I was in the early alpha and beta testing of Worlds, as I had a friend at Cheyenne Mountain. It was the first MMO I actually liked. It was a little buggy, but the game was almost done when bankruptcy hit. This was complicated by some freeze being put on the accounts where, even though the money was there, they were not able to pay their employees. Shoot, the game was in Beta, there were just a few bugs to work out, the server farms were going online - the game was pretty much READY - and the inside word was that they were weeks (about two months) from going live. Quite sad what became of it.
Its funny that this type of thing has been in Sci-Fi movies and television shows for decades, and I am thinking that even the original Gemini suits were somewhat form-fitting, and yet we are just now starting to look at the possibility of using these for real
I'll probably get marked redundant, but, come on, really? IE9 hasn't been released yet! The fact that it had 10 million downloads in six weeks while IT WAS STILL IN BETA should say that IE is not dying. Its marketshare may be slipping, but not by enough to worry about.
I think the only reason this story even got posted is because this is Slashdot, and any chance to take a stab at Microsoft, whether founded on actual facts, fluff, or paranioa, always seems to be welcome.
Its just scary that a page I created 15 years ago, and last updated ten years ago, is being archived. I had almost forgotten I had Geocities before this article. Thanks for bringing back memories I would perfer to forget.
This was pretty much how I shared links with friends before Facebook - I was just nieve enough to think that everyone in the world was as crazy about Dominique Moceanu as I was when I was 18.
You obviously have not driven around Rural Texas. Still lots of old analogue towers out there, with no data - that's right, no text messaging, no internet, no visual voice mail until you change repeaters. Considering this is setup on a mountain, is it really that hard to imagine that its an old antenna, with a microwave dish pointed to some distant reaches of the outskirts of China that may not have internet access?
You are, of course, assuming that the average Facebook user is not 14 and accepts every single friend request presented to them in some popularity contest to see who can reach 1000 friends first.
Its really not that hard to set your page to "friends only" and accept requests from only people you know.
I have NEVER had an issue with the privacy settings on Facebook, and I have had it for four years. People just need to realize that you may not want to post pictures of your kids in the tub or in swimsuits publicly for the whole world to see - know who your friends are, know your privacy levels, and even if you do know all that, don't post stuff that you don't want other people to see.
I had to yell at my mom for posting financial stuff about me to my wall instead of in a message. Use a bit of common sense!
I completely agree. Most of the "issues" on facebook stem from people not knowing how to work their privacy settings. If you are already sharing information publicly, what is wrong with adding an easy way to search it? Its like people when they started complaining that Facebook was sharing phone numbers. Well, you had to provide your phone number in the first place, and there has ALWAYS been the option to hide it.
I for one welcome this change - its been a feature I have been wishing for for a while
I saw the footage yesterday. It was incredibly grainy, but to me, it looked like she was holding an ice pack (package of meat maybe?) to her jaw. She possibly could have just had a tooth pulled.
Seriously, a time traveler with a cell phone? This wouldn't have even made sense in the 60s, as the car-phone technology used at the time is not compatable with modern day cells.
This was my thought. Seriously, if the teacher does not know the student's name by the end of the second week, they should not be in an enviornment where they interact with people.
The exception is substitute teachers. Kids use to try to fool me when I subbed. The point is, I paid attention - if one kid tried to answer for two people, I would jump on them. If they did not answer for themselves, they were marked absent. Then they had to deal with the office for why they were present for one class and not another on the same day
Actually, "Christian business principles" and "ethical business principles" are practically one and the same. You are right, there isn't much difference. Sadly, though, just like in all religions, and probably especially in Christianity, many people say they are of said religion without practicing the teachings of said religion.
The point of this news story, however, is that the investor and the site owners seemed to have two very different understandings of what this site was going to be. This wouldn't be the first time this happened. I think the question is, did the operators actually make an agreement or lead the investor to the impression that this was going to make a money making site. Its really hard to make money in a product that others are giving away for free, and doing it quite well.
I have been a person who has been getting upset with my iPhone. I hate the huge bills, I hate the restriciton that Apple places on the app store.
Or rather, I hated.
What changed my mind? Had a friend who picked up an android phone a couple of weeks ago, and we played with it. Suddenly, I love Apple. The Android app store seemed to rarely have what I was looking for, and when I did find something, it was either a generic clone, or a virus, according to the comments. There seems to be zippo quality control. Other providers who offer Android phones in my area seem to have only slighly cheaper data plans than what i currently have with AT&T, and with MUCH worse coverage - especially on the data side.
From what I have seen, I think Android has reached its peak, and will start falling off. Pitty, It could have been good if they had of standardized a few things and had better censorship in the app store
1) don't screw your customer 2)don't sabatage your competition or engage in espionage 3) Don't try to circumvent the law 4) Treat your employees fairly 5) Treat your stockholders fairly 6) Treat your partners fairly
Overall, not a bad business model. You conduct yourself in that fashion, people will respect you, and will give you repeat business.
