After 10 years, even if you want to keep your car that long, battery technology will have evolved, so it's difficult to predict if it'd still be a major cost to replace them. Let alone the fact that you'll probably only be replacing them once in the car's lifetime.
While I agree with you, and am no fan of Apple, the arguments you gave sound similar to those that could be given for MP3 players before they introduced the iPod.
The fact is that Apple does have great design and marketing, and that alone might be enough to make this idea work.
As a consumer, I'm happy to see more companies taking risks and trying out new things. I don't like Apple's walled garden paradigm, but it'd be nice to see what they have to bring to the table (as long as it's something more than simply an Apple TV bolted onto a TV).
To be honest, I don't know much about MySpace. I came late to that party, and when I did, MySpace was already an ugly mess of animated gifs, flash animations and loud music (on autoplay, no less).
I always thought that FB grew out from the exodus of people who preferred to use a clean and professionally-designed social network (that is, FB exploded after myspace made the changes), but I could be wrong. I don't know which features which website had at the time.
As for FB's financials, I thought those were hidden, since they aren't a publicly traded company (yet). Wikipedia tells us their ad profits, but says nothing about their operating costs, so who really knows if they're making that much money. In any case, it's pretty clear they're aiming to accelerate their growth, and as I said, it'll be hard to do that without impacting their users negatively.
Given network effects, what is this "next best thing" going to have that will draw the majority of users away from FB?
I wish I knew. But then again, no one could've predicted that FB would take over MySpace, or that Twitter would grow so large. My point was, there's already a growing sentiment of distrust in FB. If that continues to mount, the conditions will be ripe for another exodus to the new coolest thing.
They changed, and arguably that's what led to their demise. The point is that these companies need to find a way to make money while keeping their userbase, and those two objectives may not always be compatible.
Now I believe that if Facebook wants to, they'll be able to monetize their network without scaring their users away, but I also believe that their management is too greedy for the kind of slow sustainable growth they could get that way. Instead, their actions seem to point towards the kind of "shooting star" growth which inevitably will mean increasing their privacy abuses, and turn people off even more than they are now.
Most of my friends are already cautious of the privacy implications of using Facebook. I think the field is almost ripe for the next best thing to come along and throw FB in the corner with MySpace.
Agreed, and the local coffee shop I go to gives me a discount for using the green stuff. It puzzles me how all these customers come in and use a credit card for a 2 dollar purchase. The dirty looks the cashier gives to these people is "priceless".
I don't get it, they don't want to take credit cards, but they do anyway.
Or, as you mentioned, customers are paying a tax for using the credit card (it's not a discount to you, it's a penalty for them, even if the word discount sounds better), and choose to do so anyway, in which case it either compensates the coffee shop for the extra transaction costs, or they're not setting the tax high enough.
In any case I can't see what the problem is. Unless you think that paying with a card takes longer than paying cash, which from my supermarket experience isn't always true.
They admit this is a security/privacy risk, and they're planning on getting a better synchronization system going sometime in the future, but at least for now there's this caveat. I think it's only fair to warn potential users before they start this for private things.
That said, I have very high hopes for Sparkleshare, and I'm hoping to start testing it locally soon.
Admittedly though, a VM is the best bet for a current smartphone OS, since nobody can say in which architecture your phone will be running in 2 years, let alone 5.
Besides, Android's now moving from smartphones to tablets, to car stereos, TVs, and who knows what else. Using native code for apps would kill their options to grow in the future. MS also saw that, and so did Palm.
I don't know about Apple or RIM, I think they compile their apps to native code. While that's a better idea on the short term, eventually they'll want to run on a different architecture, and have to choose between using an inferior arch; dropping all legacy apps; or running them in "emulation mode", which is usually worse than a VM.
That's a good question. I remember a court case where a good looking woman was walking around naked in her apartment. She was sued by a (presumably uglier) neighbour who didn't like her husband catching peeks. She lost.
But I can imagine that with children the outcome would be completely different, either rooted in law, or in a knee-jerk "think of the children" reaction.
I'm sorry, but you didn't read the definition of "public data", now did you? "Anything I can see while walking down the street" -- by definition.
No, it's not.
As I said, even you you can clearly look inside my house from the street, it's not "public data". You can't take pictures, and you can't complain about my hairy ass if I decide to walk around naked in my apartment with open windows (there was a court case about this, but I don't have the link at hand).
