The vertical service code system could probably be considered prior art. Think *69, the system receives data in the form of a phone number from a database and based on the user's input performs the action of dialing that number for the user or not. Those standards were developed back in the 70's
The programming abstraction layer patent is a joke.
Seriously. All computer software patents should be voided on the grounds that they are merely expressions of existing mathematical formulae and logic structures and prior art applies as a result. When it comes down to it it's all loops, conditionals, and math placed in an organizational structure or if you go even further.. 0s and 1s.
I have the same deal with Xbox - my average price is $5.19 (excluding DLC). The highest price I'll pay for a game is $15 because they're so short and I usually only like about 20% of them.
I was going to write a long involved comment on it but I think it's better put this way:
$22,733 - this is how much it would have cost me to buy what I have for my Xbox (including the cost of the xbox and accessories) had I not bought it used.
Somehow I don't think my $60/month budget for gaming would cover that... unless they wanted to wait 31 years. They've priced themselves out of their own market and rather than dropping prices so people can actually afford to buy the games new they're trying to impose a tax on the used market.
No such thing as an infallible system. I do know that the less the user is involved the more likely problems will arise. If I did anything to the user+pass system it would be to combine it with the human authentication system so that it's personalized to the user while still requiring human thought.
I'm listing things that can and do happen. There are a LOT of people in this world who are successful but struggle with basic things like this. My sister and brother in law are perfect examples - highly successful ivy league professors near the top of their field but every 6 months my parents head down and make sure they take care of things like paying taxes, renewing licences, and a million other small things that just never occur to them or they don't have time to deal with or plain forget. Anyone who has issues with executive functions (ADHD as an example).
And domain seizures/rebranding are 3rd party issues outside of personal control. And there have been plenty of documented "errors" in domain seizures so it is a possibility for anyone who owns a domain (remote as it may be).
The point is that these are possibilities and if/when they occur it's a major problem in the concept of browser ID
So I'm sitting there with my personal laptop beside me with a walkthrough as I get some collectibles in a game, family member comes along and says can I borrow your computer for a sec, I want to check my email.
You're suggesting I say no, or create and maintain profiles for each family member that might use the system, or run on a guest account which I have to maintain? It's way too complicated and unrealistic for a feature that's supposed to be a convenience feature.
or you faced bankruptcy and no longer had a credit card
Use a debit account or a pre-paid card.
Assuming the company you have your domain with accepts this type of payment and it's available as an option in your geographical region.
or didn't have auto-renew enabled or you just plain forgot to renew it
Set a damn reminder.
Yes because people always get everything done that they intend to
or it was taken away by the US government just because
Less than 0.07% of all registered domain. And you don't have to get a domain controlled by the US - get a Swiss domain or so.
or ~92000 domains and that's just by the US, other governments are also involved in the practice.
or you grew out of your "anarchy-rules.com" or "whorepresents.com" domain name and wanted something more current
Register another, redirect the old to it.
So you're now maintaining multiple domains every year to be able to login to your sites?
or your email was with a company that rebranded
You can change your email provider without affecting your domain...
As in if I used an @foo.com address and foo.com decides they're going to rebrand as @bar.com and migrate everyone's address and shutdown all foo.com services.
It's fraught with problems and demands understanding of the implications by the user which you cannot reasonably expect.
a family computer is hardly public and even at that random friends/etc come over and use your computer, do you really want to be hanging over their shoulder watching their every move just in case?
It's a feature for convenience that's going to cause a lot of security issues. The people on this site are an intelligent bunch on the whole, but there are a lot of "computer stupid" people out there who wouldn't think twice about putting this information on a public computer just because it's the procedure they've learned to do.
or you faced bankruptcy and no longer had a credit card or didn't have auto-renew enabled or you just plain forgot to renew it or it was taken away by the US government just because or you grew out of your "anarchy-rules.com" or "whorepresents.com" domain name and wanted something more current or your email was with a company that rebranded or...
Not from what I saw in the UI, it's a click and done interface not click, choose, and done. Still doesn't address others being able to authenticate themselves as me.
