I'm currently working on something like that, a "teaser" version of the strip at a static URL that updates daily that anyone can feel free to show as an image on their page as a link to my full page. This is the teaser for the full strip on the main page.
I haven't put this into public use yet because I'm waiting until after my upcoming server move, but it at least seems like an awesome idea to increase traffic to the site. I've also toyed with the idea of making a co-branded destination page, so that someone could make it appear like the target content, the full strip was a portion of their own site.
I'm not sure what type of money would be involved in something like that, even in which direction, but it's an idea I'm exploring.
A company named Thoroughbred has an Object-Oriented programming environment built around Basic called OpenWorkshop. The company I work for has a several million lines of code written in it.
Now, I'll be the first to admit, their idea of "objects" strains the definition a bit, but with a very loose interpretation of what OOP is, this fits the bill.
Well, I'm using 0.7 right now to post this, and after tooling around with it for a bit, I can finally say that it's finally an acceptable browser. Speed seems greatly improved since the last milestone, it "feels" a lot more stable, and a lot of the annoying bugs that hampered previous use of it are finally ironed out. Congratulations to the Mozilla team.
WARNING: This opinion is subject to quick and radical change the first time it crashes.;)
I've done some thinking about this issue, being as how I've had a daily online comic strip for two years now. The problem is that with the amount of money that most people would be willing to pay to read the strip, it's such a miniscule amount that charging for it is impractical.
I've found moderate success with merchandising. I imagine the larger comics would be able to be self-sufficient enough to make a living through such an endeavor.
I guess this proves one thing: Obscurity is not a form of Security. Battle.net uses *obscurity* to implement it's security. It seems to trust the client too much.
This doesn't prove that at all. What this proves is that your servers need to make damn sure that no one can create an account with the same name as an existing account.
There's no trust in the client here that's being exploited, it's a bug in their server software.
What's happening is this:
Client: I want to make a character named 'Bob'. Server: Uh, no. Client: I want to make a character named 'Bob'. Server: Uh, no. Client: I want to make a character named 'Bob'. Server: Uh, no. Client: I want to make a character named 'Bob'. Server: Uh, no. Client: I want to make a character named 'Bob'. Server: Uh, no. Client: I want to make a character named 'Bob'. Server: Okay. Here you go.
From what I've read, the bug (Creating a character with the name of the one you want to hack, and retrying till the server barfs and accepts it) existed in EverQuest as well
No, EverQuest's character stealing bugs (which have been fixed for almost two years now) relied on extremely unusual situations and were hardly exploitable because of the rarity of their occurance.
From what I've been reading, the Diablo2 bug can be easily reproduced. The competition ladders in Hardcore are a graveyard now. These are characters with hundreds of hours of play into them. I hope Blizzard kept backups.;)
Theres a new MMORPG coming out and it's looking VERY promising. It's called Dawn.
I hate to shatter hopes, but it's been determined that Dawn is vaporware and will never exist.
They claim their team of one programmer and five artists can out-do the likes of UO, EQ, and AC, with an engine written in six months. The lead programmer doesn't know any of the industry terms, has never answered any questions about what technologies he's using to develop the project, one of their main screenshots has been shown to have been stolen from an online art gallery, a major scene from their demo movie was shown to simply be a rendering of an example scene that comes with 3D Studio Max. The main programmer's much-touted "military experience" has been discovered to only be a brief stint in ROTC in High School. Their corporate website was registered by yourbigdaddy@hotmail.com, the address is in a residental area. When a phone number was dug up and called, the programmer's mother answered the phone and said she didn't know anything about any game, and that Jeff (the programmer) was in school.
Those, combined with the fact that every time he opens his mouth and talks about the game, he pours out descriptions of new, minute features. The whole thing reeks of a situation where some kid, fresh out of high school, came up with a grand idea, actually thought he could do it, and spouted his mouth off and made promises about it.
I always thought that was true, that the pop people are less happy; they're too busy trying to conform and hold their "position" that they forget to just enjoy life. While they're insulting us "geeks" to try and make themselves look better, we're just ignoring them and having fun.
