However your Internet connection drops out / you have computer problems
Sniping can be done via some web services, so that it's not dependent upon your PC being online.
/ EBay has emergency maintenance
This happens so rarely, it's inconsequential.
AKA sniping, what a stupid term
This term has been around for quite a long time now. Are you one of the people who still posts "what a stupid name" every time someone mentions the Wii?
The usefulness for this practice [...] approaches zero as it becomes more common. Then sniping just forces everyone to proxy bid properly. It neutralizes the incremental bidders who are not properly proxy bidding in the first place.
In your attempt to solve one problem, you've created others.
This is like saying that curing cancer will mean that more people will now die of heart disease. While true, the net gain is positive.
So why do I have to watch the ads for products I'm not interested in? It's just money down the toilet to them, why do THEY want to produce ads for products I'm not interested in?
The advertisers would probably tell us that it's because they want to make you interested in them. Even if it's a product you will never personally use, you may one day face a decision about what brand to buy for someone else, and you will (at least subconsciously) remember seeing an ad for that brand. If it's for someone you want to make a positive impression on, you're probably going to want to buy a well-recognized brand, not some generic no-name brand; and advertising is how brands get recognized.
Mind you, I don't think they should have any special right to force this crap on us either; I'm just providing what I think would be one of their potential responses to your question.
I used to run SETI@Home on a half dozen machines and had several thousand packets completed. I tried BOINC, but it seemed a lot more complicated, and it didn't have any neat graphical display like the old SETI client. I don't know why, but there was something kinda nerdy-cool about having scientific data analysis visuals dancing around on my screen when my computer was idle.
Finally, switching to BOINC required a registration. I tried to get my old SETI@Home account to be recognized, but there was some kind of problem with my password or somesuch, and I couldn't be bothered to do the contact-support runaround thing. Since I had been with SETI@Home since the month it was released, I was somewhat disappointed to not be able to resume my progress, so I didn't bother creating a new account.
The question I have though is what would really come along that would be compelling enough to supplant the iPod for the market at large?
Globally ubiquitous and reliable high-speed wireless networking, plus a "play nearly anything right now" subscription service. Your device will then no longer need much storage other than a download buffer.
I'd give it about 5-10 years (mostly due to foot-dragging by the RIAA more than the technical capability).
The article claims that the monthly income from 16 acres is $200 - which is gonna pay for a cheap bare-bones server in just a few months.
Actually, the price of the server itself is already covered up front. New server regions which are added to the grid are first auctioned off for >=US$1000 (usually to the land resellers).
There is a one-time cost to initially procuring the land you want. If you leave or move, you can recover this cost by selling the land. The monthly fee (from $5 for 1/8th acre up to $200 per 16-acre region) covers maintenance/bandwidth/etc just like web hosting.
Remember that user scripts continue to run even when there is nobody inside the 16 acre patch to see it happen.
Some people might ask why run stuff while nobody is there to see it. The answer is that even in the absence of avatars, some things still need to run. One example is web-activated vending scripts. There are now several web-based stores for purchasing content, which make an XML-RPC or email call into the SL grid to tell one of these scripts to send an inventoried object to a specific resident. These could be called at any time, so it's necessary for the persistance to continue even when there are no avatars present.
Another big factor in SL's server load is the Havok physics engine. Sometimes it only takes a few complex physics-enabled primitives to bring a server region to a crawl. Also, avatars are always physics-enabled.
Puzzle Pirates doesn't let their users create custom content and then let them script it.
A lot of the content in SL is scripted. I've even seen scripted shoes and scripted hair. Most servers have hundreds of scripts running, some thousands. As you might imagine, those scripts consume a lot of resources, along with all the other things the servers have to manage (e.g., havok physics, handling asset requests, communications, etc).
Besides the crapfest that has been the movie industry lately, wouldn't this also be caused by people holding off on purchases since they know another format is just around the corner?
One of the coolest things I saw in middle school was a cloud chamber, in which the science teacher placed a small sample of Uranium.
Once the environment was right, we could see very tiny smoke trails shooting off from the Uranium sample. What we were seeing was the effects of the alpha and beta particles leaving the Uranium sample.
It's a shame that our society is growing so paranoid that amazing things like this will probably not be possible to do in schools anymore.
This is how things have gotten as bad as they are in the USA. The rebuttle for any corrupt or illegal action is "well, but at least we're not as bad as $X".
This will probably continue until our language adopts a new term which distinctly identifies this fallacy.
It's not really useless given the right input. Most people just use the default library, which (i assume) doesn't provide any options for lossy compression. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to use PNG for lossy image compression.
Lossyness just has to do with changing the data that you feed into the compression algorithm. If you know the PNG algorithm well enough, you can make small adjustments to the image before compressing it in order to maximize the efficiency of the compression algorithm while minimizing perceptible changes.
