In November 2005, the Company acquired all of the outstanding capital stock of Firaxis Games, Inc. ("Firaxis"), a developer of PC and strategy titles, including the Civilization franchise. The purchase price of approximately $15,442 consisted of $12,500 of unregistered common stock and $4,085 of development advances previously paid to Firaxis reduced by net cash acquired of $1,143.
In June 2005, the Company acquired all of the outstanding capital stock of Gaia Capital Group and its wholly-owned subsidiaries ("Gaia"), the developers of certain of the Company's titles for console and handheld platforms. The purchase price consisted of $5,748 in cash, $4,055 of development advances previously paid to Gaia and deferred consideration of $1,597.
In January 2005, the Company acquired from SEGA all of the outstanding capital stock of Visual Concepts Entertainment and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Kush Games, the developers of certain of the Company's sports titles, and certain intellectual property rights associated with these products. The purchase price consisted of $27,794 in cash, $1,866 of prepaid royalties previously advanced to SEGA and contingent consideration of $2,593 based on the release of certain titles.
Shit - anyone know of any other game companies for sale at firesale prices?
No, we have to use extra html tags to fix the b0rked css.
According to the W3C standard, the div tag is a block-level tag, unlike span, which is inline. On slushduh, this comment is contained in a div (view the page source) but the CSS screws around with the div and the first p tag, turning them both into inline rather than a block-level containers.
Also, according to the same W3C standard, the closing p tag is not necessary. It's a waste, really. Semantically, paragraphs don't nest. Ditto with list items, etc.
And the affectation of writing tags that don't have a closing tag and forbid having one (such as writing an img tag like this <img src="whatever.png"/>) with the "/>" is also wrong. html != xml.
(On an unrelated note, there's supposed to be a blank line between the paragraphs above, but the new, extra-complicated CSS based Web 2.0 Slashdot implementation is broken. Bulleted lists are even more broken.)
The fix for it eating the first p tag between lines is to start your post with a p tag, before any text.
You also have to do it before any line that changes its indentation, such as when you end a blockquote. This post, for example, starts with a p tag, and there's also one after the closing blockquote.
I'm sure there are scenarios you wouldn't complain so much about.
For example, avatars designed by different porn shops/sites, with extra bonus "previews" or credits, redeemable at their web site. At the very least, you know THOSE avatars are going to be real eye-candy.
Its all about how you do DEW DEW DEW it. [/smack on sid eof head]
In part its because of how the main providers are regulated in Canada. They have had to open up their networks to competitors, and they've had to open up their services to resellers. What this meant is that, to keep a client, they have to really compete, on price/quality of service/features.
Its meant, for example, that the local Bell had to unbundle their ADSL service, so that you don't even need a voice line. IOW, you can have ADSL, and either use another provider for your voice calls, or your cell phone.
Their biggest competitor is the local cable co. Not happy with Bell? Go to Videotron. Not happy with Videotron? Go to Cogeco. Not happy with Cogeco? Go to GTA (100 mbps both ways fibre, but only available in a limited area).
As for whether the full bandwidth is available, the modem is capable of 42mb/s, and it was previously capped at 8mp/s (it was 6 mb/s 2 years ago). Last week I downloaded the Ubuntu (dapper dan) Linux isos via bittorrent, and I was consistently at the full 10mb/s.
So what about dialup? I only know one person who's still on it, and that's because he lives in the boonies. And apparently this year Cogeco cable is there...
... there's the whole issue of theft of service. Even if we grant them a "finders keepers" waiver for the physical phone, the use of the phone subscription is a separate offense.
On the internet front, my connection's uptime over the last year has been 100% (and its been on for long periods 24 hours a day). The box I'm typing on is 5 year old, and the only downtime its had in the last year was to install a new version of suse, a second video card and monitor, and a 250 gig hd.
As for the toilet, when ya gotta go, ya gotta go. Besides, its also my dogs drinking bowl. For it to be unavailable would be a disaster (and as far as the "planned downtime" while the tank is refilling, I guess you never heard of a "courtesy flush" - doesn't stop you from continuing your business, but it does clear the air.
I find it incredible that posters are justifying 20 hours of downtime for their net connection per year or a server as normal. Or outages of basic services like water on a monthly basis.
Sorry, you'll have to move to Kanuckistan and get a cable modem. 10mb/s down - 1mb/s up, no limit on transfer, IP changes maybe once or twice a year, $65/month Canadian + taxes.
That's one reason why I didn't bother with ADSL - my cable connection (10mb/s down - 1mb/s up) has been rock solid for the last 2 years. At one point (before I got a hosting account elsewhere for my sites) I was running them off the cable line 24/7, for something like 4 months, while downloading "stuff". There was one month of almost 1/3 TB of transfer, and they didn't complain...
