Try running OpenGL-based animation with texturing, full screen DVD playback, or full screen TV capture.
<rant>In addition, OSS's dependency hell is really snowballing at this point. I've got a half-dozen versions of most of the libraries in my/lib directory because every time I install something I find it's dependent on a particular version of something, which is dependent on a particular version of something else, yada yada... I've given up installing quite a few apps after the 5th or 6th level of prerequisites I have to download and build in order to get it all together. Things like OpenSSL needs PERL just to CONFIGURE-- not to build mind you, but just to CONFIGURE to build on a platform. I ran into that one on an AIX platform that hadn't as of yet had any OSS installed. And the latest PERL has outlived its usefulness-- it was once a lean-mean scripting tool, but not anymore it ain't... </rant>
I haven't heard any stories about Longhorn, I thought it was mostly Gate's fever dreams at this point so I can't comment on that.
The language of I-D is rather problematic-- in effect, evolution is a design mechanism. And based on one common definition of intelligence-- "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge," it can be said that evolution has this characteristic through DNA-- as it does in fact acquire the information "learned," and apply it in new organisms.
What evolution as an "intelligent designer" is not however, is self-aware. The I-D proponents never address what it means to demonstrate the self-awareness of the "intelligent designer," as if it is implicit. The fact is, it is the self-awareness of the "designer" that is at issue, not the "intelligence." They can demonstrate "intelligent design" all day and they still haven't contradicted evolution-- a pity they don't even realize it, but I suppose if they did they'd lose interest in it.
What the grantparent says is that since we define Bing Bang as the point where time starts, there's no meaning in questioning what happens before that. There's no "before".
Actualy his analogy is quite good considering the paradoxical nature of both questions;)
I'd say it isn't very good, as obviously it didn't get the message across.
I prefer Steven Hawking's example-- "asking what came 'before' the Big Bang is like asking what's north of the North Pole."...
The problem is, there's a HUGE PENALTY for this feature and the average desktop user doesn't need it. The fact that the Linux UI groups can't get this through their thick skulls is what's holding Linux on the desktop back, as it's diverting attention from the real solutions.
I use Linux, but I don't run anything that doesn't work in a console or with svgalib. I dual-boot to Windows for anything else that needs pixels or fonts. When DirectFB gets a decent window manager on Linux, perhaps I'll switch then, but at the moment, it doesn't look like a solution is on the way anytime soon.
And this is a HUGE opportunity for Apple, should they choose to take it. The availability of OS-X on commodity Intel hardware could cause me and more than a few others to toss Linux out the window, saving only the useful OSS...
Yeah, well, the plural of email is, uh.. email. The singular of email has become "an email" because ignorant journalists persistently misused the language. "Email" is short for "electronic mail" and we don't use "a mail" to refer to a single piece of snail mail, as the term "mail" is in fact plural. There's no point in fighting it, "an email" is pretty much a done deal. Common (mis)usage trumps standardization. Therefore, if a sufficient number of journalists start referring to "euros" then the English plural of euro may become euros de facto.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so meny of them to choose from. --Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Isn't that effectively "downloading" copyrighted material? How is that, and how should that be viewed? Is taping music off the radio "stealing?" Do we refer to those who tape their favorite TV shows at home on their VCR "thieves?" How is that different from downloading music from the internet?
And unsuprisingly, by Microsoft, the undisputed king of unreliability.
Any spam filtering the users are not directly in control of is counterproductive and contributes to the general unreliability of Email. Centralized control of filtering is counter to the very raison-d'etre of the internet. Leave it to clueless Bill-- still thinking he can control the internet. Just goes to show he never really has figured out what the 'net is all about, but then he's a control-freak, and the 'net is a control freak's worst nightmare.
Out of curiosity, do you think that changing channels on the TV when a commercial comes on is immoral or stealing?
