Try using any of those left-handed ranges from impossible to an exercise in discomfort and frustration. The two keypads are completely unusable. The joystick is uncomfortable, and most of the buttons are awkward to reach. The mice are also uncomfortable and all the 'thumb' buttons are effectively impossible to use well.
Cheap ambi-mice are plentiful, but getting a good gaming/laser mouse is hard. Ambidextrous options are pretty limited and have fewer features, and ergo-left are non-existent. I enjoyed my ambidextrous razer copperhead, but after it died I haven't found a good replacement yet. I see razer has a left-handed ergo deathadder...that must be fairly new... I'll definitely be looking into it.
As for joysticks... Saitek used to make a pretty decent ambi/convertible flightstick... but I'm currently looking for a new stick, and can't find anything that looks decent right now. Flightsims are out of fashion for the last decade and there isn't much available that isn't either super cheap and basic or super ergo-right-only.
I've known left-handers whose right hand might as well have been a withered stump flapping in the breeze. I'm no longer surprised that there are those who lack the ability/will to adapt to a different setup.
Gotcha.
If the game was designed for left-handed people and didn't accomodate righties right handed people would play it for 5 minutes call it a shit game with lousy controls... and they would be CORRECT!
But apparently if its designed for righties but not lefties, "you are longer surprised that there are those who lack the ability/will to adapt to a different setup." instead of recognizing that the controls are lousy.
Designing a video game with customizeable or reversible controls is trivial, and suggesting that left handed people should just learn to play them offhanded is just plain ignorant.
I've got a Wii, and I'm surprised at the number of games that fail to offer proper left handed support, even though it would be generally trivial.
Wii sports allows you (and even lets you choose handedness for each sport which is great because I golf right handed (due to having no access to left handed clubs growing up) but I bat, tennis, and bowl left handed; so that's a really nice touch.
Many of the other mini-games titles aren't so considerate. A frisbee minigame in one title in particular can't cope at all with a left handed movement. There are other examples as well.
Metroid Prime 3 for example comes to mind as a less severe example, its entirely playable left handed so no problem, but it would be even better if it let you reverse the model. Its a little jarring as a leftie, holding the remote in the dominant hand and the nunchuk in the offhand to throw the grapple and have samus throw it with the other hand. This occasionally impacts gameplay in small ways -- when up against an obstacle that blocks one side of the sreeen. I attempt to throw the grapple and its a clear shot, but samus attempts the throw from the other hand and hits an obstable. (It very rarely comes up as an issue, but when it does its jarring and annoying.)
If a right handed player were playing right-handedly, and samus was designed 'left handed', I'm sure they'd probably find it similiarly jarring, and would call the controls 'unpolished'.
Given just how trivial it is to support left handed players in these titles, I'm surprised more don't.
Not quite, all it says is that first and second accounts used the same computer. It is likely to be the same person, but does not have to be.
And if the first and second accounts used the same computer, browse the same sites, search for the same sorts of things, click on the same sorts of ads, contact the same people...
Whether or not google figures they are twin brothers with similiar interests and friends or the same person isn't really all that relevant.
Sure if you download a lot of data, and you do it when you are in wifi range, then sure by all means, it makes sense to use wifi. Not so much in my case, where I don't download a lot of data, and when I do I'm not in wifi range anyway (or i'd use a laptop)... so why exactly should i have wifi on 24x7 ?
You must be using a Wi-Fi network most of the time. Try turning Wi-Fi off for a month and watch what happens to those numbers.
Per my follow up in a different sub-thread, wifi is actually off to save battery. (I burn through it on voice. Mostly for work.)
I think if I enabled email data usage would skyrocket though, especially if the iphone downloads attachments automatically(?). But quite simply, regular map usage and some web browsing, and a bit of 'misc' just doesn't use a lot of data.
But despite my low MB usage, I use the data features daily... Its just that I use it to see what movies are playing or to check reviews of a movie I'm thinking of seeing, or to find a restaurant and peek at the menu (unless its a flashbased site of course -- so many restuarants are), or to check the reviews or pricing of something I'm thinking of buying because its on "sale", I do business number and address lookups. I use google maps for routing, or finding the nearest X.
End of the day I'm pretty reliant on it... but none of my uses are particularly heavy in terms of bandwidth, and while I use its data daily, its usually only for 2-5 minutes a day. Anything that I'd be on it for any length of time... I wait until I'm at home or the office with my laptops/desktops.
If I were using it for email, or if I were facebook junkie, I could see it skyrocketing. And I've seen the data useage of a youtube junkie... but a lot of people use a shockingly low amount of bandwidth... even if like me, they use data daily.
I actually use maps often to find paces, routes, etc. I use the phone's web browser regularly.
As an added detail, I even have wifi turned off, and only use cellular data. So I'm not even benefitting from my home-wifi at home. Wifi off saves battery, and while I do turn it on occasionally if I'm downloading something big at home... 3G is generally fast enough... I can't remember the last time i used wifi...if I'm at home and I want to download something big, there are laptops within easy reach.
I don't tether often, the 400 odd megabytes came from probably 3 separate incidents, my home internet was down so I tethered for most of a day; another was during a vacation; and the final was an afternoon I was downtown working from a cafe while my car was being repaired.