5 nines uptime is 5.25 minutes per year. My (low-flow) toilet has been clogged more than that this year.
I feel your pain...
Can I interest you in a black market Canadian Loo?
The low-flow toilets seemed like a good iadea at the time, but if youhave to flush them 2, 3, 4 times, I would imagine you're not going to see much, if any, savings in water consumption.
I had originally done all the calculations, for 5 minutes, 10 hours, 20 hours, plus associated comments, and decided after looking at them that I was being a bit anal... so I deleted a lot of it (guess I should have hit preview one more time, but the new css on slashdot makes my eyes bleed:-)
I've decided to take Linus' advice and back up everything by posting it on the net:-)
Seriously though, I've gone through the "oh shit" effect often enough that I double-check every deletion beforehand, and I usually have an image of the partition floating around "just in case".
Gee, I don't know where you live, but they were changing transformers in the area all last week, and they made sure that everyone was provisioned from another part of the loop. Not one minute of down time.
When they changed the transformer right outside last year, they passed around notices the day before saying the power could be out for up to 3 hours - it was out for less than 10 minutes.
As for water outages, the city had to shut off the water last winter for a bit while they repaired a broken street main, but that's the only time in the 6 years I've been living here. When they dug up the street a block down for major work (a month), they made sure everyone was connected to an alternate water source.
As for cars... mine gets an annual oil change (15 minutes), and maybe an hour or two of maintenance work a year (last year was a cv joint, the year before, the other cv joint... expected with over 200,000 km, but not something that takes much time, and certainly not a day).
Sounds interesting, but ...
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 1
... trying to read the sample chapter screws up the tab holding that page in firefox (1.5.0.4) - scrolling no longer works for that tab until you either close it or go to another url, etc. It's too bad, it sounds like a good read.
Sounds good... but when I said "redundancies in your files", I meant all those multiple copies we all keep around because we haven't bothered cleaning up our filesystems. I don't know about you, but the only time I do a real cleanup of my/home is when its time to move to a new box or an upgrade. the last time, I burned over 200 disks as backups... never again - its all going on another hard drive, after judicious use of mc to do some serious pruning.
Bragging about "only" 10 to 20 hours of downtime per year is for people who have bought into the whole "10 hours is 99.999% availability, which is excellent" midnset. 99.999% availability for ANY of the above services would be a disaster (nobody would accept having to reboot a toilet,or having to take it "offline" for a few hours during peak demand). We demand, and GET, much better than that everywhere else. And if you check the netcraft uptimes, we can also get it in the OS Server world.
If you're running a server that you care enough about to bother reading uptime surveys, then you're not going to make any changes to it until you've performed the change in an identical test environment following a documented procedure, and have tested the change to ensure the system works.
... or if you're lazy, just clone the drives (disks are CHEAP nowadays), and then do the update. If it doesn't work, you have your known good working copy. Oh, and you DID back up/etc,/usr/local and/opt elsewhere as well, so you can restore those in a jiffy and try again, right?
Probably better in mst cases to do a fresh install, though. At least you'll get the opportunity to weed out the redundancies in your files.
10 to 20 hours of downtime a year for a server? That's awful!. Heck, the last place I was at the linux box (Red Hat 9.0) only had 2 downtime incidents in over a year after it was hooked to a UPS - one of those was caused by a 6-hour power outage (the power co was installing new trunk lines, transformers, etc all along the highway as part of an upgrade to the provincial grid), and another by a lightning strike that, again, killed the power longer than the hour of runtime for the UPS.
Of course, AFTER I left, it started going down on a regular basis - but what do you expect when you let a Windows Weenie try to admin a linux box?
Weak typing, poor/nonexistent scoping rules and worse yet, auto-vivifying variables, are the big points of irritation.
Having said that, if you avoid trying to use all the "features" of php, and just use it for what it was intended for - web pages (remember, PHP originally stood for "Personal Home Page"), its "good enough" 99% of the time.
I used to write CGIs in c/c++, but I wouldn't want my stuff to share a server with someone else's c CGIs if they've only had, say, 5 years of programming experience. A badly written/implemented c CGI can bring the whole machine down. A badly written php cgi will "just" time out.
So let everyone use the "P" glue scripting language of their choice - Perl, PHP, Python... whatever floats your boat.
Besides, there's one argument that should carry more weight with slashdotters than any other: More pr0n is served up by the Apache and the P languages than any other solution: specificially, the Netcraft confirms that largest pr0n site in the world is running FreeBSD/Apache/1.3.28 (Unix) PHP/4.3.6.
The hard drives aren't going to show anything that the police didn't already have on hand - that TPB hosted torrents. There was no need to seize any equipment - TPB's published legal archives made it quite clear what TPB was hosting (just torrents) and that nobody could download copyrighted materials directly from their servers.
