I agree with others; I don't think this is a good test. If you walk into a terminal cancer ward and point a loaded gun in the face of patients, some might immediately welcome it as sweet relief, while most would respond with a fight or flight reaction.
There is a physiological response to impending danger which will be experienced by almost any human with a balanced physio/psychochemistry.
I can't find any information on "tetsom," can you provide a source of more information on this term?
Some of my lenses are full-frame lenses, but most are 3/4 frame - including my 10.5mm fisheye. This is not a round image (probably due in part to having a target sensor size of 3/4 frame), and offers 180 deg (the degree symbol shows as Â, Slashdot really needs to read up on character encodings) image corner-to-corner.
I do some landscape work, but it's not too common for me to really pine after a super wide angle.
With the Nikon D3/D700 (their two latest full-frame bodies), you can put a DX lens (3/4 frame lens) on it, and it will use only the center 3/4 of the image sensor. So it's not like I'd have to completely abandon my DX lenses, but it would be producing a smaller pixel count image (6.1mp for a 12.3mp sensor I believe), and I would find an image at that resolution more limiting than the effects of a smaller sensor I believe.
Actually this might be a reason I'd invest in a higher pixel count full-frame body - if I could keep a DX lens running at around 12mp, that would ease my transition into the full-frame world.
You're right, I was saying "sensor size" when I meant to say "pixel count." There certainly is a market for physically larger sensors - one of the advantages of larger sensors is better ISO noise performance. It's got other advantages too of course, like offsetting aperture diffraction when you want both a very sharp image and a high f-stop.
Personally I'm put off of larger sensors by two things (even though I know overall they're better). First, large format sensors are quite a bit more expensive. Two bodies with all the same features but a different sensor size can differ in price by thousands of dollars. That's something I don't quite get (except I know they get fewer sensors on a production wafer, and because the surface area is larger, the defect rate per-sensor is higher, but I can't believe this changes cost by $1,000 or more). Second, I have a lot of hardware invested in smaller sensor sizes. I have a few full-frame lenses, but most of my lenses were bought for then-standard small format sensors.
For me, the switch to full-frame would require investment in a more expensive body, as well as replacing a number of my favorite lenses, some of which have no equivalent in the full-frame world. This would be a major undertaking, and honestly when I bought most of my lenses, I did so with the belief that I'd have them for the rest of my life.
I also know professional computer programmers who can barely write: 10 PRINT "Hello World" 20 GOTO 10
If you are a pro photographer and not shooting RAW, you're doing yourself a tremendous disservice. Yes, it's a little harder because the camera makes fewer decisions for you. Some pros will probably leave the camera in fully automatic mode full time too.
If you do any post processing, not shooting raw means you can't correct exposure or white balance after the fact except for a very tiny amount. If you're doing studio work or landscapes, maybe you can get away with this since you can sit there and fine tune your settings as they won't really change once you have them dialed in. But still there's no reason that I can see why you wouldn't want to. Sometimes there are problems you simply can't see on the back of the body, until you get it onto a color corrected monitor.
Personally the only time I'd ever consider it is if I knew storage space was going to be an issue (when shooting an all-day wedding, I used up 32 gig of cards; I was transferring files to my laptop while driving between destinations to make room since I apparently had lost my card reader), or storage time was going to be an issue (shooting fast action sporting events such as hockey can fill your camera buffer even on a new model).
TIFF is different, depending on the camera body. If your body can write high-bit-depth TIFFs, this can be almost as good as RAW. You still don't have quite the same flexibility since the image data is written after post-processing by the camera body, and this post-processing might knock out some shadows or blow out some highlights, etc. But at least it's still a reasonably flexible format compared to JPG.
Now some pro's I know shoot RAW+JPG, because they want to be able to give reasonably color-corrected proofs without taking the time to color correct all the shots.
But seriously, perhaps you can ask one of them (you know so many, surely you'll be able to get in contact with one) what their reasoning is for shooting JPG because this simply doesn't make sense to me, and differs wildly from my own experience with other pro and semi pro photographers.
People eventually gave up buying computers based on nothing but processor speed.
As technology advances, certain aspects of it exceed any typical expectations from humans. The most desired feature will also be the most developed and advanced at the fastest rate (if possible) because better sells more for this feature more so than for others.
So the most desirable features will be the first to cross the diminishing returns threshold in terms of what people want out of it.
High end digital photographers are a lot more technically savvy (at least in terms of cameras) than high end computer purchasers tend to be. Consumer grade cameras may continue to sell better because of more megapixels for a while, but so-called "prosumer" and pro-level cameras aren't going to be able to push that much longer.
Indeed, a larger sensor means a larger file (by a wide margin) when shooting RAW, and a lot of pros and semi pros are almost put off by larger sensors since these are slower to work with and of course eat more disk space (and pro and semi pro will only shoot RAW). Unlike computer enthusiasts, camera enthusiasts are not looking for an excuse to buy bigger hard drives and a faster computer; their normal hardware is expensive enough as it is.
