Well, they still don't serve ad banners on pages, which keeps low-bandwidth and portable web servers happy. The paid ads that they have for selected keywords are clearly labeled with colored backgrounds and separated from the rest of the links. I can live with that.
What really impressed me in the article was the quote "If we wanted to sell ad banners, we could call DoubleClick and be profitable today." But they're not calling DoubleClick, to the rejoice of privacy-paranoid Slashdot readers everywhere. It's refreshing to see a company provide a useful service without intrusive advertising methods.
I signed up to make my page o' forms a Google Affiliate site, meaning I get three cents (soon to be just one cent) for every time I use it. Google also reserves the right to post ads on the searches from my box, in exchange for them paying me. That's another idea -- people are voluntarily "opting in" to get ads served on their pages in return for a trivial amount of cash. Unfortunately, companies like AllAdvantage [look Ma, no referrer tag!] have been bleeding cash by doing nothing but paying for eyeballs.
Inktomi now manages AOL's cache servers. From what I've heard from contacts at Inktomi, you'll soon be able to bribe Inktomi into making sure your page loads nice and fast for AOL users, especially faster than your competitors' sites. (wink wink, nudge nudge)
It most certainly is standards-compliant. It fits every one of AOL's web standards to a T. It's bulky, has lots of crappy scripting to provide the disguise of functionality, and "real" web users scoff at it.
C-SPAN stands for Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. It's a completely ad-free network, with the bills footed by cable companies and perhaps some private underwriters. Its only business is government news, and it excels at that. Any station whose call-in shows have three phone numbers -- one for Democrats, one for Republicans, and one for Independents -- is on to something.
Some cable channels succeed because they do exactly one thing, and they do it much better than anyone else. Look at the Weather Channel: nothing but weather, all the time. And it's a commercial success. No sitcoms, no panel discussion shows, no killer robots necessary.
There were as many as three local news shows in the NY area that did this. Channel 2 when they did their blitz-like "More news in less time!" format would cover every story in 30 seconds or less. They would be talking incredibly fast -- and I say this as a New Yorker -- to get out all the news, and then provide a listing of all the stories coming up, scheduled right down to the minute. Hilarious. Channels 9 (close enough to NY) and 11 still do a "ticker" format on their 10 o'clock news.
Why would anyone need this information? "Come on, honey! There's an important story about our kids and Pokémon coming up at 10:42 PM! And then we can't miss Sal's sports at 10:44 PM! This is so exciting!"
When I ask people why they don't watch the news, they usually reply that it doesn't apply to them. When Princess Diana died, many people observed, "Why does everyone care about this woman? She's just a public figurehead! This doesn't apply to ME!" The local (WCBS, New York CBS affiliate) news last night at 6:00 was overwhelmingly "Survivor"-related, with occasional breaks for weather, sports, and some wire news copy of the plane crash in Bahrain that killed 143 people. ("Bahrain? Where the hell is that? I don't care about that! I don't know any of those people! Now give us some more dirt on 'Survivor'!") I literally laughed out loud when I saw a promo hyping "live team coverage" of the "Survivor" winner on the 11:00 news. The affiliate even produced a 7:30 PM pre-show. That's four consecutive hours of "Survivor."
The growing popularity of just-for-me cable channels and customizable news sites means that people only care about what's directly relevant to them. It's a stark departure from the earlier days of TV, where everyone watching television could be alerted of news when it happened. If the president were assassinated right now, you could flip to Cartoon Network to watch something more upbeat. If you wanted to catch the news, you would do it on your own time.
But if you're going with DVD's, CD's, or even diskettes, you're going with a standard format. That way you can sign up with a company to press them out en masse without having to design special plastic molds or casings just for your games. The fact that your manufacturing cost is minimized leads to more competitive pricing.
Proprietary cartridges still cost more to make than standard CD/DVD's. The only major benefits they offer are durability (very good for kids who like to toss cartridges around, whereas CD's will scratch rather easily) and piracy protection, at least until the standard is reverse-engineered by some enterprising bootleggers.
