The problem is, paying $50 instead of $20 doesn't guarantee the company pays they're workers more. For all we know, those $30 can be going to their profits anyway.
And it usually is, considering that "premium" hardware and the like usually come off the same line anyway. What, you thought that the sweet-looking, uber-functional Logitech MX-whatever wireless gaming mouse is handmade by a Logitech hardware engineer in the US because it costs $100?
I suppose that give some of the responses here, some folks only dress in handmade cloth, sleep with handwoven linens and work for NGOs, given that most products today are, unfortunately, the fruits of cheap and unsafe labor.
You shouldn't be asking why Apple is so effective at marketing... Apple is merely competent. You really should ask yourself, why, if HP and Dell have such good products, they invariable allow their products to be introduced as blurry pictures on Gizmodo or Ars Technica, give them unrememberable names, and are so inept in their follow through and promotion that anybody who actually cares to develop or add value to their product might as well blow their brains out now and save the trouble.
Because one you're at the point where your product becomes a necessity and/or a household staple, creativity and intuition are no longer needed. HP and Dell did their hard work in the early 90's; now that everyone associates "new PC" with HP, Dell, Compaq or Apple, why should they add extra glitz to their products if they don't need to?
Notice that those companies only get "creative" when the market forces them to.
My script is less than 2000 lines, but it somehow took 10+ seconds to open. Typing would be incredibly sluggish too. Doing anything in the GUI was a mistake. This is on a P8600 Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM.
Forgot to mention: the actual web page itself is kind of a last-resort (or super basic) leftover. Many (dare I say most) people use Twitter from clients on their desktop or mobile. It's treated kind of like a protocol sans the RFC.
I would much rather see twitter remain ad free, and charge a fair monthly fee based on number of followers and following; they could charge dynamically: more for companies than individuals, and reduce fees if your tweets are retweeted beyond your local follower network.
That is totally contrary to one of the main purposes of Twitter, which is to allow anyone to spread information as widely as possible.
The zombie robot bullshit is largely due to their lacking security model. If I had to take a guess from their previous breaches, I'd say that it wasn't designed to be secure from the ground up. Facebook doesn't have nearly as bad of a bot problem as Twitter and myspace.
This will take off like wildfire. The Starbucks example is a great description of how it will do so. Twitter is already a great medium for finding underground discounts for stuff, but Promoted Tweets take it to a whole new level. Yes, there will be businesses that will abuse the living hell out of it, but its potential is enormous.
Of course, I have to include a retort against the Twitter haters. It is perfectly fine to not own a Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or whatever account. Nobody is holding you at gunpoint demanding that you expand your social media presence and/or build your social network. (Yes, these are official marketing terms. How quaint.) However, if you take a step back and see Twitter, Facebook or whatever from a more holistic perspective, you might see the amount of good that comes from these services.
Yes, there are buckets (many, many, MANY buckets) of people that post useless status updates to feed their delusions of grandeur or self-importance. Personally, reading my "friends'" status updates is almost always a huge waste of time. (Today's snippet: Look at my new shades! Wow, big pizza! I'm back home from work, tired! Sadly, the last one is oh so damn common.) However, (real, unbiased) news spreads like bacteria on Twitter, and there are lots of promotions, offers and even events that are exclusive to only Twitter users. Facebook is leaps and bounds more effective for planning events or reconnecting with old friends. It's also good for finding others who share similar interests, which can lead to bigger and better things (or at least an expanded worldview). It also makes for a great restricted blog or photo storage location.
Naturally, none of this matters if your social circle doesn't use these tools or if you just have no friends.
A few days ago, I used a copy of Visual Studio 2010 that I got from my MSDN Academic Alliance account. It looks really nice, but it ran absolutely dog slow. And this was for debugging VBScript!
I gave it another shot with Visual Studio 2010 Web Developer Express, which I heard can debug VBScript just like the full devenv can. It was a little faster (though still slower than VS2008), but it nor Visual Basic 2010 Express would debug my VBScript.
I haven't tried coding on it for real (I also do C/C++ development; can't wait to port that script over to a REAL effin' language), but if it's as slow as I remember it being, I can see lots of companies turning back really quickly.
This is not true. How useable would Facebook be without requiring a password to log in? Yes it would be easier to get in, but you would lose any trust in the application as anyone could be posting as anyone else. A system should be as secure as the data you are trying to protect within it.
Balancing usability and security is one of the toughest parts of designing a secure system; anyone that's had to even remotely consider security as a factor knows this. It still holds, however, that usability always suffers as security improves.