Obviously, you did not get your BBA / MBA from a strict Christian University, and there are quite a few of those around. They teach that its not a sin to make money, what you focus on is conducting your business in a fair and ethical way, and don't engage in practices that hinder your faith.
In this summery, however, the problem is that the investor is 1) ignorant of what he is investing in, 2) obviously doesn't share their views, and, probably most importantly, 3) is trying to find a way to make money off of something that places like http://www.biblegateway.com/http://www.e-sword.net/ and others, give away for free. I mean, let's face it, Bible.com isn't exactly a Microsoft, no matter how badly the investor wants to think it is.
Completely agree. I was one of those that joined when it was still.edu only, and before they went international. According to the movie, they were trying to get Baylor, and my university was one in the radius around the school that they expanded to trying to raise intrest at Baylor. Back in those days, there were no ads or anything else on there, and many of us were questioning how they were financing servers. The reason many of us went to it was because we were sick of Myspace constantly being down. So Mark is a bit of a douche, or know-it-all, or however you want to look at it. I could say that about 3/4ths of the slashdot userbase (no trolling intended).
Of course, before that, Seagate bought Connor and did the same thing - Connor quality with Seagate stickers. Took me years before I trusted Seagate again.
I don't know, I think Hitachi has always made crappy drives.:-) I just bought two drives over the years (the second to give them a second chance), and on both models,the ball bearings just locked up after about a year of use, with absolutely no warning. Then again, I could have just ahd a bad experience, but Hitachi seems to really be slammed with bad reviews.
I tend to stay Western Digital , partly because of brand, but partly because they are the drives that always seem to be put on huge sales. I got like three Western Digitals, a Seagate, two Maxtors, and then I think I have a Toshiba and a Samsung. Pretty much, put important files on multiple drives by different manufactorors of different ages - don't put all your eggs in one basket. Works quite well for me.
I could be the smartass, and state that Dual Density 5 1/4" discs could store about 1.2 meg, and single density 3.5s only stored 720k. Wasn't the C64 only able to store about 180k per side of a 5 1/4"?
Truthfully, all my drives under 300 gig have gone physically bad years ago. Its probably been about 8 years or longer since I had a 20 gig drive, and 4 years since I had a 40, and that was in a laptop. My 1TB drive has been my fastest and least problamatic of all my drives, but that is probably been because its the newest. In my experience, hard drives start slowing down around 2 years of age, start having dirty sectors around 3 years of age, and fail completely between 3-5 years of age. As such, I am constantly changing out / adding drives. Having multiple drives at different ages, with backups of important files on multiple drives, has kept data to a minimal.
A 3 TB drive at this time would, in a year, have 2 gigs copied from other drives in my system that are probably going to fail.
Why the space? You obviously do not mess with HD Video, Camera Raw, Premiere projects, or large Photoshop projects. 20 GB wouldn't even hold all my videos from my last vacation - that took two Blu-Ray discs to backup
I must agree here. Several video converters (MediaCoder for one) has recently added CUDA support. AFAIK, the CUDA in MediaCoder is still beta. Adobe's Media Encoder uses multiple processors REALLY well, but not sure if it supports GPU encoding. I've seen Adobe using GPU video rendering and processing (such as in Adobe Premiere), but I don't think you could say this is the same as Video Encoding.
However, all of these have come up in the past couple of years. I agree with the parent here, I don't think anyone was doing this in 2004.
As far as it being obvious, yes, it is NOW, it has been for pretty much the past two to four years when the idea of offloading work to the GPU really took off. In 2004, video encoding was either done by the capture card with hardware MJPEG / MPEG1/2 solutions, and AFAIK all other encoding was handled by the processor.
'I sometimes engage in a mental exercise I call the Laura Ingalls Test. What would Laura Ingalls, prairie girl, make of this freeway interchange? This Target? This cell phone?
Oh good, I am not the only crazy one here, although I always thought that Carrie was the cute one.
Okay, these do look better than the ones I saw. However, in image 1, there seems to be some anomily going on where the PNG file seems to have a few more rows of pixels in the middle of the picture. The edge of the building, more stars, and the fence is a hair longer. Flip back and forth between the two, its really weird.
Image 7 has a noticable difference in color between the two formats.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in the early alpha and beta testing of Worlds, as I had a friend at Cheyenne Mountain. It was the first MMO I actually liked. It was a little buggy, but the game was almost done when bankruptcy hit. This was complicated by some freeze being put on the accounts where, even though the money was there, they were not able to pay their employees. Shoot, the game was in Beta, there were just a few bugs to work out, the server farms were going online - the game was pretty much READY - and the inside word was that they were weeks (about two months) from going live. Quite sad what became of it.
