If you're going to have a single answer that will compromise the security of all your accounts, then you're reduced to the same thing: why not just have the same thing as the password for all your accounts and remember THAT.
(obviously your proposal being dumb and my nick being cute are unrelated)
Hey - thanks for writing back. I am not an expert in QIF, but I am under the impression that it does not know how to do more than I account at a time (is that right?) So how does exporting via QIF handle the two sides of a transaction?
Really, I am very curious. I am into this stuff (as you can probably tell from my activity on this thread) and I am thinking of installing GnuCash on my Linux machine just to see what happens (I tried it about 2 years ago, it was AWFUL. Simply horrible) so any feeback re: the import are quite appreciated.
Hi - thanks for the response. You mentioned using QIF as the format for import. It sounds like exactly the way to get into trouble that I was talking about - ie the two sides of the transaction not matching up. I suppose that one way to look at it is that it doesn't really matter - who cares if your app captures all the info about some deposit you made in 2002. But it's just a reason not to switch that probably matters for a lot of people.
I am curious about the services you mentioned. how can i see more info?
I don't know if anyone from the GnuCash dev comunity reads this, but for what it's worth here's my big problem to trying it or any OpenSource finance package.
Even if these things start to be able to hold a candle to MS Money, there are lots of people (like me) who have years and years worth of data in Microsoft or Quicken. Unless we can port the data, we probably won't really give these things a proper try.
I would imagine that this is HARD to do. At least based on the fact that Quicken tried to make a program to make the porting easier but it sucked (it failed to match up transactions properly - ie that the -500 that left my checking account is the same +500 that arrived in my brokerage)
In my opinion, most people who would use these tools, are the kind of people who were using Quicken or MSM before GnuCash came along. To get us to switch, we need to be able to port our data in a simple and robust way.
One thing I have to say, HSBC's phone support is AWFUL (this is why I don't use their credit card). Any evening that I call, it's clearly routed to India and the guys don't know anything about banking.
Emigrant Direct is better. If their rates are the same, I'd go with Emigrant. Cuz otherwise if you need help, you're really stuck with HSBC's shitty support. And you can't go to a branch with questions re: the online savings.
BTW Emigrant Direct is the one I have a credit card from (via Juniper...) that pays 1.25% back as long as you have 10k in your account.
Re:And you thought physicists were boring
on
GnuCash 2.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Both HSBC Direct and EmigrantDirect are paying slightly over 5% currently. INGDirect which used to offer higher yields, is lower, at about 4.25% or so. Your bank is probably half that.
In general, Emigrant has been higher than Emigrant in the past. Now that HSBC is in the picture, they have consistently been at the top of the payoff, with Emigrant catching up quickly.
Either way, much better than your local bank. The first 100k of each account is FDIC insured. Transfers between any of these accounts and your bank take about 3 days. HSBC also gives you and ATM card.
Re:And you thought physicists were boring
on
GnuCash 2.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Sorry but you're silly. For... well.. many reasons.
Ok you have one account. Into which everything is deposited. With a debit card. So it sounds like you have a checking account. How much interest do you earn on that?
You spend less than you have. Great! But you have a 50% margin, which you could definately keep at a higher interest. Oh wait, no you can't because you only have one account.
Then, you don't believe in credit cards and online banking, but you do automatic withdrawals? IE you allow your utilities to take whatever they want from your account? Nice...
Here's a better system.
I have a checking account, a high-yield online money market, and a credit card. Everything that I spend during the month goes on the credit card, including utilities (cell, landline, DSL, etc.) My paycheck gets direct deposited into the checking account at the beginning of the month. My credit card is due on the 15h. That means:
In the beginning of the month, I have my credit card statement. I schedule a transfer from the checking account into the credit card. I pay whatever other things I need to pay, by check. The balance of the checking account (minus a few hundred bucks) goes into the high yield savings.
What's the benefit of this system?
1. Since intra-month spending goes on a credit card, I don't have to worry about leaving enough cash in the low-interest checking account.
2. Establishes good credit history. I have had a credit card for years, never missed a payment (and never paid it off in anything less than full). You?
3. It makes me money. In two ways: First, I earn higher interest on the balance of my savings, and second, my credit card pays me 1.25% back on everything I spend. So if I spend $1,000 a month (including all utilities, not unreasonable), I get 12 bucks back.
