where's the porn-block extension for autocomplete?
Can we get a system that ties into one of those child protecting porn blockers but instead of blocking the content, it just hides it (no history, autocomplete, etc)? Who wants to switch to private browsing mode everytime a questionable link catches your eye and you think it might be time for a little R&R...lets put these content filters to work for us!
There isn't a lot of information but unless there are strings specifically attatched to the reimbursement, it is just that--a reimbursement.
I imagine this is quite similar to employers who do mobile phone or internet reimbursements in that they are offering it as a benefit and there is no transfer in ownership (though there may be some assumption of increased availability to work outside the office). When an employer reimburses you for personal vehicle use, they aren't claiming ownership on anything in your car...
Yeah...I found that odd as well. Wow is about the community and centralized server controlling everything so of course it makes sense to have it online only. If you were playing with your friends and a homebrew wow server, it would be pretty boring to do anything besides 5 man instances.
Games that are based on static maps however have a need for more connection options. The few LAN parties I have been to relied pretty heavily on LAN play. Sure a few people can all go and get on the same CS server and play around but when you start adding too many people, it gets laggy as all hell. Cheapo home network hardware and low upload cable connections are not meant to have 8 people playing on online game on them. LAN play is the only sensible answer to this. If piracy is a concern, I suppose you could still have some authentication to battle.net before starting/joining a LAN game (although I would imagine any such system is easy to spoof/crack). It also hurts those big mega-LANs which AFAIK often do not provide full internet connectivity...
Chicago has lots of privately owned ramps and they are just fine. A company paid to build a ramp and pays to maintain it so why not charge people to park in it...
Chicago has sold the metered street parking to a private company...these spots do not exist as definable propery like a ramp (you can't go out and buy the shoulder of a street) and their upkeep is the responsibility of the same road crews that fix the road. We basically sold the profits from street parking for a one time payment and we still have to pay the upkeep on everything except the meter itself.
Well, it runs on S60 but as far as I can tell has absolutely nothing to do with google voice.
Being able to instant message or chat on Google Talk and make voip calls from my phone are all fine and dandy but are not the features offered by a Google Voice app
We have a dollar coin here in the US too. I kind of like them, but everyone I know seems to hate them. They all question why we would want change to be worth so much as if change has always been worth almost nothing...maybe they need more grandmas saying "when I was your age...something something...only a nickle" so that they can remember that while currency has inflated to the point where change isn't worth anything, we have a long history of coins being quite useful.
In denmark, a 20kr coin will probably cost you about 5 USD depending on the rate and where you get it changed...those dollar coins are not even close but they probably won't be very well loved until we kill the penny and paper dollar, and get someone else to stop using them besides the post office and minneapolis light rail ticket machines...
If chicago hadn't sold off their parking meters, maybe the future could have been meters that are also payable by Chicago Cards (rfid based transit cards that maintain a balance and track active transfers and stuff). I can already get a card (via http://www.igocars.org/) that lets me both rent a car by the hour and take the bus/train--why not make the same card able to pay for parking and set it up in such a way that I can "swipe out" remaining time and use it on another meter.
Sure, it is an almost guaranteed loss in revenue since a lot of abandoned time goes unused but I would even settle for a system that worked like bus transfers...if you swipe out a meter with $.50 credit left, you can use that credit on any meter in the city within a limited transfer period. Stretch it out to 24 hours so people running lots of errands get a break (good job combining car trips instead of making wasteful individual trips) but it still expires at some point so the city can keep the unused time.
I always liked having meters as the cheap option though. I haven't had to park here (chicago) since the new meters started appearing but it used always work this way:
People too poor for a ramp (read: college students me) could instead trade time for a spot. Sure, you might have to circle for 10 minutes and park further away but that meter might only cost you 25c for 15 minutes.
I understand that more expensive parking puts the cost of driving more clearly on the driver but I don't like it. Ramps are already quite expensive and meters are hard to find so I like being able to spend my time instead of money (it still puts the cost on me...just in a way that I can handle). Also, a lot of the heaviest drivers don't use meters--they have monthly parking passes for work at a steep discount compared to hourly parking.
I get that increasing the perceived cost driving will cut down on unessential car use but sometimes it is simply necessary. Necessary car use is what things like uhaul and zipcar (and igo car--the chicago only zipcar equivalent that I use sometimes) are for...whenever I am parking somewhere, you can rest assured that I *need* to be doing that driving because I am already paying out the ass for mileage on a uhaul or on the clock for my igo car...
