Given the choice of convenience/cool features or privacy/security, users* will ALWAYS pick convenience/features. 100% of the time. To them, it's not "leaking a bunch of personal information", but enabling that "oh cool, it knows I took these pictures down by the waterfront and stuck them on the map for me" stuff.
* Normal users. Us paranoid slashdotters (and, in general, people that actually understand the necessity and implications of privacy and security) need not apply to that stat.
Individual apps require you to give them the OK to get location data, but that only applies to shots taken from the app itself and not those that pull from the existing photo library. You can turn location services off entirely, but I can't find an immediately obvious way to revoke privileges from individual apps.
It's been quite a while since I've thought about "extreme" computer cooling solutions, but I thought Fluorinert was just a non-conductive liquid that otherwise was quite water-like. I used good old dollar-a-gallon distilled water in my old watercooling setup and that worked perfectly well.
Of course skimming Wikipedia tells me that you can get some with very low boiling points, but you wouldn't usually use evaporative cooling for computers (I've seen it done, but it's impractical at best; downright dangerous in conjunction with very high-end equipment) and in any case the water used in computer liquid cooling systems usually only goes a few degrees above room temperature anyways (since it has a much higher heat density than air, it doesn't get as hot as traditional heatsinks do).
I also fail to see how super-cooled water would help slim down AC units and other things of that nature... all they're doing is altering the freezing point of water, not magically sucking heat away in the process of warming it up.
That's all true, but PCI compliance has nothing to do with legality. Violating the standard will get you shut down by your merchant processor (or someone else in the chain of your ability to accept credit cards), but it's not illegal.
Ultimately though, it comes down to a risk vs reward thing for those enforcing the standards. After all, Visa and Mastercard are getting a piece of every single transaction. Until people start calling up their issuing bank and charging back these fraudulent cross-sells (and do so in enough volume to raise some eyebrows or cause them to lose money, which admittedly is a very low number), it's in their financial best interest to allow it. Some of these companies are getting $10M+ in revenue from these cross-sale ads alone, so imagine what levels of volume they're doing through their legitimate business channels. Visa and MC aren't about to give that up anytime soon.
They're (often) ads designed to look like coupons that are inserted into the middle of or immediately after the checkout process. I've even seen them placed in order confirmation emails. "Click here to save $10 on that order you just completed." kind of things, with no fine print whatsoever. Some of them will immediately sign you up; others will make you hit at least one additional page before you get screwed over - it depends on how much or little fine print, usually.
At best, it's false advertising. At worst... use your imagination.
If you have Amazon prime, the shipping is often faster.
Seriously. Depends on the torrent, but I've had large files over bit-torrent take longer to download than it would have taken to get it shipped two-day with Amazon Prime.
If hardcovers and paperbacks were released simultaneously, I expect many more people would flock to paperbacks. Take Harry Potter for example - if both versions had been available at one of those midnight releases, don't you think many people would have taken the cheaper route? They wanted it that night, and hardcover was the only option, so that's what they paid for.
I agree - if I'm going to buy a hardcover over a paperback, then I'd probably also get a hardcover over an ebook. But usually if I'm buying a hardcover, I'm doing that over stealing a copy, since that's my only other option (I don't own an ebook reader so buying an ebook isn't a practical option... I'll read long documents on a computer screen, but not a novel) since a paperback version isn't available at the time.
At least music stores were lucky enough to get several format switches for the same content. Bookstores have always had just books (and to a much lesser extent, audiobooks; unlike with music format switching though, you're probably going to get one or the other and not both), and I'm sure they've been biting their nails since the first e-ink/e-paper prototypes came out. FWIW, I meant bookstores in general when I said companies that sell hardcovers. To me, paper is paper.
When your website has 350M+ users and 150M+ uniques/day, you're well past the point of traditional scaling solutions. If Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest in the world, so to say the amount of data they have to deal with is monolithic is a terrific understatement. At this point, I'm surprised they're not getting custom silicon; custom compilers seems like they should have come a hundred million users ago.
Don't get me wrong - I'm sure Facebook's original code was awful. Do you think they're still using it? Do you think they haven't hand-tuned every line of code on the site to save themselves entire datacenters worth of servers? No, I'm NOT advocating writing terrible code - but some scaling techniques simply aren't practical when a site is small, and may simply not work at all, and the best code in the world that's made for a single-server site just won't work when you need the raw horsepower of an entire rack of servers.
