Ideas are worthless. We have great ideas all the time (or at least, ideas we think are great). The value of a business proposal isn't in the idea, it's in the execution of the idea.
The most important things to a serious VC when it comes to a startup have almost nothing to do with the idea itself. You don't have to convince them of the idea: they've probably heard it before already. You're trying to convince them that YOU are the one to EXECUTE that idea, and that you can do it better than anyone else. If you can't, then the'll fund that other person instead.
When you approach a VC, the only thing you bring to the table is your ability to execute the plan you've proposed.
I fly around the world on a regular basis. There is one thing that every single foreign airport I have ever flown out of shares in common: a lack of security theater.
From Mumbai to Istanbul, Narita to that tiny little airport on the island next to Toronto, I never have to:
1. Take my shoes off 2. Submit to a body scanner 3. Suffer a pat-down 4. Wait more than ten minutes to get through security
Flying within and out of the US is slower, more difficult, more humiliating, than flying through airports where terrorism is ACTUALLY a common threat. I am embarrassed every time a foreigner has to deal with my country's ridiculous soap opera of security, and simultaneously enraged when the outside world reminds me that, outside of the US, flying is a wonderfully pleasant experience from start to finish.
I don't really have a new or insightful point here other than to vent, to be honest. It's deeply frustrating to see the ludicrous amount of money we've spent on body scanners that are not only trivially fooled, but simultaneously don't catch anything actually dangerous a metal detector wouldn't have already caught and still require me to take my god damned mother fucking shoes off. Security is worse, yet somehow takes longer. I have to choose between a ridiculous body scan or an intrusive physical search in my own relatively safe country, but can travel in comfort everywhere else.
It's maddening. I avoid flying as much as possible literally because of the TSA. It's a sad state of affairs when a 12-hour train ride (which, mind you, costs MORE than a flight) is an attractive option to dealing with airport security.
It's maddening to the point that I supported Rand Paul's original initiative to ban/reform the TSA. Rand Paul is a lunatic, yet I dislike the TSA so much that he and I agreed on this one issue.
So now, it turns out, he doesn't want to do what he'd said at all. His proposal address NONE of the things that madden me so, and in many cases make them worse. Privatized security theater is no better than public security theater. The THEATER part is the problem, not the public or private part.
He must be a pretty crappy gamer if, in all that time, there are still other civilizations in his way with which to have constant nuclear warfare. If he'd actually eliminated the other civilizations, he could easily rebuild everything.
Also, how on earth did he have so much global warming? That can really only be the effect of poor decisions or poorly waged nuclear war.
While unlikely (hopefully) to pass, this sort if thing is exactly the reason the United States has been so reluctant to give up its nominal control of the Internet's architecture, nevermind why so many technologists are tacitly OK with the US's continued dominance.
The nations of the world, given equal weight, err toward censorship, and many regimes with UN votes have deeply vested interests in clamping down on the extraordinary free-for-all of information exchange that the current Internet provides. I for one want the United Nations to have no role at this level, and both hope and expect the US to refuse ratification should it actually come to pass.
If you are actually distracted from study by someone else using a computer silently in your field of view, you will have a difficult time with most corporate environments. Ignoring unimportant screens and filtering out irrelevant information are basic abilities of modern people.
There is plenty to debate on the issue of laptops in general. I doubt many students use them to take any manner of notes, and the one's I've seen earnestly trying fall hopelessly behind someone with a pen and paper (as notes tend not to follow a format the way an office document does). But, it's basically a problem of individual students in the end. If someone chooses to distract themselves from a lecture they're paying for, it's their own business by and large.
Debate all you want, but claiming that laptops distract the whole room is laughable.
There are real arguments to be made here, but the "distracting other students" one is, in a word, ludicrous. Even from the article summary - "...when I'm trying to pay attention to the lecture, even someone's screensaver in the row ahead of me can be a major distraction,' - plays to it.
If you are actually distracted from study by someone else using a computer silently in your field of view, you will have a difficult time with most corporate environments. Ignoring unimportant screens and filtering out irrelevant information are basic abilities of modern people.
There is plenty to debate on the issue of laptops in general. I doubt many students use them to take any manner of notes, and the one's I've seen earnestly trying fall hopelessly behind someone with a pen and paper (as notes tend not to follow a format the way an office document does). But, it's basically a problem of individual students in the end. If someone chooses to distract themselves from a lecture they're paying for, it's their own business by and large.
