I know what finally made me stop renting from them years ago was that they would charge late fees on movies that were returned on time
Obviously this depends upon the store in question - how quickly they process returns, how honest the franchisee is, if you're returning a minute before the due time, and so on. I have never, ever, ever been charged an incorrect late fee (after patronizing 5 different Blockbusters). Of course I'm honest about when I'm late, too.
I'm not a huge fan of Blockbuster, but I certainly don't think an enormously awkward DVD-by-mail solution is going to be where we'll go. The biggest threat to Blockbuster is video-on-demand - I can currently, any time of the day, on a moment's notice rent from about a thousand standard and high definition movies on demand. There still are some improvements to be made (e.g. pausing and such is a tad time delayed -- unless I set it to record on the PVR and start watching 10 minutes later when it's basically buffered), but it most certainly is the future.
What does that mean? Is this yet another "PC is dead" barbs?
Amazing, isn't it? We've been hearing the "PCs are dead" line for about a decade now - each new overhyped generation of consoles will eviscerate the PC, we're told, rendering the PC irrelevant. This still hasn't happened (the xbox360 being no exception, with the general PC gamer being underwhelmed).
Of course both PCs, and consoles, will merge at some point into full power media centers, but the reality is thta the console is becoming a PC, not the other way around.
Canada has its own problems too. CD-R tax, for one thing. Draconian "hate speech" legislation is another thing. So as far as I am concerned, they are just two different poisons.
Canada absolutely has its own share of problems. Indeed, there was some legislation on the table (before the election was called) that shared a lot of similarities with the much-reviled DMCA. I think it's naive if any fellow Canadians get smug about our position.
However, complaining about hate speech is really bizarre. If that's what's wrong about Canada, then we must be doing incredibly well.
What concievable reason is there for users to want this kinda of protection on a video standard?
A lot of media companies are fearful of PCs. A lot of PC companies want to support the media companies, and to make them more comfortable, because it expands their market (e.g. media center PCs that support digital/HDTV feeds, for instance), and brings more utility to their customers.
Not to be overdramatic, but I find it disheartning all this merging and acquision going on all the time.
Are you new to watching the corporate space?
Mergers happen as a fad, and then the spinning off/focus on the core fad happens, and every company splits into 9 entities, selling off "non-core" assets to other companies, and then it repeats. This has been going on in the corporate space for time eternal, and it's how the executive level can keep giving them huge commissions, err bonuses, every time they do one of these big money maneuvers. Strangely they don't return the bonus when the bonehead move is reversed a few years later.
In any case, hard drives are a mature technology, and it should be expected that the field coalesces. Soon enough a disruptive technology (large scale flash with HD-like speeds, optical storage, whateer) and a millions startups will appear pushing their variant, and the cycle renews.
`While they may be desperate for more power and the ability to vent more heat from the datacenter, it seems deals like this come too easily to Google to call it "desperation".'
Google is desperate for revenue growth. Agreeing to full-color graphic AOL ads placed prominantly on the Google search results is the sign of a company that's willing to start cashing in. Make no mistake - Google is making cash hand over fist, however the stock has already priced in a lot of revenue growth that they can't accommodate via traditional means.
I said principal instead of principle several times in that, and the quoting of one (meant to be sarcastic) might be taken to imply that someone else said it - for that I apologize. Mea culpa.
You're being very disingenuous. Of course google's always been pursuing the almighty buck. It's a company. You know that. I know that. And parent knows that.
I'm being entirely genuous.
So, if we can get a couple of our brain cells working for a minute and re-read parent's comment, we'll realize taht parent is talking about ignoring principles more and more as their potential for greater income increases.
Right - but they aren't "principals", they're convenient positions to be in when it suits Google. Text ads were a great differentiation, and strategically there were a lot of good reasons for using them, but if you followed the line around here it wasn't because it made Google boatloads of money - No, it was because Google The Good just wanted to, uh, contribute to mankind.