Personally I'm both a camera enthusiast and a computer enthusiast, and I have a few month old Mac Pro 8-core, 8gb RAM, plus a 30" cinema display, plus a 17" Macbook Pro amongst other various gadgets. That's a reasonably high end setup in general, but I own more in camera hardware than I do in computers and gadgets (there are camera bodies alone which cost more than my computer + monitor).
With all that, 12 megapixels are all the file size and disk i/o + cpu time for managing photos that I am interested in. I care way the heck more about ISO noise performance. I have one of the highest rated low-noise camera bodies that exists, and I still can't stand to dial it above ISO 400.
My next camera body, MP count beyond 12 won't matter to me, low light performance, color accuracy, and frames per second - these things are what count to me. Also, "HD Video" which seems to be all the rage in new bodies - give me a break. I couldn't care less.
I'd gladly pay retail price for my phone if it meant no contract. I'm highly allergic to service contracts in general, I will pay more up front to avoid them subsidizing me with tie-ins. When there's a service contract, they have no motivation to provide good service past the contract signing.
Before I got an iPhone, I was on Verizon Wireless for quite a few years. Once my initial contract expired, I started getting frequent calls from VZW which went something like:
"The plan you're on right now is no longer offered, but we can grandfather you in if you'll agree to a renewed contract."
"What happens if I don't agree to the new contract?" said I.
"You'll continue with the same features, at the same rate as you're paying now, but it won't be part of a plan," was the response.
"What's the advantage of being on a plan if I get the same features for the same price without being on a plan?" I countered.
"Without a plan, you... I'm not... well you would be planless! You would not be on a plan!"
"So what reason would I have to renew my contract, if I could avoid renewing my contract and get exactly the same thing?"
"I really suppose there's no reason you would want to do that," was the actual response one person gave me. I hope she didn't get in trouble, but I sincerely appreciated her candor.
These calls happened weekly, and each time they got more aggressive. One person suggested that I would lose my service if I didn't agree to a new contract. When I asked her in direct terms, "Is it true that if I do not re-up my contract, I will continue with the same features as I have now, at the same price, and that there is no reason to suspect this would change any time in the foreseeable future?" she responded, "No sir, your service will be cut off." I said, "Then please disconnect my service as of tomorrow, I will go out this afternoon and find a new carrier." It turns out this was a third party company who was only authorized to renew my contract, not cancel my service.
Previously when I had asked them to stop calling me about this, they had assured me they would.
After this most recent interaction where I was threatened with disconnection if I didn't re-up, I called Verizon Wireless customer service directly. I asked to cancel my service, and I was transferred to the cancellation department. I told them that if I received even one more call about renewing my contract, I would cancel my service immediately. They said something about "30 business days to process that request," (keep in mind, I had been getting the calls weekly). I repeated, "I don't care how long you're told to tell me that it takes to get me off that list, if I get such a call in even five minutes, I'm calling you back immediately to cancel. If you guys can get me off the list before the next time your contracted company gets to my number, then you will keep me as a customer; if you can't, then you lose me."
I never got another such call, and had service with them for probably three more years.
Now bear in mind whatever subsidization of initial costs they required had already been covered. I had made no indication that I wanted to stop my service with them, and fully expected to continue my service indefinitely, but here they were trying to pressure me into a commitment with absolutely no benefit to myself. If I had kept them happily for ten years, and they had called me again for this purpose after all that time, I would have fulfilled my promise and canceled my account immediately.
So, sorry for the long anecdote, but I'm one of those people who detests service contracts; I'll definitely cover any subsidization costs myself in order to avoid them.
Where did you hear that there is no native support for PDF's?
You can easily load PDF's to the Kindle. Not only can you mount the Kindle as a drive and copy the file that way, but when you buy a kindle, you get a something@kindle.com email address which you can email txt, htm, and pdf files to (as long as it's from a From address which you have whitelisted) - they will load it automatically to your kindle over its built-in 3G connection.
I loaded several Cory Doctorow books to mine this way.
This python script creates a hash to make the Kindle think that.mobi files (Secure Mobipocket books, a competitor of Amazon's for this market) are native Amazon books. After you get a hash from kindlepid.py, you run kindlefix.py on your.mobi file with your hash, and it produces a.azw file which the Kindle then thinks is one of its own book formats.
GP is almost certainly right, I find it unlikely that Amazon makes a profit on the Kindle device itself, they are relying on $10 books to cover the cost of the hardware and the contract with Sprint whereby they give you free 3G access. If you're buying your books elsewhere, Amazon's going to take a loss on the whole shebang, and that's most likely what they're trying to prevent (while counting on the fact that you can't get non-drm'd copies of most books such as in.txt,.pdf, or.htm format).
How do they know what the chimp's intention with his weapons arsenal was? TFA didn't say or I missed it.
Couldn't he have been building an arsenal for no specific purpose, then saw humans and decided to deploy these weapons which were at hand?
