Funny? I'd say the sentiment is dead on---at least for me.
.99 is my upper limit. I don't do "impulse buying" at that price. I don't try new things at that price. I only buy what I already know I like. The 30 second preview is not enough of a sample. I *may* consider trying new things at.25, but it's still going to be taken into account that every 4 "experiments" is a dollar and it isn't long before these little nickel and dime experiments become significant change. (and I'm not hurting for cash)
I ought to go to Yahoo's service or something so I can sample whatever I like and still feel legal. But that $5/mo. subscription is only if yearly (right?) and a monthly fee is something significant to me; reocurring cost makes me weigh my options more. Besides, the way it works for me is that I listen to a bunch of music for a while, then get bored of it and search for more---lather, rinse, repeat. I'd use the subscription part for maybe a week, then wouldn't touch it for a month or so, then use it for a week... Ick. It's not worth it to me.
I would like a 1:30 preview. No, scratch that. Let me "preview" the whole song. Just encode it at 64k or less---something that sounds nasty so I'd never be tempted to rip it. Hmmm... kind of like the radio, but on demand. Yeah; like that's going to happen.
"Hover Dam!" I hate not being the target market. I don't get anything I want.
If I save a page, I explicitly do NOT want the browser to go back and refetch the page. It's already in the browser's memory; I'm looking at it on-screen; that's what I want. If I want to assure I've got the most up-to-date version before I save, I'll refresh on my own. Likewise, if I use "back"/"forward", the browser already has it; I wish the browser would leave the network alone!
The PQI "Intelligent Stick" is awesome! I bought a 1GB (v2.0) one off NewEgg 6 or so months ago for about $70USD. What makes it so great? It fits in my wallet; The carrying "case" is about 4 credit-cards thick and holds 2 of them.
The only time I ever had a problem with it was when I formatted it with NTFS; I forgot about that stupid caching stuff and took it out w/o doing the whole "stop/eject" thing and lost all my data. It's now formatted as FAT32 so I don't have to worry about it anymore.
I tried something similar where, instead, I made an object to contain all the needed functionality. I hooked onreadystatechange up to a member function, but, when the event fired, the "this" reference didn't point to my object. From that, I figured that when the event fired, the context under which my function was running didn't know how to properly hookup the "this" reference.
Q.Did Adaptive Path invent Ajax? Did Google? Did Adaptive Path help build Google's Ajax applications?
A.Yes. We wanted to call it HTTP, but that was already taken.
Q. Is Adaptive Path selling Ajax components or trademarking the name? Where can I download it?
A. Oops. Sorry; fooled you. It's not a product; cool acronym though, right?
Q. Is Ajax just another name for XMLHttpRequest?
A. Damn you kids are smart. Wait! I meant "No". We put "CSS" in there too, and "XML". Yeah; XML changes everything.
Q. Why did you feel the need to give this a name?
A. Two words: Midlife Crisis.
Q. Techniques for asynchronous server communication have been around for years. What makes Ajax a "new" approach?
A. Because I said so; I'm Jack Bauer!
Q. Is Ajax a technology platform or is it an architectural style?
A. Is using the BLINK tag a platform or is it an architectural style? Snatch the pebble from my hand, Grasshopper.
Q. What kinds of applications is Ajax best suited for?
A. Hmmm... That's a tough one. How about "web pages"? Does that sound nice?
Q. Does this mean Adaptive Path is anti-Flash?
A. Yes. If we liked Flash, why would we pull our hair out attempting something this complex in Javascript?
Q. Does Ajax have significant accessibility or browser compatibility limitations? Blah blah blah...
A. My sources say "Yes"....but if you shake the magic 8 ball again, who knows?
Q. Some of the Google examples you cite don't use XML at all. Do I have to use XML and/or XSLT in an Ajax application?
A. Yes. We put "XML" in the acronym! Of course you have to! Why?...because...because SHUT UP!
Q. Are Ajax applications easier to develop than traditional web applications?
A. Duh. Are you stupid? Of course they are. We called it "AJAX"; isn't that teh ish?
Q. Do Ajax applications always deliver a better experience than traditional web applications?
A. Only if we make them. Everyone else sucks.
And on a serious note: Who was the moron who made the onreadystatechange event handler? Why couldn't you just pass in a reference to the XmlHttpRequest object so people wouldn't be forced to use global variables to store the reference? Is that so hard?
