From TFA: "It is a bit like a person dying a little bit every time he breathes because the cells break down," C.C.B. lawyer Frederik Navne waxed poetically. "In the same way, the computer dies a little every time you turn it on and off."
No worries here, I never turn my machine off! So, by this analogy, my machine can hold its breath forever and thus has no worries about death by pulmonary necrosis.
Man (down on one knee): Honey, will you marry me?
Woman: What the hell is that?
Man: It's rhenium diboride, more durable than diamond. I wanted to show you just how much I love you, even more than diamond.
Woman: Cheap bastard. Come back when you have a diamond.
I can see the moral dilemma now... My computer is almost out of "juice", but so am I. Do I sacrifice all of my Mountain Dew in order to log back in to WoW at the risk of falling asleep or do I ration the both of us equally and go for better performance over a shorter time?
Microsoft has finally decided that the cathedral model of development just isn't working for them anymore, so they've decided to do like the Catholic Church and disseminate their beliefs into every household so that you can be sure to have "MS Guilt" when having any unclean thoughts about OSS.
Come to think of it, their BSA raids on small businesses is kind of like the Inquisition... I guess you could have worse business models than the church. I mean, they are still around after thousands of years and still raking in the money.
So what do you do at finals time when everyone in the whole university is cramming to study and complete projects? Do the labs and libraries have enough seats for _every_ student who lives in the dorms and the off-campus folks who need to use lab resources? That's ridiculous. Why do we have personal computers at home when there are plenty to go around in libraries and offices? Besides, the librarians usually hate it when you're dangling out of your skivvies with your dirty-socked feet up on the lab desk eating Raman at 3am. Or maybe they do things differently in India.
Here's my varied mileage...
I have a Powerbook from 2001. It's an old machine that's seen its fair share of problems over the years. I bought the AppleCare plan with it and I have to say that it has been COMPLETELY worth it. The only things on my machine that are original are the case, the dvd drive and the hard drive. Everything else has been replaced under warranty at one time or another. Once or twice I had to raise my voice with a tech support tech to get the support I was looking for, but I've always been satisfied in the end.
Apple does not want to give a $2k LCD screen to every person who drops their computer. If there is visible evidence that you broke the screen yourself, the warranty wont cover it. Is this really a surprise? The warranty is meant to cover defects in the products made by apple. They're saying that their products won't break because of anything they did, not anything that you do. If you want that kind of insurance you need something like renters or homeowners insurance, if that will cover it. On that point, I don't think this is something that is specifically the fault of Apple. Are they just supposed to trust you in saying that the screen dying and you dropping it are unrelated? Without opening the machine, how can you even be sure that that is true? Lesson learned here though. Never admit to dropping your laptop!
As for Apple Update, if we're comparing to Windows Update, it doesn't download Firefox for me either. That's because it's meant to update MS software. Still, most Apple-specific software is easier to install than Windows or Linux, drag and drop to Applications for most smaller packages, so I don't really see the need for a Mac package installer. With Linux's dependencies it makes sense, but for packaged applications like on the Mac, not so much.
As for your question and answer session with the mac tech, did you really expect different? First you ask them to tell you about third party support shops and expect them to, what?, give you a price list for shops in your area or something? That's like calling Ford and asking them what Joe the Mechanic down the street from you would charge for an oil change. Ask Joe! Then you complain about them not giving first hand support for a third party product that they were nice enough to provide you with. Did you call/contact the developer for that software product? Lastly, you ask them if they can tell you how to hack your machine and make it do something that it wasn't sold for. Do you really expect someone in tech support to be able to condone that kind of action? So then you f* something up and call back tech support and say "well, so and so told me that I could do that..." If you want to customize your car and add a new engine, it's yours, go for it. But don't call the manufacturer's warranty department and expect them to bail you out when it goes wrong. That's why most modding articles state "at your own risk".
Hmm. I don't know what school you went to, but at the ones I've been to you'd be lucky to find students who can _spell_ Microsoft Office 2007, nevermind figure out how to use its basic functions in a couple of days.
Playing with your wii leads to looking at porno... How is this news? Little boys have known this for centuries.
Of course, with an installed Rumble Pack, this does open some interesting possibilities. Thanks crazy Xian Group, you've opened my eyes to new possibilities. Of course, now I'll have to keep an eye on my girlfriend...