The 2006 experiment described in the article sounds way more convincing. It established a learning scenario, and the orangutans were able to predict which tool they would need for a job, then remember to bring that tool along with them.
This event was an anecdote which could be explained by other simpler functions.
I agree with GP, I may not feel obligated to put a check/cash into savings, but cash goes in my wallet, and the check goes into savings at least to start.
Most of the time I never quite get around to going to spend that money until I forget it was a gift to be spent that way; that money then ends up going to gas or groceries or something to that effect. At best you could say that I have that quantity of extra disposable income that I wouldn't otherwise have had, and so I eventually get some gadget I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. But by that point, all the personalness of it is lost. I'm not thinking of the gift giver two years down the line when I decide I'm going to buy a gizmo that I wouldn't have had I not received the gift way back when.
Even if I make it a conscious point to go out the very next day and buy something from the intended store worth at least that much, now I'm making much more of a cost analysis decision when considering what to buy. When I'm buying on a gift card, I'm more reckless with what I'll get. It's not money, it's a gift. I'll buy some indulgence I wouldn't have if I was evaluating it at cost. I can more easily absolve myself of the cost of a $100 sprocket when there's a $30 sprocket without as many features but which would be sufficient if I'm putting it on the gift card than if I'm forking over 5 $20's.
Also the gift card (usually) says the person thought at least somewhat about the sort of things you like. Cash or a check is, "Eh, have some money, I can't be bothered with this." I know that's not really the case (for most people), but it does feel a little less personal.
To me, receiving a gift card instead of cash is a courtesy which I sincerely appreciate.
Most likely the password only decrypts the true encryption key, which is then used for disk access.
I can't say what your setup is like, but the PC laptops where I work have full disk encryption from Safeguard Easy. The actual encryption key is known by the laptop (encrypted with the user's password), and by central management software provided by the software vendor. If a user calls the company's help desk because they forgot their disk encryption password, the laptop offers a challenge which the user can read over the phone to the support tech. That tech enters the challenge and reads a response back to the user to enter.
This challenge/response is an asymmetrically encrypted version of the disk encryption key (so the laptop never has everything it needs to know the disk key unless the user has either first entered their password, or the challenge/response has been successfully performed), which is refreshed each time the authentication happens successfully to protect it from a replay attack.
So this way users can lose their password and IS can still get the laptop to boot, but the laptop is protected from interception by a third party (unless they manage to convince IS Support to unlock it for them with social engineering).
Re:Piracy?
on
Why TV Lost
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Oh brother. If his £140 not covering the salary of one person who worked on the production of the show doesn't entitle him to watch it, then why is that the price they choose to charge him to watch it?
Maybe you were being sarcastic, but I didn't get that. You're aware of course that they make their money not from the subscription fees of a single individual, but from producing a product that they sell to tens or hundreds of thousands of people, right?
I can't quite accept, "You paid for it, but you will watch it when we say you can watch it, unless you recorded it when we said you could watch it, then you can watch it later - but not if you didn't record it when we said you can watch it but instead got the same thing from somewhere else, then watched it later, that's just unacceptable."
He paid for it. Time shifting is legal. Time shifting does not dictate what mechanism is used to shift. Get over it.
If you're talking about data, Flash and in particular Flex (built on Flash) does just fine with every major web service type, and even does just fine with straight up XML (so if you have something proprietary, Flex can consume it as long as you can output XML).
If you're talking about interface and controls, their user control markup language is MXML, which is an XML based language.
If you have the Flash Remoting services, then you also have the option to send these things as binary blobs. The benefit of this approach is that it supports SERVER PUSH, not just client polling, so your real time application can really be real time (and not just almost real time). It's also much smaller on bandwidth.
I've worked with both techs; Flash/Flex is way ahead of Silverlight. Silverlight looks competitive on paper, because that's Microsoft's signature: make it look good superficially until you control the market, then give up on it until another competitor comes along. In reality, you can accomplish more with Flex, more quickly, and in fewer lines of code than you can in Silverlight in the vast majority of situations.
You need to give your customers what they want, but not necessarily what they ask for.
Exactly right. And I'd wager to say that this is more true of games than of other products. Customer requests are based on a superficial analysis of the product. Sometimes what they want isn't feasible from a logical perspective (ie the consequences are unconsidered, they only know they want X not that X comes at the cost of Y).
I've done some game design and balancing (see my sig - that's me in the primary copyright). My players often wanted things that made their life easier, but which would represent a game unbalancing. For example, perhaps I designed in a requirement for the player to make a decision between two trade offs.
Such decisions are critical to enjoyable game play - if every decision has an obvious right and wrong choice then you are on a rail and that's not as much fun. Players often asked for these trade offs to not be a decision they have to make, or asked that the consequences of the decision not exist; maybe asked to be able to have it both ways.
They also wanted certain elements which were designed to be highly rewarding but also very rare to be made dramatically more available. Such as having their drop rate increased, or being able to purchase them for prices which would turn them from rare into common.
