In theory, giving the huge amount of photographs available online, probably already covering every public inch of the populated world, a program capable of automatically crawling, indexing, glueing the images together and autocompleting their geotags could render a fully accessible 3D-'streetview' of the world without any human interaction. Although a final implementation might still be a few years away, this project is most certainly a milestone on the way to achieve it.
I still don't get how buying from steam is any different to buying from me, other than you may already have an account on steam.
For the record, I'd love to get my games on steam. I wish it was that easy.
[...]
I'm really hassling my payment provider to support amazons one-click method. For me, I think that's even more convenient than steam.
Well, that's basically it for the digital distribution point - people don't like to fill out forms, they don't like to give away their data; not their email, not their name and especially not their address, so the common accounts most people already have, Steam and Paypal, should be used whenever possible.
Since your payment provider requires people to fill out that boring form every time someone purchases something, why don't you support Paypal directly? Just return a page with a download-link and/or serial key like other services do. One of your competitors when it comes to getting money from pirates, Rapidshare, does exactly that. If that's not possible on part of your payment provider then you should consider switching to a different one, perhaps one that doesn't support Paypal on it's own. Even if you drop it altogether and use Paypal as the only payment method, you might be better of.
For the record, I'd love to get my games on steam. I wish it was that easy.
Didn't they create Steamworks and recently released an SDK so that every developer can finally get their games on Steam? I didn't really look into it but where is the problem? Do they have some kind of requirements you can't meet?
I think one problem with selling especially those small independent games is that people who are generally interested in pirating games usually have some warez sites bookmarked. The less press a game gets, the higher are the chances that those people stumble upon the cracked version before they even know about the game.
They just download it and either try it and delete it, or they may even play it every day for several weeks but they will never even once visit the original website of the game. So normally, there is no way to communicate the value of those games to them and therefore no way to win them as customers. However, if the game is fun, some will probably visit looking for support, a patch, expansions or a sequel and still, there is no way to make them buy it if they don't want to.
The only way left is then trying to delay the warez version as long as possible so people will read about the games on news-sites before they see the torrent on piratebay. Since tougher copy-protections usually only annoy buyers, I would honestly suggest to release many patches that add features and fix bugs but also render previous cracks unuseable. Pirates want the latest version, too; some will perhaps pay for it.
Well, they will probably just provide more than one ranking; like maybe normal search results, personal and community-based or something like that (perhaps only via iGoogle, so normal users won't be affected anyway)- and I guess they should do it soon.
With all the scam-sites, fanpages and other "related" websites to one project, it's sometimes a real pain to use Google for something as simple as searching for the official homepage of a project, movie or game or whatever. The best source for that seems to be Wikipedia and since most of my searches are exactly of this kind, I use it more often for searching than Google these days.
I bought a new system a month ago and waited for this card to retail since then (while playing casual games with my onboard GFX). And now that it's finally there, it costs 259 Euro (~370$) at my prefered store (alternate.de) and I don't find it anywhere else, anyway.
Does anyone know where to get that card in Germany for 200-250$ or perhaps a good store outside of Germany that will ship it to me?
Google knows that new searchengines or advertising companies are barely a competition to them because those can usually just be bought - most of them were even started with the intention to hopefully sell out to one of the big players. Like Youtube and Doubleclick, they will probably continue to buy everything that has a strong userbase or many customers, even if the used technology is not interesting to them.
I think what they really fear are sites that make more sense to use as a startpage than a searchengine. Those are usually trying to combine everything people use on a daily basis on the net, like email, news, social networks, and especially RSS. Just like Microsoft, Google tries to have every new technology available on their own, so that new features that get very popular on other sites can be added to their own tools in no time. I am quite sure that if Google wouldn't have implemented Gagdets so fast, some other site offering something like that (and there are a lot by now) would have taken some serious share from the... umm, "startpage-market."