I think they're trying to take a cue from one of the early plusses of the Sony PlayStation. While Nintendo and Sega were charging thousands upon thousands of dollars for developer licenses, Sony was allowing people to program in C on the Net Yaroze. An enormous developer scene emerged, which created an enormous library of games. Nintendo, on the other hand, had TWO games available for the N64 at its launch (Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64). While they were certainly excellent games, the lack of software was a big turn-off to someone who just paid $200 for a system and needed a $70 (!) game to go with it.
That game was incredible. It was the first shareware program I ever registered, and they even sent me two copies of it, complete with manuals and disks.:)
OMF was also the first game that caused me to get so mad I started shouting "choice" words and smashing my keyboard to bits. My parents made me buy another one.
It wouldn't surprise me to see it's Abandonware, although I've seen some blocky 3-D games that are still damn fun after all these years. In addition to wireframe classics like Elite and BattleTanks (their imitations, Void and Tank Pilot, play well on the Palm) I remember playing MCGA classics like 4-D Boxing and Stunt Driver. Those games 0wned, and they could be cracked rather easily.
Actually, I remember seeing that MIT has had robot battles for some time. Last spring, at Spring Carnival, Carnegie Mellon introduced a new event to the Mobot festivities: MoboJoust. Basically, two robots started at opposite ends of a narrow "arena," and the first one to cross the other's goal line (or get closest in 30 seconds) won. It was hilarious seeing some of these robots pulverize their opponents. In fact, on the promo for the next BattleBots, I was shocked to hear the name "Overkill," also the name of the winner of this year's MoboJoust. It's not the same robot, though. Oh well.
Don't underestimate the power of private funding, though. The Mobot people get assistance from such companies as Dell Computer, Lockheed Martin, and Schlumberger. They have some good tech at their disposal. Literally.:)
Um, you can play it on a handheld device? You don't need a TV? This is Mario Kart Advance, for the Game Boy Advance. The fact that you can't tell a handheld shot from a console shot is just one of many signs that the GBA will be sweeeeeeet.
You know you're a geek when you read this story and the first thing that pops into your head is "Unreal Tournament Football? Where can I get the mod for that?"
Run a few of those stories through a filter that takes out common four-letter words, as well as less offensive words like "breasts" and "hardcore." Those stories may look a little strange at first, but kids know how to play "fill in the blanks.":)
Besides, we're talking about attention-starved high school kids in a public area. These are the kind of kids who would be less drawn to stories, and more drawn to the copy of Penthouse they found in their dad's drawer. I don't think little Johnny is better off for seeing "LIVE HOT NUDE TEENAGE ____S" instead of "LIVE HOT NUDE TEENAGE SLUTS."
A few years ago, I was looking at baseball scores in my high school, which naturally used a proxy. I kept on seeing results from a team called "Oa d." What the hell was Oa d? A typo? That's what I thought, but it kept on popping up all over the place. I like to keep up on sports, but was this some new team I had never heard about?
Oh yeah. Oakland. I'm glad that the proxy filtered out that KKK hate speech that ESPN.com is notorious for. Other words like "hardcore" were blanked out, although you could still go to sex sites. It's not like the content is any more kid-friendly if you take out the bad words -- who reads porn sites anyway?
I have hated N2H2 ever since their Bess proxy blocked my web site (which had negative comments about my high school) from being viewed in my high school. Fortunately, after a couple of angry letters, they reinstated it. Turns out that someone else on the same server had some games, which of course are the Spawn of the Devil Himself, so the entire domain had been banned.
N2H2 is one of many censorware firms that will lazily block out every page in a given domain because of one or two bad pages. And if a search engine should ever point you to Geocities... well, you might as well go home and do your research yourself.
All that means is that IRC is spread very thin. Sure, you'll find a few kiddies running fserves here and there, but IRC was not designed as a medium for searching for and sending files. Gnutella and Napster were. The primary function of file-sharing networks is just that, sharing files. 99.9% of the traffic on Napster is file-sharing related (the rest being the odd chat room here and there, and who's to say that's not about file sharing). The vast majority of traffic on IRC is not about MP3 transfers, at least on the big networks. Porn? Well, that's another story.;)
IRC is relatively small. In an average MP3 channel, you'll find a couple hundred people, tops. On an average Napster server, you'll find thousands of users. Add that with the fact that Napster script kiddi3z don't keep bombarding you with confusing ads and high-ASCII-laden instructions, and you'll see that IRC is not really meant for the masses.