All of this is completely anecdotal, of course, but sure, I'll throw my two cents in. I've had the exact opposite experience myself. I'm running a XP on a Dell with a P4 2.8GHz and 1GB of RAM and it's constantly slow and sticky compared to my 6-year old 866MHz Powerbook. On my Powerbook, I run lots of those "artsy" apps you speak of without any trouble. Here at work I run all of my programming apps... big hefty text editors, ssh shells and a web browser and I constantly have to reboot this machine for one reason or another. The only time I restart my Powerbook is when I get a system update that requires it (or Toast dies on me, which it sometimes does).
Some machines are tempermental, though. It could be something to do with hardware. Of course, you just sound like most MS-fanboys I've met that complain about Macs just because it's not their comfy ol' Windows. I'm not afraid of technology, but most of the time I'd like to throw this machine out the window, myself.
Almost everything I've read about the iPhone makes mention of how high priced it is and how that's going to be a detterent from people buying it. If this were a completely new type of product coming out of left field, I could see people wavering (before seeing the device) and not being sure that it will be worth the money. But they're not writing in a vacuum here... A little research will show you that there are plenty of phones on the market that are comparably priced.
As a disclaimer, this is no objective list of comparisons to features, just phones I found browsing around the internet. I also know that you can probably get them cheaper, especially when buying it with a 2-yr. contract. Please don't respond telling me how much you paid for your phone. I really don't care. I just present this to show that there are other phones on the market in this price range. Reporters have failed to say that (for instance) the Q does this or that that the iPhone doesn't, so it's worth it and the iPhone isn't. Rather, they've just stated how high priced it is, which is poor reporting in my opinion. All of these other companies seem to think there is a market for devices in this price range:
Check out Disk Catalog Maker. I've been using it for ages. I've tried a few others but their databases tend to get HUGE really quickly. With this app I have a catalog of 38 DVDs that takes up 2.2mb. It'd be nice if something like this were a built-in feature, I guess, but Disk Catalog Maker has never done me wrong. If you purchase a recent copy of Toast it comes bundled with it, too.
There is not only the worry about all of your transactions being traced by "the man", but also the availability of plastic money. In our current system, to get a hold on such plastic currency you have to have a bank account with a major financial institution and be subject to all of their rules, regulations, and fee structures. If you have any scars on your credit you can be denied access to these institutions. I'm a bit paranoid too about having even the tiniest of my transactions watched over by a banking authority, but more worrisome is all of the small, day-to-day transactions that take place with people who aren't "good enough" in the eyes of financial institutions to be deemed worthy of their plastic.
Unless some other system were instituted in which everyone would have access to accounts, I fear it would do more harm than good. It could be solved by having something like the pre-paid gift cards, but then the card isn't tied to you so if you lose that card you lose all of your money. The IRS might say that they'd like to get rid of all under-the-table business transactions, but I severely doubt that that will ever happen, or would necessarily be a good thing for the economy... And how would homeless people beg for plastic?
In a way, I'd love to see such a system take place and I think that it will eventually supplant the current paper economy, but there are a lot of problems with a purely credit economy that aren't outweighed by the assumed efficiency of it.
treos? wow. never heard of that. how would you translate that from the japanese?
in case you didn't notice, the parent was asking about japanese technology that is so advanced that it beats out the current stock here in america and you tell us to look at the current stock that's here in america? well, you've got me beat...
of course, we're arguing over the merits of a product that does not yet exist on the market yet... this is like saying how much better halo 3 is than gears of war. i'm sure it will be better, but i'll reserve my judgements until it's in my hands.
we are, however, waiting to hear what in japan is similar... really. i know they sell things in asia that never make it to the U.S. or only make it here after extended delays, but it's not impossible to get your hands on such things, or at least read about them. I have yet to hear of a device like the iPhone with all of its features. I'd love to see one. I think the iPhone looks awesome but agree with those who criticize it. I don't like that they've aligned themselves with a big telco. I was hoping they'd help blow the lid off of the current lockdown they have on technology. It's a step in the right direction, but not quite there yet. I'm sure we'll be seeing unlocked versions soon after it's released, though. If you've got something light years ahead of the iPhone in Japan already, though, please tell me. I'll pay the extra shipping to get my hands on that instead.