That's not insightful. No more than them insulting geeks in the first place. It's just putting the shoe on the other foot.
Pop People: Hahaha! Look at the geeks! They have no social skills, they can't interact with people so they interact with computers! What losers! Geeks: Hahaha! Look at the pop people! They have no real social skills, they just emulate what they see Britney Spears do! What losers!
... but then, look at me. I'm a geek, I dream about code, but I also enjoy CHR music and I was elected to student government back in High School. What does that make me? A hideous mutant with no social abilities and no self-distinction?
Any attempts to classify any group into neat, tidy little boxes is bound to fail. It doesn't matter if the group is pop people or geeks.
NET only got an "honourable mention"...
infinitely more vaporous than most of the top 10, including OSX, which has been in beta for a while...
.NET is in beta. I have it on my machine. If Linux 2.4 doesn't deserve to be called vaporware, and OSX doesn't deserve to be called vaporware, then.NET doesn't deserve to be called vaporware either. Being made by Microsoft doesn't suddenly make it a candidate.
Regional North Pole offices and warehouses employ quite a few elves and one human Santa. The Santa hits the shopping malls and tabulates kids' wish lists. Elves then purchase toys in megabulk from the big manufacturers (Hasbro, Mattel, Nintendo, Sony, Tyco, etc.) with (among other income sources) the fines paid by the families of naughty juvenile delinquents, wrap up the toys, and distribute them by truck or train (the cars say North Pole Express, or `Norpolex') to other regional offices. The mall Santa then handles toy delivery in each town.
In other news, North Pole, Inc., recently lost a lot of its market cap in the stock market when investors realized that it had a business plan like a dot-com: give stuff away and get nothing back.
In fact, in one day, Santa's holdings in the company went from well over $12 billion dollars to a little over $35.20.
North Pole, Inc. (listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol SNTA) is currently trading for under a dollar and is in danger of being delisted. Rumors abound that Lycos may be looking into purchasing the company.
A search for "Linux Sucks" yields 114,000 results, and a search for "Windows 2000 Sucks" gets 66,700.
And thanks to the power of Open Source propaganda, where you can rely on everyone to be an advocate, as opposed to the old style Closed Source propaganda, where the majority of suckage has to come from the vendor, this problem will be fixed by Linux 2.4!
Another thing seems to be that it is the Unix geeks above all who seem to have a higher artistic sensibility, and like tolkien more than the average NT geek, for whom the "hitchhikers guide to the galaxy" seems to hold more interest.
I think you're stereotyping a bit. Not all Unix geeks like Tolkein. Not all NT geeks like Adams. I'm a Terry Pratchett fan and I prefer Unix over NT as a server. I could rattle off the names of several of my coworkers that think that the whole fantasy genre is crap.
I can take or leave Tolkien. I don't like anime much. I wasn't one of the downtrodden in high school. Hemos, CmdrTaco, JonKatz and the rest of the Slashdot crew don't speak for the entire geek community, by any stretch of the imagination. Any attempts to put us in nice little easily-filed boxes is destined to failure.
Hmmm... well, I've historically voted with my dollars for games that contain gore, but I understand there's a large market for games that contain bush, too. Nobody ever wants to acknowledge that they went for bush, though. Too embarassing, I think, and they fear what their peers would think.
If someone could come up with a game with both bush AND gore, hell, they've got it made.
The long-term plan of most free service sites is to eventually find a way to make money other than banner ads.
I don't believe forcing unrelated content down the user's throat is the best way to go about making that money. This is just my opinion, so your mileage may vary.
I, for one, would be perfectly willing to pay a small fee for access to the lean-and-mean deja.com, if that were the direction they wanted to go. That's closer to old-economy concepts as well: sell the customer what they want, not everything else under the sun.
Spoken like a reasonable person, which is why you don't get interviewed.
I guess to make headlines you have to make outrageous claims like The Impending Collapse of Microsoft(tm).;)
However, it's also possible that a few OEMs will start advertising thier computers as costing $1000, with Linux installed. You then have to "upgrade" to Windows for $100.