The figure I keep seeing thrown around is that the SL population currently consists of about 15% content creators (people who make stuff and sell it or give it away), and 85% consumers (people who mostly buy things, and rarely make something, let alone sell it), and that the trend clearly shows the former decreasing and the latter increasing.
To make it even more complicated, some places (for example, Florida) have short periods (usually a week) where there are no sales taxes on certian types of items.
For example, in the fall there is usually a week around the time before school starts where school supplies are exempt from sales tax. Currently, in preparation for the hurricane season, certain hurricane supplies are exempt from sales tax.
Ten years from now, mobile devices will probably be powerful enough to render most web content, making a separate "branch" of your website for mobile devices redundant anyway.
I guess the people in charge of this stuff these days are slowly caving in to marketing mentalities, instead of sticking with the more elegant and future-proof designs.
One commonly ignored reactor is the energy amplifier reactor. It is a subcritical reactor, uses Thorium as fuel (which is three times more abundant than Uranium), and actually can be used as a way of disposing of the toxic waste generated by conventional nuclear reactors.
The only big downside is that it needs a synchrotron to operate.
I thought the whole point of a representatitive democracy is that the representatitives would make rational decisions instead of the knee-jerk reactions that are problematic with a direct democracy?
I played a few of the games at E3 and I was surprised at the resolution and responsiveness of the controller. It's accuracy and responsiveness is perceptually the same as the mouse on my PC.
I waited in line about 1.5 hours to see this demonstration. The line moved very slowly too, since about 2/3 of the audience in the room of about 30-40 people were invited, so they could skip the line. I didn't even know WW was going to be demoing it himself, and at first I didn't realize it was him (he didn't say his name).
The parent's linked video is pretty much the exact same demo I saw in person, with only some minor differences (i.e. he said that the ability to toss things with your abduction ray was a bug). Plus, in the video someone's head wasn't blocking a quarter of my view of the screen =)
On my way out of E3 on friday, I noticed there were about seven or eight nominations/awards for "Best of E3" and the like hanging on the wall around the doorway to the demo room.
Slashdot Mirror
However your Internet connection drops out / you have computer problems
Sniping can be done via some web services, so that it's not dependent upon your PC being online.
/ EBay has emergency maintenance
This happens so rarely, it's inconsequential.
AKA sniping, what a stupid term
This term has been around for quite a long time now. Are you one of the people who still posts "what a stupid name" every time someone mentions the Wii?
The usefulness for this practice [...] approaches zero as it becomes more common.
Then sniping just forces everyone to proxy bid properly. It neutralizes the incremental bidders who are not properly proxy bidding in the first place.
In your attempt to solve one problem, you've created others.
This is like saying that curing cancer will mean that more people will now die of heart disease. While true, the net gain is positive.
So why do I have to watch the ads for products I'm not interested in? It's just money down the toilet to them, why do THEY want to produce ads for products I'm not interested in?
The advertisers would probably tell us that it's because they want to make you interested in them. Even if it's a product you will never personally use, you may one day face a decision about what brand to buy for someone else, and you will (at least subconsciously) remember seeing an ad for that brand. If it's for someone you want to make a positive impression on, you're probably going to want to buy a well-recognized brand, not some generic no-name brand; and advertising is how brands get recognized.
Mind you, I don't think they should have any special right to force this crap on us either; I'm just providing what I think would be one of their potential responses to your question.
I agree.
I used to run SETI@Home on a half dozen machines and had several thousand packets completed. I tried BOINC, but it seemed a lot more complicated, and it didn't have any neat graphical display like the old SETI client. I don't know why, but there was something kinda nerdy-cool about having scientific data analysis visuals dancing around on my screen when my computer was idle.
Finally, switching to BOINC required a registration. I tried to get my old SETI@Home account to be recognized, but there was some kind of problem with my password or somesuch, and I couldn't be bothered to do the contact-support runaround thing. Since I had been with SETI@Home since the month it was released, I was somewhat disappointed to not be able to resume my progress, so I didn't bother creating a new account.
The question I have though is what would really come along that would be compelling enough to supplant the iPod for the market at large?
Globally ubiquitous and reliable high-speed wireless networking, plus a "play nearly anything right now" subscription service. Your device will then no longer need much storage other than a download buffer.
I'd give it about 5-10 years (mostly due to foot-dragging by the RIAA more than the technical capability).
Couldn't they just coat the nanotubes and conductor surfaces with an insulator, then full the voids with a conductive liquid?
Of course there's always Snapzilla, which was made for exactly this purpose.
I have a paid-for flickr "Pro" account, I wonder if this affects them too? Doesn't really matter though, as I rarely use it anyway.
Physics is done server-side using the Havok engine. The client doesn't do much other than very simple prediction to tween.
The article claims that the monthly income from 16 acres is $200 - which is gonna pay for a cheap bare-bones server in just a few months.
Actually, the price of the server itself is already covered up front. New server regions which are added to the grid are first auctioned off for >=US$1000 (usually to the land resellers).
