A modal box is the only sane compromise. If you don't stick it right in their face, users will happily ignore everything you throw at them. It doesn't matter that your errors cover the bottom half of the screen in red 24pt Comic Sans, they will ignore it, and when they stop ignoring it they will complain to you that the errors take up too much of the screen.
For a technical user (coder, sysadmin), error logs are fine. For a non-technical computer operators, the more obnoxious the error dialog, the better. Make it modal but user-friendly, e.g. don't post a big stack trace or register dump - that is noise to everyone but you, they will ignore it and continue breaking your app. Instead, log those nasty details to a file (or email), and present a friendly error message such as "There was an error, was NOT done. If this persists please call Joe at 212-555-1212 and tell them [error-type & log-ID]". Then you read your logs, find out what the user was trying to do and either educate them or fix your app.
If you want to make it even nicer, add some smarts in your app to detect when a user's been repeatedly getting the same error (or doing it wrong), and throw a different popup "Please stop doing that and call I.T. so we can help you". It may seem rude, but we're supposed to be solution providers. A user having trouble with app, that's also a problem in need of a solution, something the app cannot provide on its own. I've had countless situations where someone had given up on an app, because they felt ignorant for not knowing how to work it, and didn't want to "bother" me with their "stupid questions". Things would linger on for weeks, that would have taken a 2 minute conversation to fix in the first place... but now there's 20 hours of cleanup work involved because someone didn't speak up. As UI designers and developers, I think it is our duty to make users less afraid of technology, and to open that conversation channel between users and developers. I'm not saying every coder should have to deal with the crazies in HR, but at least acknowledge that cooperation is required for problem resolution.
"ZOMG TERRORISM! Cancel the passport!" "ZOMG your passport is invalid. You must be a terrorist!!!" "ZOMG you can't apply for a new passport, because, you know, terrorism." "ZOMG good people can't get passports anymore, so only terrorists have passports"
It's not like policy writers bother with unit testing.
Why is it that when mean things are said, regardless of their veracity, about the chinese, the russians, the dutch, or any other ethnic or geopolitical group, it's called racism, but when those same comments are aimed at jewish people, it's called anti-semitism ?
Why do jews get their own word, distinct from the stigma of racism ? What makes them so goddamned special ?
I'm going to posit my own theory, that everyone is "jumping on Israel's case" because Israel is always jumping on everyone else's case. Palestine this, Lebanon that... That country is seriously fucked up, and they hide behind pure medieval racism to justify their endless wars. It's a kindergarten scuffle taken to idiotic proportions. The greatest hypocrisy is that Israel is judged differently from all the other intolerant theocracies that make the middle-east the birthplace of blind hatred. Congrats to those who emigrate and start a fruitful life elsewhere.
Pride in your origins ? You were born. Whoop-tee-doo! One person's birth doesn't make an arbitrary geopolitical territory automagically awesomer than the one next to it.
If we're going to take the gloves off, I'll posit that the entirety of "American English" is ignorant, as it is an inferior, jocular, slurred dialect that only loosely resembles English syntax. It is to English what Afrikaans is to Dutch.
Well.. the apartment example isn't quite analogous, since you call up the super or landlord and they have the right to go deal with the problem on your behalf. Let's say you own your house, and your neighbour's water pipe burst, flooding your lot, you can't break into their home and fix the problem - at least not without being arrested and sued for B&E. If they're on vacation, you would need some form of legal approval, probably from the municipality, to call over an expect to deal with it. You can, however, take reasonable measures on your plot of land to limit or contain the damage, and then seek restitution for those costs.
In Microsoft's case, it's quite different in that they are a 3rd party. They have nothing to do with the domain holders, and nothing to do with the victims other than selling them software. The only reason they weren't thrown out of court is because this was about spam, but really they had no right to even ask for suspension. Furthermore, Verisign had no right to suspend services for an alleged crime to which they were not party. Right now, companies get away with these transgressions due to weaselly-worded contracts, but in theory they are opening themselves up for a nasty suit by the alleged spammers.
