every time a story comes up about India "stealing" jobs. Or when companies hire lots of young adults out of College.
Judging from the one-sided moderation, I guess Slashdot is fully behind the idea of companies dumping high paid workers and shifting work over to where labor is cheaper. After all, it's not about who is being paid or what they're being paid. It's about getting a product out. According to the majority of Slashdot users apparently the product is more important than the livlihood of those who make it.
You should just go into some nonviolent career path like amusment park rides. Or some other engineering field that doesn't involve blowing things up with the intent to kill. Teaching could be another option.
I can't imagine they're blacklisting you from every job on the planet. If nothing else I'm sure you could work at McDonald's. You could use your mad engineering skills to turn that thing they make into something that tastes like real meat.
In the last six years I've probably written more pages of my own than I've read of others.
In Junior High I read every thick novel I could get my hands on. In High School I got out of the habit. Now if I want to hear a good story I rent/buy/go see a movie. There are plenty of deep movies and since I'm more visual I retain and get more out of it. I have a terrible imagination. When I write stories (of which I've written many) they aren't drawn out with detail. They have a major theme and everything deals with that theme. I'm more interested in the ideas than what color a character's shirt is.
I imagine that when I get older I'll start reading more books. In the mean time I don't have that kind of attention span.
Vehicals traveling on mars would benefit a great deal by having a high accuracy. It would allow ground stations to give very specific coordinates to tell the robot to go anywhere without having to keep an eye on it or give it direction and distance commands. It's alot easier and faster to correct for 3 meter than 1km accuracy once it's done making it's inital move from point A to point B.
It's rediculous how many "well *I* can't see a need for it so it must be useless" posts get moderated up as insightful.
I paid my $6.50 and saw the film. The above is my full review.
----------------
The next conspiracy theory deals with the Bin Laden family. Moore pretends this is new information yet this was revealed long ago. The Bush administration has a relationship with the Bin Laden family. They're very wealthy oil tycoons. But they don't have much of a relationship with their son, Osama. On September 13th they were flown out of the country. What he fails to mention is that the flight restrictions were being lifted on the 13th. The reason they were flown out was because they were being harassed. Moore spends a great deal of time showing old cop films about interrogating witnesses. What Moore fails to consider is that while the Bin Laden family was flown out of the country for their own safety, they were not necessarily out of contact with the White House. In fact he doesn't even ask the question "has the Bush administration talked to them?" He never bothers to find out whether or not the Bush Administration is still in contact with the Bin Laden family. If Bush is trying to protect Osama somehow then it's pretty odd that the first official reports blame him and a war is started against him and his organization within two months. The other important point that Moore doesn't bother to consider is that it was not Bush that authorized the Bin Laden's to leave the country but Richard Clarke. On May 26, 2004 Clarke told The Hill newspaper:
"I take responsibility for it. I don't think it was a mistake, and I'd do it again." ... "It didn't get any higher than me," he said. "On 9-11, 9-12 and 9-13, many things didn't get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI."
http://www.hillnews.com/news/052604/clarke.aspx
I guess we can excuse Moore's ignorance on the issue since Richard Clarke came clean on it most likely after Moore had finished editing his film and history. What Moore also failed to consider is that fact that the Bin Laden family was actually talked to. But that's very inconvenient for Moore since those old cop movie clips provided a bit of humor for his farce.
------------
The FBI did actually talk to the Bin Laden family and then said it was okay to let them leave. Clarke then authorized their flights out. Whether or not the Bush Administration is still in contact with them (very likely) is never considered by Moore. That on top of the fact Moore never bothered to find out who actually let them leave the country or why.
You just can't automatically redirect the user to that script. They have to click on the link to start the download. The page was clear about this if you actually bothered to read it. If the user clicks on the link then the browser assumes they wanted to download the file.
"The new behaviour will make it impossible to automatically pop up a file download dialog, rendering this type of download counter/anti-leech script usless."
If that were actually true (which it's not) it would break all web-based CVS/SVN repositories.
"Ever seen those "Your download should start in 5 seconds..." messages?"
All the sites have to do is tell the user to click the link instead of wait because the browser will block the automatic launching of the script.
If they want to force a delay they can use sessions to tell the script not to pass the file to the user until X amount of time and then use JavaScript to disable the link until X amount of time has passed. If a user disables JavaScript and clicks too soon, the file script can just show the user a "Your file isn't ready yet. If you had JavaScript enabled you'd know this." With a self referencing link and same JavaScript code set to however many seconds are left of the delay. The delay option is still there. It just has to be done differently.
Site owners can still count downloads if they want. They just have to use server side scripts only that don't interfer with the file being sent to the user.
Ben
You can do real time 3D in JavaScript
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Link in sig.
