No, the explanations on offer are that AT&T lost it or the post office lost it. Both are possible, and either way, I'm off the hook. I deposited the envelope in the US mail with adequate postage, I'm done.
However, I've had a lot more trouble with AT&T over the years than I have with the post office.
You may confidently assume that I'm counting the months on my AT&T contract, and will hop to Verizon when it's over.
I really do value the iPhone in a number of ways, but dealing with AT&T has been a nightmare. I had tons of trouble with them in the past, but the most recent one is still fairly typical:
My last payment to them apparently didn't make it. Now, I can show that the other three checks I mailed out the same night all got cashed, but whatever. Could be the post office, could be their mailroom, no one is ever likely to find out.
1. The letter to me was hostile and sort of rude. I've never missed a payment before. Heck, I don't think I've had ANY payments late, for anyone, in the last four or five years. I don't think the first letter you send to a customer with a flawless payment record should make the assumption that it's their fault that you didn't get paid. I deposited the payment in the US Mail in a timely manner, assholes. 2. So I called in. Navigated through a voicemail system. Which hung up on me. 3. So I called in again. Navigated through a voicemail system. Got someone who made meaningless noises a lot but implied that things were all good. 4. So I went to the web site to online-bill-pay it, and kept getting dropped on a page saying "the function you've selected isn't available". Turns out you have to have JavaScript on or the login page doesn't work. Noticed a late payment charge, which the previous rep had not mentioned. 5. So I called in again, navigated through the same voicemail system, and got someone to ACTUALLY reverse the late payment fee.
That was an awful lot of hassle given that the most likely explanation is that their mailroom lost something. No one I dealt with during the process seemed friendly.
I call T-mobile sometimes, and they're always pleasant to talk to.
Past results have always predicted future outcomes so far.... You know, I'd probably better explicitly state that this is a joke, or people won't get it.
This is a really interesting question, but I think people are missing some of the points in the alleged criticisms "of the scientific method". It's not that it doesn't work, as it obviously does, but that there exist things for which it doesn't work. Want to know what to get your spouse for your anniversary? Hint: The correct path to answering this question does not involve the use of a control group. Some people get caught up in science as a method and try to use it in cases where it's not really the right tool. They also often don't understand what kinds of certainty science offers. It's entirely true that science is good at answering questions, but if you don't understand why and how, you can come to mistaken beliefs about how good it is, or what questions.
Uh, no, most people wouldn't do that, not Republicans, not Democrats, not anybody.
This happened because of you, and people like you, promoting the notion that one side and the other are totally different. Your belief that the Other Side aren't people is what creates this kind of thing. Not the biases you think other people have; the biases you have. As long as it's all about how you feel the other side has "double standards", you're the one with the double standard.
When you can react to something like this without using it as a chance for a pot shot at the other side, you will no longer be part of the problem.
So true. I'd love to be friendly and helpful to people, but I have a hard time with social rules. I'd have been years ahead if people had told me more often and earlier what they thought I was supposed to be doing, and why.
The No Asshole Rule argues persuasively that, at least for the case where it's a jerk, it's actually a bad idea no matter how "good" they appear to be.
I've rarely met anyone "totally" unreliable. I'm a little flakey around the edges (hah!) but I can mostly do what I'm supposed to be doing, though it helps if people remind me.
I don't buy it. I don't think this will prevent people from paying larger prices for things larger than the stuff in the app store. Wouldn't bother me, anyway, although it might provide effective competition. Which we need.
Kagi spammed me recently.:( They grabbed an address I'd used with one particular program, and used it to send me promotional mailings about another. Meh.
Wrong! This is a real distinction with semantic content.
People don't experience prices linearly. They experience prices in a somewhat disjoint manner, where crossing a particular arbitrary line makes a large difference in peoples' perception of prices.
Now, the "factual accuracy of this article is disputed". So it may be false. But even if the theory is wrong, the term "price point" is not just a synonym for "price".
I guess I don't see the big deal. The API is in that language, and you can't trivially translate to that API from any other language. What do you want them to do? Provide a bunch of C wrappers all of which do nothing but translate C idioms to Objective-C idioms? That'd be wasteful of memory and CPU time, both of which are expensive for the iPhone/iPod target.
I seem to recall Android's done in Java, and I'm not aware of any support for using Objective-C for Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Phone 7, Android, or...
Yeah, whatever. If I want to target an API that is built closely around the design and capabilities of a language, the code that talks to that API has to be in that language.