People want a simple point-and-click interface to download MP3's, not an endless stream of "j00 @r3 #49800 in d@ qu3u3" messages from your friendly neighborhood script kiddy. IRC, Usenet, FTP sites -- all of these confusing old "standards" are no match for the point-and-click clients that get millions of people into "sharing."
I could have sworn that was supposed to be satire, but lo and behold, they're real. According to their FAQ, Newtella is "effectively a subset of the gnutella [sic] network . . . designed to retrieve and exchange only MP3 files."
Translation: take a Gnutella client, strip all the file extensions away except for.mp3, and filter all non-.mp3 files out of search results. Absolutely brilliant. I wish I had that kind of initiative.
You know, there is a company called Indrema that's planning on releasing a Linux-based video game console. Hoor-fucking-ray. Obviously the reasoning behind this is to appease the loud, vocal minority of Linux gamers who feel that everything should be open-source and free.
Oooh, and they've got a great new business model! Let me take a stab at it... they're gonna market the thing like crazy to geeks, and then take forever to release ports of games that are spectacularly old and underwhelming. Why play tired old games like Sonic the Hedgehog when you can have gSonic gthe gHedgehog? It's almost the same game, except it's pretty slow, and you have to recompile it with a special option if you want sound. But let freedom ring, brother!
Slashdot Mirror
Lying already makes you popular. In fact, lying can even get you elected President if you play your cards right. :)
Well, they still don't serve ad banners on pages, which keeps low-bandwidth and portable web servers happy. The paid ads that they have for selected keywords are clearly labeled with colored backgrounds and separated from the rest of the links. I can live with that.
What really impressed me in the article was the quote "If we wanted to sell ad banners, we could call DoubleClick and be profitable today." But they're not calling DoubleClick, to the rejoice of privacy-paranoid Slashdot readers everywhere. It's refreshing to see a company provide a useful service without intrusive advertising methods.
I signed up to make my page o' forms a Google Affiliate site, meaning I get three cents (soon to be just one cent) for every time I use it. Google also reserves the right to post ads on the searches from my box, in exchange for them paying me. That's another idea -- people are voluntarily "opting in" to get ads served on their pages in return for a trivial amount of cash. Unfortunately, companies like AllAdvantage [look Ma, no referrer tag!] have been bleeding cash by doing nothing but paying for eyeballs.
Why did you pass it up? If you never opened the box, you could have been paid good money for it!
Inktomi now manages AOL's cache servers. From what I've heard from contacts at Inktomi, you'll soon be able to bribe Inktomi into making sure your page loads nice and fast for AOL users, especially faster than your competitors' sites. (wink wink, nudge nudge)
It most certainly is standards-compliant. It fits every one of AOL's web standards to a T. It's bulky, has lots of crappy scripting to provide the disguise of functionality, and "real" web users scoff at it.
C-SPAN stands for Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. It's a completely ad-free network, with the bills footed by cable companies and perhaps some private underwriters. Its only business is government news, and it excels at that. Any station whose call-in shows have three phone numbers -- one for Democrats, one for Republicans, and one for Independents -- is on to something.
Some cable channels succeed because they do exactly one thing, and they do it much better than anyone else. Look at the Weather Channel: nothing but weather, all the time. And it's a commercial success. No sitcoms, no panel discussion shows, no killer robots necessary.
There were as many as three local news shows in the NY area that did this. Channel 2 when they did their blitz-like "More news in less time!" format would cover every story in 30 seconds or less. They would be talking incredibly fast -- and I say this as a New Yorker -- to get out all the news, and then provide a listing of all the stories coming up, scheduled right down to the minute. Hilarious. Channels 9 (close enough to NY) and 11 still do a "ticker" format on their 10 o'clock news.