Except who uses the same email for all logins? I have one for professional use, one for personal use, one for sites I don't know if I can trust, and at least 2 alternates for different ids. I'm not going to setup 6 profiles and open close the browser depending on which one I need. Worse yet it means others using my computer can authenticate themselves as me.
I feel a bit out of place in this crowd, while my first games were on Atari (ET/Dig Dug) and the original Burger Time to get my fix I just hop on my Xbox 360 to play all those great Sega classics (Gunstar Heroes, Streets of Rage 2, TMNT, etc), the Kanomi/Namco/etc classics like Dig Dug, Galaga, and such. Doom, Duke, and the like have all been ported.
The stuff that I miss from Xbox I get from FireNES (not perfect but reasonable) and Final Fantasy titles on the PS3.
The only thing missing then is SNES which I haven't found a solution for yet.
I'm sure they've tweaked it to solve certain problems but I guarantee you there are trade offs for each and every tweak. A lot of companies and talented people have been working with various databases for years and there's no perfect solution, it's always about trade offs.
Sacrifice accuracy for speed and increase the servers to create redundancy for errors or preserve accuracy at the cost of speed and increase the servers to handle the load. The former gets used more often than the latter because the latter ideally should have some redundancy as well.
It's a database that operates in memory instead of on the hdd... other than that there's nothing special about it. The big problem is that that's no a solution, if you have a power failure you're screwed. It fails the so called "ACID properties" because it's not durable. The problem to me is that you've got 2 layers doing the same task - the file system and the database. The database should be it's own file system running on a separate portion of the hdd.
Or simply create a whitelist. There's tones of filters out there for kids which will block anything except the whitelist. Just install that, whitelist the services you need and let someone else control the password to it. If you find you need something else, have them update it.
The only problem is that intranet, filters, etc are only going to reduce the access not the problem. The behaviour is there for a reason and you'll just replace the internet with something else. Find the problem, fix it, and the internet or whatever won't be a problem anymore.
It actually wasn't propaganda. Some of the Canadian banks were hit hard as they did have stakes in the sub-prime scandal.
There were a lot of factors, including tighter regulation, but the main thing credited to protecting them is their reserve requirements. The reserve requirement is how much banks can leverage their money.
In Europe it's about 40:1 In USA it's 30-35:1 In Canada it's 20:1
So the main, but not only, reason they didn't fail is because they had enough of money on hand to weather the storm.
It's not that people can't it's that people like to enjoy less healthy foods during entertainment periods. There are a few times I like to enjoy myself: Slickers ice cream on a hot summer day, fries and hot chocolate at the xmas parade, hot dog or nachos at a ball game, pop corn or Skittles and a big budget action, cotton candy at the fair, marshmallows/gorp and camping.... you know those pesky cultural norms or times of personal enjoyment.
You're implying that everyone eats junk food all the time and as a result it's some how ok to overcharge for those items because we're all fat slobs. I don't know about you but personally I eat very healthily day to day (vegetarian, no pre-made foods, etc) but probably about 10% of the time I want to eat some crap cause it tastes good and is part of the experience. Unless you're suggesting we all become orthorexic?
$25 for 2 tickets or $22.99 for 16-18 hours of a TV show or up to 5 DVDs which any number of people could watch, repeatedly if desired, and can be lent to friends.
If theatres charged regular prices for their concessions it would probably be $10 instead of $25. A bag of popcorn that would last me a year costs $0.50 less than a small popcorn.
Honestly, if you've got a 42" or bigger at home or your own home projection it's infinitely better than going to the theatre. Besides the obvious of being able to pause to go to the bathroom and the like, every time I've gone to the theatre in the past few years some jackass has been talking, the picture quality has been horrible (about 1/3rd of the time it's out of focus because they hire minimum wage workers to run the projectors), a speaker is blown, there's crap on the screen (gummies, drinks, holes). Typically here it costs over CDN$50 for 2 people to go to the theatre if you want snacks/drink. It's just not worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
The vertical service code system could probably be considered prior art. Think *69, the system receives data in the form of a phone number from a database and based on the user's input performs the action of dialing that number for the user or not. Those standards were developed back in the 70's
The programming abstraction layer patent is a joke.