If you want to write tiny little C wrapper stuff in Objective-C, then talk to everything else from C, you're welcome to.
"Google Groups" is not just a Usenet interface. It is also a thing that does mailing lists. Mailing lists which allow you to upload your Millions CD and use that as the mailing list.
So I'm getting mail to some address @MyOldISP.example. When this mail comes in, from the "Google Groups" mail servers, I can't complain about it. I'd have to have a Google account, and the address @MyOldISP.example would have to be the Google account's address.
The problem is that they can send mail to any address they want, even one which is not in any way associated with Google Groups.
In short, I CARE ABOUT IT BECAUSE I AM GETTING SPAMMED BY THE GROUP. That's why. I thought this was obvious, but I guess it wasn't obvious enough. I receive spam. Since the spam was not sent specifically to my gmail address, Google's allege spam-reporting procedure is unavailable to me. If I use the direct link I got from someone who works at Google, then I can use it to report spam, but Nothing Happens.
Interestingly, the first spam I got this way was delivered without a Message-ID, making it even harder to report, since their system only allows you to submit the message-id of the message.
If Google Groups email spam could only be sent to Google Groups accounts which had joined the group, it wouldn't be as big a problem. The problem comes when they send millions upon millions of messages to addresses which they absolutely know cannot possibly be "signed up" in a way that would allow them to report spam if the messages were spam.
Oh, and they've known about this for months. They don't seem to care.
Google is now responsible for a fairly large portion of the plain old spam I get. As in, their computers send it. Their latest gimmick is a new "feature" of Google Groups:
1. You can't send emailed abuse reports, they don't process those. 2. You have to go to the group's home page and click "Report This Group". 3. But you can't unless you're logged into a Google account, and your Google account is a member of the group. Otherwise, you just get the "you must be a member of this group to see this page" page. 4. You can directly navigate to groups.google.com/abuse/, but... 5. They don't do anything about spam reports anyway.
Similarly, they are apparently rapidly becoming a world leader in Usenet spam, because they don't have any particular objection to people posting spam. Or, if they do, it has not yet risen to the level of the kind of objection that results in doing something to stop it.
I'd buy this more, except my android phone is G2, and last I heard, it's not possible for me to remove the occasional Photobucket pop-up ads from it. You can root it, and the next time it reboots it comes up as though you never did anything of the sort.
So I'm not convinced that Android carries any kind of guarantee of being mod-friendly.
Dunno where you live. In the US, take a couple of classes from the state university as "extension" classes (not part of a degree program) and you should be able to get into a college on the basis that you've already done college-level work.
At least, it worked for me. There is at least one guy out there (possibly now deceased) whose only academic credential of any sort was his PhD.
I have no idea, but copyright wouldn't allow me to sue them unless they used my exact wording in their patent, because copyright protects expressions, not ideas.
Fair enough, but it's still unrelated to the way in which app developers self-qualify. It's still someone hired to program, not just someone putting out an app which someone picks up.
Step 1: In 9th grade, take AP Calc. AP courses you do well in (got a 5 on the test) count as college credits. Step 2: That summer, take an intensive language course at the state university. You don't need to be in any sort of program, or "accepted" to the college, to do so; you can just pay money and take a course. Step 3: Then spend a year taking Chinese classes in China with exchange students who are in colleges. Step 4: Apply to college citing the equivalent of a semester's worth of course credits including specific courses that they have students in.
Easy. I also got to skip over Calc 1 and 2, plus the entire foreign language requirement, and got out after summer school of my third year, because I'd made my credit requirements.
In short, you're wrong; people will accept anything that convincingly demonstrates that you're prepared to succeed in college-level work, including as a concrete example "has already done well in college classes".
For what it's worth, I've never taken a CS class. As to whether that makes me underqualified or not, well, I guess that's up to the rest of the world to decide, but my employer seems happy with me.
So, let's see.
1. You seem to assume that shareware is bad code, but quite a lot of the shareware I've used over the years has been excellent. 2. Nothing to do with "Apps" has anything to do with the built-in clock and alarm in the iPhone, which is part of the Apple-provided stuff, presumably developed by relatively qualified developers. 3. You have this rant about "Visual Basic". Whatever. I have an app in the app store, and I have never in my life touched VB. 4. Who cares about a 4-year BS? For crying out loud, I never even finished high school, nor did I get a GED. Instead, I hopped on over to doing college, where I got a BA in Psychology.