Debate all you want, but claiming that laptops distract the whole room is laughable.
So how do you address this? Is it illegal for me to watch you drive your car to the urologist? Is it illegal to then google for your license plate and/or address to see who you are or where you live? Is it illegal to see you visit the pharmacist, and remember that I'd also seen you at the urologist at some point in the past?
Should it be illegal to say to my one friend "Hey, I saw IndustrialComplex at the urologist, and again at the pharmacist. Funny that! His license place was 'ASSMAN' too!" ? Should it be illegal for my friend to tell his friend what I told him? Should it be illegal for my to tell ten of my friends? Should it be illegal for me to make a blog post about it?
At what specific point do you intend to make something like this illegal?
Ahh, but our entire society's expectations of privacy have been unreasonable for the better part of the last several decades. This false sense of privacy has existed solely due to the inefficiency of access to public data, much in the same manner that entire localized business models disappeared with the advent of national television and freeways.
It's a nonissue only because the work, both in law and expectations, to actually address the fact that we're finally having to come to terms with the fact that there is a lot of perfectly legally accessible information about all of us in the wild will never be undertaken by our government or our society, and technological workarounds will evolve far faster than any legislation or agreement can. The point is moot. If Facebook didn't do it themselves, someone with a screenscraper and a database would.
If you can see it, you can correlate it. This is a nonissue only because there is no possibility of a solution for anyone who is upset.
If this information was already extant, and this functionality is just an aggregation and compilation of said extant data, then there is no problem. No new information is being provided: public information has simply been correlated, something any person could do on their own at any point prior.
Making already legally accessible data more readable is not in any way wrong. Anyone who fears or is angry about this is in for a shock over the next decade or so as technology reveals all sorts of already public things about them, and younger generations simply won't care.
Also, synchronized robotics, precisely coordinated CNC, and a host of other applications. Primarily, it's where absolute time isn't the concern, but rather where arbitrary time must be consistent between multiple devices (accounting for propagation delays, failures, etc...). Of course, protocols like PTP solve this fairly neatly: this particular product solves a different problem, and probably isn't actually useful.
There are two time issues to consider. One is how close your environment is to true time. The other is how close your individual devices are to one another. Messaging time-critical information between devices is severely complicated when the two devices are not on the same plane time-wise. Atomic clocks and the like solve the first problem. PTP solves the second problem. NTP almost (95%) solves both, but falls short in certain extremely time-critical situations.
I'm confident that at least some Twitter apps will simply not do this. What's Twitter going to do? Ban the popular apps? How would they even go about this? I fully expect the following interesting behavior by the apps that will end up being used the most by people like us.
1. The faker. It will report semi-random clicks or route garbage through the gateway, but never the user's real clicks. 2. The shirker. It will simply not route anything through the gateway. 3. The hider. It will shirk the gateway, but simultaneously masquerade as some other app that itself plays by the rules.
Twitter really has two options if they want to enforce something like this. They can force ALL apps to play by their rules (breaking functionality for perhaps a large portion of their userbase) or they can accept the fact that people will route around this. I don't see the former happening, in all honesty, and they've engendered little love from third party developers of late, so they can't count on developer goodwill either.
While that is what D&D (or Chainmail, really) was originally, there is a great deal of tabletop roleplaying that is nothing of the sort. While Dungeons & Dragons basically became "tabletop World of Warcraft" with the release of fourth edition, games like Burning Wheel, Inspectres, Prime Time Adventures, and Mouse Guard have broken far away from this progress quest paradigm. D&D is, simply put, the "WoW of tabletop gaming," and just as with WoW, the savvier gamers have moved to the independent scene or to games with less mass appeal but also less grind.
The real issue is simply that, for mass appeal and mass profit, the addiction model can't be beaten. D&D polished it as much as it can be polished on a table, and WoW did the same on a screen.
"You don't have to pay sales tax in your state on goods purchased in another state. The whole problem with internet companies is deciding what "state" they are in."
Yes you do, albeit indirectly. You have to pay a "use tax" on anything purchased outside of your tax jurisdiction which you then bring in for use or consumption. This is a whole branch of our tax code that doesn't cope well with the modern, internetworked world.
"This decision was driven by your direct and candid feedback and our continued commitment to you as our valued customers."
This is obviously just a publicity statement. There is no way in the world a large corporation would assume the massive risk of defying a law like this on the advice of its customers. Something else precipitated this.
