Just print off reflective duplicates of politician's plates, and those of their friends, relatives, and supporters, then tape them over yours (if you have a common make, model & color of vehicle with no distinguishing characterstics), then run lots of red lights late at night in disreputable districts when there is no traffic.
Screwing the customer pays off now. Treating them excellently will pay off for decades.
But most brain-dead execs and investors are too impatient, and too focused on quarterly results. If you want a really good business, focus on results four years from now instead of four months from now.
If my code takes more than a few seconds to figure out what it's doing, I keep rewriting it until it doesn't.
The golden rule of being a truly good programmer is that you write the code that you wish other people would write.
Write code that is self documenting by way of having very descriptive method and variable names. Because while it may take longer to write, you'll invariably end up reading it ten or more times more than you'll be editing it. So time making it readable & grokable is time exceedingly well spent.
here's a quick sample of what I mean:
Instead of this
if (thingy.getLastTime() - thingy.getCurrentTime() > 3600000) {
for (Calendar calendar : thingy.getCalendars()) {
calendar.update();
}
}
write this:
boolean isChangingTimeZones = hasChangedTimezones(thingy);
if (hasChangedTimeZones) {
updateAllCalendarsWithTimeZoneChange(thingy);
}
It's debugger friendly (you can see the value of isChangingTimeZones before you step into the if-then-block, and the logic is described via the variable name which has a corresponding method that can be easily unit tested) and all the names are descriptive as hell. Not to mention the action is decoupled from the logic, and could easily be more so. Either could be modified without ever changing that particular code. And yes, the boolean method should use a constant for that magic number. You can probably infer what that constant is, but why waste people's time making them infer when you can very easily tell them explicitly?
Willful ignorance of irrelevant or distasteful information is completely harmless or even beneficial even discounting limited brain storage as a limiting factor.
For example I'm willfully ignorant of the processes through which celebrities are selected for awards Emmys or Grammies or whatever. Because it's not relevant to me and I don't care one whit about a bunch of socialites jacking each other off.
I'm willfully ignorant of the finer points of racial epithets because I find racism to be ignorant, stupid and contemptible.
I'm extremely willfully ignorant of the best way to go about sexually abusing another person, because....well, if I have to explain that to you...
It's one thing for a fictitious character to discount factual celestial science - it's entertaining and gets a reaction out of the reader, which is the point - but it's entirely another for a real person to deliberately remain ignorant of basic facts of the universe we live in.
Given the unbelievable amount of power they have over an ordinary citizen the should be given absolutely no wiggle room.
You shouldn't be legally allowed to fine people, strip away their rights, humiliate them, confiscate their property, detain them (for 24 hours at a whim), or to initiate a process that can completely ruin their life, all behind a shield of legality that makes you basically immune to punishment, and also be allowed to do anything illegal whatsoever.
I can't believe something so short sighted is modded insightful.
If a developer's machine takes too long for some non-interactive activity, they'll stop paying attention (probably to read the onion or something #9). Or *cough* post on Slashdot, then lose track of time and not get back to work for hours.
So what if a for loop isn't as optimal as it could be? These days the difference between optimal code and good code is usually too small to be measured in anything but milliseconds; and thus, not very important (link quotes Martin Fowler's PDF).
Contrast this with losing hours of usefulness from extremely expensive equipment (read: good developers).
Well, that's pretty amazing, considering that Nokia only claims 4 hours.
If you've got bluetooth and wifi enabled and in use the battery goes a lot faster. If you're sitting there refreshing the screen occasionally it lasts much, much longer.
Jeez, what is this silly obsession with backlighting?
What's this silly obsession with nitpicking use cases you obviously aren't a party to? 90% of the time I read it's in bed a night. So it's more of a mandatory requisite for me than a "silly obsession".
all these devices had simple monochrome displays that were perfectly readable without a backlight under normal lighting conditions. Which, oddly enough, is where you mostly use them.
No, I mostly read in bed, at night. And judging by the sheer volume of "kindle compatible" booklights for sale, I'm not alone.
And WTF cares about "even lighting"?
