadata (like the user name or time it was sent), no one would need any of these stupid URL shortening services. Think! URLs that would work next year when 3 of those services disappear.
I know Twitter was designed with the limitations of SMS in mind, but most recent phones seem to support longer multi-part SMS messages, and most people seem to use a twitter client on their phone now instead of the SMS gateway.
Fix the root problem, don't apply another band-aid. By making all the links go through Twitter as a passthrough, they could get this marketing data they want.
Really? I read that line as a worry of a massive unexpected cost. If you can automate a whole factory, and then the UPS guy says he gets injured on your premises, you can lose 20 million easy.
No one would run a factory that was, even with the supposed horrible conditions, in the US. The labor costs alone (even if you only paid minimum wage or less) would be staggering. You'd replace as many people as possible with robots to keep costs down.
But then someone decides to sue you for something ridiculous, and your legal bills are huge. You settle or spend years spending tons of defend it. Or maybe it's a real issue, but instead of the $30k for medical bills and more for pain and suffering, they get some some like $10 million that is completely out of line relative to their injury.
His view sounds rather sane to me. And the last pages of the article point out just how good Foxcon is compared to many other Chinese employers. Conditions there don't sound anywhere near as bad as some of the stuff that when on in the US during the industrial revolution.
I would think that would drain its little battery pretty fast.
If it's wrong to put data outside of partitioned space, what are these user spaces apps doing writing there? I can see a pretty good case for boot loaders doing this (the comment below about the 4 partition limit is one). Why is a copyright/licensing program writing there (which is what Flexnet seems to be)?
What's to prevent one of these programs from overwriting the data another makes? How would you like it if every time you ran NewSuperGameWithDRM, Photoshop lost it's license and forced you to phone home to reconfirm it?
It's not a troll, and it's not a copy and paste. I wrote "Then I saw a game on sale for my PSP that I wanted to play", and that's what happened. When Patapon 2 came out, I didn't bother, and hadn't gotten around to playing it. The price drop to $8 was on the Playstation blog) on the 16th as a "Back to School" deal.
My PS3 controller seems to pair with my MacBook Pro 2010 when I plug it in, or at least lose it's PS3 pairing. It's perfectly reproducible for me.
My internet connection is a 6Mbps (see later in the post) DSL line. That was my experience, and Ars Technica had a simmilar experience with slow download speeds and the problem of firmware updates.
I understand firmware needs to complete or my device will brick, but I want to do the update on the AC adapter. I haven't run into a device that isn't happy to have the AC for a firmware update before. I did notice it doesn't need to be full. It was happy at the 70% or so my new batter was when I opened it.
Sony has lost a lot of credibility in my eyes due to recent experiences.
I bought a PS3 a few months ago, and it's quite a nice machine... but it has some really odd decisions. You have to have the system on to charge the controllers by plugging them into the system. If you plug them into your laptop instead, they seem to unregister with the system and you have to pair them back up.
Then I decided to buy a game from PSN. I needed the latest firmware, which took a few minutes to download and a few minutes to install. Then I downloaded the game, which would only transfer at about 1.5Mbps, since Sony's servers are slow. Then the game had to install. All told it took 2.5 hours to play, mostly because of the slow download.
Then I saw a game on sale for my PSP that I wanted to play. Patapon 2, only a download. So I went and bought a memory stick for my PSP to hold the game (since my model was from when all games were on discs and they only gave 32MB memory sticks). So I download the new firmware, try to install it... nope. The battery has to be charged.
My battery didn't charge, it's dead because it's 5 years old and never used. Having the system plugged into the wall isn't enough, you have to have a charged battery too.
So I had to buy a new battery. Then I got the firmware installed, downloaded the 250MB game in about a half hour, then it installed for 5 minutes. Now I can finally play it.
These are not ideal customer experiences. I understand the new firmware requirement (especially on my PSP which was about 3 years behind). But my 360 seems to handle the process much better, and downloads games at the fastest speed my internet connection supports. My DS Lite is 3+ years old, can sit on the shelf for months and months and yet the battery will still take a charge.
Sony never had smoothest interfaces, but things haven't always been this bad.
I was going to moderate in this discussion. Forget it.
How is there enough competition? Is that why text message prices have gone up, despite costs to send them going down? Is that why AT&T has been spending less on their (famously bad) network lately, despite traffic being up at least 40%? Does that sound like something you do when you're in tight competition?
And what's this low barriers to entry stuff? Putting up cell towers is expensive as hell, and it's hard to get the land to put towers up (which is one reason it's hard to cover cities). Then you have to have a spectrum license, phones that work with your chunk of spectrum, backhaul.... And no one is going to sign up with a carrier that only has 2 or 3 towers.
Or are you talking about being an MVNO? Because those, even those that were arms of the big guys, have done so well over the last few years. The only carrier that seems to have entered the market recently is Wal*Mart, who is an MVNO (they don't have their own towers), and they have hundreds of billions they can spend to do it.
It's a legal contract, the government should stay out of it. But that's not the situation. We have 2-4 big companies, who move in concert (text message price raises are an example) and use their resources to keep new players out of the market (contracts, spectrum license auctions are bid up, etc). They have an oligopoly which they actively try to keep in place to stifle competition.
The government should keep it's hands off the free market. But wireless and consumer internet access are no where near free markets for the vast majority of people, so it's the government's job to come in and protect citizens. Sometimes an industry or market needs a kick in the rear to get it moving. Sometimes that comes from inside (foreign cars during the oil crisis pushed the direction of Detroit), and sometimes it has to come from outside (the AT&T breakup).