I was playing last night or else I would've posted an update. Somewhere between 5:30-6pm Steam let me login. Next, it attempted to authenticate my CD-key; it said that it wasn't able to yet, but that I could go ahead and play anyhow---Steam said it would get back to me later. Frankly, as a consumer, I really liked that; I sure don't envy the person who coded that and had to worry about how it could get hacked. Anyhow, a few seconds ago, Steam just told me that I'm all good-to-go! Yes! I won't have to call CustSupport! =)
As for emailing Gabe directly, I bet he's presently inundated with email; thanks for the idea, alnjmshntr. I plan to watch the steampowered forums for a while and see what others have reported. If I have something to contribute, I most definitely will; that whole "pegging the CPU" thing can't be correct. (And that "AuthenticationServer" error is misleading.)
I'm sort of in the same boat; extremely frustrated. I, however, have not been able to play yet. I have been able to waste my entire afternoon and I'm not happy in the slightest.
My first problem came attempting to install it. I made the mistake of de-selecting Counter-Strike; the install fails on disc 4 if you do. It can't find "hl2.ico1". Well, Duh! It's on disc 5 retard! After waiting for the forums on steampowered.com, I found the problem was that I had chosen to not install Counter-Strike. Wasted time: about an hour and a half.
Next, I fired up Steam to create an account. Oh, my living hell! Who coded that thing? What requires 100% CPU time? Was someone at Valve experimenting with spin-locks? It seems like every click means a 2-minute wait while it pegs the CPU---then it finally does something. Another hour and a half---maybe 2---wasted.
Finally, after it decided to create my account, it got stuck validating my CD-key. I let it attempt to validate for---I kid you not---1:45 before I killed the stupid thing. Thereafter, I get the
Error:Steam error: SteamProcessCall(Login)(0xab0002,0x15efc04,0x15efd 0c) failed with error 200: Failed to find Master AuthenticationServer
error in the logs. I guess the servers finally melted down. The scary part is, when they come back online, will I have to call customer support to fix my account? I shudder to think there are more suprises like this waiting.
The forums at steampowered.com are now officially offline and I have yet to find anywhere else (well, through Google at least) with help. It seems the entire support/authentication system has melted.
It is now almost 7 hours since I bought Half-Life 2 and I still cannot play it. I'm just now barely getting myself back to the state where I don't want to kill/maim/destroy something; I'm extremely dissatisfied with Steam. It was not up to the task, and has left a bad taste in my mouth. I hope Valve can fix this soon, but the damage is done.
Unfortunately, I don't have an exact solution for you. I do have the same sort of problem;
one of my roomates is, shall we say, "new" to the whole Internet thing.
As far as I can tell, if his computer's on, Chat (MS Msngr) and Morpheus are running. Some day,
he'll grow out of it;), but until then...
When he found Morpheus, my other roommate and I found it next to impossible to
play Tribes2/Diablo2---we never had so much as a hiccup before. Since Morpheus doesn't
appear to "play fair", I decided it would be best to stop it at the router; we don't
have to worry about him forgetting that his habits hog the pipe. I found a
site with some info useful for blocking/throttling file-sharing programs that might help
you:
http://www.oofle.com/FileSharing/index.htm
In a perfect world, I would like to setup some sort of rule which only limits
his "fun" when others are using the LAN. I'd also like to have the bandwidth throttled
at his computer so we're (our LAN) not wasting bandwidth upstream. Since I don't know enough---and really don't
care to waste any more time with it---I just added rules to my iptables-setup script that get me the result I was after.
In a nutshell, traffic from the LAN that originates on port 1214 gets dropped; that
stops him from being a server (that scenario just makes me nervous). Traffic from the 'Net that
originates on 1214 gets limited to 10 per second; the balance gets dropped. We've not
had any bandwidth problems since, and he still gets decent speeds (4 x ~4kbps downloads).
Slashdot Mirror
"Hoover" Dam. Is it still Monday?
I ought to go to Yahoo's service or something so I can sample whatever I like and still feel legal. But that $5/mo. subscription is only if yearly (right?) and a monthly fee is something significant to me; reocurring cost makes me weigh my options more. Besides, the way it works for me is that I listen to a bunch of music for a while, then get bored of it and search for more---lather, rinse, repeat. I'd use the subscription part for maybe a week, then wouldn't touch it for a month or so, then use it for a week... Ick. It's not worth it to me.
I would like a 1:30 preview. No, scratch that. Let me "preview" the whole song. Just encode it at 64k or less---something that sounds nasty so I'd never be tempted to rip it. Hmmm... kind of like the radio, but on demand. Yeah; like that's going to happen.
"Hover Dam!" I hate not being the target market. I don't get anything I want.
I don't agree it's a web site bug.
If I save a page, I explicitly do NOT want the browser to go back and refetch the page. It's already in the browser's memory; I'm looking at it on-screen; that's what I want. If I want to assure I've got the most up-to-date version before I save, I'll refresh on my own. Likewise, if I use "back"/"forward", the browser already has it; I wish the browser would leave the network alone!
