This is interesting. From my hopelessly and woefully inadequate understanding of celestial mechanics I would guess this must be due to the stars rotating around some huge mass in the centre, right? A black hole or similar? Without that in place wouldn't the stars interact with one another and eventually end up a horribly chaotic mess? The article doesn't say.
The article states that the Fireworks trinket would cost you $900.00, and the Ogre trinket $2,100.00. From experience running a university gaming society back at the height of MtG's popularity I'd say that a $2100 collection is actually quite small. I've met people at gaming conventions with collections that must have cost them 10* that.
If the user were to enable pipelining in his browser (such as setting Firefox's network.http.pipelining in about:config), the number of hostnames we use wouldn't matter, and he'd make even more effective use of his available bandwidth. But we can't control that server-side.
I rather like the abstractness of the furniture they've mocked up, particularly the swirly chair thing, but I think this has a 'better' use. I'd love to see what sort of 3D forms it'd make from a ballet dancer or a gymnast. Turning graceful movement into sculpture would be fascinating.
"The CD as it is right now is dead," Levy said, adding that 60% of consumers put CDs into home computers in order to transfer material to digital music players.
If they realise that 60% of CD purchasers are ripping content then why on Earth are they trying to make it more difficult? If this guy is correct then increased anti-piracy measures will alienate more than half of their target audience.
Either he's wrong (I doubt it) or the music industry is trying to commit business suicide.
But I suppose we already knew that when they signed Ashlee Simpson.;P
We don't need a fancy search, or a complicated 'if you liked this try...' feature.
You might not need those things, but any company providing files for download at cost certainly will. It's called cross-selling, it's marketing, and it's the sort of thing that makes the difference between living and dying for an ecommerce company. When you're "microselling" something you need to sell a large number of units just to stay in business. How is the service going to do that if they don't maximise every conversion?
("maximise every conversion"? Oh god, I've turned into a PHB. Shoot me now.)
Nothing in MySpace is "Web 2.0". All the control you have on that site is within the very limited bounds of a form that accepts HTML and CSS. Geocities had a pagebuilder that gave users as much back in 1996. Web 2.0 is about rich interfaces and client side applications. As yet I would argue that there are only two popular Web 2.0 sites. Those are GMail and DeviantArt (and DevArt is flakey at best). The rest are just sites that claim to be Web 2.0 but aren't (Digg, Flickr, MySpace, etc).
As for how much control to give users, give them whatever your resources will allow. If you've got the team strength to be able to firefight a javascript worm (MySpace) then give them a lot. If you've got the bandwidth to give them video upload (YouTube) give them space. If you're a one man team working on a toy website give them a couple of checkboxes and a button.
They still had jobs, just not working on IE. You don't get rid of developers just because the project finishes. Similarly, you don't keep a team together when they've got nothing to do. That would be a waste of some valuable assets. They'd just gone to other parts of Microsoft.
I doubt that desktop interfaces will ever shift to full 3D. There's no reason to, it would be more difficult to navigate than '3D' paradigm of nested directorys accessed through a 2D window display that we use today. Personally I think that filesystems are going to stop being organised using a 'physical' representation like files within folders, and will shift to a more database-y style similar to iTunes. Instead of thinking that a file is in a particular folder you'll end up with files being grouped by metadata and searched through using the equivalent of smart playlists ("all ODF files" rather than "all Martha Wainwright tunes"). There are several relational filesystems in development at the moment (including the SQL filesystem Microsoft dropped from Vista).
Where I see 3D becoming ubiquitous is in social community websites. It won't come about until either a Canvas3D element or Flash is capable of seamlessly streaming a scene quickly and easily, and until making a 'room' is as easy as making a MySpace profile (all that requires is a clever team to write a nice interface to the markup, the markup itself need not be simple), but once those are in place it'll catch on very quickly indeed. The idea of a MySpace 'city' where your page has a virtual location, you have neighbours, you're part of a 'block', will be.. well.. even more like Geocities than MySpace is now, but I'm sure it'll be fun.
