I find the title inflammatory and ignorant; I would downvote this if I could.
While I applaud the tenacity in prospecting and divulging the methods at which Blizzard has employed to create such "tracking" "watermarks," I highly doubt this is to discourage or indict anyone. Quite frequently, screenshots are used during support requests.
As the author states, "we [...] verified that there is no pattern included in high quality screenshots." I find this highly suggestive that Blizzard was rather interested in an easier way to debug their program, and the mode slipped out in production.
There's a work around, please remove your tinfoil hats.
I was mainly referring to the implication by omission that Blizzard had nefarious intent with its watermarking. Though, my comment was itself inflammatory; karma's a jerk.
The title, as currently, written, "Blizzard is secretly watermarking WOW screenshots" is pretty generic (and entirely accurate - They are watermarking WOW screenshots, and it is being done secretly).
I'm curious as to what your title would have been:
"Blizzard watermarking WOW screenshots?" - This is less informative, but removes the word "secretly?"
Just a little note, I think there's a bug in your profile picture retrieval: asker & answerer have different usernames but the same pictures; e.g. John Skeet & Remus Rusanu on p. 9.
> _I just want a device that works, and upgrades easily._
As a loyal TMo G2 (stock Froyo) owner, I wholeheartedly agree with that opinion. As other replies called out, TMo has a knack for luring you in and never releasing OS updates.
That said, I'm very happy running my "legacy" Froyo OS: My GPS is fast and spot-on, data pipe is 4G-wide, and my bit-laggy camera app is supplemented by dedicated hardware for anything cleaner than "LOL quality."
I agree with that statement about Tmobile, but if you just stick with the reference devices (G1, Nexus, Nexus S, Nexus Galaxy,) you get all the updates from Google as they're released.
I've stuck with the Google reference models since the G1, and while I'm usually behind on "what's new" (I'm currently on a Nexus S, while the Nexus Galaxy has been out for awhile now), my wife is constantly buying the 'new' Android hotness, and is perennially jealous of my phone, even when it's older and has less features.
I get the software updates faster, everything works, and nothing has been mucked with, ala Blur or whatever. Meanwhile her phone is dual core, has HDMI out, and is better on paper, but crashes often, becomes unresponsive and lags on Android updates.
> Jason [...] does not understand or respect his responsibilities in his business relationship.
This is indisputably the most succinct account of what has transpired. I would have presumed there to be laws governing a minimal merchant balance -- placed on Square, then in turn passed on to its merchants -- to be maintained in good standing, good faith, and so as to be lawful.
Additionally, I find a poetic irony in his account with his own bank:
> At this point my bank has levied an insufficient funds fee on my account, however I was [surprisingly] able to [...] get the charges reversed.
To which I'm led to laugh: "So, Jason, you want it your way on both sides of the argument?"
This is the binary-vs-plaintext argument all over again. Java's been through this once before, and they settled on .jar files containing bytecode (the author's ASTs, etc.), and human-readable source.
To jinshaun's point: I wouldn't mind requiring an IDE, but it should absolutely not be required to run in a window system. The overwhelming majority of administration is conducted over CLI, and if you've never had to hotfix something on an X-less production server, you're either a deployment rock star or lying to yourself and others.
I lastly want to reiterate that programming languages are "languages" by definition, and their syntax and terminology are what makes them universal. Using "dingbats" to represent functionality inherently breaks down the out-of-band communication of ideas. "Add a left-pointer-finger to pass the value to the caller of the function." WAT?
I lastly want to reiterate that programming languages are "languages" by definition, and their syntax and terminology are what makes them universal. Using "dingbats" to represent functionality inherently breaks down the out-of-band communication of ideas. "Add a left-pointer-finger to pass the value to the caller of the function." WAT?
Yeah, every time someone comes along and says something like "text is so barbaric; we need to use GUIs to do things better!", I'm reminded of a quote along the lines of language being the only thing expressive enough to accomplish a broad range of tasks. Whether it's programming or system administration, there's a reason that technical people still have keyboards. If someone has something better, by all means show it. So far, no one has been able to meet this simple requirement.
I'm not saying you aren't typing symbols into an editor. Programming should still be done with a language. I'm saying: why should what you type be the same thing that is stored on disk. We are a decade into the 21st century and we still edit code the way we did in the 70s. Am I the only one who sees something wrong with that?
Let me ask you this. How will software for the Starship Enterprise be written? If we are still doing it in VIM then there is something seriously wrong with the future. Surely something better will come along. Let's explore what that something is.
While I applaud the tenacity in prospecting and divulging the methods at which Blizzard has employed to create such "tracking" "watermarks," I highly doubt this is to discourage or indict anyone. Quite frequently, screenshots are used during support requests.
As the author states, "we [...] verified that there is no pattern included in high quality screenshots." I find this highly suggestive that Blizzard was rather interested in an easier way to debug their program, and the mode slipped out in production.
There's a work around, please remove your tinfoil hats.