If the login form isn't on and SSL page, how does the user ensure that the page is being posted to the correct location?
Aye, you'd have to check the HTML code. Annoying and not user friendly. Which is why, if you don't already know better, I said you could submit the form once without/bad credentials, which typically brings you to the login page that's SSL.
For all you know, that unsecured login page had some javascript inserted that takes the information you enter, and sends it to a different page
Then it doesn't matter if the page is SSL or not. There's been a breach on their web server/site and you won't be protected either way.
Without looking at the page source, and verifying every line, you have no idea where the form is going to submit to or what's going to happen once you enter your credentials.
This is true no matter what. Just because a page is SSL-ed doesn't mean anything besides the data you send between your client and and the server is encrypted. Nothing more. It doesn't protect you against other things such as you mentioned.
(i.e. email addresses for IDs and short crackable passwords)
There's a line a bank must tread between obvious security and usability. There's one bank I use that forced me to take THEIR login ID but let me set my own password. It's the only bank I have to save my login ID in an accessible location so I can go and look it up, because I can't damn well remember what stupid number they gave to me at the end of some sort of concatenated user name based on my real name.
There extra security in having hard to guess logins and passwords, but you're also making it difficult to the point of uselessness to make people remember endless amount of logins and passwords where they're just going to start writing them down on stick-it-notes at their work desk. In that sense, allowing them to make easily remembered logins can be MORE security by avoiding having your customers take their own extreme measures to remember their credentials.
What I'm seeing happening recently is that banks are having you pick a specific picture associated with your account and have you just enter your login ID. They then direct you to a "second" login page that will show your "site key" (the image you selected) along with some text you might have filled in yourself (describing the picture). This, I assume, is to defeat phishing sites. A phishing site shouldn't be able to know your "site key" picture and text, which is to alert the user that they're not on the right website.
Though, I personally have no pity to people who fall for phishing sites. Knowing how to read and check an address bar is part of being able to use the Internet properly. Otherwise, it would be like allowing people to drive without a license. Sure, some people can do it successfully but they're more likely to make a mistake that is easily avoidable, just because they didn't know better.
- logons etc on insecure pages
This is often a misunderstanding. One that I had at a point as well. Your login form has to submit to a SSL page, not reside on an SSL page to be secure. This is why several banks have login's on non-SSL pages, because their main informational site doesn't need the extra overhead of SSL to transmit their advertisement stuff.
However, should your login fail and they send you back to a non-SSL page with your information filled in, then I would be concerned. Though, I've not seen a bank do that yet. General rule of thumb is that if you're paranoid about it, submit the login form, without/wrong credentials and you'll get a login/SSL page.
2) It looks like GP said the institution is protected, not the customer
I believe the GP was referring to the bail of some banks by the US Gov' due to their imminent collapse caused by bad investment into the housing market/mortgages.
Good story. Good character dialog. Lost of subtle references to modern social-political topics.
Attempts to make more realistic. I can suspend plenty of belief for a comic book movie, but a lot of the elements where changed to be more real. Face paint instead of chemical alteration. Little tidbits about about ex-CIA extraction plans. None of that swinging to safety at the last minute (how did he survive that fall off the penthouse?)
Good special effects. "Two-Face" was particularly cool.
The Bad
No matter what, I just can't get over Bale's "raspy" Batman voice. It simply bugs me and did so in the previous film as well.
Chicago. Maybe it's because I live too close to Chicago and been there plenty of times, but I lost some immersion when I could easily identify some landmark buildings. Sure, I didn't see the Sears Tower, but Harvey Dent's office was overlooking the Chicago River and their round car park high-rises. That and all the cars had Illinois license plates. I didn't know Gotham was in Illinois? I was just waiting to see "Cubs" and "Bears" sticks on peoples cars.
Other than that, I really enjoyed it. The Joker really did have an awesome performance.
Speaking as a European, I have, and really no offence, found US cheese to range from bland for the better stuff, to disgusting for the most mass-market ranges.
