Do you have any tips on installing to a DVD-less netbook? I have a USB CD-RW, but I don't have a USB DVD drive, but I'm wondering if I could share the drive from my desktop PC over the network and use that to install. Any tips?
Ask your salespeople whether they have ever had a customer accidentally running the unregistered version of your product, even when they owned a valid registration code. I think that'll answer your question.
Still, it doesn't work nearly as well as is could. Many things aren't put in the right default permissions which makes a lot of stuff fail when not having admin privileges (I know I stopped using a limited user account when winamp didn't work well).
So WinAMP is coded by idiots who didn't read the documentation, and it's Microsoft's fault? Good to know.
1) Normal human beings don't use the CLI to check file permissions; you can do it, but as you've griped, the UI sucks.
2) The Unix equivalent is a string of like "rf-r-x-rfx" or some shit. It's no easier to read or use.
3) The NTFS permissions system is a lot more powerful than the (standard) Unix permissions system, so even if using it over the CLI is more complicated, that's just because it does more.
If people would stop running randomly-downloaded.exes on Windows XP while logged into administrative accounts, this would be... a cute WAV file and nothing more.
Say what you want about Vista, but at least it protects all users from stuff like this. Well, assuming you haven't removed that protection because some keep on Slashdot thought it was slightly annoying.
Why do you even have a queen? What the hell. "Let's spend massive quantities of government money to the institution that brainwashed us all into believing that God chose them to lead us and made us obey their cruel and arbitrary whims!"
Why don't you just keep the GOOD traditions, like everybody else?
Yes, but on the other hand, they HAVE made those modifications to two 747s already, yes? So (in theory at least) all the major kinks are already worked-out?
Whereas with the A-380, they'd be starting the process from scratch.
I think the reason is more one of scope creep. They probably have a long wishlist of items they want to put in Air Force One but currently can't due to space or size restrictions. If the mission of the aircraft is different than it was 25 years ago, then yes they should buy a new aircraft capable of meeting that mission.
(But I'd much prefer it come from Boeing. I don't see why they have to wait for the Dreamliner when they can get a 777 now...)
My point was that "not being able to see a lot of stars" is extremely petty. Compared to "neighbors with constantly loud music" or "not being able to breathe" or "there's no clean water", it is... you haven't changed my mind one bit.
Unless you're seriously equating "no clean water" with "not able to see dim stars" in which case I think you're literally crazy.
Things like streetlights are a public affair, and as such our "whims" on this matter are as valid as yours.
I agree, but the benefits of streetlights far, outweigh the downside of "waaah I can't see as many stars as people in 1850 could!"
If astronomy is important to you, move somewhere where you can practice astronomy!
Let's say I like snowmobiling... does that mean I should start up some project to convince every city to set aside a couple days a year to buy artificial snow machines and cover all the streets? Of course not, that demand is crazy. I could easily just drive (or fly, or otherwise travel) to a place where there's snow and enjoy my hobby without inconveniencing everybody else.
Well that's just silly. If my email provider goes down, there's nothing stopping me then signing up for a new one. And I can always create a spare one just in case. Same with OpenID.
Yes, but when you sign up for a new OpenID, all the data (answers, reputation, whatever) you've inputted/associated with the old one is lost! (Unless the site makes weird hackish changes, like StackOverflow did, to get it to recognize multiple OpenIDs for a single account.)
Why would I join a community and start interacting with it using Yahoo's OpenID login when, at any moment, Yahoo could decide it's not profitable and turn it off? (Like the site in the article did.) Boom, my data is gone. The only way I can keep using the site is by making a new account with no data.
(That said, if you only use webmail, and Yahoo shut down their email service, you'd also lose data; but at least with webmail I have the choice to download the email, OpenID doesn't let me "back it up" in any way.)
Ok, then get on an fucking plane. Geez, how about displaying some ability for independent thought and maybe thinking to yourself: "hm, maybe he didn't mean 'drive' in a literal sense, but perhaps he meant 'travel' instead!"
Yes, I know that costs money and takes time. But you need to ask yourself, "is it that important to me?" (Again: independent thought!) If so, then do it. If not, then stop whining. Asking everybody else to bow to your whims by turning off their lights is crazy and stupid.
It's a ABC Network-owned site about their soap operas, and it lets you log in using Passport. It doesn't advertise, or even say, that it does, but if you try it it works. (My friend was doing some consulting work for them, and noticed when he hit "Logout" from XBox.com, Passport told him it was logging him out of Soap.net as well.)
