This has been my beef with this new 'feature' from the get go. I have Mac systems and I have several MythTV boxes - none of which are even close to supported at this point. Hell, if they DID start supporting this on Mac systems - which is realistically the only move they'll ever make - it would STILL not work for me since all my A/V is done in Myth. I don't want to watch movies on my laptop or in my office - I want to watch them on that big flatscreen in the living room.
I have to presume that this value added option they have is in some way being 'given' to me in lieu of, say, reducing my monthly rate. Great. Thanks for nothing.
Ultimately, I don't understand what all the fuss is about this. I'm not remotely interested in keeping copies of everything they send me - and why would I be? If I wanted to watch a movie and/or TV show again - I'll just 'rent' it again! This has already happened to me with their physical service - I don't ever buy actual DVDs any more. Why would I want to purchase and store boxes upon boxes of physical media on the off chance I'd want to watch something again when I can let NetFlix keep all that crap in THEIR warehouse? Moving to pure digital distribution simply eliminates the only irksome side effect of that arrangement: having to wait for the physical object to be delivered.
Instead, I get to 'pay' for a service that doesn't work at all for me. Because I might be a dirty pirate - or something. I'm not even sure what the argument is at this point. Seems that if we all go the NetFlix sanctioned way, we get it to work the way I want anyway - as long as we use Windows.
In Summary:
$25/month NetFlix + Windows Only = Cranky Customer who doesn't pirate
$25/month NetFlix + Any Platform = Happy Customer who doesn't pirate
That's pretty much how the iTunes Plus service works. You turn on the 'I want DRM free songs' option, and it shows you those instead of the DRM versions. Previously, this would be reflected in the price of the songs, but presumably that will no longer be evident - but the preference should still function the same.
It may not be a big intrusive popup dialog when you first go to the iTunes store, but it IS right there on the front page.
Well, I hope you make it clear to your players that their actions are irrelevant and you are the one directing the play and not them.
In a case like that, the actions of the players are hugely relevant - even if the die rolls aren't. It's interactive storytelling, and a lot of us DMs feel it is better to fudge the dice than to let a few unlucky rolls destroy the narrative. If the players just want to roll dice against each other, perhaps Yahtzee would be a better choice.
I don't think anyone really has a problem with the technical improvements with the IDs. It's the the centralized database, requiring it for travel and other obscenely intrusive bits that people oppose. Of course, a lot of people rally around the 'unfunded mandate' banner simply because it's easier to influence the general public with money-related arguments.
I suspect that your two-page RE for mailing addresses tries to also accomodate bang paths, X.400 addresses and other archaic addressing formats that are no longer relevant, as well as supporting STMP address lists, angle addresses, route specifications, obsolete SMTP formats and other obscure structures that can be safely ignored -- some of which probably wouldn't be accepted by an SMTP server anyway.
You're absolutely correct. My post was merely an attempt to harp on the seemingly inflexible position of 'accept all valid email addresses' by pointing out that being pedantic works in both directions. Thanks for helping!
On the last two pages of my copy of Mastering Regular Expressions is an example of a regular expression that matches valid email addresses.
It is two full pages with no 'noise' whitespace.
It is considered 'inaccurate, but close enough'
What is considered a 'valid' email address is not an easy thing to sniff. Large chunks of MTA code go into figuring out validity, and they have it much easier since they can do it procedurally instead of in a single match. Expecting every single web site out there to apply this level of accuracy to their address validity check is flat out asking for too much.
Yeah, it'd be nice if the whole rest of the world was pedantic and accurate. It's not, though, so get over it.
Did you know that if you right click on a pdf opened inside Safari that it gives you the option to open the pdf inside preview? This might help you with your problem.
Ayup - I knew that, but why would I want to add an extra step into the process? My goal is to always have PDFs viewed by an application designed for it and my web pages viewed by an application designed for web browsing. The hidden preference option is ideal for getting the behavior I want. Having to clumsily provide additional input isn't.
I belong to the 'simple tools that work together' school of design, so monolithic apps that do everything irk me. Different strokes and all:)
I hated it when Apple decided that Safari should be used to view PDFs inside a browser window instead of in, say, a PDF viewer. In the browser, you have no control over the zoom level (which is ALWAYS too small) and you have no way to jump directly to a specific page. When I need to see page 623 of a 1000 page document, the last thing I want to do is scroll the damned window around hunting for it. People put tables of contents in documents for a reason. I'm honestly baffled why anyone thinks that this is a better solution than just firing open Preview (which launches in roughly.5 seconds).