I could do these things, and it would be easy for me, and you would be glad that I did... today. Tomorrow you'd be like every other player because everyone made the same choice or didn't have to make a choice at all. Success (however you measure that) would come after a fixed number of clicks.
No, you have to decode what your users are really asking for and give *that* to them, not the literal request. In the case of games, they are asking you to make it more fun. It's not fun when you get stuck in a puzzle game and can't figure out how to proceed. These times it makes sense to have a Suggest button. However that should be detected and only offered when the user is stuck, because if you offer them it immediately it amounts to a "solve this for me" button (aka an I WIN button), and that isn't fun. Offer the suggest button, but only when they haven't made a move in some amount of time (long enough that it's not viable to use for every move, but short enough that they don't get frustrated and close out your app). Also make it have a cost. Give them either a fixed number of total uses, or make it dock their score in some significant way (if scoring on time, add 30 seconds for each use, if scoring by points, deduct 10 moves worth of points). They choose whether they want to pay that price.
Just out of curiosity, does it prompt you for permission to download? I'm wondering what sort of protections they have against someone using either their own codec (thus downloading arbitrary executable content - presumably they don't allow this), an obscure codec not typically used (this would greatly increase the attack surface area since it effectively becomes any bug in any codec supported by the platform whether or not you have it installed), and finally against man in the middle attacks that allows someone to deliver you a false codec when you're trying to download a normal one.
That was my experience. For the set of games which worked well under Wine (I used Cedega actually), performance was better under Linux, both in terms of frame rate as well as loading times.
That wasn't all games though, there were some that worked poorly under Cedega, but mostly there were ones that didn't work at all. If it worked, it was better, if it didn't... well it didn't.
As time went on though, I found myself wanting to play those Windows-only games less and less, eventually leaving them behind all together.
I never could get Linux to see all my mouse buttons.
They may be a little cheaper, but they can't be that much cheaper or they couldn't afford to live here.
Actually that's not true. H1B's often accept a dramatically reduced standard of living, with the intent to make as much money as they can for the duration of their visa, then take it home with them. Sometimes this is still much better than the conditions they left at home.
The citizen counterparts tend to want things like kids, gadgets, a nice car, good clothes, a house, etc. The H1B tends to have 1 week's worth of clothes, takes public transportation or has an inexpensive used car, lives here alone (maybe with family back home), lives in a one-room studio apartment, and maintains a minimum of optional expenses.
How is it more open than Flash? The Flash spec is released by Adobe in case you missed it. Adobe also themselves provide a complete implementation.
They don't try to get open source developers to fill in the gaps for them for free, they put in the sweat and expense all alone. It also doesn't require last-minute quick fixes to make it work. This whole thing is exactly why Flash is a better platform for this than Silverlight.
I've got a live feed running from CNN right now which didn't require me to patch just in time to be able to use it for something real. Man, the fact that Moonlight wasn't ready for this before today only demonstrates the size of the gap between these technologies. Flash is mature, stable, and complete. Silver/Moonlight is new, poorly implemented, and wholly feels like a knee-jerk reaction to the sudden and very late realization by Microsoft's part that they have a real competitor.
Actually blackened marshmallows are probably better for you than a slow roasted golden brown marshmallow.
The black is carbon left over from the burning of sugar, and pure carbon like this is very good at absorbing toxins. It also will spend less time over the fire and more of its cooking energy comes from the sugars in the marshmallow. So any foreign agents in the fire which may be leaving unhealthy soot deposits on the outside of your marshmallow have less opportunity to build up.
My buddy's daughter was on a Semester at Sea around a year ago. Sounds like a really fantastic experience overall.
Her classmates' solution to this problem was not at all surprising, and remarkably effective. They got a hold of one of the professors' password. Within a few days the whole ship had unlimited access. There was ship-wide wifi, and normally you'd sign on to a web page that appeared before it granted you access. I guess the sign-on page wasn't encrypted, and it was trivial for students to pick up a new professor password whenever it was changed.
Hopefully they've closed that gap since then, but you never know.
That works for a specific case. But the more times you play that card, the higher the cost for the next faster CPU. If that's the standard approach to most problem solving, eventually you end up with an application which on the very best distributed hardware you can buy, still performs like a dog.
That work will still need to be done. Instead of going from paper to the accounting system, it'll go to the DHR system. Maybe even to both places separately if a small health care provider's software either doesn't support doing so automatically, or doesn't see a ROI for buying / hiring the changes for doing so.
Weren't a number of high profile Twitter users recently hacked because someone "brute forced" the password "happiness" on one of the Twitter admin staff accounts?
Small to mid sized companies can benefit from outsourcing things like document storage and data security. They lack the economy of scale to do this internally as a good return on investment. Large companies need to internalize this so they can better control exactly what measures go into this.
Large companies aren't the target of most critical hosted solutions, it's the small and mid-sized companies that benefit most from these things.
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I agree with others; I don't think this is a good test. If you walk into a terminal cancer ward and point a loaded gun in the face of patients, some might immediately welcome it as sweet relief, while most would respond with a fight or flight reaction.
