Another stupidly asked why he doesn't contact the US Attorney General for help in fighting the RIAA.
No, any attorney general. States have them, too. While the USAG might be a useless endeavor, there are still some state AGs that are willing to bring cases against corruption.
The simple solution would be to place a greater emphasis on exams and essay questions, and less on "take home" assignments that give the student time to gather enough disparate sources to fool the system. Certainly, the quality of an essay written under those kind of time constraints is going to be of lesser quality than the student's full potential, but it would be easy enough for a teacher to simply lower their expectations with regard to style and spelling, and grade accordingly.
That, or just go with one-on-one interrogative exams.
Their biggest nitpick is that computer voice. The "voice" from the computer is clearly just a text to voice synthesizer which, may be a little high end but remember TI had voice synthesizers for their computers around 1980.
I don't even see this as a valid nitpick. Computer synthesized voices have been around for ages, and sound pretty-much just like the one in the movie. At one point the girl even makes a remark when first hearing the "talking" computer... something like, "Woah, it can talk!?" Matthew Broderick's character replies (I'm paraphrasing) "Not really, it's just a computer program that converts the text to sound."
How do you know who I've gone to or spoken to? As far as going to the Attorney General, haven't you been reading? The US Attorney General is on the RIAA's side.
Yes, we all know the US Attorney General is in the back pockets of the groups that make up the RI/MPAA. That wasn't what I wanted to know. What I wanted to know was why nothing has been done with any attorney generals, specifically state AG's. In New York, for instance, (future governor, hopefully) Eliot Spitzer made quite a name for himself for going to bat against large, evil corporations on behalf of the little guy. Is Bill Lockyer a similarly spineless invertebrate?
And to answer your first question, I don't. I haven't heard a thing about you approaching any attorney general, state or otherwise. Nada. I haven't read any announcements that you approached the AG in your state, I haven't read anything about his/her response or lack thereof. I haven't heard anything. Good thing you guys are a lawfirm and not a PR firm.
Instead of playing Whack-a-Mole by defending clients that are being extorted by these thugs in Gabardine, why aren't you doing anything about stopping it in the first place? Why haven't you petititioned the Attorney General to bring RICO charges against the members of the RIAA?
People will cope alright. They'll cope right out your front door and leave you twisting in the wind.
Great! Then they should stop complaining about it and start exercising their free-market rights. Or better yet, come up with an alternative that actually respects its users' privacy, and creates such a groundswell of support that FaceBook either succumbs to the market pressure of thousands of their customers jumping ship, or doesn't, and ceases to be relevant. Bitching about it does practically nothing, however. I say "practically" because while it does let them know their users aren't happy, it's not necessarily a given that this alone would be enough for them to institute a change. If they're smart, they will. But given the target group's absolute lack of motivation when it comes to changing their behaviors to punish corporations they disagree with, I doubt it (see also: MPAA, RIAA, PayPal, just about every credit card company on the planet, etc.)
PEOPLE DON'T LIKE IT. That's really all that matters.
TOUGH SHIT. That's all that really matters. Life's full of crap you won't like. Sadly, they seem to have dropped Reality 101 from most college curriculums.
A useful analogy for the construction of a space elevator is the old method used to build bridges over giant chasms. The first, most difficult, and most important step is to attach the two ends somehow. One way is to fly a kite, or if the distance is short enough, throw a weight across the chasm attached to a string. Once you have the initial connection, you can slowly add more lightweight lines to it until you've got a strong enough rope to hold some weight (like a person). The process of building-up the initial connection becomes progressively easier with each iteration.
Absolutely agreed. I used to be an Eclipse evangalist before my dev team got me hooked on IntelliJ. Java-based, so it runs everywhere. The built-in conveniences never seem to end (jump straight to a method's JavaDoc, instantly find all uses of a function anywhere in your project, show a dropdown of all possible methods off an object, built-in auto-generation for getters/setters, try/catch blocks with the right exception handler, etc., etc., et-fucking-cetera). Debugging is an absolute joy. And the plugins! Oh, the plugins! My personal fave-of-the-moment is Hibero, which allows you do perform Hibernate queries on the fly.
Full page refreshes always lose for performance in my world, so I go with Ajax.
