I don't think any littering should get special treatment. They should all be cause for a fine, and community service cleaning up litter.
Re:Things like this are easy to fix.
on
Google's Evil NDA
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· Score: 1
(and discussed this with the HR rep, I didn't tuck the changes in the center of a large agreement or something)
This is the way to go. Being sneaky about it won't win you any allies, and may not be legally binding. If you ask them about it though, the worst that can happen is that they say "no" and then you have a decision to make.
If a cop saw you toss a beer bottle out the window, not only would you be hit with a littering fine, but you'd probably be subjected to all sorts of other unpleasantries to find out if you had just consumed said beer while you were driving. Toss your butt out this window where somebody else has to clean it up (open your door and look at the curb at any intersection) and you should get off scott free?
Sorry, but there should be a $500 fine and 8 hours of community service if you're caught throwing a cigarette butt out the window, even if there is no fire risk. It should be a moving violation if you do it on the highway where your lit butt can hit another vehicle. Either that or we should build some stockades... I'm not saying other roadside litterers shouldn't be treated similarly, but smokers shouldn't get special treatment.
Re:Things like this are easy to fix.
on
Google's Evil NDA
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I've modified the NDA at two places I've worked, and modified the non-compete and copyright assignment forms at *every* job I've worked at. I've even discussed the changes with the hiring manager. Yet I still worked for those companies.
Don't be afraid to stand up for yourself. It will probably even earn you some respect.
In fact I'd be stupified if new tools aren't created to format common UNIX tools output into XML streams and vice versa.
I'm stupified that anybody would find value in that. The shells ferry data around. They themselves generally don't need to or have any business actually understanding that. They funnel it to other commands to deal with that. Wrapping of common utilities output in XML is a ridiculous exercise in buzzword compliance that could only possibly help people who are dealing with unstable utilities (in the "change a lot" sense, not the "crash a lot" sense). No wonder it eats so much memory.
I assumed they were rumors until I saw the financials for Microsoft's previous quarter. The 360 supposedly costs less to make than its sticker price, yet they lost a boatload of money on them last quarter. That money is going somewhere... To replacements maybe?
The problem is probably triggered by some user variable, and you're not doing whatever it is that triggers the problem.
Yes, but it seems odd that considering how many Wii units have been produced, we haven't seen many (if any?) reports of unit failures, versus the repeated reports of the XBox 360 failing. Also, despite how much the media seems to dislike the PS3, we've seen very few (again, if any?) reports of PS3 unit failures.
Well, there were the Wii system update failures that bricked the systems early on, and the reports of PS3 kiosk failures.... Also, there has been no mainstream news of the 360 issues...
Anecdotally, I know somebody who has been through 3 Warrantied PS3s so far, and has been cut off from additional replacements by Sony. He's also killed a few 360s, and went through several PS2s though, so I think he just treats his consoles like shit though.
Yeah, that seems like a plausible explanation. Maybe it's something as simple as horizontal vs. vertical use... Maybe it's related to dust... Infrequent vs. Frequent use (people I know who have had the problem have all been casual players... The more frequent users have had no trouble). No matter what the connection, there's got to be a way to find the common element. That way if Microsoft is unwilling to solve the issue, these people can protect themselves from future failure.
Everybody you see posting about it online always suspects or disclaims heat issues. People need to get out of the '1337 0verclocker mentality and actually gather some real data.
The #1 goal of the X-Box is to promote Microsoft's DRM. They want it to become the industry standard so they can use it to shore up their OS market share with additional vendor lock-in.
Direct-X games that don't run on the 360 generate *zero* revenue for Microsoft, and Microsoft only cares about them enough to prevent a "lack of games" opening a chink in their marketshare-protecting armor. If Xbox were a lever for Direct-X adoption instead of Direct-X being a lever for Windows adoption, Direct-X 10 would have been available for XP. (All the technical reasons given by Microsoft are bullshit.)
I know two types of 360 owners: People who's consoles still work, and people who have been through multiple 360s.
Perhaps there is a flaw in the design that causes failure, but given the none/multi dichotomy of the situation (and I say this as somebody who is as anti-Xbox as you're likely to find without being a fanboy for another platform) the question I want to know the answer to is "What are these people doing differently to their system that is causing it to break?". Sure, maybe they're victim to a faulty device, but it's got to be something about the way they use the system that is triggering the failures.
The other question I want answered is that, given the mainstream media's willingness to report on every minor Xbox development from Microsoft, why aren't they reporting on this problem. It's clearly widespread, as it had notable impact on Microsoft's bottom line. Are CNN and the New York Times really in Microsoft PR's pocket? I mean, I know they spend a lot on advertising....
Would you like a broken 360 shipped to you for 'evidence' when you read an article on a website?
