Most of what you describe is an artifact of any commenting system that shows older posts first. Most people won't read beyond the first page (or even half page) of any comment board, so the early posts get the most attention, mod points or not. Of course, if you display new posts first, you get a bunch of redundant threads as people re-post essentially the same thing other people posted earlier on.
Basically, Slashdot's system has a lot of problems, but so does every other comment system. From what I've seen out there, Slashdot's is probably the best one for a high-traffic site that gets lots of comments, but it's far from perfect. A good entry to this particular contest might involve taking Slashdot's system as a base and trying to figure out how to solve its problems.
So do I, but I've definitely noticed that my comments get vastly more attention posting at +2 or +1 than they do when I post as a +0 AC, both by moderators and other posters. Personally, I think you should be forced to browse at -1 whenever you have mod points, but that would probably just lead to a sharp decrease in the number of people willing to moderate.
Sure, it will play at 64 frames per second. The trick is, it will display all 64 of those frames simultaneously, for a duration of one second. Playability may be affected.
I love this attitude, because it means when the iPhone 5 gets released I'll be able to get an iPhone 4 on the cheap. My iPhone 3G has definitely been showing its age lately, but I've been holding out until the iPhone 5 is released so the iPhone 4 price will drop.
This is a horrible, horrible idea. If you make photosynthesis more efficient, plants won't have to spend all their time generating food. A few hours a day, and they'll have all they need. Soon enough, plants will have more free time than they know what to do with. They'll wake up in the morning, spend a couple of hours making sugar, and spend the rest of the day sitting in coffee shops and arguing about the finer points of whatever passes for philosophy among the members of the plant kingdom.
Eventually, various collectives will form based on commonalities of ideas and who is rooted near what coffee shop. Sure, most of these collectives will concern themselves primarily with taking drugs and producing regrettable artworks, but eventually some of them will start to ponder their lot in life at the constant mercy of mankind. This will lead to the writing of lengthy treatises on the Rights of Plants and how they are constantly being trod upon (often quite literally) by man. After that, it's only a matter of time before they rise up under the banner of the Glorious Plant Revolution and kill us all.
Honestly, the last thing we can afford to do is make plants more efficient.
Anyone who could legitimately be called "l33t" would have hacked the Gibson and added the word to the OED themselves rather than asking for permission.
Every year Slashdot does something for April Fool's, and every year people bitch about it. Personally, I like that Slashdot is linking to the various geek april fools jokes out there so I don't have to go hunting for them myself, and I think the Mad Libs in the article summaries are clever too.
April Fool's is the one day of the year this sort of thing happens. If it bothers you that much, just take a day off from the Internet and spend the day chasing kids off your lawn or something.
Only the very last scene (all of a few seconds long) was written before the first season started, and honestly with the producers' penchant for lying through their teeth ("everything on the island will be scientifically explainable"), I have a hard time believing even that. You are right that they had to make up a lot of stuff because they didn't anticipate getting so many seasons, and it definitely shows.
I think most fans of Lost (me included) were hooked in by the first season and wanted to see how it all ended up. The first two seasons were excellent, but it started to sort of tail off from there until it was indeed laughably bad toward the end. Still, by the time it got really difficult to watch I still stuck it out because a.) I wanted to see what they would do, and b.) I knew it wasn't going to last forever because they had already announced how many more seasons it would get.
So, I watched the whole thing when it aired, but I would never want to watch it again, and certainly wouldn't buy it on DVD.
- Put the item in your shopping cart. Visit the site every few days, and you'll see it say, "This item's price has dropped". If it's a good deal, buy it.
True, but this technique is not without risk. Prices can rise as well as drop. For example, I put a printer into my shopping cart and decided to wait to buy it. Two weeks later, the price of the printer had increased by $250. Now, a month after that, it's dropped by $100, but is still $150 more than it was when I first put it in the cart.
Bribes, or the expectation of bribes, gum up the works of commerce. The strongest economies in the world almost universally have strong anti-corruption measures in place. The weakest economies are generally those where bribery and corruption are endemic. This is not a coincidence.