He's obviously talking about the page rendering time, not hosting a fast app from a dial-up connection. We're not serving static pages anymore (and if it takes a full second to serve a static page, you're doing something seriously wrong).
In the tech world (and even more so in the land of Web 2.0 and web apps), getting stuff out the door quickly and improving it is way more important than having it work perfectly from day one. Because if the idea is any good, someone else is also working on it, and the first one out the door tends to win. It's widely acknowledged that with web startups, if you want to take on an existing market, you need to be 10x better than your competition. So if you're first to market with something decent, the second guy with a better, faster, sleeker product is going to still lose to you unless his product is WAY better than yours.
Scalability only matters if you have lots of users. Not scaling well is a good problem to have, because it means you have lots of users. And no, getting slashdotted over lunchtime does not qualify as a scalability issue (that typically qualifies as a server misconfiguration or really bad code issue). It sucks for a couple of hours, but you don't get slashdotted every day. If you ARE seeing that kind of traffic burst every day, then congratulations - you have users!
Yes, eBooks DO devalue books - as they should. Books are just a very (very!) old medium.
What eBooks don't devalue is content, or at least they shouldn't. Up until now, the content has been tied to the medium in the publishing world. We've seen what happened when the two became decoupled with music and movies (and even video games, to some extent - at least for PC gaming), and it's about damn time that the same thing happens with the written word.
As for companies that sell hardcovers... well, sucks to be them. That's what happens when your business model is tied to a single medium.
Well technically it was less than double, as HD-DVD was 15GB, not 12. More importantly, consumers care about cheap - so it's actually quite remarkable that blu-ray "won" (I use the word loosely as DVD is still dominating and plenty of people seem to be skipping HD discs in favor of downloads and streaming)
Neither of those sound appealing when there are Free/free alternatives which will work just as well for my purposes — if I can get my users to install support for them, anyway. And which will never work on the iPhone...
Maybe I'm not understanding your website's goals, but it sounds like those alternatives in fact do not work just as well for your purposes.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all about Free, free, and open standards. But as someone in control of websites, I'm going to use what gives the best experience for my visitors. For better or worse, that's h264 - a closed, but de facto standard. It's not ideal, but I'm not willing to sacrifice a large portion of desktop visitors and nearly 100% of mobile visitors. If you are, more power to you.
Well, six years from now when you have to start worrying about it, we'll probably have come up with some superior format. If it's that much of a concern to you, write a better codec and make sure it stays as FOSS. (That's meant to come across much less douchey than it probably will)
Of course, MPEG-LA will do the same thing in 2016 that they've done now, provided the codec is still even in use by then. It doesn't make any business sense to try and extract money from ten million websites that are using video with their codec when they can just license out the encoder to a select few companies for a huge amount of money. Legally they could try, but it would just be stupid.
Languages aren't insecure, bad code is. It's not PHP's fault that people use it to write bad code.
Ok, it is, but some language has to be one of the easiest to learn. And the language that has a lot of newbies in it will tend to have the most bad code written in it. Any language will allow you to (for example) use unfiltered GET/POST values in a SQL query; it's the programmer's fault for being dumb enough to do so.
True, but it's one line of code to convert all of the traditional errors into instead throwing ErrorExceptions (set_error_handler(create_function('$a, $b, $c, $d', 'throw new ErrorException($b, 0, $a, $c, $d);'), E_ALL); - incidentally, this breaks use of @ error suppression).
If you're using @ in a couple of select places, it's quite handy - especially when dealing with stuff that's outside of your control (talking to external APIs which may be offline, for example). But I'm sure there's no shortage of crappy code out there as a hack to get around actual bugs in the code.
That they made it unwillingly doesn't change the fact that MS did, in fact, make a standards-compliant browser. Maybe not the latest and greatest, but it's pretty solid (albeit slow) with just about all CSS that doesn't require a -prefix- on the property name. It's accurate enough that I don't worry about doing any more extensive testing than I perform in Firefox or Webkit-based browsers; I'm willing to lose round corners and drop shadows in IE if it saves me the time of having to make tons of hacks for what amounts to minor eye candy.
It's not like I use IE8 as my day-to-day browser, but as a web developer I don't fear it either. Even 7 usually does a decent job, though maybe I've just been at it long enough that I subconsciously build hacks into my code.
