Except where the theory falls down is, once they've got your cash, they don't care if you spend the points or not. It's not like they're providing a physical product and get some kind of real world benefit in holding onto your money while delaying the delivery of that product as long as possible.
Also, with purchases as low as 80 points, you can, if you really want, redeem all your points down to something paltry like 40 points easily - depending on how much you spent on the original points that's something like half a dollar (according to a quick Google around). Even if they managed to scam every last person on Live (around 20 million according to the news reports before Christmas), that's only $10m, spare change to a corporation like MS. I don't think they'd risk exposing themselves to a lawsuit for scamming users (not to mention scaring customers away from a very lucrative system) for a return that's probably less than their yearly paperclip spend. This is MS - they only scam users for $billions, not $millions, silly!
I'll be all for the switch from points to money (for transparency reasons, although I might have a shock when I see what real money I'm spending!) so long as it doesn't continue to store credit card details on the system and instead perhaps allows you to "charge up" an account with money or make one-off transactions without retaining card details. It was a major PITA getting a previous card removed from my system (it wasn't my card, I borrowed it to make a payment for live and they retained the details which made me feel a bit uneasy - I believe you can now remove these via the website, which is still an additional hoop to jump through, but at the time even that wasn't possible).
Except it sounds like this is neither malice, stupidity or a mistake. It's hard to determine what the actual complaint is, but from the Facebook page (I won't dignify it with a link since that's the guy's whole intention, but it's called "Microsoft Point Fraud Class Action Lawsuit"):
"Defendant Microsoft Corporation received and retained money paid by Plaintiffs in response to incomplete and or partial downloads of digital goods and services and refused refund of same."
That implies a massive misunderstanding of the system. Points aren't a bank that you can pay into and extract money from at will, they're more like a gift card you can redeem at some future date, and neither does MS make any guarantees about the date of redemption, instead they allow you to re-download your content at any time. That means if your initial download fails to complete, or you can't download because the download system is "balky", you just try again later (and honestly, the only time I've ever had problems with downloads on Live is during dash updates, when it can be a bit flaky for the first few hours as everyone's getting the same download at the same time - more likely if he's having continual problems downloading it's his connection rather than the download system that is "balky"). Either way, once you've spent your points it's up to you to download your content.
As someone else already said, once MS has your money they have no real interest in not delivering the downloads, all that will do is risk deterring customers from making future purchases (compared to the frankly tiny cost of providing the download). I'm all for giving big companies short shrift when they step out of line, and god knows MS have made some major misteps in the past, but this just looks like a case of a slimy lawyer either trying to hit it big by suing $RANDOM_BIG_TECH_COMPANY, or at the very least trying to get his face and name all over the internet.
Web developers are a dime a dozen. Being in the position of trying to hire web developers who know what they're doing and actually care about it, I can say that good web developers are as rare as rocking horse excrement.
2) If you're going to try to have me sign something like that I'm going to have a talk with you about bureaucracy and how we can't afford a BS cover your ass mentality in a small company. You may rest assured that if I don't back up and there's a crash there are two possible results: If I'm a bad manager I'm going to come back at you and no little piece of paper will stop me from firing you (though I'd expect you would receive unemployment as it's not really for cause). If I'm a good manager I'm going to write the check to cover the damages, feel foolish and accept your recommendation going forward.
Of course, if you're a good manager you might realise that the only thing that bit of paper is good for is giving me some minor piece of mind against the possibility that you're a bad manager so you'll sign it to keep up my morale, instead of giving the "let's just make this bit of paper disappear and nobody gets hurt" talk that is exactly what a bad manager would do and makes me think maybe I should be looking for emplyment elsewhere... Besides, there's nothing wrong with CYA so long as it's not getting in the way of anyone doing their job (and believe me I've worked at plenty of places where it did).
S/he's probably weighing up the good of the company versus personal inconvenience (and there might be some overlap if they see it as a waste of the time they could be spending more profitably elsewhere). Just because he/she doesn't want to follow every single dictum, it doesn't automatically follow that he/she doesn't want the best possible people for the job. Bad reputations can seriously harm a company's chances of attracting quality employees.
