To overcomplicate the process and make exaggerated claims about how difficult it is to set up a relatively simple thing ?
Are you suggesting that installing an air conditioner on the 18th floor of an office building is a simple thing? Or are you suggesting that setting up a server to host an SVN repository doesn't require dedicated A/C? If you mean the latter, on a small scale you're correct (a server doesn't inherently generate any more heat than a desktop PC, and we don't have dedicated A/C for those), but on a larger scale when you have multiple servers that you want to contain within a single room, heat is definitely an issue.
Take a look at this hypothetical example again. You're talking about making a hole in the wall, so building management needs to be involved (it's their wall you're making a hole in). That's not something your programmers should ever have to think about, but you can't have your servers unless you deal with it, so who should be the ones to handle it? Managers. It's what they're there for. Taking care of things the programmers need, so the programmers don't have to.
If you think Joel was making "exaggerated claims about how difficult it is," you've obviously never tried to do anything like this before.
If the VP had given orders in response to an attack, I doubt many people would be questioning him.
That's exactly my point. The VP could have given orders, and they probably would have been followed. But they shouldn't have been. He had no legal power or authority at that point. No one did.
According to Wikipedia, Vice-President Bush didn't have power only because he chose not to take power, which he had the authority to do (with support of a majority of the Cabinet) under the 25th Amendment.
General public SHOULD be able to install unsigned drivers. It's not your right to tell them what NOT to do. Anyway, inability to install drivers is certainly a limitation compared to WXP.
If you disagree, then please explain how freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.
The general public can't understand the difference between an OS crash and a driver crash, so they're likely to blame Microsoft for something that isn't Microsoft's fault. If users think the OS is buggy and crashes a lot, they're likely to avoid it, even though it has useful features that would be good for them.
Hardware vendors have little motivation to sign their drivers if Microsoft makes it easy for the general public to disable the warning, because the general public is shockingly adept at dismissing whatever they need to dismiss in order to get past an obstacle (I could have sworn there was a DailyWTF article about a RAID-6 array that eventually failed because they kept dismissing the alert messages every time a hard drive died, but I can't find it now). Vendors will simply tell their customers to go ahead and bypass any security warnings, and people will do it without complaint. This pretty much completely defeats the purpose of signing drivers to begin with.
I agree that there should be some obscure command you can type in a DOS prompt to disable the restriction. Removing it was a mistake.
Don't forget that with DSL the quality of *your* wiring is important. In the UK, British Telecom are responsible for all cabling up to the "master socket" inside your house. You're responsible for the rest of it, which is fair enough.
Good call! The concept is the same here in the US; there's usually a gray plastic box installed by the phone company called the NID (Network Interface Device), MPOE or DMARC (see demarcation point). Anything on your side, you're responsible for; anything on their side, they're responsible for.
I highly recommend installing a DSL splitter at the NID, and running a dedicated cat5 line from the DSL side of the splitter to the DSL modem. Then connect the rest of your house wiring to the telephone side of the splitter, and you can get rid of all those annoying little filters.
Hmm, crazy - when I've bought stuff from Apple retail stores I've had to give them my e-mail address. Maybe I was using a different credit card than what I had previously used on iTunes.
Unlike cable, with DSL the bandwidth between your house and the CO is not shared with your neighbors. If that's where the problem is, the phone company may be able to fix it.
If the problem is between the CO and your ISP's POP, well, that shouldn't happen - it means the LEC screwed up pretty badly somewhere.
If the problem is between your ISP and the Internet, then your ISP sucks ass and you should find a better one. Your phone company probably doesn't advertise this fact, but most likely, it is possible to choose from many local ISPs. Again, this is unique to DSL.
OK, those are good points - if you're using an operating system that iTunes doesn't support (Win98, Win2k, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.), then requiring iTunes is a problem. And no, not all devices support AAC, although many do, in particular the most popular portable media player (with 70% of the market).
