The only thing is, MySpace didn't get created as a way to gather free footage for an ad campaign or to push apparel sales on kids. From the FAQ:
SO, WHAT CAN I DO HERE?
There's tons of fun stuff to keep you entertained! Check out the latest fashion trends and make your own personalized page for a chance to win amazing prizes from Sony! If you're a little more ambitious, create your own video clip and send it in for a chance to have it turned into a TV commercial!
The whole "Wal-MartSpace" site seems to be geared around a contest to create a Wal-Mart ad. The rules of the contest state
Entrants are asked to discuss, illustrate, express their individuality (any way within the provisions of these rules and the guidelines posted on the Web Site), how it is reflected in their personal style, taste in fashions / accessories, interests, activities, etc., and to consider how Wal-Mart helps support their personal style and self-expression through the depth and breadth of products Wal-Mart offers.
And so much for it being a blog of sorts
Page and/or Page and Video must be completed and submitted at the same time in a single online session.
My personal favorite rule is the one that states
Without limitation and in its sole discretion, Sponsor may disqualify any Entry that it deems to:... Contain any beverages, tobacco, drug paraphernalia, firearms, or any depiction or representation thereof; or
Damn it, those kids better not have anyone drinking water in their submission! The four example videos shown would all be disqualified by the rules - most have trademarks or copyrights (music and clothing logos), one has someone with a beverage (gasp!) and one has partial nudity (shirtless boys). This is an ad campaign that is doomed to fail, IMHO. The bright side is that we will have some Wal-mart joke fodder for a while. Your kid, too, can have a Genuine Faux Blog(tm).
Care to prove any of those statements or is it just another Wikideadhead justifying the unjustifiable?
I think you meant to say {{citation needed}}
The Nature article can be found here. My favorite part is the rebuttal of the rebuttal by Britannica which can be found in pDF form here. At leats the Wikipedia folks know they can't always be accurate and dont't resort to lying when they are found to be wrong.
If only Cyrano Jones could go back to the past and peddle his tribbles through auctions! He would have made a fortune. What planet was that portal on again?
The telcos own the wires - do you propose the government take the wires away and lease them to the lowest bidder?
Um... We citizens used to own those lines as a public utility. The telcos (when they were one telco) were given large subsidies to build out their networks. You should go read this history and then read this old but prescient article. The government still forces Telcos to lease the lines for telephony use at a fixed wholesale price, but I guess the Internet doesn't count for some reason.
Any one of those would be a compelling reason to pursue their current business model
Not to mention the only existing installation would be their own. The risk of it being pirated or eploited is greatly reduced because of this. The piracy factor is probably a large motivation behind a lot of "software as (web-)service" models (M$!). I know that I've contemplated it because of that reason for some of my own projects.
Royal Bank is particularly incompetent in the IT department, I wonder how Microsoft came to hire somebody from such a famously inept organization. Birds of a feather perhaps?
Perhaps experience in covering up and diffusing major mistakes? Snow jobbing cutomers? Obfuscating incompetance? MS has need of those.
One would hope that if you were planning on giving a speech about the internet that you would either pay an aide to sit you down and brief you on it... or you would at least Google it.
The description of that first link in the search probably scared him off: "A slightly technical whitepaper explaining what makes the Internet tick." Run Ted! Run!
Internet?!? That bozo can't even understand Netflix:
"There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.
"But this service isn't going to go through the interent and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free."
I'm calling Netflix in the morning to ask where my other 7 DVDs are... and argue that I shouldn't be charged for changing my Queue. I'll also ask them where their non-internet website is at. My other 7 DVDs better arrive when I get home!
CSPAN is sometimes indistinguishable from Comedy Central. I can't believe this guy is the President pro Tempore of the senate (third in line of presidential succession). He also chairs the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. If you voted for this asshat, do the rest of us a favor and please don't ever vote again.
Every nation should have representation based on the number of servers hosted in it's soil, amount of bandwidth generated, etc.
