If you had bothered to read the summary, this was an intentional April Fools joke that went wrong. It has nothing to do with Perl and any lack of strict typing in the language.
Are you illiterate? From the summary: Upstart online brokerage site Zecco had an unfortunate April Fool's day snafu that they are claiming was an honest mistake (emphasis mine).
From the linked "article": Consumerist has updated their post with a message from Zecco claiming that it was not an April Fool's joke,...
And from the "real" article that is linked from there: Online brokerage site Zecco accidentally increased 1% of their customers' Buying Power balances by millions on April 1st, leading some customers to wonder whether it was a system glitch or some horrible April Fool's joke. It turned out to be the former.
And from Zecco itself: "Additionally, we want to make it clear that contrary to some reports, this was not in any way intentional and was not an April Fool's joke. We take the integrity of our customers' accounts very seriously and we have taken measures to ensure this does not happen again."
Whether or not you believe Zecco is a different matter, but the only thing pointing towards it being an April Fool's joke is speculation, and this is flatly contradicted by the claims of Zecco, and the summary somewhat accurately conveys this.
Exactly. Bidding because you think you'll actually use the money is stupid; bidding because you think it's a prank is at least somewhat reasonable. From the comments in the linked article, sounds like there were several at least who did this, and were quite surprised when they actually went through. Zecco is going to have a "fun" time sorting this stuff out.
So basically they did an April's fool joke, it went wrong, and they are trying to make people pay for their mistake.
They've retracted the charges & losses (at least according to them); I'm just going to guess that they were still present for a while while they were sorting out WTF happened.
And no, I don't buy the "honest mistake" line.
I'm not sure I do either... I'm going to guess "rogue employee playing April 1st joke". The company would have to be pretty damn retarded to actually go through the normal decision channels and approve this.
Better yet, provide a way for users to disconnect bad software.
I would say that such a mechanism would be essential for a "lock the soundcard" model to even have a chance at being non-shitty.
Or, you could just mix sources, which is the more general solution anyway, since you can always manually pause whatever source you aren't listening to, and it will both solve this problem and, say, let me listen to music while playing a game that has intermittent sound.
Hey, I think that's great. The music player gets muted until the youtube video is done playing.
Except that's not what happens for me. What happens for me would be much better described as "the music player gets muted until you close Firefox." Whether this is a configuration problem on my end on behalf of Firefox, Flash, or the sound service I don't know, but I don't have root, so it's not something I have much hope of fixing.
And this is one of the bigger problems with locking something like the sound card: all it takes is one poorly-behaved program and the system just fails horribly.
I listen to high-quality music while I work - why on Earth would I want another application mixing something else into that?
Because you want to pause your music player and watch a youtube video someone linked you to?
(Granted, this is sort of Flash's problem for keeping the card locked longer than necessary, but it's still a problem. Sound is set up crappily on the system I'm on now, and it appears that only one program can access it at once unless I manually start esd or something like that. If I want to have sound in Flash (and thus youtube), which I want fairly often, I might need to have nothing else holding the sound card when I start firefox. It's definitely the case that if I go to a page with flash, the sound card remains locked by FF until I close it. Which means if I want to start listening to other music, I have to close firefox, which at best is annoying and at worst loses state.)
I don't even search my disks hardly ever, since I keep everything logically organized myself, so metadata is one of those features (next to indexing) that I don't even appreciate, although I'm sure there are users that do.
Keep in mind that "metadata" here is referring to much more than things like extended attributes, and in fact is probably NOT referring to those. "metadata" here means stuff like the inode and indirect blocks, which you definitely DO care about because it's what lets you access your data.
Metadata journaling saves this information so that you don't have things like blocks that are doubly-allocated or just lost because they aren't part of any file but aren't on the free list, which is what fsck saves.
No matter what shell you're using, someone has to write the tab completion scripts. Maybe it's easier done in ZSH, I don't know... but ZSH alone doesn't do magic.
Which is a shame... someone should look over the completion scripts that are out there, figure out what sorts of things they need to do, and standardize a way of storing that sort of completion information in a section of the binary itself. That way the shell could just read an ELF section of whatever program it's going to run instead of having to write completion scripts for each program out there.
You could even imagine designing a program that would display a GUI representation of the command line options for a program by reading this information automatically.
You can't copyright movie theater seats. Yet you can still sell those.
Concerts are certainly a reasonable argument, but I don't know if movie theater seats are. Theaters are already losing ground to people staying at home, and this will continue to be the case as large-screen TVs and home theater systems become more prevalent. Cutting the cost of seeing a movie from a few bucks (or a couple days with something like Netflix) to download it would, I suspect, become the death knell for most theaters.