Let's say last week I bought the album "Nothing's Free", by "The Capitalists". I paid $9.99. I can buy it this week, for $9.99, and it will be playable on every device I own right out of the gate.
If I want that same freedom for my week-old purchase(assuming I'm a non-technical user), I have to pay $3.
It's a straight up cash grab on Apple's part. They're willing to stick it to the client base that already paid.
If the DRM-encumbered album was worth $9.99 to you last week, then you got what you paid for, and you're welcome to continue listening to it under the terms you agreed to when you made the purchase.
If the DRM-encumbered album was not worth $9.99 to you last week, then you shouldn't have bought it; you should have gone elsewhere or done without.
It was under warranty, but it still took me 3 damned months for them to send me a replacemnt (first they sent a power cable, then the ac adapter, THEN the battery). I was ready to fly to india with the bad battery to beat the support guy to death just to get it through his head that I when I said battery I meant battery.
Fortunately, I've never had this kind of experience when calling Apple support. Also, Apple-authorized service providers are fairly plentiful in the US (worldwide links here), so in most areas it's not too much trouble to take the machine in and show the problem to somebody who can fix it (obviously there are exceptions to this).
" simply cannot fathom why Apple keeps making these things without a number pad. "
Probably because the number pad prevents the QWERTY keyboard from being centered.
Exactly. In order to add a number pad on the right side, you'd have to shift the whole keyboard to the left. That means for normal typing, if the laptop is on your desk you're shifting the whole laptop (including the screen) to the right to compensate, or if it's on your lap where it has to be balanced, you're shifting your hands to the left which is even worse for your wrists.
Yes, it should be possible to add a skinny little number pad thing on the right without moving the rest of the keyboard, but if it's not full size it's of limited usefulness (you can already use NumLock to make certain letters behave like a number pad, which is also of limited usefulness).
For those of us who WANT to use iTunes, that's not really a problem. I've only bought a couple of things on the iTunes Store, but I've been using iTunes regularly since before the iTunes Store existed.
Yes, it'll be 192kbps AAC. If that's not good enough for you, then you have a valid complaint. Most people can't hear the difference and don't want to take up the extra hard drive space for lossless encoding, then take the time to re-encode it when transferring to other devices.
It's a bug in the Slashdot software, eating "less than" and "greater than" characters in "Plain Old Text" mode.
If "Plain Old Text" mode had a more intuitive name, that would help. What most people think of as "plain old text" is what Slashdot calls "Extrans", which isn't a label most people would recognize. What Slashdot calls "Plain Old Text" is an attempt to "do the right thing" when you use a combination of HTML and plain text, with the assumption that your plain text doesn't contain greater-than/less-than/ampersand characters.
Microsoft might be a monopoly, but if they sat on their heels for too long, eventually (it might take 10 years) alternatives would overtake them.
This is exactly what happened with Internet Explorer. IE development halted with version 6, because they reached monopoly status and didn't need to do anything further. Then Firefox started kicking their ass. Now we have all these "web standards" and "standards-compliant browsers" out there that people can choose from, and web sites are being designed for them. IE6 is being left in the cold, and Microsoft had a choice to make: cut it loose, or start playing catch-up. The ad revenue they get from msn.com made the former too hard to swallow, so they've started working on it again. IE7 was an attempt to clean up the worst bugs, and add the one killer feature that all other mainstream browsers now have: tabs. IE7 isn't good, but it's slightly less bad than IE6 was. IE8 is actually good - I'd say it's pretty much on par with other mainstream browsers of 2007, except of course that it won't be released until later in 2009, and the competition is already moving ahead. They got complacent, and it cost them time; Safari 4 and Opera 10 will pass Acid3 when they're released this year and I expect Firefox 3.3 will probably pass eventually, but Internet Explorer won't pass until at least version 9 and probably not until IE10.
Oh, and for the guy above who said that Vista's driver issue has improved--it really hasn't. People just replaced their older hardware, so the improvement is mostly perception.
