I never got the settlement notification (I never used Beacon) but all FB notifications typically come from a similar address. For example:
notification+km-m-d_i@facebookmail.com
So I'm really not sure what your point is. If you look up the facebookmail.com domain, it's clearly owned by Facebook.
Well my "data" is based on what I've experienced. I've never claimed anything other than that. I'd love to collect more detailed data on what's going on but I don't exactly have access to Google's servers. Whatever the case, I have read about problems other people are having and the service is far from complete. Believe it or not, but there are actually other people that have run into similar bugs (especially the "can't hear" bug).
Anyway, I can make international calls using my mobile phone without Google Voice and I get connected without trouble. And I can hear the people I call. Connecting to the right person and being able to hear each other are kind of critical for a telephone/VoIP service, by the way.
If Google Voice is merely making use of landlines, towers, etc. then surely it should behave exactly like my mobile phone, right? At the very least people should be able to hear me, yes? I haven't run into either problem with my wireless provider.
Skype works just fine when using my same mobile phone and when calling the exact same international number. So I call shenanigans on your shenanigans.
I was thinking it may actually be an issue with certain area codes. They just recently (by "recently" I mean the past few months) started making numbers available in my state. Maybe something isn't configured quite right for those numbers. But the location called may be the issue too. Whatever the case, it just isn't usable for me in its current form, which sucks. I like the concept of the service.
Verizon Wireless has always been extremely reliable in the past for me. But I suppose it's possible. That said, Skype To Go (seems to have a lot in common with Google Voice) works brilliantly for me when making international calls. So I strongly suspect the problem is on Google's end.
Most of the problems I've had have been with international calls. That's the only time I've had it randomly connect to people I don't know. As amusing as that has been, I don't really want to be making international prank calls...
But the not being able to hear others problem consistently shows up. I've poked around a bit on the official help forums and it seems like other people have had this problem for a while now too. It's very bizarre.
Google has been absolutely worthless when it comes to helping resolve this issue. They just keep giving me credit back. While that's great, it doesn't really solve anything.
This is all very interesting but Google Voice barely functions when calling internationally. And I've had horrible luck with it domestically too.
I've been trying to use this service for a while now and it consistently connects me to random numbers in the country I'm calling (yes, I'm dialing the right number and I'm dialing correctly). When I actually do connect to some random person, they can't hear me 4 out of 5 times (and that's being generous).
When calling domestically, I get connected to who I'm calling, but 50% of the time one of us can't hear the other. Very irritating.
So, until they can actually guarantee that their service, you know, WORKS, this isn't something I'm remotely interested in. Google Voice isn't even close to ready for anything beyond a fun little service to play with.
If a SecuROM service actually existed and wasn't completely hidden from my administrator account, that might be a good place to start. But no such service visibly exists for administrators. %WinDir%\System32\UAService7.exe (or a similarly named executable) doesn't exist either.
The following hidden folder does exist, however:
%HomePath%\AppData\Roaming\SecuROM
And upon searching the registry, the following key exists for SecuROM: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SecuROM]
As well as one for all users in HKEY_USERS.
As expected, it's loaded with invalid registry keys to prevent you from accessing some of the data OR changing it so you can actually delete it. The same is true with the data contained in the user directory and prevents you from backing up or moving your user data. For what it's worth, I'm in Vista and I have some of the latest and "greatest" SecuROM crap on my system.
It's very possible that those lurking Bethesda employees are unable to say anything without getting into trouble. Perhaps they are fighting the publisher on this and are waiting to see how it turns out before saying anything official. Bethesda employees would hardly be in a position to comment on a possible legal struggle. So what may seem like bad PR may not be intentional, like you seem to be hinting at.
Bad PR is Blizzard taking time to do an interview here on Slashdot about World of Warcraft while ignoring *paying* customers on their own message boards that were complaining about the server downtime.
