Re:"Friendly" and "Bank" in the same sentence?
on
Developer-Friendly Banks?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
By and large, yes - but it's not impossible. Of course, it really depends what you're looking to do. Many merchant processors allow you to move money in and out of your account(s) via ACH, and plenty of them have APIs with varying degrees of crappiness. You'll find that initiating the transfers tends to be fairly straightforward with most of them; it's the reconciliation of which transfers actually went through that's a pain in the ass (download a rather nonsenisical CSV file over FTP that's only available after a seemingly random time of day, rather than just pinging an API every few hours with a cron job).
I'm currently working with a company called Check Gateway which has a pretty good API at least by bank standards and staff that's quite helpful and willing to do stuff that a lot of other processors aren't comfortable with.
Having done that in the past, I'll say that buying a Drobo was worth the cost. Granted, I hunted around a bit to get a good sale price (it's not too difficult... though the FS is brand new so maybe not on that model yet), but unless you really enjoy tinkering with getting samba shares set up and working properly, sometimes it's just easier to buy your sanity.
Don't get me wrong - I wish they were cheaper. But their system worked better and more reliably than anything I ever put together, and I'm by no means incompetent. And their BeyondRaid tech, while proprietary, is pretty damn cool and works incredibly well. Being able to mix drives and not waste tons of storage space is a huge advantage that (as far as I know) I'm not going to get anywhere else.
Just a happy customer, not an employee or anything like that.
Or just write a loop that runs a Luhn check against a sequence of numbers. About one in eight or so numbers in the sequence will pass as being a "valid" card number - but to run charges against it, you still need some additional data like a billing ZIP code at the very least
Blippy has tons of ways of generating revenue - they're just (consciously) not using them yet. When you have $12mm of runway to work with, you're better off building new features and getting more customers instead of spending your limited engineering resources on generating revenue. That's not universally the case, but when your revenue streams are going to rely on having a massive customer base, it makes sense to spend your VC money on getting customers for as long as that's sustainable.
The client-side exploit could have been prevented if the software the server was properly sanitizing input data. Most of these XSS holes come from things like login forms pre-populating the username/email field with the previous value if you type your password wrong. Submit "onmouseover="alert(1); as a username/email to check if you have a hole. Evildoers will have that action instead change where the form POSTs to, steal your data, and silently redirect you back to where you had originally intended to go so you don't even know something happened.
And TFS said that passwords were stolen via an XSS exploit. You could be storing passwords on the server with some sort of quantum solution and still be screwed, because the passwords are stolen before they hit the server.
Sounds like there's two stages here though. Get admin access via logging passwords with the XSS exploit, and then get at the DB and do whatever the hell they want. Even if you have XSS vulnerabilities (and they're terribly common), admins should still know better than to login through a tinyurl link, since that's now one of the easiest ways for a malicious user to get a vulnerability on the page.
That said, storing unsalted hashes is still abysmally stupid.
You lose the vacuum very quickly - at least in my car, you probably get three or four assisted presses before it's almost all gone, and each of those is successively weaker (that's not to say the vacuum won't hold for a while - it will - but you eat it up rapidly). If you lose power braking and don't know what it feels like to brake otherwise, it's damn scary. Even going under 15MPH coasting in neutral, I have to really throw my entire body weight onto the brake pedal to stop the car (I'm a super-lightweight, but even still it's not just a little extra pressure required). I can only imagine what it's like when you're careening out of control and you also have to overcome a wide-open throttle.
Yes, I did some testing after this nonsense started happening, despite owning a manual. And some of it was coasting downhill in 14 miles of stop-and-go traffic where I just turned the car off to save gas, more out of boredom than anything else.
The closest I've seen to true cross-platform coding is HTML/CSS/JS. Granted as a web application developer I'm biased, but I also write in a single platform-independant language and have working code across pretty much every platform in existence. And what's even better is that when a new platform comes along, my code is compatible with it from day one without any extra effort on my part; no #ifdef nonsense.