Even so, I agree 1GB for a year is pretty low. I have a number of friends with smartphones and most of them are shocked at how low their data is too. Many are down here with me. Of course, a couple are shocked at how high theirs is, mind you, but then they do things like stream radio and are youtube, facebook, farmville junkies, so no surprise there.
I guess I just wanted to counterpoint that $40 for a gigabyte is 'crazy expensive'. Most people I know would easily get through a year on 1 or 2 GBs, and they are all paying upwards of $20/month now, so this sort of data would be substantially cheaper than what they get now.
Personally, I'm on some promo 6GB/mo iphone data plan with tethering allowed. As lousy as my data usage is, if I switched to any other data plan, I'd save maybe $5 bucks a month, and lose the tethering option which I don't use much, but love to have available.
So says Ars Technica, anyway. I don't know much about the market for mobile Internet, but $40 per gigabyte sounds unbelievable. I'm just passing on what I've read.
Really "unbeleivable"? I've had an iphone for about a year now. According to its usage statistics I've used:
13,140 minutes
475 MB of data
426 MB of tethered data
1GB for $40 will apparently cover me for a year at a time. Instead I pay some $20bucks a month or something for the data plan.
I'm not a video on my phone junkie, and I don't get my email on my phone either. (I get too damn much of it, and really important stuff... I'll get a phone call anyway.)
A store that is big enough to give you a loyalty card has probably already done enough damage to your social environment
The independant car wash at the end of the street has a loyalty card. After I buy 10 washes I get the 11th free. Its integrated into their POS system and I assume they can do all sorts of data profiling to see which add-on options I bought, whether I got a snack or a coffee while I waited, how often I get a car wash, exterior only vs in-and-out vs full wax... whatever. I'm ok with that.
I think you are seriously underestimating what these stores have done and what they're capable of just to increase their profits.
I don't deny that the walmarts of the world are a very bad thing in terms of the environment, in terms of culture, in terms of promoting 3rd world labor exploitation, in terms of destroying local crafstmanship, small businesses, small agriculture, and even domestic manufacturing, and so on.
But that still doesn't make their loyalty card program particularly "evil", as long as its constrained to their premises.
Plus I always find it amusing that many people who get paranoid about biometric data will still carry things like store loyalty cards that seem to do nothing more harmful than give purchase discounts.
A store loyalty card tracks why I buy at that store. It stops tracking me when I leave the store.
They already have low tech measures (people) watching customers move the store to see what path they take, and how long they spend in each area, etc. Using technology to do this lets them do more people at once... but I find it hard to get too offended about a store that wishes to track me and what I do on their own premises.
Governements and google who wish to follow you everywhere and know everything about everyone are far uglier. I'm more worried about google than the government, and I'm more worried about the government than a loyalty card at the grocery store.
And the qualifier is, of course, "qualifying." The article doesn't say who qualifies, and says that journalists and NGOs don't have to do anything to get the license, which means they don't find out that they don't qualify until they're in the same situation they're already facing, I guess.
This isn't the sort of situation where microsoft would be trying to weasel. More importantly, the way it worked from what I can tell, is that russian authorities needed Microsoft lawyers to essentially sign-off on the complaints against dissidents -- they'd indicate they had "reason to beleive" group-X was using priated software, and the MS-attack-lawyers would say 'raid away'.
This change is essentially instructions from Microsoft to its own legal counsel saying if its an NGO or Journalist etc then they have a license, and not to be party to police requests.
Strictly speaking they could instruct their lawyers to refuse to pursue cases against NGOs and so on without the license, but this 'grant of license' is:
a) good PR
b) makes it harder (impossible?) to for the police to build a software piracy case as long as the legal system isn't competely subverted. The Microsoft lawyer simply says "they are licensed" end of story. He doesn't have to say, something like "my client isn't interested in prosecuting a case against them". Its more thorough and complete this way. It changes from "they might be doing something wrong, but we don't care to find out" to "we are completely satisfied that they are licensed".
which means they don't find out that they don't qualify until they're in the same situation they're already facing, I guess.
As you can see they don't really need to "know they qualify". The protection is indirect - its really more a way to give microsoft's lawyers an out from having to cooperate with russian police against NGOs more than direct protection for the end user. At least that's how i read it.
Not that I have, or ever am likely to, commit a crime ever but an iris scan isn't going to put me at the scene of a crime or give much away to a private health insurance company looking for any excuse to up my premiums.
You know what, that's actually pretty insightful. I'm against biometrics in general for government tracking, but you make a good point that an iris scan, unlike dna and fingerprints isn't something that you casually strew around everywhere you go.
It does genuinely seem like one of the least evil / least abusable biometrics available.
And defeating casual remote scanning applications is solved with such high tech solutions as 'sunglasses' (soon to be illegal I'm sure.), and novelty contact lenses which obscure or alter the iris.
One concern though is could this be vector for criminal identity theft? Take a scan and print it to a contact lens...? In controlled circumstances it should be easy to determine that a contact is in place, but some of the iris scanner literature I've read promises iris scanning of 'people in motion as they walk through a doorway' which should be much more easily fooled than a system where you have to put your eye an inch or so away from a box of camera equipment.
Toolbars? Search engines? Are we talking about the same program here?
