Their point isn't to catch unscrupulous customers - it is to catch unscrupulous employees. The scam works like this. Customer takes several high ticket items to checkout. Cashier doesn't scan some of the items but goes through the motions. Customer walks out of door with serveral items for free. Customer and employee sell them and profit. (Obviously the customer and employee team up for this).
Now the store could explain that the door people are there to catch bad employees, but they would rather you didn't think of their employees potentially being like that.
Most people actually using Red Hat were downloading and burning ISOs anyway
You could always have fixed the process for taking money. I downloaded RH8 and used that. I then sent email to Redhat sales saying I would like to pay for it. They were adamant that the only way I could so was by buying a boxed copy from Redhat and having it shipped across the country. There was no way for me to hand over cash, and not also pay to ship something I didn't want or need. So I bought a boxed copy at Frys and never opened it.
My usual upgrade path was to buy a new hard disk (I usually need more space anyway), shuffle all the existing drives along and make the new drive the primary drive. Then I would install the newest Redhat version. If anything went wrong with the new install, I could just change drive ids and be back where I was. It always used to take me around a weekend to do the upgrade since I would have to go and build software Redhat didn't supply such as Qmail and Courier-IMAP as well as deal with recompiling other stuff with different options than Redhat picked (various multi-media packages).
When Redhat decided they no longer wanted my money, I switched to Gentoo. One of the big reasons was not having to undergo the upgrade pain all in one go. Now I have tiny little bits of upgrade pain spread out and far easier to deal with.
More accurately you can emulate the full instruction set of the P4 including all priviledge levels using only unpriviledged P4 instructions. Due to the design and implementation of the x86 that is actually a very big achievement. It can also emulate various bits of hardware which is less of a challenge, but still hard work.
A way better site is www.metacritic.com. They do games, music, books, films and DVD. They also excerpt portions of each review so you can quickly get an idea of what each reviewer said to substantiate their score. (Gamerankings just shows the scores with no excerpts and movies.com is a bit better than that.)
Whenever I look up stuff in metacritic, I usually look at the comments for the top rated scores and the lowest rated scores and you get a very representative picture.
Yes, I enjoy the game. Sid gets the whatever tiny percentage of the $50 it cost me at the store. The only feedback mechanism I could find was at Atari's website and I provided them that feedback. Ultimately Sid bears responsibility for the publisher he picked and that publisher bears responsibility to consider feedback and tell the developer. I have done way more than most to tell them what is going on. The ball is in their court now.
I bought Pirates! recently (published by Atari), and discovered that they make it assume that anyone using a CD emulator (in my case Daemon Tools) is an unsound person and refuse to let the game run. A few minutes on the Internet and the workaround is to change permissions on one registry key. (Note you just have to have a CD emulator installed, not even trying to run the software via it.)
Since they think so lowly of me, I decided to return the favour and never buy another Atari product. I even emailed them and told them why. What goes around comes around. And it isn't like there aren't enough games from other publishers to spend my money on.
And of course the game has been extensively cracked and copied anyway.
The big guys can already do this to you today, and the little guys don't have much of a chance of winning anyway. And note that it isn't always loser pays, but only if you initiate the lawsuit and only if you then lose do you pay the costs. I certainly agree that it is a good system but it is IMNSHO considerably less bad than the current system where people whose time is free can spray lawsuits around without much consideration for wether they are right, or adverse consequences to losing.
It would also help the free software community and patent situations. For example if someone sues you for patent infringement now, even for a patent that shouldn't have been granted (ie most of them) then winning that case will cost you a considerable sum of money.
Actually it is one trait of the US legal system. In *should* be that if you bring suit against someone else and you lose, then you are automatically liable for their legal costs. That way it ensures that people only bring cases where they have a good case, and won't cost defendants who are innocent anything (in the long term). I believe it is substantially like this in the UK.
Sadly I doubt anything like this would happen since it would reduce the volume of lawsuits. And the people who win in every lawsuit (the lawyers) don't want that, and supply many members of the government.