I'm sorry, it just seems to petty to ask everybody to turn off all their lights so some tiny group of people, all of who are perfectly capable of traveling somewhere else, can get their pet need taken care of. If viewing the sky is important to you, and you live where you can't find darkness anywhere, then I guess you just need to decided whether it's important enough to you to move, eh?
If you design a system without taking the human factor into account, you've failed. This isn't 1975 anymore- we can forgive the designers of email for not antcipating the human factor (spam) because it wasn't well-studied or considered relevant. There's no excuse in 2009.
If the product can't be learned quickly by the average person, you've failed. If you don't know how to communicate the benefits to your (potential) users, then they won't use it.
It seems to me that OpenID was designed in a haze of technical perfection with no consideration of the human factor.
On the contrary, having to register yet another unique login/password in order to use a web site is a major usability problem.
No, because once I've done that, I can log in without problems even subsequent time. Like I said in the original post, I've never managed to successfully log in with OpenID on the first try. Speaking of "cutting off your nose to spite your face."
I understand that, in theory, OpenID is "better", but in reality I just don't see it.
You ask me what a better solution is. I don't know; what I *do* know is that OpenID isn't it... I'd much rather use a browser-managed (or otherwise client-side) tool than OpenID. Maybe that *is* the better solution, I dunno.
Out of curiosity, have you done a survey to find out how many visitors to your site *aren't* logging in because of the OpenID requirement? I was just wondering this about StackOverflow in another post in this thread (they also require OpenID to log in.)
Yes, but the difference is that Passport has worked reliably for years and years now... 10 years, if I'm remembering correctly... and I've yet to flawlessly log in to anything using OpenID even once.
I have to admit, that after typing that post I went back to StackOverflow and they've actually fixed their faulty instructions for how to enter Yahoo IDs. (It used to read: my.yahoo.com/username which never worked, AFAIK. Now it just says to use www.yahoo.com and have Yahoo ask your username, which does appear to work.)
But look at it this way, availability-wise:
If you use OpenID with a delegate, you're dependent on your own web server working, at least one of your OpenID providers working, and StackOverflow working. If you use OpenID with no delegate, you're dependent on your OpenID provider working, and StackOverflow working. If they use Passport, they're dependent on Passport.com and StackOverflow.com both being working.
If StackOverflow had their own login, you only have one dependency: itself. Clearly this is the best option if you want to optimize for availability.
And what really makes me bitter here is that the goal isn't to make their website easier or quicker or more available to use, it's just a political campaign to increase the number of people who use some crappy, poorly-designed, technology. OpenID is too crappy to succeed on its own merits, so now we have website "activists" trying to force its use... that's crummy.
Yeah, and it demonstrates the flaws of OpenID quite well, too. The number one feature request for the site, since it opened to the public, was to add a way of "moving" your OpenID to another provider since many OpenID providers are completely unreliable. Instead of fulfilling this feature request, some users recommended creating a OpenID "delegate," which basically means setting up your own website which can switch between different OpenIDs. This process, needless-to-say, is not only extremely complicated and technical, but requires you own a webserver.
They've added in a "feature" where you can add a second OpenID (and have two entirely different logins for a single account! Usability/security nightmare!) Of course, that doesn't help people in the vastly most common case: when their OpenID provider craps out, and they haven't had the foresight to add a "backup" OpenID.
The usability of OpenID is also extremely poor. It took me several tries to get a Yahoo OpenID working. After finding out that the URL example given by StackOverflow's login page was completely wrong, and also discovering that Yahoo keeps OpenID turned off by default until you request it be turned on, my actual OpenID turned out to be something like: my.yahoo.com/asaij223dsdh2q45acsh421qi32h (I don't remember it exactly, it was a giant impossible-to-memorize string.)
Unfortunately, while the site now allows you to move your OpenID and made some other improvements, they still haven't added an option to just eschew OpenID altogether in favor of a simple username/password combo, so I just don't use the site at all. (Rather, I'll use the site, but not any features that require a login.) StackOverflow is free, so they don't care about ad revenue, but I'm sure curious how many users their crappy OpenID requirement is driving away.
Sure, Microsoft sucks and we all hate them, etc, etc, but at least their Passport/LiveID system actually freakin' WORKS. So far I've had nothing but problems from OpenID.
If you have assets in Javascript, though, I'd still recommend obfuscating it, even if only for reducing the filesize. I wouldn't go "crazy" and do more than just using an off-the-shelf JS decompiler, something like this: http://shrinksafe.dojotoolkit.org/
(I've worked for companies before that decided to write their own JS obfuscator; this is a surprisingly complex problem to solve, and most obfuscators can't handle edge cases like complicated RegEx. So make sure the one you pick does actually work, but don't waste your own time writing it.)
