True, especially when said Flash-based version fails to load any of the data with Swfdec on my Fedora 11 Linux box while the JavaScript version is light and responsive and probably a hell of a lot more accessible to boot.
I've got an old Nokia 3510 and it can handle multi-part text messages. Generally it'll arrive in pieces, one after the other, but it manages to patch it together okay. I can send multi-part messages as well (my "characters remaining" count is in the form of "characters remaining/texts used"). I was able to do it with a 3310 as well, and possibly even the Motorola 3588 that I started with.
Someone sold you a crap phone;)
More on-topic, I can normally fit a properly written text in 160 characters with punctuation etc. Sometimes I want to say more and flow in to a second, but if it is a couple of characters over one text then it's normally because I used a long word and I can trim things to fit. I'd always assumed it was technology and overheads on some fixed size rather than some guy trying to work out how long sentences were and how much he could cram in there.
Given the language the Sims speak in, it'll be about as intelligable and interesting as half of what's on Twitter. No-one would probably notice if they did suddenly start Sims posting on Twitter!
Could my ISP sue me for writing a letter instead of an email?
Perhaps, but the more worrying thought is that you're screwed both ways because the postal service could sue you for writing an email instead of sending a letter;)
Isn't that normally with the caveat of "in any cover other than the one supplied"? I used to think that charity shops were always liable to encounter problems because of the "no renting or reselling" clause until I read it and realised that the legalese included a bit more than that.
If the ISP goes "you're sending out a huge number of emails - you're either a spam bot or a server, so we're locking you down" then that's not being the police. Action like that is just enforcing fair use on a network and ensuring everyone gets an even share without service being degraded by someone else. There's generally a rather obvious point at which someone goes from "sensible home usage on a home broadband connection" to "some kind of spammer or bot".
"Tracking down" illegal torrents tends to require DPI, which is much more like the police, and blacklisting all torrenters is potentially stopping legit emails, which isn't fair on anyway.
As long as there is some kind of control to compensate and/or resolve false-positives and as long as it doesn't turn to criminal proceedings without police involvement then I can't see a problem with ISPs doing the normal job of service providers - monitoring their service for abusers.
There's no real benefit to the packaging and/or CD itself once it's installed
There's the useful advantage of having the physical media. It came up before in a previous topic, but I'd still rather have the physical item rather than the binary download because a) it won't get lost in a disk crash or reinstall etc, b) the DRM is (generally) still slightly less and c) it is generally easier to install it on a second computer (for use at a different time rather than getting multiple copies from a single purchase).
1- Will Google be sued next (filetype:torrent anyone?)
No, because of searches like "Fedora 10 filetype:torrent". I can imagine that Google returns a somewhat larger proportion of legit torrents than TPB, and those illegal ones would probably be removed if Google was told about them.
The way Phorm works is to monitor every page on all websites that a user on a Phorm'd ISP visits and build up a profile of them by analysing the content. This is then used to supply more targeted adverts on every site that is part of Phorm's network.
They don't replace (for example) GoogleAds with their own adverts, but they do read the content of your website and use it for their own profit by scanning it after an interesting flurry of fakes and redirects - all without returning a single penny to you.
That's the part that annoys me the most. I'm not on a Phorm'd ISP, so it doesn't affect me as a user, but I don't have any adverts on any of my websites so I sure as hell don't want them making an advertising profit from my content without me getting a proportion of it. That plus their method of monitoring and using opt-out is ethically dubious at best.
I think $250 of it is a tax on the brand rather than the design. The design tax would be around the $30-$40 mark, because they're nicer* than some cheap $20 pair you can pick up in a supermarket.
Disclaimer: I don't know how much supermarket sunglasses are exactly, especially not in dollars. I know they're cheap in the UK if you buy the cheap plastic things, but it has been ages since I even bought any of those given the weather we have over here!
* Sometimes, although some "fashionable" items are completely hideous and only sell because some people are suckered in by "it is fashionable" and "it has a big label on it"
I think they mis-quoted him. What he probably said was:
So we started looking at the biggest stuff we'd done that people really liked, but that we could do in smaller, digestible chunks. After that we thought 'given that HTTP downloads from a normal website are so easy, can be backed up and don't rely on some other system, how can we screw it up?', so we found Games for Windows Live. That's what we've gone for with Fallout 3."