I'm assembling a number of tutorials on doing software rendering using JavaScript. I used to think it wasn't good for much but after doing textured polygons with a color key my opinion has changed. Since it's all software the concepts can be transfered to any language that can plot a pixel, do math and store an array.
I've also written a graphical adventure game in TI BASIC as well as some pretty basic 2D and 3D demos. Most of my graphics stuff is now done in OpenGL. I've worked with DirectX quite a bit in the past.
Programming is no harder to get into now that it was X years ago. It's just that kids think they can do anything so they try to start out making the next Quake or MMO instead of starting with the basics and working their way up.
You can also find QBasic and QuickBASIC on-line and Libraries still have books on programming in the language.
The problem isn't that these languages aren't available. It's that they aren't "cool" and everyone tells them they absolutly must start with a C style language or they'll forever be corrupted. So they go to C and find out they can't do anything interesting so they just quit. If I had been forced to start with C, I wouldn't be a programmer.
that JavaScript and cacheing are broken (and who knows what else) in the latest versions of FireFox and Mozilla. JavaScript worked fine in older versions. I don't know if the developers have ever managed to use the URL to generate a unique cache file name which is the only thing preventing caching from working the way it's supposed to.
I've tried the latest versions of Mozilla, FireFox, Opera and Netscape and I'm right back using IE.
Maybe a few releases down the line I'll give it another shot. But basically this was just a really bad time for FireFox to have this kind of publicity. I never go to a web-site wondering if IE will be able to display it properly.
But when I'm seeing screens from Wolf5K showing up in my JavaScript tutorials (and not even showing the whole screen at that) in FireFox and Mozilla, something is definitly broken with the browser.
when Mozilla/FireFox fix the caching problem (how hard is it to use the url as part of the cache file name?) and when they unbreak JavaScript. Who knows what else is broken.
Older versions of Moz/FF work fine with my JavaScript 3D pages. The latest versions don't. It's kind of hard to imagine a good reason why something that worked as it was supposed to in an older version no longer works.
In the mean time I use IE exclusivly and have never had any problems.
"The cost reduction is possible, he said, because of a patent-pending method of lumping together individual transactions into one transaction to reduce the cost to the merchant."
How in the world is that patentable? Apple has been doing that with iTunes since the beginning. Google also doesn't handout checks for AdSense until you have $100.00 or more accumulated.
People have also mentioned Wal-Mart dropping a charge from their credit card because it was such a small amount that lingered for too long.
This company is patenting something companies have done for a very long time and then calling their product 2.0. Pretending this is going to translate from video games (anyone who's worked or played in an arcade knows how fast quarters fly completely obvlivious to how much has been spent) to the web is just ignorant. Nobody is going to be sitting on a web-site dropping "quarters" for hours. There's not enough "excitement" to distract visitors from how much they're spending.
It's a whole different paradigm from playing games at an arcade.
If you think your content isn't worth changing a worthwhile amount of money ($1.00 or more) for then you should just put up ads (AdSense). Or if you just don't want to charge visitors for access. Nothing is worth the hassle of doing an electronic transaction for a few pennies. Google AdSense is built for doing very small transactions and it requires no work on the visitors part except to be interested enough in an ad to click thru.
I'm not going to go to a web-site and whip out my credit card just to spend a few pennies. The effort isn't worth the "reward." But if an ad is interesting enough and the site isn't vomiting ads in my face I won't hesitate to click on the ad. They get their "micropayment" with no hassle on anybody's part.
Content owners need to take a hint from Costco et al and sell in bulk. Digital Blasphemy charges for access to some of their new material and access to the archive.
Charging per comic or per page is just silly. Would you pay a penny for a single page out of a book? Have the most recent X days of strips free and charge for access to older strips. That gives visitors the ability to get a good idea if your work is of any quality and the fans the ability to support the author in a reasonable fashion.
Someone needs to take this micopayment horse out to pasture and put it out of its misery. The only people making money on this scheme are the people who come up with these cheesy products that alledgedly handle micropayments.
unnecessary division. Technology is pretty neutral. If Slashdot consistantly had political news items then this story would be appropriate. Slashot is not a political news site.
All this story is going to do is alianate people that would otherwise be completely indifferent to any minor political slant this site may have.
Anyone viewing this story is going to see a very steep slant in one very obvious direction. And the fact that it's moderated into that slant leaves a very sour taste in people's mouths.
I'm currently working on what will be a large number of tutorials that go through the process of building a graphics API with pure software rendering. Starting with JavaScript and eventually will get into C and ASM.
The most recent lesson (written Friday) demonstrates how to do texture mapping. With a color key to boot.
With OpenGL and DirectX already being used with pretty much everything I don't think Java3D is going to go very far. It has no real advantage on the desktop. The problem is that most devices that rely on Java like Cellphones don't have a large enough screen to make 3D really useable. And they certainly don't have the hardware acceleration.