If they did it by registered domain names (IPs), Tuvalu could finally pass Sierra Leone, Grenada, Liberia, Somalia and French Guiana as a major world power!
(as a side note, I came across this cool map hunting the links)
Really? So you are saying no corporation has ever lost money pursuing some product or service because the CEO was stroking his ego?
I give you a prime example to support how much an ego can change the path of a company for the worse: Darl McBride. Turned a company that once had many products to a shitty litigation house with few products which have dwindling customer numbers (SCO Unix has lingered at version 7.1.4 for a couple of years now). How much empty ego do you need to say something like "And C++ programming languages, we own those, have licensed them out multiple times, obviously. We have a lot of royalties coming to us from C++." (source)?
What is KinderStart anyway? I searched for it, and it seems that there are plenty of results completely unrelated to the plaintiff.
The real proof in the pudding is how other engines handle it. MSN, Yahoo and even Webcrawler (who has horrid URLS now) list it as the top result. They may be gaming results (since when do kids need NASDAQ?). Despite their cheery presentation, they are a for-profit company as far as I can tell. Google may have cought them doing something fishy. From what their press release page has, they have an activity gap of four years or so, so the pageRank theories people have proposed might have weight as well. I guess we'll find out eventually.
How do you write links like you did in "Magic Folders" and "Holding"? When I follow the URL: instructions it shows the whole URL. The/. help and FAQ does not cover this.
Pretty simple, it's just a regular HTML link. What you're doing is creating an "auto-link". The auto-link will just display an URL as a link (like http://slashdot.org/). What you want to do is look at the "Allowed HTML" section when you post. If you don't know how to use one of the HTML tags, just google it like this. Slashcode will put the domain name of the address in brackets next to the link automagically.
I write most of my comments in HTML and have done so for years now. Come to think of it, I can't remember a time when I posted without any HTML. For Example, here's the source code for the first paragraph of this comment (wrapped in <ecode> tags so you can see it):
<blockquote><em>How do you write links like you did in "Magic Folders" and "Holding"? When I follow the URL: instructions it shows the whole URL. The/. help and FAQ does not cover this.</em></blockquote>
<p>Pretty simple, it's just a regular HTML link. What you're doing is creating an "auto-link". The auto-link will just display an URL as a link (like <URL:http://slashdot.org>). What you want to do is look at the "Allowed HTML" section when you post. If you don't know how to use one, just google it like <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=html+tag+em"> this</a>. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashcode">Slas hcode</a> will put the domain name of the address in brackets next to the link automagically.</p>
You'll find that the <em> (emphasis) tag surrounded by the <blockquote> tag is quite common when quoting what you are replying to. So much so that the CSS now seems to recognize it and do it's fancy(pants) formatting. I suspect blockquote is doing this doing this, but have been using the two tags together for so long now it's habit;)
Like they say: "News for Nerds"....And that's our/. HTML formatting lesson for today. Hope it helps.
As for me, I'm never putting an old system disk on a new system as a second disk. After what happened last time.
Aha! You did have problems. Please post what happened so the rest of us may avoid it. Even if you weren't sure what was going on when it happened, you might get replies that help clear things up. I hope you don't think I'm nitpicking you, I'm just trying to help you and I have the Karma to burn on helping other posters (modded to oblivion for being offtopic). Believe it or not, I've learned quite a bit by posting "A happened, then B happened so I don't do that anymore" here on Slashdot.
BTW, I learned the term "magic" from the Microsoft tool "tweakgui". I didn't invent it.
I looked in TweakUI and it calls them "Special Folders" as well. My point is: Be careful about how you present things that you may only have cursory knowledge of here on Slashdot. I was being funny about it, but there are planty of users out there who will ream you for bad information. Instead of being authorative and telling the mods what to do, you could have replied in the form of a question such as "You could try, but won't windows have problems with the magic folders?" or something like that. Further, you could disclaim being an authority and just post something along the lines of "I think that...".