UAC is an example of both listening to the customer and at the same time ignoring them. They gave them the security they wanted but they didn't deliver it to them in a way they wanted.
Ok; how SHOULD they have implemented it?
Keep in mind your implementation must have all the same security features and broad compatibility as UAC, but it should also be closer to "what the user wanted". Keep it mind it also has to work with vendors with low-level OS hooks, like Novell, or you'll be accused of "monopolistic behavior."
It's easy to criticize, it's hard to come up with something better. OS X had the advantage that (virtually) all software for OS X had to be re-written anyway, so third party software vendors had many opportunities to fix their apps to work with OS X's security scheme. Microsoft has no such luxury, because they actually give half-a-crap about backwards-compatibility.
They're not Mitsubishi (makers of everything from TVs to medical scanners, to cars, to locomotives, to advanced fighter jets), but they're pretty damned diverse for a tech/software company. I mean, they got Apple, IBM, Sun, Dell, HP, all beat. (Although HP comes closest, I wager.)
Seems to me the easiest way to make Stallman happy is to not even use a computer at all. Or a cellphone, or a TV with an on-screen menu, or your car... etc.
If you use Linux, he'll gripe the drivers are binary blobs. If you remove the drivers, he'll gripe the firmware on the network card is proprietary, if you buy a crazy open-source network card, the BIOS on the motherboard is closed source. If you fix all that, oops can't use your cellphone: it's closed source too. And the chip in your car that controls fuel mixture? Closed source.
There's no way to make him completely happy while living like a normal human being.
Ok, so I have a loop within a loop, and I need to drop out of BOTH loops because of some error condition in the inner loop:
for( x = 0; x 10000; x++ ) {
for( y = 0; y 100; y++ )
{
if( error_condition ) goto fatal_error;
} }
fatal_error: CleanupAndQuit();
The only alternative is to create a boolean flag and check it each go through the loop, but that's retarded. And note that, even Javascript, which is an modern language designed with all the lessons learned from C, also has a way to break to a specific label, added exactly because it lacked a GOTO.
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Do you have any tips on installing to a DVD-less netbook? I have a USB CD-RW, but I don't have a USB DVD drive, but I'm wondering if I could share the drive from my desktop PC over the network and use that to install. Any tips?
Ask your salespeople whether they have ever had a customer accidentally running the unregistered version of your product, even when they owned a valid registration code. I think that'll answer your question.
Still, it doesn't work nearly as well as is could. Many things aren't put in the right default permissions which makes a lot of stuff fail when not having admin privileges (I know I stopped using a limited user account when winamp didn't work well).
So WinAMP is coded by idiots who didn't read the documentation, and it's Microsoft's fault? Good to know.
1) Normal human beings don't use the CLI to check file permissions; you can do it, but as you've griped, the UI sucks.
2) The Unix equivalent is a string of like "rf-r-x-rfx" or some shit. It's no easier to read or use.
3) The NTFS permissions system is a lot more powerful than the (standard) Unix permissions system, so even if using it over the CLI is more complicated, that's just because it does more.
If people would stop running randomly-downloaded .exes on Windows XP while logged into administrative accounts, this would be ... a cute WAV file and nothing more.
Say what you want about Vista, but at least it protects all users from stuff like this. Well, assuming you haven't removed that protection because some keep on Slashdot thought it was slightly annoying.
Why do you even have a queen? What the hell. "Let's spend massive quantities of government money to the institution that brainwashed us all into believing that God chose them to lead us and made us obey their cruel and arbitrary whims!"
Why don't you just keep the GOOD traditions, like everybody else?
Please. I know from extended studies of Dr Who that the British don't even notice when their prime minister is abducted by blubbery, farting aliens.
Yes, but on the other hand, they HAVE made those modifications to two 747s already, yes? So (in theory at least) all the major kinks are already worked-out?
Whereas with the A-380, they'd be starting the process from scratch.
I think the reason is more one of scope creep. They probably have a long wishlist of items they want to put in Air Force One but currently can't due to space or size restrictions. If the mission of the aircraft is different than it was 25 years ago, then yes they should buy a new aircraft capable of meeting that mission.
(But I'd much prefer it come from Boeing. I don't see why they have to wait for the Dreamliner when they can get a 777 now...)
My point was that "not being able to see a lot of stars" is extremely petty. Compared to "neighbors with constantly loud music" or "not being able to breathe" or "there's no clean water", it is... you haven't changed my mind one bit.
Unless you're seriously equating "no clean water" with "not able to see dim stars" in which case I think you're literally crazy.
