They aren't going to spend time implementing and supporting a feature that you and 0.1% of their other customers will use; hence the last part of my previous statement concerning what is or should be offered to the "average" user. Google spends time and resources implementing esoteric features that few people actually use, but they also have a nearly unlimited budget; most regular IT departments don't enjoy that luxury.
you have to agree to have automatic debit from your checking account
That is not true. T-Mobile accepts automatic payment using a filed and active credit card. They also permit online viewing with manual payment if you prefer (direct bank account debit is one of the available options, but it is not the only one). I know because I use T-Mobile with the automatic CC payment option (I keep a special low-limit credit card NOT issued by my bank for small online purchases; although I wish they would allow PayPal and Google Checkout as well).
This is actually a good point that often goes unmentioned when the topic of paperless billing or financial transactions comes up. Paper bills and statements have a long and well litigated history as "official" legal documents. The written and common laws are generally much less clear about electronic files or records; even when additional techniques, such as digital signatures, are employed. If you want to cover your ass legally, then paper is the only way to go, accept no substitutes. However, practically speaking very few people want to legally dispute small bills (like their phone bill) so it sometimes makes sense to go paperless for small and regular bills where the risks are lower and the rewards (less unimportant paper) outweigh them.
Why can't the companies just email me a PDF of the bill I normally receive?
If you had ever worked in web application development or computer security then you wouldn't be asking that question. Can you say phising? There are reasons why online banking and other financial institutions, for example, never use e-mail for account correspondence other than to inform you that your statement is ready for viewing without providing any links. The public Internet exists in a constant state of open warfare and any transaction involving money or billing is bound to be targeted by the bad guys. Could it be made secure? Possibly, but NOT in such a way that average users would (a) be able to set it up OR (b) be able to understand and use it properly.
That is not the point. The intent here is to create a "protection mechanism" via "technical device" (however ineffective) which serves to trigger the portion of the DMCA law (Britain probably has equivalent legal language now due to copyright "normalization" treaties) which makes circumvention without permission or fair dealing (which requires a specially granted exemption from Library of Congress here in the United States) unlawful. In other words, it doesn't matter that they locked the door with chwing gum and rubber bands, you still "broke in" according to the letter of the law and they can still sue you. In these cases the "protection mechanism" is only there to create enough of a speed bump to trigger the anti-circumvention laws, NOT to present a real technical challenge to hackers.
Does it strike anyone else as just a bit ironic that the CTO of a company whose business is plugging the holes in Windows and repairing the damage when there are leaks chooses to use a Mac instead of a PC?
Sounds kind of silly to me. There really has to be a class action lawsuit in there somewhere. The only reason that I can think of for doing this is to limit warranty claims caused by faulty, improper, or incomplete repairs done by third parties. The solution is, as Massachusetts is doing, to legislate that consumers have the right to third party repairs without undue or unreasonable restrictions (charging thousands for a proprietary diagnostic box or using encryption to lock out third parties or those who haven't paid additional fees would probably qualify as undue or unreasonable).
Yeah thats right. It takes very little energy to use a mouse.
I believe that when the GP said "standard interface" he was referring primarily to the keyboard and not the mouse. Many skilled computer users prefer to use the keyboard (preferably an advanced keyboard with lots of programmable macro keys) rather than the mouse because expert level keyboard use is both faster and more efficient in many cases.
And they are owning up to the fine tradition of nerfing by admitting that they might nerf something, but offering some alternatives so that you don't have to start over from the very beginning. I expect every MMO will be watching this piece of code very closely and will probably immitate it in every MMO from here on out.
There have been similar solutions in other MMOs where characters affected by a nerf were offered a limited time opportunity to re-assign skills, powers, etc...Although, in a game like COH, where so many items and enhancements are geared towards certain skills and powers and can only be acquired through play, this remains an imperfect solution. However, those who are affected by a nerf should ask themselves, "Do I really want to play in an unbalanced game where everyone eventually chooses 'the combination' because it is hands-down better than any other possible build"? Ultimately, that is fun for neither those who benefited initially from the unbalanced characters or those who all create new "uber-build" characters with the unbalanced skills and powers.
If and when vancomycin resistant Staph. becomes prevalent (I'm aware of 3 documented cases so far), we're in deep shit.
Note quite. There is still Linezolid and when that becomes less effective there are several other Oxazolidones in the drug pipeline. Of course Linezolid is crazy expensive right now, being as it is under patent protection, but that is actually a good thing because it discourages frivolous uses such as anti-bacterial hand soap or animal feed. A few thousand dollars is worthwhile if it saves a life, but not for non-life threatening uses.