We've seen the same sort of adoration of IBM around here - Historically IBM has been one of the most abusive and protective companies, but when it suits them (e.g. When they're getting their asses handed to them by Microsoft), suddenly they grow some "principals", and they're all about open source and open standards. The naive fools are the people who think that it's anything more than the almighty buck.
it seems that post-IPO Google is abandoning a few of it's old principles in the pursuit of the almighty buck
The naivety around here is mind-blowingly astounding.
Google's original, super-clean, no-ad interface was a differentiation to get them attention and eyeballs. Sure enough it worked wonders, and all of the techies and geeks (and overlaps between them) were raving about this great new search engine, encouraging all of their friends and family to use it as well (a no-pay sales force). Soon enough they started introducing those differentiated text-ads (which had a good click through rate because they were novel), and the rest is history.
All of that was in pursuit of the almighty buck. The fact that someone could say that the company is now doing something in pursuit of the almighty buck, while this young company sits with a valuation of $127 billion dollars, is astounding.
Beijing is hardly a futuristic city (not really sure why you included that one. It's a beautiful city, but it hardly fits in with the other two). Hong Kong's prosperity is completely and absolutely the result of the British rule and law, and it has diminished since the takeover.
If you go to Shanghai you should try the sooper high speed mag-lev train.
One thing about a statist economy is that you can put billions towards really dumb money sinks, all to get gullible citizens and tourists to proclaim about how futuristic it is. I hear Brazilia in Brazil is a real futuristic city as well.
I was really surprised by the whole energy of the place. When I went to McDonalds and they didn't have my food immediately, they said no problem we will find you and bring it to you when its ready. 2 min latter I had my fries. This particular McDonald's had around 30 registers all open. They said that they served 6000 lunches everyday -- just nuts. You won't find any fast food resturant in the US that can manage that volume and provide good service too.
You're impressed that they brought your food to you? Wow, your opinion really needs to be considered suspect. Fastfood restaurants everywhere bring food to you.
Regarding the McDonalds being big --- if that's your measure of prosperity... That's like saying that a town is a great town because they have the largest Walmart. I'm going to have to presume that you're being sarcastic.
In closing, the US needs to sell $3,000,000,000 in bonds everyday to China just to keep running. If they really wished us harm they could just stop buying our debt. Once China no longer relies on exports we will be at their mercy. That will happen in around 10 - 20 years just when the US needs money to fund SS payments to baby-boomers.
Ah, good old fear mongering and ignorant economics. Ignoring the fact that China isn't a big financer of debt (and hasn't been for some time), countries don't buy bonds because they're benevolent - they do it for their own best interest. In the case of China they buy up US $ (and formerly bonds) to prop up the dollar, which keeps the yuan undervalued and serves China.
Secondly, if China did something (ignoring that they couldn't do anything that could be rapidly circumvented) they would punish the US $, depreciating their own holdings in US bonds (most of which can't be cashed in for years and decades. Boy, win win!
Idiots that don't have the slightest clue about economics, and that are wide-eyed about isolated advantages (OMG! I hear that North Korea has gigantic pyramid towers! They must be super first world!) should just keep their ignorance to themselves. China is eventually joining the ranks of the first world, and will soon earn some "problems" like citizens that don't like being poisoned by the air and water, and who like some rights, but this pissy nonsense about how the US is doomed reeks of ignorance.
It takes 1.4 million complaints to get action over the DNC list then I would say the DNC list is somewhat of a failure.
I'm going to guess that CNN jammed together some facts - this article makes some guesses at the number of people on the list that were called, saying "in the thousands". Certainly not in the millions. And of course it's doubtful many of the people called bothered to file a complaint, which is why the FTC just arbitrarily assessed a penalty of the maximum penalty per call per day.
The article implies that the entire program has received 1.4 million complaints overall, which seems reasonable.
Interestingly this entry was inspired by the DVR/commercials story earlier, but it also applies as to how people end up with PHP and MySQL as the backbone of their infrastructure.
This has been possible for 20 years. I don't know why it hasn't been a problem before.