There's a few other things that my systems kicks ass about. But really, it doesn't take more effort than yours (infact it takes less, I don't have to keep phoning my bank to check my balance), it avoids worrying about overdrafting (the credit card limit is high enough), it allows my money to earn higher interest, it allows me to get cash back on my purchases, etc.
It doesn't matter how these things are assigned. If I run an ISP and I start running out of IPs I'll just go to a system where people share IPs. I don't lose any sleep at night because Ford has more addresses than I do.
Sorry to be a ludite but this is really not an issue. Greanted we're placing more devices on-line, but so what? If I need to telnet into my toaster, I can just have my router forward a particular toaster port to it. He doesn't NEED his own IP. Similarly, do all the 1000-plus apartments in my building need to have separate IPs? Why? Most people read e-mail and look at websites, they don't need to host anything. We can all be on a LAN with a single internet IP, just like resnet in college was. Why not? if somebody needs an IP they can have their service set up that way but most of us don't give a shit.
I know, I know, there are more people in the world than there are IP addresses or whatever, but so what? I'd say that billions of people don't have a shot at owning a PC in their life anyway. Those who do can probably share IPs too.
It's a made-up crisis. There's nothing wrong with IPv6 but there's absolutely no dire need for it.
Since we're on the subject of blog aggregation, can someone recomend a GOOD way to aggregate?
Every single RSS aggregator I've come across treats my RSS world similar to an e-mail reader, where each blog is a 'folder' and each entry is equivalent to an e-mail.
This is decidedly NOT what I want and I don't understand why everyone's writing the same thing.
My friend is running PLANET, which builds a frontpage out of the RSS feeds (looks kind of like the slasdot frontpage where adjacent stores come from different sources and are sorted in chronolocial order (newest on top)
PLANET seems to be a server-side implementation. My buddy's running Linux and he made a little page for me but it's not right for me to bug him every time I want to add a feed.
Is there anything like what I want that would run on Windows? And if not, why the heck not?
By the same token, why doesn't del.icio.us have any capacity to know when my links have been updated?
For what it's worth, here's my del.icio.us BLOGS area with some blogs I find good.
There was a similar thread a while ago and I think that the people who ask such questions are missing the point. The idea is: you want a phone which has good reception, good battery life, etc. I don't see why you'd MIND if a phone had all this plus extra features.
For example my Sanyo 4920 (and 4900 before that) has superb reception and battery life, yet it has all the other features too. I don't use the games and PCS vision features much but it doesn't bother me that it's there. Why should it bother you? I got the phone very cheaply considering the Sprint rebate, so it's not like I am paying a lot for features I don't want much.
Ok these are sprint phones, so they don't meet your GSM requirement, but my point is that you should look for a phone that has things you care about, not a phone that doesn't have things you may not care about. You'll have a much bigger variety to select from, then.
I always wonder what the hell that means? Earned the right to fail? Like he wasn't allowed to fail before? Exactly how much money was he supposed to make before he could buy his way into the club of mere mortals who are allowed to fail? Kind of a strange way to approach a creative ambition, I think. What mental process must go on in Lucas's head that he has to actually give himself permission to be creative, and justify it by pointing to his past commercial successes?
It means he can afford to make a movie that is not well recieved w/o it ending his career. If some unknown director is given a shot and he fails, he may never have a chance to try again. Lucas is comfortable knowing that he can make something which does not have popular appeal and still be able to come back and try again.
Maybe that's not what he means, but hey I prefer my simple interpretation to your lovely "Lucas is just sort of a sad, isolated, lonely, messed-up old fucker" conclusion.
I am not interested in e-mail as database, what would be really cool is mining e-mail for patterns.
I am not talking about "mentions viagra => probably spam" patterns.
I want to mine for correlations. For example maybe there's some patter between the time of the year and whom I talk to. Maybe in the spring I talk more to my ex's and in the fall to old college friends. I would not be conciously aware of that but it would be an interesting insight into a personality - why do I do that?
Is there a pattern between an e-mail I get from my boss to the tone I use in an e-mail to a family member right after. Maybe that would indicate some subconcious response to work.
