If this is to make a significant impact in the area, more businesses need to follow suit.
Unless you're a West Seattle resident, chances are you never shop at this Thriftway. People I know in Belltown, Capitol Hill, Fremont, and near UW all either go for the small co-op grocery stores, Whole Foods, or the commercial Safeways and QFCs.
I think the technology is a great convenience for the consumer, but why should it be limited to one store in a not-so-often-visited part of town? I've lived in Seattle for nearly a year now and I didn't even know about this Thriftway.:)
It's all about profitability for SONICblue, and they're counting on long-term customers who feel better about spreading out the cost of the service versus paying up front for a lifetime subscription.
Assuming a lower cost barrier to entry and an ease of unsubscribing with no penalties, it benefits consumers to buy into this model. Consider a better, newer, faster, cheaper technology coming out in 1 year. If the consumer has paid less for the Replay 4500 + 1 year subscription than they would have invested with a lifetime-subscription Replay, they have more incentive to break away and invest in the new technology.
SONICblue's home is that they are the ones making that better-faster-cheaper technology and roping in existing subscribers to it. They may be too slow, however, as they'll also be concerned with sustaining their Replay business as well.
I predict a fleet-footed R&D-focused company will edge them out in 1-2 years on this subscription model.
The law does care about gaining unauthorized access into machines. Customers, assuming they read every word of the license agreement, are made aware of what a program potentially does and can opt not to install it.
Not to defend spyware makers, but they're more "within the law" than a hacker is.
What about installing Adaware afterwards?
on
Spyware Fights Back
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· Score: 2
Can't users who want Radlight install Adaware afterwards? The story mentions Radlight checks for and uninstalls Adaware files on its first run. I assume it doesn't do the check everytime it runs - if so, isn't a post-install an easy workaround?
Books are cheap: dropping a book into the bathtub is annoying, but its not going to put you out a few hundred dollars.
Same with a paper organizer, but millions have opted for a PDA. The reason is power and flexibility - there's a point where the rising benefits of the high-tech solution outweigh the costs associated.
I think e-books have a while to go before this turning point is reached, but it'll happen.
(yes, mod me down, I hit submit too soon...I'm a loser).
To finish my thought: Is Google really planning on opening themselves up to the perf hit of a potentially huge amount of traffic against its web service? I imagine the resources needed to balance the demand could grow pretty quickly (while maintaining their current, excellent perf). Even if they charge money to use the service, it opens up their perf analyses to various external agents, some of which they only have partial control of.
Carriers set phones' SIDs and MDNs so that they work with only one provider (AT&T, for example). They add encryption on top of that so that it's hard to reprogram a phone. Carriers are currently regulated only in terms of tariffs on the service (i.e. federal tax), not on the handset-to-service binding. The latter is unregulated, hence this filing with the district court.
If "user agnosticism" were as prevalent as your Meyer quote leads us to believe, then we would be stuck in the proverbial Stone Age when it comes to current UI design standards for client and web applications.
While I agree that the starting point for a UI design does involve making few to no assumptions, this must be pared down to target "personas" (to borrow from Alan Cooper). Without target end-users, your UI design will be either: a) too broad with no depth where users need such things as inductive UI, iconography, or blackboxing of features b) too deep in certain areas that users won't care about, and too shallow in other areas that users do care about
It's important to define a market or user base, and then go out and show them prototypes of your design and/or study them in the lab. Without F2F, lab, beta, or other forms of feedback from users that you think will use your product, you stand a high chance of developing a user interface that meets few to none of your users' goals.
A well-known corollary of Parkinson's Law says that data, like everything else, always expands to fill the volume allotted to it.
I don't think this extends to distributed computing; I hardly think the collective drivespace of the WWW has been filled to the brim. Even a few percent free space per drive per server equates to huge amounts of unfilled sectors.
It's relative. Some parents don't want their kids looking at pictures of naked breasts, period, despite being a potentially educational site about how to perform self breast exams, what to do if you feel a lump, etc.
What I don't want to see is argument over what is and isn't.prn based on arbitrary opinions. I prefer the porn filter to fall on the user's head, not the taxonomist's.
This reminds me of the recent story of libraries filtering adult content (or not, as the case may be). How does one really determine if something belongs as a.prn versus a.org?
If I show pictures of breasts, am I.prn automagically? What if I run a site on breast cancer? Am I automatically.org?
IBM has been innovating in the disk drive market for years, but it's important to note they've been innovating a sustaining technology. They haven't been as fleet-footed about leading the industry in alternative modes of storage, opting rather to make incremental improvements on a decades-old technology.
I think IBM has seen the industry getting undercut by small co's who are focusing away from the desktop/server market and onto other devices for their storage needs. Given these are still small (but emerging) markets, it's really tough for a company to wait & see what happens and THEN innovate on top.
