We used to have standards, now we have patents. One benefits all of mankind for eternity, the other benefits a small group of manufacturers for a very limited time. You can see why society has chosen the one over the other....
Well of course it is! Manufacturers discovered a long time ago, that even their cheapest quality stuff lasts too long and people don't buy new ones often enough. By internet enabling them, they can conveniently discontinue the server side support (which usually blocks all local functions as well) any time they need a new revenue boost and force people to buy new ones all over again.
The headline stated something rare (legitimate installers of popular programs being infested by malware)
Of course the headline was nothing to do with reality, the article, or even the summary, which is all about the every day occurrence of fake installers being used to try to trick people in to installing malware, which is not new at all.
In this case, you're right. But conversely, just because it's legitimate, does not mean it's malware free.
Of course this makes for clickbait, because legitimate installers installing malware are rare, whereas fake installers installing malware is an every day occurrence.
I had already decided that, this just reinforces it.
I have been loyal to the Note line of phones for a long time (since they were basically the only choice for a large screen phone). But first they got rid of the replaceable battery and sd card, and made the back out of the sliperiest material they could find, then they made it impossible to hold without performing unintended touch operations with the ridiculous "edge" screen, and now they're getting rid of the headphone jack. and I gather they're also now locking their bootloaders down.
I like the stylus on the note line of phones, but it's not enough to make me put up with all the other disadvantages. Not sure yet what my next phone will be, but it's highly unlikely to be a Samsung with all the downgrades they've made to their devices recently.
Sure, it may not be legal in some places. But if half the people are doing it, and less than 1% of people care that it's happening, maybe it's time to modernize the law and bring it in to line with societal norms...
Legality and morality are not the same thing, and when such a large percentage of people think something is right, and comparatively few feel that it's wrong, maybe the law is on the wrong side of the evolution of modern society.
And in 3 words you've explained exactly why pay by phone isn't taking off.
Paying with my phone is far more convenient than with a card, if I don't have to carry the card. But because it's *most* and not *all* locations that support contactless payments, I have to carry both, and if I have to carry both anyway, I might as well just use the card.
Add to that the absolutely horrendous implementations that are out there for electronic wallets, and no wonder they aren't in use. For specific examples of issues: - My current bank's app takes long enough to load each time on the phone that I can start it loading, pull out my actual credit card, pay with it, put it away again, and the app still won't have finished loading to allow me to pay - The Canadian Mint actually got involved developing it's own digital payment method, known as MintChip it sounded like a great idea, until you find out it's accepted by only a dozen merchants in the whole country, and has transaction limits of only a few hundred dollars per week. - Half the banks don't yet have any mobile payment app at all (one notable Canadian bank claims to allow you to pay with your smartphone, but they don't mean an app, they mean that they will send you a large sticker with an RFID chip embedded in it that you can plaster on the back of your smartphone... talk about missing the point!) - Whenever my phone NFC doesn't scan right the first time at any terminal, there's no option for a second try, it immediately forces you to insert your chip card, or swipe the magnetic stripe, which means you better have your physical card handy, so you can't just leave it at home. - As mentioned earlier, although most merchant terminals accept tap-to-pay, not every single merchant does, and without all of them you end up having to carry your card anyway, so there's no advantage in that case to using the phone instead
So why are mobile wallets failing? Because the banks are making them fail. it's really that simple.
You say that, but on Windows even pen drives are a pain with pop-ups that say it's installing drivers, even if the same pen drive has been in the computer before on a different USB port. Drivers? For a pen drive? Really?
One of the reasons I prefer Linux. Everything "just works".
I have to thank Microsoft for my scanner. Without them I probably wouldn't even have one. My parents had a very nice, high end scanner that they used for years until Windows stopped working with the driver, and the manufacturer stopped making drivers for new windows versions. Luckily it works great on my Linux box though with no driver's or setup required (after I installed the old SCSI card it came with... That worked straight out of the box too) Scanner is now about 20 years old and works better than many modern ones (and does legal paper too which is a rare feature)
There are ways to do that, both add-ons that offer it, and I believe you can change it in the hidden settings that control everything. That said, I actually like that feature. I've never seen the need to clutter up the interface with a separate search bar. The key is really just setting it to use the right search engine.