Where Java3D might have a chance, developers are probably better off sticking to software rendering and 2D games with some 3D effects like lighting, alpha blending and whatnot.
I'd imagine they're making it open source because they realize that without a community to call it their own there's probably not going to be much of a fan base to get anything practical (read: that can make money) done with it. If anything goes wrong, Sun isn't really out anything.
You're looking for an internship. Preferably paid.
Lots of companies have internships available because it's a good way for them to get cheap labor that will do grunt work and for the intern to get their foot in the door. After so much time if they like you they hire you.
Find a company you want to work for and call them up and ask if they have internships availablable. These are the kinds of jobs that college students are expected to take as a way to get started in their career.
Some guy a few stories back mentioned he was getting 3000 ad impressions and 15 clicks a day or so with AdSense. Which is terrible. At first I assumed he was just oversaturating his visitors with ads. But his ad placement is also terrible. It's at the very bottom of the page where few are going to see it. But he is also over saturating. His pages are very busy with information and the ads are on every single page.
What happens when you constantly shove something in someone's face is that they learn to ignore it. Either consciously or subconsciously. In the case of advertising if someone is shown an ad and they aren't interested and another ad is shown there's a very good chance they won't even notice it. Even if they would have been interested in what it was offering. This is because they were annoyed by the first ad so they just mentally block any additional ads.
This is why the response rate to spam is so terrible. People for the most part just subconsciously ignore it. It's just noise.
Advertisers like radio stations because it tends to be a captive audience. People are very unlikely to turn the station when ads come on. However there is one local station that I've learned to turn the channel on when the ads start because I know I'm going to get to my destination before another song comes on. There are other stations that I don't change the channel on because I know it's just a short break.
Just like the guy pumping out 2985 ads that no one clicks on, spammers would benefit immensly by pulling a large chunk of the ads. People are more likely to notice when they aren't bombarded by ads and the response percentage goes up.
It seems counterintuitive that less advertising means a greater response but that's actually the case.
I normally notice the ad banners on Slashdot because that's pretty much all the advertising there is. I rarely ever notice the text ads. Even though they're placed on the left side in the best position as anyone who scrolls the page is probably going to see them. Slashdot's problem is that the ads blend in with the web-site's color scheme too well so they're pretty much invisible to anyone with a scroll wheel.
On GameDev the site is so littered with advertising that I never notice it anymore. By the time I close the stupid popup ads that circumvent Google's pop up blocker using evil little tricks I'm too annoyed to even look at the other ads.
Web-sites get desperate and think more ads == more money. And the actual result is less valuable ad space because the click thru rate is so low and fewer clicks because users tune the ads out which results in less money than if they had focused on the click thru percentage rather than the number of impressions. If you have a web-site with a high click thru rate advertisers are more likely to pay more because they know that if they show an ad there's a very good chance they'll get a click thru.
But then I'm guess spammers have never taken a course in marketing or bothered to think about things from their potential customer's perspective.
Keeping ineffective ads visible hurts the effectiveness of the better ads. Spammers are in effect destroying themselves in that area. As are ad happy web-sites.
If you're getting 3000 impressions and only 15 click thrus you're oversaturating your visitors with ads. The net result is that they see an ad they aren't interested in and then ignore the rest of the ads or are simply bothered by them to begin with.
You need to figure out which pages are generating the most impressions and fewest click thrus and pull the ads.
You should be getting at least a 1.0% clickthru rate. 0.5% is a big sign something isn't working. It could also be a sign you lack the content to get Google to effectively target ads at your audience.
You can tell who your audience is by induction based on what kind of content you have. I have a lot of programming related content so my visitors are obviously coders. It's not an advanced site so my demographic is beginner to intermediate programmers which fall mainly in the early teens to mid twenties.
You can also get a good idea who your audience is by looking at the search terms they use to find your site in search engines.
I flat out stated that Utah should be a seperate Mormon nation. And I wasn't being serious. But you asked so now I'm giving you the details on the history of polygamy which you apparently aren't familiar with in any real level of detail.
The "prophets" after much fierce rhetoric about dying for the cause of polygamy finally caved when they realized how it wasn't going to work out for them. They'd look pretty silly being a territory completly surrounded by states. There's also a huge financial and political advantage to being part of the US. Orin Hatch is currently abusing his role in that area. Power and money always win out over doctrine (or constitutional rights in Hatch's case) no matter how much you wanted people to die for it previously.
Utah != most of the western US. They didn't control the entire western continent at the time.
"Every school child in Utah knows that statehood was delayed because of the issue of polygamy."
Yes, and Christopher Columbus had an effect on the Indians when he got here.
Apparently they don't fill in the details much if they believe the current "prophet's" stance that polygamy was no big deal practiced by a few. Since pretty much all the LDS believe this, I'd say very few have taken the time to actually study the full history of polygamy.