Bully for you. So do I. You seem to be under the impression that I don't like AJAX, which couldn't be further from the truth. The banking application I wrote relies heavily on it for dynamic table generation. My point is that these libraries are crutches for people who either can't code well themselves, or can't be bothered to care about the performance on the client's machine.
Because, as I already said, JavaScript is not a compiled language. Convience methods are strictly convenient for the programmer, not for the person on the other end of the pipe who's actually using the program. They couldn't give two shits if you saved yourself from future RSI. Because it's not a compiled langauge, convenience methods come at a cost of execution speed. Which means every cutesy $() or A() function is slowing down your user's environment. A lot? No, of course not. But it adds up. And that's the problem with these libraries: a series of steps to make JavaScript appear--at least to the programmer--like a real programming langauge (getters and setters, classical inheritance, etc.). But these are abstractions that offer no real benefit, just useless cycle overhead on the client's machine.
Anyway, if you're manipulating hundreds of elements every second and are concerned about the overhead of the $ method, perhaps javascript or even a web app is not for you. In fact, maybe it isn't regardless.
One doesn't have to be manipulating hundreds of elements every second to see a performance hit. And I don't even understand the last part--why wouldn't a web app be for me because I care about performance? You wouldn't happen to work in Redmond, would you?
If you actually know what you're doing, it's far, far better to either write your own code, or strip out the routines from an "established" package rather than deploy the package as a whole.
The biggest problem with the toolkits that are coming out is that they're sacrificing runtime efficiency for programing efficiency. Case in point: just about every one of these toolkits have the asinine $(elementId) method as a shortcut for writing out document.getElementById(elementId). WHY? Do you really need a method look-up just to save yourself a few keystrokes of typing?
Javascript is not compiled. None of the compiler optimizations you get from "good coding practice" are going to go into effect when you wrap your simple methods in gi-normous objects. All you do is make your code run slower on the client's machine.
But it will be interesting to see how Google rates some of its own products, including the potentially risky Google Desktop."
From the article:
Google confirmed to ZDNet UK that data was temporarily transported outside of businesses when the Search Across Computers feature was used, and that this represented "as much of a security risk as e-mail does."
And also...
Gartner has recommended that businesses use Google Desktop for Enterprise, as this allows systems administrators to centrally turn off the Search Across Computers feature, which it said should be "immediately disabled."
Wouldn't that force you to write your applications in Java? The beauty of ajax is being able to do so much with just an HTTP server, a server side scripting language, javascript and html.
The beauty of AJAX is being able to communicate with the server without reloading the entire page.
That's it.
If you're talking about a non-polling push mechanism on your web server, I can just about guarantee you that the server powering it isn't going to be running friggin' PHP.
Set up variables as parameters in the URL that hold the state (for bookmarking). If you can control your form values, throw in some hidden fields that hold the info on page load. If the values are empty, the ajax request uses the default, otherwise is preloads your values.
Yes, there are ugly hacks to keep a connection alive, but it is exactly that, a hack, and introduces problems of it's own.
There are some ugly hacks to allow the server to "push" to the client (embedded flash objects, never-closed-connections, etc.)--mostly encapsulated by the moniker COMET (get it? Ajax... Comet...)
But if you get to pick your app server, there are some ready-made solutions. The problem with traditional web servers is their IO method. It's not their fault that the HTTP spec is out-of-date, but there are already new developments on the horizon that get around the current limitations. Take a look at GlassFish, Sun's new open-source enterprise application server, and pay particular attention to NIO socket writes. The performance benefits of NIO over straight IO are astonishing, with the side-benefit that it supports server-push out-of-the-box.
I didn't like waiting to get my money back and occasionally having to make a phone call or even two.......so now I'm glad that no one else is getting the deal either
Except, we are getting the deals. Online. Brick-and-mortar stores used rebates to try and compete with the low-overhead of online dealers like Amazon or NewEgg. Those $0.00 price tags were on items that made the company no money anyway... they're just to get you into the store, with hopes that you'll see something else you like and buy it as well.
If the brick-and-mortar stores are getting rid of rebates, they're going to have a very hard time competing with their online rivals unless they start having clowns and free hot-dog days. Or dropping prices. Frankly, I couldn't care one way or the other. I haven't bought an electronics item from a "real" store since 1995.