If they're going to do DLC, at least make it downloadable rather than pushing it through Games for Windows Live!
Have you actually managed to get those videos working in Gnash? I've got Gnash 0.8.4 on an openSuse system and they'll load but they won't play. It's not normally a major problem since most Flash is pointless, and I've had some videos working, but it seems like Gnash isn't up to the task on these ones.
That depends - it is the "Royal We", but any time she does a speech it is always "one is upset to hear about [insert thing here]" rather than "I am upset to hear about [insert thing here]".
Surely it was a onePod because one uses the phrase "one" to refer to ones self rather than taking one down to the uncouth level of using "I" when one is, for example, upset that one cannot help one's fellow humans during a humanitarian crisis.
What does replayability (or whatever else achievements are meant to give) mean for a site that's "news for nerds" and random microsoft bashing?
It means that now we get to repeatedly Microsoft bash and claim that we're "replaying for different unlocks" rather than "being boring and repetitive"!
Yeah, it was a rather obvious one. Also, you'd be a bit screwed if you had an uncontrollable facial twitch!/me wonders how many other people post for the sake of racking up the "April Fool" achievement
Ah, it seemed like good customer service without all of the detail! Still, more companies should do the "caring to some degree about customers after the sale is made and not just ignoring you because they made their money" bit.
In the long, dark past before the internet was popular a publisher once sent me a patch for a buggy game on CD, for free.
Now that is caring for your customers. They probably had fewer customers back then, but publishers should take more responsibility for their products after release by hosting the patches.
This is probably what killed their site. Hosting -- once you get to the large VPS/dedicated server level -- is expensive. Hosting for a high bandwidth site is extremely expensive.
So what you need is a sustainable income to support it, which adverts aren't.
They couldn't pay their bills because advertising on the 'net is a failing industry. The reason for that is people like you blocking adverts.
No, as pointed out by other people, the reason it is failing is because of the way the industry behaves. Of the tens of thousands (or more) of ads that AdBlock has blocked for me I'd probably have clicked on a grand sum of about two of them at most, if it was really interesting. Maybe if things were less intrusive and more targetted to the audience of the site showing the advert then people might be more likely to click on them and less likely to block them.
How are medium-large site owners supposed to pay their bills?
Targetted affiliate links? Targetted self-hosted adverts? Sponsored links? I'm hardly doing any work and every month I've more than recovered the cost of my VPS account, sometimes several times over. That's just with two affiliate links that I use in targetted locations appropriate to each link.
Working on the Internet is an utterly thankless task sometimes.
Exactly, and people shouldn't expect to be bailed out by visitors and advertising. I host my sites a) because I want to b) because I enjoy working with it and improving it and c) because I know that people are making use of things even if they don't say anything or give any feedback.
I've got adblock too, but not everyone does so saying "go to gamename.filefront.com" used to assault them with excessive horrible ads, including popups at one point. That was why one of my sites was set up with the aim of not having any adverts on it at all and serving quality content.
As for what's wrong with it, I already said. For the games I play it has too much rubbish on there (Football team badges in the 41st millenium? Random corporation logos? Other miscellany junk?) and too many idiots. I tried to help out on the FileFront forums for a while, posting pointers to tutorials etc, but the general response was "those two steps are too complex - do it for me now" (complete with unintelligible half-sentences).
The Good: FileFront is shutting down, so all of the random junk probably won't have a home and all of the good stuff will find it worthwhile finding a better host that isn't full of adverts and idiots. (I set up one of my websites because the FileFront site was such a horrible place with annoying members and a high noise to signal ratio)
The Bad: The idiots will have to find somewhere else, so we'll have otherwise usable sites suddenly flooded with the "give me it on a silver platter because I can't be bothered while I spout gibberish in badly written and incomprehensible sentences".