Why would anyone need this information? "Come on, honey! There's an important story about our kids and Pokémon coming up at 10:42 PM! And then we can't miss Sal's sports at 10:44 PM! This is so exciting!"
When I ask people why they don't watch the news, they usually reply that it doesn't apply to them. When Princess Diana died, many people observed, "Why does everyone care about this woman? She's just a public figurehead! This doesn't apply to ME!" The local (WCBS, New York CBS affiliate) news last night at 6:00 was overwhelmingly "Survivor"-related, with occasional breaks for weather, sports, and some wire news copy of the plane crash in Bahrain that killed 143 people. ("Bahrain? Where the hell is that? I don't care about that! I don't know any of those people! Now give us some more dirt on 'Survivor'!") I literally laughed out loud when I saw a promo hyping "live team coverage" of the "Survivor" winner on the 11:00 news. The affiliate even produced a 7:30 PM pre-show. That's four consecutive hours of "Survivor."
The growing popularity of just-for-me cable channels and customizable news sites means that people only care about what's directly relevant to them. It's a stark departure from the earlier days of TV, where everyone watching television could be alerted of news when it happened. If the president were assassinated right now, you could flip to Cartoon Network to watch something more upbeat. If you wanted to catch the news, you would do it on your own time.
11.2 Forbidden Weapons
The following weapons may not be used:
[snip]
3. Explosives or Flammable Solids - This includes, but is not limited to the following:
But if you're going with DVD's, CD's, or even diskettes, you're going with a standard format. That way you can sign up with a company to press them out en masse without having to design special plastic molds or casings just for your games. The fact that your manufacturing cost is minimized leads to more competitive pricing.
Proprietary cartridges still cost more to make than standard CD/DVD's. The only major benefits they offer are durability (very good for kids who like to toss cartridges around, whereas CD's will scratch rather easily) and piracy protection, at least until the standard is reverse-engineered by some enterprising bootleggers.
I think they're trying to take a cue from one of the early plusses of the Sony PlayStation. While Nintendo and Sega were charging thousands upon thousands of dollars for developer licenses, Sony was allowing people to program in C on the Net Yaroze. An enormous developer scene emerged, which created an enormous library of games. Nintendo, on the other hand, had TWO games available for the N64 at its launch (Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64). While they were certainly excellent games, the lack of software was a big turn-off to someone who just paid $200 for a system and needed a $70 (!) game to go with it.
Sure, after reading all the negative comments from fans of Robot Wars UK, I think I'll give it a try. Let me just flip to my nearby BBC affiliate.
*click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click*
Hmm, I don't appear to have one. I guess I can't watch Robot Wars UK, because I'm not in the UK! I'll have to settle for BattleBots then.
And BTW, I _loved_ the premiere.
That game was incredible. It was the first shareware program I ever registered, and they even sent me two copies of it, complete with manuals and disks. :)
OMF was also the first game that caused me to get so mad I started shouting "choice" words and smashing my keyboard to bits. My parents made me buy another one.
It wouldn't surprise me to see it's Abandonware, although I've seen some blocky 3-D games that are still damn fun after all these years. In addition to wireframe classics like Elite and BattleTanks (their imitations, Void and Tank Pilot, play well on the Palm) I remember playing MCGA classics like 4-D Boxing and Stunt Driver. Those games 0wned, and they could be cracked rather easily.
Actually, I remember seeing that MIT has had robot battles for some time. Last spring, at Spring Carnival, Carnegie Mellon introduced a new event to the Mobot festivities: MoboJoust. Basically, two robots started at opposite ends of a narrow "arena," and the first one to cross the other's goal line (or get closest in 30 seconds) won. It was hilarious seeing some of these robots pulverize their opponents. In fact, on the promo for the next BattleBots, I was shocked to hear the name "Overkill," also the name of the winner of this year's MoboJoust. It's not the same robot, though. Oh well.
:)
Don't underestimate the power of private funding, though. The Mobot people get assistance from such companies as Dell Computer, Lockheed Martin, and Schlumberger. They have some good tech at their disposal. Literally.