NewEgg doesn't do rebates. Oh sure, some of the products they sell have manufacturer rebates, but those apply to every new purchase, not just NewEgg. When you shop at NewEgg, the price they show you in BIG BLACK LETTERS is the actual price you pay. The "rebate" price is in a font about 1/3rd the height of the real price, and it's under the real price.
This is one of the things I like most about NewEgg. No rebates. No bullshit. I give you my money, you give me my shit. Fast.
The way rebates work is that you buy the item for the full price, then have to jump through a number of obstacles in order to actually get the rebate. These obstacles are deliberately designed to dissuade the customer from ever collecting their rebate.
For example, a common scam/rebate offer is where you have to mail the company the original bar code from the package, but you have to mail it to two separate places. How do you do this? You can cut it in half (it can still be read with a bar code scanner), but many times the company will say, "This isn't the original bar code... this is half the bar code!"
Another common scam is they require the originl reciept you recieve when you purchased the item. OK, no big deal, right? Except, if you purchase ten things, then send your original reciept to the company, and then suddenly discover that one of the things you purchased doesn't work, you can't take that item back to the store. Because... you don't have the original reciept.
I read an expose' on the rebate scam a couple of years ago, and one of the interesting things they mentioned was that almost all rebates, no matter where the company is based (usually a large city), will issue their checks from a small bank in the Middle of Nowhere, USA. Why? Because some towns are so small that it takes mail a week to get to the location.
Rebates are a win/win deal for the company. Most of the time, people buy something thinking, "What a great price!" but once they get home they can't be bothered to download and fill out all the paperwork. Thus, the company got you to buy their product over a competing brand, so that's a win. For those consumers who actually do go through the effort of filling out all the forms and mailing them in on time (most rebates have extremely short lifespans), the company can do what's called a float.
What that means is, let's say you purchased a $1000 item with a $200 rebate. The company takes two months (no exaggeration: two months is the standard amount of time it takes if nothing goes wrong, and you'd be surprised how often things are "lost"). You initially have to pay the full price; the company keeps your $200 until all the paperwork is processed. If they put that money into even the most basic bank account, that's 5% interest over two months they can make off your money.
So while you are getting $200 back, it's actually only costing the company $190.
I'd love to meet the person who came up with these scams so I can kick him in the nuts. Hard.
Or just click on 'Ignore trackpad input while typing' in the OS X trackpad preferences. Honestly. I'm pretty sure my 1994-era Powerbook 540 has that choice...
Ah, the Mac. Yeah, I was actually talking about the other 90% of laptops out there. And I honestly doubt you were using OSX in 1994. Honestly.
In Maine, we have our own brand of bio-terrorism against the Devil-creatures: dragonflies. The state used to provide homeowners with a batch in the late spring so that by summertime you'd have a glorious army of ravenous winged assasins. I read somewhere that dragonflies eat 20x their body weight in mosquitos a day (no ref., sorry).
No mouse pointer in the middle of the keyboard like is found on the Thinkpads or the Toshiba Tecra line.
While I'd rather have a mouse-clit than a trackpad any day of the month, any month of the year, what I'd really like to see is a hardware manufacturer bring back the trackball. I hate the faked "acceleration" on the eraser-like pointers and I detest the lack of general ergonomics.
A trackball can be easily cleaned, it's response is quick and absolute, it doesn't take up nearly as much space as the trackpad, and you don't have to worry about all the potential trackpad accidents*. I could never understand why they did away with it.
* Biggest trackpad gripe: typing a bunch of text, then accidentally swiping your palm--which because of the hardware designer's idiocy naturally rests directly on the trackpad--which causes a bunch of text to be selected. Of course, you're in a typing frenzy, and it happens so quickly that you continue typing, overwriting all of that (unhelpfully) selected text. Oh sure, there's always UNDO. That's a perfectly cromulent solution.
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But fuel cells do not have this limit, and their efficiency does not increase very much with their size.
It's going to be cheaper to build one really big plant than thousands home-sized generators. Don't forget manufacturing inefficiencies.
Another stupidly asked why he doesn't contact the US Attorney General for help in fighting the RIAA.
No, any attorney general. States have them, too. While the USAG might be a useless endeavor, there are still some state AGs that are willing to bring cases against corruption.