Seriously. All computer software patents should be voided on the grounds that they are merely expressions of existing mathematical formulae and logic structures and prior art applies as a result. When it comes down to it it's all loops, conditionals, and math placed in an organizational structure or if you go even further.. 0s and 1s.
"My 0s and 1s were first, pay me millions!"
probably Canadian... $70 new, $65 used at EB!
I have the same deal with Xbox - my average price is $5.19 (excluding DLC). The highest price I'll pay for a game is $15 because they're so short and I usually only like about 20% of them.
I was going to write a long involved comment on it but I think it's better put this way:
$22,733 - this is how much it would have cost me to buy what I have for my Xbox (including the cost of the xbox and accessories) had I not bought it used.
Somehow I don't think my $60/month budget for gaming would cover that... unless they wanted to wait 31 years. They've priced themselves out of their own market and rather than dropping prices so people can actually afford to buy the games new they're trying to impose a tax on the used market.
No such thing as an infallible system. I do know that the less the user is involved the more likely problems will arise. If I did anything to the user+pass system it would be to combine it with the human authentication system so that it's personalized to the user while still requiring human thought.
I'm listing things that can and do happen. There are a LOT of people in this world who are successful but struggle with basic things like this. My sister and brother in law are perfect examples - highly successful ivy league professors near the top of their field but every 6 months my parents head down and make sure they take care of things like paying taxes, renewing licences, and a million other small things that just never occur to them or they don't have time to deal with or plain forget. Anyone who has issues with executive functions (ADHD as an example).
And domain seizures/rebranding are 3rd party issues outside of personal control. And there have been plenty of documented "errors" in domain seizures so it is a possibility for anyone who owns a domain (remote as it may be).
The point is that these are possibilities and if/when they occur it's a major problem in the concept of browser ID
So I'm sitting there with my personal laptop beside me with a walkthrough as I get some collectibles in a game, family member comes along and says can I borrow your computer for a sec, I want to check my email.
You're suggesting I say no, or create and maintain profiles for each family member that might use the system, or run on a guest account which I have to maintain? It's way too complicated and unrealistic for a feature that's supposed to be a convenience feature.
or you faced bankruptcy and no longer had a credit card
Use a debit account or a pre-paid card.
Assuming the company you have your domain with accepts this type of payment and it's available as an option in your geographical region.
or didn't have auto-renew enabled
or you just plain forgot to renew it
Set a damn reminder.
Yes because people always get everything done that they intend to
or it was taken away by the US government just because
Less than 0.07% of all registered domain. And you don't have to get a domain controlled by the US - get a Swiss domain or so.
or ~92000 domains and that's just by the US, other governments are also involved in the practice.
or you grew out of your "anarchy-rules.com" or "whorepresents.com" domain name and wanted something more current
Register another, redirect the old to it.
So you're now maintaining multiple domains every year to be able to login to your sites?
or your email was with a company that rebranded
You can change your email provider without affecting your domain...
As in if I used an @foo.com address and foo.com decides they're going to rebrand as @bar.com and migrate everyone's address and shutdown all foo.com services.
It's fraught with problems and demands understanding of the implications by the user which you cannot reasonably expect.
a family computer is hardly public and even at that random friends/etc come over and use your computer, do you really want to be hanging over their shoulder watching their every move just in case?
It's a feature for convenience that's going to cause a lot of security issues. The people on this site are an intelligent bunch on the whole, but there are a lot of "computer stupid" people out there who wouldn't think twice about putting this information on a public computer just because it's the procedure they've learned to do.
or you faced bankruptcy and no longer had a credit card
or didn't have auto-renew enabled
or you just plain forgot to renew it
or it was taken away by the US government just because
or you grew out of your "anarchy-rules.com" or "whorepresents.com" domain name and wanted something more current
or your email was with a company that rebranded
or...
Not from what I saw in the UI, it's a click and done interface not click, choose, and done. Still doesn't address others being able to authenticate themselves as me.
Except who uses the same email for all logins? I have one for professional use, one for personal use, one for sites I don't know if I can trust, and at least 2 alternates for different ids. I'm not going to setup 6 profiles and open close the browser depending on which one I need. Worse yet it means others using my computer can authenticate themselves as me.
