MasterCard have the equivalent of Verified by visa, I'm not sure what it's called now but you interface with both systems in the same way (3DSecure is the generic name). I guess the US is a year behind the UK in this; last summer Mastercard forced all "cardholder not present" transactions done by Maestro (a UK debit card) through this system. As both a merchant and a developer I was less than pleased. As you point out the implementation is horrific. The UK banks actually use (or used at least, I haven't checked recently) a third party to provide the external verification pages and these are hosted on a shared server (at secureserver.co.uk I think) that also has the likes of maspieshop.secureserver.co.uk on it (at least that's what you used to get when you visited the IP that this resolved to). Reinforcing the appearance that this was some kind of scam was the poor html and appalling design. Needless to say Maestro payments pretty much dried up to nothing and we had a great time fielding phone calls from customers that hadn't been informed by their banks what was happening (pretty much all of them).
This was forced through by mastercard completely ignoring the protests of the clearing banks, payment gateways and merchants, presumably from some political motive, and it simply hasn't been thought through at all: you can change the password just by entering the card number and cv2, which if you've stolen the card details, you of course have.
Don't assume that mastercard is any better than visa: they are a two member cartel. Anyway, given that maestro payments collapsed to about 20% of their prior level, I hope that mastercard got what they deserved.
The trouble is that this is the wrong way round...
Bill Gates always comes across, to me anyway, as a fairly likeable, if insanely rich, geek. Whereas Steve Jobs comes across as a psychopathic megalomaniac who would sell his children to a Gap sweatshop if he thought it would help sell more iPhones.
I've always imagined Bill's house as a nice secluded ranch somewhere, where he spends most of his time silently sitting with his face bathed only the glow from the 3 monitors in front of him. Steve Jobs on the other hand would have a lair rather than a house. A place where he can constantly rage against the world, formulating ever more devious plans for world domination whilst feeding those employees who disappoint to his pet pirhanas. Think Hank Scorpio, but less polite.
Well duh. The answer to that question is contained in your previous sentence, where you used the phrase "Apple's hip Get a Mac campaign".
By definition an ad campaign cannot be hip. Ad campaigns worthy of the name are paid for by companies who are trying to make more money. Making money is not hip. Ad campaigns that make you think they are "hip" are very, very expensive indeed. Not only do you have to pay for air/ad space like a normal campaign but you must also buy out the principles of the actors/celebrities involved in the campaign, get a good script and some swish design, and also get as much favourable magazine editorial coverage as is physically possible. The last bit is actually easier than it may seem, because the shallow journos have already bought the message that the celebs were putting across and are using macs to produce all the mags. They therefore are pre-disposed to favour apple products and are especially pleased when free ones arrive in the post. The resulting use of the distinctly partisan "hip" when describing a cynical marketing ploy must give Steve Jobs wet dreams.
No, they assemble in the US because of the anti-competitive proctectionist tariffs in place on auto imports to the US. It costs them the same as the big three, it's just that they are better and more efficiently run companies. All this bullshit about union costs dragging them down is a smokescreen; Germany is one of the most highly unionized countries in the world with astronomical rates of tax, yet BMW seem to manage ok.
If they're not going to be used why has the US spent $62 billion on them?
If think it's more likely you could get 200 P51s for the price of one f22. Interestingly, according to wikipedia, they originally cost $50k each to build, which is about $500k today (probably not far off their current price as antiques) so relatively speaking, state of the art in 1945 cost 1/300th of state of the art in 2008. They probably use a lot less fuel too, so when oil hits $300 a barrel they might be able to afford to fly them.
I am missing something here? Wouldn't a much cheaper solution to your "problem" of too many mexicans be to stop subsidising agri-business and make US farmers compete at international prices? The guiding hand and all that..
BTW if you want cheap and reliable iRobot is *not* who you're looking for.
Well, as I am often at pains to point out to the non-British, Britain is not London. A large minority of the city's population is not British and a large majority of the country's population has never and will never visit. This is particularly noticable in the drinking establishments as *every* staff member is, for reasons I will not speculate on, Australian, Kiwi or South African.