Actually, it's now pretty irrelevant. More people use commercials to go to the fridge or take a leak than switch channels, and the advertisers have realized that. So, now they're inculcating themselves into the primary program content-- purchasing space in the show itself for their product to appear or be mentioned in the dialog. For me, that doesn't work either as modern content has gotten so crappy that I've since stopped my cable TV service, and only watch PBS on broadcast (and even that, less and less as they're milking both worlds-- ad revenue AND paid subscribers). Where I have spent my money is on DVDs which are currently at least, pretty ad-free. I have enough content in old TV shows, movies, etc., that I'd rather watch anyway, that the adverdroids have no way to get to. If in the future they start putting commercials on DVD I'll no longer pay for them and go back to reading books. On the internet, I don't use adblocker, but something at least as powerful-- I rarely see any ads-- even on Google where they have conveniently made them easy to ignore. When the forces of unsolicited advertising pollute the waters enough, I look for some kind of clearer shores, and they're there-- there are bookstores full of content I haven't read yet, and that's where I'll go if they insist on making the online or video environment a cesspool. If a TV station then doesn't get the ad revenue it needs to upgrade to HDTV gear, that's just too f**'n bad...
And the demise of the CPB will not really give these demons what they really want-- the elimination of competition from non-advertising content. In fact, they open up a whole new category of competition, which I'm looking forward to. They are no longer in control, despite the posturing and political shenanigans, though it's clear they still think they are in control. Their now magnificent irrelevance is truly awe inspiring.
Arrogant corporations seem to think they have a right to my eyeballs. If they weren't so oblivious, I'd say they had a rude awakening coming, but I doubt they'll get it and instead act the whining victim and go hide under the skirts of the only entity to which their inherently corrupt nature pales in comparison, the U.S. Congress. All their activities are only so much fiddling while Rome burns.
Actually, free-rider situations like this are precisely where market forces don't work efficiently. Everyone reading this site while blocking ads is able to do so only because of people like me who do view them (and subscribers). And I free-ride at the expense of people who are willing to view pop-ups.
Unsolicited advertising now has a name-- SPAM. Whether via apyware, stealthware, cookie tracking, email or site supported popup or adspace, it's still SPAM and its days are numbered. Those who's livelihood depends on it are going to have to go out and find real jobs within a few years. You forget that noone controls the web, it is a cooperative. If the users won't cooperate with your business plan, it's time to find a new one. The whole POINT of the internet is it gives individual users control-- if they don't have it they'll go elsewhere-- and since the web is not dependent on centralized services that are controlled by a few, whiner marketdroids who claim the sky is falling are really only talking about the free ride they've been getting on our eyeballs. They are the ones that are going to have to pay to get our eyeballs, and pay us directly, not through content-riding, as the users will no longer put up with it. Most of the content on the internet is NOT supported by advertising dollars, just some of the content provided by the market-protecting dinosaurs who can't get used to the idea that they are no longer in control.
If you want to put your spam in front of MY eyeballs, you are going to have to cough up some hard cold cash and send it directly to ME, not to Google, Yahoo or some other intermediary. And I will only agree to look, but not to buy, even if you do. Get used to it.
That's what lost me from Yahoo search years ago. In the early days, they used to really work hard when you enter a search term to keep you on their site for an extra page by first taking you to some kind of intermediate page where you would have to select a subcategory before you would get to actual search results. It was just a ploy to throw an extra page of ads at you before you left the site. Well, I left the site for good and haven't been back to their search. In fact, I avoided them like the plague in any form for about a year or so till finally I needed to check something out in the groups and then the finance section and I've found those at least tolerable-- once I installed an ad-blocker on their group articles that is, as they randomly subject you to spam pages. YMMV though, as I use a pretty draconian HTML filter so I don't see a lot of the crap that pages are throwing out at people-- I NEVER see pop-ups, for example, are they still even using them?
They seem to keep on coming up with research that says, "Offshore everything! oh and by the way, we just happen to have a large offshore consulting division, what a coincidence".
Wouldn't that sorta backfire? I mean, if there are supposedly fewer programming jobs in the US, wouldn't that ultimately mean there are a surplus of programmers in the US which according to the law of supply and demand, you could get cheaper than you used to? Wouldn't that actually undermine the argument for outsourcing?
The depth is controlled by the property of CCD itself. For a very expensive professional version of a CCD, saturation probably occurs about 32,000 electrons per pixel. For a commercial version, it'd be much less than that. To-date, there is no CCD camera (that I know of) which can achieve a dwell depth of 1e9 electron per pixel (or 32 bits).
There's at least one camera that achieves increased sensitivity by averaging multiple samples-- though this obviously takes increased exposure time, and it can't be done indefinately for indefinate resolution, but the CCD saturation can be worked around to some extent...