There is a physiological response to impending danger which will be experienced by almost any human with a balanced physio/psychochemistry.
I can't find any information on "tetsom," can you provide a source of more information on this term?
Some of my lenses are full-frame lenses, but most are 3/4 frame - including my 10.5mm fisheye. This is not a round image (probably due in part to having a target sensor size of 3/4 frame), and offers 180 deg (the degree symbol shows as Â, Slashdot really needs to read up on character encodings) image corner-to-corner.
I do some landscape work, but it's not too common for me to really pine after a super wide angle.
With the Nikon D3/D700 (their two latest full-frame bodies), you can put a DX lens (3/4 frame lens) on it, and it will use only the center 3/4 of the image sensor. So it's not like I'd have to completely abandon my DX lenses, but it would be producing a smaller pixel count image (6.1mp for a 12.3mp sensor I believe), and I would find an image at that resolution more limiting than the effects of a smaller sensor I believe.
Actually this might be a reason I'd invest in a higher pixel count full-frame body - if I could keep a DX lens running at around 12mp, that would ease my transition into the full-frame world.
You're right, I was saying "sensor size" when I meant to say "pixel count." There certainly is a market for physically larger sensors - one of the advantages of larger sensors is better ISO noise performance. It's got other advantages too of course, like offsetting aperture diffraction when you want both a very sharp image and a high f-stop.
Personally I'm put off of larger sensors by two things (even though I know overall they're better). First, large format sensors are quite a bit more expensive. Two bodies with all the same features but a different sensor size can differ in price by thousands of dollars. That's something I don't quite get (except I know they get fewer sensors on a production wafer, and because the surface area is larger, the defect rate per-sensor is higher, but I can't believe this changes cost by $1,000 or more). Second, I have a lot of hardware invested in smaller sensor sizes. I have a few full-frame lenses, but most of my lenses were bought for then-standard small format sensors.
For me, the switch to full-frame would require investment in a more expensive body, as well as replacing a number of my favorite lenses, some of which have no equivalent in the full-frame world. This would be a major undertaking, and honestly when I bought most of my lenses, I did so with the belief that I'd have them for the rest of my life.
I also know professional computer programmers who can barely write:
10 PRINT "Hello World"
20 GOTO 10
If you are a pro photographer and not shooting RAW, you're doing yourself a tremendous disservice. Yes, it's a little harder because the camera makes fewer decisions for you. Some pros will probably leave the camera in fully automatic mode full time too.
If you do any post processing, not shooting raw means you can't correct exposure or white balance after the fact except for a very tiny amount. If you're doing studio work or landscapes, maybe you can get away with this since you can sit there and fine tune your settings as they won't really change once you have them dialed in. But still there's no reason that I can see why you wouldn't want to. Sometimes there are problems you simply can't see on the back of the body, until you get it onto a color corrected monitor.
Personally the only time I'd ever consider it is if I knew storage space was going to be an issue (when shooting an all-day wedding, I used up 32 gig of cards; I was transferring files to my laptop while driving between destinations to make room since I apparently had lost my card reader), or storage time was going to be an issue (shooting fast action sporting events such as hockey can fill your camera buffer even on a new model).
TIFF is different, depending on the camera body. If your body can write high-bit-depth TIFFs, this can be almost as good as RAW. You still don't have quite the same flexibility since the image data is written after post-processing by the camera body, and this post-processing might knock out some shadows or blow out some highlights, etc. But at least it's still a reasonably flexible format compared to JPG.
Now some pro's I know shoot RAW+JPG, because they want to be able to give reasonably color-corrected proofs without taking the time to color correct all the shots.
But seriously, perhaps you can ask one of them (you know so many, surely you'll be able to get in contact with one) what their reasoning is for shooting JPG because this simply doesn't make sense to me, and differs wildly from my own experience with other pro and semi pro photographers.
People eventually gave up buying computers based on nothing but processor speed.
As technology advances, certain aspects of it exceed any typical expectations from humans. The most desired feature will also be the most developed and advanced at the fastest rate (if possible) because better sells more for this feature more so than for others.
So the most desirable features will be the first to cross the diminishing returns threshold in terms of what people want out of it.
High end digital photographers are a lot more technically savvy (at least in terms of cameras) than high end computer purchasers tend to be. Consumer grade cameras may continue to sell better because of more megapixels for a while, but so-called "prosumer" and pro-level cameras aren't going to be able to push that much longer.
Indeed, a larger sensor means a larger file (by a wide margin) when shooting RAW, and a lot of pros and semi pros are almost put off by larger sensors since these are slower to work with and of course eat more disk space (and pro and semi pro will only shoot RAW). Unlike computer enthusiasts, camera enthusiasts are not looking for an excuse to buy bigger hard drives and a faster computer; their normal hardware is expensive enough as it is.