Not to take this too far off topic but would you mind answering a question or two about how GV works on a G1?
When you want to make a call with your GV number, is it instant? Does it start ringing as fast as normal or is there a weird pause (the S60 program basically had to send a request to GV and then wait for GV to call back the phone which led to long pauses in automatic mode or having to answer the call in the normal mode).
How well does it work without data access? The features on the S60 app required data which is ok (although I am on pay per use data so I try to keep it down) but it seemed to delay or prevent action if I didnt have a good 3g connection even for things like making a call.
Also the my faves thing is one of the first thoughts I had about GV although it is also about the *only* thing that a carrier could actually get mad about...all the other features of GV still use regular minutes (cheap international is already available via calling card type services you can have stored in your address book) or standard data...it will be interesting to see what T-Mobile does about this (especially since they are the only network that even has a real GV app)
So Apple is holding Google's app in limbo until they have time to reverse engineer the functionality and release it as native functionality of the iPhone?
That's ok with me...I tried an add-on app on my S60 phone (though admittedly not one developed by google) and the google voice stuff was like jumping through hoops when you wanted to use it. I would love it to be native functionality
leveling and progressive questing was fun. once you hit the cap, you know that you have more content to experience (raids/heroics/whatever) but you can't get there as part of a story line as you level...you get there by grinding for rep, money, and consumables (most of which entails repeating the exact same thing every day rather than moving to a new zone as you progress). Stop with the expansions and make a WoW 2 already (or a WoS or WoD)
How expensive was the visual voice mail and what does it really have to do with the iphone other than it being the first device to support it?
When I was testing a BB Storm for work on verizon, it had visual voicemail (although at $3 a month or so) so it must not have been that expensive to reproduce seeing as verizon doesn't even seem to advertise the fact that it exists very heavily...
I actually recall there being some arena tournaments arranged that sounded like that (maybe it was a big LAN that did it or someone using the open test servers that let you get a standard setup).
It was something like you got an arena set and got to choose your skills. There were some builds that wouldn't work because they relied on different stats than the arena sets provided but it sounded like a good idea.
I just looked up my old characters that were sold (guy renamed them before changing emails so I knew the names)...idiot leveled my twink out of 30-39 to level 52 and only replaced 2 items since everything I had was almost as good as it gets (I wasn't willing to shell out for like...staff of jordan but I had good enchants and my main was max tailoring and able to do things like red mageweave pants with non-epic spellthread). Poor little blood elf is now an abandoned level 52 character as neither it nor the main have been played since Armory started having the stats page
I think you are right, that part of WoW is gone forever. The only time that experiance will return is when blizzard EOLs WoW and stops releasing expansions in preparation ofr WoW2 or world of starcraft or whatever.
I sold my account about 1.75yrs ago and stopped playing about 2yrs ago...sorry blizzard! but while I hate playing with people who clearly ebayed themselves a 60 (or 70, 80...90?), how am I going to turn down an opportunity to turn my playtime into an extra $300+ in my pocket for a mediocre account (it was a 70 shadow priest with some kara gear and the best 39 pvp frost mage in the battlegroup).
I just didn't like playing anymore. I had a blast in the low level BGs but 70 pvp was awful since it was just a series of stun, fear, silence, repeat (hint: people don't like losing control of their characters...it is much more frustrating than simply dying). At 39, I got to pvp with people who had clearly played through the game and were good with teamwork and stuff...there were too many idiots at 70 but I eventually realized that I was playing wow as if it were some FPS with BGs being different servers so...I stopped playing and started playing FPS games again.
I loved the initial experience of WoW when leveling my first char but that experiance is gone now and won't come back since the level cap is now incredibly far away from where you start. The only problem is that if I play something else, I just compare it to wow--I tried playing the free Runes of Magic and said "If I want to play another MMO that is identical to wow...I can afford $15 a month for the real thing" but now I am realizing that a game like that might be the only way to get that experience of a game without a full max-level population...
Also, I always thought it would be fun to see a wow-BG game...give people some basic gear options (like the low level BG rewards and a few other items to allow a wider build selection) and let them spec out characters with the proper number of talent points...I always liked the 30-39 and 40-49 ranges for class balance and ability to compete without twinking...and let it run like a normal online game.
Its not advertisers that drive new technology but rather pornographers. Think about how much digital video was pushed forward by the back office techies at porn distributers? They pushed dvds to their limits, pioneered steaming video formats, etc...
When playboy or other mens magazines take up this type of technology for themselves (or I suppose publishes advertising with this technology), you will begin to see production numbers come up and per unit costs drop as the technology improves.