If bribes are legal, or even illegal but tolerated, it's not long before a bribe is expected by everyone just to do their jobs properly. It's impossible to run a competitive economy in this type of environment because rampant bribery introduces massive costs and inefficiencies into the system. For evidence, look at basically every third world country.
Every time you buy something with your credit card, Visa sends that payment to the retailer in cash. It does this by carefully placing each individual dollar bill on a velvet pillow, and having it lovingly hand-carried to its destination by a Visa representative, who is dressed in a tuxedo and wearing white gloves.
So yes, it does get more expensive the more money you send, and Visa is practically running a charity by only charging 2%.
I agree with your assertion that developing their own app ecosystem is the wrong approach, but I disagree with your conclusion. In my mind, trying to transform an electric car into basically a smart phone on wheels is a horrible idea, and their approach (much like your "use Android" solution) is simply wrong-headed.
At this stage, the aim of electric cars should be proving that they are a viable alternative to gasoline-powered cars, at least following the 80/20 rule. Getting sidetracked by bells and whistles now is counterproductive. Tesla should be concentrating on making a car that's capable of serving at least 80% of the needs a standard sedan meets (short trips, daily commutes, cruise control, capable of seating 5, etc) while costing at best a small premium over gasoline-powered competitors. Encouraging the development of apps that will draw power and reduce the range or carrying capacity of the vehicle is silly.
At this point, consumers interested in electric cars, outside of the rich folks who are looking to buy Tesla's roadster model, only really want to know that an electric car can handle their daily needs without running out of juice and that it won't cost a fortune. Giving it the ability to play Angry Birds is simply a distraction.
Don't get too excited. Microsoft and Google both have hundreds of dubious patents to their names, so it's not like they're doing it to strike a blow in favor of sane patent reform. They're probably just doing it because once this patent trolling firm goes public, they'll have access to enough capital to start suing the big dogs (like Microsoft and Google) under these same patents instead of just going after the little fish who can't afford to defend themselves properly.
I'm sure they'd rather spend less now to smother the company than spend a lot more later defending themselves against it.
The amenities, as I read it, seem to be geared toward the customers of a colo facility. While the actual data center company needs some on-site staff, the individual colo clients will each only be taking up a small fraction of the space, and will rarely need to visit the facility. Given that the data center company will need to charge more to pay for these amenities, their customers are paying for amenities that they (the customer) should only get any use out of once or twice a year. From the customer's perspective, the cost isn't worth the value added.
If you've got remote management set up properly, the only reason you ever even need to go to the data center is due to some kind of hardware failure. There's no sense paying the extra money a place like this will have to charge (to recoup the cost of all those extra amenities) for colo space if you only need to physically visit your servers maybe once or twice a year.
Cable is definitely broadband, and that site shows Time Warner among the list of providers in my area. It does mention that the data is only updated every 6 months, so maybe Time Warner moved into your area less than 6 months ago? Either that or Time Warner may not be accurately reporting its coverage area to the government.
Right, which makes this a rather pointless exercise. By version 6, Netscape was not Netscape in any meaningful sense, and its market share was so small that developers barely even knew it existed.
A much more interesting exercise would be to see how Netscape 4 and IE4 fare on today's web, since NS4 is probably the last Netscape browser to have any kind of significant market share.
So it's basically Netflix, with the exact same shortcomings of Netflix. I'd gladly pay at least twice what Netflix currently charges for streaming if I could get their entire collection that way. Unfortunately, the content providers haven't yet pulled their heads out of their asses and figured out that digital distribution is the future, so we're still stuck waiting for DVDs in the mail for most reasonably modern and/or highly rated content.
As digital distribution becomes more ubiquitous, more and more people will turn to piracy unless the content providers start allowing more of their stuff to be streamed legally. Hopefully they'll figure that out instead of fighting streaming every step of the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of what you describe is an artifact of any commenting system that shows older posts first. Most people won't read beyond the first page (or even half page) of any comment board, so the early posts get the most attention, mod points or not. Of course, if you display new posts first, you get a bunch of redundant threads as people re-post essentially the same thing other people posted earlier on.