In a game were serving ads nets fractions of a penny, they will run as close to the margins as they can rather than paying for better servers or even more for extra bandwidth. Its a money game for the ad servers, plain and simple, and wasting your time doesn't cost them anything (at least not on the order of seconds). As long as the ad gets served within 30 seconds or so most users will continue to put up with them because they don't know about adblock. We who can should simply refuse to play their game.
Yes, but that is about par for the course here in the US. You have a choice between horrible, crappy, and even worse service; take your pick. The US international rank in broadband speed and availability for 2009 is 28th place...ouch. I basically have the minimum possible services and refuse to pay more until I can get South Korean or Japanese style speed and services at roughly equivalent prices.
One thing that annoys me is when the ads have to be served from external links and those links don't work.
This happens because ad serving companies are cheap. Too cheap in fact to pay for servers and bandwidth to actually serve ads quickly. So instead they let their low end servers strain under crushing loads 24/7 hovering just on the edge of crashing because wasting your time costs them nothing. Yet another reason to use Ad Block Plus. Go ahead, use the nuclear option; the ad companies don't give a shit about you so why should you give a shit about them?
I will grant you that the iPhone certainly has attracted a lot of attention from consumers and developers (unusual for an Apple platform), but one must be careful not to confuse popularity with ease of development. The iPhone may be easy to develop for (don't know personally), but that doesn't prove that popular == easy to develop for. The PlayStation platform, for example, has historically been both popular AND difficult to develop for. In fact, Sony went so far as to tout "difficulty of development" as a feature because it created barriers to entry for hobbyists and other less "qualified" (in Sony's opinion) developers. This both prevented lower quality titles for PlayStation (mostly) AND limited the total number of titles. Some people thought that was a good thing, but others had the opposite opinion. Apple has historically been more like Sony in this regard, limiting who can write for their platform AND what they can publish. Also, something to remember about mobile platforms in general and iPhone in particular: they generally have a more limited and defined feature set because everyone has essentially the same hardware device (or with only minor variations).
Contrast this with generic platforms, such as the PC, which make no such guarantees making them both more flexible and powerful; albeit somewhat more difficult to develop for in that a third party has not already made most of your choices for you. Some people like that and others don't. Finally, the Mac platform is way behind the Windows and probably Linux platforms in number and variety of applications (many of them are crap yes, but Apple could learn a thing or two from Microsoft about treating developers right). The Apple enthusiast rejoinder to that is usually something along the lines of, "Yes, but Mac apps are always high quality so we don't mind having fewer". How many people do you know who are interested in general purpose computing and choose to run MacOS? They usually choose a PC which they have built for themselves and run Linux or (gasp) Windows (especially if they are at all into PC gaming).
Also, using C# is not THAT much better than the native objective-c
Excuse me? C# and.NET take the same approach as Java which is to provide the most powerful general purpose programming language + massive class library of common functionality possible (C# and.NET which allows any language to compile to the CLI assembly are arguably even more powerful than Java right now). C# and.NET are definitely MORE powerful than objective C in a general purpose sort of way (objective C might have more depth in specific targeted areas like GUI widgets, but the breadth of massive frameworks like C# and Java is truly vast). As for the memory management in C# and.net languages, you have to know a bit about garbage collection, finalization, and the IDisposable interface (which enables the "using" keyword syntax) when dealing with "unmanaged" resources (which require manual destruction, usually because they are outside the managed heap maintained by the.NET framework).
Its interesting that Google believes that they can compete enough on quality that lock-in is no longer an advantage to them because it scares away more potential customers than it traps.
With the rise of strong or at least credible competition from many open source products and a greater user awareness (although still not universal) of the perils of lock-in, the use of lock-in as a strategy by proprietary software vendors is becoming progressively less valuable. In fact, a tipping point may already have been reached whereby, as you stated, the number or users entrapped is not outweighed by the number of users scared away by the trap. This is a good thing for both consumers and the marketplace because it removes or lessens the impact of a classic barrier to entry in the software business. Google is wise to recognize and exploit this against other large competitors, such as Microsoft and Autodesk (which is infamous for their proprietary file format lock-in on their AutoCAD products), that have historically favored lock-in or at least done little or nothing to facilitate interoperability.