It's true that the problem is with ISPs and not with those who create and maintain blacklists. This spam solution however, is contributing to the general unreliability of email. Consequently, I for one, refuse to utilize an ISP unless I can turn OFF the spam filtering for my email accounts. That is how I SELECT an ISP. Otherwise email is just too darn unreliable due to false positive blocking. I maintain my own filtering, so I can address problems with it immediately, and I don't lose emails as I keep a complete log and cache filtered mails for a limited time.
While not everyone is prepared to take filtering into their own hands, DIY spam filtering may take another turn with the advent of better filtering add-ons to your own email clients. It's more efficient to filter further upstream, but unless ISPs start more generally making upstream custom filtering available to their users the reliability of email will continue to get worse as the spam arms race forces ISPs to institute more and more draconian filtering rules. But they've chosen to take on the problem, and if they're not very good at it users will look for better alternatives.
IMHO, the problem of SPAM pales to the problem of the unreliability of email produced by errors in filtering. It's true though, I'm not an ISP-- but an ISP who uses filtering to solve it's internal problems at the expense of its users is out of touch with its user base and that presents an opportunity for its competition.
Like DRM, SPAM filtering as applied by ISPs is not a solution to and end-user problem but a solution to a provider problem. End users are not particularly sympathetic to solutions to problems they don't have that actually cause problems. The customer is always right (many seem to forget that these days), and there's plenty of places to which the customer can walk if they're dissatisfied.
Cool? Hardly. Pathetic is more like it. In the words of Ronald Coleman in "Champagne for Caesar," "If it is noteworthy and rewarding to know that 2 and 2 make 4 to the accompaniment of deafening applause and prizes, then 2 and 2 making 4 will become the top level of learning." If using a multi-billion dollar space program as an incinerator for your classwork is impressive, then you should get your money back on your education...
Ok, I can see some interest in some amateur experiments with radio in this thing, but what's the point of sticking a CD full of student artwork in it just to have it get fried after a couple of weeks? They could throw some artwork into an incinerator on earth and get as much out of it. If that's all they can think to do with this thing, it's a particularly powerful indicator of how bad science education has gotten...
If they want some kids to express themselves, have them put the artwork up on the web or in a gallery or something-- giving them the impression that "flying" it in a spacesuit is anything but a circle-jerk is really pathetic.
What do you expect? We're talking about Microsoft here. I read an extended bio of Gates once-- he LOVES puzzles. He apparently makes the mistake of assuming that the rest of us do as well. A better qualification for good system or interface design would be someone who hates puzzles...
The word is not compatibility, but modularity. The old shells are still useful because they do little more than facilitate basic interconnection of modular entities-- it's the "Less is More" school of design which MS has never had the slightest inkling about (preferring the "kitchen sink" school instead)-- possibly because they still think quality and flexibility is determined by the size of the feature list. In order to keep dinging their customers for upgrade costs, they have this need to constantly add more features. They'll end up with a shell that's about like Perl is now-- grown into an overbloated, version dependent nightmare that they incessantly have to upgrade and evolve way past its optimum.
Well, we actually could use a "tiny-perl", as Perl was great for the first couple of years, but now is suffering from significant bloat and dependency hell. But it looks like the string operations are rather weak in MSH though, if the quick start guide is any indication...
Problem is, within 5 years, your hardware has been updated and it no longer has a compatible drive on it. And compatible drives are no longer available new, so you have to resort to eBay. That is, unless you went through all of your old backups and converted them when you switched over (and the reason you switched over was NOT because of hardware failure)...
I think that the whole heckle and jeckly thing was somewhat disturbing.
Heckle and Jeckly thing? So what did I miss here? Was there some stereotype I didn't notice? Seems to me, at times they had varying accents, some times sort of British, other times sort of New Jersey. I've always been a fan of those magpies...
That was my point-- the shipping address is my work address, and I feel it is inappropriate to attach that to my credit card. While I realize it is an anti-fraud measure, I prefer the convenience and that convenience is available from most of their competitors. While perhaps they can keep their price lower because they have such an anti-fraud measure, I'd rather pay a little more for the convenience of not having to phone them to get an order placed.
Frankly, I'm getting sick and tired of businesses justifying the sacrifice of good customer service in order to keep the price at rock bottom. There are lots of businesses that have figured out how to provide both competitive pricing and good service. Newegg is not one of those IMHO...
Try running OpenGL-based animation with texturing, full screen DVD playback, or full screen TV capture.
