I asked him for my full archive download in October 2022, and having heard nothing back I wound up paying him another $39 to keep my archive from being deleted while I tried to get his attention.
I didn't get any response until late February 2023, when he sent me a link that produced a 404 error. I complained about that, and about a week later, I got an email from him that asked me whether I'd been able to download that archive he'd sent me the link for "in late January".
I told him, again, that the link he'd sent in February hadn't worked, and that I'd told him that, and in a couple of hours everything was wrapped up satisfactorily.
Had he been able to do that when I'd asked for it five months earlier, I would undoubtedly have a much higher opinion of the man.
It used to seem to me that there was a strong libertarian tendency among computer people, at least relative to the rest of society.
I always attributed this to the fact that anyone who has ever tried to tell a computer what to do has a different kind of understanding of how hard it is to precisely define intentions, even when the compiler doesn't have a personal financial or other incentive to deliberately misconstrue your code so as to create a bug.
It doesn't matter how beneficial is the intention of your law, it'll really only work if it's generally aligned with the local cultural values -- in which case people will Do What You Mean.
Politicians either don't understand this, or pretend not to; you regularly see them passing laws to outlaw things that are already illegal.
In the past few years, McDonald's (and some, but not all, other fast food restaurants) really seems to have gone all-in on the price-discrimination approach of setting list prices high and offering all kinds of discounts if you know where to look.
Relevant to the Big Mac Index, at the moment the app offers a two-for-one deal, through February 27, on Big Macs; so the effective price isn't $5.81 but $2.90. If you don't want two Big Macs, you can get free fries or a free drink, or both, or 20% off your whole order instead: but you can only use one discount every fifteen minutes, and you can only use any specific discount once per day.
The implication for the Big Mac Index is that in the face of the complex web of discounts offered by McDonald's it's nearly impossible to calculate the actual price of a Big Mac in the United States for general purposes.
That the 'discount' is offered through February 27 shows that this isn't really a discount but effectively the regular price for people who order through the app. The choice of the 27th for the end date leads me to suspect that they might be lifting the discount for one day a month to keep the FTC happy.
>“The most cruel and evil effect of the Means Test is the way in which it breaks up families. Old people, sometimes bedridden, are driven out of their homes by it. An old age pensioner, for instance, if a widower, would normally live with one or other of his children; his weekly ten shillings goes towards the household expenses, and probably he is not badly cared for. Under the Means Test, however, he counts as a ‘lodger’ and if he stays at home his children’s dole will be docked. So, perhaps at seventy or seventy-five years of age, he has to turn out into lodgings, handing his pension over to the lodging-house keeper and existing on the verge of starvation. I have seen several cases of this myself. It is happening all over England at this moment, thanks to the Means Test.”
It's not that I see the greater flexibility of, well, nearly all non-Apple product as being a bug, exactly. There are certainly tremendous advantages to being flexible, adaptable, and extensible. It's just that there are also some advantages to being less flexible; these advantages are subtle and often missed.
The big win in an inflexible system like the iPhone — aside from it being inherently more discoverable and predictable — is that it's much easier and more reliable to get an intelligent, thinking, learning human to adapt to an inflexible system than it is to build a system that can deftly adapt to various imagined human desires.
It's this inflexibility, oddly enough, that gives Apple its reputation for ease of use: it's possible to make much more concrete statements about the operation of a Mac or an iPhone or iPad than it is about most competing systems and devices. The system perceived as 'friendly' is, oddly enough, the one that imposes its will upon the user.
Alternately, it can be explained by the fact that a lot of happy Apple customers — 'fans', I suppose — are fine with farming out some of their technological decision-making to Apple. Seriously: if Apple isn't putting some seeming obvious feature into a phone, or computer, or whatever, I figure that there's probably some good reason for that. I'm not sufficiently interested to need to understand the minute details of every choice they make.
LTE is a perfect example. I don't give a damn whether my next phone has LTE. I have better things to do with my time than figure out whether the coverage — independent of carriers' marketing claims — is decent, make guesses — independent of etc. etc. — as to the extent of the coverage rollout over the next year, read up on the battery-life implications of LTE, and ponder whether the bottleneck on my phone has anything to do with the network speed in the first place.