Of course I have years worth of e-mail in Outlook folders. Hell, my mom defended herself against a lawsuit once by having saved e-mails from her old job. But besides just having it for refference (which of course is very useful but rather trivial) I want to seek patterns I am unaware of.
If you think about it, your e-mails probably have a more thorough history of you than a blog would, because you may tell one person some aspect of your business like and another person some aspect of your sex life, and you would not want either on a public blog, but years later it may be cool to glance back and have some meta representation of what was going on in your life.
Especially after the statute of limitations expires.
The taskbar's default position should be on the left-hand side of the screen, not the bottom. Here's why:
Obviously, whatever works for you is the way to go... but I don't believe your arguments are compelling:
1. Having the bar at the bottom uses up vertical space, esp. when it's two units high or more. Reading stuff on a screen requires much more vertical space than horizontal. Moving the bar to the side frees up vertical space and results in less scrolling.
Whenever you need to read something which requires vertical space, you will probably need to scroll pages anyway. You can easily do it with page down / spacebar / whatever. Also, you only have to do it whenever you reach the bottom of the page. So decreasing your vertical space a few pixels is not a huge deal. On the other hand, if by taking up horizontal space you force yourself to have to scroll sideways, that sucks - because you'd have to do it more frequently than every page.
2. You can fit WAY more quicklaunch buttons without affecting how much taskbar room you have for running programs. Quicklaunch buttons are a blessing and I can't live without em.
Because you start off with taking up much more screen real estate...
3. You also get way more room for the hooks for running programs that show on the taskbar (can't think of a better way to describe them). They stack vertically and you can fit dozens more than when the taskbar is horizontal.
Again, this generally means that you're taking up more area than you did otherwise.
I have a folder on my system which has subfolders with shortcuts. The folder is a quick-lunch on the taskbar. It has a little arrow on it, which then has all my shortcuts in it. It's like a mini-start button
This only helps. Google's advertizers realize that a certain percentage of clicks are from people who are looking for information and aren't out to buy anything. This knowledge is factored into a price they pay per referal.
If Google implements factual answers, they will potentially get a net increase in their traffic (since they will offer a feature other engines do not). So even if the number of advertiser clicks goes down, the ratio of those clicks being people genuinely interested in buying stuff vs. those who click on shopping sites while looking for info for a report (for example) rendering each click more valuable. This can enable them to charge more per click since they can guarantee better returns.
It could also be a purely defensive move, since other engines are providing serious competition. A while ago MSN reduced the number of paid ads they display. Obviously this is not out of some goodness of heart. It's because they realize that they can improve market share by giving people more of what they want and perhaps less of what brings MSN profit. Google is the same.
There's been a lot of condemnation of this, but it sounds OK to me. A lot of people who live in NJ (for example) commute to NYC to work. It's understood that they pay taxes.
They do not get to vote in NY, but they pay taxes because that's where they make the money. Everyone is OK with that.
If someone lived in NJ and only came into the office 1 day a weekm they still have to pay same NY taxes, because the fact that their employer kindly let them work from home doesn't change the fact that they work in NY. They don't pay 1/5th of NY's tax.
Instead of coming in once a week, this guy doesn't come in at all. But it's not so different than the guy who only comes in once a week. The employer lets him work from home, but he's an employer of a NY office. He works in NY.
Some mentioned the reasons why this must be the case. NYC makes ample investment to attract employers, and it's meant to make that money back in income taxes. The company this guy works for benefits from these advantages. If he's really offended at having to pay the tax in a state where he works (even if he doesn't show up) then he should find a job in-state so that he'll only have to pay one tax.
The fact that he doesn't use NY's resources is a non-issue. The fact that you don't use some service doesn't entitle you to a refund, and he's no different.
The flash demo shows a dependancy check. The screen shots show the dependancy screen with one "warning"-level issue (a dependancy that is recomended but not necessary)
But what happens if a dependancy is missing? Is the user stuck having to go find and install that thing first? Or does the thing try and fetch it?
The FAQs posted in the thread do not seem to answer that question. To me, it's the most important one. I don't have a problem typing 'rpm' on command line, I don't mind configure; make ; make install. Do do mind having to trace down every single dependancy that's either not on my system or on my system but needs a symlink to a different name before the install recognizes it.