Maybe, but that has the potential to really screw up a lot of web app interactions. Many login systems check for consistency in the User Agent string (among other headers) to help prevent session hijacking by copying someone's cookies; if browsers in stealth mode start omitting that, it could easily turn into either a security hazard or a completely broken web experience.
Don't confuse ability with necessity. Remember the whole "fast, good, cheap: pick two" thing? When you offshore your software development to India, you're always aiming for cheap and almost always aiming for fast. It's not their fault that their clients don't care about the end-product actually being good. I've met plenty of good Indian coders and plenty of bad American coders. It's like buying stuff made in China - it's not inherently worse, but the goals of the people ultimately selling the product care more about getting it cheap and fast and are willing to sacrifice in quality. Yet my laptop, also made/assembled in China, is fantastic quality - because the manufacturer chose "good" over "cheap".
This is one of the less complicated web apps I've seen, to be honest. I'm not knocking Google for having made it, but very little if any of GV is using stuff specific to HTML5 (there may be some offline storage, but it's certainly not using it aggressively if at all in my testing) - it's mostly a polished interface made for small screens to do a lot of javascript. Ultimately, it's just putting a lot of easy-to-click links that use the tel:// URI that Apple made up a couple of years ago as part of their short-lived web app obsession.
Mobile Gmail is a whole hell of a lot more complex. It uses the offline storage quite heavily and effectively.
That said, I'm happy to see anything that pushes forward the spec and adoption of HTML5-compatible browsers,
GV doesn't seem to use the HTML5 features - or at least every time I've tried, it does plenty of reloading and refreshing. Maybe it only tries to pull from local storage when there's no internet connection. Hell, they don't even have it set up so that saving it as a web app (the home screen bookmark thing) hides the navigation bar - and that's literally one line of HTML to implement provided their AJAX is rigged up correctly, which seems to be the case.
Still, a great start. I certainly see myself using GV a lot more now, even if what they have could use a little more polish.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the choice of convenience/cool features or privacy/security, users* will ALWAYS pick convenience/features. 100% of the time. To them, it's not "leaking a bunch of personal information", but enabling that "oh cool, it knows I took these pictures down by the waterfront and stuck them on the map for me" stuff.
* Normal users. Us paranoid slashdotters (and, in general, people that actually understand the necessity and implications of privacy and security) need not apply to that stat.
If it's a service that exists for that kind of thing (Wikileaks?), they should know well enough to strip that data out themselves.
Not that I'd want to rely on someone else. You'd be astonished at the number of websites that don't even hash or encrypt passwords.
Individual apps require you to give them the OK to get location data, but that only applies to shots taken from the app itself and not those that pull from the existing photo library. You can turn location services off entirely, but I can't find an immediately obvious way to revoke privileges from individual apps.
It's been quite a while since I've thought about "extreme" computer cooling solutions, but I thought Fluorinert was just a non-conductive liquid that otherwise was quite water-like. I used good old dollar-a-gallon distilled water in my old watercooling setup and that worked perfectly well.
Of course skimming Wikipedia tells me that you can get some with very low boiling points, but you wouldn't usually use evaporative cooling for computers (I've seen it done, but it's impractical at best; downright dangerous in conjunction with very high-end equipment) and in any case the water used in computer liquid cooling systems usually only goes a few degrees above room temperature anyways (since it has a much higher heat density than air, it doesn't get as hot as traditional heatsinks do).
I also fail to see how super-cooled water would help slim down AC units and other things of that nature... all they're doing is altering the freezing point of water, not magically sucking heat away in the process of warming it up.
Possibly. But more likely than not, it was because the driver forgot to set the parking brake, or something equally stupid.
That's all true, but PCI compliance has nothing to do with legality. Violating the standard will get you shut down by your merchant processor (or someone else in the chain of your ability to accept credit cards), but it's not illegal.
Ultimately though, it comes down to a risk vs reward thing for those enforcing the standards. After all, Visa and Mastercard are getting a piece of every single transaction. Until people start calling up their issuing bank and charging back these fraudulent cross-sells (and do so in enough volume to raise some eyebrows or cause them to lose money, which admittedly is a very low number), it's in their financial best interest to allow it. Some of these companies are getting $10M+ in revenue from these cross-sale ads alone, so imagine what levels of volume they're doing through their legitimate business channels. Visa and MC aren't about to give that up anytime soon.
You haven't seen these things in action.