This, I believe, is a more plausible scenario for what might happen in the future. And when it's all said and done, it won't affect Microsoft's bottom line much at all. If it does, I totally expect Microsoft to lower their prices. They are a business after all. If they have to take a smaller profit margin to move the units, they'll do it.
For the most part, OEMs sell computers to non-technical end users. The people that like the talking paperclip. A computer without Windows is useless to them, because they're certainly not going to grok things that even the Linux community deems easy-to-use, like Gnome and KDE.
ESR is doing nothing but giving the reporters something to write about, and at the same time, trivializing the push to get Linux to the desktop. If Linux makes it to the desktop, it's not going to be "by default" because Microsoft gives it up like he suggests it is. It's going to take a lot of work and polish on the Linux user interface, better multimedia support, better recreational application support, and perhaps even (*choke*) some cute little talking mascot.
ESR sez: and that they'll drop the M$ tax, and replace their bundled OS with something cheaper, like Linux
....and completely ignore what the general public wants, selling them computers that can't run their favorite software and games. Yeah, companies last real long when they do that. I hear DVD drives are expensive too, perhaps OEMs will drop them and replace them with Betamax drives.
A topic brought up on Slashdot a couple days ago had some interesting discussion that if Free solutions like Plex86 took off, it would destroy VMWare's business model, and show other businesses that you can't make money developing software for Linux because someone will undercut you with a Free solution. How do you respond to these fears?
Slashdot Mirror
If they had implemented this on MacOS(random OS picked off the top of my head) would the BSD guys say the same thing?
If it had just been implemented in Windows, everybody would be saying that, the Linux folks and the BSD folks.
Don't pick on Linux, but feel free to bash Microsoft.
Congratulations!!! It's a binary adder!
*passes out cigars*
I'm currently working on something like that, a "teaser" version of the strip at a static URL that updates daily that anyone can feel free to show as an image on their page as a link to my full page. This is the teaser for the full strip on the main page.
I haven't put this into public use yet because I'm waiting until after my upcoming server move, but it at least seems like an awesome idea to increase traffic to the site. I've also toyed with the idea of making a co-branded destination page, so that someone could make it appear like the target content, the full strip was a portion of their own site.
I'm not sure what type of money would be involved in something like that, even in which direction, but it's an idea I'm exploring.
A company named Thoroughbred has an Object-Oriented programming environment built around Basic called OpenWorkshop. The company I work for has a several million lines of code written in it.
Now, I'll be the first to admit, their idea of "objects" strains the definition a bit, but with a very loose interpretation of what OOP is, this fits the bill.
Well, I'm using 0.7 right now to post this, and after tooling around with it for a bit, I can finally say that it's finally an acceptable browser. Speed seems greatly improved since the last milestone, it "feels" a lot more stable, and a lot of the annoying bugs that hampered previous use of it are finally ironed out. Congratulations to the Mozilla team.
;)
WARNING: This opinion is subject to quick and radical change the first time it crashes.
We do not guarantee that any source code or executable code available from the mozilla.org domain is Year 2000 compliant.
Drat. I guess I should stop working on my mod_timetravel module for Apache, since it's not going to work with Mozilla.
I've done some thinking about this issue, being as how I've had a daily online comic strip for two years now. The problem is that with the amount of money that most people would be willing to pay to read the strip, it's such a miniscule amount that charging for it is impractical.
I've found moderate success with merchandising. I imagine the larger comics would be able to be self-sufficient enough to make a living through such an endeavor.
I'm personally getting worried (OK, paranoid) due to all this stuff I'm seeing on Slashdot
;)
Everyone knows you shouldn't believe everything you read on Slashdot.
I guess this proves one thing: Obscurity is not a form of Security. Battle.net uses *obscurity* to implement it's security. It seems to trust the client too much.
This doesn't prove that at all. What this proves is that your servers need to make damn sure that no one can create an account with the same name as an existing account.
There's no trust in the client here that's being exploited, it's a bug in their server software.
What's happening is this:
Client: I want to make a character named 'Bob'.
Server: Uh, no.
Client: I want to make a character named 'Bob'.
Server: Uh, no.
