Allowing for longer development time is a great option -- if you want to go out of business fast. In the real world, you miss the holiday season and you are screwed. Nobody likes games with graphics that are even slightly behind the state of the art, so you have to stay on schedule. There have been lots of great games that flopped simply because they were released a couple of months too late.
In any case, this is a management problem. Avoiding this problem is how good managers earn their salary. Unfortunately, good managers are few and far between, and natural selection does not do a good job here.
You are implying that your car doesn't burn fuel until it gets to the catalytic converter? Maybe you should have a mechanic look at it, it probably needs a new engine.
I wasn't discussing his allegations. I was disputing the notion that he is an authoritative expert in the field of computer security. I pointed out that he is not an expert, and therefore his _opinions_ on the relative security of operating systems are worthless.
Personal bias? I don't see any. As far as my crappy school allegation, let's see. It's small, private, and fairly expensive, yet it has an average freshman SAT of only 1167. It has very low research expedentures -- 9 million for the entire campus. Even for their size, this is pitiful. They are not in any rankings I looked at (such as the phds.org ones). In short, they are a crappy school by almost any measure.
I'm not saying the guy is wrong. I am saying he is neither reputable nor qualified to speak on the topic. I think I made it pretty clear why that is so.
Reputable my ass. The Ford guy is at a crappy school, doing what basically amounts to fluff "research" in BS areas like e-commerce or "software testing". On top of that, his PhD is in semiconductor physics, of all things. Why he is a research professor of computer science I do not know, but he does not seem to be someone who knows what he is talking about.
What are you smoking? Red light cameras are nothing like DRM. Traffic lights are not a fluke of our legal system, they are the most important traffic control device on the road today.
Jackasses like you who run red lights cause thousands of fatal accidents every year. Don't give me BS about high visibility at night. Some intersections don't have good visibility and it's often impossible to judge it. Besides, most traffic lights are programmed to switch immediately during the night.
As far as emergencies: if it's a real emergency, call 911 and get a police escort instead of endangering the safety of other drivers. If you run red lights, you will likely end up with two or more emergencies to contend with.
First, I have yet to see solid proof that this is happening. Second, yellow light timing IS determined by traffic engineers. It's not like the camera manufacturers dictate what a city should do -- I'm sure there are traffic engineers involved in making those decisions. Making the yellow light too long is just as bad as making it too short. Perhaps it was shortened simply because too many people were running it?
That's a totally different issue, that is almost completely unrelated to automatic cameras. And it does have quite a bit to do with safety. When yellow lights are 10 seconds long, people get the impression that yellow means "floor it". There are minimum lengths set by the federal government that ensure safety; anything beyond it encourages people to run the yellow light. In my town (which has no red light cameras) people routinely run red lights. Usually, you have to wait at least 2 seconds after the light turns green for the cross traffic to clear.
I think red light and speeding cameras serve a useful purpose. They guarantee near-100% enforcement, which is always a good thing. If the speed limit is too set too low in some place, call your DOT and complain instead of violating it. If enough people do that, we won't have artificially low speed limits that nobody respects.
Please, shut the hell up. It actually seems like the system in your town is catching law-breakers quite well, and it seems like you have no respect for speed limits or red lights or whatever. You just want to get out of paying the fine. Why the hell should we adapt the system to make it easier to break the law without being punished for it?
My having an account with them obligates them to deliver my traffic under reasonable and customary assumptions about their service.
You signed a contract with your ISP. That contract determines all of their obligations to you.
You cannot morally or (in the US or other former British possessions) legally bind somebody to a contract when you are deliberately relying on that person's not understanding the contract's terms; I believe the term is "meeting of minds".
Where are you getting this from? So, you are saying that you can get out of contractual obligations simply by saying that you didn't read the contract? Bullshit. If you sign it, it's valid.
which means at least not blocking traffic to competitors, and arguably treating every packet exactly the same with no filtering, QoS, transparent proxies, restrictions on servers (how many customers understand the definition of a "server") or anything of the kind.