(Actually, I already have a very strong suspicion about where the bottleneck is on my phone, and that's why I really don't care about LTE right now.)
Overall, I trust Apple to sell me the best all-round phone given the constraints of current technology. So far I've been very happy with that approach. So, yes, if Apple isn't putting some seeming obvious feature in a phone, I figure that there's probably a good reason for it, a reason that I'd understand and possibly even agree with if I invested a lot of time in the question.
The risk is that, should Apple go rogue, they could rip me off for an iteration or two before I wised up. In which case I would just go buy another phone from someone else and be done with it.
It's not like I'm blindly trusting Apple to not, say, saw off my leg and feed it to alligators; I'm trusting them to make decisions about a whole bunch of tradeoffs, decisions that will at best be valid only for a few months anyway, decisions on which hinge the expenditure of a few hundred dollars.
I'm not saying that becoming a micro-expert on your purchases is wrong, just that there's something to be said for not bothering. This is very much not the Nerd Way, but I have to say that I'm much happier since I stopped having to personally establish the perfect correctness of all my techno-purchasing decisions.
I'm also skeptical of the idea of an iPad with a 7" screen, mainly because typing on such a screen would be far worse than on the current one.
However, such a thing would probably be a lot more pocketable than you'd think. My Kindle 2 (9" diagonal and 3/8" thick overall) fits very nicely into all of my inside coat pockets.
The Kindle 2 also weighs less than half of what the iPad does, which is important; I thought about having a giant pocket sewn in to some of my jackets, but then I realized that I'd need a counterweight on the other side, and I actually got as far as starting the weight-and-balance calculations before concluding that this was getting silly. The counterweight idea would require keeping the jacket buttoned all the time, anyway.
A high-density-screen iPad the size of the Kindle 2 would be worse for movies, photos, and (especially) typing, but I could have it with me nearly everywhere, not just places where I am willing to carry my nerd bag.
> Would you apply the same logic to oxygen instead of water?
Markets are a means of managing scarcity. Oxygen is not scarce, at least not if you're at sea level and you don't mind it mixed about 5:1 with nitrogen and a bunch of other gases.
For use in places where oxygen is scarce — like on top of a tall mountain or in an unpressurized aircraft at high altitude — you'll find that the stuff is very commonly bought and sold.
I thought I was future-proofing myself a bit by buying a Griffin AirCurve. The AirCurve is an ear-trumpet kind of thing that acoustically amplifies the output from the iPhone's speaker. You wouldn't call it hi-fi, but it works surprisingly well.
I figured that the iPhone 4 would just require a different dock insert to hold the new shape firmly, but no dice: Apple have also swapped the positions of the speaker and microphone vs. their positions on previous iPhones.
I wonder how much of the speed differences are due to the time spent turning pages? The iPad generally turns pages faster than the Kindle (no matter what app you're using on the iPad), and most books present more text at once, so you have fewer page-turns to begin with.
A large part of AT&T's perception problem seems to have to do with their congestion, not their RF performance, in a few places.
This might be one of those situations where more information would be useful. The ideal solution would be to charge a higher price (e.g. a 'minute multiplier' — show this next to the signal strength indicator) for traffic in congested conditions — but this would present marketing problems, Mobile-phone pricing is already opaque enough, and people would rightly be suspicious that the introduction of such a congestion charge would soon result in interesting re-defintions of 'congestion'.
You might be able to get much the same effect by simply showing the user the current local network condition, by turning the signal indicator into a signal-and-congestion indicator. You'd see the signal strength as a measure of the radio conditions, and some kind of indicator that reflected the ability of the network to handle calls at that moment.
I'm assuming, with no particular knowledge of the matter, that the congestion problems with mobile-phone networks are like nearly all other such problems: extremely fleeting. You might be unable to make a call for about five minutes out of an hour; but if that's the five minutes during which you want to make a call, not only are you frustrated because you can only discover the situation through what amounts to black-box analysis, but the phone company gets no goodwill from you for the performance of the network during the other fifty-five minutes.
