A few years ago, an author published a book that told the story of a slave in the movie Gone With the Wind. This book was quickly thrown to the mud and censored out of existence with the force and efficiency of a nuclear bomb.
At least on this one (emphasis mine), that's not quite true. The copyright owners of Gone With the Wind tried to stop its publication and failed..
Tips from the Marquis de Sade School of HCI
on
Computing Pet Peeves?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
You know better than your users. Include lots of wizards and bots to guide them. Don't allow them to disable them--it's for their own good.
If your program had been doing something in the background and was minimized or covered, be sure and let the user know it's finished by popping up! If this can be accomplished while the user is in mid sentence in a document or an IM, so much the better. The user paid good money for your application--you should be letting him know he got his money's worth!
When performing processor intensive operations, don't waste cycles telling the user what's going on. To an astute user, the wait cursor is more than sufficient--if he has so little faith in you that he thinks your application is locked up, fie on him.
Never repaint the screen while performing processor intensive operations--once again, performing repaints requested by the operating system interferes with the arduous task at hand for the application.
If your application is a game, be sure and use keys that are near the hotkeys for the operating system. For example, an ideal Windows game would use Alt for fire and Tab for missiles. Other combinations are left as an exercise for the reader.
If you write more than one application, be sure that the as few keyboard shortcuts as possible are the same between applications. Even better: take an innocuous, commonly used keyboard shortcut in one of your apps, and make it do something potentially dangerous in the other. For example, our alumni at Microsoft wrote Word to use Ctrl-Enter for a page break. In Outlook, when typing a message, this sends it immediately. If a user was typing a rant to his boss, he should have thought of that before putting venom in his draft email!
If yours is a web application, be sure the "Back" button never operates.
If a user fills out a form and it doesn't pass your rigorous validation checks, return him to the form and ensure that none of the entries he typed are filled in. If he made a mistake in the one you caught, who knows what other mistakes are in there? Can't be too careful!
When validating a form, once you catch an error, report it and make the user fill it out again. There's no value in pointing out all the failed edits, since you're going to clear the form for him anyway, right?
Next week's lesson: Desigining effective product upgrade notification dialogs.
Sam's lost my business because they only take Discover, but Costco kept mine because they take AMEX. Each cut a deal to give one issuer exclusive business, and likely got quite a break on fees for it. Such is life.
I don't disagree with the fact that what this guy did is deplorable. But I notice that the issue in your case is more of credit than linking, and I think you did the right thing. What I'm not particularly comfortable with is the courts interfering with the right to link to anything, which I feel should remain sacrosanct, lest we have to obtain a notarized permission slip from anyone to which we link. That said, the community (we can still pretend we have one of those, right?), not judges, should take care of cases like yours, in the manner in which it happily was in your case.
Yes. There is a problem. You made the image available with an openly specified protocol, on a public network, for anyone to access. If you don't want to make it available that way, that's your choice--and it's just plain absurd to whine that people dare to actually use the methods in place to see that image!
If you want to use countermeasures, such as checking HTTP_REFERER, hacking your web server to verify that a banner ad loaded first, etc., that's your right, but it might just drive the people you want away from your site.
If you want to make it available that way, and complain when people "cheat" you or "steal" from you by "directly" linking to your image, that's also your right, but it's not going to accomplish anything terribly useful. If it's on the web, and it's anything anyone gives a darn about, it's going to be looked at, captured, stored, manipulated, and shared. I miss the days when more people thought that was a good thing than not.
This dangerous (and, I know, hypothetical) scenario assumes:
1. You paid for your network card in cash, at a store with no security cameras, and didn't use it anywhere else, ever. (Or you changed the MAC address in the driver or with ifconfig. And you're sure it didn't send a packet with your real MAC over the air before it was changed.)
2. You didn't send or receive any other traffic that could identify you, either outright or through correlation with browsing habits that could be trivially mapped to you (hmm . . . that MAC address also connected to slashdot.org; let's see what other people in the area have accounts there--Smith, you get the subpoena).
3. No one (and no cameras) observed someone fitting your description acting "suspiciously" at the airport with a laptop. (There was this guy with this sh*t eating grin with a computer. Why, officer? Is there a terrorist loose?)