FYI - you can disable this bone-headed behavior at the command line. Make sure Safari isn't running, then type "defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES" into the terminal.
Personally, I'd modify the system so the very first item in any right-click popup menu is a flyout containing the main application menus. Make it an option if need be, but I think it would make multiple/large screens easier to use.
I like this idea. The bigger and more numerous my screens get (currently a 24" plus a 19"), the less I like my single menu bar. I'm lucky enough to know all the keyboard shortcuts for all of the common things I do in a day and most apps that I keep on my second display tend to have toolbars for common actions - but it sucks to have to take that long trip up to the menu for that rare action I can't remember.
You're presuming that the 'background count' of murders was somehow replaced by these killings. Instead, you should look at it as a sudden 100% increase over 2 hours.
To be honest, I never understood why Microsoft went with the whole 'hog the screen' mentality with their application model - and it's never fit with my workflow. The window arrangement on my (dual headed, of course) desktop is meticulously tiled so I'm never more than a single click away from any of them. When you have on average 5 terminal windows, two web browsers, ten text files, multiple chat windows, iTunes and an email app open, tiling is critical. I certainly couldn't work as effectively if I were limited to a single screen. Log tails, reference and email go on the left screen - work happens on the right. I can't imagine having to fit all that on a single monitor, and if any of those apps were 'optimized' to prefer full screen mode, I'd go crazy.
To me, it seems ironic that an operating system named Windows has such a hard time allowing me to manage windows the way I'd like.
Wait a second. You want their new software with new enhancements to run on an older system that didn't have any of them? That isn't backwords compatibility, that would be forwards capacity for XP. MS can run programs that were written as far back as the DOS age. That's backwords compatability.
Can programs written for MAC OSX be run from a computer running Mac 9? That's what we're talking about.
See, this is why I don't ever post on Slashdot any more. My intent was to post a relatively off topic rebuttal (and have even been modded as such already) to a red herring thrown into this discussion. God only knows why you felt the need to reply to my comment by effectively saying the same thing I did but about DOS instead of Mac OS 6.
In the meantime, the guy who posted FUD about hardware lock-in and backwards compatibility is currently at +3 informative and climbing. I'm not sure why I come here any more, let alone post...
You're being disingenuous with your objection. The GP poster was talking about backwards compatibility with respect to the OS, not with hardware. The point stands that it is still possible to this day to run software written in 1984 for Mac OS 6.x on a 68k processor. That's two processor architectures and a complete OS rewrite. I'd call that pretty good backwards compatibility. The only times an application requires a certain version of the OS is when it is actually using a feature that wasn't present in a previous release - not due to some artificially created 'requirement' by Apple.
Additionally, it's possible to run their current OS on some amazingly old or completely unsupported hardware. I'm not sure how Apple's decision to standardize on a single hardware platform relates to backwards compatibility at all, actually.
Even better - add in a breathalyzer so that in order to join the voice channel you MUST blow between.05 and.1 in order to guarantee exactly the right level of inebriation.
The exec's that are whining like little babies are the ones that want to wring another $1.00 per viewing out of it after it aired. I.E. the pigs that smell the cooking bacon out there and want a piece of that pie too.
Opening a document can be an extremely expensive operation if the owning application isn't already running (think Photoshop). Opening the WRONG document can be a WASTED extremely expensive operation. When fat-fingering the return/enter keys, I would much rather the Finder toggle me into 'edit filename' mode than have it launch Photoshop.
This philosophy is scattered all around the OS. The more expensive the operation, the more input you need to provide. That applies to dialog boxes with and without default options as well as shortcut keys. Incidentally, this addresses the Shutdown/Restart confirmation complaint as well - both terribly expensive operations (as noted elsewhere, this is avoidable by holding down option key - more input).
Considering more and more software these days will actually turn your smiley into a graphic, using the 'mouth' as your closing paren will cause the sentence to be rendered 'unclosed'. Because of this, I've gotten in the habit of NOT counting the 'mouth' as the closing paren. Of course, this looks funny when you're working in pure plain text, but the developer in me prefers to think of the smiley as its own token (a diacritical, in effect).