You are one of those people that wants something for nothing. Every ISP has services with very few restrictions, such as business class cable/DSL and dedicated lines (T1s and so on). These are expensive -- for a reason. The reason is that the bandwidth is reserved for you.
Consumer-grade services, such as regular cable and DSL, are not meant to be used as dedicated connections. Therefore, the ISP does not have enough bandwidth available to give maximum bandwidth to all subscribers at once. This is the reason these connections cost $50 a month instead of $1500 a month. This is also the reason the ISP prohibits servers and other bandwidth-consuming applications.
In short, if you don't like the restrictions your service plan imposes, get a different service plan. Stop whining about getting >3Mbps of bandwidth for only twice the price of a 56K connection.
Bullshit. Any media player can play Windows Media files. All you need to play them is the redistributable Microsoft codecs. Nobody gets screwed; you can install Winamp and play the same files WMP plays and more.
Passphrases are not hard to remember. Instead of remembering seven digits, you could be remembering seven words (which is a _very_ secure passpharase). It's certainly not difficult to remember.
No shit. A lot of R&D probably goes into toothpaste, too. It's just that it is a cheap commodity product sold for 1000x its normal price. You could probably buy a gallon of bulk inkjet ink for the price of one cartridge.
I've had really good luck with Samsung's low end laser printers. They are built a lot better than the $500 HPs and cost around $100-$150. I have an old ML-1210 yet. It's a vertical feed printer and it hasn't had a single paper jam in the last 2 years! It has official Linux drivers from Samsung.
In short: I think HP is one of those companies that used to be good, but now just make low-end crap.
Unless Valve agrees to refund the money to people have paid for HL2, they must unbundle Steam. And they should definitely be fined, to discourage this type of violations.
Usually, something like that implies that the internet might be needed to activate the game or to play online. However, in the case of HL2, you have to continuously remain connected even when playing the single-player game. Therefore, the packaging is misleading.
Let's see, I can have expensive surgery with a 5-10% risk of serious complications (which include complete loss of vision and many others) and a 40% rate of more minor complications (some of which are also permanent and more annoying than contact lenses). And the surgery might not even correct the problem completely! No thanks.
I find that if you don't follow the instructions on your "no-rub" solution bottle and actually rub the contacts vigorously, they last a lot longer (you get way more protein off that way). I've been using the same set of 2-week contacts for damn near 3 months now and they feel the same as new ones do.
By the way, has anyone noticed that the Wal-mart (equate) brand contact lens solution is obviously the same stuff as Bausch and Lomb ReNu at about 1/6th of the price? The list of ingredients, patent numbers, and directions are word-for-word identical. Also, if you compare the date codes and markings on the boxes and the bottles it is obvious they are made with the same type of machine. I don't find it entirely implausible to believe they are made on the same production line. It might be that brand loyalty here is high enough that B&L doesn't undercut their higher-priced brands by selling their stuff for cheap.
I've never seen such a user, and I would venture to guess they are far in the minority. Even the most clueless newbie I have seen has used either yahoo or google as their search engine (and knew it wouldn't break their computer). Besides, all it would take for them to switch is a more experienced user suggesting it. Again, it runs into the problem of having high-quality results.
Whatever. You can SELL britney spears records with marketing, but if people don't like them, they won't listen to them.
With search engines, there is nothing to buy, absolutely no user lock-in, and the user can switch anytime with absolutely no effort. If I notice that MSN Search gives me consistently better results than Google, I'll use it. If I notice the results aren't as good, I won't try it again. This isn't just true of techies, it's true of anyone who actually uses a search engine.
MS can spend as much as they want on marketing and it won't grow their market share unless their search engine is at least as good as Google. Google has turned from a relative unknown to #1, and I have yet to see a Google advertisement.
The driver on the host has to ask the keyboard for its descriptors when the host enumerates it. The keylogger can simply grab them at that point. This does require a significantly smarter keylogger, though.
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Allowing for longer development time is a great option -- if you want to go out of business fast. In the real world, you miss the holiday season and you are screwed. Nobody likes games with graphics that are even slightly behind the state of the art, so you have to stay on schedule. There have been lots of great games that flopped simply because they were released a couple of months too late.