Facebook is a great example. Their authentication scheme was originally only passwords. However, they've had problems thwarting bots and other security problems over the years, so now they added CAPTCHAs depending on use. This wasn't too much of a problem (though I'd argue that usability was mitigated in favor of security, even if only slightly)...until Facebook Chat got popular. (Remember when people protested it up and down?) Porting Facebook Chat to anything was possible but difficult, largely due to these new authentication rules. Getting kicked out every couple of hours was the norm while using the Facebook protocols available at the time. It wasn't until they moved it over to Jabber that IMing on Facebook using external clients got easy.
Twitter's ongoing security issues are another great example of this. It's dead easy to use and I'll venture that the API is pretty easy to work with, since there are umpteen Twitter clients out there for every platform there is. However, Twitter made it on the front page here tons of times due to security breaches and the like. It's still used as an easy score for bots.
but most of the time getting a true single sign on requires you replicate password changes to systems that cannot change their authentication source and then you end up with the weakest link (say a messaging client that stores the password as an md5 hash) having the key to accessing your most guarded systems (i.e. payroll systems).
This is true, but there are a few caveats to that:
Weak links are non-unique and non-inherent. There are still corporations out there that use applications that accept passwords as plain text. All it takes for a steadfast employee (or outsider, for that matter) to get someone else's password is for them to run a packet sniffer. Wouldn't it be better for a designer to approach the weakest link problem by strengthening the weakest link instead of trying to eliminate it outright?
The answer is a budgeting problem. I never said that such a conversion would be easy or even cheap. The cost of replacing software that use weaker authentication/security paradigms for those that conform to the SSO model is probably always non-trivial, but if it provides more overall security than the status quo with minimal impacts to usability, then isn't it still a win?
I don't think single sign-on is a flawed idea; at worst, I believe it's incomplete. In an ideal world, all software would support the most common authentication scenarios available (password, passphrase, card token and smart card). It would be extremely convenient for people to use one key for all of the important systems they interact with on a daily basis, as that would mean there's less for the person to lose and/or remember. However, idealism is hardly representative of reality. Perhaps a hybrid model where smart cards/work IDs are used for Windows authentication and RSA tokens are used for other systems would be a more realistic proposition...
The cost to have users continually change their passwords is small by comparison.
But the costs of a data breach associated to the natural carelessness of handling passwords (making a post-it note, blanking the password, making them too simple, never changing them, etc.) are much, much higher.
Yes; in fact, I own two (E6500 for myself, and an E6400 for my work). I haven't had any problems with either of them, though my lid casing is pretty dinged up from being carried, tossed, dropped, etc.
One really cool bit I like about the Macbooks is their magnetic hinge, especially since the first hinge I had broke off after about three months.
Increased security always decreases usability. Though now that I think about it, I'm wondering: why aren't smart cards used more in corporations? Wouldn't it be convenient for people to log in with the same ID they use to get into their workplace building or floor?
Get it on eBay, though if you live in or are close to a major city, finding one on Craiglist can be significantly cheaper. (I think you can get a 17" non-Unibody Macbook Pro for something like $800 here in NYC.)
You can also go to Apple's refurbished store, which will get you a nice warranty with it too.
Problem: iPhone developers must have the latest updates installed in order to install the SDK. I think older SDKs can be installed, though it will obviously be limited and, at worst, obsolete.
Solution: Any computer with an Intel Core or Core 2 Duo CPU can install OS X using Empire EFI or Chameleon CD bootloader and the retail disc from the Apple Store. It's super cheap at $29.99, but don't bother if you're trying to get it for the license; installing it on a PC still breaches it.
Also should note that in many cases, software updates are completely seamless. Updating to 10.6.3 on my Latitude E6500 was as simple as using Software Update, though SleepEnabler.kext needs to be deleted before installing/rebooting. (SleepEnabler is kernel-dependent, so wrong SleepEnabler = horrible kernel panic, though it's still resolvable by booting the retail disc and removing it using Terminal.)
Now they are mostly on par with my Dell Latitude E6500 (or a Precision M4400, which has the better graphics card) at about $700 more. (Both of them run OS X Snow Leopard, with updates, really, really well.)
Look, I know that we call some competitive activities "sports" to make them appear more legitimate, but video gaming is as much as a sport as computer troubleshooting is, which is hardly at all...
Yeah, but that's a program-specific error though. And they still give you an error code; way better than this. Of course I know that memory region; I write all my bits to RAM manually!:(
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The problem is, paying $50 instead of $20 doesn't guarantee the company pays they're workers more. For all we know, those $30 can be going to their profits anyway.