Personally I'm both a camera enthusiast and a computer enthusiast, and I have a few month old Mac Pro 8-core, 8gb RAM, plus a 30" cinema display, plus a 17" Macbook Pro amongst other various gadgets. That's a reasonably high end setup in general, but I own more in camera hardware than I do in computers and gadgets (there are camera bodies alone which cost more than my computer + monitor).
With all that, 12 megapixels are all the file size and disk i/o + cpu time for managing photos that I am interested in. I care way the heck more about ISO noise performance. I have one of the highest rated low-noise camera bodies that exists, and I still can't stand to dial it above ISO 400.
My next camera body, MP count beyond 12 won't matter to me, low light performance, color accuracy, and frames per second - these things are what count to me. Also, "HD Video" which seems to be all the rage in new bodies - give me a break. I couldn't care less.
I didn't make any value judgement that it's good or bad; I merely posited a possible motive.
I'd gladly pay retail price for my phone if it meant no contract. I'm highly allergic to service contracts in general, I will pay more up front to avoid them subsidizing me with tie-ins. When there's a service contract, they have no motivation to provide good service past the contract signing.
Before I got an iPhone, I was on Verizon Wireless for quite a few years. Once my initial contract expired, I started getting frequent calls from VZW which went something like:
"The plan you're on right now is no longer offered, but we can grandfather you in if you'll agree to a renewed contract."
"What happens if I don't agree to the new contract?" said I.
"You'll continue with the same features, at the same rate as you're paying now, but it won't be part of a plan," was the response.
"What's the advantage of being on a plan if I get the same features for the same price without being on a plan?" I countered.
"Without a plan, you... I'm not... well you would be planless! You would not be on a plan!"
"So what reason would I have to renew my contract, if I could avoid renewing my contract and get exactly the same thing?"
"I really suppose there's no reason you would want to do that," was the actual response one person gave me. I hope she didn't get in trouble, but I sincerely appreciated her candor.
These calls happened weekly, and each time they got more aggressive. One person suggested that I would lose my service if I didn't agree to a new contract. When I asked her in direct terms, "Is it true that if I do not re-up my contract, I will continue with the same features as I have now, at the same price, and that there is no reason to suspect this would change any time in the foreseeable future?" she responded, "No sir, your service will be cut off." I said, "Then please disconnect my service as of tomorrow, I will go out this afternoon and find a new carrier." It turns out this was a third party company who was only authorized to renew my contract, not cancel my service.
Previously when I had asked them to stop calling me about this, they had assured me they would.
After this most recent interaction where I was threatened with disconnection if I didn't re-up, I called Verizon Wireless customer service directly. I asked to cancel my service, and I was transferred to the cancellation department. I told them that if I received even one more call about renewing my contract, I would cancel my service immediately. They said something about "30 business days to process that request," (keep in mind, I had been getting the calls weekly). I repeated, "I don't care how long you're told to tell me that it takes to get me off that list, if I get such a call in even five minutes, I'm calling you back immediately to cancel. If you guys can get me off the list before the next time your contracted company gets to my number, then you will keep me as a customer; if you can't, then you lose me."
I never got another such call, and had service with them for probably three more years.
Now bear in mind whatever subsidization of initial costs they required had already been covered. I had made no indication that I wanted to stop my service with them, and fully expected to continue my service indefinitely, but here they were trying to pressure me into a commitment with absolutely no benefit to myself. If I had kept them happily for ten years, and they had called me again for this purpose after all that time, I would have fulfilled my promise and canceled my account immediately.
So, sorry for the long anecdote, but I'm one of those people who detests service contracts; I'll definitely cover any subsidization costs myself in order to avoid them.
Where did you hear that there is no native support for PDF's?
You can easily load PDF's to the Kindle. Not only can you mount the Kindle as a drive and copy the file that way, but when you buy a kindle, you get a something@kindle.com email address which you can email txt, htm, and pdf files to (as long as it's from a From address which you have whitelisted) - they will load it automatically to your kindle over its built-in 3G connection.
I loaded several Cory Doctorow books to mine this way.
This python script creates a hash to make the Kindle think that .mobi files (Secure Mobipocket books, a competitor of Amazon's for this market) are native Amazon books. After you get a hash from kindlepid.py, you run kindlefix.py on your .mobi file with your hash, and it produces a .azw file which the Kindle then thinks is one of its own book formats.
GP is almost certainly right, I find it unlikely that Amazon makes a profit on the Kindle device itself, they are relying on $10 books to cover the cost of the hardware and the contract with Sprint whereby they give you free 3G access. If you're buying your books elsewhere, Amazon's going to take a loss on the whole shebang, and that's most likely what they're trying to prevent (while counting on the fact that you can't get non-drm'd copies of most books such as in .txt, .pdf, or .htm format).
How do they know what the chimp's intention with his weapons arsenal was? TFA didn't say or I missed it.
Couldn't he have been building an arsenal for no specific purpose, then saw humans and decided to deploy these weapons which were at hand?
