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Atari has apparently decided to cut back on video game titles by 20% and the number of PC games to only 20%. Driv3r isn't going to help this company as they go down, down, and further down, Interplay style. Not that I'm bitter.

If we decide to drop copper as an alternative, then we will lose big when some event occurs that prevents a VOIP user from getting a critical emergency call through - and the resulting lawsuits and regulations will stifle growth and acceptance of VOIP as a viable universal solution.

Events can affect conventional service as well, but Vonage appears to be aware of the impact of VOIP on emergency services. Read Internet Phones, 911 Systems Could Clash.

There are instances where people have even died because regular 911 service failed. Here is a sampling of failures:
Family Questions Follow 911 Failure
911 goof slows cops' arrival in killing

I'm certain there are more; I only googled for a few.

Here is a link to Wired news covering the story.

Wired News Story link

Does this annoy anyone else, or is it just me?

This is just for fun...

The price of Red Hat's stock has grown steadily over the last year, from around $5 to around $25.

Meanwhile, the price of Microsoft's stock has stayed flat, at around $26.

And today, for the first time since the initial bubble, the price of Red Hat's stock exceeded that of Microsoft's.

See RHAT and MSFT

Of course, it doesn't really mean anything, since you can't really compare the two. There are a lot more shares of MFST in circulation than RHAT. Mind you, the fact that one is going up, while the other is flat does mean something.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it. :-)

This is just for fun...

The price of Red Hat's stock has grown steadily over the last year, from around $5 to around $25.

Meanwhile, the price of Microsoft's stock has stayed flat, at around $26.

And today, for the first time since the initial bubble, the price of Red Hat's stock exceeded that of Microsoft's.

See RHAT and MSFT

Of course, it doesn't really mean anything, since you can't really compare the two. There are a lot more shares of MFST in circulation than RHAT. Mind you, the fact that one is going up, while the other is flat does mean something.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it. :-)

Zacks.com Announces That Mike Chrisman Highlights the Following Stocks: IPIX Corporation and SCO Group

For Sale: Lycos.com

Posted by
timothy
in The Mysterious Future!

from the make-an-offer dept.

prostoalex writes "Terra Lycos is planning to sell Lycos.com. The price, quoted by News.com.com.com, is in the $200 mln range, while the original acquisition amounted to $12.5 bln. Lycos is currently re-inventing itself as a portal for the new generation with the link to Playboy affiliate placed right on the front page (click on "Adults 18+ only")."

What about Lycos you insensitive clod? They're still around.

In the UK around the year 2000, they advertised Lycos on the TV. The advert featured a bagpiper who had a kilt and no underpants and asked Lycos to find some underpants. A dog then went off at great speed, and came back with underpants in his jaws, and then, the bagpiper could safely play the bagpipes when there were sudden gusts of wind. Anyway, just for fun, I typed in 'underpants', on Lycos and the first item it came up with was a pornographic website. However, this was lycos.com, and not lycos.co.uk which is what was advertised.

awww crap

Now that I think about it, all this stuff about income taxes and sales taxes masks a real problem: corporate tax evasion.

Hell, even Warren Buffett thinks that something is up. According to him, federal income taxes paid by all U.S. companies fell by 16 percent, from 1995 to 2003. I'd say, forget about the small fries and target the big multinational corporations that are siphoning off funds, and leaving the rest of us taxpayers with the bill.

Me too. Its a rather sad state of affairs when someone like Elena takes the time, fuel, and a camera along and lets the rest of the world see what its really like, and then might have to pay for the bandwidth to boot.

Apparently you're new around, well, the internet. Back in the day, there were PLENTY of free hosting sites. Geocities, Angelfire, and quite a few others. They all had that broken business model where you give stuff away for free then worry about making money later. Somehow, they didn't all die.

Anyway, from Angelfire's Site:

----
FREE ANGELFIRE
Where can you get 20MB of space, great building tools, and a blog of your very own - all without spending a dime? Angelfire FREE, that's where! Who says the best things in life are free? We do! Sign up today. You'll be glad you did.
----

See? Free. Really. If you want, you can get your own space. Remember geeks run their own sites, non-geeks use free services like this, which are usually kinda huge. So don't worry about bandwidth.

I followed the whole site, wondering when the server was going to melt down like it did the last time, apparently before I even got there, but this time it held up quite well.

It *didn't* melt down, dude. Did you see her message? It said she had temporarily removed it to add more content. Now, it's back. The server didn't melt, it was always available.