It's not the "industry" that wants a monopoly, it's the management of this industry. Industry itself has no self-organized will to monopolize. Monopolies are inherently anti-competetive. The reason Ma Bell was broken up in the first place was to protect consumers. It is inherently in the best interest of these companies to raise the "cost to play" once they've formed a monopoly in order to keep small players out and thus kill off competition. Once you're the only provider, you can afford to pay whatever outrageous fees are needed because consumers have no choice but to pay you for service. Look what happened when the government recently removed the Universal Service Fund fee and the big telcos moved to fill that gap to help pay off their taxes. And they're still getting away with "tax recovery" fees, passing on their social responsibility to their customers in order to bolster their bottom line. Can I get a raise of hands here on how many people find today's cable or telco companies (land-line or cell) doing all they can to respond to market pressure and consumer demand instead of just filling their own pockets?
But hey, if you want to go back to renting phones, be my guest...
I could go into the disorganized way that things are arranged in windows to illustrate my point. I had to set up a wireless network the other day and the screens you need to access are distributed around various parts of the admin tools that are none to intuitive. But the case that I'd really like to bring up would have to be one of my biggest pet peeves about microsoft products: Word. Not really anything in particular, just the whole damn program. I cringe whenever a professor or a job has asked for anything in word format, because I know it means nothing but suffering, and I think this points to the larger issue with Microsoft itself.
In an effort to stay ahead of the game and make Word the end all be all of word processing programs, the program has become so "feature rich" (ie, bloated) that without spending hours of figuring out how to set up the options (which does not work when you do work in a computer lab or on someone else's machine), the standard features often do more harm than good. From resumes to outlines, I've spent hours battling against Word trying to automatically format things that I don't want it to format. Selected characters' formats get transferred to whole pages that weren't selected, bullets get inserted where I just want a dash, and don't even get me started on their piss poor implementation of tables. They make me want to pull my hair out.
At this point, I end up using indesign or xpress to write a two page essay rather than trifling with word. It's like using a steamroller to flatten dough, but it's easier to get it done with that than to use the swiss-army rolling pin that is Word. My point is that Microsoft does not try to make good products. They try to make something that will usurp the competition. There eyes focus on the bottom line of their account books and those of their competitors, and not on their customers. As others before me have stated, I don't think this is a because of maliciousness on the part of the company. I'm sure that programmers are trying their best to come up with the best products. But the bloat of their software reflects the bloat of their design process.
I just love it when things work out like this... both on the article page and on this very page that I'm typing on now there is a full color ad for Windows Server 2003 and the London Stock Exchange. Making the worlds computing systems more reliable one trojan infested botnet at a time...
I got so tired of trying to crack XP. Good to know I'll be able to pirate a copy of Vista so I can run all the important programs that I can't run on my Mac or Linux boxes.
Now if only they'd come up with some important programs like that, I'll be set.
wow. glad to see that things are more "secure" on ie7. now when i actually want to install software I have to go through a twelve stage process of "are you sure? are you really, really sure? are you sure you're really sure?" screens. The fact remains that anyone who know what they're doing most likely won't install bad software on their computer. It's good that it comes up with a warning, but if these warnings come up for everything you try to do, people will become accustomed to them and see them as only another annoyance and go ahead and install spyware anyway. this is like the "warning: contents hot" on a coffee cup. people are going to continue to burn their lips on it anyway.
Well, I have verbose error messages turned on on my local dev server to make debugging easier, but we log all errors on the live site, returning an "oops! something went wrong" generic error to users. Verbose errors can give you a lot of information, depending on what the error is.
First of all, it's going to tell a hacker what kind of system you're using. They'll probably find out anyway if it isn't apparent, but who wants to give them any help along the way? And then it all depends on what the error is. If i'm making reads to the filesystem or requiring files and I screw up the path, verbose error reporting will spit that path out. Now the hacker knows what your file system looks like, and possibly what kind of system you're using. Also, while the hacker is busy trying out various methods to inject SQL, verbose errors may spit out the entire failed query, giving them full knowledge of how to edit it to make it work...
Somehow I think it'd cause more accidents if the guy on the bike in front of me was wearing a shirt that was constantly shifting geometric patterns and colors. I'd think I was having a bad acid flashback or something. i understand your point, I just hope they wouldn't design it to look like my itunes visualizer.
Slashdot Mirror
If I put this in my drink, will it heat it up or cool it down?
"Honey, can you get me some ice for my drink? It's too cold..."
From TFA: "It is a bit like a person dying a little bit every time he breathes because the cells break down," C.C.B. lawyer Frederik Navne waxed poetically. "In the same way, the computer dies a little every time you turn it on and off."
No worries here, I never turn my machine off! So, by this analogy, my machine can hold its breath forever and thus has no worries about death by pulmonary necrosis.