I don't think that works when your product competes with one of apples products...then I think they block it from the app store (just wait until there is an osx app store)
I agree with you that the ebay stuff is awful but I will throw it out there that I know a lot of people who maintain both personal and business paypal accounts (like you should do with bank accounts) so that they are only hit with fees when they have to be.
Check out this article on what happened to paypal. I thought it was pretty interesting since I remember paypal being an innovative (pretty much pioneered captchas), competitive company that did a good thing for consumers and was able to out-compete ebay on their own turf (remember billpoint?). Nowadays when someone like google wants to compete on ebays turf, the just get turned away--ebay seems to forget that one of the reasons everyone used paypal was because paypal could do a better job than ebay's own in-house service. I think this quote from the article is most telling about paypal's stagnation and change into a pure revenue stream:
Safely nestled within the belly of the eBay monopoly, and without Billpoint to foster a competitive itch, PayPal is far removed from the market forces that sparked the rapid innovation and entrepreneurial fire that marked its early days.
That sounds fishy as your credit card transaction was in country. The credit card's involvement with paypal starts and ends in the states--paypal completes the international transaction.
Visa is not usually very hard to talk into doing a chargeback since it has very little effect on them
Not that I don't prefer things sans fees but do you really think it is unreasonable from them to change you a small amount for your *business* transactions?
If you want to accept credit cards, paypal is by far the easiest way to do so since you don't need to qualify for a merchant account and get set up with a card processor.
The anger here is split between the fact that they added the fees without really alerting anyone and the fact that until now their business model had always been to give people free access for personal and near-personal (small scale ebay selling etc.) and then charge fees to the business users who receive payments. People would get comfortable with using the service as a buyer (no fees) and then as a small scale seller (fees only on CC based transactions) before becoming a true revenue stream for paypal when they move a business onto paypals system. Paypal has a lot of annoying stuff going on and maybe some fees are too high (although the real fee problem lies in their parent company getting double fees since you basically have to use paypal with ebay), but I am not sure that charging a small amount for business transactions that cost them money on a site that is otherwise cost and ad free is that big of a problem.
Sometimes I get stuck on words that I have misspelled that firefox is not very good at correcting and I actually have to misspell the word *worse* in order to get it to tell me the right spelling.
This usually happens with double letters, I just tried to type a few examples but firefox got them right but think of a longer word with two double letter pairs and I only double one of them or a word that should only have one double letter pair but I leave it single and double another letter. An example that firefox gets right would be "tomorrow" spelled as either "tommorow" or "tommorrow" (although I am a better speller than that). Whenever I find a word like that, I have to either attempt to spell it correctly which often turns out wrong or I have to bastardize the spelling to something I know is wrong for it to spit out the right spelling.
as an aside, did anyone else find themselves making far MORE typos and spelling errors in responding to this topic than they usually make?
I got to read the original article (though it would be nice of/. linked to it directly or mentioned it in the summary) and read a few posts of the twitter followers and such. Interesting concept, I wonder how much of it he will get to expense later (and if the 5k out of his salary if found is really enough to make him ultra paranoid about being found)
Slashdot Mirror
where's the porn-block extension for autocomplete? Can we get a system that ties into one of those child protecting porn blockers but instead of blocking the content, it just hides it (no history, autocomplete, etc)? Who wants to switch to private browsing mode everytime a questionable link catches your eye and you think it might be time for a little R&R...lets put these content filters to work for us!
I imagine this is quite similar to employers who do mobile phone or internet reimbursements in that they are offering it as a benefit and there is no transfer in ownership (though there may be some assumption of increased availability to work outside the office). When an employer reimburses you for personal vehicle use, they aren't claiming ownership on anything in your car...
I knew that looked familiar
Games that are based on static maps however have a need for more connection options. The few LAN parties I have been to relied pretty heavily on LAN play. Sure a few people can all go and get on the same CS server and play around but when you start adding too many people, it gets laggy as all hell. Cheapo home network hardware and low upload cable connections are not meant to have 8 people playing on online game on them. LAN play is the only sensible answer to this. If piracy is a concern, I suppose you could still have some authentication to battle.net before starting/joining a LAN game (although I would imagine any such system is easy to spoof/crack). It also hurts those big mega-LANs which AFAIK often do not provide full internet connectivity...
Chicago has lots of privately owned ramps and they are just fine. A company paid to build a ramp and pays to maintain it so why not charge people to park in it...
