Maybe my own consumer behavior is not normal, but the more I see something aggressively marketed, the more I am convinced I don't need it. If the item provided great value and was a good deal, people would be lining up to buy it on their own and advertising wouldn't really be necessary. Relentless advertising and sales efforts are only needed to override peoples' logical thought processes to get them to make an impulsive buy decision before they can come to their senses and talk themselves out of it.
Glad to know I'm not the only one who thinks BMWs are going to shit. Ever since the newest designs came out, I thought they looked really cheap. I guess it's not just looks. And whoever decided to use Win CE for the car controls needs to be strapped into a BMW with faulty i-drive and sent plummeting into a river.
You are exactly right. All too often, we developers are guilty of failing to see the requirements of the customer (the guy who pays the bills) because we are so focused on the best way to code the project. Sure, some bosses and salesmen are clueless and make moronic requests, but if we can't see things from the business side, we're no better than they are. Good code will only get you so far; if you want to make money from it, there has to be a good business plan too.
Bottom line is: a fool and his (or her) money are soon parted. It's harsh but it will always be true, no matter what new laws are passed. Scammers will always find a way to seperate naive people from their money, legally or illegally.
For the socialist who went through this thread modding Flamebait to everything he disagrees with: join the grandparent AC and get the fuck out of this country. We have enough lazy leeches already. Our already-too-high taxes cannot support anymore.
I've got an easy solution for your problems: buy a one way ticket to France. And don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. I assure you, we can do with one less whiner in this country.
The story here is that somebody had a deadline to meet and needed a scary sounding story to impress his boss. This hardly qualifies as "spyware". When I read the headline and the first couple of sentences, it sounded like the application put users' files out on the internet for the world to see, but of course it does no such thing. This is the technical equivalent of the National Enquirer and what little respect I had for pcworld is gone since they allowed this rubbish to be published.
If U.S. IT workers want to accelerate the offshoring trend, unionizing is the most effective way to do it. When something is not selling well at the current price, do you then raise the price? You either increase value or reduce price. The only alternative is to sell nothing at all. Protectionism is not a viable long term strategy, as it will only push up the price of domestic software and send more business to foreign companies.
That attitude is as wrong now as it was then. How much did it help the auto industry, afterall? People will buy whatever gets them the best bang for the buck (for some people, just the absolute cheapest will do). People don't pay more for an inferior product just because it was made domestically. The domestic products that are popular are the ones that are well made and generally better than what is imported. Software will be no different. Nobody's going to quit going to ebay.com just because they offshore development. If you want to encourage domestic development, drop your the-world-owes-me-a-living attitude and make something genuinely better than the imports. The auto makers failed to do this and saw Honda and Toyota take their market share. Software companies need to wake up before it's too late.
And that right there is the problem with becoming a PhD in CS, or for that matter even getting a masters. Nobody is willing to pay for that level of experience because businesses only want to hire someone who can hook up a database and generate some reports. Research seems to be only funded by universities and government grants anymore. I admire you for pursuing your interests to this extent, but I'm afraid you are in for a rough ride if you want to make money doing hardcore CS work.
Just think about how many highly paid consulting jobs are created in cleaning up after the latest IT trend gone awry. Short sighted management is mostly to thank for this. So if you want to keep an American IT job, get as much experience in many different technologies as you can, then you can be the one billing $150 an hour to fix the system that the Elbonians coded which didn't do anything it was supposed to do.
Discipline and problem solving are the 2 biggest problems in education today. There is no discipline, and the last thing schools want is some student questioning things. That was fine when everyone was being prepared for factory type jobs where the boss was standing over you all day, but almost all modern American jobs require a certain amount of autonomoy on the part of the worker. Public schools have never taught this well, and it's getting even worse. Home schooling is no longer just for religious nuts.
Yes, let's wait for them to kill a few thousand more people before taking action. It was proven that Bin Laden, who was sheltered by the Taliban, directed the 9/11 attacks. His own admission and bragging about it was proof enough. It was hardly an isolated incident, unless you view history in a highly selective way (remember USS Cole, embassy bombings, etc.)
They eventually made a slight change to this policy and placed a black E on the barcode of edited CDs. I assume this was in response to customer complaints, but the E is certainly not easy to see if you aren't specifically looking for it. Why hide it like that? I've always wondered why Wal-Mart didn't just not carry explicit CDs instead of requiring them to be edited in a way that makes some CDs sound like random bits of line noise.
That's what I always hated about it. Even before much product information was available online, I couldn't see the need to pay $5 for a big book of ads and almost no content. Why didn't the vendors pay to have their products promoted? If they did, somebody was making a big fat pile of cash on that magazine. That's probably why it overstayed its welcome by so long.
That's not a security feature, that's extreme incompetence on the part of Compaq. Their junky machine couldn't recover from the simplest of hardware failures. What a waste.
You of course are a perfect human being who never forgets anything, right? If you're going to call someone completely negligent for occaisonally forgetting to turn off/on a phone, I would think you're not throwing stones in a glass house now are you?