In any case, this is a management problem. Avoiding this problem is how good managers earn their salary. Unfortunately, good managers are few and far between, and natural selection does not do a good job here.
Wrong. You can trademark the case design if it's distinctive. Examples of this: coca-cola glass bottle, maglite, various cars, and so on.
You are implying that your car doesn't burn fuel until it gets to the catalytic converter? Maybe you should have a mechanic look at it, it probably needs a new engine.
You get lots of water from combustion, too. Where do you think the "hydro" part in "hydrocarbons" goes?
I wasn't discussing his allegations. I was disputing the notion that he is an authoritative expert in the field of computer security. I pointed out that he is not an expert, and therefore his _opinions_ on the relative security of operating systems are worthless.
Personal bias? I don't see any. As far as my crappy school allegation, let's see. It's small, private, and fairly expensive, yet it has an average freshman SAT of only 1167. It has very low research expedentures -- 9 million for the entire campus. Even for their size, this is pitiful. They are not in any rankings I looked at (such as the phds.org ones). In short, they are a crappy school by almost any measure.
I'm not saying the guy is wrong. I am saying he is neither reputable nor qualified to speak on the topic. I think I made it pretty clear why that is so.
Reputable my ass. The Ford guy is at a crappy school, doing what basically amounts to fluff "research" in BS areas like e-commerce or "software testing". On top of that, his PhD is in semiconductor physics, of all things. Why he is a research professor of computer science I do not know, but he does not seem to be someone who knows what he is talking about.
What are you smoking? Red light cameras are nothing like DRM. Traffic lights are not a fluke of our legal system, they are the most important traffic control device on the road today.
Jackasses like you who run red lights cause thousands of fatal accidents every year. Don't give me BS about high visibility at night. Some intersections don't have good visibility and it's often impossible to judge it. Besides, most traffic lights are programmed to switch immediately during the night.
As far as emergencies: if it's a real emergency, call 911 and get a police escort instead of endangering the safety of other drivers. If you run red lights, you will likely end up with two or more emergencies to contend with.
First, I have yet to see solid proof that this is happening. Second, yellow light timing IS determined by traffic engineers. It's not like the camera manufacturers dictate what a city should do -- I'm sure there are traffic engineers involved in making those decisions. Making the yellow light too long is just as bad as making it too short. Perhaps it was shortened simply because too many people were running it?
That's a totally different issue, that is almost completely unrelated to automatic cameras. And it does have quite a bit to do with safety. When yellow lights are 10 seconds long, people get the impression that yellow means "floor it". There are minimum lengths set by the federal government that ensure safety; anything beyond it encourages people to run the yellow light. In my town (which has no red light cameras) people routinely run red lights. Usually, you have to wait at least 2 seconds after the light turns green for the cross traffic to clear.
I think red light and speeding cameras serve a useful purpose. They guarantee near-100% enforcement, which is always a good thing. If the speed limit is too set too low in some place, call your DOT and complain instead of violating it. If enough people do that, we won't have artificially low speed limits that nobody respects.
Please, shut the hell up. It actually seems like the system in your town is catching law-breakers quite well, and it seems like you have no respect for speed limits or red lights or whatever. You just want to get out of paying the fine. Why the hell should we adapt the system to make it easier to break the law without being punished for it?
Are you really that fucking stupid?
My having an account with them obligates them to deliver my traffic under reasonable and customary assumptions about their service.
You signed a contract with your ISP. That contract determines all of their obligations to you.
You cannot morally or (in the US or other former British possessions) legally bind somebody to a contract when you are deliberately relying on that person's not understanding the contract's terms; I believe the term is "meeting of minds".
Where are you getting this from? So, you are saying that you can get out of contractual obligations simply by saying that you didn't read the contract? Bullshit. If you sign it, it's valid.
which means at least not blocking traffic to competitors, and arguably treating every packet exactly the same with no filtering, QoS, transparent proxies, restrictions on servers (how many customers understand the definition of a "server") or anything of the kind.