Of course, the web has its limitations, not to mention the whole IE thing. But almost every application I use today could be turned into a web app, and plenty of them would be better off as one. There's a time and place for desktop apps, but when I want to reach the widest possible audience with the least amount of programming effort, browsers tend to be the logical target.
I would think that a PIN would be an optional layer of extra security. I can already use my iPhone as a proximity sensor to unlock my computer with no interaction whatsoever (see: Airlock) and some newer cars have a similar option for door locks and the ignition, but there are some situations where you'd want the second layer of security. Especially since it's relatively easy to clone a broadcast digital signal compared to a physical key.
By the sounds of it, many recent automatic transmissions basically have the shifter wired up to a bunch of switches rather than anything mechanical. If the acceleration subsystem is having issues, it's entirely possible that the shifting system is as well.
That said, it's the first thing you should try doing. Probably followed by killing the ignition.
By turning a profit, Apple can continue to exist. By turning a large profit, they can reinvest that money into making newer, better devices.
I like companies that exist, especially ones that continue to make newer, better devices. And because they're better, I'm willing to pay a little extra.
I've bought plenty of cheap crap because it was cheap. It was also crap. At least to me, the cost savings does not offset the unnecessary frustration. YMMV.
If the webmaster chooses to review any and all content you post before it's published, that's fine (impractical, but there are a hundred other sites that won't do so which you're free to use). If the government requires the site to do so, that's a violation of free speech. It's a slightly gray area if it's a government-run forum (or video sharing site, etc.) but I think that so long as they haven't intervened and shut down every other forum, etc., then I think it would be fine.
I don't know what, if any, laws there are in Italy about free speech, so that may not actually be illegal there. IANAL, and most definitely IANAIL.
I have my PHYSICAL hardware not behave as expected very frequently when attempting to navigate Flash-based sites - my scroll wheel almost never works, and forms often don't respond to hitting enter as expected. If Flash devs can't get that basic level of functionality working for completely standard hardware, I can't imagine how much it would suck trying to make it worth with a plethora of virtual devices. And of course, any sort of hack to simulate mouseovers on a touchscreen device is going to be, well, a hack. Suffice to say, it will add a lot of complication and frustration to my browsing experience, something I don't need any more of when on a tiny screen with a slow connection.
This is before the fact that most Flash I encounter is for advertisements, which is something I really don't feel the need to have more of on my mobile browsing devices. The only thing I wouldn't mind seeing Flash enable on mobile devices is native camera support since that's not (currently) part of any HTML5 spec. Almost all video is done in h264 which is already supported natively by nearly all mobile browsers.
Backups are designed to deal with data loss at my end, not some publisher getting persnickety about usage rights (read: 1984 fiasco). The ONLY legitimate reason for pushing out a "delete this content from all devices" notice is one where failure to do so could cause the security of the device to be compromised. Given the nature of bookstores and what I can only assume happens before content shows up in them, I feel that the need for that "feature" to exist is zero, and I have no intention of buying any device that allows that to happen. At least with apps, you're running code that could be later discovered to do some malicious things... books are just dumping text, and maybe a couple images, on a screen (that said, I'd rather take my chances with a rogue app and not have that remote deletion feature exist - if something can be used for political reasons, it will).
I was quite excited for the nook (more as a gadget than a reading device, since most of my reading is on forums, blogs, and other stuff that's not in bookstores) until I actually played with one in person. It definitely came across as a good idea but it would be better to wait for the second-gen version.
Of course I only had about 45 seconds to play with it, but my first impressions were not good.
For me, the DRM is a big issue - to the point of being a deal-breaker. For any content store for that matter, not just books. I got screwed by DRM once in the early days of iTunes (and from Sony's abysmal ATRAC3 format for otherwise-great Minidisc players, before that) and did not buy another track until they were available without copy protection. Data portability is a real concern for me, so I'm not buying into any format that's going to limit that in any meaningful way.