I think you need to pay heed to the advice in your sig. A simple AJAX application is definitely not going to crush your server unless a: it gets slashdotted, b: your webserver is written in C64 Basic, or c: you're an idiot who puts things live without testing them properly first.
He played for 70 days out of a year. That's "only" 19.something percent. If you're the sort to only need 4 or 5 hours sleep a night you could easily fit that in beside a pretty normal life (9 - 5 job, a light social life, chores, etc). If giving 1/5th of your day over to a hobby is a sign that your life has been devoured then you need to sort out your priorities. Everyone should dedicate that much time at least to stuff they enjoy. Perhaps it's a bit narrowminded to concentrate on a single activity, but it's better than spending all that time at the office or wasted in a bar*.
And, as an addendum to that, make extensions run in some sort of "protected memory" area so they can't take the browser down with them. If that's not possible at least make instances of the browser run seperately so a crash doesn't take down the whole lot.
I've had occasion to read through stacks of Curriculum Vitea (I'm English) in my job. It's truly a soul destroying task. I don't have any links to samples but experience has taught me one universal truth: Long lists of skills mean nothing. People put everything they've ever heard of. It comes to the interview and it goes along the lines of "You know Perl well? No, but I walked past the Camel book in a library once.". If there isn't any mention of using the skill then the chances are the candidate hasn't ever used it professionally. I've updated my CV to put jobs and key projects with a description of the skills used in each first now.
The fact is, most movies, most TV shows, most video games put Muslims in a bad light, so we have to try to tell our side of the story.
Most movie producing nations have a problem with Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, so it's not really all that suprising that they cast Muslims as the baddies. If you're concerned with the way you're portrayed how about you stop blowing us up?
I imagine this is actually a bad thing for MySpace. Having 50 million unique hits from a single demographic such as teens is a huge deal. That'd be an amazing market penetration. Spread those 50 million out over a broader age range and, while you're getting the same number of eyeballs, your advertising target audience for any particular ad has shrunk considerably. After all, if 50% of the site is over 30 then 50% of the ad views of the latest pop sensation are going to be wasted on people who won't click.
From a business perspective I'd say this is damaging news.
So, what will Venice offer to combat YouTube's dominance? Streaming video with DVD-like controls, on-screen menus of preset channels, and interactive tools to share video playlists are only the beginning.
So, Venice will offer nothing that YouTube doesn't already offer then? It'll be all fancy with Web 2.0 controls though. Big deal. The interface is of little consequence, and arguably Venice will fall flat with their Web 2.0 gimmickery because you'll not be able to embed it in a MySpace profile like you can with Flash. The challenge to overcome with a video content site is.. well.. content. Maybe the professional content will win out, but I rather doubt it.
While search firms have a legitimate business interest in using this data in reasonable ways for both ongoing business and R&D purposes, it is difficult for reasonable observers to justify the retention of this data on an indefinite basis.
The information that you submit to a search engine, such as your search terms, your IP address, your user agent string, any cookie information, is all submitted voluntarily. You give up this data willingly. If you want to keep any of this information private then don't submit it. Of course, that means you won't be able to use the search engine, that's the cost of privacy. A price you should be willing to pay if your privacy is genuinuely important to you.
Too many people seem to expect that they should be able to live a private life despite handing over vast swaths of data on a daily basis. You can't. If you want your data to be private you need to keep it to yourself. Data retention issues are only applicable in situations where you don't have a choice about relinguishing your information (eg tax returns, vehicle licensing, etc).
Bottom line: If you choose to tell someone something voluntarily you cannot expect them to forget about it when you think they should.
Slashdot Mirror
This is interesting. From my hopelessly and woefully inadequate understanding of celestial mechanics I would guess this must be due to the stars rotating around some huge mass in the centre, right? A black hole or similar? Without that in place wouldn't the stars interact with one another and eventually end up a horribly chaotic mess? The article doesn't say.