Small changes in usability yield tremendous change in adoption or use. Recording with a VCR, especially timed recordings where you had to set the bounds, was a major pain in the ass. It wasn't until relatively recently, maybe 7 years ago, that a few guides started printing special coded numbers that automatically set the times in the VCR, but it was still a nuisance - You still had issues like tape handling, the degraded quality of VHS, and non-random access. Blah. Most people would rather miss the show than bother with that, and of course that didn't facilitate watching while recording.
Watching while recording is, of course, how most ads are being skipped - After putting the kids to bed, we finally get started watching Survivor at 8:20, which is just enough buffer to skip virtually every ad for the rest of the show (it's a moment of sadness when you catch up to real-time).
I think that tv shows are just looking for an excuse to put out more ads. I mean, I don't know "that many" people with tivos. certainly not a big percentage compared to those who tape shows and watch them later on their vcr.
Everyone uses the phrase "Tivo" for a generic technology (which is unfortunate) - that generic technology is appearing in set-top boxes distributed and rented by cable companies (I have a wonderful Motorola 6812), media center PCs, among many other sources. Not only is there a vast number of people with PVRs, it is absolutely certain to grow by leaps in bounds very, very quickly.
When it comes to expensive, and frequently fragile electronics, always buy local. This should be a no brainer. The on-line prices are too good to be true simply because the on-line retailers know they won't have to deal with the customer service part.
I purchased a Digital Rebel XT online (from a guy who sold new goods through Ebay auctions no less), saving about $350 over what it was going for (and is still going for) in the store. I did all of my own research (I've found most local shops to be disinterested, uninformed space fillers personally. Obviously there are exceptions, but it seems the norm goes quite contrary to the "informed, personal touch" that is paraded about as the reason for patronizing the small local shops), and if I do have a problem with the camera my only recourse is mailing it to Canon, so again the local shop is irrelevant. Seems like a win win to me.
Someone should go around and take pictures of all the proprietors and store-fronts of these scammy camera salesman and post them on a website somewhere so the rest of us can be informed....
I believe they're talking about websites. Maybe people could take screenshots and post those, and we can be informed!
Seriously, though, there's a practical reason why vigilante justice is discouraged: Every a-hole who's mad that he couldn't get an otherwise reputable and service oriented business to cater to his every whim imagines himself in the same category as the guy who thought he was buying a Digital Rebel XT, but got an old, scratched Billy Idol CD in the mail. Thus you end up with the noise of a lot of ridiculous complaints alongside the real ones, and the last thing you want is to encourage these people to "take action". Just as there are dirty, scumbag shopkeeps, there are dirty, scumbag, sociopath customers.
Anyways this whole story is a lame spam for some lame website. So they're telling us that there are shady businesses, and that anonymous reviews aren't trustworthy? Egads, what a revelation! Thank you for informing me, 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable website!
I don't have anything on my bookshelf. I use google to find programming resources. This saves me from piling up books on very old technologies. It is also easier to search a web site than it is to load the Book On CD and search that.
While I have several books, I feel the same way. I'm highly suspicious when I walk into a developer's office and see the two dozen ".NET" books on the shelf, the spines giving all appearances of never being violated. This is pretty much par for the course, though : Stock your bookshelf to give the appearance of a professional, when in reality it's just filler that is very unlikely to have ever been read.
Indeed even many of the "classics" fall under this umbrella. The Mythical Man Month, Peopleware, and Code Complete are fantastic books, and everyone and their brother lauds them, yet if you talk to people you discover that, overwhelmingly, they haven't actually read them: It's just a meme to these people to talk about how great those books are. [Note: They ARE great books. Well, the MMM could have been condensed into a blog entry with little loss of value, and Peopleware could easily have been turned into a couple of blog entries, but nonetheless]
Sidenote: Many Microsoft Press books come with a CD with an electronic copy of the book for searching and electronic access, as well as sample and promo material. Of course most developers wouldn't know this because they never actually cracked it open.
as for listing, have you try to put that link in your sig on slashdot? I think that would definitely help to get your site listed/. adds nofollow on sigs and comment links, so add it as your sig gets you nothing.