This is exactly right. Windows 7's most important feature is not being named Vista. By now, most people's hardware has Vista-compatible drivers available, and most people's applications have Vista-compatible versions available, so if they're running XP now, upgrading to Windows 7 when it comes out will be pretty smooth. Exactly as smooth as upgrading to Vista when Windows 7 comes out would be. However, upgrading to Vista two years ago was a disaster, and that's why people are still clinging to XP.
Windows 7 will also ship with IE8, which looks to be a pretty decent browser, by 2007 standards. It passes ACID-2 and everything. The "View Source" command is actually functional (it has line numbers and syntax highlighting, just like in other modern browsers), and it even has some pretty serious debugging capabilities (although I haven't had a chance to play with that much). On top of that, it has an IE7 compatibility mode for sites that are not standards-compliant but that work in IE7. This is a great thing for web developers.
That said, I think a real, official open beta would be a very interesting move.
Isn't that what is happening with Vista right now ?
I know this has been a long-running joke, but actually in this case that's not far off. Windows 7 won't really be much different than Vista. The new features aren't particularly significant; they're fixing some of the more serious bugs and improving the performance. They're taking what they've learned from having Vista out in the wild, and trying to improve it gradually without doing a major overhaul.
It is becoming increasingly clear that SSL certificates issued by private industry cannot be trusted... Who then should issue certificates? The only entity that doesn't have to make money--your governments.
The problem with your idea is, even though you're correct that private industry cannot be trusted in this matter, the government cannot be trusted in this matter either.
These are technical flaws, not policy flaws - mistakes are happening due to software errors, NOT because some executive decided that allowing anyone to have a certificate without verification would be a great idea. I may trust the government's intentions, but experience suggests that they won't develop a system like this in-house, but contract it out to the lowest bidder, who is likely to have far less experience with this sort of thing than the current players.
For starters, we could make SSL certificates fall under the same kinds of laws that govern passports or drivers licenses. If you forge one, or enter fake information, you could be charged under the same laws that faking a drivers license fall under.
Pretty much all current spam is illegal under the CAN-SPAM act, so spammers could be charged under that law. They're not. I have no confidence that fake SSL certs would be prosecuted.
The speakers that connect to the green 1/8" headphone jack on the back of the PC won't help you; it's the tiny little speaker inside the front of the case that plugs into the motherboard with a little red/white twisted wire that you need.
"I'm paying $20 a month and I demand you let me online now!" (From a caller in a small town experiencing a power outage.)
In September 2001, a customer in Manhattan called Earthlink to complain about his DSL service being down, and angrily threatened to cancel his account and switch to another ISP if they didn't fix it within 24 hours. He was politely informed that his Central Office was under water, and that he was more than welcome to cancel his service (an early termination fee would apply).
And this is hardly an isolated case of stupidity. People simply close every warning information they get because "I don't understand it anyway". Without reading it, how do you KNOW whether you understand it?
I was doing tech support for a dialup ISP about ten years ago, and I had a customer call in with some sort of problem. I could tell she'd had experience calling tech support before, because instead of closing the error dialog before calling, she had left it on the screen so she could read it to me over the phone.
So she read me the error message, and then I paraphrased it back to her. She immediately recognized the problem and said she knew how to fix that, and hung up. I was glad, because I had absolutely no idea (it wasn't anything Internet-related).
Had she attempted to understand the error message, rather than treating it as a secret code written in a magical language that only tech support people can comprehend, she would have been just fine.
Half the population believes the state government already has way too much money, and if we let them have any more they'll just waste it. These people are firmly opposed to any and all tax increases for any reason, but there's chance that they might be less opposed to an additional milage tax than an increase in the gas tax.
I don't think there's anything sinister going on here. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." The governor is simply trying to appeal to the dumber portion of the population who thinks increasing the gas tax would be worse than this.
Slashdot Mirror
To overcomplicate the process and make exaggerated claims about how difficult it is to set up a relatively simple thing ?