That doesn't necessarily stop me from buying the device, just from using the built-in store. But when devices are built around showcasing the integrated storefront (and certain features are really only useful in that context, which is largely the case for the Kindle's wireless to my understanding), that's usually a good indication that it's the wrong device for me.
Don't let that stop YOU from buying what you want - you're all intelligent people and can make informed decisions. Ultimately an ebook reader is not the right device for me simply because I don't read books enough to make it worthwhile. Just don't forget that everyone is placing different values on the various aspects of these devices, so what's perfect for one reader may be terrible for another.
I don't know... I played with a Nook the last time I was in a Barnes and Noble, and the e-ink display really didn't impress me (the touchscreen interface was also terribly slow and unintuitive, but that's beside the point). I found that, just like a book - surprise! - it's horrible to read in poorly lit areas. Of course it didn't look like it would suffer from glare issues or related stuff you get from an LCD, but as a slashdotter I never venture into brightly-lit areas.
At least for me, a sufficiently high-resolution display is way better than fake paper. Maybe it's a generational thing. I've been using computers since I was about 4, which is going on twenty years and obviously almost my entire life; suffice to say, I'm used to reading lots and lots of text on computer screens.
That, and I'm becoming increasingly pleased with the quality of convergence devices. I hate to come off as a Mac fanboy, but it seems like the introduction of the iPhone really was a turning point for the quality standards of do-nearly-everything gadgets. Especially as someone who doesn't do a whole lot of (book) reading, buying a dedicated device for the purpose just doesn't make sense to me - I'd rather spend a bit more and get a single device that replaces several other things. For now, that remains a laptop - though I'll certainly recognize that even a lightweight 13" model (or even a netbook) simply doesn't have the portability factor that some are looking for.
I don't think the data is stacked, though that would make sense if that's the case. My reasoning for that statement is the online services section being in the negatives - it simply doesn't make sense to have positive data stacked on top of negative like that, since then you have to calculate the value at any given point with a ruler instead of the y-axis label.
I could be wrong, but I think this is just a really stupidly-made line chart.
That's more akin to the gas tank no longer functioning, not its emptiness. By the sounds of it, this car analogy is smart enough to drive itself to the nearest gas station and fill up for you (on someone else's dime, no less) when it's running low on gas.
If this device is as smart as TFS suggests, it can probably use more than 10 characters. Hell, something that size (9mm^3) could be, uh, discreetly placed to take pictures and send out the real thing!
Not that I would ever condone or support such an act.
I'm rather intrigued by the price. Not that $500 is cheap (even if less than expected) nor would I end up with the $500 model should I get one, but because the 9.7" Kindle is $489. So for an extra $10, I get 4x the storage, a color screen, a fuller-featured OS, a plethora of applications, etc., etc., and it can still read ebooks quite capably. The eInk display on the Kindle is really a non-starter for me - I read text on a computer screen probably twelve hours a day, so it just doesn't bother me. Of course, I prefer audiobooks so that's a wash anyways.
I think the most desirable part for me is the option of getting a contract-free unlimited 3G data plan for half the cost of a 2-year-contract-required AirCard w/ 5GB bandwidth for my laptop. Not quite as useful as an aircard on a laptop just given the limitations of the device and the OS, but given the difference in cost...
FYI, the iPad supports a hardware keyboard and has an adapter for connecting cameras, etc. Not the same thing of course, but it does give the benefit of not requiring the space of a physical keyboard that you may only use 15% of the time.
Apple has more or less created a new category with the iPad; most of the people that are complaining about it seem to really want laptops with touchscreens. Which is fine - get one. But don't waste time complaining to Apple that their device that's not intended to do what you want doesn't do what you want. They won't listen.