IANAL, but frankly the first reaction I had was negative. Today, they're revoking a domain because of spam. Tomorrow, nilly-willy censorship. What if Microsoft doesn't like that I use the words "Fuck" and "swine" and "Microsoft Works", and gets yet another nearsighted judge to shut my domain off ? It doesn't matter what you do with it, there are written laws and procedures to be followed. People's lives weren't in danger here, it's just spam. There was no excuse for trumping the law IMO.
What does public policy have to do with any of this ? If someone sucks at something, it is not a public policy issue to hide the consequences of ignorance. I am a terrible cook, so I don't waltz into people's homes and turn their dinner into burnt rubber. It isn't the government's job to help me not suck at cooking, nor should the rest of the world be forced to endure my inedible concoctions. I can either learn to do it right, or get the fuck out of the kitchen.
Because it doesn't run a broad palette of unverified code rife with vulnerabilities ? Because you can't accidentally install a virus while surfing pr0n ? Because it doesn't run Kazaa ?
The problem with the cost of the iPad is more than the hardware cost, it's the fact that you'll need to buy a bunch of little apps to do stuff with it. The elegance of the netbook is that, despite being a tiny crap machine, it is usually bundled with a software suite that's tailored to the small screen and expected usage patterns. You don't need to buy special software to run on your netbook, you just fire up your favorite package manager and load whatever you need for free, or if it's windows you can install the same apps you use on your full-sized laptop or desktop computer.
With the iPad, not only will we need to buy all these stupid little 5 dollar apps, but it will still be tethered to a regular computer running iTunes.
I call your bullshit. Windows 7 has a completely new sound engine. While many aspects of Vista are mostly unchanged in Win7, the sound API is by far one of the most improved features. A heap of old drivers are incompatible with it, because they step outside their boundaries and try to do stuff that clashes with the new engine, such as speaker management and overzealous jack sensing.
For a laptop, if it's one of those weird sound card + modem jobbies, I would be surprised at all if the drivers were utter garbage. It's very difficult to get proper driver support for a component that has no retail counterpart, you're stuck with whatever your OEM redistributes, or in some cases the chip vendor might offer a generic driver that kinda sorta works but might not support custom functionality designed by the OEM.
The problem with multiple displays, and specifically Matrox' business model, is that it is utterly trivial to add more displays to a card. The most difficult part, and I say this facetiously, is to come up with a break-out connector since the PCI backplate can only fit two full-sized DVI or VGA ports. Mash a bunch of pins into a tiny form-factor, make a cable that splits them back out into regular DVI, and you have yourself an N-way display card. The electronics are just more of the same. If you can make a dual-DVI card, then you can mash eight of those chipsets together on one board and have a 16 DVI card.
What Matrox used to excel at was their RAMDACs, which resulted in better output quality on the VGA. In this age of all-digital interconnects, there is no need for a RAMDAC anymore. It's all digital to digital, the graphics card simply acts as a frame buffer with accelerated drawing routines, all the heavy lifting has been moved to the display itself. With an act like Matrox, the "GPU" component is an underpowered 2D engine designed for low cost, not high performance.
ATI's Eyefinity is a non-starter for gaming, but it is a slap in the face of all these shitty companies that have been selling glorified garbage to multi-display fetishists for so long.
Yep you nailed it. All three games, I played through the campaign with a buddy (split screen) and we had a blast. The pacing was great, every few minutes there was a tense moment where we had to think together to pull through, and it rarely got boring. I even felt Halo 3 was too short, seems like we plowed through it in no time at all.
When I played them again on my own, I found each game a bit tedious overall. The levels tend to feel too large and I'm not a fan of massive fights where they drop four dozen of little alien bastards every ten minutes, and the flood reminded me of the HL's headcrabs, which I equally hated.
I'm still eager to see the next instalment, but that's because I know my old buddy will be calling me for some split-screen alien carnage.
There is a massive community of HTPC enthusiasts who want to do just that. Remember XBMC (formerly Xbox Media Player) ? Yeah, that thing. Slap it on a netbook or "nettop" with ION, hook it up to your TV and you have an 1080p capable any-format media player for less than the cost of a halfway-decent BluRay player.
The real solution to this problem is to reduce the base power consumption of the GeForce. Dual-GPU switching is a kludge, nothing more. A crutch for an inefficient GPU.
The problem with GPU throttling is it's far more visible (pun intended). If your CPU is rapidly switching between 3.0ghz and, say, 1.2ghz, you probably won't notice at all, but if your game or video app has uneven framerates or the dreaded micro-stutter, you will feel the overwhelming urge to smash your laptop against the nearest brick wall.
GPUs typically have two power modes: power-saving (idle), and full-blast (gaming). Your device drivers kick it into high-power mode whenever you launch a 3D app, so the stutter of switching speeds happens before any animation takes place, and it stays that way until you exit the game. This is representative of typical GPU usage: you're either using it to the max, or not at all. I don't know anyone who runs their games at lower quality settings just to "save power on the GPU", you'll push the flashiest pixels your hardware can handle.
What would be quite appreciated is if the high-end GPUs had a true low-power mode that shuts off all the excess pwnage, but that's just my bias. I tend to buy the fastest GPU I can afford, and stick it out for a few years until it starts bothering me. My latest acquisition, the GTX 295, is a power hog. Even when sitting idle at the desktop, my PC chugs a hearty 400 watts to do nothing, roughly 300w to the two GPUs and the remainder for the CPU and motherboard. While gaming, this number swells to around 800w, again 3/4 of that goes to the GPUs. I'm fine with the 800w active consumption, it's the idle power draw that bothers me, because I only game for an hour or two a night, 3-4 nights a week. If I replace those two GPUs with a low-end card, my 2D performance is unaffected yet power usage drops to a much cozier 100w. Why the big GPUs need 200 more watts to do absolutely nothing, that defies even the most usurious logic. Now given the greater number of high-end desktop vs laptop GPUs, I think they should figure out how to shut down parts of the desktop GPU when not in use, rather than investing in some never-gonna-sell IGP+GPU trickery. The $25 drop on my monthly hydro bill would more than justify the expense of a higher-efficiency device. Hell, that's enough to buy the latest GPU every year!
How hard can it possibly be for a chinese factory to affix "Proudly made in USA" stickers on everything ?
Trust is an illusion, anyway. Where a product was made doesn't say much about HOW it was made. All you're really doing is weighing the perceived reputation of a country, which is almost entirely made up from limited media exposure and political spin, since you've probably never been to that country yourself, and you don't know the manufacturing process, you certainly don't know the engineer(s) and designer(s) that created the damned thing, and well really you're just pulling some fuzzy sense of value out of your own ass.
It doesn't matter where a product is made. Assume it is a steaming pile of shit until proven otherwise. American manufacturers can be every bit as incompetently cheap as Chinese mfgs.
RIAA: Ok, I was kidding all along. I didn't really mean to sue you, especially since I have no hope of ever winning. Let's call the whole thing off. No hard feelings ?
Judge: Yeah, Beckerman, quit being such an feisty little prick. Oh, and btw you can both go fuck yourselves.
Now I'm not all that well-versed in the letter of the law, but that reeks of fraud. A frivolous lawsuit gone unpunished is what this is. I'd dare accuse the judge of collusion.
Personally, I feel that if we're going to colonize the moon (or Mars), that responsibility should not be put in the hands of NASA, the USA, or any other hypercapitalist nation for that matter. What these bean counters love to ignore is that, once we hit space, money/wealth will quickly become irrelevant. I don't know about you, but I can't picture debt collectors chasing me through the galaxy so some dirty banker can buy a diamond-encrusted iPad.
That's real nice if everyone cooperates, but it is all too easy for a disgruntled admin to change either the password or the password database, and lock the next guy out. Wasn't there such a psycho last year, who was screwing with CA utilities or some ISP long after he'd been fired (for being a psycho) ?
Would you rather they spin off different company names for these side-projects, instead of taking them all under the Google brand ?
They nailed search, then went looking for the next frontier. This is what they DO. This is what most intellectually-minded people do, they figure something out, then move on to a new challenge, building upon their accrued knowledge. If you stop trying the moment you've mastered something, you're deadweight.
That's real cute, but what irks me, as an iPhone user, is that this fancy shmancy app submission process does nothing to ensure quality. Every goddamned week I see hundreds of those "daily babe" apps, all seemingly made by the same 3rd-world developer slapping new pics on his 99 cent app. You're trying to convince me someone actually reviews these submissions ? If I want suggestive imagery on my iphone, I can get them off the web like everyone else, no need for a freaking ad-riddled app.
The app store review process is all about Apple's selfish interests. It offers a false air of legitimacy to any apps hosted therein, and by that sole trait I consider it a fraud.
Yes, as a matter of fact I do. At least when dealing with server/network support duties, there are very few cases where dragging a mouse pointer across the screen is faster than just typing what I want outright.
If I were a movie protagonist "hacking into the pentagon", I'd almost certainly be using command-line tools to do the job. Nmap, John, SSH/SCP... not "Click here to hack" apps with ever-changing lava-lamp acid-trip color swaths and blinking red sat-cams.
Hell, I even play the World of Warcraft with mostly keyboard input and macros, because then I don't have to aim tiny little arrow at stuff, I just mash the button that does the action I want. Using a mouse requires touch and sight, a keyboard only needs the former.
It is, if there is a perfectly suitable standard for the power outlets and voltage/current specifications. The argument is not that electric cars can't fuel at regular gas stations, it's that electric charge stations are often vendor-specific FOR NO REASON. Positive, Negative, maybe a simple protective shield to avoid shocks, that's it! Any alteration in the plug format is a lock-in scheme... they could just as well give you a pair of booster cables and hope you don't short them across your nuts... power is power.
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A modal box is the only sane compromise. If you don't stick it right in their face, users will happily ignore everything you throw at them. It doesn't matter that your errors cover the bottom half of the screen in red 24pt Comic Sans, they will ignore it, and when they stop ignoring it they will complain to you that the errors take up too much of the screen.
For a technical user (coder, sysadmin), error logs are fine. For a non-technical computer operators, the more obnoxious the error dialog, the better. Make it modal but user-friendly, e.g. don't post a big stack trace or register dump - that is noise to everyone but you, they will ignore it and continue breaking your app. Instead, log those nasty details to a file (or email), and present a friendly error message such as "There was an error, was NOT done. If this persists please call Joe at 212-555-1212 and tell them [error-type & log-ID]". Then you read your logs, find out what the user was trying to do and either educate them or fix your app.
If you want to make it even nicer, add some smarts in your app to detect when a user's been repeatedly getting the same error (or doing it wrong), and throw a different popup "Please stop doing that and call I.T. so we can help you". It may seem rude, but we're supposed to be solution providers. A user having trouble with app, that's also a problem in need of a solution, something the app cannot provide on its own. I've had countless situations where someone had given up on an app, because they felt ignorant for not knowing how to work it, and didn't want to "bother" me with their "stupid questions". Things would linger on for weeks, that would have taken a 2 minute conversation to fix in the first place... but now there's 20 hours of cleanup work involved because someone didn't speak up. As UI designers and developers, I think it is our duty to make users less afraid of technology, and to open that conversation channel between users and developers. I'm not saying every coder should have to deal with the crazies in HR, but at least acknowledge that cooperation is required for problem resolution.
"ZOMG TERRORISM! Cancel the passport!"
"ZOMG your passport is invalid. You must be a terrorist!!!"
"ZOMG you can't apply for a new passport, because, you know, terrorism."
"ZOMG good people can't get passports anymore, so only terrorists have passports"
It's not like policy writers bother with unit testing.
*raises hand* I have a question!
Why is it that when mean things are said, regardless of their veracity, about the chinese, the russians, the dutch, or any other ethnic or geopolitical group, it's called racism, but when those same comments are aimed at jewish people, it's called anti-semitism ?
Why do jews get their own word, distinct from the stigma of racism ? What makes them so goddamned special ?
I'm going to posit my own theory, that everyone is "jumping on Israel's case" because Israel is always jumping on everyone else's case. Palestine this, Lebanon that... That country is seriously fucked up, and they hide behind pure medieval racism to justify their endless wars. It's a kindergarten scuffle taken to idiotic proportions. The greatest hypocrisy is that Israel is judged differently from all the other intolerant theocracies that make the middle-east the birthplace of blind hatred. Congrats to those who emigrate and start a fruitful life elsewhere.
Pride in your origins ? You were born. Whoop-tee-doo! One person's birth doesn't make an arbitrary geopolitical territory automagically awesomer than the one next to it.
If we're going to take the gloves off, I'll posit that the entirety of "American English" is ignorant, as it is an inferior, jocular, slurred dialect that only loosely resembles English syntax. It is to English what Afrikaans is to Dutch.
Well.. the apartment example isn't quite analogous, since you call up the super or landlord and they have the right to go deal with the problem on your behalf. Let's say you own your house, and your neighbour's water pipe burst, flooding your lot, you can't break into their home and fix the problem - at least not without being arrested and sued for B&E. If they're on vacation, you would need some form of legal approval, probably from the municipality, to call over an expect to deal with it. You can, however, take reasonable measures on your plot of land to limit or contain the damage, and then seek restitution for those costs.
In Microsoft's case, it's quite different in that they are a 3rd party. They have nothing to do with the domain holders, and nothing to do with the victims other than selling them software. The only reason they weren't thrown out of court is because this was about spam, but really they had no right to even ask for suspension. Furthermore, Verisign had no right to suspend services for an alleged crime to which they were not party. Right now, companies get away with these transgressions due to weaselly-worded contracts, but in theory they are opening themselves up for a nasty suit by the alleged spammers.
IANAL, but frankly the first reaction I had was negative. Today, they're revoking a domain because of spam. Tomorrow, nilly-willy censorship. What if Microsoft doesn't like that I use the words "Fuck" and "swine" and "Microsoft Works", and gets yet another nearsighted judge to shut my domain off ? It doesn't matter what you do with it, there are written laws and procedures to be followed. People's lives weren't in danger here, it's just spam. There was no excuse for trumping the law IMO.
What does public policy have to do with any of this ? If someone sucks at something, it is not a public policy issue to hide the consequences of ignorance. I am a terrible cook, so I don't waltz into people's homes and turn their dinner into burnt rubber. It isn't the government's job to help me not suck at cooking, nor should the rest of the world be forced to endure my inedible concoctions. I can either learn to do it right, or get the fuck out of the kitchen.
Because it doesn't run a broad palette of unverified code rife with vulnerabilities ? Because you can't accidentally install a virus while surfing pr0n ? Because it doesn't run Kazaa ?
Seems rather obvious, no ?
The problem with the cost of the iPad is more than the hardware cost, it's the fact that you'll need to buy a bunch of little apps to do stuff with it. The elegance of the netbook is that, despite being a tiny crap machine, it is usually bundled with a software suite that's tailored to the small screen and expected usage patterns. You don't need to buy special software to run on your netbook, you just fire up your favorite package manager and load whatever you need for free, or if it's windows you can install the same apps you use on your full-sized laptop or desktop computer.
With the iPad, not only will we need to buy all these stupid little 5 dollar apps, but it will still be tethered to a regular computer running iTunes.
I call your bullshit. Windows 7 has a completely new sound engine. While many aspects of Vista are mostly unchanged in Win7, the sound API is by far one of the most improved features. A heap of old drivers are incompatible with it, because they step outside their boundaries and try to do stuff that clashes with the new engine, such as speaker management and overzealous jack sensing.
For a laptop, if it's one of those weird sound card + modem jobbies, I would be surprised at all if the drivers were utter garbage. It's very difficult to get proper driver support for a component that has no retail counterpart, you're stuck with whatever your OEM redistributes, or in some cases the chip vendor might offer a generic driver that kinda sorta works but might not support custom functionality designed by the OEM.
The problem with multiple displays, and specifically Matrox' business model, is that it is utterly trivial to add more displays to a card. The most difficult part, and I say this facetiously, is to come up with a break-out connector since the PCI backplate can only fit two full-sized DVI or VGA ports. Mash a bunch of pins into a tiny form-factor, make a cable that splits them back out into regular DVI, and you have yourself an N-way display card. The electronics are just more of the same. If you can make a dual-DVI card, then you can mash eight of those chipsets together on one board and have a 16 DVI card.
What Matrox used to excel at was their RAMDACs, which resulted in better output quality on the VGA. In this age of all-digital interconnects, there is no need for a RAMDAC anymore. It's all digital to digital, the graphics card simply acts as a frame buffer with accelerated drawing routines, all the heavy lifting has been moved to the display itself. With an act like Matrox, the "GPU" component is an underpowered 2D engine designed for low cost, not high performance.
ATI's Eyefinity is a non-starter for gaming, but it is a slap in the face of all these shitty companies that have been selling glorified garbage to multi-display fetishists for so long.
Yep you nailed it. All three games, I played through the campaign with a buddy (split screen) and we had a blast. The pacing was great, every few minutes there was a tense moment where we had to think together to pull through, and it rarely got boring. I even felt Halo 3 was too short, seems like we plowed through it in no time at all.
When I played them again on my own, I found each game a bit tedious overall. The levels tend to feel too large and I'm not a fan of massive fights where they drop four dozen of little alien bastards every ten minutes, and the flood reminded me of the HL's headcrabs, which I equally hated.
I'm still eager to see the next instalment, but that's because I know my old buddy will be calling me for some split-screen alien carnage.
There is a massive community of HTPC enthusiasts who want to do just that. Remember XBMC (formerly Xbox Media Player) ? Yeah, that thing. Slap it on a netbook or "nettop" with ION, hook it up to your TV and you have an 1080p capable any-format media player for less than the cost of a halfway-decent BluRay player.
The real solution to this problem is to reduce the base power consumption of the GeForce. Dual-GPU switching is a kludge, nothing more. A crutch for an inefficient GPU.
The problem with GPU throttling is it's far more visible (pun intended). If your CPU is rapidly switching between 3.0ghz and, say, 1.2ghz, you probably won't notice at all, but if your game or video app has uneven framerates or the dreaded micro-stutter, you will feel the overwhelming urge to smash your laptop against the nearest brick wall.
GPUs typically have two power modes: power-saving (idle), and full-blast (gaming). Your device drivers kick it into high-power mode whenever you launch a 3D app, so the stutter of switching speeds happens before any animation takes place, and it stays that way until you exit the game. This is representative of typical GPU usage: you're either using it to the max, or not at all. I don't know anyone who runs their games at lower quality settings just to "save power on the GPU", you'll push the flashiest pixels your hardware can handle.
What would be quite appreciated is if the high-end GPUs had a true low-power mode that shuts off all the excess pwnage, but that's just my bias. I tend to buy the fastest GPU I can afford, and stick it out for a few years until it starts bothering me. My latest acquisition, the GTX 295, is a power hog. Even when sitting idle at the desktop, my PC chugs a hearty 400 watts to do nothing, roughly 300w to the two GPUs and the remainder for the CPU and motherboard. While gaming, this number swells to around 800w, again 3/4 of that goes to the GPUs. I'm fine with the 800w active consumption, it's the idle power draw that bothers me, because I only game for an hour or two a night, 3-4 nights a week. If I replace those two GPUs with a low-end card, my 2D performance is unaffected yet power usage drops to a much cozier 100w. Why the big GPUs need 200 more watts to do absolutely nothing, that defies even the most usurious logic. Now given the greater number of high-end desktop vs laptop GPUs, I think they should figure out how to shut down parts of the desktop GPU when not in use, rather than investing in some never-gonna-sell IGP+GPU trickery. The $25 drop on my monthly hydro bill would more than justify the expense of a higher-efficiency device. Hell, that's enough to buy the latest GPU every year!
How hard can it possibly be for a chinese factory to affix "Proudly made in USA" stickers on everything ?
Trust is an illusion, anyway. Where a product was made doesn't say much about HOW it was made. All you're really doing is weighing the perceived reputation of a country, which is almost entirely made up from limited media exposure and political spin, since you've probably never been to that country yourself, and you don't know the manufacturing process, you certainly don't know the engineer(s) and designer(s) that created the damned thing, and well really you're just pulling some fuzzy sense of value out of your own ass.
It doesn't matter where a product is made. Assume it is a steaming pile of shit until proven otherwise. American manufacturers can be every bit as incompetently cheap as Chinese mfgs.
(abridged version)
RIAA: I sue you for $xx,xxx,xxx
Lindor: Ok, here's my attorney. En garde!
(many years and several thousand dollars later)
RIAA: Ok, I was kidding all along. I didn't really mean to sue you, especially since I have no hope of ever winning. Let's call the whole thing off. No hard feelings ?
Judge: Yeah, Beckerman, quit being such an feisty little prick. Oh, and btw you can both go fuck yourselves.
Now I'm not all that well-versed in the letter of the law, but that reeks of fraud. A frivolous lawsuit gone unpunished is what this is. I'd dare accuse the judge of collusion.
Personally, I feel that if we're going to colonize the moon (or Mars), that responsibility should not be put in the hands of NASA, the USA, or any other hypercapitalist nation for that matter. What these bean counters love to ignore is that, once we hit space, money/wealth will quickly become irrelevant. I don't know about you, but I can't picture debt collectors chasing me through the galaxy so some dirty banker can buy a diamond-encrusted iPad.
For the mentally-challenged: Instead of blasting your ship into space, bring space down to your ship :)
That's real nice if everyone cooperates, but it is all too easy for a disgruntled admin to change either the password or the password database, and lock the next guy out. Wasn't there such a psycho last year, who was screwing with CA utilities or some ISP long after he'd been fired (for being a psycho) ?
Would you rather they spin off different company names for these side-projects, instead of taking them all under the Google brand ?
They nailed search, then went looking for the next frontier. This is what they DO. This is what most intellectually-minded people do, they figure something out, then move on to a new challenge, building upon their accrued knowledge. If you stop trying the moment you've mastered something, you're deadweight.
If tabloid size sells twice as much, then broadsheet will sell eleventy times more!
That's real cute, but what irks me, as an iPhone user, is that this fancy shmancy app submission process does nothing to ensure quality. Every goddamned week I see hundreds of those "daily babe" apps, all seemingly made by the same 3rd-world developer slapping new pics on his 99 cent app. You're trying to convince me someone actually reviews these submissions ? If I want suggestive imagery on my iphone, I can get them off the web like everyone else, no need for a freaking ad-riddled app.
The app store review process is all about Apple's selfish interests. It offers a false air of legitimacy to any apps hosted therein, and by that sole trait I consider it a fraud.
Yes, as a matter of fact I do. At least when dealing with server/network support duties, there are very few cases where dragging a mouse pointer across the screen is faster than just typing what I want outright.
If I were a movie protagonist "hacking into the pentagon", I'd almost certainly be using command-line tools to do the job. Nmap, John, SSH/SCP... not "Click here to hack" apps with ever-changing lava-lamp acid-trip color swaths and blinking red sat-cams.
Hell, I even play the World of Warcraft with mostly keyboard input and macros, because then I don't have to aim tiny little arrow at stuff, I just mash the button that does the action I want. Using a mouse requires touch and sight, a keyboard only needs the former.
And if you were a better criminal, you could call it banking
It is, if there is a perfectly suitable standard for the power outlets and voltage/current specifications. The argument is not that electric cars can't fuel at regular gas stations, it's that electric charge stations are often vendor-specific FOR NO REASON. Positive, Negative, maybe a simple protective shield to avoid shocks, that's it! Any alteration in the plug format is a lock-in scheme... they could just as well give you a pair of booster cables and hope you don't short them across your nuts... power is power.