Nice ad hominem attack. You sure burned me there. Way to make a point! I was stating the purpose of Visual Studio: to help speed up the development time for large projects. To take full advantage of this, one would need to know what they are doing. You are seeing an attempt at an attack where none exists. If I wanted to attack you, I would do it directly.
...that are not really essential... No, they are not. I never said they were. However, as I stated before, some people may find them useful. It all depends on the task you're trying to perform. The C/C++ debugger in Visual Studio is one of the best debuggers around. If you don't want the tools, remove them. As I said before, many of them can be removed or disabled simply by going to the options menu. It's not like clicking a few buttons or checkboxes in an options menu takes that much time.
What, Dot Net? Who cares, notepad works fine for the kind of rinky-dink projects one might use dot net for. .NET can be used for much larger projects and can be used like Java or Python to help glue applications together. Saying that.NET is usually only used for "rinky-dink" applications is ignoring the larger potential of the language. Also, Notepad would be horrendous for writing a UI, which is one of the nicest features of.NET. Notepad would be fine for console applications but once a UI is involved, it would become too hard to manage.
You don't need a massive IDE to build a database middleware interface. I need an IDE when I'm doing some real work on a C++ app that has 100 files in the project. I never said that an IDE should be used for small applications. I generally write my smaller programs in a simple test editor as well.
An annoying distraction that is pretty poor at providing any real useful content. MSDN is better organized, and that's saying something, since it is a mess in its own right. Except that new versions of VS have an offline version of MSDN included as "dynamic help." That's one of the major changes between VS6 and VS.NET. I agree that the organization could be better but MSDN does have its uses.
Which brings us to my primary bitch with most MS products. I don't want the Queen Mary. I want something that is basic, fast and lean. I don't need to spend lots of time fooling around all the 'helpful' features that MS thoughtfull decided to include Some people find many of the tools included to greatly increase their development speed. If they get in your way and slow you down, then clearly VS isn't the right tool for you, which is perfectly fine.
You can still ignore MFC auto generated code. It's called "Create empty project." To compile programs in VS you need a project file so you have to go through that wizard anyway. Instead of choosing "Windows Form" choose "Win32 console application" and then "empty project." So saying that you can't avoid MFC generated code is complete crap. I do it every day.
As far as VS6 is concerned, it had some serious problems. The text editor itself was nice and it was fairly fast but the implementation of the C++ STL was horrendous. The interface was somewhat cumbersome
As many others have said, it's very possible to code everything in VS from scratch. The wizards and code generators are there to help experienced and non-experienced users deal with trivial and uninteresting code (e.g., GUIs) and it lets them focus on the real bulk of the program. GUI programming requires a ton of code and to be perfectly honest, I would rather deal with coding the actual program and not have to worry about how to draw a menu manually. The drag and drop form editor is great for getting the general layout of a form and has saved me countless hours, which I then devoted to the more important aspects of my program.
So I have to disagree that the latest versions of VS are crap. They have more tools, more language support, are closer to standards, have better dynamic help (if you need it), and have more features to help speed up development time for people that *know* what they are doing. Whether you use these tools or not is up to you and most of the help they give can be turned off or completely ignored.
As of now, MSN Messenger is a somewhat decent instant messenger service. MSN Messenger 6 was probably the best of the bunch. MSN Messenger 7 is one of the most bloated, confusing, and annoying IM client around.
AOL Instant Messenger is probably one of the buggiest, instant messenging programs around and it always has been. It lacks features, is filled with annoying advertisements (often with sound), crashes almost everytime you log out, has a large footfrint, and is just a nightmare to use.
Perhaps if they combined the two lines of instant messengers we might actually get a decent messenger program. Either that or we'd get something resembling Bram Stoker's Nightmare.
"Troll?"
Give me a frelling break...
It's called a joke, people. A joke.
Dictionary.com:
joke, n. --
* Something said or done to evoke laughter or amusement, especially an amusing story with a punch line.