Client: I want to make a character named 'Bob'.
Server: Uh, no.
Client: I want to make a character named 'Bob'.
Server: Uh, no.
Client: I want to make a character named 'Bob'.
Server: Uh, no.
Client: I want to make a character named 'Bob'.
Server: Okay. Here you go.
From what I've read, the bug (Creating a character with the name of the one you want to hack, and retrying till the server barfs and accepts it) existed in EverQuest as well
;)
No, EverQuest's character stealing bugs (which have been fixed for almost two years now) relied on extremely unusual situations and were hardly exploitable because of the rarity of their occurance.
From what I've been reading, the Diablo2 bug can be easily reproduced. The competition ladders in Hardcore are a graveyard now. These are characters with hundreds of hours of play into them. I hope Blizzard kept backups.
Theres a new MMORPG coming out and it's looking VERY promising. It's called Dawn.
I hate to shatter hopes, but it's been determined that Dawn is vaporware and will never exist.
They claim their team of one programmer and five artists can out-do the likes of UO, EQ, and AC, with an engine written in six months. The lead programmer doesn't know any of the industry terms, has never answered any questions about what technologies he's using to develop the project, one of their main screenshots has been shown to have been stolen from an online art gallery, a major scene from their demo movie was shown to simply be a rendering of an example scene that comes with 3D Studio Max. The main programmer's much-touted "military experience" has been discovered to only be a brief stint in ROTC in High School. Their corporate website was registered by yourbigdaddy@hotmail.com, the address is in a residental area. When a phone number was dug up and called, the programmer's mother answered the phone and said she didn't know anything about any game, and that Jeff (the programmer) was in school.
Those, combined with the fact that every time he opens his mouth and talks about the game, he pours out descriptions of new, minute features. The whole thing reeks of a situation where some kid, fresh out of high school, came up with a grand idea, actually thought he could do it, and spouted his mouth off and made promises about it.
Don't hold your breath over it.
Atlas Shrugged is also in their "Best of the Millennium"....
I guess that proves that the list is a joke.
I always thought that was true, that the pop people are less happy; they're too busy trying to conform and hold their "position" that they forget to just enjoy life. While they're insulting us "geeks" to try and make themselves look better, we're just ignoring them and having fun.
... but then, look at me. I'm a geek, I dream about code, but I also enjoy CHR music and I was elected to student government back in High School. What does that make me? A hideous mutant with no social abilities and no self-distinction?
That's not insightful. No more than them insulting geeks in the first place. It's just putting the shoe on the other foot.
Pop People: Hahaha! Look at the geeks! They have no social skills, they can't interact with people so they interact with computers! What losers!
Geeks: Hahaha! Look at the pop people! They have no real social skills, they just emulate what they see Britney Spears do! What losers!
Any attempts to classify any group into neat, tidy little boxes is bound to fail. It doesn't matter if the group is pop people or geeks.
NET only got an "honourable mention"...
.NET is in beta. I have it on my machine. If Linux 2.4 doesn't deserve to be called vaporware, and OSX doesn't deserve to be called vaporware, then .NET doesn't deserve to be called vaporware either. Being made by Microsoft doesn't suddenly make it a candidate.
infinitely more vaporous than most of the top 10, including OSX, which has been in beta for a while...
Regional North Pole offices and warehouses employ quite a few elves and one human Santa. The Santa hits the shopping malls and tabulates kids' wish lists. Elves then purchase toys in megabulk from the big manufacturers (Hasbro, Mattel, Nintendo, Sony, Tyco, etc.) with (among other income sources) the fines paid by the families of naughty juvenile delinquents, wrap up the toys, and distribute them by truck or train (the cars say North Pole Express, or `Norpolex') to other regional offices. The mall Santa then handles toy delivery in each town.
In other news, North Pole, Inc., recently lost a lot of its market cap in the stock market when investors realized that it had a business plan like a dot-com: give stuff away and get nothing back.
In fact, in one day, Santa's holdings in the company went from well over $12 billion dollars to a little over $35.20.
North Pole, Inc. (listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol SNTA) is currently trading for under a dollar and is in danger of being delisted. Rumors abound that Lycos may be looking into purchasing the company.