However, as long as those other sites still use Adsense to monetize their work and Google custom search, there is not much to be worried about. Sites that make money through subscriptions on the other hand are more of a threat to them, especially if those subscriptions will continue to be paid with Paypal and not with Google Checkout - I think they were kind of late seeing that coming.
For me, websites that could compete with Google would have to offer whole new ways to surf on the web, with very strong but easy to use personalization and custumization features, some kind of "See the sites like YOU want them to see" or "Stop using a searchengine, we already found what you are looking for." It's a bit hard to get into details, but imagine some kind of webbased RSS reader that not only shares every feed a user added with others but also crawls the web for feeds on it's own. You can then select what you are interested in and it would feature some kind of very fancy recommendations engine based on an algorithm yet to be invented - not this "users that like this also like that" stuff but perhaps something semantic. Then you surf the web just like you watch TV, switching channels from politics to sport. It would probably have Firefox toolbar where you can see the feed headline of the next site to visit with skip, proceed and "try something else" buttons.
Another possible competitor would be said Gadgets-like startpage that implements even more stuff - in fact, everything; where you could post a comment on Slashdot right from your startpage or see if someone answered your somethingawful forum thread. There are already some tools and websites that can or at least claim to convert every website and forum to RSS feeds. Some already do a pretty good job at it but they all have some way to go. I guess Microsoft could even be the one doing something like this. It could be the reason they are supporting OpenID because one problem would be logging in "cross-over" to the various sites.
Thanks to the forgot-password-option every site offers, using a single email address to register to everything makes that email account already the weakest link anyway. With the millions of blogs and forums these days, however, that all require people to register and validate via email just to leave a comment, a "single sign-on system" is still a good idea. I guess secure critical sites like Paypal wouldn't cause a problem because they hopefully would never provide to login with such a system in the first place.
It's a pity that OpenID somehow doesn't take off as many expected and I don't think a Microsoft solution will either. Google comes to mind as one company that could probably do it successfully.
Once the site gets a certain amount of attention and offers mainstream music, the pirates will probably write a script that downloads all the new stuff while still being free anyway.
There is another possible "attack-vector" - most email-accounts still offer or even require a security-question like "what is my pet's name?"
Some of these can porbably be answered by anyone reading the profile or blog of someone else; and once you got access to the email-account, you could use the forgot-password-option on almost all other websites, including ebay and paypal.
After setting it to sort by popularity and then back to sort by time, the icon indicates that it's sorting by time, but instead it's still sorted by popularity. Pressing the icon again doesn't change anything anymore. I tried to reset to defaults in the preferences, but that opens this page, which seems to be empty. I am using Firefox 2.0.0.6.
Also, when it still worked, I noticed that changing the color from red to orange shows red and orange content. I think it would be much better, if there was an option to only show orange. I, for one, like to browse through the quality content first and when I still have the time and feel for it, lower the threshold to browse through other stuff some more. Still showing the content I already looked at makes that very uncomfortable.
Re:Certainly there are some things which come to m
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 1
DRM mechanisms used to protect movies and music have two major flaws.
1. Most are offline protections, so every information needed to crack or circumvent them is usually right there. Encryption doesn't work, if a single person is sender and receiver at the same time.
2. Even if the authentification is made online (like video-on-demand sites), an old rule applies - as long as people can hear the music and see the movies, they will be able to copy them. So even if they continue to develop new DRM systems, people will always at least be able to make an analog copy by putting a recorder next to their speakers or using a camcorder to film their own TV, in a worst-case-scenario.
Software is a bit different, but offline application like the mentioned Logic Pro 7 have all been cracked up to this day to my knowledge. However, if you equate DRM with authentification, then there are lots of well protected applications like Web2.0 sites that require paid subscriptions or online games.
Well, but it seems that those "real business plans" these days are basically just to get bought by one of the big players or to make money through advertising, or both; and the only thing that companies, that fund or buy startups, seem to care about is a huge userbase. The best example is perhaps Google, who bought Youtube besides already owing a video streaming site themselves.