They don't, however, put nofollow on journal entries, the beginning of which will appear on your profile page.
That doesn't make a lot of sense. Podcasting is already extremely popular, and is very useful in the real world.
Among the general population, podcasting is a complete non-event. Of course, as is common, people saw the rise of podcasting among those early adopters willing to embrace a new and awkward technology temporarily, and the classic mistake of drawing an endless growth curve is repeated.
The hype about podcasting happened because of the believe that soon everyone would be involved in the podcast community.
Using a podcast does not mean you have to listen to "any dweeb with a microphone."
90% of the purported advantage of podcasting is the "Long Tail" - instead of us all being confined to a small number of sources, we can all be producers and endlessly pick amongst exactly the content we want. It would free us from the reigns of the evil radio conglomerates!
There are many very professional Podcasts, plenty from major media organizations world-wide. Using a podcast does not mean you have to listen to "any dweeb with a microphone." It has the potential to take (another) huge bite out of live radio.
Right - it's another distribution mechanism for the existing media producers. That is news why, again? That isn't news, and that has never been the reason for hype behind podcasting. "OMG! You can automatically download snippets from CBC and BBC!"
Just like the internet has seriously changed the newspaper business.
Radio is nothing like the newspaper business. Firstly, radio is awkward: People only listen to the radio generally when no other option is available. In the car, for instance, or at a gym with no TVs, or at the workplace when it's just background noise. Podcasting represents very little of a threat to any of these. It isn't going to change anything.
Is this the end of the good times? Are we witnessing the beginning of the "real" internet business, where there is no space for startups and the only players have to be the huge ones?
Are you new to the internet? This is exactly what happened during Bubble 1.0: All of the big, established companies were desperately fearful that they were going to miss out on whatever the up and comers were doing, so they bought them up left and right. The reality is that such is a great time for small startups because they don't have to bother with silly things like revenue models or rational business plans - Just try to pay the bills long enough to get bought out by Yahoo/Google/Microsoft/Ebay and then let them deal with it. Eventually big business will find that a lot of them were, for lack of a better word, fads (podcasting, for instance, has incredibly limited real-world potential, but by the talk you'd think we're soon going to listen to every dweeb with a microphone) in an anti-revenue space, and they'll abandon them.
I'm sure you wouldn't want to use.NET for a site that gets 20,000 hits a minute
The greatest improvement that.NET brought to the table wasn't rich apps (Winforms still are quite a few steps behind what you could achieve with Delphi 7 years ago), nor was it component integration (COM is still the pervasive component model, and.NET remoting is just finally getting the features of COM+): It was that it revolutionized web development on the Windows platform.
Not only was the programming model a world better than the classic ASP, but the scalability (and automatic scale-out features like shared session state) improvements are colossal..NET is one of the few technologies you should rely upon to service a large scale, robust website.
Thankfully the Flash fad died down in general, though many sites still make use of it when they want rich content. It certainly hasn't disappeared.
I talked about a bit of industry gossip that I heard from who I consider a trustworthy, connected source. If true, that sort of leadership by a respected, open company could definitely lead things in a direction very quickly. Just look at how quickly the web community fell over themselves to implement AJAX (a 7 year old technology) once they saw Microsoft do it.
That said, why would that work when you were trying to paste text? Pasting text implies that you were typing and, naturally, Shift-G doesn't activate User Mode when you're typing -- otherwise you'd never be able to type a 'G' would you?
Funny thing, isn't it? I accidentally de-focused the text input, and suddenly I was in magic mode.
Would you believe that Shift-G is a toggle?
Yeah I figured that out eventually. It's a little surprizing (and ridiculous) that an app that relies heavily upon text entry uses an upper-case letter as a shortcut.
Slashdot Mirror
I know what finally made me stop renting from them years ago was that they would charge late fees on movies that were returned on time
Obviously this depends upon the store in question - how quickly they process returns, how honest the franchisee is, if you're returning a minute before the due time, and so on. I have never, ever, ever been charged an incorrect late fee (after patronizing 5 different Blockbusters). Of course I'm honest about when I'm late, too.