Apparently a significant portion of the market given that Sony attempted to bolt this feature onto their eInk displays. And the reason I mentioned this was Sony had tried it and someone posted the pictures here on the last kindle story. And the results were extremely uneven lighting leading to being blinded at the edges and straining to read in the middle. And burning a nice after image into your retinas if you use it in the dark (you know, where you need a booklight).
As for night vision, do you really have time to read when you're on special ops?
I can only assume that since I'm only reading on special ops that you only read between 11:30 am and 12:30pm in the middle of death valley on cloudless days. When I first started reading with white text on black background is that when I put the device down to sleep I could still see a very strong afterimage of lines with my eyes closed. For several minutes. I figured this was bad for my eyes, so changed to red on black. The problem went away completely.
I wish someone would bring some first sale doctrine to Steam.
I cannot sell my "used" steam games to anyone for any price. This is not to say that steam doesn't have its benefits. But losing the ability to sell old games is a tough one to swallow.
And they typically charge the same as if I'd gotten some tangible assets I could resell even though I can't.
The ruckus being caused among developers and publishers exactly the same being caused among the RIAA/MPAA. The business model of making something intangible and selling copies of it printed on plastic discs for a premium is faltering towards obsolescence.
Basically they had a money printing machine, and now they're whining that people have found ways to cut into their fat profit margins. Forgive me if I just consider that another aspect of the market instead of sympathizing.
My Nokia N810 lasts for days of reading without recharging. And it's smaller. And it has a touch screen & stylus. And wifi for looking up definitions. And an IM client (optional) that I can use to chat while reading. And it can be configured (easily) to use dim red text on a black background that doesn't strain or ruin night vision.
The buttons on it are also incredibly convenient for turning pages. I just contract a single finger. Oh yeah, the pages turn almost instantly because it's not eInk. Or disrupting my gf sleeping next to me since there's no booklight. Or having an extra device that also requires batteries that don't last days clamped on to my ebook reading device.
Call me when you can backlight eInk evenly and still keep several days of battery life like my N810.
Who cares if "it only uses power when you turn pages!!11ONE" if the battery only lasts days. My N810's battery lasts days too - often a week or more of nightly reading - without even having to turn it off. AND it has a perfectly even backlight configurable to any color, brightness or contrast you choose. And you don't have to angle any lamps, lighting, or booklights. It's just always works perfectly.
If you turn it down that much, then you're likely not getting enough light to read the text comfortably.
When reading like that my eyes are fully adapted to night vision, so I'm getting plenty of light to read by. I spent an hour or so spread out over a few reading sessions tweaking it to perfection.
I have no trouble reading it whatsoever. If I did, I would simply adjust the display further.
It's not a powerful backlight. I have the brightness turned down so low it's difficult to read in day a well lit room (so I adjust it there as needed).
I really think you should try it before you go saying it's a bad idea. It's extremely low brightness, to the point that my night vision is completely unimpaired. I can put the device down, and navigate my room, stepping over shoes & such without the slightest difficulty or time delay for vision adjustment.
You seem to grossly underestimate how big of a difference low brightness dark red on black can be (no other colored pixels visible at all) vs. a white screen in the dark. I should take pictures actually..
Looking into the ungodly bright blue light in my mouse from across the room for 100ms is more eye damaging than reading the on the N810 for 2 hours.
I've used good book lights extensively as well, and not to mention lamps, the N810 is by far the best and most convenient.
Book + booklight = ungainly, some parts are brighter than others, you have to attach it manage batteries, additional cord, weight, and the book is huge by comparison, you can't look up definitions from the book over the internet, screws your night vision, may keep your spouse awake, requires bookmarks or a good memory
Book + lamp = good lighting, fairly convenient, but you have to orient yourself, the book, and the light so you can't roll over on whatever side you want and still get the same optimal conditions, you could keep a dictionary at hand I guess, screws your night vision, keeps your spouse awake, requires bookmarks or a good memory.
Kindle + booklight = kinda ungainly due the clamp on booklight, uneven illumination, two different electronic devices requiring batteries or cords, additional weight, ungainly size, dictionary look up in black & white, screws your night vision, may keep your spouse awake, adjustable text size (I assume), lightweight, automatically bookmarks, lasts almost as long as the N810, but your booklight may not.