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By and large, yes - but it's not impossible. Of course, it really depends what you're looking to do. Many merchant processors allow you to move money in and out of your account(s) via ACH, and plenty of them have APIs with varying degrees of crappiness. You'll find that initiating the transfers tends to be fairly straightforward with most of them; it's the reconciliation of which transfers actually went through that's a pain in the ass (download a rather nonsenisical CSV file over FTP that's only available after a seemingly random time of day, rather than just pinging an API every few hours with a cron job).
I'm currently working with a company called Check Gateway which has a pretty good API at least by bank standards and staff that's quite helpful and willing to do stuff that a lot of other processors aren't comfortable with.
Having done that in the past, I'll say that buying a Drobo was worth the cost. Granted, I hunted around a bit to get a good sale price (it's not too difficult... though the FS is brand new so maybe not on that model yet), but unless you really enjoy tinkering with getting samba shares set up and working properly, sometimes it's just easier to buy your sanity.
Don't get me wrong - I wish they were cheaper. But their system worked better and more reliably than anything I ever put together, and I'm by no means incompetent. And their BeyondRaid tech, while proprietary, is pretty damn cool and works incredibly well. Being able to mix drives and not waste tons of storage space is a huge advantage that (as far as I know) I'm not going to get anywhere else.
Just a happy customer, not an employee or anything like that.
Or just write a loop that runs a Luhn check against a sequence of numbers. About one in eight or so numbers in the sequence will pass as being a "valid" card number - but to run charges against it, you still need some additional data like a billing ZIP code at the very least
Blippy has tons of ways of generating revenue - they're just (consciously) not using them yet. When you have $12mm of runway to work with, you're better off building new features and getting more customers instead of spending your limited engineering resources on generating revenue. That's not universally the case, but when your revenue streams are going to rely on having a massive customer base, it makes sense to spend your VC money on getting customers for as long as that's sustainable.
The client-side exploit could have been prevented if the software the server was properly sanitizing input data. Most of these XSS holes come from things like login forms pre-populating the username/email field with the previous value if you type your password wrong. Submit "onmouseover="alert(1); as a username/email to check if you have a hole. Evildoers will have that action instead change where the form POSTs to, steal your data, and silently redirect you back to where you had originally intended to go so you don't even know something happened.
And TFS said that passwords were stolen via an XSS exploit. You could be storing passwords on the server with some sort of quantum solution and still be screwed, because the passwords are stolen before they hit the server.
Sounds like there's two stages here though. Get admin access via logging passwords with the XSS exploit, and then get at the DB and do whatever the hell they want. Even if you have XSS vulnerabilities (and they're terribly common), admins should still know better than to login through a tinyurl link, since that's now one of the easiest ways for a malicious user to get a vulnerability on the page.
That said, storing unsalted hashes is still abysmally stupid.
You lose the vacuum very quickly - at least in my car, you probably get three or four assisted presses before it's almost all gone, and each of those is successively weaker (that's not to say the vacuum won't hold for a while - it will - but you eat it up rapidly). If you lose power braking and don't know what it feels like to brake otherwise, it's damn scary. Even going under 15MPH coasting in neutral, I have to really throw my entire body weight onto the brake pedal to stop the car (I'm a super-lightweight, but even still it's not just a little extra pressure required). I can only imagine what it's like when you're careening out of control and you also have to overcome a wide-open throttle.
Yes, I did some testing after this nonsense started happening, despite owning a manual. And some of it was coasting downhill in 14 miles of stop-and-go traffic where I just turned the car off to save gas, more out of boredom than anything else.
The closest I've seen to true cross-platform coding is HTML/CSS/JS. Granted as a web application developer I'm biased, but I also write in a single platform-independant language and have working code across pretty much every platform in existence. And what's even better is that when a new platform comes along, my code is compatible with it from day one without any extra effort on my part; no #ifdef nonsense.