They're (often) ads designed to look like coupons that are inserted into the middle of or immediately after the checkout process. I've even seen them placed in order confirmation emails. "Click here to save $10 on that order you just completed." kind of things, with no fine print whatsoever. Some of them will immediately sign you up; others will make you hit at least one additional page before you get screwed over - it depends on how much or little fine print, usually.
At best, it's false advertising. At worst... use your imagination.
If you have Amazon prime, the shipping is often faster.
Seriously. Depends on the torrent, but I've had large files over bit-torrent take longer to download than it would have taken to get it shipped two-day with Amazon Prime.
If hardcovers and paperbacks were released simultaneously, I expect many more people would flock to paperbacks. Take Harry Potter for example - if both versions had been available at one of those midnight releases, don't you think many people would have taken the cheaper route? They wanted it that night, and hardcover was the only option, so that's what they paid for.
I agree - if I'm going to buy a hardcover over a paperback, then I'd probably also get a hardcover over an ebook. But usually if I'm buying a hardcover, I'm doing that over stealing a copy, since that's my only other option (I don't own an ebook reader so buying an ebook isn't a practical option... I'll read long documents on a computer screen, but not a novel) since a paperback version isn't available at the time.
At least music stores were lucky enough to get several format switches for the same content. Bookstores have always had just books (and to a much lesser extent, audiobooks; unlike with music format switching though, you're probably going to get one or the other and not both), and I'm sure they've been biting their nails since the first e-ink/e-paper prototypes came out. FWIW, I meant bookstores in general when I said companies that sell hardcovers. To me, paper is paper.
When your website has 350M+ users and 150M+ uniques/day, you're well past the point of traditional scaling solutions. If Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest in the world, so to say the amount of data they have to deal with is monolithic is a terrific understatement. At this point, I'm surprised they're not getting custom silicon; custom compilers seems like they should have come a hundred million users ago.
Don't get me wrong - I'm sure Facebook's original code was awful. Do you think they're still using it? Do you think they haven't hand-tuned every line of code on the site to save themselves entire datacenters worth of servers? No, I'm NOT advocating writing terrible code - but some scaling techniques simply aren't practical when a site is small, and may simply not work at all, and the best code in the world that's made for a single-server site just won't work when you need the raw horsepower of an entire rack of servers.
He's obviously talking about the page rendering time, not hosting a fast app from a dial-up connection. We're not serving static pages anymore (and if it takes a full second to serve a static page, you're doing something seriously wrong).
Talk about missing the point.
In the tech world (and even more so in the land of Web 2.0 and web apps), getting stuff out the door quickly and improving it is way more important than having it work perfectly from day one. Because if the idea is any good, someone else is also working on it, and the first one out the door tends to win. It's widely acknowledged that with web startups, if you want to take on an existing market, you need to be 10x better than your competition. So if you're first to market with something decent, the second guy with a better, faster, sleeker product is going to still lose to you unless his product is WAY better than yours.
Scalability only matters if you have lots of users. Not scaling well is a good problem to have, because it means you have lots of users. And no, getting slashdotted over lunchtime does not qualify as a scalability issue (that typically qualifies as a server misconfiguration or really bad code issue). It sucks for a couple of hours, but you don't get slashdotted every day. If you ARE seeing that kind of traffic burst every day, then congratulations - you have users!
Yes, eBooks DO devalue books - as they should. Books are just a very (very!) old medium.
What eBooks don't devalue is content, or at least they shouldn't. Up until now, the content has been tied to the medium in the publishing world. We've seen what happened when the two became decoupled with music and movies (and even video games, to some extent - at least for PC gaming), and it's about damn time that the same thing happens with the written word.
As for companies that sell hardcovers... well, sucks to be them. That's what happens when your business model is tied to a single medium.
Well technically it was less than double, as HD-DVD was 15GB, not 12. More importantly, consumers care about cheap - so it's actually quite remarkable that blu-ray "won" (I use the word loosely as DVD is still dominating and plenty of people seem to be skipping HD discs in favor of downloads and streaming)
Neither of those sound appealing when there are Free/free alternatives which will work just as well for my purposes — if I can get my users to install support for them, anyway. And which will never work on the iPhone...