Beer only comes in Pints and half Pints so "Large" and "Small" are self-evident and the culturally challenged have little need for translation. You will however get some funny looks if you order a "Large Beer" in a domestically staffed pub outside London. Given the "rite of passage" mystery with which the act of entering a pub is imbued, I find it hard to believe that any British child over the age of 10 doesn't know that beer comes in pints.
I can assure you that everyone in the UK orders their beer by the pint. No-one knows where it comes from and it's incompatible with all other units in common usage, however it is a very convienent size for drinking and people like beer so it will be in use for a very long time to come.
As an aside, for some reason only beer, blood and milk are measured in pints.
You, sir, are a pedant. When I get up every morning I don't know that my dog is really my dog and hasn't been stolen overnight and replaced with a very clever mechanical copy. I can't really check without dissecting him and that tends to upset both of us, so I assume that it being highly improbable that burglars would have replaced my crappy dog with a very expensive robot he is still my dog. It makes life much simpler.
Likewise we know there is ice on mars, and one of the very few ways that a solid lump can disappear without trace is for it to sublimate. Other ways are for something with long limbs to have reached over and picked it up or perhaps they were iron rocks attracted by passing magnetic clouds, or perhaps a tiny blackhole opened for just long enough to remove those pebbles. However we've pretty much proved conclusively that there is no long-limbed life on Mars and every other way is vanishingly improbable so Occam's razor tells us that it is likely enough that this is ice that we can, on website designed for popular consumption, dispense with the endless qualifiers.
When you give someone a cake, it only makes sense to put the RECIPIENT's name on the cake. Why? When you recieve a cake you know who the recipient is, you might not know who the sender is.
I neither know what a Gundam is nor know how this machine works, but on the reprap site it says:
There are two heads to allow a filler material to be laid down as well as the plastic. This filler is used to support overhanging parts of the objects being built, and is removed when the process is finished Which leads me to believe that it can in fact make Gundam models.
Yeah, he's too honest for his own good. Terrorism is what it is when the bad guys do it, fighting for freedom when it's the good guys. To put the "islamic" qualifier in there is effectively admitting that there are different kinds of terrorism and the logical extension of that is that some kinds of terrorism might be "better" than others.
I think it's pretty common knowledge that the GOP happily support, and even on occasion fund, Irish, Central American and Israeli terrorism, but it's never explicitly admitted. Old John McC is speaking before he thinks.
As far as I am aware democracy and republicanism are not mutually exclusive: they are different concepts. The US is a democratic republic; the UK is a democratic constitutional monarchy.
Europe's historically high fuel taxes have already pushed them to adopt fuel efficient cars and public transit...They're not going to feel the pinch like we will Wanna bet? Diesel is > $10 a gallon in most of the UK right now and 25 years of right wing governments have pared public transport outside london down to an unusable skeleton. I can assure you that people are feeling the pinch: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7420792.stm.
High taxes to try to discourage consumption are all well and good when the underlying price is low but now it's gone through the roof there's a very real danger that the economy is going to be seriously harmed. Many companies, particularly in transportation, are losing money. Unless the oil price drops dramatically in the next few weeks or fuel tax is slashed (yeah, right) an already unpopular government is going to become substantially less popular.
BTW I think Brazil is somewhat ahead of the US in the new fuel race...
Well, how do people get money? By working for it, for example. That is what I do, in any case. and where does your employer get the money to pay you? Or if you're self-employed how do your customers find you? and how do their employers get money to pay them? Selling products or selling services? Whatever it is there's a good chance that they need to advertise to be successful. Any economy where the entire means of production isn't state-owned (ie everywhere outside Cuba) will have advertising, it's necessary in order for any economy to function with any degree of efficiency.
As I understand it, only first time visitors tend to click on ads. Once you get repeat visitors they mentally block them out and don't click any more. If that were true why do you think companies continue to pay good money for them? By definition they only do things that make them money overall. It's only with pay-per-click ads that clicking is even important. People spent trillions on advertising before the internet came along and gave them a way of directly measuring impact (not to claim that it's an accurate measure).