The simple solution would be to place a greater emphasis on exams and essay questions, and less on "take home" assignments that give the student time to gather enough disparate sources to fool the system. Certainly, the quality of an essay written under those kind of time constraints is going to be of lesser quality than the student's full potential, but it would be easy enough for a teacher to simply lower their expectations with regard to style and spelling, and grade accordingly.
That, or just go with one-on-one interrogative exams.
Their biggest nitpick is that computer voice. The "voice" from the computer is clearly just a text to voice synthesizer which, may be a little high end but remember TI had voice synthesizers for their computers around 1980.
I don't even see this as a valid nitpick. Computer synthesized voices have been around for ages, and sound pretty-much just like the one in the movie. At one point the girl even makes a remark when first hearing the "talking" computer... something like, "Woah, it can talk!?" Matthew Broderick's character replies (I'm paraphrasing) "Not really, it's just a computer program that converts the text to sound."
How do you know who I've gone to or spoken to? As far as going to the Attorney General, haven't you been reading? The US Attorney General is on the RIAA's side.
Yes, we all know the US Attorney General is in the back pockets of the groups that make up the RI/MPAA. That wasn't what I wanted to know. What I wanted to know was why nothing has been done with any attorney generals, specifically state AG's. In New York, for instance, (future governor, hopefully) Eliot Spitzer made quite a name for himself for going to bat against large, evil corporations on behalf of the little guy. Is Bill Lockyer a similarly spineless invertebrate?
And to answer your first question, I don't. I haven't heard a thing about you approaching any attorney general, state or otherwise. Nada. I haven't read any announcements that you approached the AG in your state, I haven't read anything about his/her response or lack thereof. I haven't heard anything. Good thing you guys are a lawfirm and not a PR firm.
Instead of playing Whack-a-Mole by defending clients that are being extorted by these thugs in Gabardine, why aren't you doing anything about stopping it in the first place? Why haven't you petititioned the Attorney General to bring RICO charges against the members of the RIAA?
People will cope alright. They'll cope right out your front door and leave you twisting in the wind.
Great! Then they should stop complaining about it and start exercising their free-market rights. Or better yet, come up with an alternative that actually respects its users' privacy, and creates such a groundswell of support that FaceBook either succumbs to the market pressure of thousands of their customers jumping ship, or doesn't, and ceases to be relevant. Bitching about it does practically nothing, however. I say "practically" because while it does let them know their users aren't happy, it's not necessarily a given that this alone would be enough for them to institute a change. If they're smart, they will. But given the target group's absolute lack of motivation when it comes to changing their behaviors to punish corporations they disagree with, I doubt it (see also: MPAA, RIAA, PayPal, just about every credit card company on the planet, etc.)
PEOPLE DON'T LIKE IT. That's really all that matters.
TOUGH SHIT. That's all that really matters. Life's full of crap you won't like. Sadly, they seem to have dropped Reality 101 from most college curriculums.
Here's a tip:
Learn to cope.
A useful analogy for the construction of a space elevator is the old method used to build bridges over giant chasms. The first, most difficult, and most important step is to attach the two ends somehow. One way is to fly a kite, or if the distance is short enough, throw a weight across the chasm attached to a string. Once you have the initial connection, you can slowly add more lightweight lines to it until you've got a strong enough rope to hold some weight (like a person). The process of building-up the initial connection becomes progressively easier with each iteration.
Absolutely agreed. I used to be an Eclipse evangalist before my dev team got me hooked on IntelliJ. Java-based, so it runs everywhere. The built-in conveniences never seem to end (jump straight to a method's JavaDoc, instantly find all uses of a function anywhere in your project, show a dropdown of all possible methods off an object, built-in auto-generation for getters/setters, try/catch blocks with the right exception handler, etc., etc., et-fucking-cetera). Debugging is an absolute joy. And the plugins! Oh, the plugins! My personal fave-of-the-moment is Hibero, which allows you do perform Hibernate queries on the fly.
Okay, perhaps dozens.
Yeah, dozens. Add into that the other shortcuts and it starts to feel bloaty.
Better algorithms beat your curmudgeonly micro-optimizations every time.
Better algorithms != programmer coding conveniences.
Full page refreshes always lose for performance in my world, so I go with Ajax.