Speaking as a life-long Wisconsinite who's marrying a French woman, and has lived near London (Twickenham) for a while and spent more time in/around Paris than I care for, you opinion is actually fairly valid. Wisconsin is know for it's cheese in the U.S., but that pretty much covers cheddar. Sure there's emmental (aka swiss), mozorella, Blue and parmesan but it's really not much variety at all.
I'm exaggerating a little bit and there are some quite good stuff out there, but it's also not cheese you're going to normally buy and enjoy with a dinner because it's 10-year aged cheddar or some other awful expensive stuff.
As it were, I learned that it's due to the Federal law against non-pasteurized cheeses. Apparently it's illegal to sell the stuff, according to some other French people my fiancee has befriended who own a cheese shop in the Green Bay area.
Yup, even that "import" stuff like Brie is all pasteurized. The goat cheese (which only seems to be one kind of variety with mixed in herbs or spices) is pitiful at best.
England and France have a much larger assortment of cheese thanks to not having this law. Of course, the only difference is that the English love to eat their cheese on crackers (at the butt of many jokes in France) while the French refuse to eat it with anything other than a baguette.
So, while the French discovered Wisconsin (probably where our cheese history started, and was once spelled Oisconsin, as in "Oi", French for 'yes'), it seems the British had gave us the cracker. =P That's if you still have room left from all the beer and brats the Germans gave us!
And if you haven't tried, New Glarus and Capitol Brewer beer is some pretty great micro-brews. Don't be fooled by the recent popularity of Stella Atois, in the US. It's just the "bud" of Europe. Cheapest stuff I could get at any disco in the UK. Not to mention the parent company recently buying out Budweiser.
opps. On topic... I came here wondering what could put WI in the/. news, I should have figured it was either the Oshkosh EAA or Road America.
Legally if you demand it now, they have to give it to you now.
Do they? What law says they have to?
I don't recall seeing any special laws exempting employers from returning personal property on demand.
Trespassing. That prevents you from entering the building to reclaim your stuff. Sure, the company still has to return your personal items, but it has to be in a reasonable amount of time, not necessarily instantly just because you demanded it.
Should it be something important like keys, wallet, phone, or medication that might be at your desk or in your brief case in our office, most places aren't likely to be unreasonable. They'd probably escort you to your desk to get your important stuff.
Otherwise, they'll have a security or an employee with an observer get it for you while you wait in the lobby. Otherwise, if the company is being difficult, you'd have to call the police who could demand the items right away. Failure to do so would result in a fine, but nothing else.
Of course, assuming you're being terminated in a bad way.
Or do you think that those commercials are an accurate display of the Mac vs. PC world?
Define accuracy? I'm no Apple fan, but I do find their commercials to be "funny because it's true". Not "true" as in, always, but true as in we've all been there at some point or know someone who has.
Private as in privacy, no. But private as in private property? Yes. If they don't allow someone to gather their things before they leave they could be looking at serious legal troubles.
No, it's pretty common practice. They can directly escort you out of the building without your personal property and they have a reasonable amount of time to gather up your stuff and get it back to you.
Things like car keys, wallet, jacket, briefcase, etc. yes. They'll escort you to your desk to pick those up. But gathering your pictures, books, etc. Nope. They'll do it for you or have you come back at a later date.
EBGames told me I could come back anytime before delivery and get a 100% refund
EBGames/GameStop have always refunded pre-orders. In-fact, pre-orders are extremely safe. I tend to pre-order things I'm reasonably excited about and I've often gone back after more info. or some beta testing have revealed to me to cancel my pre-order. Typically, I just move the money to a game I do want.
I did that with Rock Band: Wii when I found out there would be no download content, amongst other games like AoC, after I beta-tested.
nothing like ripping out promised content and abilities to make it to release.
why not let it cook a bit longer and not pull a flaghsipp'n?
So, what's worse? Pulling content and announcing it far before release or releasing a game with really broken content or missing content and leave it for the player base to find?