<rant>In addition, OSS's dependency hell is really snowballing at this point. I've got a half-dozen versions of most of the libraries in my /lib directory because every time I install something I find it's dependent on a particular version of something, which is dependent on a particular version of something else, yada yada... I've given up installing quite a few apps after the 5th or 6th level of prerequisites I have to download and build in order to get it all together. Things like OpenSSL needs PERL just to CONFIGURE-- not to build mind you, but just to CONFIGURE to build on a platform. I ran into that one on an AIX platform that hadn't as of yet had any OSS installed. And the latest PERL has outlived its usefulness-- it was once a lean-mean scripting tool, but not anymore it ain't... </rant>
I haven't heard any stories about Longhorn, I thought it was mostly Gate's fever dreams at this point so I can't comment on that.
The language of I-D is rather problematic-- in effect, evolution is a design mechanism. And based on one common definition of intelligence-- "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge," it can be said that evolution has this characteristic through DNA-- as it does in fact acquire the information "learned," and apply it in new organisms.
What evolution as an "intelligent designer" is not however, is self-aware. The I-D proponents never address what it means to demonstrate the self-awareness of the "intelligent designer," as if it is implicit. The fact is, it is the self-awareness of the "designer" that is at issue, not the "intelligence." They can demonstrate "intelligent design" all day and they still haven't contradicted evolution-- a pity they don't even realize it, but I suppose if they did they'd lose interest in it.
What the grantparent says is that since we define Bing Bang as the point where time starts, there's no meaning in questioning what happens before that. There's no "before".
Actualy his analogy is quite good considering the paradoxical nature of both questions ;)
I'd say it isn't very good, as obviously it didn't get the message across.
I prefer Steven Hawking's example-- "asking what came 'before' the Big Bang is like asking what's north of the North Pole."...
The problem is, there's a HUGE PENALTY for this feature and the average desktop user doesn't need it. The fact that the Linux UI groups can't get this through their thick skulls is what's holding Linux on the desktop back, as it's diverting attention from the real solutions.
I use Linux, but I don't run anything that doesn't work in a console or with svgalib. I dual-boot to Windows for anything else that needs pixels or fonts. When DirectFB gets a decent window manager on Linux, perhaps I'll switch then, but at the moment, it doesn't look like a solution is on the way anytime soon.
And this is a HUGE opportunity for Apple, should they choose to take it. The availability of OS-X on commodity Intel hardware could cause me and more than a few others to toss Linux out the window, saving only the useful OSS...
Yeah, well, the plural of email is, uh.. email. The singular of email has become "an email" because ignorant journalists persistently misused the language. "Email" is short for "electronic mail" and we don't use "a mail" to refer to a single piece of snail mail, as the term "mail" is in fact plural. There's no point in fighting it, "an email" is pretty much a done deal. Common (mis)usage trumps standardization. Therefore, if a sufficient number of journalists start referring to "euros" then the English plural of euro may become euros de facto.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so meny of them to choose from. --Andrew S. Tanenbaum
The Radio Shack phone recorder is output only-- you'd still need a way to hook the phone output to the mike input.
I thought marijuana was big business too.
Actually, it's not, because BigPharma can't patent it.
Isn't that effectively "downloading" copyrighted material? How is that, and how should that be viewed? Is taping music off the radio "stealing?" Do we refer to those who tape their favorite TV shows at home on their VCR "thieves?" How is that different from downloading music from the internet?
And unsuprisingly, by Microsoft, the undisputed king of unreliability.
Any spam filtering the users are not directly in control of is counterproductive and contributes to the general unreliability of Email. Centralized control of filtering is counter to the very raison-d'etre of the internet. Leave it to clueless Bill-- still thinking he can control the internet. Just goes to show he never really has figured out what the 'net is all about, but then he's a control-freak, and the 'net is a control freak's worst nightmare.
Out of curiosity, do you think that changing channels on the TV when a commercial comes on is immoral or stealing?