To be fair to the browser manufacturers, NoScript is a fairly advanced tool which requires some user expertise to use effectively and knowledge of regular expressions to fully customize and get the maximum level of use. NoScript is great for geeks, but white listing is NOT a mass market solution to a problem which basically boils down to a combination of user ignorance and stupidity (and should not be viewed as such). NoScript is appropriate as a plugin for those who are able to make advantageous use of it, but it is not appropriate IMHO for default browser inclusion (NoScript updates frequently because the problems it attempts to address are moving targets which require specialty attention that most browser devs don't have time to give).
I'm sure this product will eventually be marketed towards all drivers
You mean mandated by law for all drivers, right? Always remember that companies pushing unpopular products have never been above using lobbyists, laws, and lawsuits to force us to use products that we would never choose to use willingly (i.e. macrovision).
While I understand your point of view, practically speaking what are the alternatives when the police need to physically subdue someone? Unless you are going to limit your hiring criteria to "officers with experience in cage fighting" then the only other real alternative, as others on this thread have pointed out, is a firearm. Before Tasers became commonplace officers carried clubs which could be used as an alternative to guns, particularly in riot situations. However, even the venerable police baton was sometimes ineffective (imagine a 120lb female officer hitting someone like Brock Lesnar with a police baton, she is likely to be beaten with her own baton or knocked out for her trouble) for a variety of reasons.
I'd really like to know what these "tree hugging Luddites" propose that we do about our rather desperate situation in terms of electricity generation.
They want you to live like a subsistence hippie vegetable farmer who wears homemade clothes, never farts, and composts human waste to grow everything organically.
If they use some flavor of Unix for their network services then it shouldn't be a major problem using Linux. However there are two caveats: websites that only support Internet Explorer (yeah they are still out there, especially on intranets) and required client side software that only runs on Windows (and maybe Mac if they are feeling generous). Despite the reputation that many Universities have for research and academic excellence, the IT infrastructure often leaves something to be desired. My advice would be to purchase a Windows license and then run it in an emulator or set up the laptop for dual boot just to be safe. Does this mean you have to fork some cash over for a Windows license? Yes, unfortunately it probably does; but look at as just another expense (like textbooks) and move on. Besides, with what tuition, books and room and board go for these days the cost of a windows license is trivial by comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but that's part of the charm, right mate?
Send me a GPG-encrypted bill.
They aren't going to spend time implementing and supporting a feature that you and 0.1% of their other customers will use; hence the last part of my previous statement concerning what is or should be offered to the "average" user. Google spends time and resources implementing esoteric features that few people actually use, but they also have a nearly unlimited budget; most regular IT departments don't enjoy that luxury.
you have to agree to have automatic debit from your checking account
That is not true. T-Mobile accepts automatic payment using a filed and active credit card. They also permit online viewing with manual payment if you prefer (direct bank account debit is one of the available options, but it is not the only one). I know because I use T-Mobile with the automatic CC payment option (I keep a special low-limit credit card NOT issued by my bank for small online purchases; although I wish they would allow PayPal and Google Checkout as well).
This is actually a good point that often goes unmentioned when the topic of paperless billing or financial transactions comes up. Paper bills and statements have a long and well litigated history as "official" legal documents. The written and common laws are generally much less clear about electronic files or records; even when additional techniques, such as digital signatures, are employed. If you want to cover your ass legally, then paper is the only way to go, accept no substitutes. However, practically speaking very few people want to legally dispute small bills (like their phone bill) so it sometimes makes sense to go paperless for small and regular bills where the risks are lower and the rewards (less unimportant paper) outweigh them.
Why can't the companies just email me a PDF of the bill I normally receive?
If you had ever worked in web application development or computer security then you wouldn't be asking that question. Can you say phising? There are reasons why online banking and other financial institutions, for example, never use e-mail for account correspondence other than to inform you that your statement is ready for viewing without providing any links . The public Internet exists in a constant state of open warfare and any transaction involving money or billing is bound to be targeted by the bad guys. Could it be made secure? Possibly, but NOT in such a way that average users would (a) be able to set it up OR (b) be able to understand and use it properly.
My GOD! Hackers will *NEVER* figure this one out!
That is not the point. The intent here is to create a "protection mechanism" via "technical device" (however ineffective) which serves to trigger the portion of the DMCA law (Britain probably has equivalent legal language now due to copyright "normalization" treaties) which makes circumvention without permission or fair dealing (which requires a specially granted exemption from Library of Congress here in the United States) unlawful. In other words, it doesn't matter that they locked the door with chwing gum and rubber bands, you still "broke in" according to the letter of the law and they can still sue you. In these cases the "protection mechanism" is only there to create enough of a speed bump to trigger the anti-circumvention laws, NOT to present a real technical challenge to hackers.