Why are all these tools evaluated based on left overs other tools find and counting them? If just pure counts are used then the makers have an incentive to label as many things as possible as spyware, and try to count the same thing several times over. For example they could count HotBar once, or they could counr each file of it, each registry key, each hook into IE etc as one item. And of course the makers now have a strong financial incentive for spyware to exist that others don't find. Guess how they will do that.
For the items that they miss, I am only interested in the severity of the items.
Actually global warming is a global problem, and is making global weather less predictable. You'll find the US near the top of most lists of the various ways of contributing to the problem, and also trying to avoid doing anything about it.
You also release them from further lawsuits if you file. And as much as Microsoft owes me big time for that copy of Windows ME I bought in 2000, the form and hoops you have to go through are way over the top. (The RIAA one let you do everything online).
However, it's missing something. Missing what? I don't know.
Good IMAP support. The best IMAP client I have found on any platform is Outlook Express! Every year or so I go around and evaluate all the others and they all still don't get it, usually because they are based around the belief they are your only client and they download and own all the email.
If you have to configure things locally (eg filters) and the setting is saved locally then that is useless in the IMAP world. I use around 4 machines each and every day, and so repeating configuration 4 times and have 4 competing machines running filters and maintaining 4 sets of settings won't work.
Even the defaults for an IMAP account appear to be to save things like Sent Messages, Drafts, Trash etc on the local machine. (Either that or the import process ignores the OE config which said to save remotely).
Other things such as not having the ability to automatically expunge folders as you click on others is very annoying (you have to manually expunge). (It can automatically expunge your inbox only on exit, not any other folders).
It also looks like Thunderbird doesn't check all folders for new messages although I can't tell for sure.
And I would like deleted items to appear as strike through rather than some tiny coloured flag.
Once Thunderbird works well no matter how many machines you run it on, then I will be happy!
Your verifying of the vote later step has a huge issue. It allows for votes to be bought. The person paying can sit with you as you login to check that you ended up voting how they paid you to.
Votes can be bought through cash or through intimidation.
This actually just comes down to process. In the software world we call it The Cathedral and the Bazaar. EB is an example of the former and Wikipedia is an example of tha latter.
And as far as I can tell, exactly the same argunments apply. What would be interesting is what he will say of Wikipedia in 10 years time. I am willing to bet that by then it will be considered to be far superior.
I don't know if AT&T can pull the same stunts with this ogo, but I'd make damn sure where I stand before forking money over for a device or committing to a service.
they had no problem stopping me at the door to check my receipt
That practise is actually largely aimed at the cashiers. A simple way of shoplifting is to have your buddy be a cashier and not charge you for stuff. There would be no trace of such a crime, unless they check at the doors.
Actually the money is spent on tax cuts. While the immediate visible effect is that less money is taken from you, government spending isn't cut and the deficit increases. It is already the case that 20% of tax revenues are spent on debt repayments. Every time taxes are cut without corresponding decreases in spending, the debt repayments go up.
The authors of "Critical Condition" were on NPR the other day, and talked about malpractice lawsuits and insurance. They named one state that had the highest rates of reported malpractices, and nothing done about it by the state government, such as disqualifying doctors. It also turned out that state has the highest malpractice insurance in the country.
There is a big difference in the US for pills. The various companies spend as much on marketing as they do on research and development. Ultimately that marketing has to be paid for. In other countries it is usually the case that pharmaceutical advertising is very restricted, and in most cases useless since you can't go to your doctor and demand they give you what you just saw on TV.
I said office suite document, not business environment. How long before you can send a card around electronically because some family member is graduating and everyone gets to put their comments on it? Or how about someone doing taxes for all other family members, but needs some form information filled in first by everyone? Or the state putting renewal forms on a web site for drivers licenses that are the PDF forms thing (this already happens in some places, but isn't the only way to do it).
All the little details change a lot on the internet. For example you can't use a 5 year old version of Yahoo Messenger anymore. Chances are that a 5 year old version of any media player will have several out of date codecs - will your user be able to see video on CNN any more, or look at a house in 3D at a realty site? SSL root certificates have certainly changed.
Just to show the equivalent in the Linux world, the Debian version that was stable 5 years ago was slink. Both that and the following version (potato) are no longer maintained. Microsoft is about the only company that does maintain that far back, and even they tried dropping support at the begining of this year.