Most likely, the law department in the company examined the law, and then the risk management division (or whoever it is: I have no idea how Newegg is managed) decided that the risk was worth taking. PR, seeing an opportunity for, well, PR, made up a fluff statement about how the dear customers were the reason.
Other than the fact that this is 3D, tons of companies tried almost the exact same thing in two dimensions back in the '90s when the whole "avatar" concept was still a major part of the mainstream media view of "the Web." (Right along with movies like "The Net" and "Hackers," when Internet things were hip to the newly computer literate).
Of course, there is actually more to this story than that. Internet connections are more reliable, the "Web" is more usable, and the Internet has largely been demystified. There remains, however, a distinct void in the realm of non-game interactive spaces. We've plugged right along with forums and IM, but shared-space chatting has all but disappeared outside of MMOs (game-contextualized) and IRC (realm of the uber-nerds and anime fansubbers alone). Second life is second-rate and ugly, and everything else is balkanized to the point of obscurity.
This is a chance, albeit a small one, that this offering will fill that void. Of course, this begs the question of whether or not this void truly exists in the perception of modern Internet users.
AMD is doing terribly at the moment. They're seriously lagging behind Intel both in fabrication technique and chip power. Furthermore, they only reason their chips are competitive -at all- is their recent and massive price cuts.
AMD chips run hotter, slower, and require more power. Their current designs are reaching their limits, and no feasible new ones are on the horizon. Intel, meanwhile, already in the lead with the Core 2 Duo, is going to jump still further forward with Penryn.
Why would Apple move to hotter, less efficient chips? Why would Apple partner with a massively unprofitable company? Why would Apple change what they're doing at all at this point?
I love AMD, and I've been loyal to them since the first K7s came off the line, but Intel has far more potential in the near future with better R&D, better chips, and surprisingly low prices.
Orkut was amazing... for about two weeks. I loved it. Our entire friend group jumped in, started making communities, and generally became very active. There was lots of discussion, and everyone was very happy with it.
Then, the Brazilians came.
My inbox slowly flooded with Portugese spam, mostly asking to be my friend. All of the communities I frequented filled with Portugese spam, mostly asking me to join other communities. They ignored the "language" preferences on communitues and overran practically every non-Portugese group. They constantly spammed one another. Many times, it was just two people having a private conversation with one another, but for whatever godforsaken reason sending this conversation to EVERYONE ON THEIR FRIEND LIST AND EVERYONE ON ALL OF THEIR FRIENDS' FRIEND LISTS!
They completely took Orkut over in the space of a month. It was impossible to use the service if you didn't speak Portugese. They'd email me constantly asking me to join their friend lists and communities. It got so bad I had to remove all of my contact information from the site.
It's not that they used their native language. I'm cool with that. You're free on the Internet to speak whatever language you want. The problem was they ignored and trampled everyone else, filling English-only boards and spamming constantly.
That's my Orkut story. Seeing it in the news again reminded me of the potential, and of how annoying Brazilians can be online;^)
I wonder if anyone outside of Brazil even uses Orkut anymore.
I've been following the "Jack Thompson Rule" when it comes to covering/reporting on/commenting on Sony in the past several months. Essentially Sony, like Jack Thompson, must be ignored unless the most recent news about them tops the previous news. For example:
Jack says something stupid: write a comment Jack says something else stupid: ignore him Jack kills a baby: write a comment
Congratulations Sony! You've gotten me to once again comment on your amazing incompetance.
I am no longer an IBM employee, and am bound to no contracts with them. I am bound by NDA only against discussing information marked as confidential of which I became aware during my tenure. Anything I may find out now, or anything that was not confidential, or even anything that I have surmised based on non-confidential information, is fair game.
My statement is based upon observations I've made of employees' attitudes, information I've discovered since I quit, and logical evaluations of the situation at hand.
You'd be surprised how little many employees there know about how IBM fits into the outside world or what's going on tech-wise beyond their own development. Out of sight/out of mind is one thing, but I was shocked by the sheer level of indifference they had.
I worked at IBM for a number of years as a sysadmin and developer. I can say with certainty that IBM isn't at all concerned with this case and never has been. In fact, the majority of IBM's employees aren't even aware that the suit exists, let alone that it's ongoing.
SCO periodically makes enough noise to get some new press, but beyond that the case is effectively dead. They really have no chance of actually winning, and the whole endeavor seems to be an elaborate pump and dump scam for their stock.
