it really doesn't solve a problem the consumer has - it's not simpler than a credit card transaction (you still have to take a token out of your pocket, and perhaps type a pin or whatever). It's not particularly faster for the consumer, and it doesn't cost the consumer any less money.
I think it's much faster. I pull my phone out and tap it. Done. No PIN; my fingerprint unlocks the phone as it comes out of my pocket. Much easier and quicker than fumbling a card from a wallet, swiping (and maybe re-swiping, if it didn't read the first time). It doesn't save me any money, but neither does it cost me any, and I like having the electronic receipts on the phone (granted that some credit cards have apps that give you that as well).
It is still simply easier to swipe a card or pay with cash.
... until you have to do a return or get your taxes audited, and you can't find the paper receipts. With digital wallets, there is no paper receipt. It is emailed to you, and they archive a copy as well.
Meh. When you need it, you print a copy. The IRS has no problem with printed copies of electronic receipts. They probably *should* have a problem with them, given how easily they can be faked... but then again so can paper receipts. Actually, emails to my gmail account are dramatically harder to forge than any paper receipts because they contain DKIM signatures, which cover date, message ID, subject, and a body hash. In addition, I could always pull up the AndroidPay transaction logs on Google's web site as further proof, which, if done on the IRS agent's computer, would also be very difficult to fake.
Apple Pay lets you pay from the lock screen with a quick double tap and touch ID, which I can (and do) in the motion of bringing my phone up from my pocket.
My Nexus 6P is a little easier/smoother even than that. As I pull the phone from my pocket my finger falls on the rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, unlocking the phone and AndroidPay. Since I do that every time I pull it out of my pocket (I basically never see the lock screen any more), to me it feels like "grab phone, tap reader, done".
You obviously haven't ever used a iPhone to make a mobile payment. It's WAY easier than any CC transaction, and no less than 10x faster than a chip based transaction.
The same is true on an Android phone that has a fingerprint reader, like my Nexus 6P.
Exactly. It's much easier for me to carry a single CC or Debit card, ID and/or a few bills in cash in my pocket than to carry a relatively heavy phone.
This statement implies there is some possibility that you may carry the card while leaving the phone home. For me -- and for many others -- that is basically never going to happen. I may or may not have my wallet on me, but I *always* have my phone.
The opposite of your scenario has happened to me several times. I got to the checkout or gas pump and realized I'd left my wallet home, but I was able to pay with my phone (NFC payment terminals are ubiquitous in my area). If I could install a driver's license app on my phone I probably wouldn't bother carrying a wallet at all most days. Come to think of it, I have my driver's license number memorized and all of the cops have computers they can look it up on... maybe I don't need to carry it at all. If I get pulled over I should just be able to give them the number. Hmm.
I mean really- who the hell really thinks taking out your phone, unlocking it, moving it over a sensor, and typing your pin into an app is more convenient then taking a card from your wallet and making one swipe?
That would be sort of bad. Personally, I just take my phone out of my pocket and tap it[*]. Done. Much more convenient than taking wallet from pocket, opening wallet, taking card from wallet, swiping, and then reversing the process. Among other problems, the card requires two hands, the phone only one.
[*] As my phone is coming out of my pocket my finger falls on the fingerprint scanner on the back, so by the time it leaves the pocket, the phone and payment app are already unlocked. As the phone goes back into the pocket my index finger taps the power button, turning off the display and re-locking the phone.
I bank with a decent sized local credit union. After they got finished patting themselves on the back for their technological advancement rolling out EVM cards, they refuse to support any of the digital wallets, including Apple's, Android's, or Samsung. Their reasoning (at least as of December 2015) is that no one is using them.
You should consider switching to a smaller credit union, or a larger bank.
The NFC support situation is kind of strange right now. All the small players who just contract their card production and management out to service providers like First Data are ready to go, as are the big banks (Chase lagged, but has finally caught up). The middle tier, though, is very hit and miss.
As an aside, if you're paying using a debit card you're a very kind person doing your part to keep retail prices down, and I thank you for it, but you're leaving money on the table. The smart thing to do is to get a good rewards credit card that gives you cash back and run everything you can through it, paying it off every month. This effectively gives you a 1-5% discount on everything you buy. If you travel for business and can do it within your company policy, run all your travel expenses through the card, too.