So, does this AutoPackaging thingy have a way to deal with that?
If they were to write a page which had 20% on top vaguelly related to topic at hand, and the rest of it bile about some unrelated pet peeve, would that be 'delusional'?
We'd have wound up with a really hard to use word processor the also does calendaring, web browsing, e-mail composition, and a whole host of other things + Clippy.
Emacs does all those things too, sans (perhaps) Cllippy.
On the other hand, at least they'd be integrated in some sane fashion, rather than sucking as they do currently.
The goal of this was to prove that one should read all EULAs, so that one can see if an app is spyware if it is buried in the EULA."
Of the things I want to do the LEAST in my life, reading EULAs ranks pretty high among things which do not cause physical pain or summering to my loved ones.
Fuck reading it. I am more likely to look a prog up on CNET. If it had a lot of thumbs-down, I read those and see what people complain about. People always complain about spyware if its there (and sometimes even if its not)
Doing a google or deja search for name of the program and spyware always brings up some discussion of that topic, which lets me know conclusively (well, as far as something can be conclusive on an internet thread) what the answer is.
Reading the actual EULA? If I am a billion dollar company about to bind something with my product, yea I'll read it. But for something I am installing at home, behind a firewall which will prevent it from phoning home, FUCK IT! Who cares what they wrote?
Folks, we may be missing the point here. As far as I can tell, there is only one legit point of view on this.
Either you percieve popups to be totally evil, and you religiously avoid any sites that use them, or you accept that you need content from sites which use the technology, in which case you may as well give up the technological solution.
I know I know, you don't like this idea, but isn't it fair? If you decide to read some site, you no more have the right to complain about their ad methods than you do about the other content. If you don't want to put up with it, that's easy. Buf if you percieve the content valuable enough, then shouldn't you be less than insane about they putting up windows?
Don't get me wrong, I use firefox and block popups, but I don't exactly believe I have a leg to stand on if some site I read manages to penetrate the blocker.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to have a single answer that will compromise the security of all your accounts, then you're reduced to the same thing: why not just have the same thing as the password for all your accounts and remember THAT.
(obviously your proposal being dumb and my nick being cute are unrelated)
Because dummy, how would you remember what fake answer matches to what question. You might as well remember your damn password in the first place!
Hey - thanks for writing back. I am not an expert in QIF, but I am under the impression that it does not know how to do more than I account at a time (is that right?) So how does exporting via QIF handle the two sides of a transaction?
Really, I am very curious. I am into this stuff (as you can probably tell from my activity on this thread) and I am thinking of installing GnuCash on my Linux machine just to see what happens (I tried it about 2 years ago, it was AWFUL. Simply horrible) so any feeback re: the import are quite appreciated.
Hi - thanks for the response. You mentioned using QIF as the format for import. It sounds like exactly the way to get into trouble that I was talking about - ie the two sides of the transaction not matching up. I suppose that one way to look at it is that it doesn't really matter - who cares if your app captures all the info about some deposit you made in 2002. But it's just a reason not to switch that probably matters for a lot of people.
I am curious about the services you mentioned. how can i see more info?
I don't know if anyone from the GnuCash dev comunity reads this, but for what it's worth here's my big problem to trying it or any OpenSource finance package.
Even if these things start to be able to hold a candle to MS Money, there are lots of people (like me) who have years and years worth of data in Microsoft or Quicken. Unless we can port the data, we probably won't really give these things a proper try.
I would imagine that this is HARD to do. At least based on the fact that Quicken tried to make a program to make the porting easier but it sucked (it failed to match up transactions properly - ie that the -500 that left my checking account is the same +500 that arrived in my brokerage)
In my opinion, most people who would use these tools, are the kind of people who were using Quicken or MSM before GnuCash came along. To get us to switch, we need to be able to port our data in a simple and robust way.
just a thoight...
One thing I have to say, HSBC's phone support is AWFUL (this is why I don't use their credit card). Any evening that I call, it's clearly routed to India and the guys don't know anything about banking.
Emigrant Direct is better. If their rates are the same, I'd go with Emigrant. Cuz otherwise if you need help, you're really stuck with HSBC's shitty support. And you can't go to a branch with questions re: the online savings.