I have the Brigham Young manual. It's as watered down as you can possibly get.
they didn't threaten to leave. They left the states without threat as Utah was still a territory at the time. They threatened to fight to the death for the doctrine rather than join the union. My mistake.
One of the leaders is calling for only those willing to die for the doctrine of polygamy to join the church. And the modern "prophet" claims it was no big deal. What kind of non-issue asks one to give their life?
It takes very little research in the one area of polygamy to see how full of it the modern LDS "church" is. Just because you choose to ignore the lies doesn't mean they're not there documented in black and white.
It's not surprising the modern "prophet" calls it a non-issue. The history of polygamy is one of the big reasons people leave the "church." Calling it a non-issue placates people into not looking into it much.
The audio problem happens when you have Norton installed. There's a patch for it.
I picked up one of those cards for my dad so he could digitize old movies. It worked perfectly after he figured out it was a bug and not a hardware problem. He actually returned the card and got a replacement before going on-line to try to sort out the problem.
I've digitized a number of VHS tapes in 640x480 30FPS at I think 1Mbps MPEG compression without a hicup with his 3 Ghz machine.
I highly recommend the card. At $60 you can't beat the price/quality.
My old Hauppauge WinTV card can only do any worthwhile recording quality when using Virtual Dub. The included software is terrible.
I run a mail server. It doesn't take much bandwidth at all. Sure there's 1GB of storage but a very small percentage of the users are going to go anywhere near the limit. E-mail is a very inefficient way to send large files. There's about 20% overhead.
Smaller "mom & pop" shops can compete by offering a unique/catchy domain name.
I offer POP3 and IMAP as well as secured web-access. Google doesn't support those other two without a third party hack.
Google offers a lot but they don't offer anything that nobody else can offer except the domain name. And they don't offer all the possible features people want for an e-mail account.
has been free from the beginning (April) and has never had a limit on the storage. Claiming 1GB is just an oversell. It also features the ability to search e-mails.
It also sports IMAP, POP3, SMTP (with alternate port for those with port 25 blocked), and web-access with SSL. And no ads. It's supported by Icarus Independent which uses AdSense.
Anybody with a weekend to spare, Mercury Mail and some talent can put together a free e-mail service. The web-mail front end uses Apache 1.3.x, PHP, MySQL and OpenSSL. It just parses the files Mercury uses. Simple and secure. Mercury has built in web-mail support but I've never used it. I prefer having the flexibility of writting my own front end.
"We did leave the United States, and now Congressmen say, if you will renounce polygamy you shall be admitted unto the Union as an independent State and live with us"
They don't make a big deal about it now but if you look at the history of polygamy (LDS Infobases is all you need which you can by at any LDS bookstore for about $50) you find out lots of things. Just do a search for the word "polygamy." Journal of Discourses is the key section which contains all the writtings of the prophets of the church. It's not commentary from later people looking back.
"We did leave the United States, and now Congressmen say, if you will renounce polygamy you shall be admitted unto the Union as an independent State and live with us. We shall live any way, and increase, and spread, and prosper, and we shall know the most and be the best-looking people there is on the earth. As for polygamy, or any other doctrine the Lord has revealed, it is not for me to change, alter, or renounce it; my business is to obey when the Lord commands, and this is the duty of all mankind. "
Journal of Discourses Volume 11 Page 111 Brigham Young
"Don't you think that we are in very great danger now?" We should be if the Lord did not rule. We should always have been in danger if the Lord did not reign. We should always have been in danger if He had not taken care of us. "But," say some, "don't you think that when our Legislature meet they had better go to work and pass a law doing away with polygamy?" No; no such thought ever enters my mind; and as I said in the few remarks I made this morning:
"We want no cowards in our ranks Who will our colors fly We call for valiant-hearted men Who are not afraid to die."
No yielding up of principles that God has revealed. What, turn our backs on Jehovah! and place ourselves in the hands of men who would deprive us of the last vestige of liberty, and take our lives if they had the power! What! shall we forsake God our Heavenly Father? No, never! And all who are for God and His Kingdom say Amen.
Journal of Discourses Volume 24 Page 358 George Q Cannon
The current "prophet" claimed that polygamy was no big deal and only practiced by a few. I have about a dozen pages going from the initial "revelation" through the conflict with the US to today.
I have hundreds of pages of studies on the church and a diploma from one of their institutes. I'm debating whether or not to put it all back on-line. I'm not sure what purpose it would serve.
Slashdot Mirror
every time a story comes up about India "stealing" jobs. Or when companies hire lots of young adults out of College.
Judging from the one-sided moderation, I guess Slashdot is fully behind the idea of companies dumping high paid workers and shifting work over to where labor is cheaper. After all, it's not about who is being paid or what they're being paid. It's about getting a product out. According to the majority of Slashdot users apparently the product is more important than the livlihood of those who make it.