Well, yeah, but putting DX10 on Windows should be Microsoft's job. Putting DX10 on Linux/Mac is basically the community's job (plus a few companies supporting things a bit) and they're doing it better than Windows, despite the fact that DX was designed as Windows-centric.
I can also see this becoming a DirectX 10 to OpenGL wrapper to provide DirectX 10 features on XP.
That's the wonderful irony about this - Linux, the non-gaming desktop, is going to get DirectX 10 through open-source while Microsoft just ignore the huge majority of people on Windows XP!
Not that I use any games that are DX10, but this is definitely an interesting development.
Slashdot Mirror
True, especially when said Flash-based version fails to load any of the data with Swfdec on my Fedora 11 Linux box while the JavaScript version is light and responsive and probably a hell of a lot more accessible to boot.
I've got an old Nokia 3510 and it can handle multi-part text messages. Generally it'll arrive in pieces, one after the other, but it manages to patch it together okay. I can send multi-part messages as well (my "characters remaining" count is in the form of "characters remaining/texts used"). I was able to do it with a 3310 as well, and possibly even the Motorola 3588 that I started with.
Someone sold you a crap phone ;)
More on-topic, I can normally fit a properly written text in 160 characters with punctuation etc. Sometimes I want to say more and flow in to a second, but if it is a couple of characters over one text then it's normally because I used a long word and I can trim things to fit. I'd always assumed it was technology and overheads on some fixed size rather than some guy trying to work out how long sentences were and how much he could cram in there.
Given the language the Sims speak in, it'll be about as intelligable and interesting as half of what's on Twitter. No-one would probably notice if they did suddenly start Sims posting on Twitter!
Perhaps, but the more worrying thought is that you're screwed both ways because the postal service could sue you for writing an email instead of sending a letter ;)
Isn't that normally with the caveat of "in any cover other than the one supplied"? I used to think that charity shops were always liable to encounter problems because of the "no renting or reselling" clause until I read it and realised that the legalese included a bit more than that.
It depends how it is done.
If the ISP goes "you're sending out a huge number of emails - you're either a spam bot or a server, so we're locking you down" then that's not being the police. Action like that is just enforcing fair use on a network and ensuring everyone gets an even share without service being degraded by someone else. There's generally a rather obvious point at which someone goes from "sensible home usage on a home broadband connection" to "some kind of spammer or bot".
"Tracking down" illegal torrents tends to require DPI, which is much more like the police, and blacklisting all torrenters is potentially stopping legit emails, which isn't fair on anyway.
As long as there is some kind of control to compensate and/or resolve false-positives and as long as it doesn't turn to criminal proceedings without police involvement then I can't see a problem with ISPs doing the normal job of service providers - monitoring their service for abusers.
There's the useful advantage of having the physical media. It came up before in a previous topic, but I'd still rather have the physical item rather than the binary download because a) it won't get lost in a disk crash or reinstall etc, b) the DRM is (generally) still slightly less and c) it is generally easier to install it on a second computer (for use at a different time rather than getting multiple copies from a single purchase).
No, because of searches like "Fedora 10 filetype:torrent". I can imagine that Google returns a somewhat larger proportion of legit torrents than TPB, and those illegal ones would probably be removed if Google was told about them.
It isn't stealing advertising revenue, though.
The way Phorm works is to monitor every page on all websites that a user on a Phorm'd ISP visits and build up a profile of them by analysing the content. This is then used to supply more targeted adverts on every site that is part of Phorm's network.
They don't replace (for example) GoogleAds with their own adverts, but they do read the content of your website and use it for their own profit by scanning it after an interesting flurry of fakes and redirects - all without returning a single penny to you.
That's the part that annoys me the most. I'm not on a Phorm'd ISP, so it doesn't affect me as a user, but I don't have any adverts on any of my websites so I sure as hell don't want them making an advertising profit from my content without me getting a proportion of it. That plus their method of monitoring and using opt-out is ethically dubious at best.
I think $250 of it is a tax on the brand rather than the design. The design tax would be around the $30-$40 mark, because they're nicer* than some cheap $20 pair you can pick up in a supermarket.