Um, you can play it on a handheld device? You don't need a TV? This is Mario Kart Advance, for the Game Boy Advance. The fact that you can't tell a handheld shot from a console shot is just one of many signs that the GBA will be sweeeeeeet.
Warning... incoming game.
Warning... incoming game.
It's a game cube! Look out!
You know you're a geek when you read this story and the first thing that pops into your head is "Unreal Tournament Football? Where can I get the mod for that?"
OK, I'll crawl back into my little hole now.
Run a few of those stories through a filter that takes out common four-letter words, as well as less offensive words like "breasts" and "hardcore." Those stories may look a little strange at first, but kids know how to play "fill in the blanks." :)
Besides, we're talking about attention-starved high school kids in a public area. These are the kind of kids who would be less drawn to stories, and more drawn to the copy of Penthouse they found in their dad's drawer. I don't think little Johnny is better off for seeing "LIVE HOT NUDE TEENAGE ____S" instead of "LIVE HOT NUDE TEENAGE SLUTS."
A few years ago, I was looking at baseball scores in my high school, which naturally used a proxy. I kept on seeing results from a team called "Oa d." What the hell was Oa d? A typo? That's what I thought, but it kept on popping up all over the place. I like to keep up on sports, but was this some new team I had never heard about?
Oh yeah. Oakland. I'm glad that the proxy filtered out that KKK hate speech that ESPN.com is notorious for. Other words like "hardcore" were blanked out, although you could still go to sex sites. It's not like the content is any more kid-friendly if you take out the bad words -- who reads porn sites anyway?
I have hated N2H2 ever since their Bess proxy blocked my web site (which had negative comments about my high school) from being viewed in my high school. Fortunately, after a couple of angry letters, they reinstated it. Turns out that someone else on the same server had some games, which of course are the Spawn of the Devil Himself, so the entire domain had been banned.
N2H2 is one of many censorware firms that will lazily block out every page in a given domain because of one or two bad pages. And if a search engine should ever point you to Geocities... well, you might as well go home and do your research yourself.
All that means is that IRC is spread very thin. Sure, you'll find a few kiddies running fserves here and there, but IRC was not designed as a medium for searching for and sending files. Gnutella and Napster were. The primary function of file-sharing networks is just that, sharing files. 99.9% of the traffic on Napster is file-sharing related (the rest being the odd chat room here and there, and who's to say that's not about file sharing). The vast majority of traffic on IRC is not about MP3 transfers, at least on the big networks. Porn? Well, that's another story. ;)
IRC is relatively small. In an average MP3 channel, you'll find a couple hundred people, tops. On an average Napster server, you'll find thousands of users. Add that with the fact that Napster script kiddi3z don't keep bombarding you with confusing ads and high-ASCII-laden instructions, and you'll see that IRC is not really meant for the masses.
People want a simple point-and-click interface to download MP3's, not an endless stream of "j00 @r3 #49800 in d@ qu3u3" messages from your friendly neighborhood script kiddy. IRC, Usenet, FTP sites -- all of these confusing old "standards" are no match for the point-and-click clients that get millions of people into "sharing."
Actually, I think that their clocks are just set ahead. That press release is just one point in a very short line of stupidity from this company.
I could have sworn that was supposed to be satire, but lo and behold, they're real. According to their FAQ, Newtella is "effectively a subset of the gnutella [sic] network . . . designed to retrieve and exchange only MP3 files."
.mp3, and filter all non-.mp3 files out of search results. Absolutely brilliant. I wish I had that kind of initiative.
Translation: take a Gnutella client, strip all the file extensions away except for
You know, there is a company called Indrema that's planning on releasing a Linux-based video game console. Hoor-fucking-ray. Obviously the reasoning behind this is to appease the loud, vocal minority of Linux gamers who feel that everything should be open-source and free.
Oooh, and they've got a great new business model! Let me take a stab at it... they're gonna market the thing like crazy to geeks, and then take forever to release ports of games that are spectacularly old and underwhelming. Why play tired old games like Sonic the Hedgehog when you can have gSonic gthe gHedgehog? It's almost the same game, except it's pretty slow, and you have to recompile it with a special option if you want sound. But let freedom ring, brother!