Yes. It wants to install the Foxit Search Bar powered by Ask (opt-out) It wants to set ask.com as your home page (also opt-out)
I just downloaded the most recent zipped version for Windows last night, and it didn't even need an installer.
Right. That's hardly how most people install the software.
Past versions that I've used the installer version of, had a rather obvious checkbox that you could use to opt out of installing a toolbar.
Oh, so you know all about the toolbar crap, and you are just being disingenuous. Classy.
Bottom line this sort of behaviour is skirting the border of being malware. What percentage of users appreciate another toolbar being crammed into their browser? What percentage of users appreciate their home page being changed? When both are pretty close to zero, you don't make it OPT-OUT in your installation wizard. Its especially obnoxious when users have to keep opting out each time they install an update.
Having an opt out toolbar or home page change as part of the default install is obnoxious enough for me to avoid recommending foxit. Too many people will end up with them and none of them will appreciate it.
What if we don't count bundles but only stand-alone sales?
You can't really.
Many of the best selling games sales numbers have been boosted due to being part of bundles for at least part of their run. Around here Halo 3:ODST, and Forza 3 were part of an xbox bundle a while ago. Today Futureshop is advertising a barebones xbox, and an xbox with 2 wireless controllers and a hard drive bundled with Halo:Reach. When it was launched in Brazil, you could ONLY get the Premium package with Perfect Dark 0, Kameo:EoP, and PGR3...
There becomes no realistic way to really separate out the bundles from game sales.
You are wearing gloves. You tap with your fingernail, pen, etc
er... these also don't even work on state of the art touch devices -- androids / iphones / blackberries. Go ahead... try using your iphone with mittens on, or tap one with your fingernail.
So I guess modern smartphones are just a hack to you?
As a non-accountant, my experience with gnucash has so far been much better than with the proprietary software it replaced. YMMV
MMV. (my mileage varied):(
As a non-accountant, I hire an accountant to help me we some aspects. Being able to provide them the data files for a program they used was far more desirable than trying anything with gnucash. I looked at gnucash hard before I upgraded from Simply 2003 to 2010.
I was also somewhat averse to attempting to migrate from gnucash to another system if I committed to it, and then wanted out later. I'm not an accountant, I didn't want to spend a lot of time re-constructing the accounting system I had in place in gnucash, nor take the risk I might have to reconstruct it again in Simply if I ran into a wall. This was the single biggest reason I didn't take the plunge and at least try it.
Buying Simply Pro every 5+ years just isn't that expensive. (And although I do use both linux and OSX, I also don't foresee or really even desire to leave windows behind completely.)
Most of my clients use stuff like Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 -- they aren't switching to gnucash anytime soon, as much as they loathe the truly insane costs.
Other clients use various industry specific hybrid point-of-sale/accounting software. They can choose between a few competing systems, but there is nothing in the foss space that addresses their needs at all. Its also what keeps them firmly entrenched on windows -- even OSX support is non-existant.
Why don't some commercial software companies seize this opportunity and use this issue to differentiate their products from their competitors.
To be fair *Most* companies actually do still allow resale of 'boxed software'. Its only a few niches where it's being locked out. (And the high end stuff where you actually are signing honest to goodness contracts, not piddly clickthru EULAs.)
Even in this particular case that this/. discussion is attached too, the whole thing is bogus. Its a case where a company purchased an upgrade to an existing system, and then resold the original version they upgraded from. Does anyone think this should be allowed?
The entire reason they received upgrade pricing instead of purchasing at 'full price' is contingent on the fact that they already own a license. Upgrade editions ALWAYS (and in my opinion 'reasonably') require you to either hang onto your previous version(s) as proof of upgrade eligibility or destroy them.
Suppose I buy filemaker 9, then buy the upgrade to 10, and then buy the upgrade to 11:
Should I really be allowed to sell 9 to one user, 10 to another, and keep 11 for myself? That's what this case was about. Strictly speaking, I shouldn't even be allowed to use 9 or 10 myself on different computers after upgrading to 11.
My license to 9 was upgraded to 10, and then was upgraded to 11. There is only once licensed copy as a result of this double upgrade. That is the legal crux of this case -- that buying an upgrade isn't an additional license for the software. Its an upgrade to the license you already have.
Filemaker, for example, does let you transfer software ownership. But naturally you have to transfer the whole upgrade chain together. You only have one licensed copy of Filemaker. That is what the court enforced here, and I don't see it as a violation of first-sale doctrine.
Unfortunately, a ramification of this perfectly reasonable case is that it might be argued that the EULA can prohibit you from transffering any copies ever, which SHOULD be a violation of first-sale doctrine.
Hopefully, the court would see the same distinction that I do here.... but who knows.
This sort of licence will start to fade as more and more Open Source projects attain "enterprise quality".
Good luck with that. Everything from Starcraft 2 to your small business accounting software has a click through EULA. FOSS is great, but its not going to fill every niche ever. Its progress in accounting is glacial. And while there are FOSS games, the bulk of major development is and will remain proprietary for the foreseeable future. That is just 2 examples.
For another example -- while FOSS forms the guts of most Virtualization schemes, the proprietary software you need to pile on to really work with them in a serious way is not at all threatened by FOSS alternatives.
Tell these software houses that still use this sort of licence to hit the road.