Maybe this is happening, and maybe it isn't, but 'reports' are all the evidence you get from any media outlet.
It seems to me that given how many of these consoles that get produced, the question isn't whether or not some of them are failing. The question is "How many are failing?"
I looked very seriously into doing this back in the 1999/2000 time frame. First I looked into doing it as an open, free system run by a group of ACM and LUG chapters. We had large scale commitments for donated hardware and hosting, but we ran into the problem you describe. The fees necessary to be included in popular browsers are too high. So then we planned on charging a minimal amount for the certificates in order to cover those costs...
It turns out that those fees you list are nothing compared to the costs of running a CA correctly. Even charging the same as what the "big guys" charge for certificates, you can't make enough money to properly validate the identity of a certificate applicant. Verisign and the like can charge as little as they do and still post the huge profits that they do because they don't do the work required to prevent the acquisition of fraudulent certificates. There is no way to undercut them on price if you want to provide a quality service. If you figure out a way, they'll buy you out to protect their revenue.
For the system to change, there needs to be a way to have the established vendor's authority revoked if they issue more than a set number of bad certs over a specified period of time. They shouldn't have a license to print money. They should have to actually provide the service they claim to provide.
Other, better editors have this as a mode that you set all the time. It seems pretty common to me that the user would want to have each paste operation behave a particular way depending on context or the type of content being pasted. It's not any more advanced than the section format. Even vi has this feature.
If Microsoft made it into a persistent setting, thus making it "advanced", then they should probably re-evaluate that decision; especially since users are complaining about it.
I don't think they are either. They clearly designed this generation to keep costs as low as possible. However I don't think they have any intention of ever turning a profit on the hardware. After all, their goal is marketshare for their DRM and digital distribution channel, not to be a profitable hardware vendor. Once they get the manufacturing costs down, they'll just drop the price. I think they thought they would have gotten there by now, and the Elite is evidence of that. It probably costs about $1.40 more to manufacture than the old model, but instead of keeping the price the same or dropping it, something that could have seriously hurt Sony, they raised the price $80....
Nope. That couldn't have happened. If they did that they'd have those extra 500k consoles on hand as an asset instead of simply having the manufacturing costs deducted from their overall revenue.
Why are people so unwilling to accept as fact that Microsoft is still losing money on these things?
Whatever the cost of the SLA, Fios makes a huge impact to even the most mission critical applications. Where I used to have dual-redundant T1s, or a T1 backing up a T3, I now have a T1, and a Fios line.... And the Fios line is actually more reliable with faster response times, has higher upstream bandwidth, and lower latency (but no latency guarantee). It remains to be seen if the last two remain true as deployment increases, but the market in my locality (which was one of the first to get Fios) is close to saturation. We actually keep the backup T1 for supplier diversity more than the SLA. I also still use a T1 PRI for voice communications, but hopefully Verizon will provide a fiber solution in that department soon. Voice T1s are significantly cheaper per month than data anyway, since they also have usage fees.
That disclaimer is the same as the disclaimer on the SLA equipped T1, BTW. The SLA doesn't guarantee uninterrupted service. You can't that kind of SLA in many locations, and where you can they're really expensive (more than the T1 prices quoted in the article). Even with such a guarantee, I've never seen an agreement that didn't limit the provider's liability to the cost of the service. In other words, an uninterrupted service guarantee only means that you get a refund for the period of time your service is out. The typical T1 SLA merely guarantees a maximum response time to issues. The Fios line does this as well, but at 24hours instead of the 1, 3, or 6 hours you usually see for a T1. Fios also doesn't require the long service contracts that T1 providers usually require in order to give you a good rate. You're month-to-month from day one.
Yes, businesses get SLAs, but they still get outages that you can't get answer one out of them about. Or if you do enforce a reimbursement clause, its just for the cost of the link, and will in no way cover the actual business losses you get by having your web site out of commission.
You, you hit the nail on the head. An SLA means you get credit for your downtime, and that's it.
You should check out Verizon again. They'll sell you a 50Mbit link for under $1000/month. You're right about the days of Fiber coming to an end... At least outside of SBC's territory. People who work there are just screwed, as the Fiber-to-the-Node infrastructure they are deploying is designed to protect their fat T1 profits.
It's happened to me twice so far. The first time I called, got a knowledgeable tech on the phone with zero hold time, and he fixed the routing problem on their end within five minutes. The second time, we lost the pole in a wind storm. They were on-site within two hours to fix it.
This is in contrast to T1 service I've had in the past where I never got better than 3 hour response time on configuration issues (they broke the configuration every six months or so, and every time the line got sold to another provider), and had multi-day downtime on several occasions.
The guarantee is 24 hour, the same as the T1 was, but the service has been much better.