Does it strike anyone else as just a bit ironic that the CTO of a company whose business is plugging the holes in Windows and repairing the damage when there are leaks chooses to use a Mac instead of a PC?
Don't you have to have some kind of license from the EPA to dispose of toxic waste? Did the producers of the waste not verify the license?
Please tell us you aren't that naïve; this is the real world not the world as you think it should be or would like it to be.
Sounds kind of silly to me. There really has to be a class action lawsuit in there somewhere. The only reason that I can think of for doing this is to limit warranty claims caused by faulty, improper, or incomplete repairs done by third parties. The solution is, as Massachusetts is doing, to legislate that consumers have the right to third party repairs without undue or unreasonable restrictions (charging thousands for a proprietary diagnostic box or using encryption to lock out third parties or those who haven't paid additional fees would probably qualify as undue or unreasonable).
Yeah thats right. It takes very little energy to use a mouse.
I believe that when the GP said "standard interface" he was referring primarily to the keyboard and not the mouse. Many skilled computer users prefer to use the keyboard (preferably an advanced keyboard with lots of programmable macro keys) rather than the mouse because expert level keyboard use is both faster and more efficient in many cases.
And they are owning up to the fine tradition of nerfing by admitting that they might nerf something, but offering some alternatives so that you don't have to start over from the very beginning. I expect every MMO will be watching this piece of code very closely and will probably immitate it in every MMO from here on out.
There have been similar solutions in other MMOs where characters affected by a nerf were offered a limited time opportunity to re-assign skills, powers, etc...Although, in a game like COH, where so many items and enhancements are geared towards certain skills and powers and can only be acquired through play, this remains an imperfect solution. However, those who are affected by a nerf should ask themselves, "Do I really want to play in an unbalanced game where everyone eventually chooses 'the combination' because it is hands-down better than any other possible build"? Ultimately, that is fun for neither those who benefited initially from the unbalanced characters or those who all create new "uber-build" characters with the unbalanced skills and powers.
If and when vancomycin resistant Staph. becomes prevalent (I'm aware of 3 documented cases so far), we're in deep shit.
Note quite. There is still Linezolid and when that becomes less effective there are several other Oxazolidones in the drug pipeline. Of course Linezolid is crazy expensive right now, being as it is under patent protection, but that is actually a good thing because it discourages frivolous uses such as anti-bacterial hand soap or animal feed. A few thousand dollars is worthwhile if it saves a life, but not for non-life threatening uses.
In a game were serving ads nets fractions of a penny, they will run as close to the margins as they can rather than paying for better servers or even more for extra bandwidth. Its a money game for the ad servers, plain and simple, and wasting your time doesn't cost them anything (at least not on the order of seconds). As long as the ad gets served within 30 seconds or so most users will continue to put up with them because they don't know about adblock. We who can should simply refuse to play their game.
it's the telcos screwing things up.
Yes, but that is about par for the course here in the US. You have a choice between horrible, crappy, and even worse service; take your pick. The US international rank in broadband speed and availability for 2009 is 28th place...ouch. I basically have the minimum possible services and refuse to pay more until I can get South Korean or Japanese style speed and services at roughly equivalent prices.
One thing that annoys me is when the ads have to be served from external links and those links don't work.
This happens because ad serving companies are cheap. Too cheap in fact to pay for servers and bandwidth to actually serve ads quickly. So instead they let their low end servers strain under crushing loads 24/7 hovering just on the edge of crashing because wasting your time costs them nothing. Yet another reason to use Ad Block Plus. Go ahead, use the nuclear option; the ad companies don't give a shit about you so why should you give a shit about them?
I will grant you that the iPhone certainly has attracted a lot of attention from consumers and developers (unusual for an Apple platform), but one must be careful not to confuse popularity with ease of development. The iPhone may be easy to develop for (don't know personally), but that doesn't prove that popular == easy to develop for. The PlayStation platform, for example, has historically been both popular AND difficult to develop for. In fact, Sony went so far as to tout "difficulty of development" as a feature because it created barriers to entry for hobbyists and other less "qualified" (in Sony's opinion) developers. This both prevented lower quality titles for PlayStation (mostly) AND limited the total number of titles. Some people thought that was a good thing, but others had the opposite opinion. Apple has historically been more like Sony in this regard, limiting who can write for their platform AND what they can publish. Also, something to remember about mobile platforms in general and iPhone in particular: they generally have a more limited and defined feature set because everyone has essentially the same hardware device (or with only minor variations).