Things like streetlights are a public affair, and as such our "whims" on this matter are as valid as yours.
I agree, but the benefits of streetlights far, outweigh the downside of "waaah I can't see as many stars as people in 1850 could!"
If astronomy is important to you, move somewhere where you can practice astronomy!
Let's say I like snowmobiling... does that mean I should start up some project to convince every city to set aside a couple days a year to buy artificial snow machines and cover all the streets? Of course not, that demand is crazy. I could easily just drive (or fly, or otherwise travel) to a place where there's snow and enjoy my hobby without inconveniencing everybody else.
Well that's just silly. If my email provider goes down, there's nothing stopping me then signing up for a new one. And I can always create a spare one just in case. Same with OpenID.
Yes, but when you sign up for a new OpenID, all the data (answers, reputation, whatever) you've inputted/associated with the old one is lost! (Unless the site makes weird hackish changes, like StackOverflow did, to get it to recognize multiple OpenIDs for a single account.)
Why would I join a community and start interacting with it using Yahoo's OpenID login when, at any moment, Yahoo could decide it's not profitable and turn it off? (Like the site in the article did.) Boom, my data is gone. The only way I can keep using the site is by making a new account with no data.
(That said, if you only use webmail, and Yahoo shut down their email service, you'd also lose data; but at least with webmail I have the choice to download the email, OpenID doesn't let me "back it up" in any way.)
Ok, then get on an fucking plane. Geez, how about displaying some ability for independent thought and maybe thinking to yourself: "hm, maybe he didn't mean 'drive' in a literal sense, but perhaps he meant 'travel' instead!"
Yes, I know that costs money and takes time. But you need to ask yourself, "is it that important to me?" (Again: independent thought!) If so, then do it. If not, then stop whining. Asking everybody else to bow to your whims by turning off their lights is crazy and stupid.
You'd be surprised.
For example, look at this site a co-worker pointed out to me: http://soapnet.go.com/soapnet/index
It's a ABC Network-owned site about their soap operas, and it lets you log in using Passport. It doesn't advertise, or even say, that it does, but if you try it it works. (My friend was doing some consulting work for them, and noticed when he hit "Logout" from XBox.com, Passport told him it was logging him out of Soap.net as well.)
Ok, what you've just described? About 8 times more complicated than just letting me pick a goddamned username and password and be done with it.
I'm sorry, it just seems to petty to ask everybody to turn off all their lights so some tiny group of people, all of who are perfectly capable of traveling somewhere else, can get their pet need taken care of. If viewing the sky is important to you, and you live where you can't find darkness anywhere, then I guess you just need to decided whether it's important enough to you to move, eh?
Or people who want to see dark skies could just drive for a couple hours and leave the rest of us alone.
If you design a system without taking the human factor into account, you've failed. This isn't 1975 anymore- we can forgive the designers of email for not antcipating the human factor (spam) because it wasn't well-studied or considered relevant. There's no excuse in 2009.
If the product can't be learned quickly by the average person, you've failed. If you don't know how to communicate the benefits to your (potential) users, then they won't use it.
It seems to me that OpenID was designed in a haze of technical perfection with no consideration of the human factor.
On the contrary, having to register yet another unique login/password in order to use a web site is a major usability problem.
No, because once I've done that, I can log in without problems even subsequent time. Like I said in the original post, I've never managed to successfully log in with OpenID on the first try. Speaking of "cutting off your nose to spite your face."
I understand that, in theory, OpenID is "better", but in reality I just don't see it.
You ask me what a better solution is. I don't know; what I *do* know is that OpenID isn't it... I'd much rather use a browser-managed (or otherwise client-side) tool than OpenID. Maybe that *is* the better solution, I dunno.
Out of curiosity, have you done a survey to find out how many visitors to your site *aren't* logging in because of the OpenID requirement? I was just wondering this about StackOverflow in another post in this thread (they also require OpenID to log in.)
Yes, but the difference is that Passport has worked reliably for years and years now... 10 years, if I'm remembering correctly... and I've yet to flawlessly log in to anything using OpenID even once.
I have to admit, that after typing that post I went back to StackOverflow and they've actually fixed their faulty instructions for how to enter Yahoo IDs. (It used to read: my.yahoo.com/username which never worked, AFAIK. Now it just says to use www.yahoo.com and have Yahoo ask your username, which does appear to work.)
But look at it this way, availability-wise:
If you use OpenID with a delegate, you're dependent on your own web server working, at least one of your OpenID providers working, and StackOverflow working.
If you use OpenID with no delegate, you're dependent on your OpenID provider working, and StackOverflow working.