Because you use a feature doesn't make it a good feature. It's horrible from a design consistency perspective. It's horrible from a risk of data loss perspective, it's just all around bad UI.
You got used to it, but that doesn't mean it should have ever been offered in the first place.
That's exactly why "sticky keys" was developed. For those very people. They need it for hundreds of other tasks, one more is not an issue. You may find that demographic is less likely in general to use keyboard shortcuts at all though and will simply use the mouse.
I actually had an extension installed to DISABLE it... it was always an absolutely HORRIBLE idea. There's already the alt-left arrow combination which was far less likely to be activated accidentally while being just as easy to use on purpose.
Our carriers pretend to have followed suit, but the difference between their BYOD price and their full price tells a different story (about half the price of buying a phone, should be the full price (maybe more for interest))
Carriers here don't have a "BYOD fee" but they do have a different price for your monthly charge for BYOD vs their subsidized phones. But the price difference, over the 2 year contract, is only about half the price of the device bought outright, meaning that it's cheaper to buy the device on contract.
The same could be said of the USA, all concentrated on the coasts.
Face it, the problem in the USA has nothing to do with size of the country, or population density, it has to do with the Telcos not looking past their quarterly earnings report.
And, generally, other countries don't generally have the sheer landmass that the US does. That's why the push for CO consolidation wasn't felt as greatly as it was here. This happenstance was lucky in that it left most of these countries as prime targets for truly high speed DSL implementation.
I hate to break it to you, the country I'm talking about here is Canada, more landmass and less population density than the USA... Australia also has tons of landmass and low population density and they also have good DSL service.
The American Telcos placed short term finances ahead of long term success, it's not a technology problem, it isn't even really an infrastructure problem, it's a business decision problem.
The main Telco here was skewered by investors when they said they were going to re-invest profits in to infrastructure build out, but it's shown huge returns by growing market share, investors now (in hind sight) love the idea because it worked, but they sure didn't like that it took money out of the immediate quarter to focus on a long term strategy. It's all too easy for a company to listen to those shareholders who want the small short term gains instead of the big long term success.
Sorry, that reason doesn't work. COs everywhere are spread out and serve huge geographic areas. What people are ignoring is that there's no reason that the DSLAM has to be in the CO, in many cases they aren't. Where I live extremely few DSL customers are served from the CO, sure there are some DSLAMs in the COs, but most of the DSLAMs are out in the field. It's not that these other telcos didn't consolidate COs, it's that they've spent the money since to get the DSLAMs out in the field closer to the customers.
Density is somewhat relevant in that you're not going to find DSLAMs in farm country, but then you don't find any cable service out there either. you need some form of density to make it work, but really it's not that much, Each field DSLAM serves about 100 customers, and can easily serve distances up to a few hundred meters. That's not farm sparse, but it doesn't require mammoth office towers either, a normal residential (single detached) neighbourhood is plenty.
So you ignored not only the content of my post, but the very subject line you're replying to... I know it's considered bad form on slashdot to read articles, but you could at least get as far as the subject line before you reply....
That would be refreshing, here we get a discount for BYOD, but it's not that much. They have 3 tiers of phones you can subsidize, basic, smartphones, premium smartphones. Start with the BYOD price, add $5/mo for the basic phones, $10/mo for the smartphones, and $15/mo for the premium smartphones. Over the 2 year contract period, those prices don't cover the cost of buying one of those devices. This tells me that even if you BYOD you're still paying roughly half the subsidy cost, meaning it's still cheaper to buy through the carrier.
Slashdot Mirror
We used to have standards, now we have patents. One benefits all of mankind for eternity, the other benefits a small group of manufacturers for a very limited time. You can see why society has chosen the one over the other....