Sorry if i seem harsh on you, Almost-Retired, but i just feel the need to point out how your entirely made up theories on this site are unfounded, and incorrect. For the sake of accuracy, and so we don't feel sorry for her paying this ficticious money to this free site.

Is this the one? I think it's the best LCARS skin. There's also this one, but I don't like it as much.

If you just mean general style, and not imitation, I can't help you, but there are only 446 skins in the sonique.com archive, so it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to scroll through all of them to see if it catches your eye.

Is this the one? I think it's the best LCARS skin. There's also this one, but I don't like it as much.

If you just mean general style, and not imitation, I can't help you, but there are only 446 skins in the sonique.com archive, so it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to scroll through all of them to see if it catches your eye.

Lots of tutorials, some more technical than others: webmonkey. Wired said they're pulling the plug, however, so you might want to archive the site if HD space permits.

I, for one, will be switching to DirecTV if they don't get this figured out.

There was a similar situation with DirecTV, the ABC Family channel, and the 700 Club a while ago. In that case, however, it was DirecTV playing hardball. IIRC, DirecTV wanted to pay less to ABC for the ABC Family channel, and threatened to drop it. Since ABCF is the cable outlet for the 700 Club, the issue of "freedom of religion" came up. So DirecTV started a scroll that said something like "The 700 Club is carried by a number of local channels throughout the country." A deal was eventually worked out, and ABCF is still on DirecTV.

There was also a nasty battle between ESPN and Cox Communications.

In short, these disputes are becoming commonplace. Thank goodness so many good shows are being put out on DVD!

Travis

For the record, a free Angelfire site presently gets 1 GB of monthly bandwidth on which to serve up to 20 MB of content. Which means, when /. finishes off this site's bandwidth allowance, this site's gone for the month.

If somebody were to give this unfortunate person Angelfire's highest "element plan", it would cost $15 for the setup and $14.95 for the first month, and give her 30 GB of monthly traffic. That might be enough to survive a slashdotting.

... and Paul Boutin is writing about a subject that he knows about, because he has written several good articles in Webmonkey

I will miss Webmonkey too. I have learned many things about web building in the "early days" from the articles that have been posted there.

Mulder's Style Sheet Tutorial on Webmonkey is one of my favorite style-sheet references.

This might seem like a bad joke but people getting laid off from webmonkey team might make a use of this:

Webmonkey Tips

It seems as if TerraLycos is cleaning house and pulling the plug on unprofitable operations. Furthermore, it seems as if the Lycos search engine itself is one of those elements being downplayed.

The current Lycos Home Page still has the search box, but they're talking about the "new Lycos" which is all about the non-search sites that are part of the Lycos Network. It seems as if Lycos has fallen into an also-ran status.

Another classic search engine met the same fate a few years ago. When Infoseek was bought up by Disney, it was supposed to be the anchor of the Go Network. When that didn't work out, the core part of the Go Network shut down, leading to a Go Network homepage that does nothing but link to stories on the surviving Disney-owned sites and provide a Google-powered search box.

When we see Lycos Search powered by Google, we'll know that the layoff spree is complete...

Is this article Better LATE than NEVER?

This was first announced almost TWO WEEKS ago, on February 17th. NEWS for nerds? Maybe those who just got back from a 10 day Internet-less vacation in Laos!

Perhaps the delay is due to Webmonkey's bashing of the VA Linux / Andover / Slashdot buyout in which they said "Any unbiased appraisal of this merger, however, will yield one difficult but inescapable truth: The camaraderie and high spirits engendered by Linus and his band of programmers will soon be replaced by the same rancor and factiousness that permeates the rest of the capitalist world. And Slashdot, which is so highly revered by its readers and those who know its mission, will soon lose its trust, reputation, and standing. The deal has dealt the much-heralded geek community and its open-source development model a terrible blow, one from which it may never recover."

This may sound far-fetched, but one time I worked for a particular company that denied another company a lucrative contract just because that company's CTO had bullied my company's CEO when he was in high school (these two companies were in the same city). So, stuff like this happens, even (perhaps) at Slashdot. OSDN/Slashdot may just not want Webmonkey or any of its entities to get press coverage of any sort, and it could be an unspoken rule among editors. I just queried Slash's database for Webmonkey-based stories, and I must say that they didn't carry nearly as many of them as they could have. Either way, it's interesting in my opinion, especially since they bashed Slashdot so much because of that merger, and Slash is still mostly alive and well these days, so kudos to Taco et al. for that.