That's not to say that it can't be overdone. Artificially splitting an article into 6 more pieces just to present more ad impressions is repugnant and self defeating. I can guarantee that the ads on such sites will be bottom-of-the-barrel specimens.
That's a stupid analogy. They didn't get a bit of paper, they got an MP3 player with 5% less capacity than they thought. Yes it's devious, but was it really worth a class action suit? Don't you guys have some kind of Trading Standards body to deal with this stuff sans lawyers?
A better TV analogy might be that you bought a 32" TV thinking it was 32" wide, yet when you got it home you realised they actually measured 32" across the diagonal...
You are right and Linus is wrong. However, saying Vista doesn't work out of the box is just retarded. It patently does. Two years ago vista was going to be Linux's killer app and we would all be using Linux desktops by 2009. Somehow that didn't happen.
If the facts don't fit your theory, you change the theory, not the facts.
As I, and many others have pointed out, the way to get Linux on the desktop is to work at both the high and low end markets. Asus are doing very well at the low end with the low-cost EEE. Once more people have seen that, they will be at least used to the concept of a non-Windows OS. However at the other end, no progress has been made. Linux needs a good gaming distro. These are the only people the hardware manufacturers pay attention to, but with joy of catch 22, you need good games in order for manufacturers to take notice first. So, what linux *really* needs is a game developer to port some of it's new titles to Linux.
Who'd have thought that one company actually *doing* something could evangelize linux better than a million geeks screaming at each other through the ether...
All it needs now is for *one* major game developer to port their games to linux and "Linux on the Desktop" might cease to be an oxymoron. (valve is the obvious one for me. They're obviously not going to port every game, but with steam you would get to see all they have at once.) Of course it would kill some people to use a closed source app on their shiny OS OS, but with ubunutu pulling people (particularly teens) in from the mainstream, their injection of open-mindedness might make it a viable business model now where it wasn't 3 years ago.
With Vista out there... desktop linux is about to get really popular really fast
They said that a year ago and it didn't happen.
I'm no MS apologist, but I think you should actually try using Vista before making statements like that. Despite what you might read on slashdot, there is nothing fundamentally broken in it and most "average" users find it a step up from XP. Frankly I've had less trouble with Vista than I've had with Ubunutu on the same machine.
Plus if people use Linux at work, even if it's on a server, they're going to come home and want to use it too since it's free and they're familiar with it.
I don't really understand how using it on a server makes you familiar with an OS? To most people the "server" is that folder with funny icon on it, or, for the more technical, where their web pages come from.
I run CentOS or RHEL on all my public servers and would never dream of using anything else, but I ain't about to get all my staff to install ubuntu; for one they couldn't get the software to do their jobs. I still think that if linux wants to make headway on the desktop someone needs to come up with a distro to go after the gaming market. That's the only demograph that hardware manufacturers really pay attention to and what is cutting edge now will be standard in 12 months. Unfortunately you can't even get recent games that run on linux yet, so it's no wonder the hardware guys are a bit behind.
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MasterCard have the equivalent of Verified by visa, I'm not sure what it's called now but you interface with both systems in the same way (3DSecure is the generic name). I guess the US is a year behind the UK in this; last summer Mastercard forced all "cardholder not present" transactions done by Maestro (a UK debit card) through this system. As both a merchant and a developer I was less than pleased. As you point out the implementation is horrific. The UK banks actually use (or used at least, I haven't checked recently) a third party to provide the external verification pages and these are hosted on a shared server (at secureserver.co.uk I think) that also has the likes of maspieshop.secureserver.co.uk on it (at least that's what you used to get when you visited the IP that this resolved to). Reinforcing the appearance that this was some kind of scam was the poor html and appalling design. Needless to say Maestro payments pretty much dried up to nothing and we had a great time fielding phone calls from customers that hadn't been informed by their banks what was happening (pretty much all of them).