The article states that the Fireworks trinket would cost you $900.00, and the Ogre trinket $2,100.00. From experience running a university gaming society back at the height of MtG's popularity I'd say that a $2100 collection is actually quite small. I've met people at gaming conventions with collections that must have cost them 10* that.
If the user were to enable pipelining in his browser (such as setting Firefox's network.http.pipelining in about:config), the number of hostnames we use wouldn't matter, and he'd make even more effective use of his available bandwidth. But we can't control that server-side.
i ning-faq.html
For those that don't know what that means: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/http/pipel
I've had it switched on for ages. I sometimes wonder why it's off by default.
I rather like the abstractness of the furniture they've mocked up, particularly the swirly chair thing, but I think this has a 'better' use. I'd love to see what sort of 3D forms it'd make from a ballet dancer or a gymnast. Turning graceful movement into sculpture would be fascinating.
"The CD as it is right now is dead," Levy said, adding that 60% of consumers put CDs into home computers in order to transfer material to digital music players.
;P
If they realise that 60% of CD purchasers are ripping content then why on Earth are they trying to make it more difficult? If this guy is correct then increased anti-piracy measures will alienate more than half of their target audience.
Either he's wrong (I doubt it) or the music industry is trying to commit business suicide.
But I suppose we already knew that when they signed Ashlee Simpson.
Sure, why not? It's free (in every sense).
We don't need a fancy search, or a complicated 'if you liked this try...' feature.
You might not need those things, but any company providing files for download at cost certainly will. It's called cross-selling, it's marketing, and it's the sort of thing that makes the difference between living and dying for an ecommerce company. When you're "microselling" something you need to sell a large number of units just to stay in business. How is the service going to do that if they don't maximise every conversion?
("maximise every conversion"? Oh god, I've turned into a PHB. Shoot me now.)
Nothing in MySpace is "Web 2.0". All the control you have on that site is within the very limited bounds of a form that accepts HTML and CSS. Geocities had a pagebuilder that gave users as much back in 1996. Web 2.0 is about rich interfaces and client side applications. As yet I would argue that there are only two popular Web 2.0 sites. Those are GMail and DeviantArt (and DevArt is flakey at best). The rest are just sites that claim to be Web 2.0 but aren't (Digg, Flickr, MySpace, etc).
As for how much control to give users, give them whatever your resources will allow. If you've got the team strength to be able to firefight a javascript worm (MySpace) then give them a lot. If you've got the bandwidth to give them video upload (YouTube) give them space. If you're a one man team working on a toy website give them a couple of checkboxes and a button.
They still had jobs, just not working on IE. You don't get rid of developers just because the project finishes. Similarly, you don't keep a team together when they've got nothing to do. That would be a waste of some valuable assets. They'd just gone to other parts of Microsoft.
From the no-one-attended-the-antarctic-bikini-fashion-show- either dept
Oh but I did. And those nipples... dear lord those nipples!
The BBC is neither run nor controlled by the government.
This post has been censored.
I doubt that desktop interfaces will ever shift to full 3D. There's no reason to, it would be more difficult to navigate than '3D' paradigm of nested directorys accessed through a 2D window display that we use today. Personally I think that filesystems are going to stop being organised using a 'physical' representation like files within folders, and will shift to a more database-y style similar to iTunes. Instead of thinking that a file is in a particular folder you'll end up with files being grouped by metadata and searched through using the equivalent of smart playlists ("all ODF files" rather than "all Martha Wainwright tunes"). There are several relational filesystems in development at the moment (including the SQL filesystem Microsoft dropped from Vista).
.. well .. even more like Geocities than MySpace is now, but I'm sure it'll be fun.
Where I see 3D becoming ubiquitous is in social community websites. It won't come about until either a Canvas3D element or Flash is capable of seamlessly streaming a scene quickly and easily, and until making a 'room' is as easy as making a MySpace profile (all that requires is a clever team to write a nice interface to the markup, the markup itself need not be simple), but once those are in place it'll catch on very quickly indeed. The idea of a MySpace 'city' where your page has a virtual location, you have neighbours, you're part of a 'block', will be
I think you need to pay heed to the advice in your sig. A simple AJAX application is definitely not going to crush your server unless a: it gets slashdotted, b: your webserver is written in C64 Basic, or c: you're an idiot who puts things live without testing them properly first.