If you can afford to stop using proprietary software great. Most of us don't really have that option.
You want to do something that threatens the endless supply of cheap, pointless shit lining the shelves at WalMart? I think you underestimate the popular consumer backlash that would create.
Meh, the consumer backlash would sort itself out, due to the sudden rise of employment, manufacturing, and so on in the US. They'd piss and moan that tube socks cost more, but they'd get over it. Once upon a time we used to repair holes in socks and other clothing instead of chucking it an buying it new...this is thanks to the absurdly low cost of new thanks to exploited labour.
It really wouldn't be the end of the world if we returned to a paradigm where things initially cost more and got repaired instead of replaced.
The real backlash would come from Walmart and the other corporations.
The quotes you provided are NOT in it. And it says things that weasel around those quotes if you ask me. Please clarify.
My concern is one day they may start linking my Google accounts to my searches such as my iGoogle account.
Its called "Personalized Search" or "Web History" its been around for years. Not too long ago they expanded it to make it an opt-out service, instead of opt-in... you probably already 'use it'. Ooops.
Google is a data miner. Although I know they collect information, I also use their services for free.
Their search service and their map service are the only services I use. I am presented their sponsored links in exchange for both. They don't require more than that.
Although it's easy to claim they don't tie my account info to my searches,
Where did they ever claim that? I fully expect they can and do tie your account to your web searches to whatever browsing information their ad tracking cookies report back to your usage of google maps to whatever the umpteen million 3rd party sites using google analytics on the backend give them.
And that's before talking about their image face tagging, youtube efforts, or harvesting your social network through your email contacts and their attempts to expand on that via google talk, and voice... and wave... not to mention the google toolbars...
Hell, even if you don't have a gmail account, they can construct a pretty good social network on an awful LOT of people just based on the gmail users who have you in their contact lists...
Then again, with respect to google at least I mostly just use the search field in my menu bar anyway; so I don't spend a lot of time at the home page unless I'm on a PC with an old version of IE.
I'm curious about why you do that on a regular basis.
Remote support / administration of a variety of servers and virtual servers for a variety of clients is the primary use. I'm also occasionally called on to do remote support for end user systems. - fades are BIG annoyance here, as they'll have god-knows-what installed and running. I also occasionally need to remotely access my personal desktops from my laptop. - fades are an annoyance here too. I also need to use a couple bandwidth heavy client-server applications, which are made available to remote users via Citrix. Installing them on my laptop or even my desktop is not a viable option (licensing reasons, -and- network performance reasons). My office is not where the database servers are. fades are an big annoyance here too.
Fades on consumer targeted apps are annoying... but I can't believe they are starting to show up in server admin tools as well. WTF?! Splash screens that fade in and out, screen transitions... its demented. And that goes for websites distributing things like server patches and updates etc. For example, if I remote into an administration VM to download a patch for a server on the same LAN the last thing I need is to navigate through a freaking animated glitzy web 2.0 website to get to the download package. (I'd download it to my local PC and then upload it, but would take far longer if its a large download.)
On that note... driver websites should take that hint to. If I'm stuck in 800x600 16-colour VGA I really don't want to navigate a high-res high-color flash loaded javascript animated website to get the chipset and video drivers.
but ultimately found it more efficient to move my e-mail over to an IMAP server
I have had nothing but miserable experiences with IMAP. I find them slow. And they always seem to fail cryptically. I'll be copying a folder, and get a 'syntax error' or 'unknown error -50' or some other nonsense, and have it just abort, and then nothing works until I quit and restart my mail client. And then I have to clean up the mess left behind. I've also had miserable luck with imap clients. With Entourage 2004 Mac it's nothing buck suck, ditto for Outlook XP (2002). I use Thunderbird as my primary email client, and to be honest I haven't tried IMAP for a long time with it. To be fair my experience with IMAP and Outlook 2010 has been limited but so far quite positive... so maybe its time to try it again.
install a firefox plugin that syncs bookmarks
I'd be more interested in syncing the smart-bar/history/saved form fields than the bookmarks, and I'm reluctant to become dependant on a 3rd party service provider (especially google) to hold my data, as I object to having my data harvested by them more than is already happening.
Personally excessive fade effects annoy me because I spend a lot of time using tools like vnc, remote desktop, citrix ica clients, etc. Fades are generally slow, clumsy, and downright obnoxious when viewed remotely.
If they said it without a study we'd have a bunch of "[citation please]" followed by sarcastic comments that a few anecdotes are meaningless, and how they happen know a bunch of humble self-assured people who use facebook a lot too.
So yes, they needed a fucking study. Its how we separate truth from truthiness. Science at work. Just because it confirms what most people might beleive is true doesn't make it unworthy of study. Sometimes looking into things that most people believe is true has surprising results.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly as a leftie I've never once had a problem or felt disadvantaged when using any kind of computing device, ever...
Apparently you've never tried to use one of these...
http://www.ink2print.com/gbu0-prodshow/ergo_500.html
or these...
http://www.expansys.com/zoompic.aspx?i=160630
or these...
http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?moduleno=224053
or these...
http://www.logitech.com/en-us/mice-pointers/mice/devices/5845
or these...
http://store.razerzone.com/store/razerusa/en_US/pd/productID.169418900/categoryId.35208800
Try using any of those left-handed ranges from impossible to an exercise in discomfort and frustration. The two keypads are completely unusable. The joystick is uncomfortable, and most of the buttons are awkward to reach. The mice are also uncomfortable and all the 'thumb' buttons are effectively impossible to use well.