These kind of services tend towards convergence in the long run. The more successful schemes such as Steam will continue to grow and absorb the lesser services - it's not like the market can support a massive number of service providers, and if it ever gets to the point where it's too much hassle, gamers will just avoid games outside their existing networks. I can't see many publishers happily throwing away potential customers on a shrinking platform for the possibility of some control in the future, except maybe the really big players such as MS.
Yeah I can't say I really see the issue - well maybe on consoles, but for the PC we already have the situation where online gaming has been around for almost two decades, and sure it's not so easy to find players for the really old games, but there are fan groups out there you can hook up with and play, it's not impossible. Okay you weren't locked down to a particular network back then, but as OP indicates, that's easily patched, especially once the game drops off the radar enough that nobody really cares (and if they do care enough, i.e. they think there's still money to be made, then it won't be an issue because they'll still be supporting their network or releasing their own patch to allow users to play on their own servers, etc).
The full prices aren't that great but they do often run deals and occasionally there'll be a pretty competitively priced game - considering the fact that you get to play sooner, it's not always the worst option. I've never bought one that way though (I refuse to have a credit card and it seems they don't, or didn't when I last tried, accept debit cards in the UK).
I don't really know what you're saying here, I don't see any readers implying (other than in jest) that fantasy games have anything to do with criminality. The implication is very strongly that a spurious link to criminality was used to justify a ban on something the prison authorities just don't like.
As to your claim that the only options are either fantasy games allow criminality or have no effect on criminality, I'd repudiate that absolute claim unless you can provide evidence that playing games which encourage imagination and social interaction and highlight the consequences of ones actions as well as (generally though admittedly not always in D&D) guiding the players along the path of "good" with positive reinforcement have zero effect on reducing instances of repeat offences.
I guess it's horses for courses - for me it's an automatic (no pun intended) response to change gears manually I've been doing it so long, and I enjoy the extra control it gives me when I really need it, on top of that, it's a seamless experience for me to drive an automatic (on the very rare occasion that I do have to, rental car, etc) while I imagine it would be more jarring for someone who has only ever driven an automatic to have to drive a manual. For me that's worth the extra step of manually switching, though some days when stuck in gridlock I really wish I did drive a manual as I hate stop-start driving in heavy traffic with a passion.
I guess it's a side effect of living somewhere with good (relatively) city planning - you have lots of straight roads meaning you don't really need to gear shift so much. I live in the UK and we have enough fiddly little winding roads that I'd rather handle the gears than have it done automatically (although an auto is a godsend for long motorway journeys for the same reason). I also find it's quite a bit more fun driving a manual on such roads, as well as being a lot less expensive.
In colder climates you could start the car to warm it up before you venture outside or you could possibly have the AC running in hotter climates.
Honestly had to think for a second why the Anonymous Coward would be running...
The problem I've had this winter (which has been the worst we've had in a century or something ridiculous) is that my daily commute is so short, the car doesn't get chance to properly warm up and run for any amount of time before it's cooling down again, so unless I idle it so that it's running warm for the majority of my journey, I'm sure I'll hurt the engine more.
Hmm, when I learned to drive I was taught to always ensure a comfortable driving position before driving away as you're less likely to become distracted - this includes things like checking mirror positions and seat position (which I have to do regularly as my other half uses my car not infrequently and she's a good deal shorter than I am) and to me "comfort" includes not being freezing cold:)
Disclaimer: having said that, I live where it's rare to be cold enough to matter (UK) - although the fact that it's so rare tends to mean when it does happen, like this winter, it's even more important to be safe, warm and careful because we're not used to handling such conditions and that's the worst time to be distracted by something as silly as the cold - rather a live wuss than a dead hothead!
Re:I really want XBMC-HD for PS3
on
PS3 Hacked?
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· Score: 1
I've yet to see a media solution that I liked as much as XBMC back on the original XBOX (in the end I got a Popcorn Hour for the living room but I still keep the Mk1 modded XBOX in the bedroom for XBMC and aside from lack of HD it does just as good a job for something I installed back around 2003. The first console manufacturer to do something half as good out of the box will get my undying support - forget trying to win the war for the living room, THIS is it. Do this and you can DRM your games to hell and back, I'll still buy your system.
Tabs to indent, spaces to align, problem solved - everyone still gets their favourite indentation level and everything after the indentation still aligns nicely. What's so difficult about that that we'd sacrifice the usability of user-defined indentation spacing?