Passive cooling was around for a *little* bit after the Amiga; a decade ago I had a 486 with passive cooling. Actually I'm pretty sure it didn't even have a heat sink. Near its end of life I was playing around and dropping drops of water on the CPU package to see how fast it evaporated.
The Pentium 100 we had around that time though *did* have a CPU fan, so that's about the era when they started doing that. Still a decade and a half ago though.
Anyway, the GP specifically mentioned the Intel 5400, which is a northbridge, and those being actively cooled is much more recent. Still not particularly rare though.
I didn't even know you could get 15.4" displays that ran at such a res.
For some reason, laptop displays often come with a far higher resolution* than you seem to be able to get desktop LCDs. Guess they figure the demand is greater there, but it is annoying.
* Strictly speaking, "far higher PPI" is what I should have said.
Keep in mind that the URL in the request is not the only place you'd get savings. Let's say the average page contains 9 links that can each be shortened by 100 bytes. You're an order of magnitude off then -- they'd save $1300.
In actuality, 9 is pathetically low and I'd estimate the main page of Facebook when I sign in has closer to 150, but saving 100 bytes is also very high in that case, since most of those URLs aren't even close to being that long, so these things probably roughly balance each other out.
It is a bit obnoxious though when someone posts something that's just flat out wrong, there are 5 posts and a whole discussion about why they are wrong, but they're still sitting at (+5, Informative) or something dumb like that. (That's extreme, but I've seen it happen a few times, and also far far more if you make it +3 or something.) Maybe (-1, Wrong) won't drop you below your original 0, 1, or 2 rating.
Why would I want to monitor usage on a single plug?... Having a view in the aggregate would encourage people to disconnect devices using power in stand-by mode, etc
I almost completely disagree... with only aggregate information, you don't know what to turn off. You can't point and say "hey, the TV is using quite a lot of power in standby", because you don't know what proportion of the whole is due to it. Even if you compare the aggregates across a couple days, one with the TV plugged in and one with it not, how much of the difference is due to the TV, and how much is just varying fluctuation?
Oh, and (3) the 99% was a little bit of an exaggeration, but the fact that anyone using a package manager implicitly checks signatures won't affect that so much since there aren't that many people doing that in general.;-) What is actually decreasing the percentage a bit is the fact that Vista, when it displays a UAC prompt for a program, checks the program for a digital signature and displays information about the program and publisher in the UAC prompt. It's also possible to set up Vista so that it will automatically deny rights to programs without a signature. This is a far step from saying people care -- realistically speaking if I run an installer and it says that there's no signature, even I am almost certainly going to grant permission anyway -- so in some sense it's still not as good as the package manager approach, but it is probably affecting the number of people who check for digital signatures in an informed way more than package managers now.
True, but: (1) in some sense, package managers have in general been ahead of their time from a Windows point of view. (2) Package managers are really not all that old -- a quick glance of Wikipedia indicates Apt is just over a decade old, and the first version that included it was almost exactly a decade ago. Presumably checking signatures is more recent than that; looking here, it seems that feature is about 6 years old and was only part of Debian proper in the last 4. Even by internet time, that isn't all that long ago (still long after the dot-com bust for instance).
Interesting that today's malware is more secure than program updaters of not that long ago. (And let's face it, also more than 99% of people out there downloading programs who don't bother to check the hash or signature, including myself.)
Technically you're not suppose to resell most software, period.
That's what the software companies would like you to think, but most software -- even most games -- are not an online game like WoW is. (Or at least they have a substantial offline aspect which someone could reasonably want to get just for that aspect.)
Of course reselling WoW doesn't make much sense, or even L4D. But programs like that are still a minority.
When you buy software you're buying a license to use it,
That usually lets you resell it, I'll point out, even if you do in fact need their permission.
Yes, Steam supports offline play.
Largely. You still need to activate it before you play it and again periodically; you can't stay offline indefinitely.
To be fair, it IS possible to buy Steam games that still require activation on Steam from sources other than Steam. I have a Steam'ed copy of HL1, HL2, The Orange Box, and L4D all on CD, and all require an internet connection to activate.
You can actually (or at least could) play the PC version of L4D splitscreen between two players. It's annoying to set up, and was hard to get a controller working with the right players, but it IS possible.
I don't think this is a particularly good analogy... after all, to a fairly large extent, the time you spend dating someone is a trial period for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you illiterate? From the summary: Upstart online brokerage site Zecco had an unfortunate April Fool's day snafu that they are claiming was an honest mistake (emphasis mine).