There are some ok left-handed friendly options available...
I use a Fang keypad, which is ambidextrous
http://www.amazon.ca/ZGP-1000-Fang-USB-Gamepad-Keypad/dp/B000FRW8KS
Cheap ambi-mice are plentiful, but getting a good gaming/laser mouse is hard. Ambidextrous options are pretty limited and have fewer features, and ergo-left are non-existent. I enjoyed my ambidextrous razer copperhead, but after it died I haven't found a good replacement yet. I see razer has a left-handed ergo deathadder...that must be fairly new... I'll definitely be looking into it.
As for joysticks... Saitek used to make a pretty decent ambi/convertible flightstick... but I'm currently looking for a new stick, and can't find anything that looks decent right now. Flightsims are out of fashion for the last decade and there isn't much available that isn't either super cheap and basic or super ergo-right-only.
I've known left-handers whose right hand might as well have been a withered stump flapping in the breeze. I'm no longer surprised that there are those who lack the ability/will to adapt to a different setup.
Gotcha.
If the game was designed for left-handed people and didn't accomodate righties right handed people would play it for 5 minutes call it a shit game with lousy controls... and they would be CORRECT!
But apparently if its designed for righties but not lefties, "you are longer surprised that there are those who lack the ability/will to adapt to a different setup." instead of recognizing that the controls are lousy.
Designing a video game with customizeable or reversible controls is trivial, and suggesting that left handed people should just learn to play them offhanded is just plain ignorant.
I've got a Wii, and I'm surprised at the number of games that fail to offer proper left handed support, even though it would be generally trivial.
Wii sports allows you (and even lets you choose handedness for each sport which is great because I golf right handed (due to having no access to left handed clubs growing up) but I bat, tennis, and bowl left handed; so that's a really nice touch.
Many of the other mini-games titles aren't so considerate. A frisbee minigame in one title in particular can't cope at all with a left handed movement. There are other examples as well.
Metroid Prime 3 for example comes to mind as a less severe example, its entirely playable left handed so no problem, but it would be even better if it let you reverse the model. Its a little jarring as a leftie, holding the remote in the dominant hand and the nunchuk in the offhand to throw the grapple and have samus throw it with the other hand. This occasionally impacts gameplay in small ways -- when up against an obstacle that blocks one side of the sreeen. I attempt to throw the grapple and its a clear shot, but samus attempts the throw from the other hand and hits an obstable. (It very rarely comes up as an issue, but when it does its jarring and annoying.)
If a right handed player were playing right-handedly, and samus was designed 'left handed', I'm sure they'd probably find it similiarly jarring, and would call the controls 'unpolished'.
Given just how trivial it is to support left handed players in these titles, I'm surprised more don't.
Not quite, all it says is that first and second accounts used the same computer. It is likely to be the same person, but does not have to be.
And if the first and second accounts used the same computer, browse the same sites, search for the same sorts of things, click on the same sorts of ads, contact the same people...
Whether or not google figures they are twin brothers with similiar interests and friends or the same person isn't really all that relevant.
The two accounts can still be linked.
Sure if you download a lot of data, and you do it when you are in wifi range, then sure by all means, it makes sense to use wifi. Not so much in my case, where I don't download a lot of data, and when I do I'm not in wifi range anyway (or i'd use a laptop)... so why exactly should i have wifi on 24x7 ?
You must be using a Wi-Fi network most of the time. Try turning Wi-Fi off for a month and watch what happens to those numbers.
Per my follow up in a different sub-thread, wifi is actually off to save battery. (I burn through it on voice. Mostly for work.)
I think if I enabled email data usage would skyrocket though, especially if the iphone downloads attachments automatically(?). But quite simply, regular map usage and some web browsing, and a bit of 'misc' just doesn't use a lot of data.
But despite my low MB usage, I use the data features daily... Its just that I use it to see what movies are playing or to check reviews of a movie I'm thinking of seeing, or to find a restaurant and peek at the menu (unless its a flashbased site of course -- so many restuarants are), or to check the reviews or pricing of something I'm thinking of buying because its on "sale", I do business number and address lookups. I use google maps for routing, or finding the nearest X.
End of the day I'm pretty reliant on it... but none of my uses are particularly heavy in terms of bandwidth, and while I use its data daily, its usually only for 2-5 minutes a day. Anything that I'd be on it for any length of time... I wait until I'm at home or the office with my laptops/desktops.
If I were using it for email, or if I were facebook junkie, I could see it skyrocketing. And I've seen the data useage of a youtube junkie... but a lot of people use a shockingly low amount of bandwidth... even if like me, they use data daily.
I actually use maps often to find paces, routes, etc. I use the phone's web browser regularly.
As an added detail, I even have wifi turned off, and only use cellular data. So I'm not even benefitting from my home-wifi at home. Wifi off saves battery, and while I do turn it on occasionally if I'm downloading something big at home... 3G is generally fast enough... I can't remember the last time i used wifi...if I'm at home and I want to download something big, there are laptops within easy reach.