It's just a bad idea all round.
Yes. It's called the NSA. There's a reason it's budget is estimated at 7 times that of the CIA.
Don't forget server shut downs!
http://www.ea.com/1/service-updates
LOL
I feel a bit out of place in this crowd, while my first games were on Atari (ET/Dig Dug) and the original Burger Time to get my fix I just hop on my Xbox 360 to play all those great Sega classics (Gunstar Heroes, Streets of Rage 2, TMNT, etc), the Kanomi/Namco/etc classics like Dig Dug, Galaga, and such. Doom, Duke, and the like have all been ported.
The stuff that I miss from Xbox I get from FireNES (not perfect but reasonable) and Final Fantasy titles on the PS3.
The only thing missing then is SNES which I haven't found a solution for yet.
I'm sure they've tweaked it to solve certain problems but I guarantee you there are trade offs for each and every tweak. A lot of companies and talented people have been working with various databases for years and there's no perfect solution, it's always about trade offs.
Sacrifice accuracy for speed and increase the servers to create redundancy for errors or preserve accuracy at the cost of speed and increase the servers to handle the load. The former gets used more often than the latter because the latter ideally should have some redundancy as well.
It's a database that operates in memory instead of on the hdd... other than that there's nothing special about it. The big problem is that that's no a solution, if you have a power failure you're screwed. It fails the so called "ACID properties" because it's not durable. The problem to me is that you've got 2 layers doing the same task - the file system and the database. The database should be it's own file system running on a separate portion of the hdd.
Or simply create a whitelist. There's tones of filters out there for kids which will block anything except the whitelist. Just install that, whitelist the services you need and let someone else control the password to it. If you find you need something else, have them update it.
The only problem is that intranet, filters, etc are only going to reduce the access not the problem. The behaviour is there for a reason and you'll just replace the internet with something else. Find the problem, fix it, and the internet or whatever won't be a problem anymore.
It actually wasn't propaganda. Some of the Canadian banks were hit hard as they did have stakes in the sub-prime scandal.
There were a lot of factors, including tighter regulation, but the main thing credited to protecting them is their reserve requirements. The reserve requirement is how much banks can leverage their money.
In Europe it's about 40:1
In USA it's 30-35:1
In Canada it's 20:1
So the main, but not only, reason they didn't fail is because they had enough of money on hand to weather the storm.
It's not that people can't it's that people like to enjoy less healthy foods during entertainment periods. There are a few times I like to enjoy myself: Slickers ice cream on a hot summer day, fries and hot chocolate at the xmas parade, hot dog or nachos at a ball game, pop corn or Skittles and a big budget action, cotton candy at the fair, marshmallows/gorp and camping.... you know those pesky cultural norms or times of personal enjoyment.
You're implying that everyone eats junk food all the time and as a result it's some how ok to overcharge for those items because we're all fat slobs. I don't know about you but personally I eat very healthily day to day (vegetarian, no pre-made foods, etc) but probably about 10% of the time I want to eat some crap cause it tastes good and is part of the experience. Unless you're suggesting we all become orthorexic?
$25 for 2 tickets or $22.99 for 16-18 hours of a TV show or up to 5 DVDs which any number of people could watch, repeatedly if desired, and can be lent to friends.
If theatres charged regular prices for their concessions it would probably be $10 instead of $25. A bag of popcorn that would last me a year costs $0.50 less than a small popcorn.
My question is this: Is it ok to draw a parellel between stealing a loaf of bread from a baker and downloading a pirated movie or music file?
Sorry, no. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
Honestly, if you've got a 42" or bigger at home or your own home projection it's infinitely better than going to the theatre. Besides the obvious of being able to pause to go to the bathroom and the like, every time I've gone to the theatre in the past few years some jackass has been talking, the picture quality has been horrible (about 1/3rd of the time it's out of focus because they hire minimum wage workers to run the projectors), a speaker is blown, there's crap on the screen (gummies, drinks, holes). Typically here it costs over CDN$50 for 2 people to go to the theatre if you want snacks/drink. It's just not worth it.
ala Sony with PS3 Linux.