The 2006 experiment described in the article sounds way more convincing. It established a learning scenario, and the orangutans were able to predict which tool they would need for a job, then remember to bring that tool along with them.
This event was an anecdote which could be explained by other simpler functions.
I agree with GP, I may not feel obligated to put a check/cash into savings, but cash goes in my wallet, and the check goes into savings at least to start.
Most of the time I never quite get around to going to spend that money until I forget it was a gift to be spent that way; that money then ends up going to gas or groceries or something to that effect. At best you could say that I have that quantity of extra disposable income that I wouldn't otherwise have had, and so I eventually get some gadget I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. But by that point, all the personalness of it is lost. I'm not thinking of the gift giver two years down the line when I decide I'm going to buy a gizmo that I wouldn't have had I not received the gift way back when.
Even if I make it a conscious point to go out the very next day and buy something from the intended store worth at least that much, now I'm making much more of a cost analysis decision when considering what to buy. When I'm buying on a gift card, I'm more reckless with what I'll get. It's not money, it's a gift. I'll buy some indulgence I wouldn't have if I was evaluating it at cost. I can more easily absolve myself of the cost of a $100 sprocket when there's a $30 sprocket without as many features but which would be sufficient if I'm putting it on the gift card than if I'm forking over 5 $20's.
Also the gift card (usually) says the person thought at least somewhat about the sort of things you like. Cash or a check is, "Eh, have some money, I can't be bothered with this." I know that's not really the case (for most people), but it does feel a little less personal.
To me, receiving a gift card instead of cash is a courtesy which I sincerely appreciate.
Most likely the password only decrypts the true encryption key, which is then used for disk access.
I can't say what your setup is like, but the PC laptops where I work have full disk encryption from Safeguard Easy. The actual encryption key is known by the laptop (encrypted with the user's password), and by central management software provided by the software vendor. If a user calls the company's help desk because they forgot their disk encryption password, the laptop offers a challenge which the user can read over the phone to the support tech. That tech enters the challenge and reads a response back to the user to enter.
This challenge/response is an asymmetrically encrypted version of the disk encryption key (so the laptop never has everything it needs to know the disk key unless the user has either first entered their password, or the challenge/response has been successfully performed), which is refreshed each time the authentication happens successfully to protect it from a replay attack.
So this way users can lose their password and IS can still get the laptop to boot, but the laptop is protected from interception by a third party (unless they manage to convince IS Support to unlock it for them with social engineering).
Oh brother. If his £140 not covering the salary of one person who worked on the production of the show doesn't entitle him to watch it, then why is that the price they choose to charge him to watch it?
Maybe you were being sarcastic, but I didn't get that. You're aware of course that they make their money not from the subscription fees of a single individual, but from producing a product that they sell to tens or hundreds of thousands of people, right?
I can't quite accept, "You paid for it, but you will watch it when we say you can watch it, unless you recorded it when we said you could watch it, then you can watch it later - but not if you didn't record it when we said you can watch it but instead got the same thing from somewhere else, then watched it later, that's just unacceptable."
He paid for it. Time shifting is legal. Time shifting does not dictate what mechanism is used to shift. Get over it.
If you're talking about data, Flash and in particular Flex (built on Flash) does just fine with every major web service type, and even does just fine with straight up XML (so if you have something proprietary, Flex can consume it as long as you can output XML).
If you're talking about interface and controls, their user control markup language is MXML, which is an XML based language.
If you have the Flash Remoting services, then you also have the option to send these things as binary blobs. The benefit of this approach is that it supports SERVER PUSH, not just client polling, so your real time application can really be real time (and not just almost real time). It's also much smaller on bandwidth.
I've worked with both techs; Flash/Flex is way ahead of Silverlight. Silverlight looks competitive on paper, because that's Microsoft's signature: make it look good superficially until you control the market, then give up on it until another competitor comes along. In reality, you can accomplish more with Flex, more quickly, and in fewer lines of code than you can in Silverlight in the vast majority of situations.
You need to give your customers what they want, but not necessarily what they ask for.
Exactly right. And I'd wager to say that this is more true of games than of other products. Customer requests are based on a superficial analysis of the product. Sometimes what they want isn't feasible from a logical perspective (ie the consequences are unconsidered, they only know they want X not that X comes at the cost of Y).
I've done some game design and balancing (see my sig - that's me in the primary copyright). My players often wanted things that made their life easier, but which would represent a game unbalancing. For example, perhaps I designed in a requirement for the player to make a decision between two trade offs.
Such decisions are critical to enjoyable game play - if every decision has an obvious right and wrong choice then you are on a rail and that's not as much fun. Players often asked for these trade offs to not be a decision they have to make, or asked that the consequences of the decision not exist; maybe asked to be able to have it both ways.
They also wanted certain elements which were designed to be highly rewarding but also very rare to be made dramatically more available. Such as having their drop rate increased, or being able to purchase them for prices which would turn them from rare into common.
I could do these things, and it would be easy for me, and you would be glad that I did... today. Tomorrow you'd be like every other player because everyone made the same choice or didn't have to make a choice at all. Success (however you measure that) would come after a fixed number of clicks.