I'm not a huge fan of Blockbuster, but I certainly don't think an enormously awkward DVD-by-mail solution is going to be where we'll go. The biggest threat to Blockbuster is video-on-demand - I can currently, any time of the day, on a moment's notice rent from about a thousand standard and high definition movies on demand. There still are some improvements to be made (e.g. pausing and such is a tad time delayed -- unless I set it to record on the PVR and start watching 10 minutes later when it's basically buffered), but it most certainly is the future.
What does that mean? Is this yet another "PC is dead" barbs?
Amazing, isn't it? We've been hearing the "PCs are dead" line for about a decade now - each new overhyped generation of consoles will eviscerate the PC, we're told, rendering the PC irrelevant. This still hasn't happened (the xbox360 being no exception, with the general PC gamer being underwhelmed).
Of course both PCs, and consoles, will merge at some point into full power media centers, but the reality is thta the console is becoming a PC, not the other way around.
Canada has its own problems too. CD-R tax, for one thing. Draconian "hate speech" legislation is another thing. So as far as I am concerned, they are just two different poisons.
Canada absolutely has its own share of problems. Indeed, there was some legislation on the table (before the election was called) that shared a lot of similarities with the much-reviled DMCA. I think it's naive if any fellow Canadians get smug about our position.
However, complaining about hate speech is really bizarre. If that's what's wrong about Canada, then we must be doing incredibly well.
What concievable reason is there for users to want this kinda of protection on a video standard?
A lot of media companies are fearful of PCs. A lot of PC companies want to support the media companies, and to make them more comfortable, because it expands their market (e.g. media center PCs that support digital/HDTV feeds, for instance), and brings more utility to their customers.
Not to be overdramatic, but I find it disheartning all this merging and acquision going on all the time.
Are you new to watching the corporate space?
Mergers happen as a fad, and then the spinning off/focus on the core fad happens, and every company splits into 9 entities, selling off "non-core" assets to other companies, and then it repeats. This has been going on in the corporate space for time eternal, and it's how the executive level can keep giving them huge commissions, err bonuses, every time they do one of these big money maneuvers. Strangely they don't return the bonus when the bonehead move is reversed a few years later.
In any case, hard drives are a mature technology, and it should be expected that the field coalesces. Soon enough a disruptive technology (large scale flash with HD-like speeds, optical storage, whateer) and a millions startups will appear pushing their variant, and the cycle renews.
`While they may be desperate for more power and the ability to vent more heat from the datacenter, it seems deals like this come too easily to Google to call it "desperation".'
Google is desperate for revenue growth. Agreeing to full-color graphic AOL ads placed prominantly on the Google search results is the sign of a company that's willing to start cashing in. Make no mistake - Google is making cash hand over fist, however the stock has already priced in a lot of revenue growth that they can't accommodate via traditional means.
Yes, obviously they want their stock price to go up. But they aren't nearly as accountable to shareholders as most public companies.
Yet they've been desperately trying to grow the revenue stream, today signing a deal with AOL that even Microsoft considered unethical.
I said principal instead of principle several times in that, and the quoting of one (meant to be sarcastic) might be taken to imply that someone else said it - for that I apologize. Mea culpa.
You're being very disingenuous. Of course google's always been pursuing the almighty buck. It's a company. You know that. I know that. And parent knows that.
I'm being entirely genuous.
So, if we can get a couple of our brain cells working for a minute and re-read parent's comment, we'll realize taht parent is talking about ignoring principles more and more as their potential for greater income increases.
Right - but they aren't "principals", they're convenient positions to be in when it suits Google. Text ads were a great differentiation, and strategically there were a lot of good reasons for using them, but if you followed the line around here it wasn't because it made Google boatloads of money - No, it was because Google The Good just wanted to, uh, contribute to mankind.
We've seen the same sort of adoration of IBM around here - Historically IBM has been one of the most abusive and protective companies, but when it suits them (e.g. When they're getting their asses handed to them by Microsoft), suddenly they grow some "principals", and they're all about open source and open standards. The naive fools are the people who think that it's anything more than the almighty buck.
it seems that post-IPO Google is abandoning a few of it's old principles in the pursuit of the almighty buck
The naivety around here is mind-blowingly astounding.