Ah, but each individual item is marked with the discount that applies to it, so that's OK. Now if they were all marked "up to 50% off" but you didn't find out what the discount was until after you'd bought it, that would be a problem.
And that's very similar to what's going on here.
No, my point with that was that since most American's don't really have a choice of provider, the market can't fix this since at best you can switch to someone else who is lying to you in the same way.
If I sold toilet bowl cleaner tablets that hang in the tank, and say they are good for "up to 1000 flushes", would it be OK if they worked for only 500 flushes for the majority of people, and the rated amount for less than 5%? No one would accept that.
When other industries advertise something (the weight in a bag of food, or of some raw material) they are advertising mean, and they have a lot of quality control to keep close to that number. Too much and they lose money, too little and people stop buying or they get sued for false advertising.
But that doesn't happen in broadband. They think it's OK for the speed to be way less than the rated, but it is almost never higher (let alone by 50%). But I have two choices right now. I have DSL that maxes out at 6mbps, and cable that is supposed to go to 24mbps. But if the top cable tier delivers 8, what am I supposed to do? It's the fastest available.
When bags of concrete mix turn out to be light, contractors stop buying because they are being ripped off and can buy another brand. The free market works there. Broadband has so little competition in most places (the majority of americans only have 2 choices, many only have one) that the options are usually "pay and suck up the false advertising" or "have no broadband at all".
They aren't selling 24 and delivering 21, they are selling 24 and delivering 12. That's not a "not always quite there", that's "complete exaggeration."
Do you think Doritos would be allowed to sell bags as "up to a pound" when they averaged 9oz and some had quite a bit less? The big problem is it's one way. When you are promised Xmbps, you get some number, Y, where Y<= X. I would be amazed if more than 1% of the broadband population got higher than their rated speed. If it was a real normal distribution, or when you called to sign up they told you "you can expect to get X most of the time".
But my parents have 12 or 15mbps cable internet. During normal hours (even early afternoon) it is almost never faster than about 8mbps, and that's with multiple downloads coming from what I assume to be a CDN, because most sites aren't anywhere near that. Over the last 5-6 years, the top speed you could reach on their cable line has dropped as more people have signed on, but the advertised speed (and the price) have both increased. They have a medium package since there is no point trying to get more on an oversubscribed line.
I, on the other hand, pay for 6mbps DSL, and get almost exactly 6. I like getting what I pay for, and if I could only get 3, I'd pay for that service level.
If your "up to" only applies to 5% of your customers, you're scamming them. If it was 30%, I think we'd all be a lot more forgiving.
That's the problem the students have. My reading has it going like this:
They're taking the blank as a "fill in the answer from the previous part", working the equation from left to right, instead of understanding that the right side is related to the left, and not "part B" of the problem.
This makes perfect sense to me. Helping my little sister with her homework just a few years ago, I would manipulate equations (like moving something to the other side or dividing both sides by two) and she would say you couldn't do that, so I'd have to tell her you could and then give examples that show it was correct. Her teacher didn't get the point that the equation is a whole across, she saw it as two separate things with a symbol in between. But she could usually get the right answers by memorizing the 3 or 4 steps for solving that kind of problem the teacher gave her. But if the problem has a trick in it or isn't formatted right... the students don't know what to do and intuit (incorrectly) how they are supposed to do it.
Don't forget, the Concord was '70s technology. Even 90s technology could have done better.
The thing wasn't cheap, but there was no other option on Earth. There simply wasn't (and isn't) a way to get between NY and London faster. You can't buy a supersonic jet, and the military won't let you borrow one.
Call me back when they fix the depth of field issue. The whole scene needs to be in focus so that when my eyes aren't looking at precisely what the director wants, my eyes don't try to focus on something that can't be focused on.
Then Ebert is really against 3D because of how much darker the picture is, when normal movies are already projected too darkly half the time.
At this point, it still seems to be a gimmick. I remember reading that 3D ticket sales had fallen from 85% (or so) of ticket sales in some of the earlier 3D movies this year to ~40%. Clearly, people are realizing that it's usually a scam for an extra $5 from you.
Cameron worked on it for 10+ years. Nolan explicitly fought against making Inception 3D because he didn't think it would work. There is no way the no-name director of American Pie 7: Bagpipe Retreat is going to do 3D well.
Good point. I'd assume that to be able to hook into page rendering and pulling multiple pages it would have to be in webkit, but I suppose it could be some sort of layer in Safari its self, using all the various webkit notification callbacks.
It's a great feature in Safari, and I'd imagine that having something like it would make the Kindle browser much better for reading articles on the web.
I don't follow that. The Kindle is a reading device. They took an update from Safari that makes reading web pages easier. They improved it's reading abilities. That doesn't make it a more general purpose tablet.
If they add a touch screen, that will make it more of a "tablet in training". Refining a feature that was already there? Seems like a stretch.
That said, those new cheaper Kindles look really enticing, and the fact they have this mode only makes it more interesting.
Why is your right to acquire something more important than his right to control his creation?
While someone's right to their own creation is pretty well established (after all, that's the purpose of copyright), where does the idea that people should have to either sell you something or let you take it come from?
It seems like just because something isn't physical (has no marginal cost), people argue that a creator's rights don't apply.