The CompUSA near me (Framingham MA), and many other CompUSA stores are closing. I was there last night. They had a cage, and another display packed full of Vista. All editions including upgrades, over 100 copies total, and they were 60% off. If you need Vista for some reason, a defunct CompUSA is probably your best bet right now.
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How did you manage to get *that* past the lameness filter?
I don't think any littering should get special treatment. They should all be cause for a fine, and community service cleaning up litter.
This is the way to go. Being sneaky about it won't win you any allies, and may not be legally binding. If you ask them about it though, the worst that can happen is that they say "no" and then you have a decision to make.
In other news, two wrongs now make a right?
If a cop saw you toss a beer bottle out the window, not only would you be hit with a littering fine, but you'd probably be subjected to all sorts of other unpleasantries to find out if you had just consumed said beer while you were driving. Toss your butt out this window where somebody else has to clean it up (open your door and look at the curb at any intersection) and you should get off scott free?
Sorry, but there should be a $500 fine and 8 hours of community service if you're caught throwing a cigarette butt out the window, even if there is no fire risk. It should be a moving violation if you do it on the highway where your lit butt can hit another vehicle. Either that or we should build some stockades... I'm not saying other roadside litterers shouldn't be treated similarly, but smokers shouldn't get special treatment.
I've modified the NDA at two places I've worked, and modified the non-compete and copyright assignment forms at *every* job I've worked at. I've even discussed the changes with the hiring manager. Yet I still worked for those companies.
Don't be afraid to stand up for yourself. It will probably even earn you some respect.
I'm stupified that anybody would find value in that. The shells ferry data around. They themselves generally don't need to or have any business actually understanding that. They funnel it to other commands to deal with that. Wrapping of common utilities output in XML is a ridiculous exercise in buzzword compliance that could only possibly help people who are dealing with unstable utilities (in the "change a lot" sense, not the "crash a lot" sense). No wonder it eats so much memory.
That's an excellent point. I hadn't considered that, and it seems quite plausible.
I assumed they were rumors until I saw the financials for Microsoft's previous quarter. The 360 supposedly costs less to make than its sticker price, yet they lost a boatload of money on them last quarter. That money is going somewhere... To replacements maybe?
The problem is probably triggered by some user variable, and you're not doing whatever it is that triggers the problem.
Well, there were the Wii system update failures that bricked the systems early on, and the reports of PS3 kiosk failures.... Also, there has been no mainstream news of the 360 issues...
Anecdotally, I know somebody who has been through 3 Warrantied PS3s so far, and has been cut off from additional replacements by Sony. He's also killed a few 360s, and went through several PS2s though, so I think he just treats his consoles like shit though.
Yeah, that seems like a plausible explanation. Maybe it's something as simple as horizontal vs. vertical use... Maybe it's related to dust... Infrequent vs. Frequent use (people I know who have had the problem have all been casual players... The more frequent users have had no trouble). No matter what the connection, there's got to be a way to find the common element. That way if Microsoft is unwilling to solve the issue, these people can protect themselves from future failure.
Everybody you see posting about it online always suspects or disclaims heat issues. People need to get out of the '1337 0verclocker mentality and actually gather some real data.
Yeah, but how do you distinguish real negative news from FUD?
Do you think Tycho from Penny-Arcade tends to spread anti-360 FUD?
The #1 goal of the X-Box is to promote Microsoft's DRM. They want it to become the industry standard so they can use it to shore up their OS market share with additional vendor lock-in.
Direct-X games that don't run on the 360 generate *zero* revenue for Microsoft, and Microsoft only cares about them enough to prevent a "lack of games" opening a chink in their marketshare-protecting armor. If Xbox were a lever for Direct-X adoption instead of Direct-X being a lever for Windows adoption, Direct-X 10 would have been available for XP. (All the technical reasons given by Microsoft are bullshit.)
I know two types of 360 owners: People who's consoles still work, and people who have been through multiple 360s.
Perhaps there is a flaw in the design that causes failure, but given the none/multi dichotomy of the situation (and I say this as somebody who is as anti-Xbox as you're likely to find without being a fanboy for another platform) the question I want to know the answer to is "What are these people doing differently to their system that is causing it to break?". Sure, maybe they're victim to a faulty device, but it's got to be something about the way they use the system that is triggering the failures.
The other question I want answered is that, given the mainstream media's willingness to report on every minor Xbox development from Microsoft, why aren't they reporting on this problem. It's clearly widespread, as it had notable impact on Microsoft's bottom line. Are CNN and the New York Times really in Microsoft PR's pocket? I mean, I know they spend a lot on advertising....
Would you like a broken 360 shipped to you for 'evidence' when you read an article on a website?
Maybe this is happening, and maybe it isn't, but 'reports' are all the evidence you get from any media outlet.
It seems to me that given how many of these consoles that get produced, the question isn't whether or not some of them are failing. The question is "How many are failing?"