This whole thing is going to end up like Shylock in Shakespeare's play - "You're entitled to your pound of flesh as per the agreement, but not one drop of blood."
Can you imagine the scene:
Prosecutor: We used over 50 investigators to raid the sites, during which we inadvertently seized equipment hosting hundreds of other sites at the same time, and spent hundreds of hours documenting that TPB hosts torrent files. This has cost the taxpayer lots of kronor, as well as inconveniencing hundreds of other businesses. We will prove to the court that TPB was hosting these torrents.
TPB: May it please the court, they didn't have to go to all that expense. All they had to do was visit the web site. It says we host torrents. It lists those torrrents. It evel lets them download the torrents. We have a legal section devoted to that fact. Oh, and we'll prove that the prosecutor's office is having its collective arse reamed on a daily basis by the US government.
Slashdot Mirror
Cripes, you can buy game developers cheap. Check out this quote from the 10-Qa meset.aspx?dcn=0001125282-06-003343&Type=HTML
http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/fetchFilingFr
Shit - anyone know of any other game companies for sale at firesale prices?
Even if they're not used for web browsing, they're still networked ... and probably connected to the net for data exchange.
No, we have to use extra html tags to fix the b0rked css.
According to the W3C standard, the div tag is a block-level tag, unlike span, which is inline. On slushduh, this comment is contained in a div (view the page source) but the CSS screws around with the div and the first p tag, turning them both into inline rather than a block-level containers.
Also, according to the same W3C standard, the closing p tag is not necessary. It's a waste, really. Semantically, paragraphs don't nest. Ditto with list items, etc.
And the affectation of writing tags that don't have a closing tag and forbid having one (such as writing an img tag like this <img src="whatever.png" />) with the "/>" is also wrong. html != xml.
Re: b0rked formatting:
The fix for it eating the first p tag between lines is to start your post with a p tag, before any text.
You also have to do it before any line that changes its indentation, such as when you end a blockquote. This post, for example, starts with a p tag, and there's also one after the closing blockquote.
I'm sure there are scenarios you wouldn't complain so much about.
For example, avatars designed by different porn shops/sites, with extra bonus "previews" or credits, redeemable at their web site. At the very least, you know THOSE avatars are going to be real eye-candy.
Its all about how you do DEW DEW DEW it. [/smack on sid eof head]
Its a win-win situation. As we would say:
In part its because of how the main providers are regulated in Canada. They have had to open up their networks to competitors, and they've had to open up their services to resellers. What this meant is that, to keep a client, they have to really compete, on price/quality of service/features.
Its meant, for example, that the local Bell had to unbundle their ADSL service, so that you don't even need a voice line. IOW, you can have ADSL, and either use another provider for your voice calls, or your cell phone.
Their biggest competitor is the local cable co. Not happy with Bell? Go to Videotron. Not happy with Videotron? Go to Cogeco. Not happy with Cogeco? Go to GTA (100 mbps both ways fibre, but only available in a limited area).
As for whether the full bandwidth is available, the modem is capable of 42mb/s, and it was previously capped at 8mp/s (it was 6 mb/s 2 years ago). Last week I downloaded the Ubuntu (dapper dan) Linux isos via bittorrent, and I was consistently at the full 10mb/s.
So what about dialup? I only know one person who's still on it, and that's because he lives in the boonies. And apparently this year Cogeco cable is there ...
... there's the whole issue of theft of service. Even if we grant them a "finders keepers" waiver for the physical phone, the use of the phone subscription is a separate offense.
On the internet front, my connection's uptime over the last year has been 100% (and its been on for long periods 24 hours a day). The box I'm typing on is 5 year old, and the only downtime its had in the last year was to install a new version of suse, a second video card and monitor, and a 250 gig hd.
As for the toilet, when ya gotta go, ya gotta go. Besides, its also my dogs drinking bowl. For it to be unavailable would be a disaster (and as far as the "planned downtime" while the tank is refilling, I guess you never heard of a "courtesy flush" - doesn't stop you from continuing your business, but it does clear the air.
I find it incredible that posters are justifying 20 hours of downtime for their net connection per year or a server as normal. Or outages of basic services like water on a monthly basis.
Sorry, you'll have to move to Kanuckistan and get a cable modem. 10mb/s down - 1mb/s up, no limit on transfer, IP changes maybe once or twice a year, $65/month Canadian + taxes.
That's one reason why I didn't bother with ADSL - my cable connection (10mb/s down - 1mb/s up) has been rock solid for the last 2 years. At one point (before I got a hosting account elsewhere for my sites) I was running them off the cable line 24/7, for something like 4 months, while downloading "stuff". There was one month of almost 1/3 TB of transfer, and they didn't complain ...