You'll still have to have a license for any music you want to play... assuming that its artists who are covered by restrictive contracts. You'all know about the fees that clubs, bars, and other venues have to pay to the good folks at ASCAP, SESAC and BMI... There really won't be any competition for clearchan-hell. On the other hand, if you've really wanted to see what AXELF sounds like on the "airwaves," this might be just the thing for you.

Apple's stock is up $.07, it must be true! ;-)

Both Google and Fast have image and picture search. They're all right. But I have had more luck with Lycos.

What are your experiences?

Of course, none of these services search in the image data itself. They search filenames, special features (like image size), and the content of the pages they are found in.
What is the state of searching in images today? Facial recognition systems have existed for a while, but they are made for a specific purpose.

How long before we can take a picture of that piece of your IKEA furniture and find the same model in pictures of celebrity houses, Babylon 5 sets and crime scenes? Or taking a picture of that familiar-looking person walking down the street, searching for her, and remembering that she was in that "reality" series two years ago.

One site that I've found useful as an introduction is Mulder's Stylesheets Tutorial. It's presented quite well, and covers enough to give you a good idea of what can be done easily with CSS.

I'd go on more about it, but if you're looking for a good tutorial, you'll probably try every link you see in this story's comments. If you're not looking for a tutorial, there's no point in me wasting my time describing it.

That and it's time to poop. Bye!

There were a few players out there - most mp3 enthusiasts at that time would have heard names such as:

(1) Nad, the mp3 decoding engine was leagues greater than the equivelant winamp decoder at the time. Extremely light (later grew to become the Sonique)

(2) Kjofol - excellent player, one of the first to use skins.

Now compare to the Froogle results which lists 3 wave compatible sheaths on the first page (two of which were the wave custom molded ones I was looking for) and almost all are from independent vendors (versus amazon.com referrals). I got lucky and managed to snatch the last one from one of the first page vendors. I'm quite impressed with the beta release. I hope they do well.

Everyone keeps making the analogy of breaking into my private home. This MAY be an acceptable analogy if people are scanning IP #'s and try to break into my non-publicly accessable home computer. But if I am running a web site with a MySQL backend that is listed by google, that I want people to see, and someone pokes around my "feedback" form for my blog and finds that they can make a purple barney pop up, they'd better tell me about it. And I will be appreciative too, because "shame on me!".

It's even worse if I am selling stuff and have people's names, addresses and (God forbid) credit card numbers on my system (This is why I won't do CC auths on the sites I host - I'm not confident enough yet in my own abilities to risk it. Well, that and I play Diablo L.O.D. on the same box as my webserver :-)

People need to realize that connecting to the internet carries with it a resposibility. A business needs to realize that they carry an even bigger resposibility because of the exponential additional damage that can be done to innocent people's lives because of their cavalier (or ignorant) attitude.

Public websites, and computers that host public information, which are accessible to every jerk on the internet should be compared to a bank or a store, not a private home. If I walk into a bank and see a stack of (my?) money sitting on the counter and no one is watching it, I have a responsibility to let someone know and they have a duty to fix the problem and sack the idiot responsible.

OTOH, If I see the money and don't point it out; instead opting to walk up to the manager and say "You are about to lose $$$, give me big bucks and I'll tell you how to avoid it." That's extortion. I'd expect to be thrown in the clink. But, if I can prove that I've acted in good faith and pointed out the security problem to the company and I can also prove that they have not acted on it in a (reasonable?) amount of time - I should be able to report it to a "responsible agency" and be able to file a (monitary/punitive?) claim on the negligent company comensurate with the potential damage as determined by a panel of unbiased experts (if you can find them).

Personally, I think this guy's a jerk who is trying for the quick buck. But I'm willing to admit that I don't know the whole story, since I couldn't be bothered to RTFA. It just bugs the hell out of me that some people are so insecure with their own capabilities that they would rather risk compromise than admit they were wrong and fix the problem.

Livecharts SCOX Values Check out the detailed quote and add a volume study. Insiders own about 45% Institutions about 31% That only leaves 24% laying around to trade. Volume is really low. Looking at the time and sales for the past few weeks there have been almost no large block trades. With so little trading volume it's probably relatively easy to keep the price up. We'll see what happens with the institutionals after the 11th of Jan.

I thought you would like to know: the NASDAQ:TTWO
are going UP TTWO

Not down as this ... "guy" predicted, so much for financial advice...

GTA is worse than kids sexual molestation?
makes you wonder if the guy is in the AMBLA?