4. Your real name isn't on a passenger manifest for an aircraft arriving or departing that could place you in the airport around that time.
5. There is nothing in your email headers inadvertently identifying you (NETBIOS name? You'd be amazed at what gets stuffed into email headers by some programs.
6. You covered all the things not this easily imagined that could get you nailed.
I know you're kidding, but the Secret Service does not screw around with threats to the President (rightfully so), and the government has effectively infinite investigative resources.
. . . they'll get a patent on annoying interstital ads on a handheld device. Get Plucker and dump AvantGo. Choose what you want to read on your Palm without having to tell a third party that's going to stuff your handheld with ads and sell your reading habits to direct marketers.
It's all part of a post-Illuminati Gatesian conspiracy to . . . that's right . . . REQUIRE POSTAGE FOR EMAIL!
The Masons, the Roman Catholic Church, the United States Congress, the Post Office, and Microsoft are RIGHT NOW embedding technology (heard of Windows CE? Embedded!) in MICROSOFT OUTLOOK (and Outlook Express--anyone notice that? Express, as in Express MAIL?) to require that to send email, you must have a PASSPORT (which you get at . . . you guessed it . . . the Post Office) and give your CREDIT CARD NUMBER to pay EMAIL POSTAGE!!!.
The proof is incontrovertible. ACT NOW! TAKE TO THE STREETS!
Or, it could be just that the USPS made a few bucks displaying MS coasters to help keep the price of stamps from going up so much. Naw.
Sure, it possible. But to do it legally, they'd have to do one of the following:
1. Write it from scrtach, possibly using a cleanroom approach
or 2. Release the source when they send out the coasters with this new "AOL OS."
I think either of those is less likely than that they would develop a closed AOL client targeted to Red Hat's distribution. But then, that doesn't require them to buy Red Hat.
You mean like IBM being out of the hard disk drive business for having supported CPRM? Don't get me wrong--I agree with you that this would be what happened in an ideal world. But, unfortunately, this issue isn't on the radar of the vast majority of people buying a Mac or a PeeCee with which to "get online" and to "help the kids in school."
The challenge before the community is to get the issue on their radar.
I don't think he's suggesting that Joe Sixpack will do that. But at least one Jack Hack will (it only takes one), and legions of Joe Sixpacks will be able to grab the program. The "content" "industry" is beating itself about the head and shoulders trying to solve the insoluble. Oh well.
It does if the merchant is within 50 miles of your home, and you tried to correct the problem in good faith with the merchant (q.v. the Fair Credit Reporting Act). The store might not accept the return, but it'll be cheaper for them to fold than challenge the chargeback, at least with the purchase of a CD.
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Why did you not tell this guy to go screw? Or was it an off-duty cop in uniform or something?
Tell that to Disney. Or do you mean that they can only buy them?
At least on this one (emphasis mine), that's not quite true. The copyright owners of Gone With the Wind tried to stop its publication and failed..
You can get the book you're referring to that parodied Gone With the Wind from Amazon.
You know better than your users. Include lots of wizards and bots to guide them. Don't allow them to disable them--it's for their own good.
If your program had been doing something in the background and was minimized or covered, be sure and let the user know it's finished by popping up! If this can be accomplished while the user is in mid sentence in a document or an IM, so much the better. The user paid good money for your application--you should be letting him know he got his money's worth!
When performing processor intensive operations, don't waste cycles telling the user what's going on. To an astute user, the wait cursor is more than sufficient--if he has so little faith in you that he thinks your application is locked up, fie on him.
Never repaint the screen while performing processor intensive operations--once again, performing repaints requested by the operating system interferes with the arduous task at hand for the application.
If your application is a game, be sure and use keys that are near the hotkeys for the operating system. For example, an ideal Windows game would use Alt for fire and Tab for missiles. Other combinations are left as an exercise for the reader.
If you write more than one application, be sure that the as few keyboard shortcuts as possible are the same between applications. Even better: take an innocuous, commonly used keyboard shortcut in one of your apps, and make it do something potentially dangerous in the other. For example, our alumni at Microsoft wrote Word to use Ctrl-Enter for a page break. In Outlook, when typing a message, this sends it immediately. If a user was typing a rant to his boss, he should have thought of that before putting venom in his draft email!