So you are stuck. If it is impossible to update the device then it ages very rapidly. If you do have the ability to update the device then that update process can be comprised by spyware. If the device never has to talk to anyone else then this is a non-issue. But people wouldn't buy something they can't network.
There are half way approaches such as the HipTop were the device becomes just a screen, and the processing and apps run centrally. However that then bets on the service provider never putting on spyware.
Basically you get to choose who becomes your gatekeeper and who you trust. For geeks, it is easy - no one but yourself. For others, it remains an open question. Pretty much every service provider has done things that some consider going to far (eg Tivo, T-Mobile).
You completely missed my point. If that functionality is missing then they can't participate with others. It will be other people, usually friends and family, who send them the forms, the links to media sites, the invites for instant messenging etc. Geeks are able to route around that (eg I am careful what links I send my Dad to ensure he never has to install RealPlayer). But other non-geeks aren't going to be able to figure out what someone with limited functionality device will or won't be able to do.
And the new memory stick/bootable DVD doesn't change the ability to add spyware. How many people verified that the AOL CDs they received actually came from AOL?
You cite form filling as an example of something Joe Average would never want. I didn't mean in the spyware (Gator) sense. There have been two drivers for networked machines. One is porn and the other has been interpersonal communication. For the latter my example is a card being sent round several people to "sign" but done as an office suite document. Another is something to fill out and print (eg forms for government). (Except your no updates rule means no new printer drivers so the original device has to either not be able to print, or somehow have drivers that don't ever need to be updated).
Physical media updates won't solve the spyware/virus problem either, although they will make it somewhat more expensive. As a bad guy, simply send disks with your spyware already on it to people. Depending on your opinion of AOL, that can already be considered to have been done:-)
So how long do you expect the device to last? Your 5 year PC example shows just how useless this device would be. 5 year old web browsers, instant messengers, versions of SSL, media players etc will very highly constrain being able to use the device for interpersonal communication.
They may be somewhat feasible in a business environment, but using "thin" devices with remotely displayed desktops is way easier and more effective.
Yes, there was no networking. There wasn't even a working 'ps' command. I had to transfer everything to/from the machine via floppy disk to one of my university's Sun workstations. So technically it would have been possible:-)
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Their point isn't to catch unscrupulous customers - it is to catch unscrupulous employees. The scam works like this. Customer takes several high ticket items to checkout. Cashier doesn't scan some of the items but goes through the motions. Customer walks out of door with serveral items for free. Customer and employee sell them and profit. (Obviously the customer and employee team up for this).
Now the store could explain that the door people are there to catch bad employees, but they would rather you didn't think of their employees potentially being like that.
You could always have fixed the process for taking money. I downloaded RH8 and used that. I then sent email to Redhat sales saying I would like to pay for it. They were adamant that the only way I could so was by buying a boxed copy from Redhat and having it shipped across the country. There was no way for me to hand over cash, and not also pay to ship something I didn't want or need. So I bought a boxed copy at Frys and never opened it.
My usual upgrade path was to buy a new hard disk (I usually need more space anyway), shuffle all the existing drives along and make the new drive the primary drive. Then I would install the newest Redhat version. If anything went wrong with the new install, I could just change drive ids and be back where I was. It always used to take me around a weekend to do the upgrade since I would have to go and build software Redhat didn't supply such as Qmail and Courier-IMAP as well as deal with recompiling other stuff with different options than Redhat picked (various multi-media packages).
When Redhat decided they no longer wanted my money, I switched to Gentoo. One of the big reasons was not having to undergo the upgrade pain all in one go. Now I have tiny little bits of upgrade pain spread out and far easier to deal with.
A way better site is www.metacritic.com. They do games, music, books, films and DVD. They also excerpt portions of each review so you can quickly get an idea of what each reviewer said to substantiate their score. (Gamerankings just shows the scores with no excerpts and movies.com is a bit better than that.) Whenever I look up stuff in metacritic, I usually look at the comments for the top rated scores and the lowest rated scores and you get a very representative picture.