Of course, the web has its limitations, not to mention the whole IE thing. But almost every application I use today could be turned into a web app, and plenty of them would be better off as one. There's a time and place for desktop apps, but when I want to reach the widest possible audience with the least amount of programming effort, browsers tend to be the logical target.
I feel really screwed with my 978 area code... what terrible odds.
I would think that a PIN would be an optional layer of extra security. I can already use my iPhone as a proximity sensor to unlock my computer with no interaction whatsoever (see: Airlock) and some newer cars have a similar option for door locks and the ignition, but there are some situations where you'd want the second layer of security. Especially since it's relatively easy to clone a broadcast digital signal compared to a physical key.
By the sounds of it, many recent automatic transmissions basically have the shifter wired up to a bunch of switches rather than anything mechanical. If the acceleration subsystem is having issues, it's entirely possible that the shifting system is as well.
That said, it's the first thing you should try doing. Probably followed by killing the ignition.
By turning a profit, Apple can continue to exist. By turning a large profit, they can reinvest that money into making newer, better devices.
I like companies that exist, especially ones that continue to make newer, better devices. And because they're better, I'm willing to pay a little extra.
I've bought plenty of cheap crap because it was cheap. It was also crap. At least to me, the cost savings does not offset the unnecessary frustration. YMMV.
Photoshop, Handbrake, and VMWare on a netbook?
Good luck with that. Even flash games make them choke.
If the webmaster chooses to review any and all content you post before it's published, that's fine (impractical, but there are a hundred other sites that won't do so which you're free to use). If the government requires the site to do so, that's a violation of free speech. It's a slightly gray area if it's a government-run forum (or video sharing site, etc.) but I think that so long as they haven't intervened and shut down every other forum, etc., then I think it would be fine.
I don't know what, if any, laws there are in Italy about free speech, so that may not actually be illegal there. IANAL, and most definitely IANAIL.
I have my PHYSICAL hardware not behave as expected very frequently when attempting to navigate Flash-based sites - my scroll wheel almost never works, and forms often don't respond to hitting enter as expected. If Flash devs can't get that basic level of functionality working for completely standard hardware, I can't imagine how much it would suck trying to make it worth with a plethora of virtual devices. And of course, any sort of hack to simulate mouseovers on a touchscreen device is going to be, well, a hack. Suffice to say, it will add a lot of complication and frustration to my browsing experience, something I don't need any more of when on a tiny screen with a slow connection.
This is before the fact that most Flash I encounter is for advertisements, which is something I really don't feel the need to have more of on my mobile browsing devices. The only thing I wouldn't mind seeing Flash enable on mobile devices is native camera support since that's not (currently) part of any HTML5 spec. Almost all video is done in h264 which is already supported natively by nearly all mobile browsers.
Backups are designed to deal with data loss at my end, not some publisher getting persnickety about usage rights (read: 1984 fiasco). The ONLY legitimate reason for pushing out a "delete this content from all devices" notice is one where failure to do so could cause the security of the device to be compromised. Given the nature of bookstores and what I can only assume happens before content shows up in them, I feel that the need for that "feature" to exist is zero, and I have no intention of buying any device that allows that to happen. At least with apps, you're running code that could be later discovered to do some malicious things... books are just dumping text, and maybe a couple images, on a screen (that said, I'd rather take my chances with a rogue app and not have that remote deletion feature exist - if something can be used for political reasons, it will).
I was quite excited for the nook (more as a gadget than a reading device, since most of my reading is on forums, blogs, and other stuff that's not in bookstores) until I actually played with one in person. It definitely came across as a good idea but it would be better to wait for the second-gen version.
Of course I only had about 45 seconds to play with it, but my first impressions were not good.
For me, the DRM is a big issue - to the point of being a deal-breaker. For any content store for that matter, not just books. I got screwed by DRM once in the early days of iTunes (and from Sony's abysmal ATRAC3 format for otherwise-great Minidisc players, before that) and did not buy another track until they were available without copy protection. Data portability is a real concern for me, so I'm not buying into any format that's going to limit that in any meaningful way.