Maybe I'm not understanding your website's goals, but it sounds like those alternatives in fact do not work just as well for your purposes.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all about Free, free, and open standards. But as someone in control of websites, I'm going to use what gives the best experience for my visitors. For better or worse, that's h264 - a closed, but de facto standard. It's not ideal, but I'm not willing to sacrifice a large portion of desktop visitors and nearly 100% of mobile visitors. If you are, more power to you.
Well, six years from now when you have to start worrying about it, we'll probably have come up with some superior format. If it's that much of a concern to you, write a better codec and make sure it stays as FOSS. (That's meant to come across much less douchey than it probably will)
Of course, MPEG-LA will do the same thing in 2016 that they've done now, provided the codec is still even in use by then. It doesn't make any business sense to try and extract money from ten million websites that are using video with their codec when they can just license out the encoder to a select few companies for a huge amount of money. Legally they could try, but it would just be stupid.
Languages aren't insecure, bad code is. It's not PHP's fault that people use it to write bad code.
Ok, it is, but some language has to be one of the easiest to learn. And the language that has a lot of newbies in it will tend to have the most bad code written in it. Any language will allow you to (for example) use unfiltered GET/POST values in a SQL query; it's the programmer's fault for being dumb enough to do so.
True, but it's one line of code to convert all of the traditional errors into instead throwing ErrorExceptions (set_error_handler(create_function('$a, $b, $c, $d', 'throw new ErrorException($b, 0, $a, $c, $d);'), E_ALL); - incidentally, this breaks use of @ error suppression).
If you're using @ in a couple of select places, it's quite handy - especially when dealing with stuff that's outside of your control (talking to external APIs which may be offline, for example). But I'm sure there's no shortage of crappy code out there as a hack to get around actual bugs in the code.
Well luckily they won't be driving very fast if they don't know how the clutch works, so it's a non-issue.
Actually, I'd bet most of them downloaded their OS from bit-torrent. I bet a few of them even did it legitimately.
That they made it unwillingly doesn't change the fact that MS did, in fact, make a standards-compliant browser. Maybe not the latest and greatest, but it's pretty solid (albeit slow) with just about all CSS that doesn't require a -prefix- on the property name. It's accurate enough that I don't worry about doing any more extensive testing than I perform in Firefox or Webkit-based browsers; I'm willing to lose round corners and drop shadows in IE if it saves me the time of having to make tons of hacks for what amounts to minor eye candy.
It's not like I use IE8 as my day-to-day browser, but as a web developer I don't fear it either. Even 7 usually does a decent job, though maybe I've just been at it long enough that I subconsciously build hacks into my code.
Maybe, but that has the potential to really screw up a lot of web app interactions. Many login systems check for consistency in the User Agent string (among other headers) to help prevent session hijacking by copying someone's cookies; if browsers in stealth mode start omitting that, it could easily turn into either a security hazard or a completely broken web experience.
Don't confuse ability with necessity. Remember the whole "fast, good, cheap: pick two" thing? When you offshore your software development to India, you're always aiming for cheap and almost always aiming for fast. It's not their fault that their clients don't care about the end-product actually being good. I've met plenty of good Indian coders and plenty of bad American coders. It's like buying stuff made in China - it's not inherently worse, but the goals of the people ultimately selling the product care more about getting it cheap and fast and are willing to sacrifice in quality. Yet my laptop, also made/assembled in China, is fantastic quality - because the manufacturer chose "good" over "cheap".
This is one of the less complicated web apps I've seen, to be honest. I'm not knocking Google for having made it, but very little if any of GV is using stuff specific to HTML5 (there may be some offline storage, but it's certainly not using it aggressively if at all in my testing) - it's mostly a polished interface made for small screens to do a lot of javascript. Ultimately, it's just putting a lot of easy-to-click links that use the tel:// URI that Apple made up a couple of years ago as part of their short-lived web app obsession.
Mobile Gmail is a whole hell of a lot more complex. It uses the offline storage quite heavily and effectively.
That said, I'm happy to see anything that pushes forward the spec and adoption of HTML5-compatible browsers,
GV doesn't seem to use the HTML5 features - or at least every time I've tried, it does plenty of reloading and refreshing. Maybe it only tries to pull from local storage when there's no internet connection. Hell, they don't even have it set up so that saving it as a web app (the home screen bookmark thing) hides the navigation bar - and that's literally one line of HTML to implement provided their AJAX is rigged up correctly, which seems to be the case.
Still, a great start. I certainly see myself using GV a lot more now, even if what they have could use a little more polish.