Some places are held back by ill-advised enterprise junk foisted on them. Others are buried in legacy clusterfucks. But when you start a new project and every other word out of your mouth is "can't," what's the point?
Sure. On the other hand, sometimes to a first-order approximation and given an understanding of the context which QA engineers tend to lack, stuff really can't be done.
I've never been a fan of the regular release schedule of Firefox (or software in general).
I'm a huge fan of regular release schedules
Releasing a new version just for the sake of having a new version every three months seems like a way to just make sure you're introducing potential new issues in your software
Quite the opposite. Delaying release until you have some significant new "release-worthy" features leads to "big bang" releases that require endless testing because there is so much new code in them. It makes it hard to get something out the door, ever, and means you need a separate cycle of frequent bugfix releases, with corresponding management of separate dev and release trees (separate trees are good, but allowing them to become very different is not). Worst of all, it motivates developers to get their feature into the release even if it's not quite ready, because if they don't get on this train the next one isn't leaving the station for a long time.
A fast, regular release cadence means that large features get broken up into many small features, which are much easier to test and manage. It removes the need for lots of bugfix releases, because you just fix the bug in the next regular release -- unless it's severe, of course, in which case you hold either the release or the feature until it's fixed. Best of all it means that if developers decide their feature isn't quite ready, it's not too painful to wait for the next.
For server-side work, my preferred release cadence is weekly. Getting to that level requires automated testing and a well-tuned QA team and process, but it makes for a very fast, smooth development process, and the cost of not getting your feature into a given release is almost nil. It also means that if a release fails QA it is very reasonable to simply skip it. If releases get skipped too often, that's a strong signal that the dev team needs to slow down and focus on quality rather than features. If they never get skipped, that's a signal that the dev team is probably being too cautious.
For application software like Firefox, a weekly release would create too much burden on users. The six week schedule is a pretty good compromise, as long as the team is willing to delay or even skip releases as needed. Again, if the team is releasing on schedule like clockwork, that's an indicator that they should probably get more aggressive. If delays (or, especially, skips) are common then they should retool their processes to slow down and catch more bugs early.
No, working in QA and going back and forth with devs and business analysts I often get overruled because devs claims this or that "cannot be done". Fact is, they are just too lazy and the BAs don't want to deal with it either...until a customer complaints about exactly that, then it is top priority and a fix is put in place within ten minutes.
That they are just too lazy is one possibility, but I've worked with a lot of devs in my career, and I haven't met many who work that way. Some more likely explanations are:
1. It can't be done without either massive work or an ugly hack that the devs expect will bite them on the butt later.
2. It can't be done without hugely complicating other, in-progress work.
3. It can't be done without creating large problems for other teams (e.g. it creates a potential for a doubling of server workload in pathological scenarios).
4. Maybe it can be done, but it's not clear what the implications might be, and it's too risky.
5. It can be done, but the devs are buried, don't have time to deal with it and perceive it as low priority, but you've shown in the past that you won't accept that.
Of course, when a customer raises the priority, then devs may be forced to drop other work to do it, or to accept whatever the other implications are, no matter how painful. You apparently choose to take the proof that it can be done as evidence that the devs are lazy liars, but that probably says more about you than about them. Or maybe they really are lazy liars. I'd bet against that, though.
So I got lucky and was able to fix the problem but no thanks to systemd it was just a data drive not essential to the booting of the os.
That's not a systemd bug, that's normal -- and correct -- mountall behavior. Always has been.
wouldn't it be better if systemd was able to init what it can and finish booting and issue a cry for help once the system was up and running?
No. Mountall (whether systemd's implementation or one of the older ones) has no way to know if the failed disk is required for essential system services. Failures of core system components should cause severe errors as early as possible, to avoid making anyone think that the system is functional when it isn't.
So what are you supposed to do remove drives that are not essential for your server to start from fstab and manually mount them once the server has booted maybe not init any services that will be using those drives either....
If you have drives that aren't essential for system operation, you should add the "nofail" option on them in/etc/fstab. (See the fstab man page).