Google's original, super-clean, no-ad interface was a differentiation to get them attention and eyeballs. Sure enough it worked wonders, and all of the techies and geeks (and overlaps between them) were raving about this great new search engine, encouraging all of their friends and family to use it as well (a no-pay sales force). Soon enough they started introducing those differentiated text-ads (which had a good click through rate because they were novel), and the rest is history.
All of that was in pursuit of the almighty buck. The fact that someone could say that the company is now doing something in pursuit of the almighty buck, while this young company sits with a valuation of $127 billion dollars, is astounding.
I always like that part. I'm not sure what people are hoping for:
Police: We're going to raid your house today. Noon good for you?
Raidee: I'm moving some gear then. Would two be OK?
Police: Sure!
That would work perfect for the police. Knowing geeks, they could just show up at 1:45 and they'd still catch him with everything.
Consider going to Bejing, Shanghai or Hong Kong.
Beijing is hardly a futuristic city (not really sure why you included that one. It's a beautiful city, but it hardly fits in with the other two). Hong Kong's prosperity is completely and absolutely the result of the British rule and law, and it has diminished since the takeover.
If you go to Shanghai you should try the sooper high speed mag-lev train.
One thing about a statist economy is that you can put billions towards really dumb money sinks, all to get gullible citizens and tourists to proclaim about how futuristic it is. I hear Brazilia in Brazil is a real futuristic city as well.
I was really surprised by the whole energy of the place. When I went to McDonalds and they didn't have my food immediately, they said no problem we will find you and bring it to you when its ready. 2 min latter I had my fries. This particular McDonald's had around 30 registers all open. They said that they served 6000 lunches everyday -- just nuts. You won't find any fast food resturant in the US that can manage that volume and provide good service too.
You're impressed that they brought your food to you? Wow, your opinion really needs to be considered suspect. Fastfood restaurants everywhere bring food to you.
Regarding the McDonalds being big --- if that's your measure of prosperity... That's like saying that a town is a great town because they have the largest Walmart. I'm going to have to presume that you're being sarcastic.
In closing, the US needs to sell $3,000,000,000 in bonds everyday to China just to keep running. If they really wished us harm they could just stop buying our debt. Once China no longer relies on exports we will be at their mercy. That will happen in around 10 - 20 years just when the US needs money to fund SS payments to baby-boomers.
Ah, good old fear mongering and ignorant economics. Ignoring the fact that China isn't a big financer of debt (and hasn't been for some time), countries don't buy bonds because they're benevolent - they do it for their own best interest. In the case of China they buy up US $ (and formerly bonds) to prop up the dollar, which keeps the yuan undervalued and serves China.
Secondly, if China did something (ignoring that they couldn't do anything that could be rapidly circumvented) they would punish the US $, depreciating their own holdings in US bonds (most of which can't be cashed in for years and decades. Boy, win win!
Idiots that don't have the slightest clue about economics, and that are wide-eyed about isolated advantages (OMG! I hear that North Korea has gigantic pyramid towers! They must be super first world!) should just keep their ignorance to themselves. China is eventually joining the ranks of the first world, and will soon earn some "problems" like citizens that don't like being poisoned by the air and water, and who like some rights, but this pissy nonsense about how the US is doomed reeks of ignorance.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171089&cid=142 50238
This is filler text to avoid the lameness filter.
It takes 1.4 million complaints to get action over the DNC list then I would say the DNC list is somewhat of a failure.
I'm going to guess that CNN jammed together some facts - this article makes some guesses at the number of people on the list that were called, saying "in the thousands". Certainly not in the millions. And of course it's doubtful many of the people called bothered to file a complaint, which is why the FTC just arbitrarily assessed a penalty of the maximum penalty per call per day.
The article implies that the entire program has received 1.4 million complaints overall, which seems reasonable.