Basically, Slashdot's system has a lot of problems, but so does every other comment system. From what I've seen out there, Slashdot's is probably the best one for a high-traffic site that gets lots of comments, but it's far from perfect. A good entry to this particular contest might involve taking Slashdot's system as a base and trying to figure out how to solve its problems.
So do I, but I've definitely noticed that my comments get vastly more attention posting at +2 or +1 than they do when I post as a +0 AC, both by moderators and other posters. Personally, I think you should be forced to browse at -1 whenever you have mod points, but that would probably just lead to a sharp decrease in the number of people willing to moderate.
Sure, it will play at 64 frames per second. The trick is, it will display all 64 of those frames simultaneously, for a duration of one second. Playability may be affected.
That may be true, but from what I hear, your mom's back door is wide open.
I love this attitude, because it means when the iPhone 5 gets released I'll be able to get an iPhone 4 on the cheap. My iPhone 3G has definitely been showing its age lately, but I've been holding out until the iPhone 5 is released so the iPhone 4 price will drop.
This is a horrible, horrible idea. If you make photosynthesis more efficient, plants won't have to spend all their time generating food. A few hours a day, and they'll have all they need. Soon enough, plants will have more free time than they know what to do with. They'll wake up in the morning, spend a couple of hours making sugar, and spend the rest of the day sitting in coffee shops and arguing about the finer points of whatever passes for philosophy among the members of the plant kingdom.
Eventually, various collectives will form based on commonalities of ideas and who is rooted near what coffee shop. Sure, most of these collectives will concern themselves primarily with taking drugs and producing regrettable artworks, but eventually some of them will start to ponder their lot in life at the constant mercy of mankind. This will lead to the writing of lengthy treatises on the Rights of Plants and how they are constantly being trod upon (often quite literally) by man. After that, it's only a matter of time before they rise up under the banner of the Glorious Plant Revolution and kill us all.
Honestly, the last thing we can afford to do is make plants more efficient.
Anyone who could legitimately be called "l33t" would have hacked the Gibson and added the word to the OED themselves rather than asking for permission.
Every year Slashdot does something for April Fool's, and every year people bitch about it. Personally, I like that Slashdot is linking to the various geek april fools jokes out there so I don't have to go hunting for them myself, and I think the Mad Libs in the article summaries are clever too.
April Fool's is the one day of the year this sort of thing happens. If it bothers you that much, just take a day off from the Internet and spend the day chasing kids off your lawn or something.
Sure, but nobody takes these things seriously until they're featured in some college student's blog.
the wheel tends to gum up after 18 months
You may find keeping wet wipes on your desk and wiping your fingers off after every 10th Cheeto or so clears that problem up.
Good point. We should start an online petition instead.
Only the very last scene (all of a few seconds long) was written before the first season started, and honestly with the producers' penchant for lying through their teeth ("everything on the island will be scientifically explainable"), I have a hard time believing even that. You are right that they had to make up a lot of stuff because they didn't anticipate getting so many seasons, and it definitely shows.
I think most fans of Lost (me included) were hooked in by the first season and wanted to see how it all ended up. The first two seasons were excellent, but it started to sort of tail off from there until it was indeed laughably bad toward the end. Still, by the time it got really difficult to watch I still stuck it out because a.) I wanted to see what they would do, and b.) I knew it wasn't going to last forever because they had already announced how many more seasons it would get.
So, I watched the whole thing when it aired, but I would never want to watch it again, and certainly wouldn't buy it on DVD.
- Put the item in your shopping cart. Visit the site every few days, and you'll see it say, "This item's price has dropped". If it's a good deal, buy it.
True, but this technique is not without risk. Prices can rise as well as drop. For example, I put a printer into my shopping cart and decided to wait to buy it. Two weeks later, the price of the printer had increased by $250. Now, a month after that, it's dropped by $100, but is still $150 more than it was when I first put it in the cart.
Bribes, or the expectation of bribes, gum up the works of commerce. The strongest economies in the world almost universally have strong anti-corruption measures in place. The weakest economies are generally those where bribery and corruption are endemic. This is not a coincidence.