The only time I ever had a problem with it was when I formatted it with NTFS; I forgot about that stupid caching stuff and took it out w/o doing the whole "stop/eject" thing and lost all my data. It's now formatted as FAT32 so I don't have to worry about it anymore.
I tried something similar where, instead, I made an object to contain all the needed functionality. I hooked onreadystatechange up to a member function, but, when the event fired, the "this" reference didn't point to my object. From that, I figured that when the event fired, the context under which my function was running didn't know how to properly hookup the "this" reference.
I'll try that approach. Thanks! =)
And on a serious note: Who was the moron who made the onreadystatechange event handler? Why couldn't you just pass in a reference to the XmlHttpRequest object so people wouldn't be forced to use global variables to store the reference? Is that so hard?
Or he could just ask "Which path leads to your village?"
Both people will point to the truth-tellers' village.
I was playing last night or else I would've posted an update. Somewhere between 5:30-6pm Steam let me login. Next, it attempted to authenticate my CD-key; it said that it wasn't able to yet, but that I could go ahead and play anyhow---Steam said it would get back to me later. Frankly, as a consumer, I really liked that; I sure don't envy the person who coded that and had to worry about how it could get hacked. Anyhow, a few seconds ago, Steam just told me that I'm all good-to-go! Yes! I won't have to call CustSupport! =)
As for emailing Gabe directly, I bet he's presently inundated with email; thanks for the idea, alnjmshntr. I plan to watch the steampowered forums for a while and see what others have reported. If I have something to contribute, I most definitely will; that whole "pegging the CPU" thing can't be correct. (And that "AuthenticationServer" error is misleading.)
I'm sort of in the same boat; extremely frustrated. I, however, have not been able to play yet. I have been able to waste my entire afternoon and I'm not happy in the slightest.
My first problem came attempting to install it. I made the mistake of de-selecting Counter-Strike; the install fails on disc 4 if you do. It can't find "hl2.ico1". Well, Duh! It's on disc 5 retard! After waiting for the forums on steampowered.com, I found the problem was that I had chosen to not install Counter-Strike. Wasted time: about an hour and a half.
Next, I fired up Steam to create an account. Oh, my living hell! Who coded that thing? What requires 100% CPU time? Was someone at Valve experimenting with spin-locks? It seems like every click means a 2-minute wait while it pegs the CPU---then it finally does something. Another hour and a half---maybe 2---wasted.
Finally, after it decided to create my account, it got stuck validating my CD-key. I let it attempt to validate for---I kid you not---1:45 before I killed the stupid thing. Thereafter, I get the
error in the logs. I guess the servers finally melted down. The scary part is, when they come back online, will I have to call customer support to fix my account? I shudder to think there are more suprises like this waiting.The forums at steampowered.com are now officially offline and I have yet to find anywhere else (well, through Google at least) with help. It seems the entire support/authentication system has melted.
It is now almost 7 hours since I bought Half-Life 2 and I still cannot play it. I'm just now barely getting myself back to the state where I don't want to kill/maim/destroy something; I'm extremely dissatisfied with Steam. It was not up to the task, and has left a bad taste in my mouth. I hope Valve can fix this soon, but the damage is done.
Already tried this.
Note to self: Don't try to pour Dr. Pepper in eyes again.
My friend got one of these things. It just happens to be the same size as his laptop and blocks the heat rather nicely. Pretty useful for only $15.
I'm game on becoming a Protector; this breeder stage is getting old. ...and I've always wanted a beak.
Unfortunately, I don't have an exact solution for you. I do have the same sort of problem; one of my roomates is, shall we say, "new" to the whole Internet thing. As far as I can tell, if his computer's on, Chat (MS Msngr) and Morpheus are running. Some day, he'll grow out of it ;), but until then...
When he found Morpheus, my other roommate and I found it next to impossible to play Tribes2/Diablo2---we never had so much as a hiccup before. Since Morpheus doesn't appear to "play fair", I decided it would be best to stop it at the router; we don't have to worry about him forgetting that his habits hog the pipe. I found a site with some info useful for blocking/throttling file-sharing programs that might help you:
In a perfect world, I would like to setup some sort of rule which only limits his "fun" when others are using the LAN. I'd also like to have the bandwidth throttled at his computer so we're (our LAN) not wasting bandwidth upstream. Since I don't know enough---and really don't care to waste any more time with it---I just added rules to my iptables-setup script that get me the result I was after.
In a nutshell, traffic from the LAN that originates on port 1214 gets dropped; that stops him from being a server (that scenario just makes me nervous). Traffic from the 'Net that originates on 1214 gets limited to 10 per second; the balance gets dropped. We've not had any bandwidth problems since, and he still gets decent speeds (4 x ~4kbps downloads).