* A mischievous trick; a prank.
* An amusing or ludicrous incident or situation.
Personally I'm waiting for the iPod Yacto.^ Details are a bit sketchy at this time but some expected features include:
* Incredibly small design! Only 1 cm x 1 cm! * Connect the iPod Yacto directly into your brain for optimal performance! * Store music directly in your brain! * Features new DRM technology to further limit what you can do with your purchased music! * New patented One-Blink (tm) interface (no one needs more than one blink!) * Battery life now 3 times as long, bringing the total battery life to 9 hours! * And much, much more!
^ Requires iTunes: Working Edition. Quicktime 8.0 will be installed without your permission.
How does the existence of a LE make you not want to buy the regular, cheaper edition of a game that isn't on your "must-have" list? No one is forcing you to pay for a limited edition. If a game isn't on your "must-have" list, why would you care about a few extra, meaningless goodies?
I have the same problem in my area, only we get about 10 to 15 minutes of advertisements and then previews. It's bad enough that we have advertisements after paying $9+ but then we are shown MPAA advertisements telling us not to pirate movies!
The big deal is that everytime a new protection scheme is cracked, the **AAs feel the need introduce more restrictions on content, new copy protection, lobby for new laws, etc. So while the ineffectiveness of these new protection schemes is amusing, cracking the new protection schemes isn't helping matters. Then again, if people stopped cracking these things altogether, then the **AAs would have "proof" that the technology works. So either way we are screwed.
In the end though, people that legally purchase music or movies are the ones that pay.
Slashdot Mirror
I never got the settlement notification (I never used Beacon) but all FB notifications typically come from a similar address. For example: notification+km-m-d_i@facebookmail.com So I'm really not sure what your point is. If you look up the facebookmail.com domain, it's clearly owned by Facebook.
Well my "data" is based on what I've experienced. I've never claimed anything other than that. I'd love to collect more detailed data on what's going on but I don't exactly have access to Google's servers. Whatever the case, I have read about problems other people are having and the service is far from complete. Believe it or not, but there are actually other people that have run into similar bugs (especially the "can't hear" bug).
Anyway, I can make international calls using my mobile phone without Google Voice and I get connected without trouble. And I can hear the people I call. Connecting to the right person and being able to hear each other are kind of critical for a telephone/VoIP service, by the way.
If Google Voice is merely making use of landlines, towers, etc. then surely it should behave exactly like my mobile phone, right? At the very least people should be able to hear me, yes? I haven't run into either problem with my wireless provider.
Skype works just fine when using my same mobile phone and when calling the exact same international number. So I call shenanigans on your shenanigans.
I was thinking it may actually be an issue with certain area codes. They just recently (by "recently" I mean the past few months) started making numbers available in my state. Maybe something isn't configured quite right for those numbers. But the location called may be the issue too. Whatever the case, it just isn't usable for me in its current form, which sucks. I like the concept of the service.
Verizon Wireless has always been extremely reliable in the past for me. But I suppose it's possible. That said, Skype To Go (seems to have a lot in common with Google Voice) works brilliantly for me when making international calls. So I strongly suspect the problem is on Google's end.
Most of the problems I've had have been with international calls. That's the only time I've had it randomly connect to people I don't know. As amusing as that has been, I don't really want to be making international prank calls...
But the not being able to hear others problem consistently shows up. I've poked around a bit on the official help forums and it seems like other people have had this problem for a while now too. It's very bizarre.
Google has been absolutely worthless when it comes to helping resolve this issue. They just keep giving me credit back. While that's great, it doesn't really solve anything.
What the hell? "Troll?" I'm stating my personal experience with a service and I get branded a "troll." Nice.
[Bender Bending Rodriguez]Neat![/Bender Bending Rodriguez]
This is all very interesting but Google Voice barely functions when calling internationally. And I've had horrible luck with it domestically too.