Ben
You should just go into some nonviolent career path like amusment park rides. Or some other engineering field that doesn't involve blowing things up with the intent to kill. Teaching could be another option.
I can't imagine they're blacklisting you from every job on the planet. If nothing else I'm sure you could work at McDonald's. You could use your mad engineering skills to turn that thing they make into something that tastes like real meat.
Ben
In the last six years I've probably written more pages of my own than I've read of others.
In Junior High I read every thick novel I could get my hands on. In High School I got out of the habit. Now if I want to hear a good story I rent/buy/go see a movie. There are plenty of deep movies and since I'm more visual I retain and get more out of it. I have a terrible imagination. When I write stories (of which I've written many) they aren't drawn out with detail. They have a major theme and everything deals with that theme. I'm more interested in the ideas than what color a character's shirt is.
I imagine that when I get older I'll start reading more books. In the mean time I don't have that kind of attention span.
Ben
Vehicals traveling on mars would benefit a great deal by having a high accuracy. It would allow ground stations to give very specific coordinates to tell the robot to go anywhere without having to keep an eye on it or give it direction and distance commands. It's alot easier and faster to correct for 3 meter than 1km accuracy once it's done making it's inital move from point A to point B.
It's rediculous how many "well *I* can't see a need for it so it must be useless" posts get moderated up as insightful.
"why spend the money now?"
So we can benefit and do research now.
Ben
Fahrenheit 9/11 Review
I paid my $6.50 and saw the film. The above is my full review.
----------------
The next conspiracy theory deals with the Bin Laden family. Moore pretends this is new information yet this was revealed long ago. The Bush administration has a relationship with the Bin Laden family. They're very wealthy oil tycoons. But they don't have much of a relationship with their son, Osama. On September 13th they were flown out of the country. What he fails to mention is that the flight restrictions were being lifted on the 13th. The reason they were flown out was because they were being harassed. Moore spends a great deal of time showing old cop films about interrogating witnesses. What Moore fails to consider is that while the Bin Laden family was flown out of the country for their own safety, they were not necessarily out of contact with the White House. In fact he doesn't even ask the question "has the Bush administration talked to them?" He never bothers to find out whether or not the Bush Administration is still in contact with the Bin Laden family. If Bush is trying to protect Osama somehow then it's pretty odd that the first official reports blame him and a war is started against him and his organization within two months. The other important point that Moore doesn't bother to consider is that it was not Bush that authorized the Bin Laden's to leave the country but Richard Clarke. On May 26, 2004 Clarke told The Hill newspaper:
"I take responsibility for it. I don't think it was a mistake, and I'd do it again."
...
"It didn't get any higher than me," he said. "On 9-11, 9-12 and 9-13, many things didn't get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI."
http://www.hillnews.com/news/052604/clarke.aspx
I guess we can excuse Moore's ignorance on the issue since Richard Clarke came clean on it most likely after Moore had finished editing his film and history. What Moore also failed to consider is that fact that the Bin Laden family was actually talked to. But that's very inconvenient for Moore since those old cop movie clips provided a bit of humor for his farce.
------------
The FBI did actually talk to the Bin Laden family and then said it was okay to let them leave. Clarke then authorized their flights out. Whether or not the Bush Administration is still in contact with them (very likely) is never considered by Moore. That on top of the fact Moore never bothered to find out who actually let them leave the country or why.
Ben
You just can't automatically redirect the user to that script. They have to click on the link to start the download. The page was clear about this if you actually bothered to read it. If the user clicks on the link then the browser assumes they wanted to download the file.
"The new behaviour will make it impossible to automatically pop up a file download dialog, rendering this type of download counter/anti-leech script usless."
If that were actually true (which it's not) it would break all web-based CVS/SVN repositories.
"Ever seen those "Your download should start in 5 seconds..." messages?"
All the sites have to do is tell the user to click the link instead of wait because the browser will block the automatic launching of the script.
If they want to force a delay they can use sessions to tell the script not to pass the file to the user until X amount of time and then use JavaScript to disable the link until X amount of time has passed. If a user disables JavaScript and clicks too soon, the file script can just show the user a "Your file isn't ready yet. If you had JavaScript enabled you'd know this." With a self referencing link and same JavaScript code set to however many seconds are left of the delay. The delay option is still there. It just has to be done differently.
Site owners can still count downloads if they want. They just have to use server side scripts only that don't interfer with the file being sent to the user.
Ben
Link in sig.
I'm assembling a number of tutorials on doing software rendering using JavaScript. I used to think it wasn't good for much but after doing textured polygons with a color key my opinion has changed. Since it's all software the concepts can be transfered to any language that can plot a pixel, do math and store an array.