The intended purpose of a corporation is to provide gainful employment
That's a bizarre reinterpretation. The purpose of a corporation is to facilitate pooling of capital to enable the undertaking of large projects that no single person could fund, and to shield investors from potential losses -- which has pros and cons, but on balance is good. Capital would be much harder to raise if investors had to risk everything on each investment.
Large projects, such as making a product and distributing it on very large scales, usually do require employing people, usually a lot of people, but there's nothing employment-related in the concept of a corporation. Indeed, some corporations are capital-intensive and labor-light, employing very few people.
What's wrong with the Prius? It's reasonably-priced, reliable, comfortable, quiet, efficient transportation. I don't own one, but it's my vehicle of choice when I'm renting a car.
Electric cars are still bleeding edge. The amount you save on gasoline, even over the full life of the car, will not pay for the premium price. You don't buy them to save money.
I did, and it worked. The payoff period for my LEAF ended up being a bit longer than expected because when I bought it (in 2012) I was projecting that gas prices would continue increasing, when in fact they dropped dramatically, but it has paid for itself. Note that that calculation does include just over $9K in tax credits, and charging partially at work. Without those, my payoff period would have been about 10 years, which is a bit long, but about the amount of time I keep a car. Actually, it's probably a bit better than that because maintenance costs on an EV are lower.
I expect the government of Mexico to serve the interests of the citizens of Mexico. I expect the government of China to serve the interests of the citizens of China. I expect the government of the USA to serve the interests of the citizens of the USA.
I don't. The USA was established as a more enlightened nation, one that understood the notion of inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The proper role of such an enlightened government is to guarantee those rights and freedoms to all people within its jurisdiction, not just to those who through an accident of birth acquired the label of "citizen". Further, such a government should take the view that all humans everywhere deserve the same guarantees, and that there is no reason to favor one group over another, though the government's ability to provide guarantees is limited to its own territory.
I expect other nations to be short-sighted and parochial. I expect mine to be exceptional. Yes, taking the high road often means some short-term disadvantages and pain, but moral leadership will win in the long term.
Instead Google is playing along and trying to show how great Chrome is on Windows 10's battery life. This is a losing war, Google. You're fighting a winter war against Russia here. Nobody uses Edge because they legitimately are concerned about their laptop battery life.
Meh. Unless it damages the user experience in other ways, using less power is a good thing.
You are an example of what Nietzsche called last man. Scared of taking risks, scared of living in the real world, seeking comfort and safety, not interested in achieving great things. In other words, a pussy. You're disgusting.
Nietzsche is disgusting. His philosophies, particularly the notions of "Will to Power" and the "Übermensch", were among the key intellectual motivations of the nationalism and aggression that caused the World Wars, especially the second. Granted that Baeumler twisted his ideas shamelessly to make the connection easier, at bottom Nietzschean philosophy is a disavowal of morality in favor of power. The moment someone starts quoting Nietzsche at you to support a moral argument, you know you've won.
There is a difference between murder and manslaughter.
I'm not trying to make some emotional argument with that, just pointing out why people may perceive the extinction of species differently in this case.
Really, when a company like Apple decides to test boundaries of the law
By "test the boundaries of the law" you actually mean "comply with a 25 year-old agreement with a sovereign nation that still argues that the agreement is wholly correct and is considering suing the EU for attempting to invalidate it".
Apple should expect the authorities to do exactly the same.
And by "do exactly the same" you mean "move the boundaries".
To take the most famous example, the precession of Mercury's orbit is quite a bit larger than that.
Which is a silly argument as the precession is not based on a relativistic effect but on simple orbit mechanics.
Umm, perhaps you should go back to school. Newtonian mechanics does not account for the magnitude of the precession, predicting a rate of precession that is half the rate actually observed. Relativity provides a correct prediction. This was one of the first big pieces of empirical evidence for relativity.
Slashdot Mirror
it really doesn't solve a problem the consumer has - it's not simpler than a credit card transaction (you still have to take a token out of your pocket, and perhaps type a pin or whatever). It's not particularly faster for the consumer, and it doesn't cost the consumer any less money.