There's already a game for people who want that out of a roleplaying game: http://www.progressquest.com/
No, you have to decode what your users are really asking for and give *that* to them, not the literal request. In the case of games, they are asking you to make it more fun. It's not fun when you get stuck in a puzzle game and can't figure out how to proceed. These times it makes sense to have a Suggest button. However that should be detected and only offered when the user is stuck, because if you offer them it immediately it amounts to a "solve this for me" button (aka an I WIN button), and that isn't fun. Offer the suggest button, but only when they haven't made a move in some amount of time (long enough that it's not viable to use for every move, but short enough that they don't get frustrated and close out your app). Also make it have a cost. Give them either a fixed number of total uses, or make it dock their score in some significant way (if scoring on time, add 30 seconds for each use, if scoring by points, deduct 10 moves worth of points). They choose whether they want to pay that price.
Just out of curiosity, does it prompt you for permission to download? I'm wondering what sort of protections they have against someone using either their own codec (thus downloading arbitrary executable content - presumably they don't allow this), an obscure codec not typically used (this would greatly increase the attack surface area since it effectively becomes any bug in any codec supported by the platform whether or not you have it installed), and finally against man in the middle attacks that allows someone to deliver you a false codec when you're trying to download a normal one.
That was my experience. For the set of games which worked well under Wine (I used Cedega actually), performance was better under Linux, both in terms of frame rate as well as loading times.
That wasn't all games though, there were some that worked poorly under Cedega, but mostly there were ones that didn't work at all. If it worked, it was better, if it didn't... well it didn't.
As time went on though, I found myself wanting to play those Windows-only games less and less, eventually leaving them behind all together.
I never could get Linux to see all my mouse buttons.
Actually that's not true. H1B's often accept a dramatically reduced standard of living, with the intent to make as much money as they can for the duration of their visa, then take it home with them. Sometimes this is still much better than the conditions they left at home.
H1B's make on average 23% less than their citizen counterparts.
The citizen counterparts tend to want things like kids, gadgets, a nice car, good clothes, a house, etc. The H1B tends to have 1 week's worth of clothes, takes public transportation or has an inexpensive used car, lives here alone (maybe with family back home), lives in a one-room studio apartment, and maintains a minimum of optional expenses.
I haven't seen such reports, would you care to enlighten us with references and links to them so that we may judge their credibility?
Pandora already offers this. A $36/yr subscription eliminates the ads.
How is it more open than Flash? The Flash spec is released by Adobe in case you missed it. Adobe also themselves provide a complete implementation.
They don't try to get open source developers to fill in the gaps for them for free, they put in the sweat and expense all alone. It also doesn't require last-minute quick fixes to make it work. This whole thing is exactly why Flash is a better platform for this than Silverlight.
I've got a live feed running from CNN right now which didn't require me to patch just in time to be able to use it for something real. Man, the fact that Moonlight wasn't ready for this before today only demonstrates the size of the gap between these technologies. Flash is mature, stable, and complete. Silver/Moonlight is new, poorly implemented, and wholly feels like a knee-jerk reaction to the sudden and very late realization by Microsoft's part that they have a real competitor.
Actually blackened marshmallows are probably better for you than a slow roasted golden brown marshmallow.
The black is carbon left over from the burning of sugar, and pure carbon like this is very good at absorbing toxins. It also will spend less time over the fire and more of its cooking energy comes from the sugars in the marshmallow. So any foreign agents in the fire which may be leaving unhealthy soot deposits on the outside of your marshmallow have less opportunity to build up.
My buddy's daughter was on a Semester at Sea around a year ago. Sounds like a really fantastic experience overall.
Her classmates' solution to this problem was not at all surprising, and remarkably effective. They got a hold of one of the professors' password. Within a few days the whole ship had unlimited access. There was ship-wide wifi, and normally you'd sign on to a web page that appeared before it granted you access. I guess the sign-on page wasn't encrypted, and it was trivial for students to pick up a new professor password whenever it was changed.
Hopefully they've closed that gap since then, but you never know.
That works for a specific case. But the more times you play that card, the higher the cost for the next faster CPU. If that's the standard approach to most problem solving, eventually you end up with an application which on the very best distributed hardware you can buy, still performs like a dog.
That work will still need to be done. Instead of going from paper to the accounting system, it'll go to the DHR system. Maybe even to both places separately if a small health care provider's software either doesn't support doing so automatically, or doesn't see a ROI for buying / hiring the changes for doing so.
Weren't a number of high profile Twitter users recently hacked because someone "brute forced" the password "happiness" on one of the Twitter admin staff accounts?
Small to mid sized companies can benefit from outsourcing things like document storage and data security. They lack the economy of scale to do this internally as a good return on investment. Large companies need to internalize this so they can better control exactly what measures go into this.
Large companies aren't the target of most critical hosted solutions, it's the small and mid-sized companies that benefit most from these things.