Mrs Hudson said her daughter has also suffered greatly because of the breach of her privacy. "Jodie is 15 years old," she said. "She did not consent to the publication in the media of any photograph of her or her party, or of any material that she wrote on her Bebo site."
but OpenOffice is still slow, huge, and somewhat more buggy.
Slow? Definitely slower start... much slower. Like 10x longer to start. However, once it's started, it's just as "fast" as Office. This is my biggest and only real criticism of OpenOffice.
Huge? Honestly, I've not looked at a size comparison. But I'll do one right now by opening a blank page in MSWord and OOWriter... 13,320k for Word, and 46,716k for Writer. Yup, much larger. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that every OO program is sort of bundled together as one application. Or so it feels.
Buggy? I find the opposite true. I still have endless formatting issues with Word and I still see endless formatting issues from co-workers and family. People who loose Word documents because something went screwy and the backup failed or someone who just can't get Word to format a page correctly, resorting to copy/pasting into notepad and then starting a new document to remove all formatting. I've never had that problem with OO.
A small price to pay for "free" and at least OO updates more than MSO.
thus it's not particulary suprising that they are very similar in certain policy.
more appropriately, I think it should be said that they "at least claim to be" very similar in policy.
As you said, "the more things change...". What's the last time any politician full-filled campaign promises, besides GWB, who's pretty much said he isn't pulling out of Iraq? As some of my friends, who never waste a chance to fire a few shots off, said: "The one thing about Bush, he'll been honest. He said he's screw up this country and he did!" *badda bing*
McCain's changing his stance as fast as Obama. There's more than enough sound clips out there of the two directly contradicting themselves in the hopes to obfuscate and confuse votes to make them believe they're on the right side. That's just par for the course. Has anything changed with the Democrat controlled congress? Nope, more Pork Barrel Ear Marked spending on pet projects and no balls to actually live up to their "out of Iraq" promises.
The only real record one has is the voting record, which Obama doesn't have as much history of as McCain.
Now IE has tabs, and the playing field is level again.
You must have an incredibly slow computer to not notice the difference between browser speeds. The first thing I notice running FF3 was how much faster it was. Faster in loading the browser, rendering pages, and re-drawing pages when scrolling. And of course, I'm not the only one. After coercing my cube-mate to download FF3 on it's download day, his first comment about FF was...
"Is there something wrong with my IE7 because it's really slow compared to FF."
I simply told him that IE7 is ridiculously slow. The next praise he had for FF3 was that he loved the little star in the address bar that auto bookmarks a page. Just wait until IE7 gets that!
Unless they have some new amazing way for me to vote Saw a five-star and my wife a one-star and not have it mess up the rating system... I don't see how this could possibly be a "minor" change.
Ah, that's actually a very good point and a great example of functionality that will be lost. I haven't used a profile in many years and when I did, I don't recall there being separate rating systems. The other examples of separate managed queue is the minor inconvenience I was thinking of. A separate rating system is actually a big change indeed because it has no possible alternative other than separate accounts, which I think is ridiculous but doable for anyone who cares enough.
It could be a PITA to maintain. But if they want to implement more features and can't because of the legacy coding, would it not make sense to keep this feature until the new code is ready?
Which is a good point and not something I fully thought through on my first post. Which can only lead me to believe that a) the feature simply costs a lot more to maintain for the little, but appreciated convenience it offers some of it's customers or b) it is simply a malicious attempt to drive people towards the higher margin plans (unless they also plan on changing their lower plan prices to be inline with their higher plan prices but haven't announced it yet for some reason).
Either way, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and demand greater transparency to their actions (as a customer myself) so I can make a better value judgment to just dump them all together for their actions, even if they're not affecting me.
I really don't see how difficult it is to maintain the extra profiles feature.
I admit that I don't see how much cost this feature is to maintain either, and speaking from a website and database programmer and developer. I think this is the point that Netflix should really have been more clear as to why they're removing it. They currently haven't been.
I think what it really comes down to is money.