I'd like to think that we (GeekNights) sound fairly professional. It's not difficult or expensive to put together the equipment and have pro-sounding audio: the trick is in having something worthwhile to say and saying it well.
Well means good pacing, good language, and a conversational tone. You have to get used to hearing your own voice and speaking without immediate feedback from your audience. I don't know how much a book could help with these things.
Just practice and practice, podcast and podcast. We've done some 130 hour-long shows, and you'd be surprised how quickly you get used to being "on the air."
Honestly, I'd never understood just who bought these books. Every gaming shop I've been to had a giant wall of their content, rows upon rows of manuals and sourcebooks and what-have-you. I never once even gave one of them a second glance. I never once saw someone pick one up. I've never seen one outside of a gaming store. I've never seen or even known of an actual game of RIFTS.
I always wondered who their audience was. I guess now I know: noone.
There is no more shortage, and there hasn't been for some time. I see Xbox360s for sale at standard retail price, both the "value" edition and the full one, all over. Anyone who wants one can just go pick one up.
I wonder how many people who don't already have an Xbox360 are actually going to buy one in the near future. Microsoft likes to spin this as though they're producing more units to cover the huge demand and reduce shortages, but said shortages are now nothing more than an illusion. I honestly believe that most everyone who wants one already has one or can't really afford one.
It's funny how, despite all this, I still think that Sony is in a worse position than Microsoft in this round of the console "wars."
I'm a geek. I work for IBM. I run several websites in my spare time. I play German board games. I watch anime, and in fact ran the largest anime club in the US for several years. I do a freaking podcast four nights a week.
You want to know what I did last Sunday? I climbed a mountain. Yesterday, after work, I ran 4 miles. Today, I'm going to run another 4. Last week, I biked 10. I lift weights. I play DDR.
Being a geek has NOTHING to do with being a lazy fat ass. Using that as an excuse is pathetic. A pasty, weak geek sitting in his parents' basement in front of a computer is no better off than a pasty, beer-bellied sports geek sitting in his livingroom in front of a TV.
Mind and body are both important. To exercise one at the expense of the other is unbalanced and unhealthy (severe medical problems aside). The Greeks knew this. The Romans knew this. It's nothing new.
Slashdot Mirror
Ideas are worthless. We have great ideas all the time (or at least, ideas we think are great). The value of a business proposal isn't in the idea, it's in the execution of the idea.
The most important things to a serious VC when it comes to a startup have almost nothing to do with the idea itself. You don't have to convince them of the idea: they've probably heard it before already. You're trying to convince them that YOU are the one to EXECUTE that idea, and that you can do it better than anyone else. If you can't, then the'll fund that other person instead.
When you approach a VC, the only thing you bring to the table is your ability to execute the plan you've proposed.
I fly around the world on a regular basis. There is one thing that every single foreign airport I have ever flown out of shares in common: a lack of security theater.
From Mumbai to Istanbul, Narita to that tiny little airport on the island next to Toronto, I never have to:
1. Take my shoes off
2. Submit to a body scanner
3. Suffer a pat-down
4. Wait more than ten minutes to get through security
Flying within and out of the US is slower, more difficult, more humiliating, than flying through airports where terrorism is ACTUALLY a common threat. I am embarrassed every time a foreigner has to deal with my country's ridiculous soap opera of security, and simultaneously enraged when the outside world reminds me that, outside of the US, flying is a wonderfully pleasant experience from start to finish.
I don't really have a new or insightful point here other than to vent, to be honest. It's deeply frustrating to see the ludicrous amount of money we've spent on body scanners that are not only trivially fooled, but simultaneously don't catch anything actually dangerous a metal detector wouldn't have already caught and still require me to take my god damned mother fucking shoes off. Security is worse, yet somehow takes longer. I have to choose between a ridiculous body scan or an intrusive physical search in my own relatively safe country, but can travel in comfort everywhere else.
It's maddening. I avoid flying as much as possible literally because of the TSA. It's a sad state of affairs when a 12-hour train ride (which, mind you, costs MORE than a flight) is an attractive option to dealing with airport security.
It's maddening to the point that I supported Rand Paul's original initiative to ban/reform the TSA. Rand Paul is a lunatic, yet I dislike the TSA so much that he and I agreed on this one issue.
So now, it turns out, he doesn't want to do what he'd said at all. His proposal address NONE of the things that madden me so, and in many cases make them worse. Privatized security theater is no better than public security theater. The THEATER part is the problem, not the public or private part.