I think IBM learned their lesson in this scenario from the disk drive wars circa 20 years ago, and they don't want to waste more investments of time and money into an ever-decreasing-margin business.
Quit. Quit now. Don't you realize you're wasting your time, the time of your colleagues, the time of your professors, and the time of your future coworkers or researchers?
There is a wealth of knowledge to pick up from a CS degree. Go and talk to a Ph.D student tomorrow and see what s/he is working on. Sign up to help out with their dissertation. Talk to their advisor and see what papers s/he has published.
I bet you that you'll be humbled, and if you care a bit about your field of choice, I bet you may be a bit more interested, too.
The simple response to your argument is that, well, college ain't the real world. In the real world, you're not surrounded by dozens to hundreds of people who are expected to independently solve the exact same problem. In college, you are.
Ahem...welcome to the supercompetitive landscape that is technology. Sure, there may not be hundreds of folks doing the same thing as you, but in a competitive marketplace there's surely at least a handful of competitors trying to make a better Widget(tm) than you?
There's a hell of a lot of difference between 12 people coding the same thing for a class and 12 companies making the same piece of software. Ironically, however, there's a lot of similarity as well.
I believe you're missing the true value of a CS degree if you feel you're not learning anything. While I agree over half of a CS bachelor's is about crisis and time management, working in groups, etc., there's some valuable theory, research, and academic exposure that you can't get from reading Sipser in the off-hours (sorry MIT folks.;) ).
Yes. It works. Let me clarify. It works in organizations where almost everyone can pull their weight. I'm sorry to hear you haven't had the priviledge of being a part of these organizations.
I was there. I graduated about a year ago. I TA'ed for CS1312 and its many other prior names. I can tell you, at least from what I saw, that this guy probably did more than just "talk to his roommate" to be charged with cheating (at least per protocol that I saw before I graduated).
The barrier to entry is high. Do you think ExxonMobil, BPAmoco, etc. can justify spending billions on exploring hydrogen stores to their shareholders? That on top of there not being a worldwide market for such high consumption rates that they would (eventually) yield.
...I'm sure the checkout lady won't mind you holding up a drinking glass to the Thriftway fingerprint reader.
If this is to make a significant impact in the area, more businesses need to follow suit.
:)
Unless you're a West Seattle resident, chances are you never shop at this Thriftway. People I know in Belltown, Capitol Hill, Fremont, and near UW all either go for the small co-op grocery stores, Whole Foods, or the commercial Safeways and QFCs.
I think the technology is a great convenience for the consumer, but why should it be limited to one store in a not-so-often-visited part of town? I've lived in Seattle for nearly a year now and I didn't even know about this Thriftway.
It's all about profitability for SONICblue, and they're counting on long-term customers who feel better about spreading out the cost of the service versus paying up front for a lifetime subscription.
Assuming a lower cost barrier to entry and an ease of unsubscribing with no penalties, it benefits consumers to buy into this model. Consider a better, newer, faster, cheaper technology coming out in 1 year. If the consumer has paid less for the Replay 4500 + 1 year subscription than they would have invested with a lifetime-subscription Replay, they have more incentive to break away and invest in the new technology.
SONICblue's home is that they are the ones making that better-faster-cheaper technology and roping in existing subscribers to it. They may be too slow, however, as they'll also be concerned with sustaining their Replay business as well.
I predict a fleet-footed R&D-focused company will edge them out in 1-2 years on this subscription model.
The law does care about gaining unauthorized access into machines. Customers, assuming they read every word of the license agreement, are made aware of what a program potentially does and can opt not to install it.
Not to defend spyware makers, but they're more "within the law" than a hacker is.
Can't users who want Radlight install Adaware afterwards? The story mentions Radlight checks for and uninstalls Adaware files on its first run. I assume it doesn't do the check everytime it runs - if so, isn't a post-install an easy workaround?
Books are cheap: dropping a book into the bathtub is annoying, but its not going to put you out a few hundred dollars.
Same with a paper organizer, but millions have opted for a PDA. The reason is power and flexibility - there's a point where the rising benefits of the high-tech solution outweigh the costs associated.
I think e-books have a while to go before this turning point is reached, but it'll happen.
(yes, mod me down, I hit submit too soon...I'm a loser).
To finish my thought: Is Google really planning on opening themselves up to the perf hit of a potentially huge amount of traffic against its web service? I imagine the resources needed to balance the demand could grow pretty quickly (while maintaining their current, excellent perf). Even if they charge money to use the service, it opens up their perf analyses to various external agents, some of which they only have partial control of.
One of the huge wins of Google in my mind is its roundtrip speed for returning search results.