I've also written a graphical adventure game in TI BASIC as well as some pretty basic 2D and 3D demos. Most of my graphics stuff is now done in OpenGL. I've worked with DirectX quite a bit in the past.
Programming is no harder to get into now that it was X years ago. It's just that kids think they can do anything so they try to start out making the next Quake or MMO instead of starting with the basics and working their way up.
You can also find QBasic and QuickBASIC on-line and Libraries still have books on programming in the language.
The problem isn't that these languages aren't available. It's that they aren't "cool" and everyone tells them they absolutly must start with a C style language or they'll forever be corrupted. So they go to C and find out they can't do anything interesting so they just quit. If I had been forced to start with C, I wouldn't be a programmer.
Ben
that JavaScript and cacheing are broken (and who knows what else) in the latest versions of FireFox and Mozilla. JavaScript worked fine in older versions. I don't know if the developers have ever managed to use the URL to generate a unique cache file name which is the only thing preventing caching from working the way it's supposed to.
I've tried the latest versions of Mozilla, FireFox, Opera and Netscape and I'm right back using IE.
Maybe a few releases down the line I'll give it another shot. But basically this was just a really bad time for FireFox to have this kind of publicity. I never go to a web-site wondering if IE will be able to display it properly.
But when I'm seeing screens from Wolf5K showing up in my JavaScript tutorials (and not even showing the whole screen at that) in FireFox and Mozilla, something is definitly broken with the browser.
Ben
to monitor traffic to a certain extent to know how one's service is being used.
How else do you think service providers find out about TOS violations?
Users get overzealous in their actions which attracts the attention of a sysadmin which results in an investigation.
Then it's simply a matter between the user and the service provider. No third parties are involved. Hence, no invasion of privacy.
Ben
when Mozilla/FireFox fix the caching problem (how hard is it to use the url as part of the cache file name?) and when they unbreak JavaScript. Who knows what else is broken.
Older versions of Moz/FF work fine with my JavaScript 3D pages. The latest versions don't. It's kind of hard to imagine a good reason why something that worked as it was supposed to in an older version no longer works.
In the mean time I use IE exclusivly and have never had any problems.
Ben
"The cost reduction is possible, he said, because of a patent-pending method of lumping together individual transactions into one transaction to reduce the cost to the merchant."
How in the world is that patentable? Apple has been doing that with iTunes since the beginning. Google also doesn't handout checks for AdSense until you have $100.00 or more accumulated.
People have also mentioned Wal-Mart dropping a charge from their credit card because it was such a small amount that lingered for too long.
This company is patenting something companies have done for a very long time and then calling their product 2.0. Pretending this is going to translate from video games (anyone who's worked or played in an arcade knows how fast quarters fly completely obvlivious to how much has been spent) to the web is just ignorant. Nobody is going to be sitting on a web-site dropping "quarters" for hours. There's not enough "excitement" to distract visitors from how much they're spending.
It's a whole different paradigm from playing games at an arcade.
Ben
If you think your content isn't worth changing a worthwhile amount of money ($1.00 or more) for then you should just put up ads (AdSense). Or if you just don't want to charge visitors for access. Nothing is worth the hassle of doing an electronic transaction for a few pennies. Google AdSense is built for doing very small transactions and it requires no work on the visitors part except to be interested enough in an ad to click thru.
I'm not going to go to a web-site and whip out my credit card just to spend a few pennies. The effort isn't worth the "reward." But if an ad is interesting enough and the site isn't vomiting ads in my face I won't hesitate to click on the ad. They get their "micropayment" with no hassle on anybody's part.
Content owners need to take a hint from Costco et al and sell in bulk. Digital Blasphemy charges for access to some of their new material and access to the archive.
Charging per comic or per page is just silly. Would you pay a penny for a single page out of a book? Have the most recent X days of strips free and charge for access to older strips. That gives visitors the ability to get a good idea if your work is of any quality and the fans the ability to support the author in a reasonable fashion.
Someone needs to take this micopayment horse out to pasture and put it out of its misery. The only people making money on this scheme are the people who come up with these cheesy products that alledgedly handle micropayments.
Ben
unnecessary division. Technology is pretty neutral. If Slashdot consistantly had political news items then this story would be appropriate. Slashot is not a political news site.
All this story is going to do is alianate people that would otherwise be completely indifferent to any minor political slant this site may have.
Anyone viewing this story is going to see a very steep slant in one very obvious direction. And the fact that it's moderated into that slant leaves a very sour taste in people's mouths.
Ben
I'm currently working on what will be a large number of tutorials that go through the process of building a graphics API with pure software rendering. Starting with JavaScript and eventually will get into C and ASM.
JavaScript 3D
The most recent lesson (written Friday) demonstrates how to do texture mapping. With a color key to boot.