Bully for you. So do I. You seem to be under the impression that I don't like AJAX, which couldn't be further from the truth. The banking application I wrote relies heavily on it for dynamic table generation. My point is that these libraries are crutches for people who either can't code well themselves, or can't be bothered to care about the performance on the client's machine.
Why is it so important to you?
Because, as I already said, JavaScript is not a compiled language. Convience methods are strictly convenient for the programmer, not for the person on the other end of the pipe who's actually using the program. They couldn't give two shits if you saved yourself from future RSI. Because it's not a compiled langauge, convenience methods come at a cost of execution speed. Which means every cutesy $() or A() function is slowing down your user's environment. A lot? No, of course not. But it adds up. And that's the problem with these libraries: a series of steps to make JavaScript appear--at least to the programmer--like a real programming langauge (getters and setters, classical inheritance, etc.). But these are abstractions that offer no real benefit, just useless cycle overhead on the client's machine.
Anyway, if you're manipulating hundreds of elements every second and are concerned about the overhead of the $ method, perhaps javascript or even a web app is not for you. In fact, maybe it isn't regardless.
One doesn't have to be manipulating hundreds of elements every second to see a performance hit. And I don't even understand the last part--why wouldn't a web app be for me because I care about performance? You wouldn't happen to work in Redmond, would you?
If you actually know what you're doing, it's far, far better to either write your own code, or strip out the routines from an "established" package rather than deploy the package as a whole.
The biggest problem with the toolkits that are coming out is that they're sacrificing runtime efficiency for programing efficiency. Case in point: just about every one of these toolkits have the asinine $(elementId) method as a shortcut for writing out document.getElementById(elementId). WHY? Do you really need a method look-up just to save yourself a few keystrokes of typing?
Javascript is not compiled. None of the compiler optimizations you get from "good coding practice" are going to go into effect when you wrap your simple methods in gi-normous objects. All you do is make your code run slower on the client's machine.
But it will be interesting to see how Google rates some of its own products, including the potentially risky Google Desktop."
From the article:
Google confirmed to ZDNet UK that data was temporarily transported outside of businesses when the Search Across Computers feature was used, and that this represented "as much of a security risk as e-mail does."
And also...
Gartner has recommended that businesses use Google Desktop for Enterprise, as this allows systems administrators to centrally turn off the Search Across Computers feature, which it said should be "immediately disabled."
In other words, mostly harmless.
Wouldn't that force you to write your applications in Java? The beauty of ajax is being able to do so much with just an HTTP server, a server side scripting language, javascript and html.
The beauty of AJAX is being able to communicate with the server without reloading the entire page.
That's it.
If you're talking about a non-polling push mechanism on your web server, I can just about guarantee you that the server powering it isn't going to be running friggin' PHP.
How do I save an AJAX page in a given state
Set up variables as parameters in the URL that hold the state (for bookmarking). If you can control your form values, throw in some hidden fields that hold the info on page load. If the values are empty, the ajax request uses the default, otherwise is preloads your values.
Yes, there are ugly hacks to keep a connection alive, but it is exactly that, a hack, and introduces problems of it's own.
There are some ugly hacks to allow the server to "push" to the client (embedded flash objects, never-closed-connections, etc.)--mostly encapsulated by the moniker COMET (get it? Ajax... Comet...)
But if you get to pick your app server, there are some ready-made solutions. The problem with traditional web servers is their IO method. It's not their fault that the HTTP spec is out-of-date, but there are already new developments on the horizon that get around the current limitations. Take a look at GlassFish, Sun's new open-source enterprise application server, and pay particular attention to NIO socket writes. The performance benefits of NIO over straight IO are astonishing, with the side-benefit that it supports server-push out-of-the-box.
In fact, that's how PGPphone used to work, if you can still lay your hands on a copy of it.
Oh, I'm sure you can find it floating around somewhere.
However there were still limitations to what he would/could tell us (sorry I won't go into specifics).
Funny, I didn't notice anyone ask.
I didn't like waiting to get my money back and occasionally having to make a phone call or even two. ... ...so now I'm glad that no one else is getting the deal either
Except, we are getting the deals. Online. Brick-and-mortar stores used rebates to try and compete with the low-overhead of online dealers like Amazon or NewEgg. Those $0.00 price tags were on items that made the company no money anyway... they're just to get you into the store, with hopes that you'll see something else you like and buy it as well.
