It’s only been a few months since Google Wave came out of beta, and now it’s being killed off.
(…) Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.
– Update on Google Wave
Can’t say I’m surprised.
For most of my professional career, I’ve been one of the class of software engineers that don’t mind dealing with their QA department too much. In my experience, engineers and testers clash more often than not — which is probably largely to do with looming deadlines the tense situations that result from them more than anything else. Which in turn is really a problem that management should deal with… but quite often doesn’t.
But if quality assurance was taken to be part of the development process at more or less every step, that might not be necessary.
The role of [Software Quality Assurance], then, is not merely to ensure your product works. It is to ensure the business you are building around your product works the way you intended, by ensuring that your product’s target audience is satisfied.
— Put Software Quality Assurance in it’s Place!
Maybe people should just view SQA as affecting the bottom line, rather than affecting deadlines, and consequently treat it with the respect it deserves.
So I figured I’d cave in to the hype surrounding StarCraft II to log in to my Battle.net account, and see whether there is an OS X download, and how much that would be. I was greeted with new terms and conditions for my account that I had to agree on.
There were two boxes, one with a ton of relatively regular sounding terms. Then a second box with this:
Chat Agreement
In order to provide the Battle.net Service, Blizzard must be entitled to access, monitor and/or review text chat, including private, or “whisper” chat, in the event of complaints from other users or violations of the law. By clicking the check box below, you agree that Blizzard (or one of Blizzard’s affiliates) has the right to monitor and review personal messages you send or receive on the Battle.net Service, or through any game that is playable through the Battle.net Service, to investigate potential violations of the law, the Battle.net Terms of Use, or the Terms of Use agreement specific to any game playable on the Battle.net Service. Blizzard will not use the information for any reason other than pursuing such violations.
[ ] I consent to Blizzard monitoring and/or reviewing my personal messages.
Uhh… privacy?
Fuck no, Blizzard, you’re not law enforcement.
The law gives police the right to do all of the above if sufficient reasons exist for doing so. You don’t need the same power.
You cannot be allowed to have the same rights without making a mockery of democracy; there’s a ton of good reasons why you shouldn’t have that power, and why having that power is privilege restricted to a very small set of government officials.
No. Just no. This is not 1984.
Der Titel sagt eigentlich alles, der rosa Riese mag Netzneutralität nicht. Ein Glueck lebe ich im Ausland und kann gar kein Kunde mehr von denen sein.
Sorry about the German post: it links to a German language article, and there’s not much point in trying to translate everything. The gist of it is that Germany’s largest ISP speaks out openly against net neutrality, and received a lot of criticism for that. Go German netizens!
In recent years, I’ve watched myself grow increasingly cynical and almost hostile towards irrational belief systems. This trend had me worried for a while… at best, it’s not nice to become cranky when people mention their beliefs, and at worst it appears to stand in direct conflict with human rights’ freedom of religion. I’m a most fervent supporter of human rights; that I might not actually adhere to what I fight for is a disturbing thought.
Before I go into details, let me briefly explain what I mean by a “belief system”. Any religion fits into that, obviously. But so does homeopathy, cloudbusting and pretty much anything that ends in -ism.
What I absolutely do not mean are atomic beliefs, that is a belief that stands on it’s own, or individual beliefs, that is a belief that you as an individual hold but that isn’t generally shared by others.
![[FSF Associate Member]](/images/fsf_4971.png){kind=small}
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