I don't tether often, the 400 odd megabytes came from probably 3 separate incidents, my home internet was down so I tethered for most of a day; another was during a vacation; and the final was an afternoon I was downtown working from a cafe while my car was being repaired.
Even so, I agree 1GB for a year is pretty low. I have a number of friends with smartphones and most of them are shocked at how low their data is too. Many are down here with me. Of course, a couple are shocked at how high theirs is, mind you, but then they do things like stream radio and are youtube, facebook, farmville junkies, so no surprise there.
I guess I just wanted to counterpoint that $40 for a gigabyte is 'crazy expensive'. Most people I know would easily get through a year on 1 or 2 GBs, and they are all paying upwards of $20/month now, so this sort of data would be substantially cheaper than what they get now.
Personally, I'm on some promo 6GB/mo iphone data plan with tethering allowed. As lousy as my data usage is, if I switched to any other data plan, I'd save maybe $5 bucks a month, and lose the tethering option which I don't use much, but love to have available.
So says Ars Technica, anyway. I don't know much about the market for mobile Internet, but $40 per gigabyte sounds unbelievable. I'm just passing on what I've read.
Really "unbeleivable"? I've had an iphone for about a year now. According to its usage statistics I've used:
13,140 minutes
475 MB of data
426 MB of tethered data
1GB for $40 will apparently cover me for a year at a time. Instead I pay some $20bucks a month or something for the data plan.
I'm not a video on my phone junkie, and I don't get my email on my phone either. (I get too damn much of it, and really important stuff... I'll get a phone call anyway.)
A store that is big enough to give you a loyalty card has probably already done enough damage to your social environment
The independant car wash at the end of the street has a loyalty card. After I buy 10 washes I get the 11th free. Its integrated into their POS system and I assume they can do all sorts of data profiling to see which add-on options I bought, whether I got a snack or a coffee while I waited, how often I get a car wash, exterior only vs in-and-out vs full wax... whatever. I'm ok with that.
I think you are seriously underestimating what these stores have done and what they're capable of just to increase their profits.
I don't deny that the walmarts of the world are a very bad thing in terms of the environment, in terms of culture, in terms of promoting 3rd world labor exploitation, in terms of destroying local crafstmanship, small businesses, small agriculture, and even domestic manufacturing, and so on.
But that still doesn't make their loyalty card program particularly "evil", as long as its constrained to their premises.
Plus I always find it amusing that many people who get paranoid about biometric data will still carry things like store loyalty cards that seem to do nothing more harmful than give purchase discounts.
A store loyalty card tracks why I buy at that store. It stops tracking me when I leave the store.
They already have low tech measures (people) watching customers move the store to see what path they take, and how long they spend in each area, etc. Using technology to do this lets them do more people at once... but I find it hard to get too offended about a store that wishes to track me and what I do on their own premises.
Governements and google who wish to follow you everywhere and know everything about everyone are far uglier. I'm more worried about google than the government, and I'm more worried about the government than a loyalty card at the grocery store.
And the qualifier is, of course, "qualifying." The article doesn't say who qualifies, and says that journalists and NGOs don't have to do anything to get the license, which means they don't find out that they don't qualify until they're in the same situation they're already facing, I guess.
This isn't the sort of situation where microsoft would be trying to weasel. More importantly, the way it worked from what I can tell, is that russian authorities needed Microsoft lawyers to essentially sign-off on the complaints against dissidents -- they'd indicate they had "reason to beleive" group-X was using priated software, and the MS-attack-lawyers would say 'raid away'.
This change is essentially instructions from Microsoft to its own legal counsel saying if its an NGO or Journalist etc then they have a license, and not to be party to police requests.
Strictly speaking they could instruct their lawyers to refuse to pursue cases against NGOs and so on without the license, but this 'grant of license' is:
a) good PR
b) makes it harder (impossible?) to for the police to build a software piracy case as long as the legal system isn't competely subverted. The Microsoft lawyer simply says "they are licensed" end of story. He doesn't have to say, something like "my client isn't interested in prosecuting a case against them". Its more thorough and complete this way. It changes from "they might be doing something wrong, but we don't care to find out" to "we are completely satisfied that they are licensed".
which means they don't find out that they don't qualify until they're in the same situation they're already facing, I guess.
As you can see they don't really need to "know they qualify". The protection is indirect - its really more a way to give microsoft's lawyers an out from having to cooperate with russian police against NGOs more than direct protection for the end user. At least that's how i read it.
Not that I have, or ever am likely to, commit a crime ever but an iris scan isn't going to put me at the scene of a crime or give much away to a private health insurance company looking for any excuse to up my premiums.
You know what, that's actually pretty insightful. I'm against biometrics in general for government tracking, but you make a good point that an iris scan, unlike dna and fingerprints isn't something that you casually strew around everywhere you go.
It does genuinely seem like one of the least evil / least abusable biometrics available.
And defeating casual remote scanning applications is solved with such high tech solutions as 'sunglasses' (soon to be illegal I'm sure.), and novelty contact lenses which obscure or alter the iris.
One concern though is could this be vector for criminal identity theft? Take a scan and print it to a contact lens...? In controlled circumstances it should be easy to determine that a contact is in place, but some of the iris scanner literature I've read promises iris scanning of 'people in motion as they walk through a doorway' which should be much more easily fooled than a system where you have to put your eye an inch or so away from a box of camera equipment.