Just given the quality of this rant, if I had to choose between you and whoever wrote the code with this bug in it, I'd probably take the author of the buggy code, because that person might just have made a silly mistake, which most people do from time to time. I know you're incoherent; I'll take someone I just know made a single mistake over totally incoherent any day.
I use my phone for alarms because it's the thing all my other alarms and alerts are in. I have a lot fewer missed alarms using my phone than I did when I used physical alarm clocks, which are much more failure prone in my experience.
Heck, I don't think I even own a clock anymore. Why would I bother? I have many things which reliably know the time.
With randomly shooting, you can easily see whether it's happening. With drunk driving, you can't...
But we can either go "fishing" for drunk drivers (and get them off the roads at least temporarily), or we can wait until they kill someone to do anything. We can't magically spot the drunk drivers without either stopping people preemptively or waiting until something goes wrong, and waiting until something goes wrong means people already got hurt without any effort being made to protect them.
By the time someone is observed "driving recklessly", the chances of them having hurt or killed someone are pretty high. We can easily prevent that.
When they shipped a single product with this, they went off my vendor list.
Forever.
There are way too many companies making games for me to deal with one like that. Same deal as with Belkin and their router which randomly redirected sessions to an advertisement. You screw up that blatantly or obviously, even once, and you're off the vendor list unless you are a genuine monopoly on something I really need.
Since Ubisoft can never be a monopoly on much of anything, they're gone.
Note that this is not an attempt to make them behave better. That would be "off the vendor list until you fix this". That is a recipe for companies like Amazon, which patent troll and spam, then back off a little bit until the complaints die down. I don't want to deal with companies I have to watch constantly because they've learned to just go ahead and do evil stuff and see who complains.
For utterly replaceable companies, the policy is "you're gone, bye". If they eventually die, great! Everyone wins. If they merely stop selling me stuff, because I don't buy from them, at least I win.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the explanations on offer are that AT&T lost it or the post office lost it. Both are possible, and either way, I'm off the hook. I deposited the envelope in the US mail with adequate postage, I'm done.
However, I've had a lot more trouble with AT&T over the years than I have with the post office.
You may confidently assume that I'm counting the months on my AT&T contract, and will hop to Verizon when it's over.
I really do value the iPhone in a number of ways, but dealing with AT&T has been a nightmare. I had tons of trouble with them in the past, but the most recent one is still fairly typical:
My last payment to them apparently didn't make it. Now, I can show that the other three checks I mailed out the same night all got cashed, but whatever. Could be the post office, could be their mailroom, no one is ever likely to find out.
1. The letter to me was hostile and sort of rude. I've never missed a payment before. Heck, I don't think I've had ANY payments late, for anyone, in the last four or five years. I don't think the first letter you send to a customer with a flawless payment record should make the assumption that it's their fault that you didn't get paid. I deposited the payment in the US Mail in a timely manner, assholes.
2. So I called in. Navigated through a voicemail system. Which hung up on me.
3. So I called in again. Navigated through a voicemail system. Got someone who made meaningless noises a lot but implied that things were all good.
4. So I went to the web site to online-bill-pay it, and kept getting dropped on a page saying "the function you've selected isn't available". Turns out you have to have JavaScript on or the login page doesn't work. Noticed a late payment charge, which the previous rep had not mentioned.
5. So I called in again, navigated through the same voicemail system, and got someone to ACTUALLY reverse the late payment fee.
That was an awful lot of hassle given that the most likely explanation is that their mailroom lost something. No one I dealt with during the process seemed friendly.
I call T-mobile sometimes, and they're always pleasant to talk to.
Past results have always predicted future outcomes so far. ... You know, I'd probably better explicitly state that this is a joke, or people won't get it.
This is a really interesting question, but I think people are missing some of the points in the alleged criticisms "of the scientific method". It's not that it doesn't work, as it obviously does, but that there exist things for which it doesn't work. Want to know what to get your spouse for your anniversary? Hint: The correct path to answering this question does not involve the use of a control group. Some people get caught up in science as a method and try to use it in cases where it's not really the right tool. They also often don't understand what kinds of certainty science offers. It's entirely true that science is good at answering questions, but if you don't understand why and how, you can come to mistaken beliefs about how good it is, or what questions.
You know, it's funny.
We have a law against killing people, but sometimes people still do it.
You're telling me that, while they aren't going to follow our law against killing people, you think they'll follow the law against having guns?
Yeah, uhm. I don't think it works that way.
That is why talking about why it was done matters. If we ignore the causes of tragedies, we'll keep getting tragedies.
