silverlight

Sounds like we're in exactly the same boat :-)

About a year or two ago, I still had cable (I don't anymore), and I had the premium package with all the movie channels. At the time, a new season of Entourage was starting and I wanted to catch my wife up on the previous season. This previous season was not available via HBO On-Demand, they were not showing any re-runs on HBO that I could find, and the DVD of this season was not available in stores yet. There was literally no way I could legally let my wife watch this content (even though I had watched it, legally, the previous year on our HBO subscription, and via on-demand).

So, I downloaded it. And I got caught (via a warning letter from our ISP). Shortly thereafter we canceled our cable subscription.

I cannot fathom why, as a company, you would make it so hard for someone who is willing to pay you for content to get it. I wouldn't have been happy about having to buy it on DVD since I already have a subscription to HBO (and in my humble opinion, their previous original content should be available via on-demand all the time, although I realize that's a pipe dream), but I would have. Instead, they alienated a customer and lost all my money. That was around two years ago, so at $15/mo. (not sure how much of that goes directly to HBO) $360 has now been lost by them/my cable company for that part of my subscription alone.

If they ever allow you to buy into HBO Go (or whatever their online streaming option is called) by itself without a cable subscription I would consider it, but as long as they are stuck in their old-school ways they can forget having me (or most of my friends) as customers.

I know this article isn't about HBO, but I just thought I would point out another example of the way that content producers continue to alienate the people who should matter most: the consumer.

I recently switched to using this for a web app from Prawn. The main app is in Ruby, but this was so much nicer (simpler API, much, much faster PDF generation) than Prawn for our particular use case (PDFs with lots of exact positioning of text and images) that I actually set up an entire Node server just to use PDFKit. Give it a shot if you generate a lot of PDFs.

Looking forward to the conclusion of this! Interesting and as a side benefit might help me finally get a leg up on playing my wife in Scrabble :-).

Wow, this is incredibly useful. Great tip!

Is that the only thing they're looking for when they say they need a match? Just blood type? Or is that just one of the larger factors?

Am I the only one who wasn't aware that Heroku announced support for PHP?

He later goes on to suggest that perhaps there will be no "traditional" Windows on the tablet, only Metro, which he discusses having the same sorts of backgrounding-and-suspending capability iOS enjoys. From the article:

It’s worth noting that Metro is more than just a new look, and more than just putting touch first. Metro apps have similar restrictions to iOS apps. According to Jensen Harris, for example, Metro apps will get “about five seconds” after they’re no longer on-screen before the system puts them into a suspended state. There’s no file manager. Users no longer quit (or, in Windows parlance, exit) apps explicitly. These tradeoffs sound familiar?

...Did you (and the parent poster) simply read the Gruber article until you could find something to nitpick, then go with it?

This is a shame, I will miss all that great content. Hopefully this is just a ploy for a better deal and eventually an agreement will be reached...

You know it's an open source project and you could go ahead and add code yourself to support a more sensible shortcut on German keyboards, right?

The sense of entitlement when it comes to something created and used freely, solely for the purpose of making the world better, sometimes simply astounds me.

I think this is a fantastic way to do interviews. I could count on one hand the number of interviews I've been involved in where I actually felt like a true measure was taken of my skills and abilities as they relate to the job I would be performing. Instead it just feels like an excuse to trot out a bunch of computer science trivia.

If the government that produces the reserve currency can't hold up a AAA rating, what can? The idea that anything else should have a AAA rating if the US gov't doesn't seems a little ridiculous to me on face value.

There's only one problem with your thought process: even if the "thugs" were sent by the big bad hotel industry, they have no influence over the way that AirBnB responds to the incident. If they would have handled it in a responsible, savvy way this would be a non-story, or maybe even a big PR win. The "devious" plan only works if AirBnB bungles the ball, which they have done. They have no one to blame for that but themselves.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter who caused what to happen to this woman, does it? AirBnB have obviously given credence to the basic tenants of her story (she is a person, she used AirBnB, she was ransacked), that is enough. The only thing that matters after that is the way they handled the situation.

The tabloid they owned that was tapping the phone lines of celebrities.

Is VAT tax built-in to the £999 price point? Or is that added on at checkout (like sales tax is in the US)? If it's built in, that would explain at least part of the difference.

I read the licensing terms and you are still allowed to install the one copy you buy across as many computers as you own (for personal use). For business use you can install it on one computer that multiple users have access to (e.g. a shared workstation/library) or you can install it on all the computers that one employee uses (e.g. desktop + laptop).

So I guess it's more of a technical/sign-in limitation than a licensing limitation.

Having done a bit more looking, it seems like Rdio, MOG, and Spotify all have this restriction, and according to help articles on the MOG site, this is due to the contract the recording industry puts forth. I guess I see where they think this should be included, but I really don't think they should expect one family to purchase 2 or 3 subscriptions.

Am I the only one who signed up for a premium account with the expectation that I would be able to share it with my wife? I'm not quite sure why there's the artificial restriction on being in 'online' mode on more than one computer. It's really a deal-breaker for me. Our only option (I guess) is to have two accounts, which means managing two playlists, etc. (we like to curate them together, our music tastes are very similar). Ah well, I'm not sure if I will continue my subscription past this month...

I really think they could have done a much better job of framing the discussion around this increase. Talking about why they're doing it (not some B.S. about how "they really want to show people that they are committed to DVDs by mail") would have been appreciated.

Customers are not stupid. They see right through PR speak, and you can clearly see that in the comments.

Is there a way to start using this now? For Pandora One subscribers, even?

From the article:

"They could also use this information to see whether I’m using Google Video Chat. Whether this is the purpose or not I don’t know. Regardless, they’re collecting this information from millions of unknowing users. Bad form Facebook. Bad form."

I don't think that's making big assumptions. That's just stating a fact: you don't do something invasive when it's not required or expected by the people trusting you to run software on their computer. End of story.

I sure hope that's covered in the privacy policy...I'd love to see the legalese required to give permission for: "we are going to capture a list of everything you run on your computer every 3 hours". I'm sure it's just _super_ easy to understand.

With as much privacy flak as Facebook constantly takes, you'd think at least one person in the company would be trying to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen.

There's a pretty big difference between "joined" and "switched". This title is ridiculous.

It sounds like they're basically just basing it on the same Webkit fork as Apple and Chrome with a few features disabled...

I have to say, I'm not sure what the benefit of this service is. I understand where you're trying to positon yourselves (a "Heroku for eveything"), but to me that just doesn't work.

If I really want to not deal with the headaches of managing an infrastructure, I'd really prefer to go with a provider who picks a language and becomes a major player in that field (e.g. EngineYard, Heroku); companies that really push the envelope and give back and are a _part_ of the community. It just feels like you're going to be decent at a lot of stacks, and master of none.

If on the other hand I really have a need for 30 different types of services, and I don't want to work with 30 different service providers (Heroku + RedisToGo + etc.), I would probably be a big enough company/app to be comfortable just running things myself on AWS.

About the only way I think you could compete in this space (at least from my personal prospective) is to be cheaper than Heroku, EngineYard, RedisToGo, etc. for those particular stacks -- the idea being that you're not going to get the "major player" in Ruby to host your site, but you're not quite just using bare-metal AWS, either.

I really don't know why I'd pay the same or more than specialized service providers for a "jack of all trades".

EDIT: That being said, I do notice that you have stacks available for PHP, Perl, and other languages/tools that maybe don't have such an established PaaS provider as the Ruby ecosystem does. So maybe it's not too later to capture that market. I just don't see myself jumping on board the generic PaaS train for solutions where there are great, established providers out there (Ruby, Redis, CloudDB, others).

Another impressive release from the DocumentCloud team. Thanks for your excellent contributions to the open source community, they are always useful and appreciated.

It occurs to me that Upskirt is released under an MIT License, and is hosted on Github. So it would take approximately one click to create a fork and rename it to something else. The names of the files under the src/ directory are things like "markdown.c" and "buffer.c", nothing pornographic there.

I agree that when creating an open source solution, you should name it something work-appropriate. On the other hand, picking a name that's unique tends to get it to stick in developer's minds (who read about lots of open source solutions on a daily basis).

I guess I'm just saying: it sounds like you spent a lot of work on a "mammoth" task that could have easily been handled a different way.

+1. As a "cable cord cutter", I have no way of getting their content. I would gladly pay an ala carte subscription, or even buy episodes of the show on Amazon.com or another online VOD site (as I do for many other cable shows that I enjoy). I have seen all the arguments for the "franchise fees being their lifeblood", but if you wait until it's too late to explore other sources of revenue, it's going to be just that: too late.

How often are they doing this? 29 days is a little short notice for me to make it...am I going to have to wait a year for it to come around again?

Wow, this could not have come at a better time, since I was just wondering the other day if our companion app to our SaaS offering would be approved. Very pleased to see them reversing their position on this, and further clarifying that even this guideline excludes SaaS subscriptions (which I think is why they specifically spell out audio, video, etc. as the types of content). Thanks, Apple!