N810 = perfect brightness since you can customize it to taste, contrast, illumination at all angles, able to look up definitions from the device using copy paste, very little light pollution of your bedroom, tiny, weighs about the same as a book, adjustable text size, automatically bookmarks, batteries last 3-7 days of 1-3 hour reading.
Having a cell phone makes sense for a ton of reasons. That you seem to think they are unnecessary is ridiculous to the point of ludicrous. If they weren't so useful there wouldn't be so many of them.
And good luck getting a basic plan. I have the most basic non-prepaid plan AT&T offers with the single addition 200 txt messages a month ($3) and it somehow works out to $52 a month instead of the advertised $39.99. Think about that for just a second. Why isn't my $39.99 plan exactly $42.99 (plan + texting)? False advertising! You can attempt to justify it by saying they're regulatory fees or some hogwash, but the fact is the plan is advertised at $39.99 and it's completely impossible to actually pay just that amount and not get sent to collections.
And good look finding a cheaper plan of any kind on any carrier. It's effectively price fixing. $40+ a month is about the minimum you can get on any carrier for any plan that isn't prepaid.
Companies are increasing the cost of text messages even though their costs didn't change. They do this on a plan where you're locked into a 2 year agreement due to a subsidized phone. You can potentially get out of your agreement as a result, but it's not easy and it's horribly inconvenient. So you generally just eat the cost and their profits go up.
Cell phone companies have been pretty customer abusive for a very long time now, and no single customer has sufficient power to force them to change their ways. Hence the government should step in. They actually do have that kind of power. Which IMHO is what the government is for - and no other purpose - standing up to entities that individual citizens cannot.
You somehow forgot to mention that it requires a freaking booklight to read in the dark.
The most absurd facet of the thing if you ask me.
I still prefer my Nokia N810 device with software ebook reader FBReader. I can set the display to red text on a black background and reap the following benefits:
I can read in the dark
I can read in the dark in bed without keeping my girlfriend awake.
I can read in the dark without hosing my night vision due to the red text.*
For a $360 device that uses electronic paper I'm flabbergasted that you still need to buy a freaking book light for it.
*Note: Prior to learning to use red on black (still using white on black text) I noticed that after I turned the reader off and laid down to sleep that I could still see an afterimage of a bunch of little lines organized in a rectangle with my eyes closed. This problem evaporated with red on black.
I suspect it's because the skillset to make a program in C/C++ or some other locally-run language are very close to the same skillet to write a debugger for those languages. But I suspect the skills to write a JavaScript debugger are much more disparate from those for writing JavaScript itself.
So you have all these web developers and no debugger developers in the field. The people who can write debuggers are all busy writing in languages that aren't JavaScript. At least that's my crackpot theory.
Last time I used it, it also send you advertisements from MS/Hotmail that you couldn't mark as spam, couldn't block the send for, and could not otherwise game the system to block. Basically you were being forced to accept spam from your mail provider.
Also, they'll close your account after a a few months activity, and you have to jump through hoops to get back in.
So I used my ISP's mail until gmail came along, and I never looked back.
I should probably setup Thunderbird to mirror my gmail though. Can anyone provide a link to a guide that will ensure I don't download the mail and remove it from the server? I basically want an offline mirror that I never have to think about.
If you ask me, I have no problem with monopolies by themselves.. They're the natural result of a capitalistic system.
The problem occurs when the company with the monopoly becomes abusive of its users or detrimental to the industry due to lack of competition.
For example, Microsoft has become detrimental. There are quirky, broken, useless things in Windows because they haven't had to compete on merit for years. They're still using a drive addressing system invented on the VAX. You can't even cd directly to a directory on another freaking drive. It's still a two step process. The font dialogs in Vista are the same ones from Windows 3.1! IE, the worst, most painful, browser on the market came to dominate via coupling with the monopolistic OS, not by merit. Windows Media Player became hugely popular despite being DRM friendly (user abusive) and a steaming bloated pile compared to winamp, once again by being bundled with the OS and harnessing the power of defaults. Vista includes DRM code in the kernel execution path that makes it slower than XP - and this wasn't done for the users of the OS, but for the interests of other big companies.