Chicago has sold the metered street parking to a private company...these spots do not exist as definable propery like a ramp (you can't go out and buy the shoulder of a street) and their upkeep is the responsibility of the same road crews that fix the road. We basically sold the profits from street parking for a one time payment and we still have to pay the upkeep on everything except the meter itself.
Being able to instant message or chat on Google Talk and make voip calls from my phone are all fine and dandy but are not the features offered by a Google Voice app
We have a dollar coin here in the US too. I kind of like them, but everyone I know seems to hate them. They all question why we would want change to be worth so much as if change has always been worth almost nothing...maybe they need more grandmas saying "when I was your age...something something...only a nickle" so that they can remember that while currency has inflated to the point where change isn't worth anything, we have a long history of coins being quite useful.
In denmark, a 20kr coin will probably cost you about 5 USD depending on the rate and where you get it changed...those dollar coins are not even close but they probably won't be very well loved until we kill the penny and paper dollar, and get someone else to stop using them besides the post office and minneapolis light rail ticket machines...
If chicago hadn't sold off their parking meters, maybe the future could have been meters that are also payable by Chicago Cards (rfid based transit cards that maintain a balance and track active transfers and stuff). I can already get a card (via http://www.igocars.org/) that lets me both rent a car by the hour and take the bus/train--why not make the same card able to pay for parking and set it up in such a way that I can "swipe out" remaining time and use it on another meter.
Sure, it is an almost guaranteed loss in revenue since a lot of abandoned time goes unused but I would even settle for a system that worked like bus transfers...if you swipe out a meter with $.50 credit left, you can use that credit on any meter in the city within a limited transfer period. Stretch it out to 24 hours so people running lots of errands get a break (good job combining car trips instead of making wasteful individual trips) but it still expires at some point so the city can keep the unused time.
People too poor for a ramp (read: college students me) could instead trade time for a spot. Sure, you might have to circle for 10 minutes and park further away but that meter might only cost you 25c for 15 minutes.
I understand that more expensive parking puts the cost of driving more clearly on the driver but I don't like it. Ramps are already quite expensive and meters are hard to find so I like being able to spend my time instead of money (it still puts the cost on me...just in a way that I can handle). Also, a lot of the heaviest drivers don't use meters--they have monthly parking passes for work at a steep discount compared to hourly parking.
I get that increasing the perceived cost driving will cut down on unessential car use but sometimes it is simply necessary. Necessary car use is what things like uhaul and zipcar (and igo car--the chicago only zipcar equivalent that I use sometimes) are for...whenever I am parking somewhere, you can rest assured that I *need* to be doing that driving because I am already paying out the ass for mileage on a uhaul or on the clock for my igo car...
When you want to make a call with your GV number, is it instant? Does it start ringing as fast as normal or is there a weird pause (the S60 program basically had to send a request to GV and then wait for GV to call back the phone which led to long pauses in automatic mode or having to answer the call in the normal mode).
How well does it work without data access? The features on the S60 app required data which is ok (although I am on pay per use data so I try to keep it down) but it seemed to delay or prevent action if I didnt have a good 3g connection even for things like making a call.
Also the my faves thing is one of the first thoughts I had about GV although it is also about the *only* thing that a carrier could actually get mad about...all the other features of GV still use regular minutes (cheap international is already available via calling card type services you can have stored in your address book) or standard data...it will be interesting to see what T-Mobile does about this (especially since they are the only network that even has a real GV app)
Come on google, throw me a bone here
That's ok with me...I tried an add-on app on my S60 phone (though admittedly not one developed by google) and the google voice stuff was like jumping through hoops when you wanted to use it. I would love it to be native functionality
leveling and progressive questing was fun. once you hit the cap, you know that you have more content to experience (raids/heroics/whatever) but you can't get there as part of a story line as you level...you get there by grinding for rep, money, and consumables (most of which entails repeating the exact same thing every day rather than moving to a new zone as you progress). Stop with the expansions and make a WoW 2 already (or a WoS or WoD)
When I was testing a BB Storm for work on verizon, it had visual voicemail (although at $3 a month or so) so it must not have been that expensive to reproduce seeing as verizon doesn't even seem to advertise the fact that it exists very heavily...
It was something like you got an arena set and got to choose your skills. There were some builds that wouldn't work because they relied on different stats than the arena sets provided but it sounded like a good idea.