He must be a pretty crappy gamer if, in all that time, there are still other civilizations in his way with which to have constant nuclear warfare. If he'd actually eliminated the other civilizations, he could easily rebuild everything.
Also, how on earth did he have so much global warming? That can really only be the effect of poor decisions or poorly waged nuclear war.
While unlikely (hopefully) to pass, this sort if thing is exactly the reason the United States has been so reluctant to give up its nominal control of the Internet's architecture, nevermind why so many technologists are tacitly OK with the US's continued dominance.
The nations of the world, given equal weight, err toward censorship, and many regimes with UN votes have deeply vested interests in clamping down on the extraordinary free-for-all of information exchange that the current Internet provides. I for one want the United Nations to have no role at this level, and both hope and expect the US to refuse ratification should it actually come to pass.
If you are actually distracted from study by someone else using a computer silently in your field of view, you will have a difficult time with most corporate environments. Ignoring unimportant screens and filtering out irrelevant information are basic abilities of modern people.
There is plenty to debate on the issue of laptops in general. I doubt many students use them to take any manner of notes, and the one's I've seen earnestly trying fall hopelessly behind someone with a pen and paper (as notes tend not to follow a format the way an office document does). But, it's basically a problem of individual students in the end. If someone chooses to distract themselves from a lecture they're paying for, it's their own business by and large.
Debate all you want, but claiming that laptops distract the whole room is laughable.
There are real arguments to be made here, but the "distracting other students" one is, in a word, ludicrous. Even from the article summary - "...when I'm trying to pay attention to the lecture, even someone's screensaver in the row ahead of me can be a major distraction,' - plays to it.
If you are actually distracted from study by someone else using a computer silently in your field of view, you will have a difficult time with most corporate environments. Ignoring unimportant screens and filtering out irrelevant information are basic abilities of modern people.
There is plenty to debate on the issue of laptops in general. I doubt many students use them to take any manner of notes, and the one's I've seen earnestly trying fall hopelessly behind someone with a pen and paper (as notes tend not to follow a format the way an office document does). But, it's basically a problem of individual students in the end. If someone chooses to distract themselves from a lecture they're paying for, it's their own business by and large.
Debate all you want, but claiming that laptops distract the whole room is laughable.
So how do you address this? Is it illegal for me to watch you drive your car to the urologist? Is it illegal to then google for your license plate and/or address to see who you are or where you live? Is it illegal to see you visit the pharmacist, and remember that I'd also seen you at the urologist at some point in the past?
Should it be illegal to say to my one friend "Hey, I saw IndustrialComplex at the urologist, and again at the pharmacist. Funny that! His license place was 'ASSMAN' too!" ?
Should it be illegal for my friend to tell his friend what I told him?
Should it be illegal for my to tell ten of my friends?
Should it be illegal for me to make a blog post about it?
At what specific point do you intend to make something like this illegal?
Ahh, but our entire society's expectations of privacy have been unreasonable for the better part of the last several decades. This false sense of privacy has existed solely due to the inefficiency of access to public data, much in the same manner that entire localized business models disappeared with the advent of national television and freeways.
It's a nonissue only because the work, both in law and expectations, to actually address the fact that we're finally having to come to terms with the fact that there is a lot of perfectly legally accessible information about all of us in the wild will never be undertaken by our government or our society, and technological workarounds will evolve far faster than any legislation or agreement can. The point is moot. If Facebook didn't do it themselves, someone with a screenscraper and a database would.
If you can see it, you can correlate it. This is a nonissue only because there is no possibility of a solution for anyone who is upset.
If this information was already extant, and this functionality is just an aggregation and compilation of said extant data, then there is no problem. No new information is being provided: public information has simply been correlated, something any person could do on their own at any point prior.
Making already legally accessible data more readable is not in any way wrong. Anyone who fears or is angry about this is in for a shock over the next decade or so as technology reveals all sorts of already public things about them, and younger generations simply won't care.
The Financial Sector.
Also, synchronized robotics, precisely coordinated CNC, and a host of other applications. Primarily, it's where absolute time isn't the concern, but rather where arbitrary time must be consistent between multiple devices (accounting for propagation delays, failures, etc...). Of course, protocols like PTP solve this fairly neatly: this particular product solves a different problem, and probably isn't actually useful.