Adobe has become abusive with their Acrobat reader. Bundling so much crap with it that's is a steaming pile that takes 10s of seconds load, will no longer allow you to disable its automatic updates, etc.
Most Telecoms and ISPs are abusive. The cost of text messages goes up even though their costs didn't. Verizon is particularly bad, they'll deliberately cripple Bluetooth OBEX profiles on phones you get from them to try and force you to buy ringtones & crap at an estimated 20,000% markup, they brand their phones with hideous schemes that reduce usability, they've been guilty of padding HTTP headers with junk data to arbitrarily increase data usage. (I can understand the contract severance penalties since their subsidizing the phones - provided the fee diminishes to zero by the end of the contract).
Even apple has done this. Way back around iTunes 3, you could download songs from the ipod to iTunes. They subsequently removed this functionality that was useful to their users because of interests of third parties.
These are the companies that need investigation.
Google on the other hand seems to have gotten nothing but better as their power grows. Google searches are still fantastic, they've added tons of incredibly useful free services out of the blue. They keep giving more, awesome, free stuff. More importantly, their existing free stuff keeps getting better not abusive. Maybe I missed something awful they're doing, but so far even their use of my pseudo-private data seems more useful than harmful - I get non-abusive, non-intrusive text based ads for things that are actually relevant. This is the key to long term success. Give your customers what they want and they'll keep coming back and telling their friends. It leads to long term profits, not the short quarterly gains that MS, Adobe, Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, Cox, *IAA, etc seem to be more focused on.
Slashdot Mirror
Just print off reflective duplicates of politician's plates, and those of their friends, relatives, and supporters, then tape them over yours (if you have a common make, model & color of vehicle with no distinguishing characterstics), then run lots of red lights late at night in disreputable districts when there is no traffic.
See how long the cameras last.
Screwing the customer pays off now. Treating them excellently will pay off for decades.
But most brain-dead execs and investors are too impatient, and too focused on quarterly results. If you want a really good business, focus on results four years from now instead of four months from now.
If my code takes more than a few seconds to figure out what it's doing, I keep rewriting it until it doesn't.
The golden rule of being a truly good programmer is that you write the code that you wish other people would write.
Write code that is self documenting by way of having very descriptive method and variable names. Because while it may take longer to write, you'll invariably end up reading it ten or more times more than you'll be editing it. So time making it readable & grokable is time exceedingly well spent.
here's a quick sample of what I mean:
Instead of this
if (thingy.getLastTime() - thingy.getCurrentTime() > 3600000) {
for (Calendar calendar : thingy.getCalendars()) {
calendar.update();
}
}
write this:
boolean isChangingTimeZones = hasChangedTimezones(thingy);
if (hasChangedTimeZones) {
updateAllCalendarsWithTimeZoneChange(thingy);
}
It's debugger friendly (you can see the value of isChangingTimeZones before you step into the if-then-block, and the logic is described via the variable name which has a corresponding method that can be easily unit tested) and all the names are descriptive as hell. Not to mention the action is decoupled from the logic, and could easily be more so. Either could be modified without ever changing that particular code. And yes, the boolean method should use a constant for that magic number. You can probably infer what that constant is, but why waste people's time making them infer when you can very easily tell them explicitly?
And I submit that you're wrong.
Willful ignorance of irrelevant or distasteful information is completely harmless or even beneficial even discounting limited brain storage as a limiting factor.
For example I'm willfully ignorant of the processes through which celebrities are selected for awards Emmys or Grammies or whatever. Because it's not relevant to me and I don't care one whit about a bunch of socialites jacking each other off.
I'm willfully ignorant of the finer points of racial epithets because I find racism to be ignorant, stupid and contemptible.
I'm extremely willfully ignorant of the best way to go about sexually abusing another person, because....well, if I have to explain that to you...
It's one thing for a fictitious character to discount factual celestial science - it's entertaining and gets a reaction out of the reader, which is the point - but it's entirely another for a real person to deliberately remain ignorant of basic facts of the universe we live in.
Given the unbelievable amount of power they have over an ordinary citizen the should be given absolutely no wiggle room.