I think it's much faster. I pull my phone out and tap it. Done. No PIN; my fingerprint unlocks the phone as it comes out of my pocket. Much easier and quicker than fumbling a card from a wallet, swiping (and maybe re-swiping, if it didn't read the first time). It doesn't save me any money, but neither does it cost me any, and I like having the electronic receipts on the phone (granted that some credit cards have apps that give you that as well).
It is still simply easier to swipe a card or pay with cash.
... until you have to do a return or get your taxes audited, and you can't find the paper receipts. With digital wallets, there is no paper receipt. It is emailed to you, and they archive a copy as well.
Meh. When you need it, you print a copy. The IRS has no problem with printed copies of electronic receipts. They probably *should* have a problem with them, given how easily they can be faked... but then again so can paper receipts. Actually, emails to my gmail account are dramatically harder to forge than any paper receipts because they contain DKIM signatures, which cover date, message ID, subject, and a body hash. In addition, I could always pull up the AndroidPay transaction logs on Google's web site as further proof, which, if done on the IRS agent's computer, would also be very difficult to fake.
Apple Pay lets you pay from the lock screen with a quick double tap and touch ID, which I can (and do) in the motion of bringing my phone up from my pocket.
My Nexus 6P is a little easier/smoother even than that. As I pull the phone from my pocket my finger falls on the rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, unlocking the phone and AndroidPay. Since I do that every time I pull it out of my pocket (I basically never see the lock screen any more), to me it feels like "grab phone, tap reader, done".
You obviously haven't ever used a iPhone to make a mobile payment. It's WAY easier than any CC transaction, and no less than 10x faster than a chip based transaction.
The same is true on an Android phone that has a fingerprint reader, like my Nexus 6P.
Exactly. It's much easier for me to carry a single CC or Debit card, ID and/or a few bills in cash in my pocket than to carry a relatively heavy phone.
This statement implies there is some possibility that you may carry the card while leaving the phone home. For me -- and for many others -- that is basically never going to happen. I may or may not have my wallet on me, but I *always* have my phone.
The opposite of your scenario has happened to me several times. I got to the checkout or gas pump and realized I'd left my wallet home, but I was able to pay with my phone (NFC payment terminals are ubiquitous in my area). If I could install a driver's license app on my phone I probably wouldn't bother carrying a wallet at all most days. Come to think of it, I have my driver's license number memorized and all of the cops have computers they can look it up on... maybe I don't need to carry it at all. If I get pulled over I should just be able to give them the number. Hmm.
I mean really- who the hell really thinks taking out your phone, unlocking it, moving it over a sensor, and typing your pin into an app is more convenient then taking a card from your wallet and making one swipe?
That would be sort of bad. Personally, I just take my phone out of my pocket and tap it[*]. Done. Much more convenient than taking wallet from pocket, opening wallet, taking card from wallet, swiping, and then reversing the process. Among other problems, the card requires two hands, the phone only one.
[*] As my phone is coming out of my pocket my finger falls on the fingerprint scanner on the back, so by the time it leaves the pocket, the phone and payment app are already unlocked. As the phone goes back into the pocket my index finger taps the power button, turning off the display and re-locking the phone.
I bank with a decent sized local credit union. After they got finished patting themselves on the back for their technological advancement rolling out EVM cards, they refuse to support any of the digital wallets, including Apple's, Android's, or Samsung. Their reasoning (at least as of December 2015) is that no one is using them.
You should consider switching to a smaller credit union, or a larger bank.
The NFC support situation is kind of strange right now. All the small players who just contract their card production and management out to service providers like First Data are ready to go, as are the big banks (Chase lagged, but has finally caught up). The middle tier, though, is very hit and miss.
As an aside, if you're paying using a debit card you're a very kind person doing your part to keep retail prices down, and I thank you for it, but you're leaving money on the table. The smart thing to do is to get a good rewards credit card that gives you cash back and run everything you can through it, paying it off every month. This effectively gives you a 1-5% discount on everything you buy. If you travel for business and can do it within your company policy, run all your travel expenses through the card, too.
Some places are held back by ill-advised enterprise junk foisted on them. Others are buried in legacy clusterfucks. But when you start a new project and every other word out of your mouth is "can't," what's the point?