Its funny that this type of thing has been in Sci-Fi movies and television shows for decades, and I am thinking that even the original Gemini suits were somewhat form-fitting, and yet we are just now starting to look at the possibility of using these for real
I'll probably get marked redundant, but, come on, really? IE9 hasn't been released yet! The fact that it had 10 million downloads in six weeks while IT WAS STILL IN BETA should say that IE is not dying. Its marketshare may be slipping, but not by enough to worry about.
I think the only reason this story even got posted is because this is Slashdot, and any chance to take a stab at Microsoft, whether founded on actual facts, fluff, or paranioa, always seems to be welcome.
They don't have me, http://geociti.es/Heartland/Hills/5791 but archive.org does. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/5791
Its just scary that a page I created 15 years ago, and last updated ten years ago, is being archived. I had almost forgotten I had Geocities before this article. Thanks for bringing back memories I would perfer to forget.
This was pretty much how I shared links with friends before Facebook - I was just nieve enough to think that everyone in the world was as crazy about Dominique Moceanu as I was when I was 18.
You obviously have not driven around Rural Texas. Still lots of old analogue towers out there, with no data - that's right, no text messaging, no internet, no visual voice mail until you change repeaters. Considering this is setup on a mountain, is it really that hard to imagine that its an old antenna, with a microwave dish pointed to some distant reaches of the outskirts of China that may not have internet access?
Forgot about this groups thing they added. I need to check into that. This is something I have been wanting for a long time
You are, of course, assuming that the average Facebook user is not 14 and accepts every single friend request presented to them in some popularity contest to see who can reach 1000 friends first.
Its really not that hard to set your page to "friends only" and accept requests from only people you know.
I have NEVER had an issue with the privacy settings on Facebook, and I have had it for four years. People just need to realize that you may not want to post pictures of your kids in the tub or in swimsuits publicly for the whole world to see - know who your friends are, know your privacy levels, and even if you do know all that, don't post stuff that you don't want other people to see.
I had to yell at my mom for posting financial stuff about me to my wall instead of in a message. Use a bit of common sense!
I completely agree. Most of the "issues" on facebook stem from people not knowing how to work their privacy settings. If you are already sharing information publicly, what is wrong with adding an easy way to search it? Its like people when they started complaining that Facebook was sharing phone numbers. Well, you had to provide your phone number in the first place, and there has ALWAYS been the option to hide it.
I for one welcome this change - its been a feature I have been wishing for for a while
I saw the footage yesterday. It was incredibly grainy, but to me, it looked like she was holding an ice pack (package of meat maybe?) to her jaw. She possibly could have just had a tooth pulled.
Seriously, a time traveler with a cell phone? This wouldn't have even made sense in the 60s, as the car-phone technology used at the time is not compatable with modern day cells.
Wouldn't this also put projects such as Ajax and OpenJDK in jepordy?
I have a 3G and am quite happy with it. And I have unlimited data.
Then again, this is Austrailia we are talking of, their government tries to overly-complicate everything.
This was my thought. Seriously, if the teacher does not know the student's name by the end of the second week, they should not be in an enviornment where they interact with people.
The exception is substitute teachers. Kids use to try to fool me when I subbed. The point is, I paid attention - if one kid tried to answer for two people, I would jump on them. If they did not answer for themselves, they were marked absent. Then they had to deal with the office for why they were present for one class and not another on the same day
Actually, "Christian business principles" and "ethical business principles" are practically one and the same. You are right, there isn't much difference. Sadly, though, just like in all religions, and probably especially in Christianity, many people say they are of said religion without practicing the teachings of said religion.
The point of this news story, however, is that the investor and the site owners seemed to have two very different understandings of what this site was going to be. This wouldn't be the first time this happened. I think the question is, did the operators actually make an agreement or lead the investor to the impression that this was going to make a money making site. Its really hard to make money in a product that others are giving away for free, and doing it quite well.
I have been a person who has been getting upset with my iPhone. I hate the huge bills, I hate the restriciton that Apple places on the app store.
Or rather, I hated.
What changed my mind? Had a friend who picked up an android phone a couple of weeks ago, and we played with it. Suddenly, I love Apple. The Android app store seemed to rarely have what I was looking for, and when I did find something, it was either a generic clone, or a virus, according to the comments. There seems to be zippo quality control. Other providers who offer Android phones in my area seem to have only slighly cheaper data plans than what i currently have with AT&T, and with MUCH worse coverage - especially on the data side.