You shouldn't be legally allowed to fine people, strip away their rights, humiliate them, confiscate their property, detain them (for 24 hours at a whim), or to initiate a process that can completely ruin their life, all behind a shield of legality that makes you basically immune to punishment, and also be allowed to do anything illegal whatsoever.
No. Just, no.
For stuff like that I go to www.monoprice.com. Never buy cables & stuff B&M if you can help it. The markup is ludicrous.
For example 14' Cat5e for $1.68. The same cable in every retail store I've seen is $15 or $20. That's a 892% markup.
I can't believe something so short sighted is modded insightful.
If a developer's machine takes too long for some non-interactive activity, they'll stop paying attention (probably to read the onion or something #9). Or *cough* post on Slashdot, then lose track of time and not get back to work for hours.
So what if a for loop isn't as optimal as it could be? These days the difference between optimal code and good code is usually too small to be measured in anything but milliseconds; and thus, not very important (link quotes Martin Fowler's PDF).
Contrast this with losing hours of usefulness from extremely expensive equipment (read: good developers).
If you've got bluetooth and wifi enabled and in use the battery goes a lot faster. If you're sitting there refreshing the screen occasionally it lasts much, much longer.
What's this silly obsession with nitpicking use cases you obviously aren't a party to? 90% of the time I read it's in bed a night. So it's more of a mandatory requisite for me than a "silly obsession".
No, I mostly read in bed, at night. And judging by the sheer volume of "kindle compatible" booklights for sale, I'm not alone.
Apparently a significant portion of the market given that Sony attempted to bolt this feature onto their eInk displays. And the reason I mentioned this was Sony had tried it and someone posted the pictures here on the last kindle story. And the results were extremely uneven lighting leading to being blinded at the edges and straining to read in the middle. And burning a nice after image into your retinas if you use it in the dark (you know, where you need a booklight).
I can only assume that since I'm only reading on special ops that you only read between 11:30 am and 12:30pm in the middle of death valley on cloudless days. When I first started reading with white text on black background is that when I put the device down to sleep I could still see a very strong afterimage of lines with my eyes closed. For several minutes. I figured this was bad for my eyes, so changed to red on black. The problem went away completely.
I wish someone would bring some first sale doctrine to Steam.
I cannot sell my "used" steam games to anyone for any price. This is not to say that steam doesn't have its benefits. But losing the ability to sell old games is a tough one to swallow.
And they typically charge the same as if I'd gotten some tangible assets I could resell even though I can't.
The ruckus being caused among developers and publishers exactly the same being caused among the RIAA/MPAA. The business model of making something intangible and selling copies of it printed on plastic discs for a premium is faltering towards obsolescence.
Basically they had a money printing machine, and now they're whining that people have found ways to cut into their fat profit margins. Forgive me if I just consider that another aspect of the market instead of sympathizing.
They used to be. They've been displaced.
My Nokia N810 lasts for days of reading without recharging. And it's smaller. And it has a touch screen & stylus. And wifi for looking up definitions. And an IM client (optional) that I can use to chat while reading. And it can be configured (easily) to use dim red text on a black background that doesn't strain or ruin night vision.
The buttons on it are also incredibly convenient for turning pages. I just contract a single finger. Oh yeah, the pages turn almost instantly because it's not eInk. Or disrupting my gf sleeping next to me since there's no booklight. Or having an extra device that also requires batteries that don't last days clamped on to my ebook reading device.
Call me when you can backlight eInk evenly and still keep several days of battery life like my N810.
Who cares if "it only uses power when you turn pages!!11ONE" if the battery only lasts days. My N810's battery lasts days too - often a week or more of nightly reading - without even having to turn it off. AND it has a perfectly even backlight configurable to any color, brightness or contrast you choose. And you don't have to angle any lamps, lighting, or booklights. It's just always works perfectly.
Bonus? It runs Linux.
Last I checked you weren't allowed the privilege of purchasing an amazon ebook without having a Kindle registered to your account.
And believe me I was interested in find out if it was possible, the kindle inferior. You need a book light for an ebook reader? Seriously?
Bullcrap.