Sure. On the other hand, sometimes to a first-order approximation and given an understanding of the context which QA engineers tend to lack, stuff really can't be done.
Nice try, Tanya.
Tanya?
I've never been a fan of the regular release schedule of Firefox (or software in general).
I'm a huge fan of regular release schedules
Releasing a new version just for the sake of having a new version every three months seems like a way to just make sure you're introducing potential new issues in your software
Quite the opposite. Delaying release until you have some significant new "release-worthy" features leads to "big bang" releases that require endless testing because there is so much new code in them. It makes it hard to get something out the door, ever, and means you need a separate cycle of frequent bugfix releases, with corresponding management of separate dev and release trees (separate trees are good, but allowing them to become very different is not). Worst of all, it motivates developers to get their feature into the release even if it's not quite ready, because if they don't get on this train the next one isn't leaving the station for a long time.
A fast, regular release cadence means that large features get broken up into many small features, which are much easier to test and manage. It removes the need for lots of bugfix releases, because you just fix the bug in the next regular release -- unless it's severe, of course, in which case you hold either the release or the feature until it's fixed. Best of all it means that if developers decide their feature isn't quite ready, it's not too painful to wait for the next.
For server-side work, my preferred release cadence is weekly. Getting to that level requires automated testing and a well-tuned QA team and process, but it makes for a very fast, smooth development process, and the cost of not getting your feature into a given release is almost nil. It also means that if a release fails QA it is very reasonable to simply skip it. If releases get skipped too often, that's a strong signal that the dev team needs to slow down and focus on quality rather than features. If they never get skipped, that's a signal that the dev team is probably being too cautious.
For application software like Firefox, a weekly release would create too much burden on users. The six week schedule is a pretty good compromise, as long as the team is willing to delay or even skip releases as needed. Again, if the team is releasing on schedule like clockwork, that's an indicator that they should probably get more aggressive. If delays (or, especially, skips) are common then they should retool their processes to slow down and catch more bugs early.
No, working in QA and going back and forth with devs and business analysts I often get overruled because devs claims this or that "cannot be done". Fact is, they are just too lazy and the BAs don't want to deal with it either...until a customer complaints about exactly that, then it is top priority and a fix is put in place within ten minutes.
That they are just too lazy is one possibility, but I've worked with a lot of devs in my career, and I haven't met many who work that way. Some more likely explanations are:
1. It can't be done without either massive work or an ugly hack that the devs expect will bite them on the butt later.
2. It can't be done without hugely complicating other, in-progress work.
3. It can't be done without creating large problems for other teams (e.g. it creates a potential for a doubling of server workload in pathological scenarios).
4. Maybe it can be done, but it's not clear what the implications might be, and it's too risky.
5. It can be done, but the devs are buried, don't have time to deal with it and perceive it as low priority, but you've shown in the past that you won't accept that.
Of course, when a customer raises the priority, then devs may be forced to drop other work to do it, or to accept whatever the other implications are, no matter how painful. You apparently choose to take the proof that it can be done as evidence that the devs are lazy liars, but that probably says more about you than about them. Or maybe they really are lazy liars. I'd bet against that, though.
So I got lucky and was able to fix the problem but no thanks to systemd it was just a data drive not essential to the booting of the os.
That's not a systemd bug, that's normal -- and correct -- mountall behavior. Always has been.
wouldn't it be better if systemd was able to init what it can and finish booting and issue a cry for help once the system was up and running?
No. Mountall (whether systemd's implementation or one of the older ones) has no way to know if the failed disk is required for essential system services. Failures of core system components should cause severe errors as early as possible, to avoid making anyone think that the system is functional when it isn't.
So what are you supposed to do remove drives that are not essential for your server to start from fstab and manually mount them once the server has booted maybe not init any services that will be using those drives either....
If you have drives that aren't essential for system operation, you should add the "nofail" option on them in /etc/fstab. (See the fstab man page).
The intended purpose of a corporation is to provide gainful employment
That's a bizarre reinterpretation. The purpose of a corporation is to facilitate pooling of capital to enable the undertaking of large projects that no single person could fund, and to shield investors from potential losses -- which has pros and cons, but on balance is good. Capital would be much harder to raise if investors had to risk everything on each investment.