Well of course it is! Manufacturers discovered a long time ago, that even their cheapest quality stuff lasts too long and people don't buy new ones often enough. By internet enabling them, they can conveniently discontinue the server side support (which usually blocks all local functions as well) any time they need a new revenue boost and force people to buy new ones all over again.
I'm more surprised that Slashdot passed on the error without thinking how stupid it sounded.
You must be new here.
The headline stated something rare (legitimate installers of popular programs being infested by malware)
Of course the headline was nothing to do with reality, the article, or even the summary, which is all about the every day occurrence of fake installers being used to try to trick people in to installing malware, which is not new at all.
In this case, you're right. But conversely, just because it's legitimate, does not mean it's malware free.
Of course this makes for clickbait, because legitimate installers installing malware are rare, whereas fake installers installing malware is an every day occurrence.
I had already decided that, this just reinforces it.
I have been loyal to the Note line of phones for a long time (since they were basically the only choice for a large screen phone). But first they got rid of the replaceable battery and sd card, and made the back out of the sliperiest material they could find, then they made it impossible to hold without performing unintended touch operations with the ridiculous "edge" screen, and now they're getting rid of the headphone jack. and I gather they're also now locking their bootloaders down.
I like the stylus on the note line of phones, but it's not enough to make me put up with all the other disadvantages. Not sure yet what my next phone will be, but it's highly unlikely to be a Samsung with all the downgrades they've made to their devices recently.
Sure, it may not be legal in some places. But if half the people are doing it, and less than 1% of people care that it's happening, maybe it's time to modernize the law and bring it in to line with societal norms...
Legality and morality are not the same thing, and when such a large percentage of people think something is right, and comparatively few feel that it's wrong, maybe the law is on the wrong side of the evolution of modern society.
most support contactless.
And in 3 words you've explained exactly why pay by phone isn't taking off.
Paying with my phone is far more convenient than with a card, if I don't have to carry the card. But because it's *most* and not *all* locations that support contactless payments, I have to carry both, and if I have to carry both anyway, I might as well just use the card.
Add to that the absolutely horrendous implementations that are out there for electronic wallets, and no wonder they aren't in use.
For specific examples of issues:
- My current bank's app takes long enough to load each time on the phone that I can start it loading, pull out my actual credit card, pay with it, put it away again, and the app still won't have finished loading to allow me to pay
- The Canadian Mint actually got involved developing it's own digital payment method, known as MintChip it sounded like a great idea, until you find out it's accepted by only a dozen merchants in the whole country, and has transaction limits of only a few hundred dollars per week.
- Half the banks don't yet have any mobile payment app at all (one notable Canadian bank claims to allow you to pay with your smartphone, but they don't mean an app, they mean that they will send you a large sticker with an RFID chip embedded in it that you can plaster on the back of your smartphone... talk about missing the point!)
- Whenever my phone NFC doesn't scan right the first time at any terminal, there's no option for a second try, it immediately forces you to insert your chip card, or swipe the magnetic stripe, which means you better have your physical card handy, so you can't just leave it at home.
- As mentioned earlier, although most merchant terminals accept tap-to-pay, not every single merchant does, and without all of them you end up having to carry your card anyway, so there's no advantage in that case to using the phone instead
So why are mobile wallets failing? Because the banks are making them fail. it's really that simple.
Of course you don't know if it will actually work with Windows....
You say that, but on Windows even pen drives are a pain with pop-ups that say it's installing drivers, even if the same pen drive has been in the computer before on a different USB port. Drivers? For a pen drive? Really?
One of the reasons I prefer Linux. Everything "just works".
I have to thank Microsoft for my scanner. Without them I probably wouldn't even have one.
My parents had a very nice, high end scanner that they used for years until Windows stopped working with the driver, and the manufacturer stopped making drivers for new windows versions. Luckily it works great on my Linux box though with no driver's or setup required (after I installed the old SCSI card it came with... That worked straight out of the box too)
Scanner is now about 20 years old and works better than many modern ones (and does legal paper too which is a rare feature)
There are ways to do that, both add-ons that offer it, and I believe you can change it in the hidden settings that control everything. That said, I actually like that feature. I've never seen the need to clutter up the interface with a separate search bar. The key is really just setting it to use the right search engine.
If you want to use your mouse hand for back, use alt-left arrow, or use the mouse.
This is a feature that never should have been offered in the first place. Just because some people are used to it now doesn't make it good UI
Because you use a feature doesn't make it a good feature. It's horrible from a design consistency perspective. It's horrible from a risk of data loss perspective, it's just all around bad UI.
You got used to it, but that doesn't mean it should have ever been offered in the first place.
That's exactly why "sticky keys" was developed. For those very people. They need it for hundreds of other tasks, one more is not an issue.
You may find that demographic is less likely in general to use keyboard shortcuts at all though and will simply use the mouse.
I actually had an extension installed to DISABLE it... it was always an absolutely HORRIBLE idea. There's already the alt-left arrow combination which was far less likely to be activated accidentally while being just as easy to use on purpose.
Our carriers pretend to have followed suit, but the difference between their BYOD price and their full price tells a different story (about half the price of buying a phone, should be the full price (maybe more for interest))
Unfortunately I'm not in the USA.
Carriers here don't have a "BYOD fee" but they do have a different price for your monthly charge for BYOD vs their subsidized phones. But the price difference, over the 2 year contract, is only about half the price of the device bought outright, meaning that it's cheaper to buy the device on contract.
The same could be said of the USA, all concentrated on the coasts.
Face it, the problem in the USA has nothing to do with size of the country, or population density, it has to do with the Telcos not looking past their quarterly earnings report.
And, generally, other countries don't generally have the sheer landmass that the US does. That's why the push for CO consolidation wasn't felt as greatly as it was here. This happenstance was lucky in that it left most of these countries as prime targets for truly high speed DSL implementation.
I hate to break it to you, the country I'm talking about here is Canada, more landmass and less population density than the USA... Australia also has tons of landmass and low population density and they also have good DSL service.
The American Telcos placed short term finances ahead of long term success, it's not a technology problem, it isn't even really an infrastructure problem, it's a business decision problem.
The main Telco here was skewered by investors when they said they were going to re-invest profits in to infrastructure build out, but it's shown huge returns by growing market share, investors now (in hind sight) love the idea because it worked, but they sure didn't like that it took money out of the immediate quarter to focus on a long term strategy. It's all too easy for a company to listen to those shareholders who want the small short term gains instead of the big long term success.
Sorry, that reason doesn't work.
COs everywhere are spread out and serve huge geographic areas. What people are ignoring is that there's no reason that the DSLAM has to be in the CO, in many cases they aren't.
Where I live extremely few DSL customers are served from the CO, sure there are some DSLAMs in the COs, but most of the DSLAMs are out in the field. It's not that these other telcos didn't consolidate COs, it's that they've spent the money since to get the DSLAMs out in the field closer to the customers.
Density is somewhat relevant in that you're not going to find DSLAMs in farm country, but then you don't find any cable service out there either. you need some form of density to make it work, but really it's not that much, Each field DSLAM serves about 100 customers, and can easily serve distances up to a few hundred meters. That's not farm sparse, but it doesn't require mammoth office towers either, a normal residential (single detached) neighbourhood is plenty.
So you ignored not only the content of my post, but the very subject line you're replying to... I know it's considered bad form on slashdot to read articles, but you could at least get as far as the subject line before you reply....
That would be refreshing, here we get a discount for BYOD, but it's not that much. They have 3 tiers of phones you can subsidize, basic, smartphones, premium smartphones.
Start with the BYOD price, add $5/mo for the basic phones, $10/mo for the smartphones, and $15/mo for the premium smartphones. Over the 2 year contract period, those prices don't cover the cost of buying one of those devices. This tells me that even if you BYOD you're still paying roughly half the subsidy cost, meaning it's still cheaper to buy through the carrier.
But of course the really important part is... will it have rounded corners?
I think you missed the fact that this is a big company with money and lawyers, laws only apply to little people.