Actually, it's now pretty irrelevant. More people use commercials to go to the fridge or take a leak than switch channels, and the advertisers have realized that. So, now they're inculcating themselves into the primary program content-- purchasing space in the show itself for their product to appear or be mentioned in the dialog. For me, that doesn't work either as modern content has gotten so crappy that I've since stopped my cable TV service, and only watch PBS on broadcast (and even that, less and less as they're milking both worlds-- ad revenue AND paid subscribers). Where I have spent my money is on DVDs which are currently at least, pretty ad-free. I have enough content in old TV shows, movies, etc., that I'd rather watch anyway, that the adverdroids have no way to get to. If in the future they start putting commercials on DVD I'll no longer pay for them and go back to reading books. On the internet, I don't use adblocker, but something at least as powerful-- I rarely see any ads-- even on Google where they have conveniently made them easy to ignore. When the forces of unsolicited advertising pollute the waters enough, I look for some kind of clearer shores, and they're there-- there are bookstores full of content I haven't read yet, and that's where I'll go if they insist on making the online or video environment a cesspool. If a TV station then doesn't get the ad revenue it needs to upgrade to HDTV gear, that's just too f**'n bad...
And the demise of the CPB will not really give these demons what they really want-- the elimination of competition from non-advertising content. In fact, they open up a whole new category of competition, which I'm looking forward to. They are no longer in control, despite the posturing and political shenanigans, though it's clear they still think they are in control. Their now magnificent irrelevance is truly awe inspiring.
Arrogant corporations seem to think they have a right to my eyeballs. If they weren't so oblivious, I'd say they had a rude awakening coming, but I doubt they'll get it and instead act the whining victim and go hide under the skirts of the only entity to which their inherently corrupt nature pales in comparison, the U.S. Congress. All their activities are only so much fiddling while Rome burns.
Actually, free-rider situations like this are precisely where market forces don't work efficiently. Everyone reading this site while blocking ads is able to do so only because of people like me who do view them (and subscribers). And I free-ride at the expense of people who are willing to view pop-ups.
Unsolicited advertising now has a name-- SPAM. Whether via apyware, stealthware, cookie tracking, email or site supported popup or adspace, it's still SPAM and its days are numbered. Those who's livelihood depends on it are going to have to go out and find real jobs within a few years. You forget that noone controls the web, it is a cooperative. If the users won't cooperate with your business plan, it's time to find a new one. The whole POINT of the internet is it gives individual users control-- if they don't have it they'll go elsewhere-- and since the web is not dependent on centralized services that are controlled by a few, whiner marketdroids who claim the sky is falling are really only talking about the free ride they've been getting on our eyeballs. They are the ones that are going to have to pay to get our eyeballs, and pay us directly, not through content-riding, as the users will no longer put up with it. Most of the content on the internet is NOT supported by advertising dollars, just some of the content provided by the market-protecting dinosaurs who can't get used to the idea that they are no longer in control.
If you want to put your spam in front of MY eyeballs, you are going to have to cough up some hard cold cash and send it directly to ME, not to Google, Yahoo or some other intermediary. And I will only agree to look, but not to buy, even if you do. Get used to it.
That's what lost me from Yahoo search years ago. In the early days, they used to really work hard when you enter a search term to keep you on their site for an extra page by first taking you to some kind of intermediate page where you would have to select a subcategory before you would get to actual search results. It was just a ploy to throw an extra page of ads at you before you left the site. Well, I left the site for good and haven't been back to their search. In fact, I avoided them like the plague in any form for about a year or so till finally I needed to check something out in the groups and then the finance section and I've found those at least tolerable-- once I installed an ad-blocker on their group articles that is, as they randomly subject you to spam pages. YMMV though, as I use a pretty draconian HTML filter so I don't see a lot of the crap that pages are throwing out at people-- I NEVER see pop-ups, for example, are they still even using them?
It's free press...
They seem to keep on coming up with research that says, "Offshore everything! oh and by the way, we just happen to have a large offshore consulting division, what a coincidence".
Wouldn't that sorta backfire? I mean, if there are supposedly fewer programming jobs in the US, wouldn't that ultimately mean there are a surplus of programmers in the US which according to the law of supply and demand, you could get cheaper than you used to? Wouldn't that actually undermine the argument for outsourcing?
The depth is controlled by the property of CCD itself. For a very expensive professional version of a CCD, saturation probably occurs about 32,000 electrons per pixel. For a commercial version, it'd be much less than that. To-date, there is no CCD camera (that I know of) which can achieve a dwell depth of 1e9 electron per pixel (or 32 bits).
There's at least one camera that achieves increased sensitivity by averaging multiple samples-- though this obviously takes increased exposure time, and it can't be done indefinately for indefinate resolution, but the CCD saturation can be worked around to some extent...