*BTW: is very possible the so called "artist" who sued Rockstar and the 2 gungans who shot at cars (blaiming a videogame) will both lose their cases.
Meanwhile GTA:double pack is selling like pancakes on the xbox.

RedHat even got mention on the Nightly Business Report recently - the sco thing isn't taking the wind out of their sails. Techies who can grok the facts arent' scared of a paper tiger, however real it may appear to others who fall for that type of thing.

First off, why is such a worthless OS front page news on /.? SCO Unix is mediocre, and nobody would even think of using it. The only reason a SCO Unix review is on /. is because of the lawsuit hubbub.

I was poking through the SCO web site some time ago, to find good stuff for my SCO Report website and I discover SCObiz. Check it out. For $5,000, they'll basically give you a template site, with mediocre ecommerce ability. The datasheet is here (pdf), while the quick facts (pdf) is here. A Flash tour is here.

The Flash tour is pretty snappy, but you can tell, it's nothing more than a glorified template driven website builder for newbies, similar to what Tripod and Geocities provide with their drag and drop stuff. It's probably even worse.

Remember to visit SCO Report, where I do my part to annoy SCO with the truth, and SCO Countdown, where there are clocks counting down to SCO's demise...

Yeah, Sun does something like this with the Sun Ray Ultra-Thin Client. I'm guessing it's not going so well.

There's a great education site for teaching kids to write valid HTML here at Webmonkey.

Works for scared adults too.

I'd point her towards Webmonkey for Kids. They have some really neat stuff to get her started.

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/kids/

Mantis Markup Language (MML). Then they got bought by Lycos, fired, etc.

Windows is always 5 years behind.. *sigh*

Check it out here..

I've had material on MP3.com for several years now. Never paid for the service, so I had less to lose than those that took the Gold Membership, etc. But I still don't understand the griping.
The era of free multimedia serving is over. There's just too much overhead to justify providing that much free bandwidth.
For those of you who bitching about MP3.com, just accept this unfortunate reality.

Who's been screwed? OK, maybe the folks that signed up for Gold Membership. But it seems like it's pointless to bitch about what's happened - it's all just business.

It's not the same as being ripped off by your producer [Beach Boys and countless others], or cheated out of payment by a venue after a performance [an ever-present risk in a business rife with unscrupulous people].

There's always an element of risk, whatever endeavour you undertake. There's no guarantee that a party with whom you have entered into a contract and paid money for future services will not go out of business, or sell out to another party. That's just a fact of life.

Fortunately, there are still plenty of free and low-cost music-hosting alternatives [sorry, I haven't checked ALL these links recently, but most should still be good. I am a lazy sod.]:


AMP3.com
AmpCast
Audiogalaxy
efolk
etree.org (SHN)
Listen.com
Lycos Music Search
MP3.com
nzmp3
peoplesound
SoundClick
stationMP3
gdlive.com
FurtherNet
CD Baby
IUMA
BeSonic
My Local Bands
SoundClick
VITAMINIC
archive.org etree listing (SHN's)
emusic
listensmart


My music (if you're curious, totally bored, and looking for something to listen to).

I'm surprised this merited a news item.
Webmonkey had a similar article three and a half years ago, that provide some more solid examples of what happens.

I designed an e-commerce site over the last six years, and evaluated where there might be XSS vulnerabilities. Not having a bulletin board or guestbook removes many areas for exploitation.

So if someone types contaminated data into their address field when checking out, you'd think all it hoses is their own purchase, right?

Well, with PHP or Perl CGI, it's possible that the inputted variables could exploit server knowledge: if you know the variable names used in the PHP code for, say, the MySQL password, then embedding this in the input to be evaluated on output can open an avenue for hacking. The variable has to be evaluated in most cases, although code which generates new PHP pages could result in similar problems.

HTML encode EVERYTHING the user sends to you.

Hmm, compared to, say, Oracle Media Objects, MTropolis, Hypercard, Supercard, Asymmetrix Toolbook, and all the other Director competitors that died around 1998? Or compared to all the other lightweight animation formats for the Web that died around 2000?

Microsoft has its own set of subpar abandoned animation alternatives for the Web that utterly failed:

• LiquidMotion (discussed in other replies here)
• Chrome (3-D presentation/animation), exactly like Longhorn except for XAML
• Microsoft animation controls in MSIE4, a bunch of ActiveX controls for timelines, sprites, animation paths, etc. (These are probably still present in the Windows MSIE code!)