That seems like a specious argument to me - it's a reason to be extra careful in those circumstances, but on the wider scale (and even arguably in that instance if you are careful) it's no reason to endorse either method over the other.
That's an argument for formatting guidelines, not against tabs, but you're right - this misuse does seem to be the reason most of the anti-tabbers are against their use.
Yes, his confusion is around the fact that he inserts two slash characters to comment the line and it no longer lines up with the surrounding code when we all know that the slashes should be added after the indentation rather than at the beginning of the line anyway, so that code will never line up (and if he insists on adding them at the beginning of the line, then using the insert key would have the desired effect in most systems).
Three shall be the number thou shalt indent, and the number of the indenting shall be three. Four shalt thou not indent, neither indent thou two, excepting that thou then proceedest on to three. Five is right out.
That's fine when you're working in isolation, but when you're working on code with a bunch of other people and some like two spaces, some four and some eight, your choices are either a) enforce your favoured formatting flavour (assuming you're at the top of the food chain this'll work, but you'll likely annoy some people into the bargain) or b) use tabs and everyone configures for their own viewing pleasure. I can't speak for everyone else, but I probably spend 70% of my team reading code to 30% writing it, so personally I'd be willing to slightly modify the way I write code if it meant efficiency gains (and fewer migraines) reading it - of course it only works if everyone adopts the practice which is generally where these things fall down.
You're missing the fact that there is a like-for-like comparison involved here - not Windows 7 to OSX, which was obviously a ridiculous comparison just included to rile people up, but Windows 7 to Vista.
The fact that 7 is "way hotter than Vista off the line" [sic] is actually quite interesting (disclaimer: I'm no MS apologist, I hated Vista but having received 7 on a new laptop, I've been pleasantly surprised by it), especially considering the massive bad press that Vista generated. Unless of course you're suggesting the sales of PCs have increased substantially in the interim to put early 7 sales ahead of early Vista, during an economic downturn and large-scale unemployment, which I won't contest but which sounds so counter-intuitive to me that I would request a citation - and even then if that's true then it's interesting in itself.
Slashdot Mirror
And as a bonus, your law just legalised contract killing, prostitution, drug dealing, etc...
Except where the theory falls down is, once they've got your cash, they don't care if you spend the points or not. It's not like they're providing a physical product and get some kind of real world benefit in holding onto your money while delaying the delivery of that product as long as possible.
Also, with purchases as low as 80 points, you can, if you really want, redeem all your points down to something paltry like 40 points easily - depending on how much you spent on the original points that's something like half a dollar (according to a quick Google around). Even if they managed to scam every last person on Live (around 20 million according to the news reports before Christmas), that's only $10m, spare change to a corporation like MS. I don't think they'd risk exposing themselves to a lawsuit for scamming users (not to mention scaring customers away from a very lucrative system) for a return that's probably less than their yearly paperclip spend. This is MS - they only scam users for $billions, not $millions, silly!
I'll be all for the switch from points to money (for transparency reasons, although I might have a shock when I see what real money I'm spending!) so long as it doesn't continue to store credit card details on the system and instead perhaps allows you to "charge up" an account with money or make one-off transactions without retaining card details. It was a major PITA getting a previous card removed from my system (it wasn't my card, I borrowed it to make a payment for live and they retained the details which made me feel a bit uneasy - I believe you can now remove these via the website, which is still an additional hoop to jump through, but at the time even that wasn't possible).
Except it sounds like this is neither malice, stupidity or a mistake. It's hard to determine what the actual complaint is, but from the Facebook page (I won't dignify it with a link since that's the guy's whole intention, but it's called "Microsoft Point Fraud Class Action Lawsuit"):
"Defendant Microsoft Corporation received and retained money paid by Plaintiffs in response to incomplete and or partial downloads of digital goods and services and refused refund of same."
That implies a massive misunderstanding of the system. Points aren't a bank that you can pay into and extract money from at will, they're more like a gift card you can redeem at some future date, and neither does MS make any guarantees about the date of redemption, instead they allow you to re-download your content at any time. That means if your initial download fails to complete, or you can't download because the download system is "balky", you just try again later (and honestly, the only time I've ever had problems with downloads on Live is during dash updates, when it can be a bit flaky for the first few hours as everyone's getting the same download at the same time - more likely if he's having continual problems downloading it's his connection rather than the download system that is "balky"). Either way, once you've spent your points it's up to you to download your content.