There are two time issues to consider. One is how close your environment is to true time. The other is how close your individual devices are to one another. Messaging time-critical information between devices is severely complicated when the two devices are not on the same plane time-wise. Atomic clocks and the like solve the first problem. PTP solves the second problem. NTP almost (95%) solves both, but falls short in certain extremely time-critical situations.
I'm confident that at least some Twitter apps will simply not do this. What's Twitter going to do? Ban the popular apps? How would they even go about this? I fully expect the following interesting behavior by the apps that will end up being used the most by people like us.
1. The faker. It will report semi-random clicks or route garbage through the gateway, but never the user's real clicks.
2. The shirker. It will simply not route anything through the gateway.
3. The hider. It will shirk the gateway, but simultaneously masquerade as some other app that itself plays by the rules.
Twitter really has two options if they want to enforce something like this. They can force ALL apps to play by their rules (breaking functionality for perhaps a large portion of their userbase) or they can accept the fact that people will route around this. I don't see the former happening, in all honesty, and they've engendered little love from third party developers of late, so they can't count on developer goodwill either.
While that is what D&D (or Chainmail, really) was originally, there is a great deal of tabletop roleplaying that is nothing of the sort. While Dungeons & Dragons basically became "tabletop World of Warcraft" with the release of fourth edition, games like Burning Wheel, Inspectres, Prime Time Adventures, and Mouse Guard have broken far away from this progress quest paradigm. D&D is, simply put, the "WoW of tabletop gaming," and just as with WoW, the savvier gamers have moved to the independent scene or to games with less mass appeal but also less grind.
The real issue is simply that, for mass appeal and mass profit, the addiction model can't be beaten. D&D polished it as much as it can be polished on a table, and WoW did the same on a screen.
It sounds like the editors need to listen to a frank discussion concerning where lies the Burden of Proof.
In other news, I call shenanigans on this "claim."
"You don't have to pay sales tax in your state on goods purchased in another state. The whole problem with internet companies is deciding what "state" they are in."
Yes you do, albeit indirectly. You have to pay a "use tax" on anything purchased outside of your tax jurisdiction which you then bring in for use or consumption. This is a whole branch of our tax code that doesn't cope well with the modern, internetworked world.
"This decision was driven by your direct and candid feedback and our continued commitment to you as our valued customers."
This is obviously just a publicity statement. There is no way in the world a large corporation would assume the massive risk of defying a law like this on the advice of its customers. Something else precipitated this.
Most likely, the law department in the company examined the law, and then the risk management division (or whoever it is: I have no idea how Newegg is managed) decided that the risk was worth taking. PR, seeing an opportunity for, well, PR, made up a fluff statement about how the dear customers were the reason.
Not that I'm complaining.
Other than the fact that this is 3D, tons of companies tried almost the exact same thing in two dimensions back in the '90s when the whole "avatar" concept was still a major part of the mainstream media view of "the Web." (Right along with movies like "The Net" and "Hackers," when Internet things were hip to the newly computer literate).
Of course, there is actually more to this story than that. Internet connections are more reliable, the "Web" is more usable, and the Internet has largely been demystified. There remains, however, a distinct void in the realm of non-game interactive spaces. We've plugged right along with forums and IM, but shared-space chatting has all but disappeared outside of MMOs (game-contextualized) and IRC (realm of the uber-nerds and anime fansubbers alone). Second life is second-rate and ugly, and everything else is balkanized to the point of obscurity.
This is a chance, albeit a small one, that this offering will fill that void. Of course, this begs the question of whether or not this void truly exists in the perception of modern Internet users.
AMD is doing terribly at the moment. They're seriously lagging behind Intel both in fabrication technique and chip power. Furthermore, they only reason their chips are competitive -at all- is their recent and massive price cuts.
AMD chips run hotter, slower, and require more power. Their current designs are reaching their limits, and no feasible new ones are on the horizon. Intel, meanwhile, already in the lead with the Core 2 Duo, is going to jump still further forward with Penryn.
Why would Apple move to hotter, less efficient chips? Why would Apple partner with a massively unprofitable company? Why would Apple change what they're doing at all at this point?
I love AMD, and I've been loyal to them since the first K7s came off the line, but Intel has far more potential in the near future with better R&D, better chips, and surprisingly low prices.
Orkut was amazing... for about two weeks. I loved it. Our entire friend group jumped in, started making communities, and generally became very active. There was lots of discussion, and everyone was very happy with it.
;^)
Then, the Brazilians came.