With OpenGL and DirectX already being used with pretty much everything I don't think Java3D is going to go very far. It has no real advantage on the desktop. The problem is that most devices that rely on Java like Cellphones don't have a large enough screen to make 3D really useable. And they certainly don't have the hardware acceleration.
Where Java3D might have a chance, developers are probably better off sticking to software rendering and 2D games with some 3D effects like lighting, alpha blending and whatnot.
I'd imagine they're making it open source because they realize that without a community to call it their own there's probably not going to be much of a fan base to get anything practical (read: that can make money) done with it. If anything goes wrong, Sun isn't really out anything.
Ben
You're looking for an internship. Preferably paid.
Lots of companies have internships available because it's a good way for them to get cheap labor that will do grunt work and for the intern to get their foot in the door. After so much time if they like you they hire you.
Find a company you want to work for and call them up and ask if they have internships availablable. These are the kinds of jobs that college students are expected to take as a way to get started in their career.
Ben
they'll get it when they post the story again.
Ben
Some guy a few stories back mentioned he was getting 3000 ad impressions and 15 clicks a day or so with AdSense. Which is terrible. At first I assumed he was just oversaturating his visitors with ads. But his ad placement is also terrible. It's at the very bottom of the page where few are going to see it. But he is also over saturating. His pages are very busy with information and the ads are on every single page.
What happens when you constantly shove something in someone's face is that they learn to ignore it. Either consciously or subconsciously. In the case of advertising if someone is shown an ad and they aren't interested and another ad is shown there's a very good chance they won't even notice it. Even if they would have been interested in what it was offering. This is because they were annoyed by the first ad so they just mentally block any additional ads.
This is why the response rate to spam is so terrible. People for the most part just subconsciously ignore it. It's just noise.
Advertisers like radio stations because it tends to be a captive audience. People are very unlikely to turn the station when ads come on. However there is one local station that I've learned to turn the channel on when the ads start because I know I'm going to get to my destination before another song comes on. There are other stations that I don't change the channel on because I know it's just a short break.
Just like the guy pumping out 2985 ads that no one clicks on, spammers would benefit immensly by pulling a large chunk of the ads. People are more likely to notice when they aren't bombarded by ads and the response percentage goes up.
It seems counterintuitive that less advertising means a greater response but that's actually the case.
I normally notice the ad banners on Slashdot because that's pretty much all the advertising there is. I rarely ever notice the text ads. Even though they're placed on the left side in the best position as anyone who scrolls the page is probably going to see them. Slashdot's problem is that the ads blend in with the web-site's color scheme too well so they're pretty much invisible to anyone with a scroll wheel.
On GameDev the site is so littered with advertising that I never notice it anymore. By the time I close the stupid popup ads that circumvent Google's pop up blocker using evil little tricks I'm too annoyed to even look at the other ads.
Web-sites get desperate and think more ads == more money. And the actual result is less valuable ad space because the click thru rate is so low and fewer clicks because users tune the ads out which results in less money than if they had focused on the click thru percentage rather than the number of impressions. If you have a web-site with a high click thru rate advertisers are more likely to pay more because they know that if they show an ad there's a very good chance they'll get a click thru.
But then I'm guess spammers have never taken a course in marketing or bothered to think about things from their potential customer's perspective.
Keeping ineffective ads visible hurts the effectiveness of the better ads. Spammers are in effect destroying themselves in that area. As are ad happy web-sites.
Ben
If you're getting 3000 impressions and only 15 click thrus you're oversaturating your visitors with ads. The net result is that they see an ad they aren't interested in and then ignore the rest of the ads or are simply bothered by them to begin with.
You need to figure out which pages are generating the most impressions and fewest click thrus and pull the ads.
You should be getting at least a 1.0% clickthru rate. 0.5% is a big sign something isn't working. It could also be a sign you lack the content to get Google to effectively target ads at your audience.
You can tell who your audience is by induction based on what kind of content you have. I have a lot of programming related content so my visitors are obviously coders. It's not an advanced site so my demographic is beginner to intermediate programmers which fall mainly in the early teens to mid twenties.
You can also get a good idea who your audience is by looking at the search terms they use to find your site in search engines.
Ben
I flat out stated that Utah should be a seperate Mormon nation. And I wasn't being serious. But you asked so now I'm giving you the details on the history of polygamy which you apparently aren't familiar with in any real level of detail.
The "prophets" after much fierce rhetoric about dying for the cause of polygamy finally caved when they realized how it wasn't going to work out for them. They'd look pretty silly being a territory completly surrounded by states. There's also a huge financial and political advantage to being part of the US. Orin Hatch is currently abusing his role in that area. Power and money always win out over doctrine (or constitutional rights in Hatch's case) no matter how much you wanted people to die for it previously.
Utah != most of the western US. They didn't control the entire western continent at the time.
"Every school child in Utah knows that statehood was delayed because of the issue of polygamy."