Your examples are a bit twisted. Reading your appointments in a public street wouldn't make them public simply because they were private information obviously intended to be kept secret. The same with the credit card example.
It's the same difference between taking a photo of someone on the street without their permission (legal), or taking one of them in their home (illegal), even if the home is clearly visible from the street where you're standing with your super-zoom lens.
It'd be hard to argue that a police operation on the middle of a public road is intended to be kept secret and that you're not supposed to look at it.
Well, if you've seen the spam filter algorithm that Google, Yahoo or Hotmail are using, then I concede the discussion. I've only looked at local, single-user mail filters, such as the one in Thunderbird.
Though I don't believe that.
In any case the OP said that he marked the mail as spam so he'd never see mail from that sender again. I don't think that spam filters work like that, otherwise if I were to receive spam with a spoofed from address belonging to a friend of mine, then I'd never be able to receive mail from that person again.
You seem to be using the spam button to somehow punish the business in question.
I've nothing against that. My argument is that by marking legitimate emails as spam you're poisoning the spam filter rules, and making it harder for the filter to distinguish between legitimate and truly spammy email.
Worse, if you're doing it on a webmail client, you're essentially poisoning the communal filter. Now fortunately, for a popular email service like Gmail, one person's actions won't have much effect, but I guess every bit helps, and I was hoping that others wouldn't follow the OP's advice blindly.
To sum up, I don't care about the other guy's business. Punish them all you want if they're pissing you off, but I do care about the quality of my spam filter, and I thought others would as well.
When I hit the Spam button it pretty much guarantees that I won't see mail from that person again.
You're contradicting yourself. Just two posts up you were saying that your marking an email as spam had no noticeable effect on the Gmail spam filter.
Furthermore, you're confused as to how spam filters work. Marking an email as spam doesn't automatically make all emails from that sender go directly to the trash. The filter only looks at the content of the mails, not the sender, because those can and are spoofed all the time. For that you have the traditional filters -- simply create a rule that bins directly all emails from that sender.
Your attempts to use the spam filter are failing in every regard: it doesn't achieve the functionality you want, and you're poisoning the filter for everyone else.
1. The author said that the emails were legitimate.
2. Notice I didn't mention Gmail in my post. Certainly Google, Yahoo and Hotmail have enough users that your contribution wouldn't be enough to poison the filters, but in a smaller provider, it might happen. Also, even if you're using Gmail, why risk it anyway? Why not simply use the delete button which is right next to the spam?
If you do and they are legitimate emails, then you'll be training your filter (or worse, everybody's filter, if you use a web-based client) to flag real emails.
I don't think it's fair to call it idiocy, it's simple misinformation.
They probably figure that the more fuel they put in now, the more they can drive before having to refill again.
In my defense, I don't top off for two reasons: 1) those extra drops don't mean much in terms of extra distance traveled, and 2) some guy at a gas station one topped my tank so much that it blocked the fuel meter at half full until I used up the fuel in the tank until that level. On a related note, never buy Peugeot.
But I'd never heard that topping off too much leads to fuel leaking to the ground. Live and learn I guess.
I have an app on the market. Usually I have no problems supporting users on custom roms, since my app uses the standard Android libs wherever possible.
However, a few days ago I had a user complain that a new update started crashing on his device. Upon further inspection it turned out that his Android 2.2 custom rom was declaring itself as Android 2.3, and my app was crashing when it tried to call a method which was introduced in 2.3.
This to me is what's scariest about these custom roms. They can turn into support nightmares for app developers. People complain a lot about fragmentation, but my app runs on everything from 1.5 to the most recent devices available and I never had any problem with a specific device. The few really weird issues up to now have, not very surprisingly, happened on custom roms.
Slashdot Mirror
Except the "period" seems to be quite long: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius#Battery_life_cycle or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf#Battery
After 10 years, even if you want to keep your car that long, battery technology will have evolved, so it's difficult to predict if it'd still be a major cost to replace them.
Let alone the fact that you'll probably only be replacing them once in the car's lifetime.
While I agree with you, and am no fan of Apple, the arguments you gave sound similar to those that could be given for MP3 players before they introduced the iPod.
The fact is that Apple does have great design and marketing, and that alone might be enough to make this idea work.