Nice, for some reason I thought they weren't around anymore. Im remember trying out their client application like 5 years ago. The "forgot password" option even still remembers me;-)
The selection of free stuff offered there looks very usable, so I will look into the license(s) soon. I see they took up discreet's gmax too, so that's where it went.
Even more interesting is that there is a link on the site to another project, perhaps of the company behind Turbosquid, http://www.gameflood.com/ which looks almost exactly like the site I was thinking of and maybe even goes a step further.
From the description:
Introducing GameFlood, the premier destination for artists, modders, mapmakers, and gamers to create, customize, and play third-party game content. With our powerful, free project and team management tools, you can get your ideas out of your head and into gamers' hands more quickly and easily than ever before.
Using our Mashup functionality, you can create individual weapons or characters, which end users can then mix-and-match into their own creations. Or join one of our project teams, using your existing skill set to help create compelling new gameplay experiences. Oh well, why do I always come across interesting stuff when I have no time, it's like a curse...
Anyway, thank you very much for the link. I really hope I can participate there soon.
Artists usually have a huge archive of unused material, either done in their free time for practice and fun or for games that never used it due to a redesign or cancelation. Even some of the dummy objects most artists produce, to give the coders something to work with, can be better than actual graphics made by a hobbyist.
I always wondered why they just wouldn't contribute at least some early works to the open source community? Is it maybe just the lack of a good website where stuff like this could be indexed or isn't there a good enough standard license model to release something like that for free? I thought the Creatice Commons license would be quite suitabel for it.
Everybody who spent some time finding a good textured and rigged low-poly character model, preferably with basic animations, on the net for use in an open source game, knows that there is next to nothing available. Well, at least not when I could have needed one about two years ago.
It really doesn't have to be that professional or finished - even that untextured rat someone made a decade ago to have something to shoot at, later to replaced by some creatures, could maybe be of use to someone; and if he textures it, and maybe do a simple animation and perhaps record some sounds, and then uses it in his project, he should give the additional stuff he made to other developers as well.
Soon there will be a nice looking 3D rat with some textures to choose from, various sounds, walking and death animations, etc. and everybody did his part. That's the open source way - why does it seem it's not very common among artits and only coders?
Anyway, I think it could be really just the right website that is missing - some Sourceforge-style page with a nice upload-frontend, where stuff gets properly indexed based on categories, tags and styles and with a feedback option, where contributers can see which projects are using their works. Add some voting to rank it, karma, apply a fair license to it upon upload and I think something like this could really take off.
That could have been an argument indeed but I think there is another obvious reason as well.
Microsoft did always avoid to use any important technology made by a third party and rather reinvented the wheel instead to have absolute control over it.
The oint is that every time a new lucrative idea based on an existing technology breaks through, it is important for them to already have that basis, in order to quickly copy and implement that new idea themselves. That's what many of the big players do, anyway.
The result is that there is barely any type of application that is not, in one form or another, available from Microsoft.
Bram Cohen (Bittorrent inventor) commented on Avalanche on his blog two years ago and said that he thinks "the paper is complete garbarge."
However, the Wikipedia article on network coding lists a lot of fields where this techology might be useful, so I guess it's not really garbage after all, but neither the holy grail of p2p.
What can Wikipedia do about those who would use it for their own purposes? Although articles written for a conventional encyclopedia should perhaps try to avoid controverse information and focus on common knowledge, this does not necessarily apply to Wikipedia. Since it's a website as dynamic and developing as knowledge itself, there shouldn't be a problem to provide all information currently available on any given topic, even if it's mutually contradictory. Most of the time, there is no absolute truth anyway - A believes X is true while B thinks Y is true.