Carriers set phones' SIDs and MDNs so that they work with only one provider (AT&T, for example). They add encryption on top of that so that it's hard to reprogram a phone. Carriers are currently regulated only in terms of tariffs on the service (i.e. federal tax), not on the handset-to-service binding. The latter is unregulated, hence this filing with the district court.
If "user agnosticism" were as prevalent as your Meyer quote leads us to believe, then we would be stuck in the proverbial Stone Age when it comes to current UI design standards for client and web applications.
While I agree that the starting point for a UI design does involve making few to no assumptions, this must be pared down to target "personas" (to borrow from Alan Cooper). Without target end-users, your UI design will be either:
a) too broad with no depth where users need such things as inductive UI, iconography, or blackboxing of features
b) too deep in certain areas that users won't care about, and too shallow in other areas that users do care about
It's important to define a market or user base, and then go out and show them prototypes of your design and/or study them in the lab. Without F2F, lab, beta, or other forms of feedback from users that you think will use your product, you stand a high chance of developing a user interface that meets few to none of your users' goals.
A well-known corollary of Parkinson's Law says that data, like everything else, always expands to fill the volume allotted to it.
I don't think this extends to distributed computing; I hardly think the collective drivespace of the WWW has been filled to the brim. Even a few percent free space per drive per server equates to huge amounts of unfilled sectors.
It's relative. Some parents don't want their kids looking at pictures of naked breasts, period, despite being a potentially educational site about how to perform self breast exams, what to do if you feel a lump, etc.
.prn based on arbitrary opinions. I prefer the porn filter to fall on the user's head, not the taxonomist's.
What I don't want to see is argument over what is and isn't
This reminds me of the recent story of libraries filtering adult content (or not, as the case may be). How does one really determine if something belongs as a .prn versus a .org?
.prn automagically? What if I run a site on breast cancer? Am I automatically .org?
If I show pictures of breasts, am I
I'm fairly sure the state's representatives signed on the dotted line, not Logicon, Inc.
IBM has been innovating in the disk drive market for years, but it's important to note they've been innovating a sustaining technology. They haven't been as fleet-footed about leading the industry in alternative modes of storage, opting rather to make incremental improvements on a decades-old technology.
I think IBM has seen the industry getting undercut by small co's who are focusing away from the desktop/server market and onto other devices for their storage needs. Given these are still small (but emerging) markets, it's really tough for a company to wait & see what happens and THEN innovate on top.
I think IBM learned their lesson in this scenario from the disk drive wars circa 20 years ago, and they don't want to waste more investments of time and money into an ever-decreasing-margin business.
This is sad, especially considering that multiple usability studies have shown young folks dig flashing colors and animations in web ads.
Talk about an early indocrination...
I bet that helped out a lot for those CS Theory Master's students... ;)
Quit. Quit now. Don't you realize you're wasting your time, the time of your colleagues, the time of your professors, and the time of your future coworkers or researchers?
There is a wealth of knowledge to pick up from a CS degree. Go and talk to a Ph.D student tomorrow and see what s/he is working on. Sign up to help out with their dissertation. Talk to their advisor and see what papers s/he has published.
I bet you that you'll be humbled, and if you care a bit about your field of choice, I bet you may be a bit more interested, too.
The simple response to your argument is that, well, college ain't the real world. In the real world, you're not surrounded by dozens to hundreds of people who are expected to independently solve the exact same problem. In college, you are.
Ahem...welcome to the supercompetitive landscape that is technology. Sure, there may not be hundreds of folks doing the same thing as you, but in a competitive marketplace there's surely at least a handful of competitors trying to make a better Widget(tm) than you?
There's a hell of a lot of difference between 12 people coding the same thing for a class and 12 companies making the same piece of software. Ironically, however, there's a lot of similarity as well.
I believe you're missing the true value of a CS degree if you feel you're not learning anything. While I agree over half of a CS bachelor's is about crisis and time management, working in groups, etc., there's some valuable theory, research, and academic exposure that you can't get from reading Sipser in the off-hours (sorry MIT folks. ;) ).
Yes. It works.
Let me clarify. It works in organizations where almost everyone can pull their weight.
I'm sorry to hear you haven't had the priviledge of being a part of these organizations.
I was there. I graduated about a year ago. I TA'ed for CS1312 and its many other prior names. I can tell you, at least from what I saw, that this guy probably did more than just "talk to his roommate" to be charged with cheating (at least per protocol that I saw before I graduated).
The barrier to entry is high. Do you think ExxonMobil, BPAmoco, etc. can justify spending billions on exploring hydrogen stores to their shareholders? That on top of there not being a worldwide market for such high consumption rates that they would (eventually) yield.
If that's the case, try getting rid of that "Social Security number" associated with your name, credit, job, accounts, etc.
The article didn't mention it, so I thought I'd add it here. You can download the Shared Source CLI Beta from MSDN here.