As a consumer, I'm happy to see more companies taking risks and trying out new things. I don't like Apple's walled garden paradigm, but it'd be nice to see what they have to bring to the table (as long as it's something more than simply an Apple TV bolted onto a TV).
Actually I'd rather have video calling in airplanes than just normal voice calls.
As Mitch Hedberg once said: "sure, you can speak, just... use your hands".
To be honest, I don't know much about MySpace. I came late to that party, and when I did, MySpace was already an ugly mess of animated gifs, flash animations and loud music (on autoplay, no less).
I always thought that FB grew out from the exodus of people who preferred to use a clean and professionally-designed social network (that is, FB exploded after myspace made the changes), but I could be wrong. I don't know which features which website had at the time.
As for FB's financials, I thought those were hidden, since they aren't a publicly traded company (yet). Wikipedia tells us their ad profits, but says nothing about their operating costs, so who really knows if they're making that much money.
In any case, it's pretty clear they're aiming to accelerate their growth, and as I said, it'll be hard to do that without impacting their users negatively.
Given network effects, what is this "next best thing" going to have that will draw the majority of users away from FB?
I wish I knew. But then again, no one could've predicted that FB would take over MySpace, or that Twitter would grow so large.
My point was, there's already a growing sentiment of distrust in FB. If that continues to mount, the conditions will be ripe for another exodus to the new coolest thing.
Not really, look at MySpace.
They changed, and arguably that's what led to their demise.
The point is that these companies need to find a way to make money while keeping their userbase, and those two objectives may not always be compatible.
Now I believe that if Facebook wants to, they'll be able to monetize their network without scaring their users away, but I also believe that their management is too greedy for the kind of slow sustainable growth they could get that way.
Instead, their actions seem to point towards the kind of "shooting star" growth which inevitably will mean increasing their privacy abuses, and turn people off even more than they are now.
Most of my friends are already cautious of the privacy implications of using Facebook. I think the field is almost ripe for the next best thing to come along and throw FB in the corner with MySpace.
And it won't be a day too late.
Thank you.
There are few things more annoying than people who tell you how to live your life or spend your money.
I think the GP has a point. I wasn't aware of any way to remotely read a smart card. Do you have a reference?
Or are credit cards coming with RFID chips in your side of the world?
Agreed, and the local coffee shop I go to gives me a discount for using the green stuff. It puzzles me how all these customers come in and use a credit card for a 2 dollar purchase. The dirty looks the cashier gives to these people is "priceless".
I don't get it, they don't want to take credit cards, but they do anyway.
Or, as you mentioned, customers are paying a tax for using the credit card (it's not a discount to you, it's a penalty for them, even if the word discount sounds better), and choose to do so anyway, in which case it either compensates the coffee shop for the extra transaction costs, or they're not setting the tax high enough.
In any case I can't see what the problem is. Unless you think that paying with a card takes longer than paying cash, which from my supermarket experience isn't always true.
Just a word of caution: the current version of Sparkleshare is using a public IRC channel for notifications.
There is, however, a way to configure your installation to use a private one: https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/wiki/Private-notification-server
They admit this is a security/privacy risk, and they're planning on getting a better synchronization system going sometime in the future, but at least for now there's this caveat.
I think it's only fair to warn potential users before they start this for private things.
That said, I have very high hopes for Sparkleshare, and I'm hoping to start testing it locally soon.
The flash player is a separate download on the Android Market.
I updated it this morning.
Or is it different where you live?
a bastardised java VM driving OS in android
Admittedly though, a VM is the best bet for a current smartphone OS, since nobody can say in which architecture your phone will be running in 2 years, let alone 5.
Besides, Android's now moving from smartphones to tablets, to car stereos, TVs, and who knows what else.
Using native code for apps would kill their options to grow in the future. MS also saw that, and so did Palm.
I don't know about Apple or RIM, I think they compile their apps to native code. While that's a better idea on the short term, eventually they'll want to run on a different architecture, and have to choose between using an inferior arch; dropping all legacy apps; or running them in "emulation mode", which is usually worse than a VM.
Exactly.
How fitting that the Adobe guy didn't consider security in his idea.
Only on the web version of maps. AFAIK it doesn't work on Android.
That's a good question.
I remember a court case where a good looking woman was walking around naked in her apartment. She was sued by a (presumably uglier) neighbour who didn't like her husband catching peeks. She lost.
But I can imagine that with children the outcome would be completely different, either rooted in law, or in a knee-jerk "think of the children" reaction.