From the linked "article": Consumerist has updated their post with a message from Zecco claiming that it was not an April Fool's joke,...
And from the "real" article that is linked from there: Online brokerage site Zecco accidentally increased 1% of their customers' Buying Power balances by millions on April 1st, leading some customers to wonder whether it was a system glitch or some horrible April Fool's joke. It turned out to be the former.
And from Zecco itself: "Additionally, we want to make it clear that contrary to some reports, this was not in any way intentional and was not an April Fool's joke. We take the integrity of our customers' accounts very seriously and we have taken measures to ensure this does not happen again."
Whether or not you believe Zecco is a different matter, but the only thing pointing towards it being an April Fool's joke is speculation, and this is flatly contradicted by the claims of Zecco, and the summary somewhat accurately conveys this.
Exactly. Bidding because you think you'll actually use the money is stupid; bidding because you think it's a prank is at least somewhat reasonable. From the comments in the linked article, sounds like there were several at least who did this, and were quite surprised when they actually went through. Zecco is going to have a "fun" time sorting this stuff out.
So basically they did an April's fool joke, it went wrong, and they are trying to make people pay for their mistake.
They've retracted the charges & losses (at least according to them); I'm just going to guess that they were still present for a while while they were sorting out WTF happened.
And no, I don't buy the "honest mistake" line.
I'm not sure I do either... I'm going to guess "rogue employee playing April 1st joke". The company would have to be pretty damn retarded to actually go through the normal decision channels and approve this.
Better yet, provide a way for users to disconnect bad software.
I would say that such a mechanism would be essential for a "lock the soundcard" model to even have a chance at being non-shitty.
Or, you could just mix sources, which is the more general solution anyway, since you can always manually pause whatever source you aren't listening to, and it will both solve this problem and, say, let me listen to music while playing a game that has intermittent sound.
Hey, I think that's great. The music player gets muted until the youtube video is done playing.
Except that's not what happens for me. What happens for me would be much better described as "the music player gets muted until you close Firefox." Whether this is a configuration problem on my end on behalf of Firefox, Flash, or the sound service I don't know, but I don't have root, so it's not something I have much hope of fixing.
And this is one of the bigger problems with locking something like the sound card: all it takes is one poorly-behaved program and the system just fails horribly.
I listen to high-quality music while I work - why on Earth would I want another application mixing something else into that?
Because you want to pause your music player and watch a youtube video someone linked you to?
(Granted, this is sort of Flash's problem for keeping the card locked longer than necessary, but it's still a problem. Sound is set up crappily on the system I'm on now, and it appears that only one program can access it at once unless I manually start esd or something like that. If I want to have sound in Flash (and thus youtube), which I want fairly often, I might need to have nothing else holding the sound card when I start firefox. It's definitely the case that if I go to a page with flash, the sound card remains locked by FF until I close it. Which means if I want to start listening to other music, I have to close firefox, which at best is annoying and at worst loses state.)
I don't even search my disks hardly ever, since I keep everything logically organized myself, so metadata is one of those features (next to indexing) that I don't even appreciate, although I'm sure there are users that do.
Keep in mind that "metadata" here is referring to much more than things like extended attributes, and in fact is probably NOT referring to those. "metadata" here means stuff like the inode and indirect blocks, which you definitely DO care about because it's what lets you access your data.
Metadata journaling saves this information so that you don't have things like blocks that are doubly-allocated or just lost because they aren't part of any file but aren't on the free list, which is what fsck saves.
[offtopic]
No matter what shell you're using, someone has to write the tab completion scripts. Maybe it's easier done in ZSH, I don't know... but ZSH alone doesn't do magic.
Which is a shame... someone should look over the completion scripts that are out there, figure out what sorts of things they need to do, and standardize a way of storing that sort of completion information in a section of the binary itself. That way the shell could just read an ELF section of whatever program it's going to run instead of having to write completion scripts for each program out there.
You could even imagine designing a program that would display a GUI representation of the command line options for a program by reading this information automatically.
You can't copyright movie theater seats. Yet you can still sell those.
Concerts are certainly a reasonable argument, but I don't know if movie theater seats are. Theaters are already losing ground to people staying at home, and this will continue to be the case as large-screen TVs and home theater systems become more prevalent. Cutting the cost of seeing a movie from a few bucks (or a couple days with something like Netflix) to download it would, I suspect, become the death knell for most theaters.
As many others have said: the article is dated the 31st! "By Jacob Gube, March 31st, 2009." By the site's own admission, it's not on 4/1 for them.