Interestingly this entry was inspired by the DVR/commercials story earlier, but it also applies as to how people end up with PHP and MySQL as the backbone of their infrastructure.
This has been possible for 20 years. I don't know why it hasn't been a problem before.
Small changes in usability yield tremendous change in adoption or use. Recording with a VCR, especially timed recordings where you had to set the bounds, was a major pain in the ass. It wasn't until relatively recently, maybe 7 years ago, that a few guides started printing special coded numbers that automatically set the times in the VCR, but it was still a nuisance - You still had issues like tape handling, the degraded quality of VHS, and non-random access. Blah. Most people would rather miss the show than bother with that, and of course that didn't facilitate watching while recording.
Watching while recording is, of course, how most ads are being skipped - After putting the kids to bed, we finally get started watching Survivor at 8:20, which is just enough buffer to skip virtually every ad for the rest of the show (it's a moment of sadness when you catch up to real-time).
I think that tv shows are just looking for an excuse to put out more ads. I mean, I don't know "that many" people with tivos. certainly not a big percentage compared to those who tape shows and watch them later on their vcr.
Everyone uses the phrase "Tivo" for a generic technology (which is unfortunate) - that generic technology is appearing in set-top boxes distributed and rented by cable companies (I have a wonderful Motorola 6812), media center PCs, among many other sources. Not only is there a vast number of people with PVRs, it is absolutely certain to grow by leaps in bounds very, very quickly.
When it comes to expensive, and frequently fragile electronics, always buy local. This should be a no brainer. The on-line prices are too good to be true simply because the on-line retailers know they won't have to deal with the customer service part.
I purchased a Digital Rebel XT online (from a guy who sold new goods through Ebay auctions no less), saving about $350 over what it was going for (and is still going for) in the store. I did all of my own research (I've found most local shops to be disinterested, uninformed space fillers personally. Obviously there are exceptions, but it seems the norm goes quite contrary to the "informed, personal touch" that is paraded about as the reason for patronizing the small local shops), and if I do have a problem with the camera my only recourse is mailing it to Canon, so again the local shop is irrelevant. Seems like a win win to me.
Someone should go around and take pictures of all the proprietors and store-fronts of these scammy camera salesman and post them on a website somewhere so the rest of us can be informed....
I believe they're talking about websites. Maybe people could take screenshots and post those, and we can be informed!
Seriously, though, there's a practical reason why vigilante justice is discouraged: Every a-hole who's mad that he couldn't get an otherwise reputable and service oriented business to cater to his every whim imagines himself in the same category as the guy who thought he was buying a Digital Rebel XT, but got an old, scratched Billy Idol CD in the mail. Thus you end up with the noise of a lot of ridiculous complaints alongside the real ones, and the last thing you want is to encourage these people to "take action". Just as there are dirty, scumbag shopkeeps, there are dirty, scumbag, sociopath customers.
Anyways this whole story is a lame spam for some lame website. So they're telling us that there are shady businesses, and that anonymous reviews aren't trustworthy? Egads, what a revelation! Thank you for informing me, 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable website!
I don't have anything on my bookshelf. I use google to find programming resources. This saves me from piling up books on very old technologies. It is also easier to search a web site than it is to load the Book On CD and search that.
While I have several books, I feel the same way. I'm highly suspicious when I walk into a developer's office and see the two dozen ".NET" books on the shelf, the spines giving all appearances of never being violated. This is pretty much par for the course, though : Stock your bookshelf to give the appearance of a professional, when in reality it's just filler that is very unlikely to have ever been read.
Indeed even many of the "classics" fall under this umbrella. The Mythical Man Month, Peopleware, and Code Complete are fantastic books, and everyone and their brother lauds them, yet if you talk to people you discover that, overwhelmingly, they haven't actually read them: It's just a meme to these people to talk about how great those books are. [Note: They ARE great books. Well, the MMM could have been condensed into a blog entry with little loss of value, and Peopleware could easily have been turned into a couple of blog entries, but nonetheless]
Sidenote: Many Microsoft Press books come with a CD with an electronic copy of the book for searching and electronic access, as well as sample and promo material. Of course most developers wouldn't know this because they never actually cracked it open.
as for listing, have you try to put that link in your sig on slashdot? I think that would definitely help to get your site listed /. adds nofollow on sigs and comment links, so add it as your sig gets you nothing.