And it usually is, considering that "premium" hardware and the like usually come off the same line anyway. What, you thought that the sweet-looking, uber-functional Logitech MX-whatever wireless gaming mouse is handmade by a Logitech hardware engineer in the US because it costs $100?
I suppose that give some of the responses here, some folks only dress in handmade cloth, sleep with handwoven linens and work for NGOs, given that most products today are, unfortunately, the fruits of cheap and unsafe labor.
Who's going to upkeep those robots when they break down?
You shouldn't be asking why Apple is so effective at marketing... Apple is merely competent. You really should ask yourself, why, if HP and Dell have such good products, they invariable allow their products to be introduced as blurry pictures on Gizmodo or Ars Technica, give them unrememberable names, and are so inept in their follow through and promotion that anybody who actually cares to develop or add value to their product might as well blow their brains out now and save the trouble.
Because one you're at the point where your product becomes a necessity and/or a household staple, creativity and intuition are no longer needed. HP and Dell did their hard work in the early 90's; now that everyone associates "new PC" with HP, Dell, Compaq or Apple, why should they add extra glitz to their products if they don't need to?
Notice that those companies only get "creative" when the market forces them to.
Forgot to add
That's great...but will it run Linux?
and the various GNAA trolls, goatse links and Hitler references.
While it sucks that working conditions like these exist, how else can we buy mice for $20?
My script is less than 2000 lines, but it somehow took 10+ seconds to open. Typing would be incredibly sluggish too. Doing anything in the GUI was a mistake. This is on a P8600 Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM.
Not saying anything about final product, but do recall that to this day, iPhones have no official IM client.
Forgot to mention: the actual web page itself is kind of a last-resort (or super basic) leftover. Many (dare I say most) people use Twitter from clients on their desktop or mobile. It's treated kind of like a protocol sans the RFC.
lol. ISPs in control of Twitter. That'll work great after Comcast gets a hold of it...
Best quote ever. Can I follow your posts?
I would much rather see twitter remain ad free, and charge a fair monthly fee based on number of followers and following; they could charge dynamically: more for companies than individuals, and reduce fees if your tweets are retweeted beyond your local follower network.
That is totally contrary to one of the main purposes of Twitter, which is to allow anyone to spread information as widely as possible.
The zombie robot bullshit is largely due to their lacking security model. If I had to take a guess from their previous breaches, I'd say that it wasn't designed to be secure from the ground up. Facebook doesn't have nearly as bad of a bot problem as Twitter and myspace.
This will take off like wildfire. The Starbucks example is a great description of how it will do so. Twitter is already a great medium for finding underground discounts for stuff, but Promoted Tweets take it to a whole new level. Yes, there will be businesses that will abuse the living hell out of it, but its potential is enormous.
Of course, I have to include a retort against the Twitter haters. It is perfectly fine to not own a Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or whatever account. Nobody is holding you at gunpoint demanding that you expand your social media presence and/or build your social network. (Yes, these are official marketing terms. How quaint.) However, if you take a step back and see Twitter, Facebook or whatever from a more holistic perspective, you might see the amount of good that comes from these services.
Yes, there are buckets (many, many, MANY buckets) of people that post useless status updates to feed their delusions of grandeur or self-importance. Personally, reading my "friends'" status updates is almost always a huge waste of time. (Today's snippet: Look at my new shades! Wow, big pizza! I'm back home from work, tired! Sadly, the last one is oh so damn common.) However, (real, unbiased) news spreads like bacteria on Twitter, and there are lots of promotions, offers and even events that are exclusive to only Twitter users. Facebook is leaps and bounds more effective for planning events or reconnecting with old friends. It's also good for finding others who share similar interests, which can lead to bigger and better things (or at least an expanded worldview). It also makes for a great restricted blog or photo storage location.
Naturally, none of this matters if your social circle doesn't use these tools or if you just have no friends.
A few days ago, I used a copy of Visual Studio 2010 that I got from my MSDN Academic Alliance account. It looks really nice, but it ran absolutely dog slow. And this was for debugging VBScript!
I gave it another shot with Visual Studio 2010 Web Developer Express, which I heard can debug VBScript just like the full devenv can. It was a little faster (though still slower than VS2008), but it nor Visual Basic 2010 Express would debug my VBScript.
I haven't tried coding on it for real (I also do C/C++ development; can't wait to port that script over to a REAL effin' language), but if it's as slow as I remember it being, I can see lots of companies turning back really quickly.