Ok, I'm done being a slashdot post nazi now:D
From my experience, XP stores the hard locations (ie: c:\Documents and Settings\BrynM\My Documents") for the special folders it needs in the registry. I've never had a problem slapping a previously used drive into a machine to copy files (I did this exact thing to recover files after and IDE failure that was corrupting NTFS just a couple of weeks ago). If you've had problems or know of them, then please post that.
The problem with doing that is Windows can detect the "magic" folders... Mods: If you don't know what "magic" is, please mod some other comment. Thank you.
Do you mean the software named "Magic Folders"? Or perhaps you have some kind of Folder of Holding with compression created by a high-level Magic User. Most likely you mean the Special Folders that are used by Windows, but then again you may just be spouting about something you actually know little about.
Or maybe you should just explain yourself and not flame the mods... You might even get modded +Insightful or +Informative then and you would have the advantage of explaining your term to the person you were answering - thus being genuinely helpful.
Although one has to wonder what is going on when Microsoft's programmer team for Windows is in the several-thousands and Apple's development team for OS X is around 300.
I think you nailed a big part of Microsoft's problem there. It's software written by a creative bureaucracy. IBM is like that, except their aim is functionality and reliability not the nebulous "user experience". The former is a collection of software "artists" and the latter is a more scientific and testable approach. When a few artists collaborate, the result can be something dramatic (OS X), but if you have too many you generate little visionary fiefdoms where their goal is a smaller portion of the whole. Thus, feature FOO may be quite clever in it's methods and interface, but breaks completely when feature BAR (built by another fiefdom) is enabled. You also get wars between the fiefdoms that change the direction of the end product (interface versus security). Worse still, MS has grown to behemoth proportions in such a way that even the fiefdoms themselves are bloated and approaching the same state as the whole.
MS can't revitalize itself (or windows for that matter) without downsizing, IMHO. They won't do it though. They are probably afraid that it will be perceived as weakness by the public and the stock market....Or they just won't drop the "we're the biggest and therefore the best" chip from their shoulder no matter how wrong it may be.
When I installed the Windows Vista Beta, there was a segment in the EULA expressly saying that you can't copy the fonts
Easy to figure out why...
Funny that the core web fonts have been discontinued by MS as well. Sadly, the font industry is riddled with companies stealing each other's fonts all the time.
Go get some free fonts and leave the "trendy" fonts to the companies willing to eat eachother and their customers alive. There are font creators out there who want you to use their fonts without their pound of flesh, but they are being driven away from a very controversial and cruel industry.
What the post-Eolas IE actually does is prevents the user from interacting with the ActiveX control until 'activated' with a click. (The control's running fine meanwhile, which means it can also be a security risk.)
Ahhhh, then we can just consider it security Vista style being rolled out early. (thanks for the objet tag info BTW)
Slashdot Mirror
I think you meant to say {{citation needed}}
The Nature article can be found here. My favorite part is the rebuttal of the rebuttal by Britannica which can be found in pDF form here. At leats the Wikipedia folks know they can't always be accurate and dont't resort to lying when they are found to be wrong.They've been running these modified chicken experiments the 60's. I wonder if Henson coopted their research to enhance Grover.
If only Cyrano Jones could go back to the past and peddle his tribbles through auctions! He would have made a fortune. What planet was that portal on again?
He's perfectly capable of confusing those with these tubes. I always suspected the Internet was based on "Theater Rock".
Internet?!? That bozo can't even understand Netflix:
I'm calling Netflix in the morning to ask where my other 7 DVDs are... and argue that I shouldn't be charged for changing my Queue. I'll also ask them where their non-internet website is at. My other 7 DVDs better arrive when I get home!