Are you suggesting that installing an air conditioner on the 18th floor of an office building is a simple thing? Or are you suggesting that setting up a server to host an SVN repository doesn't require dedicated A/C? If you mean the latter, on a small scale you're correct (a server doesn't inherently generate any more heat than a desktop PC, and we don't have dedicated A/C for those), but on a larger scale when you have multiple servers that you want to contain within a single room, heat is definitely an issue.
Take a look at this hypothetical example again. You're talking about making a hole in the wall, so building management needs to be involved (it's their wall you're making a hole in). That's not something your programmers should ever have to think about, but you can't have your servers unless you deal with it, so who should be the ones to handle it? Managers. It's what they're there for. Taking care of things the programmers need, so the programmers don't have to.
If you think Joel was making "exaggerated claims about how difficult it is," you've obviously never tried to do anything like this before.
Obviously not the 60 million who voted Republican.
Many of them do too - they're just afraid what the Democrats would do will be even worse.
If the VP had given orders in response to an attack, I doubt many people would be questioning him.
That's exactly my point. The VP could have given orders, and they probably would have been followed. But they shouldn't have been. He had no legal power or authority at that point. No one did.
According to Wikipedia, Vice-President Bush didn't have power only because he chose not to take power, which he had the authority to do (with support of a majority of the Cabinet) under the 25th Amendment.
What the hell are you talking about?
General public SHOULD be able to install unsigned drivers. It's not your right to tell them what NOT to do. Anyway, inability to install drivers is certainly a limitation compared to WXP.
If you disagree, then please explain how freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.
The general public can't understand the difference between an OS crash and a driver crash, so they're likely to blame Microsoft for something that isn't Microsoft's fault. If users think the OS is buggy and crashes a lot, they're likely to avoid it, even though it has useful features that would be good for them.
Hardware vendors have little motivation to sign their drivers if Microsoft makes it easy for the general public to disable the warning, because the general public is shockingly adept at dismissing whatever they need to dismiss in order to get past an obstacle (I could have sworn there was a DailyWTF article about a RAID-6 array that eventually failed because they kept dismissing the alert messages every time a hard drive died, but I can't find it now). Vendors will simply tell their customers to go ahead and bypass any security warnings, and people will do it without complaint. This pretty much completely defeats the purpose of signing drivers to begin with.
I agree that there should be some obscure command you can type in a DOS prompt to disable the restriction. Removing it was a mistake.
Interesting. I too was given one of the keys on your list.
Wireless Extension Cords!
Don't forget that with DSL the quality of *your* wiring is important. In the UK, British Telecom are responsible for all cabling up to the "master socket" inside your house. You're responsible for the rest of it, which is fair enough.
Good call! The concept is the same here in the US; there's usually a gray plastic box installed by the phone company called the NID (Network Interface Device), MPOE or DMARC (see demarcation point). Anything on your side, you're responsible for; anything on their side, they're responsible for.
I highly recommend installing a DSL splitter at the NID, and running a dedicated cat5 line from the DSL side of the splitter to the DSL modem. Then connect the rest of your house wiring to the telephone side of the splitter, and you can get rid of all those annoying little filters.
Hmm, crazy - when I've bought stuff from Apple retail stores I've had to give them my e-mail address. Maybe I was using a different credit card than what I had previously used on iTunes.
Unlike cable, with DSL the bandwidth between your house and the CO is not shared with your neighbors. If that's where the problem is, the phone company may be able to fix it.
If the problem is between the CO and your ISP's POP, well, that shouldn't happen - it means the LEC screwed up pretty badly somewhere.
If the problem is between your ISP and the Internet, then your ISP sucks ass and you should find a better one. Your phone company probably doesn't advertise this fact, but most likely, it is possible to choose from many local ISPs. Again, this is unique to DSL.
OK, those are good points - if you're using an operating system that iTunes doesn't support (Win98, Win2k, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.), then requiring iTunes is a problem. And no, not all devices support AAC, although many do, in particular the most popular portable media player (with 70% of the market).