Toolbars? Search engines? Are we talking about the same program here?
Yes.
It wants to install the Foxit Search Bar powered by Ask (opt-out)
It wants to set ask.com as your home page (also opt-out)
I just downloaded the most recent zipped version for Windows last night, and it didn't even need an installer.
Right. That's hardly how most people install the software.
Past versions that I've used the installer version of, had a rather obvious checkbox that you could use to opt out of installing a toolbar.
Oh, so you know all about the toolbar crap, and you are just being disingenuous. Classy.
Bottom line this sort of behaviour is skirting the border of being malware. What percentage of users appreciate another toolbar being crammed into their browser? What percentage of users appreciate their home page being changed? When both are pretty close to zero, you don't make it OPT-OUT in your installation wizard. Its especially obnoxious when users have to keep opting out each time they install an update.
Having an opt out toolbar or home page change as part of the default install is obnoxious enough for me to avoid recommending foxit. Too many people will end up with them and none of them will appreciate it.
What if we don't count bundles but only stand-alone sales?
You can't really.
Many of the best selling games sales numbers have been boosted due to being part of bundles for at least part of their run. Around here Halo 3:ODST, and Forza 3 were part of an xbox bundle a while ago. Today Futureshop is advertising a barebones xbox, and an xbox with 2 wireless controllers and a hard drive bundled with Halo:Reach. When it was launched in Brazil, you could ONLY get the Premium package with Perfect Dark 0, Kameo:EoP, and PGR3...
There becomes no realistic way to really separate out the bundles from game sales.
You are wearing gloves.
You tap with your fingernail, pen, etc
er... these also don't even work on state of the art touch devices -- androids / iphones / blackberries. Go ahead... try using your iphone with mittens on, or tap one with your fingernail.
So I guess modern smartphones are just a hack to you?
As a non-accountant, my experience with gnucash has so far been much better than with the proprietary software it replaced. YMMV
MMV. (my mileage varied) :(
As a non-accountant, I hire an accountant to help me we some aspects. Being able to provide them the data files for a program they used was far more desirable than trying anything with gnucash. I looked at gnucash hard before I upgraded from Simply 2003 to 2010.
I was also somewhat averse to attempting to migrate from gnucash to another system if I committed to it, and then wanted out later. I'm not an accountant, I didn't want to spend a lot of time re-constructing the accounting system I had in place in gnucash, nor take the risk I might have to reconstruct it again in Simply if I ran into a wall. This was the single biggest reason I didn't take the plunge and at least try it.
Buying Simply Pro every 5+ years just isn't that expensive. (And although I do use both linux and OSX, I also don't foresee or really even desire to leave windows behind completely.)
Most of my clients use stuff like Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 -- they aren't switching to gnucash anytime soon, as much as they loathe the truly insane costs.
Other clients use various industry specific hybrid point-of-sale/accounting software. They can choose between a few competing systems, but there is nothing in the foss space that addresses their needs at all. Its also what keeps them firmly entrenched on windows -- even OSX support is non-existant.
Why don't some commercial software companies seize this opportunity and use this issue to differentiate their products from their competitors.
To be fair *Most* companies actually do still allow resale of 'boxed software'. Its only a few niches where it's being locked out. (And the high end stuff where you actually are signing honest to goodness contracts, not piddly clickthru EULAs.)
Even in this particular case that this /. discussion is attached too, the whole thing is bogus. Its a case where a company purchased an upgrade to an existing system, and then resold the original version they upgraded from. Does anyone think this should be allowed?
The entire reason they received upgrade pricing instead of purchasing at 'full price' is contingent on the fact that they already own a license. Upgrade editions ALWAYS (and in my opinion 'reasonably') require you to either hang onto your previous version(s) as proof of upgrade eligibility or destroy them.
Suppose I buy filemaker 9, then buy the upgrade to 10, and then buy the upgrade to 11:
Should I really be allowed to sell 9 to one user, 10 to another, and keep 11 for myself? That's what this case was about. Strictly speaking, I shouldn't even be allowed to use 9 or 10 myself on different computers after upgrading to 11.
My license to 9 was upgraded to 10, and then was upgraded to 11. There is only once licensed copy as a result of this double upgrade. That is the legal crux of this case -- that buying an upgrade isn't an additional license for the software. Its an upgrade to the license you already have.
Filemaker, for example, does let you transfer software ownership. But naturally you have to transfer the whole upgrade chain together. You only have one licensed copy of Filemaker. That is what the court enforced here, and I don't see it as a violation of first-sale doctrine.
Unfortunately, a ramification of this perfectly reasonable case is that it might be argued that the EULA can prohibit you from transffering any copies ever, which SHOULD be a violation of first-sale doctrine.
Hopefully, the court would see the same distinction that I do here.... but who knows.
This sort of licence will start to fade as more and more Open Source projects attain "enterprise quality".
Good luck with that. Everything from Starcraft 2 to your small business accounting software has a click through EULA. FOSS is great, but its not going to fill every niche ever. Its progress in accounting is glacial. And while there are FOSS games, the bulk of major development is and will remain proprietary for the foreseeable future. That is just 2 examples.