Disclaimer: I don't know how much supermarket sunglasses are exactly, especially not in dollars. I know they're cheap in the UK if you buy the cheap plastic things, but it has been ages since I even bought any of those given the weather we have over here!
* Sometimes, although some "fashionable" items are completely hideous and only sell because some people are suckered in by "it is fashionable" and "it has a big label on it"
Oooops, missed a closing tag there! That last sentence was mine ;)
I think they mis-quoted him. What he probably said was:
Have you actually managed to get those videos working in Gnash? I've got Gnash 0.8.4 on an openSuse system and they'll load but they won't play. It's not normally a major problem since most Flash is pointless, and I've had some videos working, but it seems like Gnash isn't up to the task on these ones.
That depends - it is the "Royal We", but any time she does a speech it is always "one is upset to hear about [insert thing here]" rather than "I am upset to hear about [insert thing here]".
You mean the parent post prevents fire? Wow!
Surely it was a onePod because one uses the phrase "one" to refer to ones self rather than taking one down to the uncouth level of using "I" when one is, for example, upset that one cannot help one's fellow humans during a humanitarian crisis.
It means that now we get to repeatedly Microsoft bash and claim that we're "replaying for different unlocks" rather than "being boring and repetitive"!
Yeah, it was a rather obvious one. Also, you'd be a bit screwed if you had an uncontrollable facial twitch! /me wonders how many other people post for the sake of racking up the "April Fool" achievement
Ah, it seemed like good customer service without all of the detail! Still, more companies should do the "caring to some degree about customers after the sale is made and not just ignoring you because they made their money" bit.
Now that is caring for your customers. They probably had fewer customers back then, but publishers should take more responsibility for their products after release by hosting the patches.
So what you need is a sustainable income to support it, which adverts aren't.
No, as pointed out by other people, the reason it is failing is because of the way the industry behaves. Of the tens of thousands (or more) of ads that AdBlock has blocked for me I'd probably have clicked on a grand sum of about two of them at most, if it was really interesting. Maybe if things were less intrusive and more targetted to the audience of the site showing the advert then people might be more likely to click on them and less likely to block them.
Targetted affiliate links? Targetted self-hosted adverts? Sponsored links? I'm hardly doing any work and every month I've more than recovered the cost of my VPS account, sometimes several times over. That's just with two affiliate links that I use in targetted locations appropriate to each link.
Exactly, and people shouldn't expect to be bailed out by visitors and advertising. I host my sites a) because I want to b) because I enjoy working with it and improving it and c) because I know that people are making use of things even if they don't say anything or give any feedback.
I've got adblock too, but not everyone does so saying "go to gamename.filefront.com" used to assault them with excessive horrible ads, including popups at one point. That was why one of my sites was set up with the aim of not having any adverts on it at all and serving quality content.
As for what's wrong with it, I already said. For the games I play it has too much rubbish on there (Football team badges in the 41st millenium? Random corporation logos? Other miscellany junk?) and too many idiots. I tried to help out on the FileFront forums for a while, posting pointers to tutorials etc, but the general response was "those two steps are too complex - do it for me now" (complete with unintelligible half-sentences).
This is both good and bad news.
The Good: FileFront is shutting down, so all of the random junk probably won't have a home and all of the good stuff will find it worthwhile finding a better host that isn't full of adverts and idiots. (I set up one of my websites because the FileFront site was such a horrible place with annoying members and a high noise to signal ratio)
The Bad: The idiots will have to find somewhere else, so we'll have otherwise usable sites suddenly flooded with the "give me it on a silver platter because I can't be bothered while I spout gibberish in badly written and incomprehensible sentences".
Well, yeah, but putting DX10 on Windows should be Microsoft's job. Putting DX10 on Linux/Mac is basically the community's job (plus a few companies supporting things a bit) and they're doing it better than Windows, despite the fact that DX was designed as Windows-centric.
That's the wonderful irony about this - Linux, the non-gaming desktop, is going to get DirectX 10 through open-source while Microsoft just ignore the huge majority of people on Windows XP!
Not that I use any games that are DX10, but this is definitely an interesting development.