Uh, no, most people wouldn't do that, not Republicans, not Democrats, not anybody.
This happened because of you, and people like you, promoting the notion that one side and the other are totally different. Your belief that the Other Side aren't people is what creates this kind of thing. Not the biases you think other people have; the biases you have. As long as it's all about how you feel the other side has "double standards", you're the one with the double standard.
When you can react to something like this without using it as a chance for a pot shot at the other side, you will no longer be part of the problem.
So true. I'd love to be friendly and helpful to people, but I have a hard time with social rules. I'd have been years ahead if people had told me more often and earlier what they thought I was supposed to be doing, and why.
The No Asshole Rule argues persuasively that, at least for the case where it's a jerk, it's actually a bad idea no matter how "good" they appear to be.
I've rarely met anyone "totally" unreliable. I'm a little flakey around the edges (hah!) but I can mostly do what I'm supposed to be doing, though it helps if people remind me.
I don't buy it. I don't think this will prevent people from paying larger prices for things larger than the stuff in the app store. Wouldn't bother me, anyway, although it might provide effective competition. Which we need.
Kagi spammed me recently. :( They grabbed an address I'd used with one particular program, and used it to send me promotional mailings about another. Meh.
Wrong! This is a real distinction with semantic content.
People don't experience prices linearly. They experience prices in a somewhat disjoint manner, where crossing a particular arbitrary line makes a large difference in peoples' perception of prices.
Wikipedia on price points.
Now, the "factual accuracy of this article is disputed". So it may be false. But even if the theory is wrong, the term "price point" is not just a synonym for "price".
I guess I don't see the big deal. The API is in that language, and you can't trivially translate to that API from any other language. What do you want them to do? Provide a bunch of C wrappers all of which do nothing but translate C idioms to Objective-C idioms? That'd be wasteful of memory and CPU time, both of which are expensive for the iPhone/iPod target.
I seem to recall Android's done in Java, and I'm not aware of any support for using Objective-C for Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Phone 7, Android, or...
Yeah, whatever. If I want to target an API that is built closely around the design and capabilities of a language, the code that talks to that API has to be in that language.
If you want to write tiny little C wrapper stuff in Objective-C, then talk to everything else from C, you're welcome to.
Okay, maybe I need to explain more.
"Google Groups" is not just a Usenet interface. It is also a thing that does mailing lists. Mailing lists which allow you to upload your Millions CD and use that as the mailing list.
So I'm getting mail to some address @MyOldISP.example. When this mail comes in, from the "Google Groups" mail servers, I can't complain about it. I'd have to have a Google account, and the address @MyOldISP.example would have to be the Google account's address.
The problem is that they can send mail to any address they want, even one which is not in any way associated with Google Groups.
In short, I CARE ABOUT IT BECAUSE I AM GETTING SPAMMED BY THE GROUP. That's why. I thought this was obvious, but I guess it wasn't obvious enough. I receive spam. Since the spam was not sent specifically to my gmail address, Google's allege spam-reporting procedure is unavailable to me. If I use the direct link I got from someone who works at Google, then I can use it to report spam, but Nothing Happens.
Interestingly, the first spam I got this way was delivered without a Message-ID, making it even harder to report, since their system only allows you to submit the message-id of the message.
If Google Groups email spam could only be sent to Google Groups accounts which had joined the group, it wouldn't be as big a problem. The problem comes when they send millions upon millions of messages to addresses which they absolutely know cannot possibly be "signed up" in a way that would allow them to report spam if the messages were spam.
Oh, and they've known about this for months. They don't seem to care.
Google is now responsible for a fairly large portion of the plain old spam I get. As in, their computers send it. Their latest gimmick is a new "feature" of Google Groups:
1. You can't send emailed abuse reports, they don't process those.
2. You have to go to the group's home page and click "Report This Group".
3. But you can't unless you're logged into a Google account, and your Google account is a member of the group. Otherwise, you just get the "you must be a member of this group to see this page" page.
4. You can directly navigate to groups.google.com/abuse/, but...
5. They don't do anything about spam reports anyway.
Similarly, they are apparently rapidly becoming a world leader in Usenet spam, because they don't have any particular objection to people posting spam. Or, if they do, it has not yet risen to the level of the kind of objection that results in doing something to stop it.
T-Mobile G2: Locked down.
I suspect it's a mix of coincidence and confirmation bias.