For another example -- while FOSS forms the guts of most Virtualization schemes, the proprietary software you need to pile on to really work with them in a serious way is not at all threatened by FOSS alternatives.
Tell these software houses that still use this sort of licence to hit the road.
If you can afford to stop using proprietary software great. Most of us don't really have that option.
You want to do something that threatens the endless supply of cheap, pointless shit lining the shelves at WalMart? I think you underestimate the popular consumer backlash that would create.
Meh, the consumer backlash would sort itself out, due to the sudden rise of employment, manufacturing, and so on in the US. They'd piss and moan that tube socks cost more, but they'd get over it. Once upon a time we used to repair holes in socks and other clothing instead of chucking it an buying it new...this is thanks to the absurdly low cost of new thanks to exploited labour.
It really wouldn't be the end of the world if we returned to a paradigm where things initially cost more and got repaired instead of replaced.
The real backlash would come from Walmart and the other corporations.
This is the privacy policy I see for Google.
http://www.google.ca/intl/en/privacypolicy.html
The quotes you provided are NOT in it. And it says things that weasel around those quotes if you ask me. Please clarify.
My concern is one day they may start linking my Google accounts to my searches such as my iGoogle account.
Its called "Personalized Search" or "Web History" its been around for years. Not too long ago they expanded it to make it an opt-out service, instead of opt-in... you probably already 'use it'. Ooops.
http://searchengineland.com/google-now-personalizes-everyones-search-results-31195
Enjoy.
Ironic that the price of live just went up. ;)
Google is a data miner. Although I know they collect information, I also use their services for free.
Their search service and their map service are the only services I use. I am presented their sponsored links in exchange for both. They don't require more than that.
Although it's easy to claim they don't tie my account info to my searches,
Where did they ever claim that? I fully expect they can and do tie your account to your web searches to whatever browsing information their ad tracking cookies report back to your usage of google maps to whatever the umpteen million 3rd party sites using google analytics on the backend give them.
And that's before talking about their image face tagging, youtube efforts, or harvesting your social network through your email contacts and their attempts to expand on that via google talk, and voice... and wave... not to mention the google toolbars...
Hell, even if you don't have a gmail account, they can construct a pretty good social network on an awful LOT of people just based on the gmail users who have you in their contact lists...
Sure I'll just type that in... :rolls eyes:
Then again, with respect to google at least I mostly just use the search field in my menu bar anyway; so I don't spend a lot of time at the home page unless I'm on a PC with an old version of IE.
I'm curious about why you do that on a regular basis.
Remote support / administration of a variety of servers and virtual servers for a variety of clients is the primary use.
I'm also occasionally called on to do remote support for end user systems. - fades are BIG annoyance here, as they'll have god-knows-what installed and running.
I also occasionally need to remotely access my personal desktops from my laptop. - fades are an annoyance here too.
I also need to use a couple bandwidth heavy client-server applications, which are made available to remote users via Citrix. Installing them on my laptop or even my desktop is not a viable option (licensing reasons, -and- network performance reasons). My office is not where the database servers are. fades are an big annoyance here too.
Fades on consumer targeted apps are annoying... but I can't believe they are starting to show up in server admin tools as well. WTF?! Splash screens that fade in and out, screen transitions... its demented. And that goes for websites distributing things like server patches and updates etc. For example, if I remote into an administration VM to download a patch for a server on the same LAN the last thing I need is to navigate through a freaking animated glitzy web 2.0 website to get to the download package. (I'd download it to my local PC and then upload it, but would take far longer if its a large download.)
On that note... driver websites should take that hint to. If I'm stuck in 800x600 16-colour VGA I really don't want to navigate a high-res high-color flash loaded javascript animated website to get the chipset and video drivers.
but ultimately found it more efficient to move my e-mail over to an IMAP server
I have had nothing but miserable experiences with IMAP. I find them slow. And they always seem to fail cryptically. I'll be copying a folder, and get a 'syntax error' or 'unknown error -50' or some other nonsense, and have it just abort, and then nothing works until I quit and restart my mail client. And then I have to clean up the mess left behind. I've also had miserable luck with imap clients. With Entourage 2004 Mac it's nothing buck suck, ditto for Outlook XP (2002). I use Thunderbird as my primary email client, and to be honest I haven't tried IMAP for a long time with it. To be fair my experience with IMAP and Outlook 2010 has been limited but so far quite positive... so maybe its time to try it again.
install a firefox plugin that syncs bookmarks
I'd be more interested in syncing the smart-bar/history/saved form fields than the bookmarks, and I'm reluctant to become dependant on a 3rd party service provider (especially google) to hold my data, as I object to having my data harvested by them more than is already happening.
Personally excessive fade effects annoy me because I spend a lot of time using tools like vnc, remote desktop, citrix ica clients, etc. Fades are generally slow, clumsy, and downright obnoxious when viewed remotely.
They needed a fucking study to see that ?
If they said it without a study we'd have a bunch of "[citation please]" followed by sarcastic comments that a few anecdotes are meaningless, and how they happen know a bunch of humble self-assured people who use facebook a lot too.
So yes, they needed a fucking study. Its how we separate truth from truthiness. Science at work. Just because it confirms what most people might beleive is true doesn't make it unworthy of study. Sometimes looking into things that most people believe is true has surprising results.