By observing the fluidity of Long Island Sound, though, you can be sure that no one has dumped ice-nine into the Gulf of Mexico. Similarly the existence of a single functioning production iPhone 4 proves that there's no fundamental design flaw in the frame-as-antenna idea.
I've also had no reception problems with my iPhone 4, despite trying everything I've read about or can think of to provoke them. Licking fingertips, grasping the phone in a position no human would ever use, sitting in my bathtub where I'd surrounded by several layers of metal lath, etc., etc.: I can get the indicated signal strength to drop somewhat (but not consistently), but I have never been unable to make a call during these experiments.
I am forced to conclude one of three things:
1. Message-board habitués are very loudly complaining about a tiny or nonexistent problem with an Apple product. This would be strange, because normally you can take all criticism of Apple and its products entirely at face value, and people never swarm out of the woodwork to complain about the performance of Apple products they don't own. Insert sarcasm punctuation mark here.
2. There is a design flaw, but it's a subtle one that results in a higher-than-expected rate of manufacturing defects, causing some people's phones to have more reception problems than one would normally expect.
3. The iPhone 4 performs about as well as every other mobile phone, which means: less than perfectly. Hype about the antenna means that this is resulting in an inordinate amount of public complaining.
Amazon handles my apostrophe without drama. One advantage to having an apostrophe in your name is that you can spot when people migrate their databases without paying attention, because the apostrophes tend to double each time. DirecTV is now sending my bill to a Mr. D''''''A…
Some systems will manage to accept the apostrophe properly, and then make life difficult by making up the collation as they go along.
At least 80% of the time someone tries to look me up in an alphabetical list, I have to try to convince them that no, I really am on the list, but that I might be found at the very beginning of the Ds, at the very end of the Ds, in the Ds where I'd be with no apostrophe (depending on how they handle alphabetization of punctuation), or at the top of the Fs (middle initial) or in the As (on lists where the D has been interpreted to be an extra middle initial).
Even better, I often wind up on these lists several times when someone decides that it's easier to enter all my information again rather than look for it in one or two more places.
Credit-card name verification seems to be a bit smarter; every credit card I have has a different variant of my name on it (and a lot of credit-card forms consider an apostrophe 'invalid' in a name even though there's one on my business Visa card), but I've never had a charge rejected because the name was not an exact match.
Netflix used to make it very difficult to find any of their customer service contact addresses or phone numbers.
I have an old blog post with a title that includes the word 'Netflix' and the phrase 'Customer Service', where I ramble on about a whole bunch of things; the content of the post is about a general principle that I think Netflix was illustrating, not about Netflix itself. The title, though, resulted in the post showing up high in search results for 'Netflix customer service'.
Three people attempted to address Netflix customer service via the comments box; one of them posted his phone number. Another posted his postal address and credit card information.
I posted a comment making it explicit that all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this blog post was not, in fact, Netflix customer service HQ.
A year later another guy posted another Netflix customer service request, right under my 'This is not Netflix' message.
I'd agree with you if you said that they deserved an outage of a few hours; that's the risk you run when someone else controls your data. Once in a while, things fail; when it happens to you and you control the data, you spend those few hours fixing whatever's wrong. When your data are in someone else's hands, you sit around writing angry tweets about it until it's fixed.
In the worst case, maybe you'll lose up to 24 hours of changes in case a backup needs to be restored.
For the data to be lost entirely, with no backup whatsoever, simply beggars belief.
I didn't get any response until late February 2023, when he sent me a link that produced a 404 error. I complained about that, and about a week later, I got an email from him that asked me whether I'd been able to download that archive he'd sent me the link for "in late January".
I told him, again, that the link he'd sent in February hadn't worked, and that I'd told him that, and in a couple of hours everything was wrapped up satisfactorily.
Had he been able to do that when I'd asked for it five months earlier, I would undoubtedly have a much higher opinion of the man.