I feel your pain ...
Can I interest you in a black market Canadian Loo?
The low-flow toilets seemed like a good iadea at the time, but if youhave to flush them 2, 3, 4 times, I would imagine you're not going to see much, if any, savings in water consumption.
I had originally done all the calculations, for 5 minutes, 10 hours, 20 hours, plus associated comments, and decided after looking at them that I was being a bit anal ... so I deleted a lot of it (guess I should have hit preview one more time, but the new css on slashdot makes my eyes bleed :-)
I've decided to take Linus' advice and back up everything by posting it on the net :-)
Seriously though, I've gone through the "oh shit" effect often enough that I double-check every deletion beforehand, and I usually have an image of the partition floating around "just in case".
Gee, I don't know where you live, but they were changing transformers in the area all last week, and they made sure that everyone was provisioned from another part of the loop. Not one minute of down time.
When they changed the transformer right outside last year, they passed around notices the day before saying the power could be out for up to 3 hours - it was out for less than 10 minutes.
As for water outages, the city had to shut off the water last winter for a bit while they repaired a broken street main, but that's the only time in the 6 years I've been living here. When they dug up the street a block down for major work (a month), they made sure everyone was connected to an alternate water source.
As for cars ... mine gets an annual oil change (15 minutes), and maybe an hour or two of maintenance work a year (last year was a cv joint, the year before, the other cv joint ... expected with over 200,000 km, but not something that takes much time, and certainly not a day).
... trying to read the sample chapter screws up the tab holding that page in firefox (1.5.0.4) - scrolling no longer works for that tab until you either close it or go to another url, etc. It's too bad, it sounds like a good read.
Sounds good ... but when I said "redundancies in your files", I meant all those multiple copies we all keep around because we haven't bothered cleaning up our filesystems. I don't know about you, but the only time I do a real cleanup of my /home is when its time to move to a new box or an upgrade. the last time, I burned over 200 disks as backups ... never again - its all going on another hard drive, after judicious use of mc to do some serious pruning.
Translate this into consumer products:
Would you accept 20 hours of downtime a year for:
Bragging about "only" 10 to 20 hours of downtime per year is for people who have bought into the whole "10 hours is 99.999% availability, which is excellent" midnset. 99.999% availability for ANY of the above services would be a disaster (nobody would accept having to reboot a toilet,or having to take it "offline" for a few hours during peak demand). We demand, and GET, much better than that everywhere else. And if you check the netcraft uptimes, we can also get it in the OS Server world.
Probably better in mst cases to do a fresh install, though. At least you'll get the opportunity to weed out the redundancies in your files.
10 to 20 hours of downtime a year for a server? That's awful!. Heck, the last place I was at the linux box (Red Hat 9.0) only had 2 downtime incidents in over a year after it was hooked to a UPS - one of those was caused by a 6-hour power outage (the power co was installing new trunk lines, transformers, etc all along the highway as part of an upgrade to the provincial grid), and another by a lightning strike that, again, killed the power longer than the hour of runtime for the UPS.
Of course, AFTER I left, it started going down on a regular basis - but what do you expect when you let a Windows Weenie try to admin a linux box?
Thee's a middling chance that I'll be doing a gig in that biz sometime in the next month or so ... wouldn't want to advertise the competition :-)
Weak typing, poor/nonexistent scoping rules and worse yet, auto-vivifying variables, are the big points of irritation.
Having said that, if you avoid trying to use all the "features" of php, and just use it for what it was intended for - web pages (remember, PHP originally stood for "Personal Home Page"), its "good enough" 99% of the time.
I used to write CGIs in c/c++, but I wouldn't want my stuff to share a server with someone else's c CGIs if they've only had, say, 5 years of programming experience. A badly written/implemented c CGI can bring the whole machine down. A badly written php cgi will "just" time out.
So let everyone use the "P" glue scripting language of their choice - Perl, PHP, Python ... whatever floats your boat.
Besides, there's one argument that should carry more weight with slashdotters than any other: More pr0n is served up by the Apache and the P languages than any other solution: specificially, the Netcraft confirms that largest pr0n site in the world is running FreeBSD/Apache/1.3.28 (Unix) PHP/4.3.6.
so just do CTL++
... except that would get them shitcanned first, and give an out to the higher-up to cover his arse.
Its too bad the cameras didn't have sound!
The hard drives aren't going to show anything that the police didn't already have on hand - that TPB hosted torrents. There was no need to seize any equipment - TPB's published legal archives made it quite clear what TPB was hosting (just torrents) and that nobody could download copyrighted materials directly from their servers.
This whole thing is going to end up like Shylock in Shakespeare's play - "You're entitled to your pound of flesh as per the agreement, but not one drop of blood."
Can you imagine the scene: