I was hoping that there would be competition, though some interpretations of the article suggest that it's open to the competition.
Who the competitors shouldn't matter as long as there is at least a handful of affordable options to get high speed internet. Right now, it's like you have to have a completely different kind of cable in order to be allowed in, so if you're lucky, you will have at most three providers, one DSL provider, one cable provider and one fiber provider. And many people might only have one. None of the connection types really compete head-to-head, even if the differences are subtle, each provides something a little different.
It might even be better savings that way, but the way people talk about how Twitter is set up, it sounds like the people that set it up didn't even know what they were doing, like maybe they dropped out of school halfway through the database class. Given that they are still having problems, I think it's reasonable to suggest that they still don't know what they are doing, even though their VC funding should have allowed them to hire enough qualified people to fix the problem. The way it is now, I wonder if there really is any resale value in the company. At this point, they have no revenue stream, not even ads as far as I can tell, so it looks like they're looking to build a service that gets bought out by a big company. I think whoever buys them would almost certainly not be buying them for the employees, the organization, the code or the infrastructure, but rather, just the users and only the users. I see little value in anyone anything there except in what amounts to buying the users.
If I understand that right, if those strings are unique to AVG, then it would be easy to adapt the script such that it sends a non-malicious copy of the page to the virus scanner.
In that vein, then just making an alternative in itself doesn't count either. The article says that there have been several alternatives that didn't manage to catch on.
Actually, I have abandoned Norton & McAfee products, but I've forgotten about them.
I don't recall them lugging my computer as much as AVG 8 either, because I would notice a lag between keypresses and when they actually show up on the screen, and a virus scan would take about several hours scanning an 18GB 15kRPM hard drive. I don't think Norton or McAfee virus scanners that I used were as bad, though maybe more recent versions were.
In all the complain threads I've seen, I've never heard of Paypal withholding payments for 21 days in any country. The same goes for requiring sellers to accept PayPal payments other than the announced one for Australia. I would have a problem with the 21 day thing if that was put on me, but requiring PayPal payments, without the 21 day thing, wouldn't put me off. The proportion of problematic transactions on PayPal vs. cash/check/MO that I get were such that transactions involving PayPal are a lot more pleasant from a buyer's and seller's side. It's the cash/check/MO purchases that gave me the worst trouble and more often.
As much as I understand, credit card companies in general do chargebacks if you dispute a charge within 6 months of the disputed charge. Some allow more outdated disputes.
Are you a user of AVG 8? If you are, you might not criticize so much.
For one, the summary said that it's noticeably hammering web servers by prefetching the link.
Maybe not slimy, but if they said irritating, I would agree. AVG 7.5 and older wasn't so bad for me at all. The installer puts in a AVG / Yahoo search bar in the web browser without asking, and I see no way to remove it without uninstalling AVG. Turning off link scanning permanently turns on a warning that you're not really protected.
If it was done well, I should be able to change the setting without having to reinstall. I can barely stand Windows now, now AVG is getting about as irritating as Windows is.
That doesn't work for me. I'm moving away from AVG just because it's suddenly more work than it is worth. AVG 8 is what did it for me, everything before was fine with me. The link scanning was irritating, turning it off triggers a non-removeable notice that I don't need to see. I don't remember being asked if I wanted the search bar in Firefox, and I install using the "advanced" mode.
The biggest thing is that a virus scan noticeably lugs down my computer, which is an accomplishment because I've never had that with any other program.
I predicted the death of broadcast TV back in 1995. IIRC, I gave it 10-15 years. It may take a little longer, but I suspect I was a lot closer than the folks who read my essay suspected....
That's a worthless prediction. Mediums generally don't die because there's a newer one. Radio was supposed to kill newspapers. TV was supposed to kill radio. But newspapers and radio had both changed in response to its "replacement". Their audience did diminish (and are still diminishing) but they aren't dying. If you really want to push it, given that eventually most internet use is at least one stage broadcast wirelessly, the model of broadcasting only changes, but it's still broadcasting.
With the advent of digital TV, we do get more options through the use of subchannels, and the inexpensive and easy to use digital converter box makes them just as easy to get to as the original channels.
Re:There is only one true keyboard...
on
Review of Das Keyboard
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As much as I'm an "old fart" kind of person, I really don't "get" the click keyboards anyway. I don't like the noise and it really doesn't feel that good anyway. The clicky fans often talk about how membrane keyboards are all bad, but the thing is, there are varying degrees and qualities of membranes.
If you buy the $5-$10keyboards, then yes, they are problematic in that they don't last long and are prone to not have one button press "feel" equal one electrical contact. I'm still using a Natural Elite, which has lasted me many years and still does have that 1:1 tactile to contact, I don't get "bounce", nor do I get contact without the tactile response that should go with it.
I think his analogy is spot on as well: why values a pair of underwear worn by Artist-Of-The-Month so much greater than that exact same brand/model/size purchased (brand new!) at the store just up the street?
If the artist designed the underwear, then it may be of interest. Otherwise, it's a pointless or broken analogy.
It's not just a panel for all these parts. The Mac mini's memory is not easy to get to, with a bit of a nest of parts in the way before you can get to the memory. The hard drive on the iMac, mini, Air and Macbook Pro are not consumer replaceable parts, you have to tear down those machines quite a bit a bit too, a bit less so with the Air, but I think that has a harder to find ribbon style drive connector rather than the 44 pin header. The Air's memory is simply not expandable at all.
Glidden, the paint company, used to be involved in making medicines as a significant side business. Think about that if you ever spread enamel on your wall or pop a prescription.
I don't think it matters what you think about this if you don't care. You're not the market in question anyway.
It almost sounds to me that you are calling pox on anyone that wants an original rather than a copy. Not everyone has the same priorities as you. I do think that the amount of money in question gets out of hand, but to get a work that a master actually touched and with their own hand rather than just some copy has value.
It's unfortunate, but I don't know if it's a massive degradation of service for most users.
Heck, I didn't even know that feature existed.
I don't think a decision about this is about convenience to the programmer, as you suggest, no one really cares about them. But a programmer's time isn't free. If the feature takes an inordinate amount of time to maintain and it's not used that much, then I don't see how the higher-ups would push it through unless it's a pet project. And if something about the feature causes instability to the service, the risk of having a service go down for everyone vs. a few percent of users could be too great.
It could be a "feeler" to see how many people would object to losing it to the point that they'll cancel their plan, though that could blow back and promote a feature that they didn't market so well.
That said, all this in this post and in this thread is highly speculative, they don't provide any details.
I wish RD articles were at least formatted better, and were less verbose as well.
RD articles seem to have several links to other articles inserted into the article that have the format appearance of being a section header, which gets quite confusing. Generally, those links don't seem to have any to do with the context of the article or section of the article in question either, it really breaks up the mental flow of reading an article in a jarring way.
It is about expectations. If the market generally expects more and more powerful devices, then that's what the sellers will produce. If the battery lasts long enough *for them* then the improvement can be made in brute power performance, or in reducing cost. Reducing cost and improving efficiency generally doesn't happen at the same time for entire systems.
Most movies don't last three hours, and that's what a lot of standard notebooks cost.
I'm sure this Eee can run for 20 hours if you were willing to add a couple pounds to the weight, but that takes away from the portability.
The heat is the reason why the industry calls portable computers *notebooks*. Even ten years ago, that's what they were called. They were never intended for on-lap use.
I've not heard of USB missile launchers either. It shoots USBs?
True, there is no HID standard for Firewire. But that's not its strength. Firewire's strength is USB's weakness, and Firewire's weakness is USB's strength.
Firewire seems to be fading into smaller niches though. I don't want to daisy chain hard drives, so eSATA will do fine, and eSATA does allow the use of port multipliers, one port still does five drives.
I have two HDV cameras, but I don't use them much, I prefer an HF10 which writes to SDHC cards. Firewire is good for audio tasks, which I don't do.
Slashdot Mirror
I was hoping that there would be competition, though some interpretations of the article suggest that it's open to the competition.
Who the competitors shouldn't matter as long as there is at least a handful of affordable options to get high speed internet. Right now, it's like you have to have a completely different kind of cable in order to be allowed in, so if you're lucky, you will have at most three providers, one DSL provider, one cable provider and one fiber provider. And many people might only have one. None of the connection types really compete head-to-head, even if the differences are subtle, each provides something a little different.
It might even be better savings that way, but the way people talk about how Twitter is set up, it sounds like the people that set it up didn't even know what they were doing, like maybe they dropped out of school halfway through the database class. Given that they are still having problems, I think it's reasonable to suggest that they still don't know what they are doing, even though their VC funding should have allowed them to hire enough qualified people to fix the problem. The way it is now, I wonder if there really is any resale value in the company. At this point, they have no revenue stream, not even ads as far as I can tell, so it looks like they're looking to build a service that gets bought out by a big company. I think whoever buys them would almost certainly not be buying them for the employees, the organization, the code or the infrastructure, but rather, just the users and only the users. I see little value in anyone anything there except in what amounts to buying the users.
I thought the uranium in those shells already has been pretty depleted.
If I understand that right, if those strings are unique to AVG, then it would be easy to adapt the script such that it sends a non-malicious copy of the page to the virus scanner.
I agree, 900GB of upload is just huge for a residential account, you're more than just running a personal server at that point.
In that vein, then just making an alternative in itself doesn't count either. The article says that there have been several alternatives that didn't manage to catch on.
There's an option when installing to uncheck Link Scanning.
If I have to reinstall the software in order to change a setting to not get the lame nag, then I'm generally going to look for alternative software.
Actually, I have abandoned Norton & McAfee products, but I've forgotten about them.
I don't recall them lugging my computer as much as AVG 8 either, because I would notice a lag between keypresses and when they actually show up on the screen, and a virus scan would take about several hours scanning an 18GB 15kRPM hard drive. I don't think Norton or McAfee virus scanners that I used were as bad, though maybe more recent versions were.
In all the complain threads I've seen, I've never heard of Paypal withholding payments for 21 days in any country. The same goes for requiring sellers to accept PayPal payments other than the announced one for Australia. I would have a problem with the 21 day thing if that was put on me, but requiring PayPal payments, without the 21 day thing, wouldn't put me off. The proportion of problematic transactions on PayPal vs. cash/check/MO that I get were such that transactions involving PayPal are a lot more pleasant from a buyer's and seller's side. It's the cash/check/MO purchases that gave me the worst trouble and more often.
As much as I understand, credit card companies in general do chargebacks if you dispute a charge within 6 months of the disputed charge. Some allow more outdated disputes.
Are you a user of AVG 8? If you are, you might not criticize so much.
For one, the summary said that it's noticeably hammering web servers by prefetching the link.
Maybe not slimy, but if they said irritating, I would agree. AVG 7.5 and older wasn't so bad for me at all. The installer puts in a AVG / Yahoo search bar in the web browser without asking, and I see no way to remove it without uninstalling AVG. Turning off link scanning permanently turns on a warning that you're not really protected.
If it was done well, I should be able to change the setting without having to reinstall. I can barely stand Windows now, now AVG is getting about as irritating as Windows is.
That doesn't work for me. I'm moving away from AVG just because it's suddenly more work than it is worth. AVG 8 is what did it for me, everything before was fine with me. The link scanning was irritating, turning it off triggers a non-removeable notice that I don't need to see. I don't remember being asked if I wanted the search bar in Firefox, and I install using the "advanced" mode.
The biggest thing is that a virus scan noticeably lugs down my computer, which is an accomplishment because I've never had that with any other program.
I predicted the death of broadcast TV back in 1995. IIRC, I gave it 10-15 years. It may take a little longer, but I suspect I was a lot closer than the folks who read my essay suspected....
That's a worthless prediction. Mediums generally don't die because there's a newer one. Radio was supposed to kill newspapers. TV was supposed to kill radio. But newspapers and radio had both changed in response to its "replacement". Their audience did diminish (and are still diminishing) but they aren't dying. If you really want to push it, given that eventually most internet use is at least one stage broadcast wirelessly, the model of broadcasting only changes, but it's still broadcasting.
With the advent of digital TV, we do get more options through the use of subchannels, and the inexpensive and easy to use digital converter box makes them just as easy to get to as the original channels.
As much as I'm an "old fart" kind of person, I really don't "get" the click keyboards anyway. I don't like the noise and it really doesn't feel that good anyway. The clicky fans often talk about how membrane keyboards are all bad, but the thing is, there are varying degrees and qualities of membranes.
If you buy the $5-$10keyboards, then yes, they are problematic in that they don't last long and are prone to not have one button press "feel" equal one electrical contact. I'm still using a Natural Elite, which has lasted me many years and still does have that 1:1 tactile to contact, I don't get "bounce", nor do I get contact without the tactile response that should go with it.
I think his analogy is spot on as well: why values a pair of underwear worn by Artist-Of-The-Month so much greater than that exact same brand/model/size purchased (brand new!) at the store just up the street?
If the artist designed the underwear, then it may be of interest. Otherwise, it's a pointless or broken analogy.
It's not just a panel for all these parts. The Mac mini's memory is not easy to get to, with a bit of a nest of parts in the way before you can get to the memory. The hard drive on the iMac, mini, Air and Macbook Pro are not consumer replaceable parts, you have to tear down those machines quite a bit a bit too, a bit less so with the Air, but I think that has a harder to find ribbon style drive connector rather than the 44 pin header. The Air's memory is simply not expandable at all.
Glidden, the paint company, used to be involved in making medicines as a significant side business. Think about that if you ever spread enamel on your wall or pop a prescription.
I don't think it matters what you think about this if you don't care. You're not the market in question anyway.
It almost sounds to me that you are calling pox on anyone that wants an original rather than a copy. Not everyone has the same priorities as you. I do think that the amount of money in question gets out of hand, but to get a work that a master actually touched and with their own hand rather than just some copy has value.
There was a Science Friday program on just that, interviewing someone that was able to deduce the real ones using mathematical techniques.
It's unfortunate, but I don't know if it's a massive degradation of service for most users.
Heck, I didn't even know that feature existed.
I don't think a decision about this is about convenience to the programmer, as you suggest, no one really cares about them. But a programmer's time isn't free. If the feature takes an inordinate amount of time to maintain and it's not used that much, then I don't see how the higher-ups would push it through unless it's a pet project. And if something about the feature causes instability to the service, the risk of having a service go down for everyone vs. a few percent of users could be too great.
It could be a "feeler" to see how many people would object to losing it to the point that they'll cancel their plan, though that could blow back and promote a feature that they didn't market so well.
That said, all this in this post and in this thread is highly speculative, they don't provide any details.
I wish RD articles were at least formatted better, and were less verbose as well.
RD articles seem to have several links to other articles inserted into the article that have the format appearance of being a section header, which gets quite confusing. Generally, those links don't seem to have any to do with the context of the article or section of the article in question either, it really breaks up the mental flow of reading an article in a jarring way.
It is about expectations. If the market generally expects more and more powerful devices, then that's what the sellers will produce. If the battery lasts long enough *for them* then the improvement can be made in brute power performance, or in reducing cost. Reducing cost and improving efficiency generally doesn't happen at the same time for entire systems.
Most movies don't last three hours, and that's what a lot of standard notebooks cost.
I'm sure this Eee can run for 20 hours if you were willing to add a couple pounds to the weight, but that takes away from the portability.
The heat is the reason why the industry calls portable computers *notebooks*. Even ten years ago, that's what they were called. They were never intended for on-lap use.
You're wrong. You are basically remembering something that's been fixed and settled a decade ago. Good job on being out of date by a decade.
The entire royalty is something like $0.25 per device, Apple only gets a portion of that.
The cost is in the smarts, each device requires a more complicated controller and an additional chip.
I've not heard of USB missile launchers either. It shoots USBs?
True, there is no HID standard for Firewire. But that's not its strength. Firewire's strength is USB's weakness, and Firewire's weakness is USB's strength.
Firewire seems to be fading into smaller niches though. I don't want to daisy chain hard drives, so eSATA will do fine, and eSATA does allow the use of port multipliers, one port still does five drives.
I have two HDV cameras, but I don't use them much, I prefer an HF10 which writes to SDHC cards. Firewire is good for audio tasks, which I don't do.