CSPAN is sometimes indistinguishable from Comedy Central. I can't believe this guy is the President pro Tempore of the senate (third in line of presidential succession). He also chairs the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. If you voted for this asshat, do the rest of us a favor and please don't ever vote again.If they did it by registered domain names (IPs), Tuvalu could finally pass Sierra Leone, Grenada, Liberia, Somalia and French Guiana as a major world power!
(as a side note, I came across this cool map hunting the links)Pretty simple, it's just a regular HTML link. What you're doing is creating an "auto-link". The auto-link will just display an URL as a link (like http://slashdot.org/). What you want to do is look at the "Allowed HTML" section when you post. If you don't know how to use one of the HTML tags, just google it like this. Slashcode will put the domain name of the address in brackets next to the link automagically.
I write most of my comments in HTML and have done so for years now. Come to think of it, I can't remember a time when I posted without any HTML. For Example, here's the source code for the first paragraph of this comment (wrapped in <ecode> tags so you can see it):
You'll find that the <em> (emphasis) tag surrounded by the <blockquote> tag is quite common when quoting what you are replying to. So much so that the CSS now seems to recognize it and do it's fancy(pants) formatting. I suspect blockquote is doing this doing this, but have been using the two tags together for so long now it's habit ;)
Like they say: "News for Nerds".I looked in TweakUI and it calls them "Special Folders" as well. My point is: Be careful about how you present things that you may only have cursory knowledge of here on Slashdot. I was being funny about it, but there are planty of users out there who will ream you for bad information. Instead of being authorative and telling the mods what to do, you could have replied in the form of a question such as "You could try, but won't windows have problems with the magic folders?" or something like that. Further, you could disclaim being an authority and just post something along the lines of "I think that...".
Ok, I'm done being a slashdot post nazi now :D
From my experience, XP stores the hard locations (ie: c:\Documents and Settings\BrynM\My Documents") for the special folders it needs in the registry. I've never had a problem slapping a previously used drive into a machine to copy files (I did this exact thing to recover files after and IDE failure that was corrupting NTFS just a couple of weeks ago). If you've had problems or know of them, then please post that.Do you mean the software named "Magic Folders"? Or perhaps you have some kind of Folder of Holding with compression created by a high-level Magic User. Most likely you mean the Special Folders that are used by Windows, but then again you may just be spouting about something you actually know little about.
Or maybe you should just explain yourself and not flame the mods... You might even get modded +Insightful or +Informative then and you would have the advantage of explaining your term to the person you were answering - thus being genuinely helpful.I think you nailed a big part of Microsoft's problem there. It's software written by a creative bureaucracy. IBM is like that, except their aim is functionality and reliability not the nebulous "user experience". The former is a collection of software "artists" and the latter is a more scientific and testable approach. When a few artists collaborate, the result can be something dramatic (OS X), but if you have too many you generate little visionary fiefdoms where their goal is a smaller portion of the whole. Thus, feature FOO may be quite clever in it's methods and interface, but breaks completely when feature BAR (built by another fiefdom) is enabled. You also get wars between the fiefdoms that change the direction of the end product (interface versus security). Worse still, MS has grown to behemoth proportions in such a way that even the fiefdoms themselves are bloated and approaching the same state as the whole.
MS can't revitalize itself (or windows for that matter) without downsizing, IMHO. They won't do it though. They are probably afraid that it will be perceived as weakness by the public and the stock market.Funny that the core web fonts have been discontinued by MS as well. Sadly, the font industry is riddled with companies stealing each other's fonts all the time.
Go get some free fonts and leave the "trendy" fonts to the companies willing to eat eachother and their customers alive. There are font creators out there who want you to use their fonts without their pound of flesh, but they are being driven away from a very controversial and cruel industry.Back when I worked at the Good Guys (a long time ago) we had several definitions for spiff.
My favorite and the most common: Special Incentive For Fuckers
or the geekier: Spent Influencing Fragile Figures
There were many, but all had the knowledge that we were being paid to screw someone with a particular product.
Why not just jump to the final step in cheesy exploitation of a brand:
NETSCAPE: The Musical