As someone else already said, once MS has your money they have no real interest in not delivering the downloads, all that will do is risk deterring customers from making future purchases (compared to the frankly tiny cost of providing the download). I'm all for giving big companies short shrift when they step out of line, and god knows MS have made some major misteps in the past, but this just looks like a case of a slimy lawyer either trying to hit it big by suing $RANDOM_BIG_TECH_COMPANY, or at the very least trying to get his face and name all over the internet.
Web developers are a dime a dozen. Being in the position of trying to hire web developers who know what they're doing and actually care about it, I can say that good web developers are as rare as rocking horse excrement.
2) If you're going to try to have me sign something like that I'm going to have a talk with you about bureaucracy and how we can't afford a BS cover your ass mentality in a small company. You may rest assured that if I don't back up and there's a crash there are two possible results: If I'm a bad manager I'm going to come back at you and no little piece of paper will stop me from firing you (though I'd expect you would receive unemployment as it's not really for cause). If I'm a good manager I'm going to write the check to cover the damages, feel foolish and accept your recommendation going forward.
Of course, if you're a good manager you might realise that the only thing that bit of paper is good for is giving me some minor piece of mind against the possibility that you're a bad manager so you'll sign it to keep up my morale, instead of giving the "let's just make this bit of paper disappear and nobody gets hurt" talk that is exactly what a bad manager would do and makes me think maybe I should be looking for emplyment elsewhere... Besides, there's nothing wrong with CYA so long as it's not getting in the way of anyone doing their job (and believe me I've worked at plenty of places where it did).
S/he's probably weighing up the good of the company versus personal inconvenience (and there might be some overlap if they see it as a waste of the time they could be spending more profitably elsewhere). Just because he/she doesn't want to follow every single dictum, it doesn't automatically follow that he/she doesn't want the best possible people for the job. Bad reputations can seriously harm a company's chances of attracting quality employees.
These kind of services tend towards convergence in the long run. The more successful schemes such as Steam will continue to grow and absorb the lesser services - it's not like the market can support a massive number of service providers, and if it ever gets to the point where it's too much hassle, gamers will just avoid games outside their existing networks. I can't see many publishers happily throwing away potential customers on a shrinking platform for the possibility of some control in the future, except maybe the really big players such as MS.
Yeah I can't say I really see the issue - well maybe on consoles, but for the PC we already have the situation where online gaming has been around for almost two decades, and sure it's not so easy to find players for the really old games, but there are fan groups out there you can hook up with and play, it's not impossible. Okay you weren't locked down to a particular network back then, but as OP indicates, that's easily patched, especially once the game drops off the radar enough that nobody really cares (and if they do care enough, i.e. they think there's still money to be made, then it won't be an issue because they'll still be supporting their network or releasing their own patch to allow users to play on their own servers, etc).
Get ready for thought DRM in 3... 2... 1...
The full prices aren't that great but they do often run deals and occasionally there'll be a pretty competitively priced game - considering the fact that you get to play sooner, it's not always the worst option. I've never bought one that way though (I refuse to have a credit card and it seems they don't, or didn't when I last tried, accept debit cards in the UK).
I don't really know what you're saying here, I don't see any readers implying (other than in jest) that fantasy games have anything to do with criminality. The implication is very strongly that a spurious link to criminality was used to justify a ban on something the prison authorities just don't like.
As to your claim that the only options are either fantasy games allow criminality or have no effect on criminality, I'd repudiate that absolute claim unless you can provide evidence that playing games which encourage imagination and social interaction and highlight the consequences of ones actions as well as (generally though admittedly not always in D&D) guiding the players along the path of "good" with positive reinforcement have zero effect on reducing instances of repeat offences.
Dungeons and Dragons. Spell in prison. Heh heh.
I guess it's horses for courses - for me it's an automatic (no pun intended) response to change gears manually I've been doing it so long, and I enjoy the extra control it gives me when I really need it, on top of that, it's a seamless experience for me to drive an automatic (on the very rare occasion that I do have to, rental car, etc) while I imagine it would be more jarring for someone who has only ever driven an automatic to have to drive a manual. For me that's worth the extra step of manually switching, though some days when stuck in gridlock I really wish I did drive a manual as I hate stop-start driving in heavy traffic with a passion.