If yours is a web application, be sure the "Back" button never operates.
If a user fills out a form and it doesn't pass your rigorous validation checks, return him to the form and ensure that none of the entries he typed are filled in. If he made a mistake in the one you caught, who knows what other mistakes are in there? Can't be too careful!
When validating a form, once you catch an error, report it and make the user fill it out again. There's no value in pointing out all the failed edits, since you're going to clear the form for him anyway, right?
Next week's lesson: Desigining effective product upgrade notification dialogs.
How could this train not eventually lead to that?
Sam's lost my business because they only take Discover, but Costco kept mine because they take AMEX. Each cut a deal to give one issuer exclusive business, and likely got quite a break on fees for it. Such is life.
That's an interesting argument. You must have made someone a bit uncomfortable, to get marked "Redundant."
I don't disagree with the fact that what this guy did is deplorable. But I notice that the issue in your case is more of credit than linking, and I think you did the right thing. What I'm not particularly comfortable with is the courts interfering with the right to link to anything, which I feel should remain sacrosanct, lest we have to obtain a notarized permission slip from anyone to which we link. That said, the community (we can still pretend we have one of those, right?), not judges, should take care of cases like yours, in the manner in which it happily was in your case.
And wasting a whole lot of quarters!
Analogies of intellectual property to physical objects are observed. And I've got your clue-by-four right here.
If you want to use countermeasures, such as checking HTTP_REFERER, hacking your web server to verify that a banner ad loaded first, etc., that's your right, but it might just drive the people you want away from your site.
If you want to make it available that way, and complain when people "cheat" you or "steal" from you by "directly" linking to your image, that's also your right, but it's not going to accomplish anything terribly useful. If it's on the web, and it's anything anyone gives a darn about, it's going to be looked at, captured, stored, manipulated, and shared. I miss the days when more people thought that was a good thing than not.
. . . they'll get a patent on annoying interstital ads on a handheld device. Get Plucker and dump AvantGo. Choose what you want to read on your Palm without having to tell a third party that's going to stuff your handheld with ads and sell your reading habits to direct marketers.
The Masons, the Roman Catholic Church, the United States Congress, the Post Office, and Microsoft are RIGHT NOW embedding technology (heard of Windows CE? Embedded!) in MICROSOFT OUTLOOK (and Outlook Express--anyone notice that? Express, as in Express MAIL?) to require that to send email, you must have a PASSPORT (which you get at . . . you guessed it . . . the Post Office) and give your CREDIT CARD NUMBER to pay EMAIL POSTAGE !!! .
The proof is incontrovertible. ACT NOW! TAKE TO THE STREETS!
Or, it could be just that the USPS made a few bucks displaying MS coasters to help keep the price of stamps from going up so much. Naw.
The DVD cases are nice; I haven't received any metal tins.
Imagine getting sets of eight CDs in your mailbox a couple of times a week: "AOLinux: Now with NO CREDIT CARD REQUIRED!"
He was just playing the "for the children" card. There's no way Lucas actually thought the clip was directed at children.
Actually, AFAIK, IBM is still very much in the hard drive business.
Looks to me like a laundry list of companies to avoid giving your money to whenever possible, if you don't like this.
The challenge before the community is to get the issue on their radar.
I don't think he's suggesting that Joe Sixpack will do that. But at least one Jack Hack will (it only takes one), and legions of Joe Sixpacks will be able to grab the program. The "content" "industry" is beating itself about the head and shoulders trying to solve the insoluble. Oh well.
HP, unfortunately, is just another company that used to make great products and squandered its good name producing consumer level trash. Such is life.
Whoops. That should have been the Fair Credit Billing Act, not Reporting.
It does if the merchant is within 50 miles of your home, and you tried to correct the problem in good faith with the merchant (q.v. the Fair Credit Reporting Act). The store might not accept the return, but it'll be cheaper for them to fold than challenge the chargeback, at least with the purchase of a CD.