This was forced through by mastercard completely ignoring the protests of the clearing banks, payment gateways and merchants, presumably from some political motive, and it simply hasn't been thought through at all: you can change the password just by entering the card number and cv2, which if you've stolen the card details, you of course have.
Don't assume that mastercard is any better than visa: they are a two member cartel. Anyway, given that maestro payments collapsed to about 20% of their prior level, I hope that mastercard got what they deserved.
cos I just didn't care that much
The trouble is that this is the wrong way round...
Bill Gates always comes across, to me anyway, as a fairly likeable, if insanely rich, geek. Whereas Steve Jobs comes across as a psychopathic megalomaniac who would sell his children to a Gap sweatshop if he thought it would help sell more iPhones.
I've always imagined Bill's house as a nice secluded ranch somewhere, where he spends most of his time silently sitting with his face bathed only the glow from the 3 monitors in front of him. Steve Jobs on the other hand would have a lair rather than a house. A place where he can constantly rage against the world, formulating ever more devious plans for world domination whilst feeding those employees who disappoint to his pet pirhanas. Think Hank Scorpio, but less polite.
Can money buy you love?
Well duh. The answer to that question is contained in your previous sentence, where you used the phrase "Apple's hip Get a Mac campaign".
By definition an ad campaign cannot be hip. Ad campaigns worthy of the name are paid for by companies who are trying to make more money. Making money is not hip. Ad campaigns that make you think they are "hip" are very, very expensive indeed. Not only do you have to pay for air/ad space like a normal campaign but you must also buy out the principles of the actors/celebrities involved in the campaign, get a good script and some swish design, and also get as much favourable magazine editorial coverage as is physically possible. The last bit is actually easier than it may seem, because the shallow journos have already bought the message that the celebs were putting across and are using macs to produce all the mags. They therefore are pre-disposed to favour apple products and are especially pleased when free ones arrive in the post. The resulting use of the distinctly partisan "hip" when describing a cynical marketing ploy must give Steve Jobs wet dreams.
No, they assemble in the US because of the anti-competitive proctectionist tariffs in place on auto imports to the US. It costs them the same as the big three, it's just that they are better and more efficiently run companies. All this bullshit about union costs dragging them down is a smokescreen; Germany is one of the most highly unionized countries in the world with astronomical rates of tax, yet BMW seem to manage ok.
If they're not going to be used why has the US spent $62 billion on them?
If think it's more likely you could get 200 P51s for the price of one f22. Interestingly, according to wikipedia, they originally cost $50k each to build, which is about $500k today (probably not far off their current price as antiques) so relatively speaking, state of the art in 1945 cost 1/300th of state of the art in 2008. They probably use a lot less fuel too, so when oil hits $300 a barrel they might be able to afford to fly them.
To put this into perspective, $6m is about the cost of the seat in a single F-22.
I am missing something here? Wouldn't a much cheaper solution to your "problem" of too many mexicans be to stop subsidising agri-business and make US farmers compete at international prices? The guiding hand and all that..
BTW if you want cheap and reliable iRobot is *not* who you're looking for.
oh...
Beer only comes in Pints and half Pints so "Large" and "Small" are self-evident and the culturally challenged have little need for translation. You will however get some funny looks if you order a "Large Beer" in a domestically staffed pub outside London. Given the "rite of passage" mystery with which the act of entering a pub is imbued, I find it hard to believe that any British child over the age of 10 doesn't know that beer comes in pints.
As an aside, for some reason only beer, blood and milk are measured in pints.
Likewise we know there is ice on mars, and one of the very few ways that a solid lump can disappear without trace is for it to sublimate. Other ways are for something with long limbs to have reached over and picked it up or perhaps they were iron rocks attracted by passing magnetic clouds, or perhaps a tiny blackhole opened for just long enough to remove those pebbles. However we've pretty much proved conclusively that there is no long-limbed life on Mars and every other way is vanishingly improbable so Occam's razor tells us that it is likely enough that this is ice that we can, on website designed for popular consumption, dispense with the endless qualifiers.