It's true that the problem is with ISPs and not with those who create and maintain blacklists. This spam solution however, is contributing to the general unreliability of email. Consequently, I for one, refuse to utilize an ISP unless I can turn OFF the spam filtering for my email accounts. That is how I SELECT an ISP. Otherwise email is just too darn unreliable due to false positive blocking. I maintain my own filtering, so I can address problems with it immediately, and I don't lose emails as I keep a complete log and cache filtered mails for a limited time.
While not everyone is prepared to take filtering into their own hands, DIY spam filtering may take another turn with the advent of better filtering add-ons to your own email clients. It's more efficient to filter further upstream, but unless ISPs start more generally making upstream custom filtering available to their users the reliability of email will continue to get worse as the spam arms race forces ISPs to institute more and more draconian filtering rules. But they've chosen to take on the problem, and if they're not very good at it users will look for better alternatives.
IMHO, the problem of SPAM pales to the problem of the unreliability of email produced by errors in filtering. It's true though, I'm not an ISP-- but an ISP who uses filtering to solve it's internal problems at the expense of its users is out of touch with its user base and that presents an opportunity for its competition.
Like DRM, SPAM filtering as applied by ISPs is not a solution to and end-user problem but a solution to a provider problem. End users are not particularly sympathetic to solutions to problems they don't have that actually cause problems. The customer is always right (many seem to forget that these days), and there's plenty of places to which the customer can walk if they're dissatisfied.
Cool? Hardly. Pathetic is more like it. In the words of Ronald Coleman in "Champagne for Caesar," "If it is noteworthy and rewarding to know that 2 and 2 make 4 to the accompaniment of deafening applause and prizes, then 2 and 2 making 4 will become the top level of learning." If using a multi-billion dollar space program as an incinerator for your classwork is impressive, then you should get your money back on your education...
Ok, I can see some interest in some amateur experiments with radio in this thing, but what's the point of sticking a CD full of student artwork in it just to have it get fried after a couple of weeks? They could throw some artwork into an incinerator on earth and get as much out of it. If that's all they can think to do with this thing, it's a particularly powerful indicator of how bad science education has gotten...
If they want some kids to express themselves, have them put the artwork up on the web or in a gallery or something-- giving them the impression that "flying" it in a spacesuit is anything but a circle-jerk is really pathetic.
What do you expect? We're talking about Microsoft here. I read an extended bio of Gates once-- he LOVES puzzles. He apparently makes the mistake of assuming that the rest of us do as well. A better qualification for good system or interface design would be someone who hates puzzles...
Hmmm... I wonder if Steve Jobs likes puzzles...
Yeah, backwards compatability.
It's pretty clear you don't get it either.
The word is not compatibility, but modularity. The old shells are still useful because they do little more than facilitate basic interconnection of modular entities-- it's the "Less is More" school of design which MS has never had the slightest inkling about (preferring the "kitchen sink" school instead)-- possibly because they still think quality and flexibility is determined by the size of the feature list. In order to keep dinging their customers for upgrade costs, they have this need to constantly add more features. They'll end up with a shell that's about like Perl is now-- grown into an overbloated, version dependent nightmare that they incessantly have to upgrade and evolve way past its optimum.
Well, we actually could use a "tiny-perl", as Perl was great for the first couple of years, but now is suffering from significant bloat and dependency hell. But it looks like the string operations are rather weak in MSH though, if the quick start guide is any indication...
Problem is, within 5 years, your hardware has been updated and it no longer has a compatible drive on it. And compatible drives are no longer available new, so you have to resort to eBay. That is, unless you went through all of your old backups and converted them when you switched over (and the reason you switched over was NOT because of hardware failure)...
Who'd a thunk it?
I think that the whole heckle and jeckly thing was somewhat disturbing.
Heckle and Jeckly thing? So what did I miss here? Was there some stereotype I didn't notice? Seems to me, at times they had varying accents, some times sort of British, other times sort of New Jersey. I've always been a fan of those magpies...
That was my point-- the shipping address is my work address, and I feel it is inappropriate to attach that to my credit card. While I realize it is an anti-fraud measure, I prefer the convenience and that convenience is available from most of their competitors. While perhaps they can keep their price lower because they have such an anti-fraud measure, I'd rather pay a little more for the convenience of not having to phone them to get an order placed.
Frankly, I'm getting sick and tired of businesses justifying the sacrifice of good customer service in order to keep the price at rock bottom. There are lots of businesses that have figured out how to provide both competitive pricing and good service. Newegg is not one of those IMHO...