A search for "Linux Sucks" yields 114,000 results, and a search for "Windows 2000 Sucks" gets 66,700.
And thanks to the power of Open Source propaganda, where you can rely on everyone to be an advocate, as opposed to the old style Closed Source propaganda, where the majority of suckage has to come from the vendor, this problem will be fixed by Linux 2.4!
I've lost count of the total number of days I've spent playing this in the last year.
/played and it will tell you how much of your life you've spent playing. ;)
In game, you can type
Some people brag about their 100+ days of played time. It's kinda scary when you think about it.
Another thing seems to be that it is the Unix geeks above all who seem to have a higher artistic sensibility, and like tolkien more than the average NT geek, for whom the "hitchhikers guide to the galaxy" seems to hold more interest.
I think you're stereotyping a bit. Not all Unix geeks like Tolkein. Not all NT geeks like Adams. I'm a Terry Pratchett fan and I prefer Unix over NT as a server. I could rattle off the names of several of my coworkers that think that the whole fantasy genre is crap.
I can take or leave Tolkien. I don't like anime much. I wasn't one of the downtrodden in high school. Hemos, CmdrTaco, JonKatz and the rest of the Slashdot crew don't speak for the entire geek community, by any stretch of the imagination. Any attempts to put us in nice little easily-filed boxes is destined to failure.
As long as I have a straw, some paper, and spit, pneumatic technology will never die.
Hmmm... well, I've historically voted with my dollars for games that contain gore, but I understand there's a large market for games that contain bush, too. Nobody ever wants to acknowledge that they went for bush, though. Too embarassing, I think, and they fear what their peers would think.
If someone could come up with a game with both bush AND gore, hell, they've got it made.
The long-term plan of most free service sites is to eventually find a way to make money other than banner ads.
I don't believe forcing unrelated content down the user's throat is the best way to go about making that money. This is just my opinion, so your mileage may vary.
I, for one, would be perfectly willing to pay a small fee for access to the lean-and-mean deja.com, if that were the direction they wanted to go. That's closer to old-economy concepts as well: sell the customer what they want, not everything else under the sun.
It's good to see one of the best (IMO, anyway) sites getting back to its roots and focusing on doing one thing, and doing it well.
Get rid of the cruft (amazon.com, you listening?) and the users will beat a path to your NIC.
Spoken like a reasonable person, which is why you don't get interviewed.
;)
I guess to make headlines you have to make outrageous claims like The Impending Collapse of Microsoft(tm).
However, it's also possible that a few OEMs will start advertising thier computers as costing $1000, with Linux installed. You then have to "upgrade" to Windows for $100.
This, I believe, is a more plausible scenario for what might happen in the future. And when it's all said and done, it won't affect Microsoft's bottom line much at all. If it does, I totally expect Microsoft to lower their prices. They are a business after all. If they have to take a smaller profit margin to move the units, they'll do it.
For the most part, OEMs sell computers to non-technical end users. The people that like the talking paperclip. A computer without Windows is useless to them, because they're certainly not going to grok things that even the Linux community deems easy-to-use, like Gnome and KDE.
ESR is doing nothing but giving the reporters something to write about, and at the same time, trivializing the push to get Linux to the desktop. If Linux makes it to the desktop, it's not going to be "by default" because Microsoft gives it up like he suggests it is. It's going to take a lot of work and polish on the Linux user interface, better multimedia support, better recreational application support, and perhaps even (*choke*) some cute little talking mascot.
ESR sez: and that they'll drop the M$ tax, and replace their bundled OS with something cheaper, like Linux
....and completely ignore what the general public wants, selling them computers that can't run their favorite software and games. Yeah, companies last real long when they do that. I hear DVD drives are expensive too, perhaps OEMs will drop them and replace them with Betamax drives.
A topic brought up on Slashdot a couple days ago had some interesting discussion that if Free solutions like Plex86 took off, it would destroy VMWare's business model, and show other businesses that you can't make money developing software for Linux because someone will undercut you with a Free solution. How do you respond to these fears?