There were also days without emergency medical care. People who got sick simply died if the one doctor in town couldn't save them. Should we give up on advances in modern society just because some uses of them annoy some people?
MHT will be about as popular as passport.net, or whatever the hell they're calling it now. Nobody wants a web format that is totally proprietary, and no doubt will introduce some major new security hole. Not only will other browsers not support it, but MS will either not let them or charge insane royalties. This format is dead in the water as far as anyone outside of Redmond is concerned.
This is clearly just a case of university lawyers trying to stop criticism of the school by sending out threatening letters, with little case law to back them up. Notice they did not actually sue, and they wouldn't, because they would get their asses handed to them. Some lawyers are slow learners and haven't yet figured out that they can't have a website shut down just because it says something their client doesn't like. But from the university's perspective, it doesn't hurt to try to stifle criticism. If the website operator is easily intimidated, they might just shut down right away. Moral of the story: if you're running a website that is critical of someone or something, know the laws and know what your rights are. If you're going to cave at the first sign of a legal battle, save yourself the trouble and don't put up the site to begin with.
I have never been able to figure out what the problem is with "pre approved" credit card offers. All they are is an application for a credit card. Every one of them that I have seen, and I get one almost every day, requires a SSN, birth date, mother's maiden name, income, employer. If you have all of this information about a person, you can just go to the credit card company's website and fill out an application for the same card. The pre approved offers are just applications sent out to people whose data has been mined from credit reports as desirable prospects based on whatever criteria they use. If I'm wrong, please correct me, but the way I see it nobody can use a pre approved app to get a card in your name if they couldn't have done it without the app.
Faking the magstrip or 3D barcode data encoded on a license is easier than faking the appearance of the license itself. All you need is some barcoding software, not too hard to get, and then study enough licenses to figure out how the checksums work. This ID verification technology being sold to bars and liquor stores is a load of snake oil. I'm betting the reason they use it is because if they were caught selling to a minor who had a really good fake, they would have a much better defense if they could say they used a lot of sophisticated equipment to filter out fake IDs.
Only idiots and lazy people pay for porn. So I guess that means that there are a lot of lazy and stupid people on the internet. Hey, you're on to something afterall! Making money off of the average person's stupidity has certainly proven successful over time. You've just got to make sure the target market for your product isn't supposed to be people who are smart.
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Maybe my own consumer behavior is not normal, but the more I see something aggressively marketed, the more I am convinced I don't need it. If the item provided great value and was a good deal, people would be lining up to buy it on their own and advertising wouldn't really be necessary. Relentless advertising and sales efforts are only needed to override peoples' logical thought processes to get them to make an impulsive buy decision before they can come to their senses and talk themselves out of it.
Glad to know I'm not the only one who thinks BMWs are going to shit. Ever since the newest designs came out, I thought they looked really cheap. I guess it's not just looks. And whoever decided to use Win CE for the car controls needs to be strapped into a BMW with faulty i-drive and sent plummeting into a river.
You are exactly right. All too often, we developers are guilty of failing to see the requirements of the customer (the guy who pays the bills) because we are so focused on the best way to code the project. Sure, some bosses and salesmen are clueless and make moronic requests, but if we can't see things from the business side, we're no better than they are. Good code will only get you so far; if you want to make money from it, there has to be a good business plan too.
Bottom line is: a fool and his (or her) money are soon parted. It's harsh but it will always be true, no matter what new laws are passed. Scammers will always find a way to seperate naive people from their money, legally or illegally.
For the socialist who went through this thread modding Flamebait to everything he disagrees with: join the grandparent AC and get the fuck out of this country. We have enough lazy leeches already. Our already-too-high taxes cannot support anymore.
I've got an easy solution for your problems: buy a one way ticket to France. And don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. I assure you, we can do with one less whiner in this country.
The story here is that somebody had a deadline to meet and needed a scary sounding story to impress his boss. This hardly qualifies as "spyware". When I read the headline and the first couple of sentences, it sounded like the application put users' files out on the internet for the world to see, but of course it does no such thing. This is the technical equivalent of the National Enquirer and what little respect I had for pcworld is gone since they allowed this rubbish to be published.
If U.S. IT workers want to accelerate the offshoring trend, unionizing is the most effective way to do it. When something is not selling well at the current price, do you then raise the price? You either increase value or reduce price. The only alternative is to sell nothing at all. Protectionism is not a viable long term strategy, as it will only push up the price of domestic software and send more business to foreign companies.
That attitude is as wrong now as it was then. How much did it help the auto industry, afterall? People will buy whatever gets them the best bang for the buck (for some people, just the absolute cheapest will do). People don't pay more for an inferior product just because it was made domestically. The domestic products that are popular are the ones that are well made and generally better than what is imported. Software will be no different. Nobody's going to quit going to ebay.com just because they offshore development. If you want to encourage domestic development, drop your the-world-owes-me-a-living attitude and make something genuinely better than the imports. The auto makers failed to do this and saw Honda and Toyota take their market share. Software companies need to wake up before it's too late.