I've been trying to use this service for a while now and it consistently connects me to random numbers in the country I'm calling (yes, I'm dialing the right number and I'm dialing correctly). When I actually do connect to some random person, they can't hear me 4 out of 5 times (and that's being generous).
When calling domestically, I get connected to who I'm calling, but 50% of the time one of us can't hear the other. Very irritating.
So, until they can actually guarantee that their service, you know, WORKS, this isn't something I'm remotely interested in. Google Voice isn't even close to ready for anything beyond a fun little service to play with.
If a SecuROM service actually existed and wasn't completely hidden from my administrator account, that might be a good place to start. But no such service visibly exists for administrators. %WinDir%\System32\UAService7.exe (or a similarly named executable) doesn't exist either.
The following hidden folder does exist, however: %HomePath%\AppData\Roaming\SecuROM
And upon searching the registry, the following key exists for SecuROM: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SecuROM]
As well as one for all users in HKEY_USERS.
As expected, it's loaded with invalid registry keys to prevent you from accessing some of the data OR changing it so you can actually delete it. The same is true with the data contained in the user directory and prevents you from backing up or moving your user data. For what it's worth, I'm in Vista and I have some of the latest and "greatest" SecuROM crap on my system.
Actually, the friends system DOES work.
"Space maker. Meet the most elegant hard drive utility ever."
Any utility that makes that kind of claim while in beta is sure to cause some problems.
Which lines of code? All of them of course!
"Japan isn't Buddhist, but their culture has grown around a lot of similar basic values..."
/ ja.html#People
Such as Buddhism:
"Religions: observe both Shinto and Buddhist 84%, other 16% (including Christian 0.7%)"
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos
OMG girlz don't exist on teh Intarweb!!!!1
Good point. Still, I stand by my other comments.
It's very possible that those lurking Bethesda employees are unable to say anything without getting into trouble. Perhaps they are fighting the publisher on this and are waiting to see how it turns out before saying anything official. Bethesda employees would hardly be in a position to comment on a possible legal struggle. So what may seem like bad PR may not be intentional, like you seem to be hinting at.
Bad PR is Blizzard taking time to do an interview here on Slashdot about World of Warcraft while ignoring *paying* customers on their own message boards that were complaining about the server downtime.
Nice ad hominem attack. You sure burned me there. Way to make a point!
...that are not really essential...
.NET is usually only used for "rinky-dink" applications is ignoring the larger potential of the language. Also, Notepad would be horrendous for writing a UI, which is one of the nicest features of .NET. Notepad would be fine for console applications but once a UI is involved, it would become too hard to manage.
I was stating the purpose of Visual Studio: to help speed up the development time for large projects. To take full advantage of this, one would need to know what they are doing. You are seeing an attempt at an attack where none exists. If I wanted to attack you, I would do it directly.
No, they are not. I never said they were. However, as I stated before, some people may find them useful. It all depends on the task you're trying to perform. The C/C++ debugger in Visual Studio is one of the best debuggers around. If you don't want the tools, remove them. As I said before, many of them can be removed or disabled simply by going to the options menu. It's not like clicking a few buttons or checkboxes in an options menu takes that much time.
What, Dot Net? Who cares, notepad works fine for the kind of rinky-dink projects one might use dot net for.
.NET can be used for much larger projects and can be used like Java or Python to help glue applications together. Saying that
You don't need a massive IDE to build a database middleware interface. I need an IDE when I'm doing some real work on a C++ app that has 100 files in the project.
I never said that an IDE should be used for small applications. I generally write my smaller programs in a simple test editor as well.
An annoying distraction that is pretty poor at providing any real useful content. MSDN is better organized, and that's saying something, since it is a mess in its own right.
Except that new versions of VS have an offline version of MSDN included as "dynamic help." That's one of the major changes between VS6 and VS.NET. I agree that the organization could be better but MSDN does have its uses.