We're talking about different classes of cheaters here. The casual cheater is for sure going to be using pre-written Windows based stuff and would never consider switching platforms. However, there is another segment of cheaters - the professional farmers. These people make a lot of money and would not hesitate to switch platforms if it meant it would further their aims.
While I'm sure Blizzard wants ALL cheaters stopped, they primarily focus on the farmers with these retaliations as they are the ones that have the largest impact on gameplay for the rest of their users. Historically, they accompany these mass banning announcements with commentary proclaiming some number of farmers were caught in the net.
Slashdot Mirror
This has been my beef with this new 'feature' from the get go. I have Mac systems and I have several MythTV boxes - none of which are even close to supported at this point. Hell, if they DID start supporting this on Mac systems - which is realistically the only move they'll ever make - it would STILL not work for me since all my A/V is done in Myth. I don't want to watch movies on my laptop or in my office - I want to watch them on that big flatscreen in the living room.
I have to presume that this value added option they have is in some way being 'given' to me in lieu of, say, reducing my monthly rate. Great. Thanks for nothing.
Ultimately, I don't understand what all the fuss is about this. I'm not remotely interested in keeping copies of everything they send me - and why would I be? If I wanted to watch a movie and/or TV show again - I'll just 'rent' it again! This has already happened to me with their physical service - I don't ever buy actual DVDs any more. Why would I want to purchase and store boxes upon boxes of physical media on the off chance I'd want to watch something again when I can let NetFlix keep all that crap in THEIR warehouse? Moving to pure digital distribution simply eliminates the only irksome side effect of that arrangement: having to wait for the physical object to be delivered.
Instead, I get to 'pay' for a service that doesn't work at all for me. Because I might be a dirty pirate - or something. I'm not even sure what the argument is at this point. Seems that if we all go the NetFlix sanctioned way, we get it to work the way I want anyway - as long as we use Windows.
In Summary:
$25/month NetFlix + Windows Only = Cranky Customer who doesn't pirate
$25/month NetFlix + Any Platform = Happy Customer who doesn't pirate
A guy goes out fishing. He catches a marlin. As he is bringing it home, sharks eat it.
The rest is just storytelling. The author was clearly being melodramatic.
That's pretty much how the iTunes Plus service works. You turn on the 'I want DRM free songs' option, and it shows you those instead of the DRM versions. Previously, this would be reflected in the price of the songs, but presumably that will no longer be evident - but the preference should still function the same.
It may not be a big intrusive popup dialog when you first go to the iTunes store, but it IS right there on the front page.
Well, that's more than minimum wage...
I'd bet the odds of finding the music you like on one of these ringles is pretty much nil, then.
In a case like that, the actions of the players are hugely relevant - even if the die rolls aren't. It's interactive storytelling, and a lot of us DMs feel it is better to fudge the dice than to let a few unlucky rolls destroy the narrative. If the players just want to roll dice against each other, perhaps Yahtzee would be a better choice.
I don't think anyone really has a problem with the technical improvements with the IDs. It's the the centralized database, requiring it for travel and other obscenely intrusive bits that people oppose. Of course, a lot of people rally around the 'unfunded mandate' banner simply because it's easier to influence the general public with money-related arguments.
You're absolutely correct. My post was merely an attempt to harp on the seemingly inflexible position of 'accept all valid email addresses' by pointing out that being pedantic works in both directions. Thanks for helping!
On the last two pages of my copy of Mastering Regular Expressions is an example of a regular expression that matches valid email addresses.
What is considered a 'valid' email address is not an easy thing to sniff. Large chunks of MTA code go into figuring out validity, and they have it much easier since they can do it procedurally instead of in a single match. Expecting every single web site out there to apply this level of accuracy to their address validity check is flat out asking for too much.
Yeah, it'd be nice if the whole rest of the world was pedantic and accurate. It's not, though, so get over it.
Ayup - I knew that, but why would I want to add an extra step into the process? My goal is to always have PDFs viewed by an application designed for it and my web pages viewed by an application designed for web browsing. The hidden preference option is ideal for getting the behavior I want. Having to clumsily provide additional input isn't.
I belong to the 'simple tools that work together' school of design, so monolithic apps that do everything irk me. Different strokes and all :)
I hated it when Apple decided that Safari should be used to view PDFs inside a browser window instead of in, say, a PDF viewer. In the browser, you have no control over the zoom level (which is ALWAYS too small) and you have no way to jump directly to a specific page. When I need to see page 623 of a 1000 page document, the last thing I want to do is scroll the damned window around hunting for it. People put tables of contents in documents for a reason. I'm honestly baffled why anyone thinks that this is a better solution than just firing open Preview (which launches in roughly .5 seconds).