Let's say last week I bought the album "Nothing's Free", by "The Capitalists". I paid $9.99. I can buy it this week, for $9.99, and it will be playable on every device I own right out of the gate.
If I want that same freedom for my week-old purchase(assuming I'm a non-technical user), I have to pay $3.
It's a straight up cash grab on Apple's part. They're willing to stick it to the client base that already paid.
If the DRM-encumbered album was worth $9.99 to you last week, then you got what you paid for, and you're welcome to continue listening to it under the terms you agreed to when you made the purchase.
If the DRM-encumbered album was not worth $9.99 to you last week, then you shouldn't have bought it; you should have gone elsewhere or done without.
It was under warranty, but it still took me 3 damned months for them to send me a replacemnt (first they sent a power cable, then the ac adapter, THEN the battery). I was ready to fly to india with the bad battery to beat the support guy to death just to get it through his head that I when I said battery I meant battery.
Fortunately, I've never had this kind of experience when calling Apple support. Also, Apple-authorized service providers are fairly plentiful in the US (worldwide links here), so in most areas it's not too much trouble to take the machine in and show the problem to somebody who can fix it (obviously there are exceptions to this).
" simply cannot fathom why Apple keeps making these things without a number pad. "
Probably because the number pad prevents the QWERTY keyboard from being centered.
Exactly. In order to add a number pad on the right side, you'd have to shift the whole keyboard to the left. That means for normal typing, if the laptop is on your desk you're shifting the whole laptop (including the screen) to the right to compensate, or if it's on your lap where it has to be balanced, you're shifting your hands to the left which is even worse for your wrists.
Yes, it should be possible to add a skinny little number pad thing on the right without moving the rest of the keyboard, but if it's not full size it's of limited usefulness (you can already use NumLock to make certain letters behave like a number pad, which is also of limited usefulness).
For those of us who WANT to use iTunes, that's not really a problem. I've only bought a couple of things on the iTunes Store, but I've been using iTunes regularly since before the iTunes Store existed.
Yes, it'll be 192kbps AAC. If that's not good enough for you, then you have a valid complaint. Most people can't hear the difference and don't want to take up the extra hard drive space for lossless encoding, then take the time to re-encode it when transferring to other devices.
It's a bug in the Slashdot software, eating "less than" and "greater than" characters in "Plain Old Text" mode.
If "Plain Old Text" mode had a more intuitive name, that would help. What most people think of as "plain old text" is what Slashdot calls "Extrans", which isn't a label most people would recognize. What Slashdot calls "Plain Old Text" is an attempt to "do the right thing" when you use a combination of HTML and plain text, with the assumption that your plain text doesn't contain greater-than/less-than/ampersand characters.
Microsoft might be a monopoly, but if they sat on their heels for too long, eventually (it might take 10 years) alternatives would overtake them.
This is exactly what happened with Internet Explorer. IE development halted with version 6, because they reached monopoly status and didn't need to do anything further. Then Firefox started kicking their ass. Now we have all these "web standards" and "standards-compliant browsers" out there that people can choose from, and web sites are being designed for them. IE6 is being left in the cold, and Microsoft had a choice to make: cut it loose, or start playing catch-up. The ad revenue they get from msn.com made the former too hard to swallow, so they've started working on it again. IE7 was an attempt to clean up the worst bugs, and add the one killer feature that all other mainstream browsers now have: tabs. IE7 isn't good, but it's slightly less bad than IE6 was. IE8 is actually good - I'd say it's pretty much on par with other mainstream browsers of 2007, except of course that it won't be released until later in 2009, and the competition is already moving ahead. They got complacent, and it cost them time; Safari 4 and Opera 10 will pass Acid3 when they're released this year and I expect Firefox 3.3 will probably pass eventually, but Internet Explorer won't pass until at least version 9 and probably not until IE10.
Oh, and for the guy above who said that Vista's driver issue has improved--it really hasn't. People just replaced their older hardware, so the improvement is mostly perception.