Fortunately, web-technologies today provide many interesting ways to organize content, e.g. two different "facts" that, however, cancel each other out, can be shown on the same page without breaking the overall picture too much. They could show the stuff that's "more common" by default, but maybe paint the background of that text passage slightly grey with a small button somewhere, which, when pushed, reveals what other people and groups (or in this case, people with faked backgrounds and intelligent agencies) believe to be true. Using some fancy Ajax or even only DHMTL this could be made very elegant.
On the downside though, that might be a feature begging for to be abused and should maybe only allowed to be added by admins and not be "crowdsourced" because we all know how an article would look like if people could vote for the text passage that's shown by default;-)
I hope this doesn't apply to working with dumb coworkers:o
Seriously though, yes, friends are probably more likely to eat the same type of food. In the the same way they are also more likely to share the same hobbies, listen to the same music, watch the same movies, wear the the same type of clothes and even share opinions and political views; and, to think of the children, if your friends are doing drugs, you are perhaps also more likely to try them too.
It's called peer pressure.
Well I should hope so, I would much prefer music companies to make music by selling new and interesting acts, and by constantly signing and recognizing new talent. Only in an ideal world...
Today it already feels like every second song is a cover version of an old one - and that's while the artists performing them have to pay royalties to the original authors.
Making the Beatles Public Domain? The charts will probably look like this:
(1) Rhianna - Eleanor Rigby
(2) Timbaland - Let it be
(3) Justin Timberlake - Yesterday
(4) Avril Lavigne - Penny Lane ...
Also, as some AC said somewhere above, Mickey Mouse comics, movies and merchandising that are not made by Disney? Do people really want that?
Copyright lasting "only" 50 years is probably the lesser of two evils, but there seems to be some downsides nonetheless. Maybe I'm just missing something though as I'm not into copyright law at all; perhaps someone could clear that up?
I think there are basically two kinds of RSS Feeds, either they show the latest news (last in first out) or they show an already sorted frontpage (e.g. "crowdsourced" like Digg); both are useful.
Using an AI to resort those feeds is definitely interesting from a coders point of view but trying to give some kind of objective view to a feed is probably not what the average user wants.
Why not do it the other way around and personalize them instead? Maybe it has been done before, but it would be nice if there was a reader to rerank (or even filter out) certain domains, keywords, tags and categories. It could take the given rank as the base score and then resort it according to the user's personal preference, e.g. if someone doesn't like politics he could give the keywords "Bush, Cheney, election, etc." a negative mulitplier and maybe the keyword "funny" gets a positive one.
It could even consider the time of the day - politics in the morning and funny pictures during the lunchbreak or something.
Just a qick thought though, someone can perhaps come up with something better. Anyway, I am pretty sure that personalization is the better approach here.
[...]how are you so sure it wasn't? Actually, I am sure it is wrong because it was just an example I made up;-)
Seriously though, as you already pointed out, there is the comment history; and it also helps if you already know something on the subject and the post contains details that you know are true. However, someone might also have a ten year old account and pretend to work at NASA on every occasion since ever while actually living in mom's basement playing with miniature Space Shuttles - but well, so might be the original author of the article he commented on, although it's a lot more unlikely.
Further, Trolls seek attention and sell their post as the 100% truth while serious people always write with some uncertainty - therefore my example is kind of wrong. It should contain more "I think, It could be, I am almost sure, I am , BUT" and so on...
Yes, good Trolls might consider that too, but to always think like that would take the discussion ad infinitum.
The talk pages are part of a Wikipedia entry just like these comments here are part of a Slashdot article - they always reveal different views on the subject, missing stuff, controversy, inaccurate facts and too often even things that the author(s) just got plain wrong.
Most of the time "corrections" are indead made by the wisdom of the crowds, e.g. reading here that the wikipedia entry about britannica is very old, certainly not meant to be very seriously and that there even was a disclaimer noting it. However, personally I read Slashdot (and Wikipedia talk pages) for the wisdom of the single expert. I just love when there is, let's say, an article about USA mounting rockets to sattelites or something and someone in the comments goes: "Well, I AM a rocket scientist working for NASA; the project existed in the 60s, but no one here is working on it anymore. Sorry, have to go back to work getting that Space Shuttle up there."