There is a one-time cost to initially procuring the land you want. If you leave or move, you can recover this cost by selling the land. The monthly fee (from $5 for 1/8th acre up to $200 per 16-acre region) covers maintenance/bandwidth/etc just like web hosting.
Remember that user scripts continue to run even when there is nobody inside the 16 acre patch to see it happen.
Some people might ask why run stuff while nobody is there to see it. The answer is that even in the absence of avatars, some things still need to run. One example is web-activated vending scripts. There are now several web-based stores for purchasing content, which make an XML-RPC or email call into the SL grid to tell one of these scripts to send an inventoried object to a specific resident. These could be called at any time, so it's necessary for the persistance to continue even when there are no avatars present.
Another big factor in SL's server load is the Havok physics engine. Sometimes it only takes a few complex physics-enabled primitives to bring a server region to a crawl. Also, avatars are always physics-enabled.
Puzzle Pirates doesn't let their users create custom content and then let them script it.
A lot of the content in SL is scripted. I've even seen scripted shoes and scripted hair. Most servers have hundreds of scripts running, some thousands. As you might imagine, those scripts consume a lot of resources, along with all the other things the servers have to manage (e.g., havok physics, handling asset requests, communications, etc).
From TFA:
DVD sales are slumping
Besides the crapfest that has been the movie industry lately, wouldn't this also be caused by people holding off on purchases since they know another format is just around the corner?
One of the coolest things I saw in middle school was a cloud chamber, in which the science teacher placed a small sample of Uranium.
Once the environment was right, we could see very tiny smoke trails shooting off from the Uranium sample. What we were seeing was the effects of the alpha and beta particles leaving the Uranium sample.
It's a shame that our society is growing so paranoid that amazing things like this will probably not be possible to do in schools anymore.
This is how things have gotten as bad as they are in the USA. The rebuttle for any corrupt or illegal action is "well, but at least we're not as bad as $X".
This will probably continue until our language adopts a new term which distinctly identifies this fallacy.
It's not really useless given the right input. Most people just use the default library, which (i assume) doesn't provide any options for lossy compression. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to use PNG for lossy image compression.
Lossyness just has to do with changing the data that you feed into the compression algorithm. If you know the PNG algorithm well enough, you can make small adjustments to the image before compressing it in order to maximize the efficiency of the compression algorithm while minimizing perceptible changes.
Here is one example of this.
The game you're probably referring to, "Ride the Comix" was there when DisneyQuest opened, so it is almost 10 years old.
The figure I keep seeing thrown around is that the SL population currently consists of about 15% content creators (people who make stuff and sell it or give it away), and 85% consumers (people who mostly buy things, and rarely make something, let alone sell it), and that the trend clearly shows the former decreasing and the latter increasing.
Lousy analogy, maybe, but I didn't respond to you.
I responded to this AC.
Do you have your comments set to re-parent?
To make it even more complicated, some places (for example, Florida) have short periods (usually a week) where there are no sales taxes on certian types of items.
For example, in the fall there is usually a week around the time before school starts where school supplies are exempt from sales tax. Currently, in preparation for the hurricane season, certain hurricane supplies are exempt from sales tax.
Using your style of logic:
Everyone who drives a car should be required to wear a helmet for protection.
The requirement to wear a helmet didn't kill the motorcycle industry, so if we make everyone wear helmets, they shouldn't complain.
Ugh. Why do all software companies eventually devolve into the "fisher-price" user interface?
Ten years from now, mobile devices will probably be powerful enough to render most web content, making a separate "branch" of your website for mobile devices redundant anyway.
I guess the people in charge of this stuff these days are slowly caving in to marketing mentalities, instead of sticking with the more elegant and future-proof designs.
One commonly ignored reactor is the energy amplifier reactor. It is a subcritical reactor, uses Thorium as fuel (which is three times more abundant than Uranium), and actually can be used as a way of disposing of the toxic waste generated by conventional nuclear reactors.
The only big downside is that it needs a synchrotron to operate.
I thought the whole point of a representatitive democracy is that the representatitives would make rational decisions instead of the knee-jerk reactions that are problematic with a direct democracy?
I played a few of the games at E3 and I was surprised at the resolution and responsiveness of the controller. It's accuracy and responsiveness is perceptually the same as the mouse on my PC.
I waited in line about 1.5 hours to see this demonstration. The line moved very slowly too, since about 2/3 of the audience in the room of about 30-40 people were invited, so they could skip the line. I didn't even know WW was going to be demoing it himself, and at first I didn't realize it was him (he didn't say his name).
The parent's linked video is pretty much the exact same demo I saw in person, with only some minor differences (i.e. he said that the ability to toss things with your abduction ray was a bug). Plus, in the video someone's head wasn't blocking a quarter of my view of the screen =)
On my way out of E3 on friday, I noticed there were about seven or eight nominations/awards for "Best of E3" and the like hanging on the wall around the doorway to the demo room.