Which brings us to my primary bitch with most MS products. I don't want the Queen Mary. I want something that is basic, fast and lean. I don't need to spend lots of time fooling around all the 'helpful' features that MS thoughtfull decided to include
Some people find many of the tools included to greatly increase their development speed. If they get in your way and slow you down, then clearly VS isn't the right tool for you, which is perfectly fine.
You can still ignore MFC auto generated code. It's called "Create empty project." To compile programs in VS you need a project file so you have to go through that wizard anyway. Instead of choosing "Windows Form" choose "Win32 console application" and then "empty project." So saying that you can't avoid MFC generated code is complete crap. I do it every day.
As far as VS6 is concerned, it had some serious problems. The text editor itself was nice and it was fairly fast but the implementation of the C++ STL was horrendous. The interface was somewhat cumbersome
As many others have said, it's very possible to code everything in VS from scratch. The wizards and code generators are there to help experienced and non-experienced users deal with trivial and uninteresting code (e.g., GUIs) and it lets them focus on the real bulk of the program. GUI programming requires a ton of code and to be perfectly honest, I would rather deal with coding the actual program and not have to worry about how to draw a menu manually. The drag and drop form editor is great for getting the general layout of a form and has saved me countless hours, which I then devoted to the more important aspects of my program.
So I have to disagree that the latest versions of VS are crap. They have more tools, more language support, are closer to standards, have better dynamic help (if you need it), and have more features to help speed up development time for people that *know* what they are doing. Whether you use these tools or not is up to you and most of the help they give can be turned off or completely ignored.
As of now, MSN Messenger is a somewhat decent instant messenger service. MSN Messenger 6 was probably the best of the bunch. MSN Messenger 7 is one of the most bloated, confusing, and annoying IM client around.
AOL Instant Messenger is probably one of the buggiest, instant messenging programs around and it always has been. It lacks features, is filled with annoying advertisements (often with sound), crashes almost everytime you log out, has a large footfrint, and is just a nightmare to use.
Perhaps if they combined the two lines of instant messengers we might actually get a decent messenger program. Either that or we'd get something resembling Bram Stoker's Nightmare.
"Troll?" Give me a frelling break... It's called a joke, people. A joke. Dictionary.com: joke, n. -- * Something said or done to evoke laughter or amusement, especially an amusing story with a punch line. * A mischievous trick; a prank. * An amusing or ludicrous incident or situation.
Personally I'm waiting for the iPod Yacto.^ Details are a bit sketchy at this time but some expected features include:
* Incredibly small design! Only 1 cm x 1 cm!
* Connect the iPod Yacto directly into your brain for optimal performance!
* Store music directly in your brain!
* Features new DRM technology to further limit what you can do with your purchased music!
* New patented One-Blink (tm) interface (no one needs more than one blink!)
* Battery life now 3 times as long, bringing the total battery life to 9 hours!
* And much, much more!
^ Requires iTunes: Working Edition. Quicktime 8.0 will be installed without your permission.
How does the existence of a LE make you not want to buy the regular, cheaper edition of a game that isn't on your "must-have" list? No one is forcing you to pay for a limited edition. If a game isn't on your "must-have" list, why would you care about a few extra, meaningless goodies?
I have the same problem in my area, only we get about 10 to 15 minutes of advertisements and then previews. It's bad enough that we have advertisements after paying $9+ but then we are shown MPAA advertisements telling us not to pirate movies!
The big deal is that everytime a new protection scheme is cracked, the **AAs feel the need introduce more restrictions on content, new copy protection, lobby for new laws, etc. So while the ineffectiveness of these new protection schemes is amusing, cracking the new protection schemes isn't helping matters. Then again, if people stopped cracking these things altogether, then the **AAs would have "proof" that the technology works. So either way we are screwed.
In the end though, people that legally purchase music or movies are the ones that pay.
I take it you don't like Windows? Now you know how I felt during my attempted Slackware and Gentoo installations.