This is exactly right. Windows 7's most important feature is not being named Vista. By now, most people's hardware has Vista-compatible drivers available, and most people's applications have Vista-compatible versions available, so if they're running XP now, upgrading to Windows 7 when it comes out will be pretty smooth. Exactly as smooth as upgrading to Vista when Windows 7 comes out would be. However, upgrading to Vista two years ago was a disaster, and that's why people are still clinging to XP.
Windows 7 will also ship with IE8, which looks to be a pretty decent browser, by 2007 standards. It passes ACID-2 and everything. The "View Source" command is actually functional (it has line numbers and syntax highlighting, just like in other modern browsers), and it even has some pretty serious debugging capabilities (although I haven't had a chance to play with that much). On top of that, it has an IE7 compatibility mode for sites that are not standards-compliant but that work in IE7. This is a great thing for web developers.
Isn't that what is happening with Vista right now ?
I know this has been a long-running joke, but actually in this case that's not far off. Windows 7 won't really be much different than Vista. The new features aren't particularly significant; they're fixing some of the more serious bugs and improving the performance. They're taking what they've learned from having Vista out in the wild, and trying to improve it gradually without doing a major overhaul.
It is becoming increasingly clear that SSL certificates issued by private industry cannot be trusted... Who then should issue certificates? The only entity that doesn't have to make money--your governments.
The problem with your idea is, even though you're correct that private industry cannot be trusted in this matter, the government cannot be trusted in this matter either.
These are technical flaws, not policy flaws - mistakes are happening due to software errors, NOT because some executive decided that allowing anyone to have a certificate without verification would be a great idea. I may trust the government's intentions, but experience suggests that they won't develop a system like this in-house, but contract it out to the lowest bidder, who is likely to have far less experience with this sort of thing than the current players.
For starters, we could make SSL certificates fall under the same kinds of laws that govern passports or drivers licenses. If you forge one, or enter fake information, you could be charged under the same laws that faking a drivers license fall under.
Pretty much all current spam is illegal under the CAN-SPAM act, so spammers could be charged under that law. They're not. I have no confidence that fake SSL certs would be prosecuted.
The speakers that connect to the green 1/8" headphone jack on the back of the PC won't help you; it's the tiny little speaker inside the front of the case that plugs into the motherboard with a little red/white twisted wire that you need.
"I'm paying $20 a month and I demand you let me online now!" (From a caller in a small town experiencing a power outage.)
In September 2001, a customer in Manhattan called Earthlink to complain about his DSL service being down, and angrily threatened to cancel his account and switch to another ISP if they didn't fix it within 24 hours. He was politely informed that his Central Office was under water, and that he was more than welcome to cancel his service (an early termination fee would apply).
Yes, this is why his DSL was down.
And this is hardly an isolated case of stupidity. People simply close every warning information they get because "I don't understand it anyway". Without reading it, how do you KNOW whether you understand it?
I was doing tech support for a dialup ISP about ten years ago, and I had a customer call in with some sort of problem. I could tell she'd had experience calling tech support before, because instead of closing the error dialog before calling, she had left it on the screen so she could read it to me over the phone.
So she read me the error message, and then I paraphrased it back to her. She immediately recognized the problem and said she knew how to fix that, and hung up. I was glad, because I had absolutely no idea (it wasn't anything Internet-related).
Had she attempted to understand the error message, rather than treating it as a secret code written in a magical language that only tech support people can comprehend, she would have been just fine.
That would be a long drive!
I must say, I've never heard anyone get Oregon and New Mexico mixed up before.
Half the population believes the state government already has way too much money, and if we let them have any more they'll just waste it. These people are firmly opposed to any and all tax increases for any reason, but there's chance that they might be less opposed to an additional milage tax than an increase in the gas tax.
I don't think there's anything sinister going on here. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." The governor is simply trying to appeal to the dumber portion of the population who thinks increasing the gas tax would be worse than this.