That'd be pretty awesome. Swiss Army Knife, EEE edition.
Passive cooling was around for a *little* bit after the Amiga; a decade ago I had a 486 with passive cooling. Actually I'm pretty sure it didn't even have a heat sink. Near its end of life I was playing around and dropping drops of water on the CPU package to see how fast it evaporated.
The Pentium 100 we had around that time though *did* have a CPU fan, so that's about the era when they started doing that. Still a decade and a half ago though.
Anyway, the GP specifically mentioned the Intel 5400, which is a northbridge, and those being actively cooled is much more recent. Still not particularly rare though.
I didn't even know you could get 15.4" displays that ran at such a res.
For some reason, laptop displays often come with a far higher resolution* than you seem to be able to get desktop LCDs. Guess they figure the demand is greater there, but it is annoying.
* Strictly speaking, "far higher PPI" is what I should have said.
There should be a "funny and insightful" mod, 'cause you should get it.
100 bytes to be saved per pageview.
Keep in mind that the URL in the request is not the only place you'd get savings. Let's say the average page contains 9 links that can each be shortened by 100 bytes. You're an order of magnitude off then -- they'd save $1300.
In actuality, 9 is pathetically low and I'd estimate the main page of Facebook when I sign in has closer to 150, but saving 100 bytes is also very high in that case, since most of those URLs aren't even close to being that long, so these things probably roughly balance each other out.
Evan
It is a bit obnoxious though when someone posts something that's just flat out wrong, there are 5 posts and a whole discussion about why they are wrong, but they're still sitting at (+5, Informative) or something dumb like that. (That's extreme, but I've seen it happen a few times, and also far far more if you make it +3 or something.) Maybe (-1, Wrong) won't drop you below your original 0, 1, or 2 rating.
Why would I want to monitor usage on a single plug? ... Having a view in the aggregate would encourage people to disconnect devices using power in stand-by mode, etc
I almost completely disagree... with only aggregate information, you don't know what to turn off. You can't point and say "hey, the TV is using quite a lot of power in standby", because you don't know what proportion of the whole is due to it. Even if you compare the aggregates across a couple days, one with the TV plugged in and one with it not, how much of the difference is due to the TV, and how much is just varying fluctuation?
Oh, and (3) the 99% was a little bit of an exaggeration, but the fact that anyone using a package manager implicitly checks signatures won't affect that so much since there aren't that many people doing that in general. ;-) What is actually decreasing the percentage a bit is the fact that Vista, when it displays a UAC prompt for a program, checks the program for a digital signature and displays information about the program and publisher in the UAC prompt. It's also possible to set up Vista so that it will automatically deny rights to programs without a signature. This is a far step from saying people care -- realistically speaking if I run an installer and it says that there's no signature, even I am almost certainly going to grant permission anyway -- so in some sense it's still not as good as the package manager approach, but it is probably affecting the number of people who check for digital signatures in an informed way more than package managers now.
True, but: (1) in some sense, package managers have in general been ahead of their time from a Windows point of view. (2) Package managers are really not all that old -- a quick glance of Wikipedia indicates Apt is just over a decade old, and the first version that included it was almost exactly a decade ago. Presumably checking signatures is more recent than that; looking here, it seems that feature is about 6 years old and was only part of Debian proper in the last 4. Even by internet time, that isn't all that long ago (still long after the dot-com bust for instance).
Interesting that today's malware is more secure than program updaters of not that long ago. (And let's face it, also more than 99% of people out there downloading programs who don't bother to check the hash or signature, including myself.)
Not the first time you want to play it.
Technically you're not suppose to resell most software, period.
That's what the software companies would like you to think, but most software -- even most games -- are not an online game like WoW is. (Or at least they have a substantial offline aspect which someone could reasonably want to get just for that aspect.)
Of course reselling WoW doesn't make much sense, or even L4D. But programs like that are still a minority.
When you buy software you're buying a license to use it,
That usually lets you resell it, I'll point out, even if you do in fact need their permission.
Yes, Steam supports offline play.
Largely. You still need to activate it before you play it and again periodically; you can't stay offline indefinitely.
To be fair, it IS possible to buy Steam games that still require activation on Steam from sources other than Steam. I have a Steam'ed copy of HL1, HL2, The Orange Box, and L4D all on CD, and all require an internet connection to activate.
You can actually (or at least could) play the PC version of L4D splitscreen between two players. It's annoying to set up, and was hard to get a controller working with the right players, but it IS possible.
Can I try out your wife/gf, too?
I don't think this is a particularly good analogy... after all, to a fairly large extent, the time you spend dating someone is a trial period for them.