And that right there is the problem with becoming a PhD in CS, or for that matter even getting a masters. Nobody is willing to pay for that level of experience because businesses only want to hire someone who can hook up a database and generate some reports. Research seems to be only funded by universities and government grants anymore. I admire you for pursuing your interests to this extent, but I'm afraid you are in for a rough ride if you want to make money doing hardcore CS work.
Just think about how many highly paid consulting jobs are created in cleaning up after the latest IT trend gone awry. Short sighted management is mostly to thank for this. So if you want to keep an American IT job, get as much experience in many different technologies as you can, then you can be the one billing $150 an hour to fix the system that the Elbonians coded which didn't do anything it was supposed to do.
Discipline and problem solving are the 2 biggest problems in education today. There is no discipline, and the last thing schools want is some student questioning things. That was fine when everyone was being prepared for factory type jobs where the boss was standing over you all day, but almost all modern American jobs require a certain amount of autonomoy on the part of the worker. Public schools have never taught this well, and it's getting even worse. Home schooling is no longer just for religious nuts.
Yes, let's wait for them to kill a few thousand more people before taking action. It was proven that Bin Laden, who was sheltered by the Taliban, directed the 9/11 attacks. His own admission and bragging about it was proof enough. It was hardly an isolated incident, unless you view history in a highly selective way (remember USS Cole, embassy bombings, etc.)
Very important distinction: in the North, we say "I'm going to Wal-Mart". In the south, they say "I'm going to THE Wal-Mart".
They eventually made a slight change to this policy and placed a black E on the barcode of edited CDs. I assume this was in response to customer complaints, but the E is certainly not easy to see if you aren't specifically looking for it. Why hide it like that? I've always wondered why Wal-Mart didn't just not carry explicit CDs instead of requiring them to be edited in a way that makes some CDs sound like random bits of line noise.
That's what I always hated about it. Even before much product information was available online, I couldn't see the need to pay $5 for a big book of ads and almost no content. Why didn't the vendors pay to have their products promoted? If they did, somebody was making a big fat pile of cash on that magazine. That's probably why it overstayed its welcome by so long.
That's not a security feature, that's extreme incompetence on the part of Compaq. Their junky machine couldn't recover from the simplest of hardware failures. What a waste.
You of course are a perfect human being who never forgets anything, right? If you're going to call someone completely negligent for occaisonally forgetting to turn off/on a phone, I would think you're not throwing stones in a glass house now are you?
There were also days without emergency medical care. People who got sick simply died if the one doctor in town couldn't save them. Should we give up on advances in modern society just because some uses of them annoy some people?
MHT will be about as popular as passport.net, or whatever the hell they're calling it now. Nobody wants a web format that is totally proprietary, and no doubt will introduce some major new security hole. Not only will other browsers not support it, but MS will either not let them or charge insane royalties. This format is dead in the water as far as anyone outside of Redmond is concerned.
This is clearly just a case of university lawyers trying to stop criticism of the school by sending out threatening letters, with little case law to back them up. Notice they did not actually sue, and they wouldn't, because they would get their asses handed to them. Some lawyers are slow learners and haven't yet figured out that they can't have a website shut down just because it says something their client doesn't like. But from the university's perspective, it doesn't hurt to try to stifle criticism. If the website operator is easily intimidated, they might just shut down right away. Moral of the story: if you're running a website that is critical of someone or something, know the laws and know what your rights are. If you're going to cave at the first sign of a legal battle, save yourself the trouble and don't put up the site to begin with.
Gay rednecks use lard or Crisco.
I have never been able to figure out what the problem is with "pre approved" credit card offers. All they are is an application for a credit card. Every one of them that I have seen, and I get one almost every day, requires a SSN, birth date, mother's maiden name, income, employer. If you have all of this information about a person, you can just go to the credit card company's website and fill out an application for the same card. The pre approved offers are just applications sent out to people whose data has been mined from credit reports as desirable prospects based on whatever criteria they use. If I'm wrong, please correct me, but the way I see it nobody can use a pre approved app to get a card in your name if they couldn't have done it without the app.
Faking the magstrip or 3D barcode data encoded on a license is easier than faking the appearance of the license itself. All you need is some barcoding software, not too hard to get, and then study enough licenses to figure out how the checksums work. This ID verification technology being sold to bars and liquor stores is a load of snake oil. I'm betting the reason they use it is because if they were caught selling to a minor who had a really good fake, they would have a much better defense if they could say they used a lot of sophisticated equipment to filter out fake IDs.
Only idiots and lazy people pay for porn. So I guess that means that there are a lot of lazy and stupid people on the internet. Hey, you're on to something afterall! Making money off of the average person's stupidity has certainly proven successful over time. You've just got to make sure the target market for your product isn't supposed to be people who are smart.