At the heart of nearly every human motivation is selfish profit. It's not misanthropy, it's a law of nature.
Even if they were forced in some situation to lend to people with who would go on to default, the stronger motivator in business is ever profit.
When reading like that my eyes are fully adapted to night vision, so I'm getting plenty of light to read by. I spent an hour or so spread out over a few reading sessions tweaking it to perfection.
I have no trouble reading it whatsoever. If I did, I would simply adjust the display further.
The really disheartening thing is....you didn't.
It's not a powerful backlight. I have the brightness turned down so low it's difficult to read in day a well lit room (so I adjust it there as needed).
I really think you should try it before you go saying it's a bad idea. It's extremely low brightness, to the point that my night vision is completely unimpaired. I can put the device down, and navigate my room, stepping over shoes & such without the slightest difficulty or time delay for vision adjustment.
You seem to grossly underestimate how big of a difference low brightness dark red on black can be (no other colored pixels visible at all) vs. a white screen in the dark. I should take pictures actually..
Looking into the ungodly bright blue light in my mouse from across the room for 100ms is more eye damaging than reading the on the N810 for 2 hours.
I've used good book lights extensively as well, and not to mention lamps, the N810 is by far the best and most convenient.
Book + booklight = ungainly, some parts are brighter than others, you have to attach it manage batteries, additional cord, weight, and the book is huge by comparison, you can't look up definitions from the book over the internet, screws your night vision, may keep your spouse awake, requires bookmarks or a good memory
Book + lamp = good lighting, fairly convenient, but you have to orient yourself, the book, and the light so you can't roll over on whatever side you want and still get the same optimal conditions, you could keep a dictionary at hand I guess, screws your night vision, keeps your spouse awake, requires bookmarks or a good memory.
Kindle + booklight = kinda ungainly due the clamp on booklight, uneven illumination, two different electronic devices requiring batteries or cords, additional weight, ungainly size, dictionary look up in black & white, screws your night vision, may keep your spouse awake, adjustable text size (I assume), lightweight, automatically bookmarks, lasts almost as long as the N810, but your booklight may not.
N810 = perfect brightness since you can customize it to taste, contrast, illumination at all angles, able to look up definitions from the device using copy paste, very little light pollution of your bedroom, tiny, weighs about the same as a book, adjustable text size, automatically bookmarks, batteries last 3-7 days of 1-3 hour reading.
Having a cell phone makes sense for a ton of reasons. That you seem to think they are unnecessary is ridiculous to the point of ludicrous. If they weren't so useful there wouldn't be so many of them.
And good luck getting a basic plan. I have the most basic non-prepaid plan AT&T offers with the single addition 200 txt messages a month ($3) and it somehow works out to $52 a month instead of the advertised $39.99. Think about that for just a second. Why isn't my $39.99 plan exactly $42.99 (plan + texting)? False advertising! You can attempt to justify it by saying they're regulatory fees or some hogwash, but the fact is the plan is advertised at $39.99 and it's completely impossible to actually pay just that amount and not get sent to collections.
And good look finding a cheaper plan of any kind on any carrier. It's effectively price fixing. $40+ a month is about the minimum you can get on any carrier for any plan that isn't prepaid.
Companies are increasing the cost of text messages even though their costs didn't change. They do this on a plan where you're locked into a 2 year agreement due to a subsidized phone. You can potentially get out of your agreement as a result, but it's not easy and it's horribly inconvenient. So you generally just eat the cost and their profits go up.
Cell phone companies have been pretty customer abusive for a very long time now, and no single customer has sufficient power to force them to change their ways. Hence the government should step in. They actually do have that kind of power. Which IMHO is what the government is for - and no other purpose - standing up to entities that individual citizens cannot.
You somehow forgot to mention that it requires a freaking booklight to read in the dark.
The most absurd facet of the thing if you ask me.
I still prefer my Nokia N810 device with software ebook reader FBReader. I can set the display to red text on a black background and reap the following benefits:
For a $360 device that uses electronic paper I'm flabbergasted that you still need to buy a freaking book light for it.
*Note: Prior to learning to use red on black (still using white on black text) I noticed that after I turned the reader off and laid down to sleep that I could still see an afterimage of a bunch of little lines organized in a rectangle with my eyes closed. This problem evaporated with red on black.