Man (down on one knee): Honey, will you marry me? Woman: What the hell is that? Man: It's rhenium diboride, more durable than diamond. I wanted to show you just how much I love you, even more than diamond. Woman: Cheap bastard. Come back when you have a diamond.
Please, please, please don't put a kerning attribute into the hands of people who consider fixing up their MySpace profile "web design".
d ownsoIcouldfititallin.
Welcometomysite.IhavealottosaysoIturnedthekerning
I can see the moral dilemma now... My computer is almost out of "juice", but so am I. Do I sacrifice all of my Mountain Dew in order to log back in to WoW at the risk of falling asleep or do I ration the both of us equally and go for better performance over a shorter time?
Microsoft has finally decided that the cathedral model of development just isn't working for them anymore, so they've decided to do like the Catholic Church and disseminate their beliefs into every household so that you can be sure to have "MS Guilt" when having any unclean thoughts about OSS.
Come to think of it, their BSA raids on small businesses is kind of like the Inquisition... I guess you could have worse business models than the church. I mean, they are still around after thousands of years and still raking in the money.
So what do you do at finals time when everyone in the whole university is cramming to study and complete projects? Do the labs and libraries have enough seats for _every_ student who lives in the dorms and the off-campus folks who need to use lab resources? That's ridiculous. Why do we have personal computers at home when there are plenty to go around in libraries and offices? Besides, the librarians usually hate it when you're dangling out of your skivvies with your dirty-socked feet up on the lab desk eating Raman at 3am. Or maybe they do things differently in India.
Here's my varied mileage... I have a Powerbook from 2001. It's an old machine that's seen its fair share of problems over the years. I bought the AppleCare plan with it and I have to say that it has been COMPLETELY worth it. The only things on my machine that are original are the case, the dvd drive and the hard drive. Everything else has been replaced under warranty at one time or another. Once or twice I had to raise my voice with a tech support tech to get the support I was looking for, but I've always been satisfied in the end. Apple does not want to give a $2k LCD screen to every person who drops their computer. If there is visible evidence that you broke the screen yourself, the warranty wont cover it. Is this really a surprise? The warranty is meant to cover defects in the products made by apple. They're saying that their products won't break because of anything they did, not anything that you do. If you want that kind of insurance you need something like renters or homeowners insurance, if that will cover it. On that point, I don't think this is something that is specifically the fault of Apple. Are they just supposed to trust you in saying that the screen dying and you dropping it are unrelated? Without opening the machine, how can you even be sure that that is true? Lesson learned here though. Never admit to dropping your laptop! As for Apple Update, if we're comparing to Windows Update, it doesn't download Firefox for me either. That's because it's meant to update MS software. Still, most Apple-specific software is easier to install than Windows or Linux, drag and drop to Applications for most smaller packages, so I don't really see the need for a Mac package installer. With Linux's dependencies it makes sense, but for packaged applications like on the Mac, not so much. As for your question and answer session with the mac tech, did you really expect different? First you ask them to tell you about third party support shops and expect them to, what?, give you a price list for shops in your area or something? That's like calling Ford and asking them what Joe the Mechanic down the street from you would charge for an oil change. Ask Joe! Then you complain about them not giving first hand support for a third party product that they were nice enough to provide you with. Did you call/contact the developer for that software product? Lastly, you ask them if they can tell you how to hack your machine and make it do something that it wasn't sold for. Do you really expect someone in tech support to be able to condone that kind of action? So then you f* something up and call back tech support and say "well, so and so told me that I could do that..." If you want to customize your car and add a new engine, it's yours, go for it. But don't call the manufacturer's warranty department and expect them to bail you out when it goes wrong. That's why most modding articles state "at your own risk".
Hmm. I don't know what school you went to, but at the ones I've been to you'd be lucky to find students who can _spell_ Microsoft Office 2007, nevermind figure out how to use its basic functions in a couple of days.
Playing with your wii leads to looking at porno... How is this news? Little boys have known this for centuries.
Of course, with an installed Rumble Pack, this does open some interesting possibilities. Thanks crazy Xian Group, you've opened my eyes to new possibilities. Of course, now I'll have to keep an eye on my girlfriend...