FYI - you can disable this bone-headed behavior at the command line. Make sure Safari isn't running, then type "defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES" into the terminal.
I like this idea. The bigger and more numerous my screens get (currently a 24" plus a 19"), the less I like my single menu bar. I'm lucky enough to know all the keyboard shortcuts for all of the common things I do in a day and most apps that I keep on my second display tend to have toolbars for common actions - but it sucks to have to take that long trip up to the menu for that rare action I can't remember.
You're presuming that the 'background count' of murders was somehow replaced by these killings. Instead, you should look at it as a sudden 100% increase over 2 hours.
To be honest, I never understood why Microsoft went with the whole 'hog the screen' mentality with their application model - and it's never fit with my workflow. The window arrangement on my (dual headed, of course) desktop is meticulously tiled so I'm never more than a single click away from any of them. When you have on average 5 terminal windows, two web browsers, ten text files, multiple chat windows, iTunes and an email app open, tiling is critical. I certainly couldn't work as effectively if I were limited to a single screen. Log tails, reference and email go on the left screen - work happens on the right. I can't imagine having to fit all that on a single monitor, and if any of those apps were 'optimized' to prefer full screen mode, I'd go crazy.
To me, it seems ironic that an operating system named Windows has such a hard time allowing me to manage windows the way I'd like.
That movie was way too plausible to be funny. I kept laughing, then realizing that it's TOO TRUE and then I would cry a little.
See, this is why I don't ever post on Slashdot any more. My intent was to post a relatively off topic rebuttal (and have even been modded as such already) to a red herring thrown into this discussion. God only knows why you felt the need to reply to my comment by effectively saying the same thing I did but about DOS instead of Mac OS 6.
In the meantime, the guy who posted FUD about hardware lock-in and backwards compatibility is currently at +3 informative and climbing. I'm not sure why I come here any more, let alone post...
You're being disingenuous with your objection. The GP poster was talking about backwards compatibility with respect to the OS, not with hardware. The point stands that it is still possible to this day to run software written in 1984 for Mac OS 6.x on a 68k processor. That's two processor architectures and a complete OS rewrite. I'd call that pretty good backwards compatibility. The only times an application requires a certain version of the OS is when it is actually using a feature that wasn't present in a previous release - not due to some artificially created 'requirement' by Apple.
Additionally, it's possible to run their current OS on some amazingly old or completely unsupported hardware. I'm not sure how Apple's decision to standardize on a single hardware platform relates to backwards compatibility at all, actually.
Even better - add in a breathalyzer so that in order to join the voice channel you MUST blow between .05 and .1 in order to guarantee exactly the right level of inebriation.
Please tell your brother thanks for the wonderful music and to keep it up.
Opening a document can be an extremely expensive operation if the owning application isn't already running (think Photoshop). Opening the WRONG document can be a WASTED extremely expensive operation. When fat-fingering the return/enter keys, I would much rather the Finder toggle me into 'edit filename' mode than have it launch Photoshop.
This philosophy is scattered all around the OS. The more expensive the operation, the more input you need to provide. That applies to dialog boxes with and without default options as well as shortcut keys. Incidentally, this addresses the Shutdown/Restart confirmation complaint as well - both terribly expensive operations (as noted elsewhere, this is avoidable by holding down option key - more input).
Considering more and more software these days will actually turn your smiley into a graphic, using the 'mouth' as your closing paren will cause the sentence to be rendered 'unclosed'. Because of this, I've gotten in the habit of NOT counting the 'mouth' as the closing paren. Of course, this looks funny when you're working in pure plain text, but the developer in me prefers to think of the smiley as its own token (a diacritical, in effect).
We're talking about different classes of cheaters here. The casual cheater is for sure going to be using pre-written Windows based stuff and would never consider switching platforms. However, there is another segment of cheaters - the professional farmers. These people make a lot of money and would not hesitate to switch platforms if it meant it would further their aims.
While I'm sure Blizzard wants ALL cheaters stopped, they primarily focus on the farmers with these retaliations as they are the ones that have the largest impact on gameplay for the rest of their users. Historically, they accompany these mass banning announcements with commentary proclaiming some number of farmers were caught in the net.