It always comes down to money and Netflix isn't claiming differently. They claim they're removing the feature to improve their website. What kind of improvement? For it to cost them less money would be an improvement. For them and for you. Netflix keeping their costs down allow them to keep their prices down. I could continue to speculate as to other reasons, but I think that's the real point is that Netflix is not being transparent enough with there message and are blowing their PR.
For all we know, there decision could be saving ALL their customers money, at the inconvenience of those who used profiles now having to spend some more time managing a single queue by moving movies around, instead of the set and forget features they had before, which I freely admit are a great feature (I'm not happy they're removing them, even when I don't use them).
if I still want to have a seperate queue
True, you'll have to pay for that convenience (a convenience that was once free). Ideally, I would hope they drop all their "unlimited" plans to be a standard price per DVD, such as "$6 per move at-a-time" no matter what plan you take. That would pretty much make this whole debate pointless as the lower 2 plans are not the same price per movie as the others.
However, I think most people would deal with the extra inconvenience than pay more. I believe the inconvenience is being over blow. It's not hard to click the "move-to-top" button to make the next movie available.
For your example, you're wife will have to keep all her moves at the bottom of the queue, which will require re-ordering some films once in a while, an easy process, and when she's done with her 1 movie, she'll have to log in and click the "move-to-top" button on her next movie in the queue. Her movie will be the next sent out.
It definitely sucks,but I believe people will take the hit to convenience over a price increase.
Of course, the real question is: what is Netflix's true motivation? I'd sure like to know! They're not being very open about it so far and if it is a malicious attempt to drive more people to the 1 or 2 at-a-time higher margin plans, then I hope they crash and burn. However, just like the American legal system, I prefer to assume their innocent until proven guilty, despite the court of public opinion preferring the other method.
And, no, we cannot just continue using the 3 at-a-time plan.
May I ask why not?
From your stated purpose, you'll be inconvenienced for sure, but all you'll have to do is keep the movies that use to belong to the "one" queue at the bottom of the main queue. When the person who had the "one" movie finishes their movie and mails it back, they'll have to click the "move-to-top" button on their movie of choice, which will be sent out next. It will end up functioning fairly similar than before but take a little more effort on the part of the customer.
It's your decision to pay more to get the convenience of multiple queues, but somehow I think you won't or you'll quit (at least for a short time out of anger, until your realize there's no better value for DVD rentals) and your (and other people's) current anger at Netflix is directed more at the fact that there's very little transparency as to why Netflix would remove a perfectly awesome customer favored feature to "improved their website".
If they had better PR, they would have said "this feature is costing us "x", "y", or "z" and we're removing it to avoid a price increase due to the increase to our costs thanks to the sky rocketing energy costs and inflation."
I'm sure it would pacify a lot more customers to have been given a good explanation. Otherwise, you'll just get what we're seeing, pissed off customers claiming "sleazy" and "underhanded" "evil corporate" policies to "screw the customer".
Which, if any pissed off customer could calm down for a moment and think, makes no sense at all. What possible benefit could Netflix have REMOVING a favored feature that's already implemented? There's either some sort of excess cost it's causing Netflix (extra database servers? Man hours to maintain?) or this feature is causing some sort of legacy code issue that's preventing some kind of site upgrade (as possibly related to their "website improvement" excuse). Or, it very well could be the underhanded evil plan to get people to purchase more accounts. However, if it was pure malice, you'd have to believe that the people running Netflix believe the customers are dumb enough to fall for it, which I find to be a much harder premise to believe (for anyone not wearing a tin-foil hat that is).
So, either we'll have to accept that fact that Netflix is stupid enough to just willingly piss of their customer base for no gain or a loss (because the pissed off customers won't fall for their malice and simply quit) or there's an actual reason why they're removing this feature, to save money, and possible prevent having to force a price increase upon their customers thanks to spiraling out of control energy costs and inflation.
Massively degrading the user's experience is not excused by programmer's convenience.
First you'll have to prove that it's a "massive" degrading of the users experiance. I'd argue it isn't.