Slashdot Mirror
Um, if you buy something for 10$ and sell it for 20$, that's 100% profit, no?
In theory, giving the huge amount of photographs available online, probably already covering every public inch of the populated world, a program capable of automatically crawling, indexing, glueing the images together and autocompleting their geotags could render a fully accessible 3D-'streetview' of the world without any human interaction. Although a final implementation might still be a few years away, this project is most certainly a milestone on the way to achieve it.
HAHAHA Disregard that, I SUCK COCKS.
Seriously, I do reuse passwords -- I use the same pw for low-security sites (message boards, excluding slashdot)[...]
Why do you exclude Slashdot? People don't gain anything compromising your account here. I use the same pw on all sites...
I still don't get how buying from steam is any different to buying from me, other than you may already have an account on steam.
For the record, I'd love to get my games on steam. I wish it was that easy.
[...]
I'm really hassling my payment provider to support amazons one-click method. For me, I think that's even more convenient than steam.
Well, that's basically it for the digital distribution point - people don't like to fill out forms, they don't like to give away their data; not their email, not their name and especially not their address, so the common accounts most people already have, Steam and Paypal, should be used whenever possible.
Since your payment provider requires people to fill out that boring form every time someone purchases something, why don't you support Paypal directly? Just return a page with a download-link and/or serial key like other services do. One of your competitors when it comes to getting money from pirates, Rapidshare, does exactly that. If that's not possible on part of your payment provider then you should consider switching to a different one, perhaps one that doesn't support Paypal on it's own. Even if you drop it altogether and use Paypal as the only payment method, you might be better of.
For the record, I'd love to get my games on steam. I wish it was that easy.
Didn't they create Steamworks and recently released an SDK so that every developer can finally get their games on Steam? I didn't really look into it but where is the problem? Do they have some kind of requirements you can't meet?
I think one problem with selling especially those small independent games is that people who are generally interested in pirating games usually have some warez sites bookmarked. The less press a game gets, the higher are the chances that those people stumble upon the cracked version before they even know about the game.
They just download it and either try it and delete it, or they may even play it every day for several weeks but they will never even once visit the original website of the game. So normally, there is no way to communicate the value of those games to them and therefore no way to win them as customers. However, if the game is fun, some will probably visit looking for support, a patch, expansions or a sequel and still, there is no way to make them buy it if they don't want to.
The only way left is then trying to delay the warez version as long as possible so people will read about the games on news-sites before they see the torrent on piratebay. Since tougher copy-protections usually only annoy buyers, I would honestly suggest to release many patches that add features and fix bugs but also render previous cracks unuseable. Pirates want the latest version, too; some will perhaps pay for it.
Well, they will probably just provide more than one ranking; like maybe normal search results, personal and community-based or something like that (perhaps only via iGoogle, so normal users won't be affected anyway)- and I guess they should do it soon.
With all the scam-sites, fanpages and other "related" websites to one project, it's sometimes a real pain to use Google for something as simple as searching for the official homepage of a project, movie or game or whatever. The best source for that seems to be Wikipedia and since most of my searches are exactly of this kind, I use it more often for searching than Google these days.
I bought a new system a month ago and waited for this card to retail since then (while playing casual games with my onboard GFX). And now that it's finally there, it costs 259 Euro (~370$) at my prefered store (alternate.de) and I don't find it anywhere else, anyway. Does anyone know where to get that card in Germany for 200-250$ or perhaps a good store outside of Germany that will ship it to me?
Google knows that new searchengines or advertising companies are barely a competition to them because those can usually just be bought - most of them were even started with the intention to hopefully sell out to one of the big players. Like Youtube and Doubleclick, they will probably continue to buy everything that has a strong userbase or many customers, even if the used technology is not interesting to them.