All of this is completely anecdotal, of course, but sure, I'll throw my two cents in. I've had the exact opposite experience myself. I'm running a XP on a Dell with a P4 2.8GHz and 1GB of RAM and it's constantly slow and sticky compared to my 6-year old 866MHz Powerbook. On my Powerbook, I run lots of those "artsy" apps you speak of without any trouble. Here at work I run all of my programming apps... big hefty text editors, ssh shells and a web browser and I constantly have to reboot this machine for one reason or another. The only time I restart my Powerbook is when I get a system update that requires it (or Toast dies on me, which it sometimes does). Some machines are tempermental, though. It could be something to do with hardware. Of course, you just sound like most MS-fanboys I've met that complain about Macs just because it's not their comfy ol' Windows. I'm not afraid of technology, but most of the time I'd like to throw this machine out the window, myself.
Almost everything I've read about the iPhone makes mention of how high priced it is and how that's going to be a detterent from people buying it. If this were a completely new type of product coming out of left field, I could see people wavering (before seeing the device) and not being sure that it will be worth the money. But they're not writing in a vacuum here... A little research will show you that there are plenty of phones on the market that are comparably priced.
As a disclaimer, this is no objective list of comparisons to features, just phones I found browsing around the internet. I also know that you can probably get them cheaper, especially when buying it with a 2-yr. contract. Please don't respond telling me how much you paid for your phone. I really don't care. I just present this to show that there are other phones on the market in this price range. Reporters have failed to say that (for instance) the Q does this or that that the iPhone doesn't, so it's worth it and the iPhone isn't. Rather, they've just stated how high priced it is, which is poor reporting in my opinion. All of these other companies seem to think there is a market for devices in this price range:
Nokia
N91 - $549.99
N80ie - $499.99
N800 - $399.99
7380 - $359.99
Sony Ericsson
W950i - $619.99 (reduced from $699.99!)
W710 - $399.00
K790 - $499.00
Motorola
Q - $449.99
KRZR K1 - $329.99
Samsung
BlackJack - $449.99
Blackberry
8700c - $399.99
8800 - $499.99
Pearl - $399.99
Cingular
8125 - $499.99
8525 - $549.99
Palm
Treo 680 - $449.00
Treo 700p - $649.99
Check out Disk Catalog Maker. I've been using it for ages. I've tried a few others but their databases tend to get HUGE really quickly. With this app I have a catalog of 38 DVDs that takes up 2.2mb. It'd be nice if something like this were a built-in feature, I guess, but Disk Catalog Maker has never done me wrong. If you purchase a recent copy of Toast it comes bundled with it, too.
There is not only the worry about all of your transactions being traced by "the man", but also the availability of plastic money. In our current system, to get a hold on such plastic currency you have to have a bank account with a major financial institution and be subject to all of their rules, regulations, and fee structures. If you have any scars on your credit you can be denied access to these institutions. I'm a bit paranoid too about having even the tiniest of my transactions watched over by a banking authority, but more worrisome is all of the small, day-to-day transactions that take place with people who aren't "good enough" in the eyes of financial institutions to be deemed worthy of their plastic.
Unless some other system were instituted in which everyone would have access to accounts, I fear it would do more harm than good. It could be solved by having something like the pre-paid gift cards, but then the card isn't tied to you so if you lose that card you lose all of your money. The IRS might say that they'd like to get rid of all under-the-table business transactions, but I severely doubt that that will ever happen, or would necessarily be a good thing for the economy... And how would homeless people beg for plastic?
In a way, I'd love to see such a system take place and I think that it will eventually supplant the current paper economy, but there are a lot of problems with a purely credit economy that aren't outweighed by the assumed efficiency of it.
Think about the strippers, man!
treos? wow. never heard of that. how would you translate that from the japanese?
in case you didn't notice, the parent was asking about japanese technology that is so advanced that it beats out the current stock here in america and you tell us to look at the current stock that's here in america? well, you've got me beat...
of course, we're arguing over the merits of a product that does not yet exist on the market yet... this is like saying how much better halo 3 is than gears of war. i'm sure it will be better, but i'll reserve my judgements until it's in my hands.
we are, however, waiting to hear what in japan is similar... really. i know they sell things in asia that never make it to the U.S. or only make it here after extended delays, but it's not impossible to get your hands on such things, or at least read about them. I have yet to hear of a device like the iPhone with all of its features. I'd love to see one. I think the iPhone looks awesome but agree with those who criticize it. I don't like that they've aligned themselves with a big telco. I was hoping they'd help blow the lid off of the current lockdown they have on technology. It's a step in the right direction, but not quite there yet. I'm sure we'll be seeing unlocked versions soon after it's released, though. If you've got something light years ahead of the iPhone in Japan already, though, please tell me. I'll pay the extra shipping to get my hands on that instead.
I call bullshit on this one.