First, it doesn't effect all the customers. Second, it's a minor inconvenience to those that are effected. They'll have to move a few movies around in their queue, which is a simple enough exercise. Unfortunate? Definitely. Some sort of "massive degradation of user experiance"? Hardly. They'd have to remove your ability to even look at your queue all together if you want to claim that.
Slashdot Mirror
If the login form isn't on and SSL page, how does the user ensure that the page is being posted to the correct location?
Aye, you'd have to check the HTML code. Annoying and not user friendly. Which is why, if you don't already know better, I said you could submit the form once without/bad credentials, which typically brings you to the login page that's SSL.
For all you know, that unsecured login page had some javascript inserted that takes the information you enter, and sends it to a different page
Then it doesn't matter if the page is SSL or not. There's been a breach on their web server/site and you won't be protected either way.
Without looking at the page source, and verifying every line, you have no idea where the form is going to submit to or what's going to happen once you enter your credentials.
This is true no matter what. Just because a page is SSL-ed doesn't mean anything besides the data you send between your client and and the server is encrypted. Nothing more. It doesn't protect you against other things such as you mentioned.
(i.e. email addresses for IDs and short crackable passwords)
There's a line a bank must tread between obvious security and usability. There's one bank I use that forced me to take THEIR login ID but let me set my own password. It's the only bank I have to save my login ID in an accessible location so I can go and look it up, because I can't damn well remember what stupid number they gave to me at the end of some sort of concatenated user name based on my real name.
There extra security in having hard to guess logins and passwords, but you're also making it difficult to the point of uselessness to make people remember endless amount of logins and passwords where they're just going to start writing them down on stick-it-notes at their work desk. In that sense, allowing them to make easily remembered logins can be MORE security by avoiding having your customers take their own extreme measures to remember their credentials.
What I'm seeing happening recently is that banks are having you pick a specific picture associated with your account and have you just enter your login ID. They then direct you to a "second" login page that will show your "site key" (the image you selected) along with some text you might have filled in yourself (describing the picture). This, I assume, is to defeat phishing sites. A phishing site shouldn't be able to know your "site key" picture and text, which is to alert the user that they're not on the right website.
Though, I personally have no pity to people who fall for phishing sites. Knowing how to read and check an address bar is part of being able to use the Internet properly. Otherwise, it would be like allowing people to drive without a license. Sure, some people can do it successfully but they're more likely to make a mistake that is easily avoidable, just because they didn't know better.
- logons etc on insecure pages
This is often a misunderstanding. One that I had at a point as well. Your login form has to submit to a SSL page, not reside on an SSL page to be secure. This is why several banks have login's on non-SSL pages, because their main informational site doesn't need the extra overhead of SSL to transmit their advertisement stuff.
However, should your login fail and they send you back to a non-SSL page with your information filled in, then I would be concerned. Though, I've not seen a bank do that yet. General rule of thumb is that if you're paranoid about it, submit the login form, without/wrong credentials and you'll get a login/SSL page.
2) It looks like GP said the institution is protected, not the customer
I believe the GP was referring to the bail of some banks by the US Gov' due to their imminent collapse caused by bad investment into the housing market/mortgages.
Disappearing Pencil Trick!
masked man 2: I suppose you're suppose to kill me?
masked man: No, I'm suppose to kill the Bus driver.
masked man 2: What bus driver?
Here are my thoughts.
The Good
The Bad
Other than that, I really enjoyed it. The Joker really did have an awesome performance.
Could someone explain this disappearing pencil to me? I didn't get it...
First you see it, then you don't!
It's a car analogy fer crying out loud...
Why would you want to be Batman when you could be Bruce Wayne? Of course, I'm talking Movie Bruce Wayne, not Adam West Bruce Wayne.
Speaking as a European, I have, and really no offence, found US cheese to range from bland for the better stuff, to disgusting for the most mass-market ranges.