I'd buy this more, except my android phone is G2, and last I heard, it's not possible for me to remove the occasional Photobucket pop-up ads from it. You can root it, and the next time it reboots it comes up as though you never did anything of the sort.
So I'm not convinced that Android carries any kind of guarantee of being mod-friendly.
Dunno where you live. In the US, take a couple of classes from the state university as "extension" classes (not part of a degree program) and you should be able to get into a college on the basis that you've already done college-level work.
At least, it worked for me. There is at least one guy out there (possibly now deceased) whose only academic credential of any sort was his PhD.
I have no idea, but copyright wouldn't allow me to sue them unless they used my exact wording in their patent, because copyright protects expressions, not ideas.
IANAL, but I talk to one sometimes.
I was walking in an icy parking lot when it hit me:
1. File a business method patent on "keeping a parking lot so icy that it's hard to walk safely in it."
2. Sue people for violations.
This led to my revised idea:
1. File a business method patent on patent trolling.
I thought I was joking. The thing is, if I blogged about it (and I may have), I wonder if it's prior art?
Fair enough, but it's still unrelated to the way in which app developers self-qualify. It's still someone hired to program, not just someone putting out an app which someone picks up.
Very simple!
Step 1: In 9th grade, take AP Calc. AP courses you do well in (got a 5 on the test) count as college credits.
Step 2: That summer, take an intensive language course at the state university. You don't need to be in any sort of program, or "accepted" to the college, to do so; you can just pay money and take a course.
Step 3: Then spend a year taking Chinese classes in China with exchange students who are in colleges.
Step 4: Apply to college citing the equivalent of a semester's worth of course credits including specific courses that they have students in.
Easy. I also got to skip over Calc 1 and 2, plus the entire foreign language requirement, and got out after summer school of my third year, because I'd made my credit requirements.
In short, you're wrong; people will accept anything that convincingly demonstrates that you're prepared to succeed in college-level work, including as a concrete example "has already done well in college classes".
For what it's worth, I've never taken a CS class. As to whether that makes me underqualified or not, well, I guess that's up to the rest of the world to decide, but my employer seems happy with me.
So, let's see.
1. You seem to assume that shareware is bad code, but quite a lot of the shareware I've used over the years has been excellent.
2. Nothing to do with "Apps" has anything to do with the built-in clock and alarm in the iPhone, which is part of the Apple-provided stuff, presumably developed by relatively qualified developers.
3. You have this rant about "Visual Basic". Whatever. I have an app in the app store, and I have never in my life touched VB.
4. Who cares about a 4-year BS? For crying out loud, I never even finished high school, nor did I get a GED. Instead, I hopped on over to doing college, where I got a BA in Psychology.
Just given the quality of this rant, if I had to choose between you and whoever wrote the code with this bug in it, I'd probably take the author of the buggy code, because that person might just have made a silly mistake, which most people do from time to time. I know you're incoherent; I'll take someone I just know made a single mistake over totally incoherent any day.
I use my phone for alarms because it's the thing all my other alarms and alerts are in. I have a lot fewer missed alarms using my phone than I did when I used physical alarm clocks, which are much more failure prone in my experience.
Heck, I don't think I even own a clock anymore. Why would I bother? I have many things which reliably know the time.
With randomly shooting, you can easily see whether it's happening. With drunk driving, you can't...
But we can either go "fishing" for drunk drivers (and get them off the roads at least temporarily), or we can wait until they kill someone to do anything. We can't magically spot the drunk drivers without either stopping people preemptively or waiting until something goes wrong, and waiting until something goes wrong means people already got hurt without any effort being made to protect them.
By the time someone is observed "driving recklessly", the chances of them having hurt or killed someone are pretty high. We can easily prevent that.
When they shipped a single product with this, they went off my vendor list.
Forever.
There are way too many companies making games for me to deal with one like that. Same deal as with Belkin and their router which randomly redirected sessions to an advertisement. You screw up that blatantly or obviously, even once, and you're off the vendor list unless you are a genuine monopoly on something I really need.
Since Ubisoft can never be a monopoly on much of anything, they're gone.
Note that this is not an attempt to make them behave better. That would be "off the vendor list until you fix this". That is a recipe for companies like Amazon, which patent troll and spam, then back off a little bit until the complaints die down. I don't want to deal with companies I have to watch constantly because they've learned to just go ahead and do evil stuff and see who complains.
For utterly replaceable companies, the policy is "you're gone, bye". If they eventually die, great! Everyone wins. If they merely stop selling me stuff, because I don't buy from them, at least I win.