I guess it's a side effect of living somewhere with good (relatively) city planning - you have lots of straight roads meaning you don't really need to gear shift so much. I live in the UK and we have enough fiddly little winding roads that I'd rather handle the gears than have it done automatically (although an auto is a godsend for long motorway journeys for the same reason). I also find it's quite a bit more fun driving a manual on such roads, as well as being a lot less expensive.
In colder climates you could start the car to warm it up before you venture outside or you could possibly have the AC running in hotter climates.
Honestly had to think for a second why the Anonymous Coward would be running...
The problem I've had this winter (which has been the worst we've had in a century or something ridiculous) is that my daily commute is so short, the car doesn't get chance to properly warm up and run for any amount of time before it's cooling down again, so unless I idle it so that it's running warm for the majority of my journey, I'm sure I'll hurt the engine more.
Hmm, when I learned to drive I was taught to always ensure a comfortable driving position before driving away as you're less likely to become distracted - this includes things like checking mirror positions and seat position (which I have to do regularly as my other half uses my car not infrequently and she's a good deal shorter than I am) and to me "comfort" includes not being freezing cold :)
Disclaimer: having said that, I live where it's rare to be cold enough to matter (UK) - although the fact that it's so rare tends to mean when it does happen, like this winter, it's even more important to be safe, warm and careful because we're not used to handling such conditions and that's the worst time to be distracted by something as silly as the cold - rather a live wuss than a dead hothead!
I've yet to see a media solution that I liked as much as XBMC back on the original XBOX (in the end I got a Popcorn Hour for the living room but I still keep the Mk1 modded XBOX in the bedroom for XBMC and aside from lack of HD it does just as good a job for something I installed back around 2003. The first console manufacturer to do something half as good out of the box will get my undying support - forget trying to win the war for the living room, THIS is it. Do this and you can DRM your games to hell and back, I'll still buy your system.
Tabs to indent, spaces to align, problem solved - everyone still gets their favourite indentation level and everything after the indentation still aligns nicely. What's so difficult about that that we'd sacrifice the usability of user-defined indentation spacing?
That seems like a specious argument to me - it's a reason to be extra careful in those circumstances, but on the wider scale (and even arguably in that instance if you are careful) it's no reason to endorse either method over the other.
That's an argument for formatting guidelines, not against tabs, but you're right - this misuse does seem to be the reason most of the anti-tabbers are against their use.
Yes, his confusion is around the fact that he inserts two slash characters to comment the line and it no longer lines up with the surrounding code when we all know that the slashes should be added after the indentation rather than at the beginning of the line anyway, so that code will never line up (and if he insists on adding them at the beginning of the line, then using the insert key would have the desired effect in most systems).
Three shall be the number thou shalt indent, and the number of the indenting shall be three. Four shalt thou not indent, neither indent thou two, excepting that thou then proceedest on to three. Five is right out.
FTFY
That's fine when you're working in isolation, but when you're working on code with a bunch of other people and some like two spaces, some four and some eight, your choices are either a) enforce your favoured formatting flavour (assuming you're at the top of the food chain this'll work, but you'll likely annoy some people into the bargain) or b) use tabs and everyone configures for their own viewing pleasure. I can't speak for everyone else, but I probably spend 70% of my team reading code to 30% writing it, so personally I'd be willing to slightly modify the way I write code if it meant efficiency gains (and fewer migraines) reading it - of course it only works if everyone adopts the practice which is generally where these things fall down.
You're missing the fact that there is a like-for-like comparison involved here - not Windows 7 to OSX, which was obviously a ridiculous comparison just included to rile people up, but Windows 7 to Vista.
The fact that 7 is "way hotter than Vista off the line" [sic] is actually quite interesting (disclaimer: I'm no MS apologist, I hated Vista but having received 7 on a new laptop, I've been pleasantly surprised by it), especially considering the massive bad press that Vista generated. Unless of course you're suggesting the sales of PCs have increased substantially in the interim to put early 7 sales ahead of early Vista, during an economic downturn and large-scale unemployment, which I won't contest but which sounds so counter-intuitive to me that I would request a citation - and even then if that's true then it's interesting in itself.