I've spoken to some of the devs there before; if it's wrong I don't think you'll have any problems getting it changed.
I think it's pretty common knowledge that the GOP happily support, and even on occasion fund, Irish, Central American and Israeli terrorism, but it's never explicitly admitted. Old John McC is speaking before he thinks.
As far as I am aware democracy and republicanism are not mutually exclusive: they are different concepts. The US is a democratic republic; the UK is a democratic constitutional monarchy.
High taxes to try to discourage consumption are all well and good when the underlying price is low but now it's gone through the roof there's a very real danger that the economy is going to be seriously harmed. Many companies, particularly in transportation, are losing money. Unless the oil price drops dramatically in the next few weeks or fuel tax is slashed (yeah, right) an already unpopular government is going to become substantially less popular.
BTW I think Brazil is somewhat ahead of the US in the new fuel race...
and I would add: if you think your customers are stupid and you can't deal with their reasonable requests, find another job.
That's not to say that it can't be overdone. Artificially splitting an article into 6 more pieces just to present more ad impressions is repugnant and self defeating. I can guarantee that the ads on such sites will be bottom-of-the-barrel specimens.
That's a stupid analogy. They didn't get a bit of paper, they got an MP3 player with 5% less capacity than they thought. Yes it's devious, but was it really worth a class action suit? Don't you guys have some kind of Trading Standards body to deal with this stuff sans lawyers?
A better TV analogy might be that you bought a 32" TV thinking it was 32" wide, yet when you got it home you realised they actually measured 32" across the diagonal...
You are right and Linus is wrong. However, saying Vista doesn't work out of the box is just retarded. It patently does. Two years ago vista was going to be Linux's killer app and we would all be using Linux desktops by 2009. Somehow that didn't happen.
If the facts don't fit your theory, you change the theory, not the facts.
As I, and many others have pointed out, the way to get Linux on the desktop is to work at both the high and low end markets. Asus are doing very well at the low end with the low-cost EEE. Once more people have seen that, they will be at least used to the concept of a non-Windows OS. However at the other end, no progress has been made. Linux needs a good gaming distro. These are the only people the hardware manufacturers pay attention to, but with joy of catch 22, you need good games in order for manufacturers to take notice first. So, what linux *really* needs is a game developer to port some of it's new titles to Linux.
Who'd have thought that one company actually *doing* something could evangelize linux better than a million geeks screaming at each other through the ether...
All it needs now is for *one* major game developer to port their games to linux and "Linux on the Desktop" might cease to be an oxymoron. (valve is the obvious one for me. They're obviously not going to port every game, but with steam you would get to see all they have at once.) Of course it would kill some people to use a closed source app on their shiny OS OS, but with ubunutu pulling people (particularly teens) in from the mainstream, their injection of open-mindedness might make it a viable business model now where it wasn't 3 years ago.
They said that a year ago and it didn't happen.
I'm no MS apologist, but I think you should actually try using Vista before making statements like that. Despite what you might read on slashdot, there is nothing fundamentally broken in it and most "average" users find it a step up from XP. Frankly I've had less trouble with Vista than I've had with Ubunutu on the same machine.
Plus if people use Linux at work, even if it's on a server, they're going to come home and want to use it too since it's free and they're familiar with it.I don't really understand how using it on a server makes you familiar with an OS? To most people the "server" is that folder with funny icon on it, or, for the more technical, where their web pages come from.
I run CentOS or RHEL on all my public servers and would never dream of using anything else, but I ain't about to get all my staff to install ubuntu; for one they couldn't get the software to do their jobs. I still think that if linux wants to make headway on the desktop someone needs to come up with a distro to go after the gaming market. That's the only demograph that hardware manufacturers really pay attention to and what is cutting edge now will be standard in 12 months. Unfortunately you can't even get recent games that run on linux yet, so it's no wonder the hardware guys are a bit behind.
I think you have cause and effect mixed up. Linux desktops will start replacing windows when Big Business starts paying attention.