BTW Emigrant Direct is the one I have a credit card from (via Juniper...) that pays 1.25% back as long as you have 10k in your account.
Both HSBC Direct and EmigrantDirect are paying slightly over 5% currently. INGDirect which used to offer higher yields, is lower, at about 4.25% or so. Your bank is probably half that.
In general, Emigrant has been higher than Emigrant in the past. Now that HSBC is in the picture, they have consistently been at the top of the payoff, with Emigrant catching up quickly.
Either way, much better than your local bank. The first 100k of each account is FDIC insured. Transfers between any of these accounts and your bank take about 3 days. HSBC also gives you and ATM card.
Sorry but you're silly. For... well.. many reasons.
Ok you have one account. Into which everything is deposited. With a debit card. So it sounds like you have a checking account. How much interest do you earn on that?
You spend less than you have. Great! But you have a 50% margin, which you could definately keep at a higher interest. Oh wait, no you can't because you only have one account.
Then, you don't believe in credit cards and online banking, but you do automatic withdrawals? IE you allow your utilities to take whatever they want from your account? Nice...
Here's a better system.
I have a checking account, a high-yield online money market, and a credit card. Everything that I spend during the month goes on the credit card, including utilities (cell, landline, DSL, etc.) My paycheck gets direct deposited into the checking account at the beginning of the month. My credit card is due on the 15h. That means:
In the beginning of the month, I have my credit card statement. I schedule a transfer from the checking account into the credit card. I pay whatever other things I need to pay, by check. The balance of the checking account (minus a few hundred bucks) goes into the high yield savings.
What's the benefit of this system?
1. Since intra-month spending goes on a credit card, I don't have to worry about leaving enough cash in the low-interest checking account.
2. Establishes good credit history. I have had a credit card for years, never missed a payment (and never paid it off in anything less than full). You?
3. It makes me money. In two ways: First, I earn higher interest on the balance of my savings, and second, my credit card pays me 1.25% back on everything I spend. So if I spend $1,000 a month (including all utilities, not unreasonable), I get 12 bucks back.
There's a few other things that my systems kicks ass about. But really, it doesn't take more effort than yours (infact it takes less, I don't have to keep phoning my bank to check my balance), it avoids worrying about overdrafting (the credit card limit is high enough), it allows my money to earn higher interest, it allows me to get cash back on my purchases, etc.
I like it better!
It doesn't matter how these things are assigned. If I run an ISP and I start running out of IPs I'll just go to a system where people share IPs. I don't lose any sleep at night because Ford has more addresses than I do.
Sorry to be a ludite but this is really not an issue. Greanted we're placing more devices on-line, but so what? If I need to telnet into my toaster, I can just have my router forward a particular toaster port to it. He doesn't NEED his own IP. Similarly, do all the 1000-plus apartments in my building need to have separate IPs? Why? Most people read e-mail and look at websites, they don't need to host anything. We can all be on a LAN with a single internet IP, just like resnet in college was. Why not? if somebody needs an IP they can have their service set up that way but most of us don't give a shit.
I know, I know, there are more people in the world than there are IP addresses or whatever, but so what? I'd say that billions of people don't have a shot at owning a PC in their life anyway. Those who do can probably share IPs too.
It's a made-up crisis. There's nothing wrong with IPv6 but there's absolutely no dire need for it.
Since we're on the subject of blog aggregation, can someone recomend a GOOD way to aggregate?
Every single RSS aggregator I've come across treats my RSS world similar to an e-mail reader, where each blog is a 'folder' and each entry is equivalent to an e-mail.
This is decidedly NOT what I want and I don't understand why everyone's writing the same thing.
My friend is running PLANET, which builds a frontpage out of the RSS feeds (looks kind of like the slasdot frontpage where adjacent stores come from different sources and are sorted in chronolocial order (newest on top)
PLANET seems to be a server-side implementation. My buddy's running Linux and he made a little page for me but it's not right for me to bug him every time I want to add a feed.
Is there anything like what I want that would run on Windows? And if not, why the heck not?
By the same token, why doesn't del.icio.us have any capacity to know when my links have been updated?