I think what they really fear are sites that make more sense to use as a startpage than a searchengine. Those are usually trying to combine everything people use on a daily basis on the net, like email, news, social networks, and especially RSS. Just like Microsoft, Google tries to have every new technology available on their own, so that new features that get very popular on other sites can be added to their own tools in no time. I am quite sure that if Google wouldn't have implemented Gagdets so fast, some other site offering something like that (and there are a lot by now) would have taken some serious share from the... umm, "startpage-market."
However, as long as those other sites still use Adsense to monetize their work and Google custom search, there is not much to be worried about. Sites that make money through subscriptions on the other hand are more of a threat to them, especially if those subscriptions will continue to be paid with Paypal and not with Google Checkout - I think they were kind of late seeing that coming.
For me, websites that could compete with Google would have to offer whole new ways to surf on the web, with very strong but easy to use personalization and custumization features, some kind of "See the sites like YOU want them to see" or "Stop using a searchengine, we already found what you are looking for." It's a bit hard to get into details, but imagine some kind of webbased RSS reader that not only shares every feed a user added with others but also crawls the web for feeds on it's own. You can then select what you are interested in and it would feature some kind of very fancy recommendations engine based on an algorithm yet to be invented - not this "users that like this also like that" stuff but perhaps something semantic. Then you surf the web just like you watch TV, switching channels from politics to sport. It would probably have Firefox toolbar where you can see the feed headline of the next site to visit with skip, proceed and "try something else" buttons.
Another possible competitor would be said Gadgets-like startpage that implements even more stuff - in fact, everything; where you could post a comment on Slashdot right from your startpage or see if someone answered your somethingawful forum thread. There are already some tools and websites that can or at least claim to convert every website and forum to RSS feeds. Some already do a pretty good job at it but they all have some way to go. I guess Microsoft could even be the one doing something like this. It could be the reason they are supporting OpenID because one problem would be logging in "cross-over" to the various sites.
Thanks to the forgot-password-option every site offers, using a single email address to register to everything makes that email account already the weakest link anyway. With the millions of blogs and forums these days, however, that all require people to register and validate via email just to leave a comment, a "single sign-on system" is still a good idea. I guess secure critical sites like Paypal wouldn't cause a problem because they hopefully would never provide to login with such a system in the first place.
It's a pity that OpenID somehow doesn't take off as many expected and I don't think a Microsoft solution will either. Google comes to mind as one company that could probably do it successfully.
Once the site gets a certain amount of attention and offers mainstream music, the pirates will probably write a script that downloads all the new stuff while still being free anyway.
There is another possible "attack-vector" - most email-accounts still offer or even require a security-question like "what is my pet's name?"
Some of these can porbably be answered by anyone reading the profile or blog of someone else; and once you got access to the email-account, you could use the forgot-password-option on almost all other websites, including ebay and paypal.
After setting it to sort by popularity and then back to sort by time, the icon indicates that it's sorting by time, but instead it's still sorted by popularity. Pressing the icon again doesn't change anything anymore. I tried to reset to defaults in the preferences, but that opens this page, which seems to be empty. I am using Firefox 2.0.0.6.
Also, when it still worked, I noticed that changing the color from red to orange shows red and orange content. I think it would be much better, if there was an option to only show orange. I, for one, like to browse through the quality content first and when I still have the time and feel for it, lower the threshold to browse through other stuff some more. Still showing the content I already looked at makes that very uncomfortable.
DRM mechanisms used to protect movies and music have two major flaws.
1. Most are offline protections, so every information needed to crack or circumvent them is usually right there. Encryption doesn't work, if a single person is sender and receiver at the same time.