If bribes are legal, or even illegal but tolerated, it's not long before a bribe is expected by everyone just to do their jobs properly. It's impossible to run a competitive economy in this type of environment because rampant bribery introduces massive costs and inefficiencies into the system. For evidence, look at basically every third world country.
Every time you buy something with your credit card, Visa sends that payment to the retailer in cash. It does this by carefully placing each individual dollar bill on a velvet pillow, and having it lovingly hand-carried to its destination by a Visa representative, who is dressed in a tuxedo and wearing white gloves.
So yes, it does get more expensive the more money you send, and Visa is practically running a charity by only charging 2%.
I agree with your assertion that developing their own app ecosystem is the wrong approach, but I disagree with your conclusion. In my mind, trying to transform an electric car into basically a smart phone on wheels is a horrible idea, and their approach (much like your "use Android" solution) is simply wrong-headed.
At this stage, the aim of electric cars should be proving that they are a viable alternative to gasoline-powered cars, at least following the 80/20 rule. Getting sidetracked by bells and whistles now is counterproductive. Tesla should be concentrating on making a car that's capable of serving at least 80% of the needs a standard sedan meets (short trips, daily commutes, cruise control, capable of seating 5, etc) while costing at best a small premium over gasoline-powered competitors. Encouraging the development of apps that will draw power and reduce the range or carrying capacity of the vehicle is silly.
At this point, consumers interested in electric cars, outside of the rich folks who are looking to buy Tesla's roadster model, only really want to know that an electric car can handle their daily needs without running out of juice and that it won't cost a fortune. Giving it the ability to play Angry Birds is simply a distraction.
I think it means you should stop shagging hedgehogs.
Never!
What, you mean these spines on my penis aren't normal?
I'd better go see a doctor.
Don't get too excited. Microsoft and Google both have hundreds of dubious patents to their names, so it's not like they're doing it to strike a blow in favor of sane patent reform. They're probably just doing it because once this patent trolling firm goes public, they'll have access to enough capital to start suing the big dogs (like Microsoft and Google) under these same patents instead of just going after the little fish who can't afford to defend themselves properly.
I'm sure they'd rather spend less now to smother the company than spend a lot more later defending themselves against it.
The amenities, as I read it, seem to be geared toward the customers of a colo facility. While the actual data center company needs some on-site staff, the individual colo clients will each only be taking up a small fraction of the space, and will rarely need to visit the facility. Given that the data center company will need to charge more to pay for these amenities, their customers are paying for amenities that they (the customer) should only get any use out of once or twice a year. From the customer's perspective, the cost isn't worth the value added.
If you've got remote management set up properly, the only reason you ever even need to go to the data center is due to some kind of hardware failure. There's no sense paying the extra money a place like this will have to charge (to recoup the cost of all those extra amenities) for colo space if you only need to physically visit your servers maybe once or twice a year.
Cable is definitely broadband, and that site shows Time Warner among the list of providers in my area. It does mention that the data is only updated every 6 months, so maybe Time Warner moved into your area less than 6 months ago? Either that or Time Warner may not be accurately reporting its coverage area to the government.
Right, which makes this a rather pointless exercise. By version 6, Netscape was not Netscape in any meaningful sense, and its market share was so small that developers barely even knew it existed.
A much more interesting exercise would be to see how Netscape 4 and IE4 fare on today's web, since NS4 is probably the last Netscape browser to have any kind of significant market share.
So it's basically Netflix, with the exact same shortcomings of Netflix. I'd gladly pay at least twice what Netflix currently charges for streaming if I could get their entire collection that way. Unfortunately, the content providers haven't yet pulled their heads out of their asses and figured out that digital distribution is the future, so we're still stuck waiting for DVDs in the mail for most reasonably modern and/or highly rated content.
As digital distribution becomes more ubiquitous, more and more people will turn to piracy unless the content providers start allowing more of their stuff to be streamed legally. Hopefully they'll figure that out instead of fighting streaming every step of the way.