That doesn't necessarily stop me from buying the device, just from using the built-in store. But when devices are built around showcasing the integrated storefront (and certain features are really only useful in that context, which is largely the case for the Kindle's wireless to my understanding), that's usually a good indication that it's the wrong device for me.
Don't let that stop YOU from buying what you want - you're all intelligent people and can make informed decisions. Ultimately an ebook reader is not the right device for me simply because I don't read books enough to make it worthwhile. Just don't forget that everyone is placing different values on the various aspects of these devices, so what's perfect for one reader may be terrible for another.
I don't know... I played with a Nook the last time I was in a Barnes and Noble, and the e-ink display really didn't impress me (the touchscreen interface was also terribly slow and unintuitive, but that's beside the point). I found that, just like a book - surprise! - it's horrible to read in poorly lit areas. Of course it didn't look like it would suffer from glare issues or related stuff you get from an LCD, but as a slashdotter I never venture into brightly-lit areas.
At least for me, a sufficiently high-resolution display is way better than fake paper. Maybe it's a generational thing. I've been using computers since I was about 4, which is going on twenty years and obviously almost my entire life; suffice to say, I'm used to reading lots and lots of text on computer screens.
That, and I'm becoming increasingly pleased with the quality of convergence devices. I hate to come off as a Mac fanboy, but it seems like the introduction of the iPhone really was a turning point for the quality standards of do-nearly-everything gadgets. Especially as someone who doesn't do a whole lot of (book) reading, buying a dedicated device for the purpose just doesn't make sense to me - I'd rather spend a bit more and get a single device that replaces several other things. For now, that remains a laptop - though I'll certainly recognize that even a lightweight 13" model (or even a netbook) simply doesn't have the portability factor that some are looking for.
I don't think the data is stacked, though that would make sense if that's the case. My reasoning for that statement is the online services section being in the negatives - it simply doesn't make sense to have positive data stacked on top of negative like that, since then you have to calculate the value at any given point with a ruler instead of the y-axis label.
I could be wrong, but I think this is just a really stupidly-made line chart.
That's more akin to the gas tank no longer functioning, not its emptiness. By the sounds of it, this car analogy is smart enough to drive itself to the nearest gas station and fill up for you (on someone else's dime, no less) when it's running low on gas.
If this device is as smart as TFS suggests, it can probably use more than 10 characters. Hell, something that size (9mm^3) could be, uh, discreetly placed to take pictures and send out the real thing!
Not that I would ever condone or support such an act.
I'm rather intrigued by the price. Not that $500 is cheap (even if less than expected) nor would I end up with the $500 model should I get one, but because the 9.7" Kindle is $489. So for an extra $10, I get 4x the storage, a color screen, a fuller-featured OS, a plethora of applications, etc., etc., and it can still read ebooks quite capably. The eInk display on the Kindle is really a non-starter for me - I read text on a computer screen probably twelve hours a day, so it just doesn't bother me. Of course, I prefer audiobooks so that's a wash anyways.
I think the most desirable part for me is the option of getting a contract-free unlimited 3G data plan for half the cost of a 2-year-contract-required AirCard w/ 5GB bandwidth for my laptop. Not quite as useful as an aircard on a laptop just given the limitations of the device and the OS, but given the difference in cost...
FYI, the iPad supports a hardware keyboard and has an adapter for connecting cameras, etc. Not the same thing of course, but it does give the benefit of not requiring the space of a physical keyboard that you may only use 15% of the time.
Apple has more or less created a new category with the iPad; most of the people that are complaining about it seem to really want laptops with touchscreens. Which is fine - get one. But don't waste time complaining to Apple that their device that's not intended to do what you want doesn't do what you want. They won't listen.
Hmm... funny you should mention cell phones. Do you think these things are going to start attacking teenagers with those "teacher-proof" ringtones?