2. Even if the authentification is made online (like video-on-demand sites), an old rule applies - as long as people can hear the music and see the movies, they will be able to copy them. So even if they continue to develop new DRM systems, people will always at least be able to make an analog copy by putting a recorder next to their speakers or using a camcorder to film their own TV, in a worst-case-scenario.
Software is a bit different, but offline application like the mentioned Logic Pro 7 have all been cracked up to this day to my knowledge. However, if you equate DRM with authentification, then there are lots of well protected applications like Web2.0 sites that require paid subscriptions or online games.
Well, but it seems that those "real business plans" these days are basically just to get bought by one of the big players or to make money through advertising, or both; and the only thing that companies, that fund or buy startups, seem to care about is a huge userbase. The best example is perhaps Google, who bought Youtube besides already owing a video streaming site themselves.
The selection of free stuff offered there looks very usable, so I will look into the license(s) soon. I see they took up discreet's gmax too, so that's where it went.
Even more interesting is that there is a link on the site to another project, perhaps of the company behind Turbosquid, http://www.gameflood.com/ which looks almost exactly like the site I was thinking of and maybe even goes a step further.
From the description:
Introducing GameFlood, the premier destination for artists, modders, mapmakers, and gamers to create, customize, and play third-party game content. With our powerful, free project and team management tools, you can get your ideas out of your head and into gamers' hands more quickly and easily than ever before.
Using our Mashup functionality, you can create individual weapons or characters, which end users can then mix-and-match into their own creations. Or join one of our project teams, using your existing skill set to help create compelling new gameplay experiences. Oh well, why do I always come across interesting stuff when I have no time, it's like a curse...
Anyway, thank you very much for the link. I really hope I can participate there soon.
Artists usually have a huge archive of unused material, either done in their free time for practice and fun or for games that never used it due to a redesign or cancelation. Even some of the dummy objects most artists produce, to give the coders something to work with, can be better than actual graphics made by a hobbyist.
I always wondered why they just wouldn't contribute at least some early works to the open source community? Is it maybe just the lack of a good website where stuff like this could be indexed or isn't there a good enough standard license model to release something like that for free? I thought the Creatice Commons license would be quite suitabel for it.
Everybody who spent some time finding a good textured and rigged low-poly character model, preferably with basic animations, on the net for use in an open source game, knows that there is next to nothing available. Well, at least not when I could have needed one about two years ago.
It really doesn't have to be that professional or finished - even that untextured rat someone made a decade ago to have something to shoot at, later to replaced by some creatures, could maybe be of use to someone; and if he textures it, and maybe do a simple animation and perhaps record some sounds, and then uses it in his project, he should give the additional stuff he made to other developers as well.
Soon there will be a nice looking 3D rat with some textures to choose from, various sounds, walking and death animations, etc. and everybody did his part. That's the open source way - why does it seem it's not very common among artits and only coders?
Anyway, I think it could be really just the right website that is missing - some Sourceforge-style page with a nice upload-frontend, where stuff gets properly indexed based on categories, tags and styles and with a feedback option, where contributers can see which projects are using their works. Add some voting to rank it, karma, apply a fair license to it upon upload and I think something like this could really take off.
That could have been an argument indeed but I think there is another obvious reason as well.
Microsoft did always avoid to use any important technology made by a third party and rather reinvented the wheel instead to have absolute control over it.
The oint is that every time a new lucrative idea based on an existing technology breaks through, it is important for them to already have that basis, in order to quickly copy and implement that new idea themselves. That's what many of the big players do, anyway.
The result is that there is barely any type of application that is not, in one form or another, available from Microsoft.
Bram Cohen (Bittorrent inventor) commented on Avalanche on his blog two years ago and said that he thinks "the paper is complete garbarge."
However, the Wikipedia article on network coding lists a lot of fields where this techology might be useful, so I guess it's not really garbage after all, but neither the holy grail of p2p.