It's not the "industry" that wants a monopoly, it's the management of this industry. Industry itself has no self-organized will to monopolize. Monopolies are inherently anti-competetive. The reason Ma Bell was broken up in the first place was to protect consumers. It is inherently in the best interest of these companies to raise the "cost to play" once they've formed a monopoly in order to keep small players out and thus kill off competition. Once you're the only provider, you can afford to pay whatever outrageous fees are needed because consumers have no choice but to pay you for service. Look what happened when the government recently removed the Universal Service Fund fee and the big telcos moved to fill that gap to help pay off their taxes. And they're still getting away with "tax recovery" fees, passing on their social responsibility to their customers in order to bolster their bottom line. Can I get a raise of hands here on how many people find today's cable or telco companies (land-line or cell) doing all they can to respond to market pressure and consumer demand instead of just filling their own pockets?
But hey, if you want to go back to renting phones, be my guest...
I could go into the disorganized way that things are arranged in windows to illustrate my point. I had to set up a wireless network the other day and the screens you need to access are distributed around various parts of the admin tools that are none to intuitive. But the case that I'd really like to bring up would have to be one of my biggest pet peeves about microsoft products: Word. Not really anything in particular, just the whole damn program. I cringe whenever a professor or a job has asked for anything in word format, because I know it means nothing but suffering, and I think this points to the larger issue with Microsoft itself.
In an effort to stay ahead of the game and make Word the end all be all of word processing programs, the program has become so "feature rich" (ie, bloated) that without spending hours of figuring out how to set up the options (which does not work when you do work in a computer lab or on someone else's machine), the standard features often do more harm than good. From resumes to outlines, I've spent hours battling against Word trying to automatically format things that I don't want it to format. Selected characters' formats get transferred to whole pages that weren't selected, bullets get inserted where I just want a dash, and don't even get me started on their piss poor implementation of tables. They make me want to pull my hair out.
At this point, I end up using indesign or xpress to write a two page essay rather than trifling with word. It's like using a steamroller to flatten dough, but it's easier to get it done with that than to use the swiss-army rolling pin that is Word. My point is that Microsoft does not try to make good products. They try to make something that will usurp the competition. There eyes focus on the bottom line of their account books and those of their competitors, and not on their customers. As others before me have stated, I don't think this is a because of maliciousness on the part of the company. I'm sure that programmers are trying their best to come up with the best products. But the bloat of their software reflects the bloat of their design process.
I just love it when things work out like this... both on the article page and on this very page that I'm typing on now there is a full color ad for Windows Server 2003 and the London Stock Exchange. Making the worlds computing systems more reliable one trojan infested botnet at a time...
I got so tired of trying to crack XP. Good to know I'll be able to pirate a copy of Vista so I can run all the important programs that I can't run on my Mac or Linux boxes.
Now if only they'd come up with some important programs like that, I'll be set.
wow. glad to see that things are more "secure" on ie7. now when i actually want to install software I have to go through a twelve stage process of "are you sure? are you really, really sure? are you sure you're really sure?" screens. The fact remains that anyone who know what they're doing most likely won't install bad software on their computer. It's good that it comes up with a warning, but if these warnings come up for everything you try to do, people will become accustomed to them and see them as only another annoyance and go ahead and install spyware anyway. this is like the "warning: contents hot" on a coffee cup. people are going to continue to burn their lips on it anyway.
I thought you were going to send him here
Well, I have verbose error messages turned on on my local dev server to make debugging easier, but we log all errors on the live site, returning an "oops! something went wrong" generic error to users. Verbose errors can give you a lot of information, depending on what the error is.
First of all, it's going to tell a hacker what kind of system you're using. They'll probably find out anyway if it isn't apparent, but who wants to give them any help along the way? And then it all depends on what the error is. If i'm making reads to the filesystem or requiring files and I screw up the path, verbose error reporting will spit that path out. Now the hacker knows what your file system looks like, and possibly what kind of system you're using. Also, while the hacker is busy trying out various methods to inject SQL, verbose errors may spit out the entire failed query, giving them full knowledge of how to edit it to make it work...
All around, it's just a very bad thing.
Funny how they won't be able to come to a final decision until AFTER the elections are over...
msauve, you read my mind.
Somehow I think it'd cause more accidents if the guy on the bike in front of me was wearing a shirt that was constantly shifting geometric patterns and colors. I'd think I was having a bad acid flashback or something. i understand your point, I just hope they wouldn't design it to look like my itunes visualizer.