They don't, however, put nofollow on journal entries, the beginning of which will appear on your profile page.
Ah...I knew the podcasting bit would get bites.
That doesn't make a lot of sense. Podcasting is already extremely popular, and is very useful in the real world.
Among the general population, podcasting is a complete non-event. Of course, as is common, people saw the rise of podcasting among those early adopters willing to embrace a new and awkward technology temporarily, and the classic mistake of drawing an endless growth curve is repeated.
The hype about podcasting happened because of the believe that soon everyone would be involved in the podcast community.
Using a podcast does not mean you have to listen to "any dweeb with a microphone."
90% of the purported advantage of podcasting is the "Long Tail" - instead of us all being confined to a small number of sources, we can all be producers and endlessly pick amongst exactly the content we want. It would free us from the reigns of the evil radio conglomerates!
There are many very professional Podcasts, plenty from major media organizations world-wide. Using a podcast does not mean you have to listen to "any dweeb with a microphone." It has the potential to take (another) huge bite out of live radio.
Right - it's another distribution mechanism for the existing media producers. That is news why, again? That isn't news, and that has never been the reason for hype behind podcasting. "OMG! You can automatically download snippets from CBC and BBC!"
Just like the internet has seriously changed the newspaper business.
Radio is nothing like the newspaper business. Firstly, radio is awkward: People only listen to the radio generally when no other option is available. In the car, for instance, or at a gym with no TVs, or at the workplace when it's just background noise. Podcasting represents very little of a threat to any of these. It isn't going to change anything.
Is this the end of the good times? Are we witnessing the beginning of the "real" internet business, where there is no space for startups and the only players have to be the huge ones?
Are you new to the internet? This is exactly what happened during Bubble 1.0: All of the big, established companies were desperately fearful that they were going to miss out on whatever the up and comers were doing, so they bought them up left and right. The reality is that such is a great time for small startups because they don't have to bother with silly things like revenue models or rational business plans - Just try to pay the bills long enough to get bought out by Yahoo/Google/Microsoft/Ebay and then let them deal with it. Eventually big business will find that a lot of them were, for lack of a better word, fads (podcasting, for instance, has incredibly limited real-world potential, but by the talk you'd think we're soon going to listen to every dweeb with a microphone) in an anti-revenue space, and they'll abandon them.
Rinse and repeat.
I'm sure you wouldn't want to use .NET for a site that gets 20,000 hits a minute
.NET brought to the table wasn't rich apps (Winforms still are quite a few steps behind what you could achieve with Delphi 7 years ago), nor was it component integration (COM is still the pervasive component model, and .NET remoting is just finally getting the features of COM+): It was that it revolutionized web development on the Windows platform.
.NET is one of the few technologies you should rely upon to service a large scale, robust website.
The greatest improvement that
Not only was the programming model a world better than the classic ASP, but the scalability (and automatic scale-out features like shared session state) improvements are colossal.
Thankfully the Flash fad died down in general, though many sites still make use of it when they want rich content. It certainly hasn't disappeared.
I talked about a bit of industry gossip that I heard from who I consider a trustworthy, connected source. If true, that sort of leadership by a respected, open company could definitely lead things in a direction very quickly. Just look at how quickly the web community fell over themselves to implement AJAX (a 7 year old technology) once they saw Microsoft do it.
That said, why would that work when you were trying to paste text? Pasting text implies that you were typing and, naturally, Shift-G doesn't activate User Mode when you're typing -- otherwise you'd never be able to type a 'G' would you?
Funny thing, isn't it? I accidentally de-focused the text input, and suddenly I was in magic mode.
Would you believe that Shift-G is a toggle?
Yeah I figured that out eventually. It's a little surprizing (and ridiculous) that an app that relies heavily upon text entry uses an upper-case letter as a shortcut.