Fortunately, web-technologies today provide many interesting ways to organize content, e.g. two different "facts" that, however, cancel each other out, can be shown on the same page without breaking the overall picture too much. They could show the stuff that's "more common" by default, but maybe paint the background of that text passage slightly grey with a small button somewhere, which, when pushed, reveals what other people and groups (or in this case, people with faked backgrounds and intelligent agencies) believe to be true. Using some fancy Ajax or even only DHMTL this could be made very elegant.
On the downside though, that might be a feature begging for to be abused and should maybe only allowed to be added by admins and not be "crowdsourced" because we all know how an article would look like if people could vote for the text passage that's shown by default
I hope this doesn't apply to working with dumb coworkers :o
Seriously though, yes, friends are probably more likely to eat the same type of food. In the the same way they are also more likely to share the same hobbies, listen to the same music, watch the same movies, wear the the same type of clothes and even share opinions and political views; and, to think of the children, if your friends are doing drugs, you are perhaps also more likely to try them too.
It's called peer pressure.
Today it already feels like every second song is a cover version of an old one - and that's while the artists performing them have to pay royalties to the original authors.
Making the Beatles Public Domain? The charts will probably look like this:
(1) Rhianna - Eleanor Rigby
(2) Timbaland - Let it be
(3) Justin Timberlake - Yesterday
(4) Avril Lavigne - Penny Lane
Also, as some AC said somewhere above, Mickey Mouse comics, movies and merchandising that are not made by Disney? Do people really want that?
Copyright lasting "only" 50 years is probably the lesser of two evils, but there seems to be some downsides nonetheless. Maybe I'm just missing something though as I'm not into copyright law at all; perhaps someone could clear that up?
I think there are basically two kinds of RSS Feeds, either they show the latest news (last in first out) or they show an already sorted frontpage (e.g. "crowdsourced" like Digg); both are useful.
Using an AI to resort those feeds is definitely interesting from a coders point of view but trying to give some kind of objective view to a feed is probably not what the average user wants.
Why not do it the other way around and personalize them instead? Maybe it has been done before, but it would be nice if there was a reader to rerank (or even filter out) certain domains, keywords, tags and categories. It could take the given rank as the base score and then resort it according to the user's personal preference, e.g. if someone doesn't like politics he could give the keywords "Bush, Cheney, election, etc." a negative mulitplier and maybe the keyword "funny" gets a positive one. It could even consider the time of the day - politics in the morning and funny pictures during the lunchbreak or something.
Just a qick thought though, someone can perhaps come up with something better. Anyway, I am pretty sure that personalization is the better approach here.
Seriously though, as you already pointed out, there is the comment history; and it also helps if you already know something on the subject and the post contains details that you know are true. However, someone might also have a ten year old account and pretend to work at NASA on every occasion since ever while actually living in mom's basement playing with miniature Space Shuttles - but well, so might be the original author of the article he commented on, although it's a lot more unlikely.
Further, Trolls seek attention and sell their post as the 100% truth while serious people always write with some uncertainty - therefore my example is kind of wrong. It should contain more "I think, It could be, I am almost sure, I am , BUT" and so on...
Yes, good Trolls might consider that too, but to always think like that would take the discussion ad infinitum.
The talk pages are part of a Wikipedia entry just like these comments here are part of a Slashdot article - they always reveal different views on the subject, missing stuff, controversy, inaccurate facts and too often even things that the author(s) just got plain wrong.
Most of the time "corrections" are indead made by the wisdom of the crowds, e.g. reading here that the wikipedia entry about britannica is very old, certainly not meant to be very seriously and that there even was a disclaimer noting it. However, personally I read Slashdot (and Wikipedia talk pages) for the wisdom of the single expert. I just love when there is, let's say, an article about USA mounting rockets to sattelites or something and someone in the comments goes: "Well, I AM a rocket scientist working for NASA; the project existed in the 60s, but no one here is working on it anymore. Sorry, have to go back to work getting that Space Shuttle up there."