Yes, and Christopher Columbus had an effect on the Indians when he got here.
Apparently they don't fill in the details much if they believe the current "prophet's" stance that polygamy was no big deal practiced by a few. Since pretty much all the LDS believe this, I'd say very few have taken the time to actually study the full history of polygamy.
I have the Brigham Young manual. It's as watered down as you can possibly get.
Ben
they didn't threaten to leave. They left the states without threat as Utah was still a territory at the time. They threatened to fight to the death for the doctrine rather than join the union. My mistake.
One of the leaders is calling for only those willing to die for the doctrine of polygamy to join the church. And the modern "prophet" claims it was no big deal. What kind of non-issue asks one to give their life?
It takes very little research in the one area of polygamy to see how full of it the modern LDS "church" is. Just because you choose to ignore the lies doesn't mean they're not there documented in black and white.
It's not surprising the modern "prophet" calls it a non-issue. The history of polygamy is one of the big reasons people leave the "church." Calling it a non-issue placates people into not looking into it much.
Ben
The audio problem happens when you have Norton installed. There's a patch for it.
I picked up one of those cards for my dad so he could digitize old movies. It worked perfectly after he figured out it was a bug and not a hardware problem. He actually returned the card and got a replacement before going on-line to try to sort out the problem.
I've digitized a number of VHS tapes in 640x480 30FPS at I think 1Mbps MPEG compression without a hicup with his 3 Ghz machine.
I highly recommend the card. At $60 you can't beat the price/quality.
My old Hauppauge WinTV card can only do any worthwhile recording quality when using Virtual Dub. The included software is terrible.
Ben
I run a mail server. It doesn't take much bandwidth at all. Sure there's 1GB of storage but a very small percentage of the users are going to go anywhere near the limit. E-mail is a very inefficient way to send large files. There's about 20% overhead.
Smaller "mom & pop" shops can compete by offering a unique/catchy domain name.
I offer POP3 and IMAP as well as secured web-access. Google doesn't support those other two without a third party hack.
Google offers a lot but they don't offer anything that nobody else can offer except the domain name. And they don't offer all the possible features people want for an e-mail account.
Ben
has been free from the beginning (April) and has never had a limit on the storage. Claiming 1GB is just an oversell. It also features the ability to search e-mails.
It also sports IMAP, POP3, SMTP (with alternate port for those with port 25 blocked), and web-access with SSL. And no ads. It's supported by Icarus Independent which uses AdSense.
Anybody with a weekend to spare, Mercury Mail and some talent can put together a free e-mail service. The web-mail front end uses Apache 1.3.x, PHP, MySQL and OpenSSL. It just parses the files Mercury uses. Simple and secure. Mercury has built in web-mail support but I've never used it. I prefer having the flexibility of writting my own front end.
Ben
"We did leave the United States, and now Congressmen say, if you will renounce polygamy you shall be admitted unto the Union as an independent State and live with us"
don't you understand?
Ben
They don't make a big deal about it now but if you look at the history of polygamy (LDS Infobases is all you need which you can by at any LDS bookstore for about $50) you find out lots of things. Just do a search for the word "polygamy." Journal of Discourses is the key section which contains all the writtings of the prophets of the church. It's not commentary from later people looking back.
"We did leave the United States, and now Congressmen say, if you will renounce polygamy you shall be admitted unto the Union as an independent State and live with us. We shall live any way, and increase, and spread, and prosper, and we shall know the most and be the best-looking people there is on the earth. As for polygamy, or any other doctrine the Lord has revealed, it is not for me to change, alter, or renounce it; my business is to obey when the Lord commands, and this is the duty of all mankind. "
Journal of Discourses
Volume 11
Page 111
Brigham Young
"Don't you think that we are in very great danger now?" We should be if the Lord did not rule. We should always have been in danger if the Lord did not reign. We should always have been in danger if He had not taken care of us. "But," say some, "don't you think that when our Legislature meet they had better go to work and pass a law doing away with polygamy?" No; no such thought ever enters my mind; and as I said in the few remarks I made this morning:
"We want no cowards in our ranks
Who will our colors fly
We call for valiant-hearted men
Who are not afraid to die."
No yielding up of principles that God has revealed. What, turn our backs on Jehovah! and place ourselves in the hands of men who would deprive us of the last vestige of liberty, and take our lives if they had the power! What! shall we forsake God our Heavenly Father? No, never! And all who are for God and His Kingdom say Amen.
Journal of Discourses
Volume 24
Page 358
George Q Cannon
The current "prophet" claimed that polygamy was no big deal and only practiced by a few. I have about a dozen pages going from the initial "revelation" through the conflict with the US to today.
I have hundreds of pages of studies on the church and a diploma from one of their institutes. I'm debating whether or not to put it all back on-line. I'm not sure what purpose it would serve.
Ben