Many many companies have been there before, the difference is MS has untold billions to spend trying, re-trying, and re-trying the market.

• iGetNet
• Bonzi Buddy
• Lycos Sidesearch

what about the SONIQUE 2.0 beta?

But you can apply CSS for the browsers that can handle it, while hiding it from the crap that can't, like NS4, using @import. You can then feed basic styles that NS4 *can* handle in a linked stylesheet.

It's called Progressive Enhancement. No-one is locked out. Everyone gets the content. Better browsers get more bells and whistles. Older ones get either vanilla or basically-styled HTML.

It's a win-win situation, unless you're the kind of developer/designer for whom the web *must* look exactly the same on every damn browser/OS combo. If so, invite all your users round to your house to use your computer. It's the only way to guarantee that they're all seeing it the same.

But seriously, at least read the book before coming out with all these...opinions.

Luckily the world was saved from this possibility.

-John (now, one of those "why, back in my day..." story telling guys... sigh.)

If you are interested in the scripting language comparison, see Server-Side Scripting Shootout.

It gave me quite a few results - first one was relevant: Bizrate

<paranoid rant>

You see, GE could give a shit about wind power. All you have to do is follow the money. First of all check out the Energy Policy Act of 2003, as Senator Domenici (NM) promises it will fix a whole laundry list of problems with our energy supply (real and percieved). Do` we really need a new Under Secretary position for energy and science as well as two new Assistant Secretary positions: one for science and one for nuclear energy, I digress.

Anways Being from New Mexico, the home of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories Don't be so shocked when Domenici's bill is pro nuclear.

Well, John Rice President and CEO GE Power Systems, recently (May 8) sez he's cautiously optimistic that there will be a new nuclear facility in the United States and has spoken with half-dozen major nuclear utilities about building a new reactor .

And I suppose since GE is a member of United States Energy Association and gave about $9 Million in campaign contributions (since 1990), It probably has some say into Domenici's Energy Bill which provisions for up to 8-10 new 1100MW nuclear reactors that The taxpayers (read you and I) would pay, through loans, 50% of the costs to build these. And according to the Congressional Budget Office the risk of default on such a loan guarantee to be very high - well above 50 percent(p.11). The CBO also figures that each of these will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $3Billion.

< /paranoid rant >

So why the hell would GE develop it's patents on Wind Turbines when the Good Ol US of A is gonna spend $52.6Billion over the next 10 years (p.1) on the Energy Policy Act of 2003.

Just follow the money....

Don't Poke the Penguin, SCO

You play as SCO.

Me? I'm a small-time web designer working out of my house. I do web sites for bands (1,a href="http://itsbeerthirty.tripod.com">2), fire halls, and also maintain my own little network of sites, flagshipped by my blog. My sites aren't anything flashy, rarely including Shockwave/Flash, JavaScript, or even Frames. As any web developer should, I keep multiple browsers around for testing sites and making small fixes in the code.

The first browser I always check in is Opera. Opera is my broser of choice when I'm surfing, so I always make sure that Opera likes my sites at sever different resolutions. It kills pop-ups totally (which is good since I use Tripod as a quick hosting solution), and allows me to test different browser identities at once as well. In the Windows environment, Opera is my King browser.

Then I move on to IE. Like alot of other /. users, I'm fairly anti-Microsoft. The only reason I use it is because, while Linux solutions are good and getting better, what I want to do still lives only in MS's domain. Anyway, I use IE 5 to debug for the IE family. If it works in 5, it'll most likely work in 6, too, and ultimately 7 (whenever that decides to get here).

Then it's off to the latest Mozilla release. Every time a new release is put out, I'm on it. Mozilla is used to test for Netscape compatability as well (like IE, if it works in M, it should work in N) since I haven't the desire to try and download it on my measly 56K connection.

My final destination is Linux, where I check it in Mozilla and Konqueror (I'm a big KDE nut), and have a buddy check them in other Linux solutions.

In the end, this article goes on at length about the IE problem. That problem doesn't really bother me. Chances are that by the time MS gets IE7 on the shelves with Longhorn, I'll be well into Linux land using development solutions that, within the three years it will most likely take Longhorn to arrive, will most likely have improved quite a bit given the current rate of open source development.

Meanwhile, my work will most likely remain simple, to the point, and still able to work in any browser it needs to. In the end, I really don't care if there's another 'Browser War' or whatever. I'll be happy if enough people can see my work and say "Hey, that looks good. Easy on the eyes, and simple to use." That is the goal of any good website, no matter what the size.