I looked very seriously into doing this back in the 1999/2000 time frame. First I looked into doing it as an open, free system run by a group of ACM and LUG chapters. We had large scale commitments for donated hardware and hosting, but we ran into the problem you describe. The fees necessary to be included in popular browsers are too high. So then we planned on charging a minimal amount for the certificates in order to cover those costs...
It turns out that those fees you list are nothing compared to the costs of running a CA correctly. Even charging the same as what the "big guys" charge for certificates, you can't make enough money to properly validate the identity of a certificate applicant. Verisign and the like can charge as little as they do and still post the huge profits that they do because they don't do the work required to prevent the acquisition of fraudulent certificates. There is no way to undercut them on price if you want to provide a quality service. If you figure out a way, they'll buy you out to protect their revenue.
For the system to change, there needs to be a way to have the established vendor's authority revoked if they issue more than a set number of bad certs over a specified period of time. They shouldn't have a license to print money. They should have to actually provide the service they claim to provide.
Other, better editors have this as a mode that you set all the time. It seems pretty common to me that the user would want to have each paste operation behave a particular way depending on context or the type of content being pasted. It's not any more advanced than the section format. Even vi has this feature.
If Microsoft made it into a persistent setting, thus making it "advanced", then they should probably re-evaluate that decision; especially since users are complaining about it.
What makes that an "Advanced" option?
I don't think they are either. They clearly designed this generation to keep costs as low as possible. However I don't think they have any intention of ever turning a profit on the hardware. After all, their goal is marketshare for their DRM and digital distribution channel, not to be a profitable hardware vendor. Once they get the manufacturing costs down, they'll just drop the price. I think they thought they would have gotten there by now, and the Elite is evidence of that. It probably costs about $1.40 more to manufacture than the old model, but instead of keeping the price the same or dropping it, something that could have seriously hurt Sony, they raised the price $80....
Nope. That couldn't have happened. If they did that they'd have those extra 500k consoles on hand as an asset instead of simply having the manufacturing costs deducted from their overall revenue.
Why are people so unwilling to accept as fact that Microsoft is still losing money on these things?
Whatever the cost of the SLA, Fios makes a huge impact to even the most mission critical applications. Where I used to have dual-redundant T1s, or a T1 backing up a T3, I now have a T1, and a Fios line.... And the Fios line is actually more reliable with faster response times, has higher upstream bandwidth, and lower latency (but no latency guarantee). It remains to be seen if the last two remain true as deployment increases, but the market in my locality (which was one of the first to get Fios) is close to saturation. We actually keep the backup T1 for supplier diversity more than the SLA. I also still use a T1 PRI for voice communications, but hopefully Verizon will provide a fiber solution in that department soon. Voice T1s are significantly cheaper per month than data anyway, since they also have usage fees.
That disclaimer is the same as the disclaimer on the SLA equipped T1, BTW. The SLA doesn't guarantee uninterrupted service. You can't that kind of SLA in many locations, and where you can they're really expensive (more than the T1 prices quoted in the article). Even with such a guarantee, I've never seen an agreement that didn't limit the provider's liability to the cost of the service. In other words, an uninterrupted service guarantee only means that you get a refund for the period of time your service is out. The typical T1 SLA merely guarantees a maximum response time to issues. The Fios line does this as well, but at 24hours instead of the 1, 3, or 6 hours you usually see for a T1. Fios also doesn't require the long service contracts that T1 providers usually require in order to give you a good rate. You're month-to-month from day one.
Actually, measured in light years, practical fusion is only 1.58e-5 light years away.
Obviously that should say the "days of Copper are coming to an end".... I previewed too... Just a brain fart.
You, you hit the nail on the head. An SLA means you get credit for your downtime, and that's it.
You should check out Verizon again. They'll sell you a 50Mbit link for under $1000/month. You're right about the days of Fiber coming to an end... At least outside of SBC's territory. People who work there are just screwed, as the Fiber-to-the-Node infrastructure they are deploying is designed to protect their fat T1 profits.
It's happened to me twice so far. The first time I called, got a knowledgeable tech on the phone with zero hold time, and he fixed the routing problem on their end within five minutes. The second time, we lost the pole in a wind storm. They were on-site within two hours to fix it.
This is in contrast to T1 service I've had in the past where I never got better than 3 hour response time on configuration issues (they broke the configuration every six months or so, and every time the line got sold to another provider), and had multi-day downtime on several occasions.
The guarantee is 24 hour, the same as the T1 was, but the service has been much better.
The CompUSA near me (Framingham MA), and many other CompUSA stores are closing. I was there last night. They had a cage, and another display packed full of Vista. All editions including upgrades, over 100 copies total, and they were 60% off. If you need Vista for some reason, a defunct CompUSA is probably your best bet right now.