I just looked up my old characters that were sold (guy renamed them before changing emails so I knew the names)...idiot leveled my twink out of 30-39 to level 52 and only replaced 2 items since everything I had was almost as good as it gets (I wasn't willing to shell out for like...staff of jordan but I had good enchants and my main was max tailoring and able to do things like red mageweave pants with non-epic spellthread). Poor little blood elf is now an abandoned level 52 character as neither it nor the main have been played since Armory started having the stats page
I sold my account about 1.75yrs ago and stopped playing about 2yrs ago...sorry blizzard! but while I hate playing with people who clearly ebayed themselves a 60 (or 70, 80...90?), how am I going to turn down an opportunity to turn my playtime into an extra $300+ in my pocket for a mediocre account (it was a 70 shadow priest with some kara gear and the best 39 pvp frost mage in the battlegroup).
I just didn't like playing anymore. I had a blast in the low level BGs but 70 pvp was awful since it was just a series of stun, fear, silence, repeat (hint: people don't like losing control of their characters...it is much more frustrating than simply dying). At 39, I got to pvp with people who had clearly played through the game and were good with teamwork and stuff...there were too many idiots at 70 but I eventually realized that I was playing wow as if it were some FPS with BGs being different servers so...I stopped playing and started playing FPS games again.
I loved the initial experience of WoW when leveling my first char but that experiance is gone now and won't come back since the level cap is now incredibly far away from where you start. The only problem is that if I play something else, I just compare it to wow--I tried playing the free Runes of Magic and said "If I want to play another MMO that is identical to wow...I can afford $15 a month for the real thing" but now I am realizing that a game like that might be the only way to get that experience of a game without a full max-level population...
Also, I always thought it would be fun to see a wow-BG game...give people some basic gear options (like the low level BG rewards and a few other items to allow a wider build selection) and let them spec out characters with the proper number of talent points...I always liked the 30-39 and 40-49 ranges for class balance and ability to compete without twinking...and let it run like a normal online game.
When playboy or other mens magazines take up this type of technology for themselves (or I suppose publishes advertising with this technology), you will begin to see production numbers come up and per unit costs drop as the technology improves.
You had better believe google is watching
I don't think that works when your product competes with one of apples products...then I think they block it from the app store (just wait until there is an osx app store)
hey look my first accepted story
Check out this article on what happened to paypal. I thought it was pretty interesting since I remember paypal being an innovative (pretty much pioneered captchas), competitive company that did a good thing for consumers and was able to out-compete ebay on their own turf (remember billpoint?). Nowadays when someone like google wants to compete on ebays turf, the just get turned away--ebay seems to forget that one of the reasons everyone used paypal was because paypal could do a better job than ebay's own in-house service. I think this quote from the article is most telling about paypal's stagnation and change into a pure revenue stream:
Safely nestled within the belly of the eBay monopoly, and without Billpoint to foster a competitive itch, PayPal is far removed from the market forces that sparked the rapid innovation and entrepreneurial fire that marked its early days.
Visa is not usually very hard to talk into doing a chargeback since it has very little effect on them
If you want to accept credit cards, paypal is by far the easiest way to do so since you don't need to qualify for a merchant account and get set up with a card processor.
The anger here is split between the fact that they added the fees without really alerting anyone and the fact that until now their business model had always been to give people free access for personal and near-personal (small scale ebay selling etc.) and then charge fees to the business users who receive payments. People would get comfortable with using the service as a buyer (no fees) and then as a small scale seller (fees only on CC based transactions) before becoming a true revenue stream for paypal when they move a business onto paypals system. Paypal has a lot of annoying stuff going on and maybe some fees are too high (although the real fee problem lies in their parent company getting double fees since you basically have to use paypal with ebay), but I am not sure that charging a small amount for business transactions that cost them money on a site that is otherwise cost and ad free is that big of a problem.
This usually happens with double letters, I just tried to type a few examples but firefox got them right but think of a longer word with two double letter pairs and I only double one of them or a word that should only have one double letter pair but I leave it single and double another letter. An example that firefox gets right would be "tomorrow" spelled as either "tommorow" or "tommorrow" (although I am a better speller than that). Whenever I find a word like that, I have to either attempt to spell it correctly which often turns out wrong or I have to bastardize the spelling to something I know is wrong for it to spit out the right spelling.
as an aside, did anyone else find themselves making far MORE typos and spelling errors in responding to this topic than they usually make?
I got to read the original article (though it would be nice of /. linked to it directly or mentioned it in the summary) and read a few posts of the twitter followers and such. Interesting concept, I wonder how much of it he will get to expense later (and if the 5k out of his salary if found is really enough to make him ultra paranoid about being found)