This is not true. How useable would Facebook be without requiring a password to log in? Yes it would be easier to get in, but you would lose any trust in the application as anyone could be posting as anyone else. A system should be as secure as the data you are trying to protect within it.
See the following:
Balancing usability and security is one of the toughest parts of designing a secure system; anyone that's had to even remotely consider security as a factor knows this. It still holds, however, that usability always suffers as security improves.
Facebook is a great example. Their authentication scheme was originally only passwords. However, they've had problems thwarting bots and other security problems over the years, so now they added CAPTCHAs depending on use. This wasn't too much of a problem (though I'd argue that usability was mitigated in favor of security, even if only slightly)...until Facebook Chat got popular. (Remember when people protested it up and down?) Porting Facebook Chat to anything was possible but difficult, largely due to these new authentication rules. Getting kicked out every couple of hours was the norm while using the Facebook protocols available at the time. It wasn't until they moved it over to Jabber that IMing on Facebook using external clients got easy.
Twitter's ongoing security issues are another great example of this. It's dead easy to use and I'll venture that the API is pretty easy to work with, since there are umpteen Twitter clients out there for every platform there is. However, Twitter made it on the front page here tons of times due to security breaches and the like. It's still used as an easy score for bots.
but most of the time getting a true single sign on requires you replicate password changes to systems that cannot change their authentication source and then you end up with the weakest link (say a messaging client that stores the password as an md5 hash) having the key to accessing your most guarded systems (i.e. payroll systems).
This is true, but there are a few caveats to that:
I don't think single sign-on is a flawed idea; at worst, I believe it's incomplete. In an ideal world, all software would support the most common authentication scenarios available (password, passphrase, card token and smart card). It would be extremely convenient for people to use one key for all of the important systems they interact with on a daily basis, as that would mean there's less for the person to lose and/or remember. However, idealism is hardly representative of reality. Perhaps a hybrid model where smart cards/work IDs are used for Windows authentication and RSA tokens are used for other systems would be a more realistic proposition...
What happened?
The cost to have users continually change their passwords is small by comparison.
But the costs of a data breach associated to the natural carelessness of handling passwords (making a post-it note, blanking the password, making them too simple, never changing them, etc.) are much, much higher.
Yes; in fact, I own two (E6500 for myself, and an E6400 for my work). I haven't had any problems with either of them, though my lid casing is pretty dinged up from being carried, tossed, dropped, etc.
One really cool bit I like about the Macbooks is their magnetic hinge, especially since the first hinge I had broke off after about three months.
Increased security always decreases usability. Though now that I think about it, I'm wondering: why aren't smart cards used more in corporations? Wouldn't it be convenient for people to log in with the same ID they use to get into their workplace building or floor?
Just a thought...
Get it on eBay, though if you live in or are close to a major city, finding one on Craiglist can be significantly cheaper. (I think you can get a 17" non-Unibody Macbook Pro for something like $800 here in NYC.)
You can also go to Apple's refurbished store, which will get you a nice warranty with it too.
Problem: iPhone developers must have the latest updates installed in order to install the SDK. I think older SDKs can be installed, though it will obviously be limited and, at worst, obsolete.
Solution: Any computer with an Intel Core or Core 2 Duo CPU can install OS X using Empire EFI or Chameleon CD bootloader and the retail disc from the Apple Store. It's super cheap at $29.99, but don't bother if you're trying to get it for the license; installing it on a PC still breaches it.
Also should note that in many cases, software updates are completely seamless. Updating to 10.6.3 on my Latitude E6500 was as simple as using Software Update, though SleepEnabler.kext needs to be deleted before installing/rebooting. (SleepEnabler is kernel-dependent, so wrong SleepEnabler = horrible kernel panic, though it's still resolvable by booting the retail disc and removing it using Terminal.)
Lol nice pun. :) Fortunately, those using Snow Leopard still have free reign over choice of development platform...
Now they are mostly on par with my Dell Latitude E6500 (or a Precision M4400, which has the better graphics card) at about $700 more. (Both of them run OS X Snow Leopard, with updates, really, really well.)
They do look ridiculously good, though.
I take that back. I read the article, and had no idea of the HUGE following that it has in South Korea.
Sorry about that.
Look, I know that we call some competitive activities "sports" to make them appear more legitimate, but video gaming is as much as a sport as computer troubleshooting is, which is hardly at all...
Just call it pro gaming and leave it at that.
Go ahead and mod me down now.
Yeah, but that's a program-specific error though. And they still give you an error code; way better than this. Of course I know that memory region; I write all my bits to RAM manually! :(