Contrast this with generic platforms, such as the PC, which make no such guarantees making them both more flexible and powerful; albeit somewhat more difficult to develop for in that a third party has not already made most of your choices for you. Some people like that and others don't. Finally, the Mac platform is way behind the Windows and probably Linux platforms in number and variety of applications (many of them are crap yes, but Apple could learn a thing or two from Microsoft about treating developers right). The Apple enthusiast rejoinder to that is usually something along the lines of, "Yes, but Mac apps are always high quality so we don't mind having fewer". How many people do you know who are interested in general purpose computing and choose to run MacOS? They usually choose a PC which they have built for themselves and run Linux or (gasp) Windows (especially if they are at all into PC gaming).
Also, using C# is not THAT much better than the native objective-c
Excuse me? C# and .NET take the same approach as Java which is to provide the most powerful general purpose programming language + massive class library of common functionality possible (C# and .NET which allows any language to compile to the CLI assembly are arguably even more powerful than Java right now). C# and .NET are definitely MORE powerful than objective C in a general purpose sort of way (objective C might have more depth in specific targeted areas like GUI widgets, but the breadth of massive frameworks like C# and Java is truly vast). As for the memory management in C# and .net languages, you have to know a bit about garbage collection, finalization, and the IDisposable interface (which enables the "using" keyword syntax) when dealing with "unmanaged" resources (which require manual destruction, usually because they are outside the managed heap maintained by the .NET framework).
Its interesting that Google believes that they can compete enough on quality that lock-in is no longer an advantage to them because it scares away more potential customers than it traps.
With the rise of strong or at least credible competition from many open source products and a greater user awareness (although still not universal) of the perils of lock-in, the use of lock-in as a strategy by proprietary software vendors is becoming progressively less valuable. In fact, a tipping point may already have been reached whereby, as you stated, the number or users entrapped is not outweighed by the number of users scared away by the trap. This is a good thing for both consumers and the marketplace because it removes or lessens the impact of a classic barrier to entry in the software business. Google is wise to recognize and exploit this against other large competitors, such as Microsoft and Autodesk (which is infamous for their proprietary file format lock-in on their AutoCAD products), that have historically favored lock-in or at least done little or nothing to facilitate interoperability.
To be fair to the browser manufacturers, NoScript is a fairly advanced tool which requires some user expertise to use effectively and knowledge of regular expressions to fully customize and get the maximum level of use. NoScript is great for geeks, but white listing is NOT a mass market solution to a problem which basically boils down to a combination of user ignorance and stupidity (and should not be viewed as such). NoScript is appropriate as a plugin for those who are able to make advantageous use of it, but it is not appropriate IMHO for default browser inclusion (NoScript updates frequently because the problems it attempts to address are moving targets which require specialty attention that most browser devs don't have time to give).
I'm sure this product will eventually be marketed towards all drivers
You mean mandated by law for all drivers, right? Always remember that companies pushing unpopular products have never been above using lobbyists, laws, and lawsuits to force us to use products that we would never choose to use willingly (i.e. macrovision).
While I understand your point of view, practically speaking what are the alternatives when the police need to physically subdue someone? Unless you are going to limit your hiring criteria to "officers with experience in cage fighting" then the only other real alternative, as others on this thread have pointed out, is a firearm. Before Tasers became commonplace officers carried clubs which could be used as an alternative to guns, particularly in riot situations. However, even the venerable police baton was sometimes ineffective (imagine a 120lb female officer hitting someone like Brock Lesnar with a police baton, she is likely to be beaten with her own baton or knocked out for her trouble) for a variety of reasons.
Can Facebook simply provide the source code in obfuscated form? As long as the compiler can parse it then it counts as source code right?
I'd really like to know what these "tree hugging Luddites" propose that we do about our rather desperate situation in terms of electricity generation.
They want you to live like a subsistence hippie vegetable farmer who wears homemade clothes, never farts, and composts human waste to grow everything organically.
If they use some flavor of Unix for their network services then it shouldn't be a major problem using Linux. However there are two caveats: websites that only support Internet Explorer (yeah they are still out there, especially on intranets) and required client side software that only runs on Windows (and maybe Mac if they are feeling generous). Despite the reputation that many Universities have for research and academic excellence, the IT infrastructure often leaves something to be desired. My advice would be to purchase a Windows license and then run it in an emulator or set up the laptop for dual boot just to be safe. Does this mean you have to fork some cash over for a Windows license? Yes, unfortunately it probably does; but look at as just another expense (like textbooks) and move on. Besides, with what tuition, books and room and board go for these days the cost of a windows license is trivial by comparison.
$23,148,855,308,184,500