I suspect it's because the skillset to make a program in C/C++ or some other locally-run language are very close to the same skillet to write a debugger for those languages. But I suspect the skills to write a JavaScript debugger are much more disparate from those for writing JavaScript itself.
So you have all these web developers and no debugger developers in the field. The people who can write debuggers are all busy writing in languages that aren't JavaScript. At least that's my crackpot theory.
Last time I used it, it also send you advertisements from MS/Hotmail that you couldn't mark as spam, couldn't block the send for, and could not otherwise game the system to block. Basically you were being forced to accept spam from your mail provider.
Also, they'll close your account after a a few months activity, and you have to jump through hoops to get back in.
So I used my ISP's mail until gmail came along, and I never looked back.
I should probably setup Thunderbird to mirror my gmail though. Can anyone provide a link to a guide that will ensure I don't download the mail and remove it from the server? I basically want an offline mirror that I never have to think about.
I've had co workers email me a PDF of a requirements document that was originally a word document.
Because they didn't want me to edit it.
Seriously. I half expected the person to ask for the file back when I was done.
Now we only have to wait through the 'L' release until they can finally use "Masturbating Monkey".
If you ask me, I have no problem with monopolies by themselves.. They're the natural result of a capitalistic system.
The problem occurs when the company with the monopoly becomes abusive of its users or detrimental to the industry due to lack of competition.
For example, Microsoft has become detrimental. There are quirky, broken, useless things in Windows because they haven't had to compete on merit for years. They're still using a drive addressing system invented on the VAX. You can't even cd directly to a directory on another freaking drive. It's still a two step process. The font dialogs in Vista are the same ones from Windows 3.1! IE, the worst, most painful, browser on the market came to dominate via coupling with the monopolistic OS, not by merit. Windows Media Player became hugely popular despite being DRM friendly (user abusive) and a steaming bloated pile compared to winamp, once again by being bundled with the OS and harnessing the power of defaults. Vista includes DRM code in the kernel execution path that makes it slower than XP - and this wasn't done for the users of the OS, but for the interests of other big companies.
Adobe has become abusive with their Acrobat reader. Bundling so much crap with it that's is a steaming pile that takes 10s of seconds load, will no longer allow you to disable its automatic updates, etc.
Most Telecoms and ISPs are abusive. The cost of text messages goes up even though their costs didn't. Verizon is particularly bad, they'll deliberately cripple Bluetooth OBEX profiles on phones you get from them to try and force you to buy ringtones & crap at an estimated 20,000% markup, they brand their phones with hideous schemes that reduce usability, they've been guilty of padding HTTP headers with junk data to arbitrarily increase data usage. (I can understand the contract severance penalties since their subsidizing the phones - provided the fee diminishes to zero by the end of the contract).
Even apple has done this. Way back around iTunes 3, you could download songs from the ipod to iTunes. They subsequently removed this functionality that was useful to their users because of interests of third parties.
These are the companies that need investigation.
Google on the other hand seems to have gotten nothing but better as their power grows. Google searches are still fantastic, they've added tons of incredibly useful free services out of the blue. They keep giving more, awesome, free stuff. More importantly, their existing free stuff keeps getting better not abusive. Maybe I missed something awful they're doing, but so far even their use of my pseudo-private data seems more useful than harmful - I get non-abusive, non-intrusive text based ads for things that are actually relevant. This is the key to long term success. Give your customers what they want and they'll keep coming back and telling their friends. It leads to long term profits, not the short quarterly gains that MS, Adobe, Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, Cox, *IAA, etc seem to be more focused on.
Diablo II + Expansion is still available in stores for $40.
Not sure how busy the servers are these days though.
I played that game off and on for 6 years. Still might if they didn't delete characters that went inactive for 90 days.
Have you tried Sumatra?
IMHO, Sumatra is to Foxit what Foxit is to Adobe Bloatreader.
Even Foxit has annoying advertisements in it that wont' stay turned off.
It might be missing some of the features you're looking for (I don't know what you need), but Sumatra is tiny, extremely fast, and open source.