My money is on b.
He played for 70 days out of a year. That's "only" 19.something percent. If you're the sort to only need 4 or 5 hours sleep a night you could easily fit that in beside a pretty normal life (9 - 5 job, a light social life, chores, etc). If giving 1/5th of your day over to a hobby is a sign that your life has been devoured then you need to sort out your priorities. Everyone should dedicate that much time at least to stuff they enjoy. Perhaps it's a bit narrowminded to concentrate on a single activity, but it's better than spending all that time at the office or wasted in a bar*.
* Ok, maybe the bar is ok..
That's a very sensible approach, but to ignore something that could save 4% of 'unused' power with practically no effort would be idiotic.
And, as an addendum to that, make extensions run in some sort of "protected memory" area so they can't take the browser down with them. If that's not possible at least make instances of the browser run seperately so a crash doesn't take down the whole lot.
I've had occasion to read through stacks of Curriculum Vitea (I'm English) in my job. It's truly a soul destroying task. I don't have any links to samples but experience has taught me one universal truth: Long lists of skills mean nothing. People put everything they've ever heard of. It comes to the interview and it goes along the lines of "You know Perl well? No, but I walked past the Camel book in a library once.". If there isn't any mention of using the skill then the chances are the candidate hasn't ever used it professionally. I've updated my CV to put jobs and key projects with a description of the skills used in each first now.
The fact is, most movies, most TV shows, most video games put Muslims in a bad light, so we have to try to tell our side of the story.
Most movie producing nations have a problem with Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, so it's not really all that suprising that they cast Muslims as the baddies. If you're concerned with the way you're portrayed how about you stop blowing us up?
Your 'fuckroland' comment + the pennyarcade image you have linked as your homepage = Amusingly ironic.
I imagine this is actually a bad thing for MySpace. Having 50 million unique hits from a single demographic such as teens is a huge deal. That'd be an amazing market penetration. Spread those 50 million out over a broader age range and, while you're getting the same number of eyeballs, your advertising target audience for any particular ad has shrunk considerably. After all, if 50% of the site is over 30 then 50% of the ad views of the latest pop sensation are going to be wasted on people who won't click.
From a business perspective I'd say this is damaging news.
So, what will Venice offer to combat YouTube's dominance? Streaming video with DVD-like controls, on-screen menus of preset channels, and interactive tools to share video playlists are only the beginning.
.. well .. content. Maybe the professional content will win out, but I rather doubt it.
So, Venice will offer nothing that YouTube doesn't already offer then? It'll be all fancy with Web 2.0 controls though. Big deal. The interface is of little consequence, and arguably Venice will fall flat with their Web 2.0 gimmickery because you'll not be able to embed it in a MySpace profile like you can with Flash. The challenge to overcome with a video content site is
A sarcasm detector? Like that'd be useful.
Get a job as a stocker at WalMart
Did you miss the bit where the article says he's extremely ill? I imagine that a shelf-stacking job isn't a viable option.
While search firms have a legitimate business interest in using this data in reasonable ways for both ongoing business and R&D purposes, it is difficult for reasonable observers to justify the retention of this data on an indefinite basis.
The information that you submit to a search engine, such as your search terms, your IP address, your user agent string, any cookie information, is all submitted voluntarily. You give up this data willingly. If you want to keep any of this information private then don't submit it. Of course, that means you won't be able to use the search engine, that's the cost of privacy. A price you should be willing to pay if your privacy is genuinuely important to you.
Too many people seem to expect that they should be able to live a private life despite handing over vast swaths of data on a daily basis. You can't. If you want your data to be private you need to keep it to yourself. Data retention issues are only applicable in situations where you don't have a choice about relinguishing your information (eg tax returns, vehicle licensing, etc).
Bottom line: If you choose to tell someone something voluntarily you cannot expect them to forget about it when you think they should.