If the brick-and-mortar stores are getting rid of rebates, they're going to have a very hard time competing with their online rivals unless they start having clowns and free hot-dog days. Or dropping prices. Frankly, I couldn't care one way or the other. I haven't bought an electronics item from a "real" store since 1995.
NewEgg doesn't do rebates. Oh sure, some of the products they sell have manufacturer rebates, but those apply to every new purchase, not just NewEgg. When you shop at NewEgg, the price they show you in BIG BLACK LETTERS is the actual price you pay. The "rebate" price is in a font about 1/3rd the height of the real price, and it's under the real price.
This is one of the things I like most about NewEgg. No rebates. No bullshit. I give you my money, you give me my shit. Fast.
The way rebates work is that you buy the item for the full price, then have to jump through a number of obstacles in order to actually get the rebate. These obstacles are deliberately designed to dissuade the customer from ever collecting their rebate.
For example, a common scam/rebate offer is where you have to mail the company the original bar code from the package, but you have to mail it to two separate places. How do you do this? You can cut it in half (it can still be read with a bar code scanner), but many times the company will say, "This isn't the original bar code... this is half the bar code!"
Another common scam is they require the originl reciept you recieve when you purchased the item. OK, no big deal, right? Except, if you purchase ten things, then send your original reciept to the company, and then suddenly discover that one of the things you purchased doesn't work, you can't take that item back to the store. Because... you don't have the original reciept.
I read an expose' on the rebate scam a couple of years ago, and one of the interesting things they mentioned was that almost all rebates, no matter where the company is based (usually a large city), will issue their checks from a small bank in the Middle of Nowhere, USA. Why? Because some towns are so small that it takes mail a week to get to the location.
Rebates are a win/win deal for the company. Most of the time, people buy something thinking, "What a great price!" but once they get home they can't be bothered to download and fill out all the paperwork. Thus, the company got you to buy their product over a competing brand, so that's a win. For those consumers who actually do go through the effort of filling out all the forms and mailing them in on time (most rebates have extremely short lifespans), the company can do what's called a float.
What that means is, let's say you purchased a $1000 item with a $200 rebate. The company takes two months (no exaggeration: two months is the standard amount of time it takes if nothing goes wrong, and you'd be surprised how often things are "lost"). You initially have to pay the full price; the company keeps your $200 until all the paperwork is processed. If they put that money into even the most basic bank account, that's 5% interest over two months they can make off your money.
So while you are getting $200 back, it's actually only costing the company $190.
I'd love to meet the person who came up with these scams so I can kick him in the nuts. Hard.
Or just click on 'Ignore trackpad input while typing' in the OS X trackpad preferences. Honestly. I'm pretty sure my 1994-era Powerbook 540 has that choice...
Ah, the Mac. Yeah, I was actually talking about the other 90% of laptops out there. And I honestly doubt you were using OSX in 1994. Honestly.
In Maine, we have our own brand of bio-terrorism against the Devil-creatures: dragonflies. The state used to provide homeowners with a batch in the late spring so that by summertime you'd have a glorious army of ravenous winged assasins. I read somewhere that dragonflies eat 20x their body weight in mosquitos a day (no ref., sorry).
No mouse pointer in the middle of the keyboard like is found on the Thinkpads or the Toshiba Tecra line.
While I'd rather have a mouse-clit than a trackpad any day of the month, any month of the year, what I'd really like to see is a hardware manufacturer bring back the trackball. I hate the faked "acceleration" on the eraser-like pointers and I detest the lack of general ergonomics.
A trackball can be easily cleaned, it's response is quick and absolute, it doesn't take up nearly as much space as the trackpad, and you don't have to worry about all the potential trackpad accidents*. I could never understand why they did away with it.
* Biggest trackpad gripe: typing a bunch of text, then accidentally swiping your palm--which because of the hardware designer's idiocy naturally rests directly on the trackpad--which causes a bunch of text to be selected. Of course, you're in a typing frenzy, and it happens so quickly that you continue typing, overwriting all of that (unhelpfully) selected text. Oh sure, there's always UNDO. That's a perfectly cromulent solution.