For what it's worth, here's my del.icio.us BLOGS area with some blogs I find good.
http://del.icio.us/eduardopcs/BLOG
There was a similar thread a while ago and I think that the people who ask such questions are missing the point. The idea is: you want a phone which has good reception, good battery life, etc. I don't see why you'd MIND if a phone had all this plus extra features.
For example my Sanyo 4920 (and 4900 before that) has superb reception and battery life, yet it has all the other features too. I don't use the games and PCS vision features much but it doesn't bother me that it's there. Why should it bother you? I got the phone very cheaply considering the Sprint rebate, so it's not like I am paying a lot for features I don't want much.
Ok these are sprint phones, so they don't meet your GSM requirement, but my point is that you should look for a phone that has things you care about, not a phone that doesn't have things you may not care about. You'll have a much bigger variety to select from, then.
=E
Get the SANYO 4920.
I always wonder what the hell that means? Earned the right to fail? Like he wasn't allowed to fail before? Exactly how much money was he supposed to make before he could buy his way into the club of mere mortals who are allowed to fail? Kind of a strange way to approach a creative ambition, I think. What mental process must go on in Lucas's head that he has to actually give himself permission to be creative, and justify it by pointing to his past commercial successes?
It means he can afford to make a movie that is not well recieved w/o it ending his career. If some unknown director is given a shot and he fails, he may never have a chance to try again. Lucas is comfortable knowing that he can make something which does not have popular appeal and still be able to come back and try again.
Maybe that's not what he means, but hey I prefer my simple interpretation to your lovely "Lucas is just sort of a sad, isolated, lonely, messed-up old fucker" conclusion.
For example, Qi is built on Common Lisp...
Just wondering, how did you hear about Qi? Mark Tarver taught one of my undergrad courses... I haven't heard Qi mentioned anywhere else.
Thx
I am not interested in e-mail as database, what would be really cool is mining e-mail for patterns.
I am not talking about "mentions viagra => probably spam" patterns.
I want to mine for correlations. For example maybe there's some patter between the time of the year and whom I talk to. Maybe in the spring I talk more to my ex's and in the fall to old college friends. I would not be conciously aware of that but it would be an interesting insight into a personality - why do I do that?
Is there a pattern between an e-mail I get from my boss to the tone I use in an e-mail to a family member right after. Maybe that would indicate some subconcious response to work.
Of course I have years worth of e-mail in Outlook folders. Hell, my mom defended herself against a lawsuit once by having saved e-mails from her old job. But besides just having it for refference (which of course is very useful but rather trivial) I want to seek patterns I am unaware of.
If you think about it, your e-mails probably have a more thorough history of you than a blog would, because you may tell one person some aspect of your business like and another person some aspect of your sex life, and you would not want either on a public blog, but years later it may be cool to glance back and have some meta representation of what was going on in your life.
Especially after the statute of limitations expires.
The taskbar's default position should be on the left-hand side of the screen, not the bottom. Here's why:
Obviously, whatever works for you is the way to go... but I don't believe your arguments are compelling:
1. Having the bar at the bottom uses up vertical space, esp. when it's two units high or more. Reading stuff on a screen requires much more vertical space than horizontal. Moving the bar to the side frees up vertical space and results in less scrolling.
Whenever you need to read something which requires vertical space, you will probably need to scroll pages anyway. You can easily do it with page down / spacebar / whatever. Also, you only have to do it whenever you reach the bottom of the page. So decreasing your vertical space a few pixels is not a huge deal. On the other hand, if by taking up horizontal space you force yourself to have to scroll sideways, that sucks - because you'd have to do it more frequently than every page.
2. You can fit WAY more quicklaunch buttons without affecting how much taskbar room you have for running programs. Quicklaunch buttons are a blessing and I can't live without em.
Because you start off with taking up much more screen real estate...
3. You also get way more room for the hooks for running programs that show on the taskbar (can't think of a better way to describe them). They stack vertically and you can fit dozens more than when the taskbar is horizontal.
Again, this generally means that you're taking up more area than you did otherwise.
I have a folder on my system which has subfolders with shortcuts. The folder is a quick-lunch on the taskbar. It has a little arrow on it, which then has all my shortcuts in it. It's like a mini-start button
This only helps. Google's advertizers realize that a certain percentage of clicks are from people who are looking for information and aren't out to buy anything. This knowledge is factored into a price they pay per referal.