Speaking as a life-long Wisconsinite who's marrying a French woman, and has lived near London (Twickenham) for a while and spent more time in/around Paris than I care for, you opinion is actually fairly valid. Wisconsin is know for it's cheese in the U.S., but that pretty much covers cheddar. Sure there's emmental (aka swiss), mozorella, Blue and parmesan but it's really not much variety at all.
I'm exaggerating a little bit and there are some quite good stuff out there, but it's also not cheese you're going to normally buy and enjoy with a dinner because it's 10-year aged cheddar or some other awful expensive stuff.
As it were, I learned that it's due to the Federal law against non-pasteurized cheeses. Apparently it's illegal to sell the stuff, according to some other French people my fiancee has befriended who own a cheese shop in the Green Bay area.
Yup, even that "import" stuff like Brie is all pasteurized. The goat cheese (which only seems to be one kind of variety with mixed in herbs or spices) is pitiful at best.
England and France have a much larger assortment of cheese thanks to not having this law. Of course, the only difference is that the English love to eat their cheese on crackers (at the butt of many jokes in France) while the French refuse to eat it with anything other than a baguette.
So, while the French discovered Wisconsin (probably where our cheese history started, and was once spelled Oisconsin, as in "Oi", French for 'yes'), it seems the British had gave us the cracker. =P That's if you still have room left from all the beer and brats the Germans gave us!
And if you haven't tried, New Glarus and Capitol Brewer beer is some pretty great micro-brews. Don't be fooled by the recent popularity of Stella Atois, in the US. It's just the "bud" of Europe. Cheapest stuff I could get at any disco in the UK. Not to mention the parent company recently buying out Budweiser.
opps. On topic... I came here wondering what could put WI in the /. news, I should have figured it was either the Oshkosh EAA or Road America.
Legally if you demand it now, they have to give it to you now.
Do they? What law says they have to?
I don't recall seeing any special laws exempting employers from returning personal property on demand.
Trespassing. That prevents you from entering the building to reclaim your stuff. Sure, the company still has to return your personal items, but it has to be in a reasonable amount of time, not necessarily instantly just because you demanded it.
Should it be something important like keys, wallet, phone, or medication that might be at your desk or in your brief case in our office, most places aren't likely to be unreasonable. They'd probably escort you to your desk to get your important stuff.
Otherwise, they'll have a security or an employee with an observer get it for you while you wait in the lobby. Otherwise, if the company is being difficult, you'd have to call the police who could demand the items right away. Failure to do so would result in a fine, but nothing else.
Of course, assuming you're being terminated in a bad way.
Or do you think that those commercials are an accurate display of the Mac vs. PC world?
Define accuracy? I'm no Apple fan, but I do find their commercials to be "funny because it's true". Not "true" as in, always, but true as in we've all been there at some point or know someone who has.
Private as in privacy, no. But private as in private property? Yes. If they don't allow someone to gather their things before they leave they could be looking at serious legal troubles.
No, it's pretty common practice. They can directly escort you out of the building without your personal property and they have a reasonable amount of time to gather up your stuff and get it back to you.
Things like car keys, wallet, jacket, briefcase, etc. yes. They'll escort you to your desk to pick those up. But gathering your pictures, books, etc. Nope. They'll do it for you or have you come back at a later date.
EBGames told me I could come back anytime before delivery and get a 100% refund
EBGames/GameStop have always refunded pre-orders. In-fact, pre-orders are extremely safe. I tend to pre-order things I'm reasonably excited about and I've often gone back after more info. or some beta testing have revealed to me to cancel my pre-order. Typically, I just move the money to a game I do want.
I did that with Rock Band: Wii when I found out there would be no download content, amongst other games like AoC, after I beta-tested.
nothing like ripping out promised content and abilities to make it to release. why not let it cook a bit longer and not pull a flaghsipp'n?
So, what's worse? Pulling content and announcing it far before release or releasing a game with really broken content or missing content and leave it for the player base to find?
So true.