You are one of those people that wants something for nothing. Every ISP has services with very few restrictions, such as business class cable/DSL and dedicated lines (T1s and so on). These are expensive -- for a reason. The reason is that the bandwidth is reserved for you.
Consumer-grade services, such as regular cable and DSL, are not meant to be used as dedicated connections. Therefore, the ISP does not have enough bandwidth available to give maximum bandwidth to all subscribers at once. This is the reason these connections cost $50 a month instead of $1500 a month. This is also the reason the ISP prohibits servers and other bandwidth-consuming applications.
In short, if you don't like the restrictions your service plan imposes, get a different service plan. Stop whining about getting >3Mbps of bandwidth for only twice the price of a 56K connection.
It's probably a problem with MPlayer. Harly anyone except complete newbies uses WMP to play WMV files. Usually, I see Winamp or some other player.
Bullshit. Any media player can play Windows Media files. All you need to play them is the redistributable Microsoft codecs. Nobody gets screwed; you can install Winamp and play the same files WMP plays and more.
Passphrases are not hard to remember. Instead of remembering seven digits, you could be remembering seven words (which is a _very_ secure passpharase). It's certainly not difficult to remember.
No shit. A lot of R&D probably goes into toothpaste, too. It's just that it is a cheap commodity product sold for 1000x its normal price. You could probably buy a gallon of bulk inkjet ink for the price of one cartridge.
I've had really good luck with Samsung's low end laser printers. They are built a lot better than the $500 HPs and cost around $100-$150. I have an old ML-1210 yet. It's a vertical feed printer and it hasn't had a single paper jam in the last 2 years! It has official Linux drivers from Samsung.
In short: I think HP is one of those companies that used to be good, but now just make low-end crap.
Unless Valve agrees to refund the money to people have paid for HL2, they must unbundle Steam. And they should definitely be fined, to discourage this type of violations.
Usually, something like that implies that the internet might be needed to activate the game or to play online. However, in the case of HL2, you have to continuously remain connected even when playing the single-player game. Therefore, the packaging is misleading.
Let's see, I can have expensive surgery with a 5-10% risk of serious complications (which include complete loss of vision and many others) and a 40% rate of more minor complications (some of which are also permanent and more annoying than contact lenses). And the surgery might not even correct the problem completely! No thanks.
I find that if you don't follow the instructions on your "no-rub" solution bottle and actually rub the contacts vigorously, they last a lot longer (you get way more protein off that way). I've been using the same set of 2-week contacts for damn near 3 months now and they feel the same as new ones do.
By the way, has anyone noticed that the Wal-mart (equate) brand contact lens solution is obviously the same stuff as Bausch and Lomb ReNu at about 1/6th of the price? The list of ingredients, patent numbers, and directions are word-for-word identical. Also, if you compare the date codes and markings on the boxes and the bottles it is obvious they are made with the same type of machine. I don't find it entirely implausible to believe they are made on the same production line. It might be that brand loyalty here is high enough that B&L doesn't undercut their higher-priced brands by selling their stuff for cheap.
I've never seen such a user, and I would venture to guess they are far in the minority. Even the most clueless newbie I have seen has used either yahoo or google as their search engine (and knew it wouldn't break their computer). Besides, all it would take for them to switch is a more experienced user suggesting it. Again, it runs into the problem of having high-quality results.
Whatever. You can SELL britney spears records with marketing, but if people don't like them, they won't listen to them.
With search engines, there is nothing to buy, absolutely no user lock-in, and the user can switch anytime with absolutely no effort. If I notice that MSN Search gives me consistently better results than Google, I'll use it. If I notice the results aren't as good, I won't try it again. This isn't just true of techies, it's true of anyone who actually uses a search engine.
MS can spend as much as they want on marketing and it won't grow their market share unless their search engine is at least as good as Google. Google has turned from a relative unknown to #1, and I have yet to see a Google advertisement.
The driver on the host has to ask the keyboard for its descriptors when the host enumerates it. The keylogger can simply grab them at that point. This does require a significantly smarter keylogger, though.