Yes, I enjoy the game. Sid gets the whatever tiny percentage of the $50 it cost me at the store. The only feedback mechanism I could find was at Atari's website and I provided them that feedback. Ultimately Sid bears responsibility for the publisher he picked and that publisher bears responsibility to consider feedback and tell the developer. I have done way more than most to tell them what is going on. The ball is in their court now.
I bought Pirates! recently (published by Atari), and discovered that they make it assume that anyone using a CD emulator (in my case Daemon Tools) is an unsound person and refuse to let the game run. A few minutes on the Internet and the workaround is to change permissions on one registry key. (Note you just have to have a CD emulator installed, not even trying to run the software via it.)
Since they think so lowly of me, I decided to return the favour and never buy another Atari product. I even emailed them and told them why. What goes around comes around. And it isn't like there aren't enough games from other publishers to spend my money on.
And of course the game has been extensively cracked and copied anyway.
The big guys can already do this to you today, and the little guys don't have much of a chance of winning anyway. And note that it isn't always loser pays, but only if you initiate the lawsuit and only if you then lose do you pay the costs. I certainly agree that it is a good system but it is IMNSHO considerably less bad than the current system where people whose time is free can spray lawsuits around without much consideration for wether they are right, or adverse consequences to losing.
It would also help the free software community and patent situations. For example if someone sues you for patent infringement now, even for a patent that shouldn't have been granted (ie most of them) then winning that case will cost you a considerable sum of money.
Actually it is one trait of the US legal system. In *should* be that if you bring suit against someone else and you lose, then you are automatically liable for their legal costs. That way it ensures that people only bring cases where they have a good case, and won't cost defendants who are innocent anything (in the long term). I believe it is substantially like this in the UK.
Sadly I doubt anything like this would happen since it would reduce the volume of lawsuits. And the people who win in every lawsuit (the lawyers) don't want that, and supply many members of the government.
Why are all these tools evaluated based on left overs other tools find and counting them? If just pure counts are used then the makers have an incentive to label as many things as possible as spyware, and try to count the same thing several times over. For example they could count HotBar once, or they could counr each file of it, each registry key, each hook into IE etc as one item. And of course the makers now have a strong financial incentive for spyware to exist that others don't find. Guess how they will do that.
For the items that they miss, I am only interested in the severity of the items.
Which are? Evolution does require that the Earth be billions of years old.
Actually global warming is a global problem, and is making global weather less predictable. You'll find the US near the top of most lists of the various ways of contributing to the problem, and also trying to avoid doing anything about it.
You also release them from further lawsuits if you file. And as much as Microsoft owes me big time for that copy of Windows ME I bought in 2000, the form and hoops you have to go through are way over the top. (The RIAA one let you do everything online).
Good IMAP support. The best IMAP client I have found on any platform is Outlook Express! Every year or so I go around and evaluate all the others and they all still don't get it, usually because they are based around the belief they are your only client and they download and own all the email.
If you have to configure things locally (eg filters) and the setting is saved locally then that is useless in the IMAP world. I use around 4 machines each and every day, and so repeating configuration 4 times and have 4 competing machines running filters and maintaining 4 sets of settings won't work.
Even the defaults for an IMAP account appear to be to save things like Sent Messages, Drafts, Trash etc on the local machine. (Either that or the import process ignores the OE config which said to save remotely).
Other things such as not having the ability to automatically expunge folders as you click on others is very annoying (you have to manually expunge). (It can automatically expunge your inbox only on exit, not any other folders).
It also looks like Thunderbird doesn't check all folders for new messages although I can't tell for sure.
And I would like deleted items to appear as strike through rather than some tiny coloured flag.
Once Thunderbird works well no matter how many machines you run it on, then I will be happy!
Your verifying of the vote later step has a huge issue. It allows for votes to be bought. The person paying can sit with you as you login to check that you ended up voting how they paid you to.
Votes can be bought through cash or through intimidation.
This actually just comes down to process. In the software world we call it The Cathedral and the Bazaar. EB is an example of the former and Wikipedia is an example of tha latter.
And as far as I can tell, exactly the same argunments apply. What would be interesting is what he will say of Wikipedia in 10 years time. I am willing to bet that by then it will be considered to be far superior.
Even better is they can screw you over at any point, and have a history of doing so.