Mrs Hudson said her daughter has also suffered greatly because of the breach of her privacy. "Jodie is 15 years old," she said. "She did not consent to the publication in the media of any photograph of her or her party, or of any material that she wrote on her Bebo site."
What does she think a website is, if not media?
but OpenOffice is still slow, huge, and somewhat more buggy.
Slow? Definitely slower start... much slower. Like 10x longer to start. However, once it's started, it's just as "fast" as Office. This is my biggest and only real criticism of OpenOffice.
Huge? Honestly, I've not looked at a size comparison. But I'll do one right now by opening a blank page in MSWord and OOWriter... 13,320k for Word, and 46,716k for Writer. Yup, much larger. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that every OO program is sort of bundled together as one application. Or so it feels.
Buggy? I find the opposite true. I still have endless formatting issues with Word and I still see endless formatting issues from co-workers and family. People who loose Word documents because something went screwy and the backup failed or someone who just can't get Word to format a page correctly, resorting to copy/pasting into notepad and then starting a new document to remove all formatting. I've never had that problem with OO.
A small price to pay for "free" and at least OO updates more than MSO.
Opps, I forgot to log in above.
thus it's not particulary suprising that they are very similar in certain policy.
more appropriately, I think it should be said that they "at least claim to be" very similar in policy.
As you said, "the more things change...". What's the last time any politician full-filled campaign promises, besides GWB, who's pretty much said he isn't pulling out of Iraq? As some of my friends, who never waste a chance to fire a few shots off, said: "The one thing about Bush, he'll been honest. He said he's screw up this country and he did!" *badda bing*
McCain's changing his stance as fast as Obama. There's more than enough sound clips out there of the two directly contradicting themselves in the hopes to obfuscate and confuse votes to make them believe they're on the right side. That's just par for the course. Has anything changed with the Democrat controlled congress? Nope, more Pork Barrel Ear Marked spending on pet projects and no balls to actually live up to their "out of Iraq" promises.
The only real record one has is the voting record, which Obama doesn't have as much history of as McCain.
Now IE has tabs, and the playing field is level again.
You must have an incredibly slow computer to not notice the difference between browser speeds. The first thing I notice running FF3 was how much faster it was. Faster in loading the browser, rendering pages, and re-drawing pages when scrolling. And of course, I'm not the only one. After coercing my cube-mate to download FF3 on it's download day, his first comment about FF was...
"Is there something wrong with my IE7 because it's really slow compared to FF."
I simply told him that IE7 is ridiculously slow. The next praise he had for FF3 was that he loved the little star in the address bar that auto bookmarks a page. Just wait until IE7 gets that!
Ah, that's actually a very good point and a great example of functionality that will be lost. I haven't used a profile in many years and when I did, I don't recall there being separate rating systems. The other examples of separate managed queue is the minor inconvenience I was thinking of. A separate rating system is actually a big change indeed because it has no possible alternative other than separate accounts, which I think is ridiculous but doable for anyone who cares enough.
Cheers,
Fozzy
I completely understand... and relate. =)
Which is a good point and not something I fully thought through on my first post. Which can only lead me to believe that a) the feature simply costs a lot more to maintain for the little, but appreciated convenience it offers some of it's customers or b) it is simply a malicious attempt to drive people towards the higher margin plans (unless they also plan on changing their lower plan prices to be inline with their higher plan prices but haven't announced it yet for some reason).
Either way, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and demand greater transparency to their actions (as a customer myself) so I can make a better value judgment to just dump them all together for their actions, even if they're not affecting me.
I admit that I don't see how much cost this feature is to maintain either, and speaking from a website and database programmer and developer. I think this is the point that Netflix should really have been more clear as to why they're removing it. They currently haven't been.
I think what it really comes down to is money.It always comes down to money and Netflix isn't claiming differently. They claim they're removing the feature to improve their website. What kind of improvement? For it to cost them less money would be an improvement. For them and for you. Netflix keeping their costs down allow them to keep their prices down. I could continue to speculate as to other reasons, but I think that's the real point is that Netflix is not being transparent enough with there message and are blowing their PR.