If Google implements factual answers, they will potentially get a net increase in their traffic (since they will offer a feature other engines do not). So even if the number of advertiser clicks goes down, the ratio of those clicks being people genuinely interested in buying stuff vs. those who click on shopping sites while looking for info for a report (for example) rendering each click more valuable. This can enable them to charge more per click since they can guarantee better returns.
It could also be a purely defensive move, since other engines are providing serious competition. A while ago MSN reduced the number of paid ads they display. Obviously this is not out of some goodness of heart. It's because they realize that they can improve market share by giving people more of what they want and perhaps less of what brings MSN profit. Google is the same.
There's been a lot of condemnation of this, but it sounds OK to me. A lot of people who live in NJ (for example) commute to NYC to work. It's understood that they pay taxes.
They do not get to vote in NY, but they pay taxes because that's where they make the money. Everyone is OK with that.
If someone lived in NJ and only came into the office 1 day a weekm they still have to pay same NY taxes, because the fact that their employer kindly let them work from home doesn't change the fact that they work in NY. They don't pay 1/5th of NY's tax.
Instead of coming in once a week, this guy doesn't come in at all. But it's not so different than the guy who only comes in once a week. The employer lets him work from home, but he's an employer of a NY office. He works in NY.
Some mentioned the reasons why this must be the case. NYC makes ample investment to attract employers, and it's meant to make that money back in income taxes. The company this guy works for benefits from these advantages. If he's really offended at having to pay the tax in a state where he works (even if he doesn't show up) then he should find a job in-state so that he'll only have to pay one tax.
The fact that he doesn't use NY's resources is a non-issue. The fact that you don't use some service doesn't entitle you to a refund, and he's no different.
The flash demo shows a dependancy check. The screen shots show the dependancy screen with one "warning"-level issue (a dependancy that is recomended but not necessary)
But what happens if a dependancy is missing? Is the user stuck having to go find and install that thing first? Or does the thing try and fetch it?
The FAQs posted in the thread do not seem to answer that question. To me, it's the most important one. I don't have a problem typing 'rpm' on command line, I don't mind configure; make ; make install. Do do mind having to trace down every single dependancy that's either not on my system or on my system but needs a symlink to a different name before the install recognizes it.
So, does this AutoPackaging thingy have a way to deal with that?
If they were to write a page which had 20% on top vaguelly related to topic at hand, and the rest of it bile about some unrelated pet peeve, would that be 'delusional'?
Make some graffiti compatible with the CueCat.
We'd have wound up with a really hard to use word processor the also does calendaring, web browsing, e-mail composition, and a whole host of other things + Clippy.
Emacs does all those things too, sans (perhaps) Cllippy.
On the other hand, at least they'd be integrated in some sane fashion, rather than sucking as they do currently.
The goal of this was to prove that one should read all EULAs, so that one can see if an app is spyware if it is buried in the EULA."
Of the things I want to do the LEAST in my life, reading EULAs ranks pretty high among things which do not cause physical pain or summering to my loved ones.
Fuck reading it. I am more likely to look a prog up on CNET. If it had a lot of thumbs-down, I read those and see what people complain about. People always complain about spyware if its there (and sometimes even if its not)
Doing a google or deja search for name of the program and spyware always brings up some discussion of that topic, which lets me know conclusively (well, as far as something can be conclusive on an internet thread) what the answer is.
Reading the actual EULA? If I am a billion dollar company about to bind something with my product, yea I'll read it. But for something I am installing at home, behind a firewall which will prevent it from phoning home, FUCK IT! Who cares what they wrote?
Folks, we may be missing the point here. As far as I can tell, there is only one legit point of view on this.
Either you percieve popups to be totally evil, and you religiously avoid any sites that use them, or you accept that you need content from sites which use the technology, in which case you may as well give up the technological solution.
I know I know, you don't like this idea, but isn't it fair? If you decide to read some site, you no more have the right to complain about their ad methods than you do about the other content. If you don't want to put up with it, that's easy. Buf if you percieve the content valuable enough, then shouldn't you be less than insane about they putting up windows?
Don't get me wrong, I use firefox and block popups, but I don't exactly believe I have a leg to stand on if some site I read manages to penetrate the blocker.