If they use Passport, they're dependent on Passport.com and StackOverflow.com both being working.
If StackOverflow had their own login, you only have one dependency: itself. Clearly this is the best option if you want to optimize for availability.
And what really makes me bitter here is that the goal isn't to make their website easier or quicker or more available to use, it's just a political campaign to increase the number of people who use some crappy, poorly-designed, technology. OpenID is too crappy to succeed on its own merits, so now we have website "activists" trying to force its use... that's crummy.
Yeah, and it demonstrates the flaws of OpenID quite well, too. The number one feature request for the site, since it opened to the public, was to add a way of "moving" your OpenID to another provider since many OpenID providers are completely unreliable. Instead of fulfilling this feature request, some users recommended creating a OpenID "delegate," which basically means setting up your own website which can switch between different OpenIDs. This process, needless-to-say, is not only extremely complicated and technical, but requires you own a webserver.
They've added in a "feature" where you can add a second OpenID (and have two entirely different logins for a single account! Usability/security nightmare!) Of course, that doesn't help people in the vastly most common case: when their OpenID provider craps out, and they haven't had the foresight to add a "backup" OpenID.
The usability of OpenID is also extremely poor. It took me several tries to get a Yahoo OpenID working. After finding out that the URL example given by StackOverflow's login page was completely wrong, and also discovering that Yahoo keeps OpenID turned off by default until you request it be turned on, my actual OpenID turned out to be something like: my.yahoo.com/asaij223dsdh2q45acsh421qi32h (I don't remember it exactly, it was a giant impossible-to-memorize string.)
Unfortunately, while the site now allows you to move your OpenID and made some other improvements, they still haven't added an option to just eschew OpenID altogether in favor of a simple username/password combo, so I just don't use the site at all. (Rather, I'll use the site, but not any features that require a login.) StackOverflow is free, so they don't care about ad revenue, but I'm sure curious how many users their crappy OpenID requirement is driving away.
Sure, Microsoft sucks and we all hate them, etc, etc, but at least their Passport/LiveID system actually freakin' WORKS. So far I've had nothing but problems from OpenID.
If you have assets in Javascript, though, I'd still recommend obfuscating it, even if only for reducing the filesize. I wouldn't go "crazy" and do more than just using an off-the-shelf JS decompiler, something like this: http://shrinksafe.dojotoolkit.org/
(I've worked for companies before that decided to write their own JS obfuscator; this is a surprisingly complex problem to solve, and most obfuscators can't handle edge cases like complicated RegEx. So make sure the one you pick does actually work, but don't waste your own time writing it.)
UAC is an example of both listening to the customer and at the same time ignoring them. They gave them the security they wanted but they didn't deliver it to them in a way they wanted.
Ok; how SHOULD they have implemented it?
Keep in mind your implementation must have all the same security features and broad compatibility as UAC, but it should also be closer to "what the user wanted". Keep it mind it also has to work with vendors with low-level OS hooks, like Novell, or you'll be accused of "monopolistic behavior."
It's easy to criticize, it's hard to come up with something better. OS X had the advantage that (virtually) all software for OS X had to be re-written anyway, so third party software vendors had many opportunities to fix their apps to work with OS X's security scheme. Microsoft has no such luxury, because they actually give half-a-crap about backwards-compatibility.
They're not Mitsubishi (makers of everything from TVs to medical scanners, to cars, to locomotives, to advanced fighter jets), but they're pretty damned diverse for a tech/software company. I mean, they got Apple, IBM, Sun, Dell, HP, all beat. (Although HP comes closest, I wager.)
Seems to me the easiest way to make Stallman happy is to not even use a computer at all. Or a cellphone, or a TV with an on-screen menu, or your car... etc.
If you use Linux, he'll gripe the drivers are binary blobs. If you remove the drivers, he'll gripe the firmware on the network card is proprietary, if you buy a crazy open-source network card, the BIOS on the motherboard is closed source. If you fix all that, oops can't use your cellphone: it's closed source too. And the chip in your car that controls fuel mixture? Closed source.
There's no way to make him completely happy while living like a normal human being.
Ok, so I have a loop within a loop, and I need to drop out of BOTH loops because of some error condition in the inner loop:
for( x = 0; x 10000; x++ )
{
for( y = 0; y 100; y++ )
{
if( error_condition ) goto fatal_error;
}
}
fatal_error:
CleanupAndQuit();
The only alternative is to create a boolean flag and check it each go through the loop, but that's retarded. And note that, even Javascript, which is an modern language designed with all the lessons learned from C, also has a way to break to a specific label, added exactly because it lacked a GOTO.