I don't know if AT&T can pull the same stunts with this ogo, but I'd make damn sure where I stand before forking money over for a device or committing to a service.
That practise is actually largely aimed at the cashiers. A simple way of shoplifting is to have your buddy be a cashier and not charge you for stuff. There would be no trace of such a crime, unless they check at the doors.
Actually the money is spent on tax cuts. While the immediate visible effect is that less money is taken from you, government spending isn't cut and the deficit increases. It is already the case that 20% of tax revenues are spent on debt repayments. Every time taxes are cut without corresponding decreases in spending, the debt repayments go up.
The authors of "Critical Condition" were on NPR the other day, and talked about malpractice lawsuits and insurance. They named one state that had the highest rates of reported malpractices, and nothing done about it by the state government, such as disqualifying doctors. It also turned out that state has the highest malpractice insurance in the country.
There is a big difference in the US for pills. The various companies spend as much on marketing as they do on research and development. Ultimately that marketing has to be paid for. In other countries it is usually the case that pharmaceutical advertising is very restricted, and in most cases useless since you can't go to your doctor and demand they give you what you just saw on TV.
I said office suite document, not business environment. How long before you can send a card around electronically because some family member is graduating and everyone gets to put their comments on it? Or how about someone doing taxes for all other family members, but needs some form information filled in first by everyone? Or the state putting renewal forms on a web site for drivers licenses that are the PDF forms thing (this already happens in some places, but isn't the only way to do it).
All the little details change a lot on the internet. For example you can't use a 5 year old version of Yahoo Messenger anymore. Chances are that a 5 year old version of any media player will have several out of date codecs - will your user be able to see video on CNN any more, or look at a house in 3D at a realty site? SSL root certificates have certainly changed.
Just to show the equivalent in the Linux world, the Debian version that was stable 5 years ago was slink. Both that and the following version (potato) are no longer maintained. Microsoft is about the only company that does maintain that far back, and even they tried dropping support at the begining of this year.
So you are stuck. If it is impossible to update the device then it ages very rapidly. If you do have the ability to update the device then that update process can be comprised by spyware. If the device never has to talk to anyone else then this is a non-issue. But people wouldn't buy something they can't network.
There are half way approaches such as the HipTop were the device becomes just a screen, and the processing and apps run centrally. However that then bets on the service provider never putting on spyware.
Basically you get to choose who becomes your gatekeeper and who you trust. For geeks, it is easy - no one but yourself. For others, it remains an open question. Pretty much every service provider has done things that some consider going to far (eg Tivo, T-Mobile).
You completely missed my point. If that functionality is missing then they can't participate with others. It will be other people, usually friends and family, who send them the forms, the links to media sites, the invites for instant messenging etc. Geeks are able to route around that (eg I am careful what links I send my Dad to ensure he never has to install RealPlayer). But other non-geeks aren't going to be able to figure out what someone with limited functionality device will or won't be able to do.
And the new memory stick/bootable DVD doesn't change the ability to add spyware. How many people verified that the AOL CDs they received actually came from AOL?
You cite form filling as an example of something Joe Average would never want. I didn't mean in the spyware (Gator) sense. There have been two drivers for networked machines. One is porn and the other has been interpersonal communication. For the latter my example is a card being sent round several people to "sign" but done as an office suite document. Another is something to fill out and print (eg forms for government). (Except your no updates rule means no new printer drivers so the original device has to either not be able to print, or somehow have drivers that don't ever need to be updated).
Physical media updates won't solve the spyware/virus problem either, although they will make it somewhat more expensive. As a bad guy, simply send disks with your spyware already on it to people. Depending on your opinion of AOL, that can already be considered to have been done :-)
So how long do you expect the device to last? Your 5 year PC example shows just how useless this device would be. 5 year old web browsers, instant messengers, versions of SSL, media players etc will very highly constrain being able to use the device for interpersonal communication.
They may be somewhat feasible in a business environment, but using "thin" devices with remotely displayed desktops is way easier and more effective.
Yes, there was no networking. There wasn't even a working 'ps' command. I had to transfer everything to/from the machine via floppy disk to one of my university's Sun workstations. So technically it would have been possible :-)