For all we know, there decision could be saving ALL their customers money, at the inconvenience of those who used profiles now having to spend some more time managing a single queue by moving movies around, instead of the set and forget features they had before, which I freely admit are a great feature (I'm not happy they're removing them, even when I don't use them).
if I still want to have a seperate queueTrue, you'll have to pay for that convenience (a convenience that was once free). Ideally, I would hope they drop all their "unlimited" plans to be a standard price per DVD, such as "$6 per move at-a-time" no matter what plan you take. That would pretty much make this whole debate pointless as the lower 2 plans are not the same price per movie as the others.
However, I think most people would deal with the extra inconvenience than pay more. I believe the inconvenience is being over blow. It's not hard to click the "move-to-top" button to make the next movie available.
For your example, you're wife will have to keep all her moves at the bottom of the queue, which will require re-ordering some films once in a while, an easy process, and when she's done with her 1 movie, she'll have to log in and click the "move-to-top" button on her next movie in the queue. Her movie will be the next sent out.
It definitely sucks,but I believe people will take the hit to convenience over a price increase.
Of course, the real question is: what is Netflix's true motivation? I'd sure like to know! They're not being very open about it so far and if it is a malicious attempt to drive more people to the 1 or 2 at-a-time higher margin plans, then I hope they crash and burn. However, just like the American legal system, I prefer to assume their innocent until proven guilty, despite the court of public opinion preferring the other method.
Cheers
Fozzy
May I ask why not?
From your stated purpose, you'll be inconvenienced for sure, but all you'll have to do is keep the movies that use to belong to the "one" queue at the bottom of the main queue. When the person who had the "one" movie finishes their movie and mails it back, they'll have to click the "move-to-top" button on their movie of choice, which will be sent out next. It will end up functioning fairly similar than before but take a little more effort on the part of the customer.
It's your decision to pay more to get the convenience of multiple queues, but somehow I think you won't or you'll quit (at least for a short time out of anger, until your realize there's no better value for DVD rentals) and your (and other people's) current anger at Netflix is directed more at the fact that there's very little transparency as to why Netflix would remove a perfectly awesome customer favored feature to "improved their website".
If they had better PR, they would have said "this feature is costing us "x", "y", or "z" and we're removing it to avoid a price increase due to the increase to our costs thanks to the sky rocketing energy costs and inflation."
I'm sure it would pacify a lot more customers to have been given a good explanation. Otherwise, you'll just get what we're seeing, pissed off customers claiming "sleazy" and "underhanded" "evil corporate" policies to "screw the customer".
Which, if any pissed off customer could calm down for a moment and think, makes no sense at all. What possible benefit could Netflix have REMOVING a favored feature that's already implemented? There's either some sort of excess cost it's causing Netflix (extra database servers? Man hours to maintain?) or this feature is causing some sort of legacy code issue that's preventing some kind of site upgrade (as possibly related to their "website improvement" excuse). Or, it very well could be the underhanded evil plan to get people to purchase more accounts. However, if it was pure malice, you'd have to believe that the people running Netflix believe the customers are dumb enough to fall for it, which I find to be a much harder premise to believe (for anyone not wearing a tin-foil hat that is).
So, either we'll have to accept that fact that Netflix is stupid enough to just willingly piss of their customer base for no gain or a loss (because the pissed off customers won't fall for their malice and simply quit) or there's an actual reason why they're removing this feature, to save money, and possible prevent having to force a price increase upon their customers thanks to spiraling out of control energy costs and inflation.
Cheers
Fozzy
First you'll have to prove that it's a "massive" degrading of the users experiance. I'd argue it isn't.
First, it doesn't effect all the customers. Second, it's a minor inconvenience to those that are effected. They'll have to move a few movies around in their queue, which is a simple enough exercise. Unfortunate? Definitely. Some sort of "massive degradation of user experiance"? Hardly. They'd have to remove your ability to even look at your queue all together if you want to claim that.