My inbox slowly flooded with Portugese spam, mostly asking to be my friend. All of the communities I frequented filled with Portugese spam, mostly asking me to join other communities. They ignored the "language" preferences on communitues and overran practically every non-Portugese group. They constantly spammed one another. Many times, it was just two people having a private conversation with one another, but for whatever godforsaken reason sending this conversation to EVERYONE ON THEIR FRIEND LIST AND EVERYONE ON ALL OF THEIR FRIENDS' FRIEND LISTS!
They completely took Orkut over in the space of a month. It was impossible to use the service if you didn't speak Portugese. They'd email me constantly asking me to join their friend lists and communities. It got so bad I had to remove all of my contact information from the site.
It's not that they used their native language. I'm cool with that. You're free on the Internet to speak whatever language you want. The problem was they ignored and trampled everyone else, filling English-only boards and spamming constantly.
That's my Orkut story. Seeing it in the news again reminded me of the potential, and of how annoying Brazilians can be online
I wonder if anyone outside of Brazil even uses Orkut anymore.
I've been following the "Jack Thompson Rule" when it comes to covering/reporting on/commenting on Sony in the past several months. Essentially Sony, like Jack Thompson, must be ignored unless the most recent news about them tops the previous news. For example:
Jack says something stupid: write a comment
Jack says something else stupid: ignore him
Jack kills a baby: write a comment
Congratulations Sony! You've gotten me to once again comment on your amazing incompetance.
I am no longer an IBM employee, and am bound to no contracts with them. I am bound by NDA only against discussing information marked as confidential of which I became aware during my tenure. Anything I may find out now, or anything that was not confidential, or even anything that I have surmised based on non-confidential information, is fair game.
My statement is based upon observations I've made of employees' attitudes, information I've discovered since I quit, and logical evaluations of the situation at hand.
You'd be surprised how little many employees there know about how IBM fits into the outside world or what's going on tech-wise beyond their own development. Out of sight/out of mind is one thing, but I was shocked by the sheer level of indifference they had.
I worked at IBM for a number of years as a sysadmin and developer. I can say with certainty that IBM isn't at all concerned with this case and never has been. In fact, the majority of IBM's employees aren't even aware that the suit exists, let alone that it's ongoing.
SCO periodically makes enough noise to get some new press, but beyond that the case is effectively dead. They really have no chance of actually winning, and the whole endeavor seems to be an elaborate pump and dump scam for their stock.
Well means good pacing, good language, and a conversational tone. You have to get used to hearing your own voice and speaking without immediate feedback from your audience. I don't know how much a book could help with these things.
Just practice and practice, podcast and podcast. We've done some 130 hour-long shows, and you'd be surprised how quickly you get used to being "on the air."
Honestly, I'd never understood just who bought these books. Every gaming shop I've been to had a giant wall of their content, rows upon rows of manuals and sourcebooks and what-have-you. I never once even gave one of them a second glance. I never once saw someone pick one up. I've never seen one outside of a gaming store. I've never seen or even known of an actual game of RIFTS.
I always wondered who their audience was. I guess now I know: noone.
There is no more shortage, and there hasn't been for some time. I see Xbox360s for sale at standard retail price, both the "value" edition and the full one, all over. Anyone who wants one can just go pick one up.
I wonder how many people who don't already have an Xbox360 are actually going to buy one in the near future. Microsoft likes to spin this as though they're producing more units to cover the huge demand and reduce shortages, but said shortages are now nothing more than an illusion. I honestly believe that most everyone who wants one already has one or can't really afford one.
It's funny how, despite all this, I still think that Sony is in a worse position than Microsoft in this round of the console "wars."
I'm a geek. I work for IBM. I run several websites in my spare time. I play German board games. I watch anime, and in fact ran the largest anime club in the US for several years. I do a freaking podcast four nights a week.
You want to know what I did last Sunday? I climbed a mountain. Yesterday, after work, I ran 4 miles. Today, I'm going to run another 4. Last week, I biked 10. I lift weights. I play DDR.
Being a geek has NOTHING to do with being a lazy fat ass. Using that as an excuse is pathetic. A pasty, weak geek sitting in his parents' basement in front of a computer is no better off than a pasty, beer-bellied sports geek sitting in his livingroom in front of a TV.
Mind and body are both important. To exercise one at the expense of the other is unbalanced and unhealthy (severe medical problems aside). The Greeks knew this. The Romans knew this. It's nothing new.