Large projects, such as making a product and distributing it on very large scales, usually do require employing people, usually a lot of people, but there's nothing employment-related in the concept of a corporation. Indeed, some corporations are capital-intensive and labor-light, employing very few people.
That's just sad.
What's wrong with the Prius? It's reasonably-priced, reliable, comfortable, quiet, efficient transportation. I don't own one, but it's my vehicle of choice when I'm renting a car.
Electric cars are still bleeding edge. The amount you save on gasoline, even over the full life of the car, will not pay for the premium price. You don't buy them to save money.
I did, and it worked. The payoff period for my LEAF ended up being a bit longer than expected because when I bought it (in 2012) I was projecting that gas prices would continue increasing, when in fact they dropped dramatically, but it has paid for itself. Note that that calculation does include just over $9K in tax credits, and charging partially at work. Without those, my payoff period would have been about 10 years, which is a bit long, but about the amount of time I keep a car. Actually, it's probably a bit better than that because maintenance costs on an EV are lower.
The employees have every right, both legal and moral, to stonewall the education of their replacements.
Sure they do. They have the right to quit. They don't have the right to continue getting paid while refusing to do the work being asked of them.
I expect the government of Mexico to serve the interests of the citizens of Mexico. I expect the government of China to serve the interests of the citizens of China. I expect the government of the USA to serve the interests of the citizens of the USA.
I don't. The USA was established as a more enlightened nation, one that understood the notion of inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The proper role of such an enlightened government is to guarantee those rights and freedoms to all people within its jurisdiction, not just to those who through an accident of birth acquired the label of "citizen". Further, such a government should take the view that all humans everywhere deserve the same guarantees, and that there is no reason to favor one group over another, though the government's ability to provide guarantees is limited to its own territory.
I expect other nations to be short-sighted and parochial. I expect mine to be exceptional. Yes, taking the high road often means some short-term disadvantages and pain, but moral leadership will win in the long term.
Instead Google is playing along and trying to show how great Chrome is on Windows 10's battery life. This is a losing war, Google. You're fighting a winter war against Russia here. Nobody uses Edge because they legitimately are concerned about their laptop battery life.
Meh. Unless it damages the user experience in other ways, using less power is a good thing.
Adobe is on board too, so browser support is guaranteed for the Widevine DRM plug-in required by Netflix' licensors.
Google owns Widevine, not Adobe. Did you mean Primetime?
You are an example of what Nietzsche called last man. Scared of taking risks, scared of living in the real world, seeking comfort and safety, not interested in achieving great things. In other words, a pussy. You're disgusting.
Nietzsche is disgusting. His philosophies, particularly the notions of "Will to Power" and the "Übermensch", were among the key intellectual motivations of the nationalism and aggression that caused the World Wars, especially the second. Granted that Baeumler twisted his ideas shamelessly to make the connection easier, at bottom Nietzschean philosophy is a disavowal of morality in favor of power. The moment someone starts quoting Nietzsche at you to support a moral argument, you know you've won.
How exactly does that pertain to my point?
Just that we clearly don't mind intentionally destroying a species when it does us enough harm.
There is a difference between murder and manslaughter.
I'm not trying to make some emotional argument with that, just pointing out why people may perceive the extinction of species differently in this case.
We intentionally eradicated smallpox.
iPhone sales in the US result in profits in Ireland
Cite?
Really, when a company like Apple decides to test boundaries of the law
By "test the boundaries of the law" you actually mean "comply with a 25 year-old agreement with a sovereign nation that still argues that the agreement is wholly correct and is considering suing the EU for attempting to invalidate it".
Apple should expect the authorities to do exactly the same.
And by "do exactly the same" you mean "move the boundaries".
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21706267-european-commissions-assault-technology-giant-wrong-bruised-apple
To take the most famous example, the precession of Mercury's orbit is quite a bit larger than that. Which is a silly argument as the precession is not based on a relativistic effect but on simple orbit mechanics.
Umm, perhaps you should go back to school. Newtonian mechanics does not account for the magnitude of the precession, predicting a rate of precession that is half the rate actually observed. Relativity provides a correct prediction. This was one of the first big pieces of empirical evidence for relativity.