I'm sorry, but you didn't read the definition of "public data", now did you? "Anything I can see while walking down the street" -- by definition.
No, it's not.
As I said, even you you can clearly look inside my house from the street, it's not "public data".
You can't take pictures, and you can't complain about my hairy ass if I decide to walk around naked in my apartment with open windows (there was a court case about this, but I don't have the link at hand).
Your examples are a bit twisted. Reading your appointments in a public street wouldn't make them public simply because they were private information obviously intended to be kept secret. The same with the credit card example.
It's the same difference between taking a photo of someone on the street without their permission (legal), or taking one of them in their home (illegal), even if the home is clearly visible from the street where you're standing with your super-zoom lens.
It'd be hard to argue that a police operation on the middle of a public road is intended to be kept secret and that you're not supposed to look at it.
Which OS?
In Ubuntu, Chrome adds a PPA to your sources so your package manager can keep it updated automatically.
Well, if you've seen the spam filter algorithm that Google, Yahoo or Hotmail are using, then I concede the discussion.
I've only looked at local, single-user mail filters, such as the one in Thunderbird.
Though I don't believe that.
In any case the OP said that he marked the mail as spam so he'd never see mail from that sender again. I don't think that spam filters work like that, otherwise if I were to receive spam with a spoofed from address belonging to a friend of mine, then I'd never be able to receive mail from that person again.
That'd be the same as individual spam filter rules for each email address, and would defeat the benefits of having a shared spam filter.
You seem to be using the spam button to somehow punish the business in question.
I've nothing against that. My argument is that by marking legitimate emails as spam you're poisoning the spam filter rules, and making it harder for the filter to distinguish between legitimate and truly spammy email.
Worse, if you're doing it on a webmail client, you're essentially poisoning the communal filter. Now fortunately, for a popular email service like Gmail, one person's actions won't have much effect, but I guess every bit helps, and I was hoping that others wouldn't follow the OP's advice blindly.
To sum up, I don't care about the other guy's business. Punish them all you want if they're pissing you off, but I do care about the quality of my spam filter, and I thought others would as well.
When I hit the Spam button it pretty much guarantees that I won't see mail from that person again.
You're contradicting yourself. Just two posts up you were saying that your marking an email as spam had no noticeable effect on the Gmail spam filter.
Furthermore, you're confused as to how spam filters work. Marking an email as spam doesn't automatically make all emails from that sender go directly to the trash. The filter only looks at the content of the mails, not the sender, because those can and are spoofed all the time.
For that you have the traditional filters -- simply create a rule that bins directly all emails from that sender.
Your attempts to use the spam filter are failing in every regard: it doesn't achieve the functionality you want, and you're poisoning the filter for everyone else.
1. The author said that the emails were legitimate.
2. Notice I didn't mention Gmail in my post. Certainly Google, Yahoo and Hotmail have enough users that your contribution wouldn't be enough to poison the filters, but in a smaller provider, it might happen.
Also, even if you're using Gmail, why risk it anyway? Why not simply use the delete button which is right next to the spam?
Don't mark them as spam.
If you do and they are legitimate emails, then you'll be training your filter (or worse, everybody's filter, if you use a web-based client) to flag real emails.
I don't think it's fair to call it idiocy, it's simple misinformation.
They probably figure that the more fuel they put in now, the more they can drive before having to refill again.
In my defense, I don't top off for two reasons: 1) those extra drops don't mean much in terms of extra distance traveled, and 2) some guy at a gas station one topped my tank so much that it blocked the fuel meter at half full until I used up the fuel in the tank until that level. On a related note, never buy Peugeot.
But I'd never heard that topping off too much leads to fuel leaking to the ground. Live and learn I guess.
I have an app on the market. Usually I have no problems supporting users on custom roms, since my app uses the standard Android libs wherever possible.
However, a few days ago I had a user complain that a new update started crashing on his device. Upon further inspection it turned out that his Android 2.2 custom rom was declaring itself as Android 2.3, and my app was crashing when it tried to call a method which was introduced in 2.3.
This to me is what's scariest about these custom roms. They can turn into support nightmares for app developers.
People complain a lot about fragmentation, but my app runs on everything from 1.5 to the most recent devices available and I never had any problem with a specific device. The few really weird issues up to now have, not very surprisingly, happened on custom roms.