From what I have seen, I think Android has reached its peak, and will start falling off. Pitty, It could have been good if they had of standardized a few things and had better censorship in the app store
Basically, Christian business principals are:
1) don't screw your customer
2)don't sabatage your competition or engage in espionage
3) Don't try to circumvent the law
4) Treat your employees fairly
5) Treat your stockholders fairly
6) Treat your partners fairly
Overall, not a bad business model. You conduct yourself in that fashion, people will respect you, and will give you repeat business.
Obviously, you did not get your BBA / MBA from a strict Christian University, and there are quite a few of those around. They teach that its not a sin to make money, what you focus on is conducting your business in a fair and ethical way, and don't engage in practices that hinder your faith.
In this summery, however, the problem is that the investor is 1) ignorant of what he is investing in, 2) obviously doesn't share their views, and, probably most importantly, 3) is trying to find a way to make money off of something that places like http://www.biblegateway.com/ http://www.e-sword.net/ and others, give away for free. I mean, let's face it, Bible.com isn't exactly a Microsoft, no matter how badly the investor wants to think it is.
Completely agree. I was one of those that joined when it was still .edu only, and before they went international. According to the movie, they were trying to get Baylor, and my university was one in the radius around the school that they expanded to trying to raise intrest at Baylor. Back in those days, there were no ads or anything else on there, and many of us were questioning how they were financing servers. The reason many of us went to it was because we were sick of Myspace constantly being down. So Mark is a bit of a douche, or know-it-all, or however you want to look at it. I could say that about 3/4ths of the slashdot userbase (no trolling intended).
Of course, before that, Seagate bought Connor and did the same thing - Connor quality with Seagate stickers. Took me years before I trusted Seagate again.
I don't know, I think Hitachi has always made crappy drives. :-) I just bought two drives over the years (the second to give them a second chance), and on both models,the ball bearings just locked up after about a year of use, with absolutely no warning. Then again, I could have just ahd a bad experience, but Hitachi seems to really be slammed with bad reviews.
I tend to stay Western Digital , partly because of brand, but partly because they are the drives that always seem to be put on huge sales. I got like three Western Digitals, a Seagate, two Maxtors, and then I think I have a Toshiba and a Samsung. Pretty much, put important files on multiple drives by different manufactorors of different ages - don't put all your eggs in one basket. Works quite well for me.
I could be the smartass, and state that Dual Density 5 1/4" discs could store about 1.2 meg, and single density 3.5s only stored 720k. Wasn't the C64 only able to store about 180k per side of a 5 1/4"?
Truthfully, all my drives under 300 gig have gone physically bad years ago. Its probably been about 8 years or longer since I had a 20 gig drive, and 4 years since I had a 40, and that was in a laptop. My 1TB drive has been my fastest and least problamatic of all my drives, but that is probably been because its the newest. In my experience, hard drives start slowing down around 2 years of age, start having dirty sectors around 3 years of age, and fail completely between 3-5 years of age. As such, I am constantly changing out / adding drives. Having multiple drives at different ages, with backups of important files on multiple drives, has kept data to a minimal.
A 3 TB drive at this time would, in a year, have 2 gigs copied from other drives in my system that are probably going to fail.
Why the space? You obviously do not mess with HD Video, Camera Raw, Premiere projects, or large Photoshop projects. 20 GB wouldn't even hold all my videos from my last vacation - that took two Blu-Ray discs to backup
I must agree here. Several video converters (MediaCoder for one) has recently added CUDA support. AFAIK, the CUDA in MediaCoder is still beta. Adobe's Media Encoder uses multiple processors REALLY well, but not sure if it supports GPU encoding. I've seen Adobe using GPU video rendering and processing (such as in Adobe Premiere), but I don't think you could say this is the same as Video Encoding.
However, all of these have come up in the past couple of years. I agree with the parent here, I don't think anyone was doing this in 2004.
As far as it being obvious, yes, it is NOW, it has been for pretty much the past two to four years when the idea of offloading work to the GPU really took off. In 2004, video encoding was either done by the capture card with hardware MJPEG / MPEG1/2 solutions, and AFAIK all other encoding was handled by the processor.
'I sometimes engage in a mental exercise I call the Laura Ingalls Test. What would Laura Ingalls, prairie girl, make of this freeway interchange? This Target? This cell phone?
Oh good, I am not the only crazy one here, although I always thought that Carrie was the cute one.
http://kayeskorner.com/jpegimages/lauraingalls.jpg
http://kayeskorner.com/jpegimages/ingallsfamily.jpg
http://media.canada.com/1785a528-bef3-4f04-af39-9312146bfd98/melissasueanderson.jpg
Okay, these do look better than the ones I saw. However, in image 1, there seems to be some anomily going on where the PNG file seems to have a few more rows of pixels in the middle of the picture. The edge of the building, more stars, and the fence is a hair longer. Flip back and forth between the two, its really weird.
Image 7 has a noticable difference in color between the two formats.
All the other pictures look the same to me.