I want a game that I can play through my browser, requiring a minimal download to get started, which is pretty immersive, doesn't cost so much to play that I get hung up about not 'getting my moneys worth' this month, doesn't penalise me to hard if I stop playing for a couple of months because I pull and have shagging to do instead, looks cool, has voice, allows me to dick about with it to show off how 1337 I am without pissing too many people off, lets me drive cars, fly planes, go on the subway, DOESN'T make me talk to elves or carry swords or have a really stupid name, DOES let me buy cool stuff with real money, DOESN'T require that I spend long periods doing dull repetitive stuff to earn stuff (I'll race a car all day to earn points though - if the tracks are good) DOES have lots of stuff going on that I can ignore, I should be able to swear and watch TV.
Oh - and it should work on my Palm, PC, XBox whatever on the same licence.
Late fees account for a decent percentage of Blockbusters profits currently, a search at Fortune.com may turn up the exact figure, I couldn't find it although I remember the article from late last year. Numbers are in the $Billions on return fees alone
However, the Shops themselves account for a much bigger slab of the operating costs. In surveys a majority of people who DONT hire movies cited the shops as OFF PUTTING because they felt intimidated by snotty staff sneering at their 'lame' movie choices. Ordering a disc through your TV opens up this VAST market to Blockbuster.
The only alternative would be to hire decent staff - which costs even more money. Blockbuster is about PROFITS not TURNOVER and would happily reduce its overall turnover to increase the profit margin.
Back of an envelope calculations would guess at each hire being anything from 20 to 200% more profitable from a business park unit than a shop - even if your sending them out within the hour on the back of a motorbike - these things are light - one courier could deliver a serious number of discs in a day.
Forward looking Blockbuster sees this - they can cope with losing the late fees. And the other posters suggestion of a 'green returnable deposit' is highly likely aswell.
Exactly. For those of us with the kit to copy this is great, but we are not the target.
Blockbuster want these more than life itself. They can finally forget about dealing with returns - and always have inventory as they don't have to play the averages game. Just order a stack of disks and send them out.
It IS wasteful, not only do we have 20 CDs falling out of every computer mag we buy - we'll have a DVD to bin every time we 'hire' a movie.
This has to be weighed against the real waste of returning to the shop with the watched tape, all the time and effort involved in dealing with the returns process etc... Its still a bigger waste, but probably not by much.
The masses (and I dont mean that in a condescending manner) will love this.
"you mean I don't have to go back to the shop with the disk!! bingo!"
This technology is actually coming on line slower than I expected. Give the consumer what he wants. He wants movies to watch once, cheaply, when he wants it, with minimal hassle. This is a better option currently than movie on demand over a bit of wire.
Another benefit is that Blockbuser after Blockbuser will close as people get used to ordering films like pizzas. I can run to three video shops while holding my breath from my front door - bet thats down to 1 within a year of this hitting the street.
Maybe they'll fill those empty shops with coffee shops!;-)
Some figures on the total software development spend of the BIG governments would be interesting - but on a 10 minute search I can't find ANY info.
I assume its huge. If all the work on systems NOT involving national security (for obvious reasons) were made open source and free these budgets would be creating a vast resource.
I can't breath underwater or fly. That means fish and birds are the result of some supreme spark plug changer?
I can't trail long bits of poo out of my ass as I swim about in a bowl placed on a television - dear god why am I so neglected!
These things came about because they gave those creatures a competitive advantage in changing climates. So they survived, shagged, had some babies that were like them. etc...
We got smart, elephants got big, mice got small, toads can sleep for months, sea monkeys can survive in packets of salt for YEARS, rabbits do it all the time, tutles live for centuries, spiders have eight eyes.
I seriously can't see where you get the idea that you need there to be some Human Centric All Powerful Dude out there somewhere to explain all that. Seriously!
I also believe in creation to the extent that some higher being at one point installed the last "spark plug", if you will, in order to give humans that certain something extra that separates us from mere beasts.
For many of us 'creationist-bashers' its exactly this type of comment that gets us pissed off. 'Mere beasts'!!! 'Spark Plug'!!! WTF
I won't scream 'show me the evidence!' I won't scream 'when your dead your dead - deal with it!'
I'll simply say stop being so damn arrogant. We're just a lucky lump of carbon and water that happens to be able to use tools and stuff - big wow!
Cakes cannot be had and eaten. I sympathise, but if you sit down to write your 'big list' of important things - and the top three are "spend time with the kids", "spend time with the missus", "have a lot of sex", then make sure you do them!
If that means you have to ditch the career into a lower gear then cool - it WASN'T FIRST ON THE LIST!!!
Some peoples list will be "earn shitloads of cash", "shag dozens of women", "play better football" - They too should go for it and make sure they get what they want.
The fact that a wee computer exists doesn't make the slightest difference to this. I carry my laptop everywhere, I'll boot up and check my messages when visiting my parents, I love my job, my first three are different from yours, tech rocks.
I've left jobs because I realised they didn't fit with my top three. If yours doesn't then leave the job. That's not meant confrontationally - but quite seriously nontheless.
Lifes too short to dick about in the wrong job - they take too much time and effort at the best of times. Job inertia is a powerful thing.. fight it.
Yep - legalisation is the only way to do it. As soon as you take away the need for drugs to be bought on the street you take away the drive to get new users hooked. You take that away the markt stops growing, it actually shrinks as in holland, and all these kids dont get into crime to feed their habit.
If it fucks up thier brains so what! so does alcohol and guns, and we let them have those!
I'd be interested in the level of drug taking among/.ers - how about a poll - drug of choice.
never
occational spliff
daily hash head
coke monster
MDMA dance amfem dude
speed freak
fabulous furry freak brothers cocktail
I'll bet we're mostly pussies that dont do nothin!
This is what we want - carry a SIGG flask around to top up your laptop. Add a charger outlet to let you charge your MP3 player, digicam, etc... while on the move and you have the ultimate roaming system.
Couldn't agree more. Everyone has a habit of assuming they are correct, that their opinion is representative of 'the majority' until they are told otherwise, repeatedly, for about 20 years.
I know my opinions differ from most of my peers - most of my friends don't have computers - or if they do they only ever use them to buy books and stuff.
"I find it appalling that a "reputable" source like new scientist is actually giving this guy's poor research this kind of air time."
One of the things New Scientist does well is mix 'proper' science with the less rigorous, 'pop science' that this report represents.
As a first briefing to the world about the economy of EQ to people who haven't heard of it this report did a good enough job. Its a bit hyped up and sensational, and wouldn't stand up to rigourous review as a serious piece of research.
BUT
There is a lot of snobbery about science. If I go out and count the number of blackbirds in my garden every day I am doing science. If I put out food for a week I get more birds. Therefore birds like food. WOW. Scientific deduction.
This is a similarly intuitive bit of research to do some quick, back of an envelope style, calculations to attempt to quantify the size of an economy. If there a real world economy? I think so, lets count it!
So while I agree that this is the lower end of the scientific spectrum - I am overjoyed that New Scientist continues to publish a range of articles. This is better founded than many of the articles they publish about extreme physics, and is certainly more approachable to the majority of the public.
Hopefully not too far off topic here.
What are peoples thoughts on the google text ads in the right hand of the results pages? Any experience as a buyer of these? Click through rates etc...?
Search Engines have to pay the rent somehow - if the google model works for advertisers it'll work for google. Personally I seldom click on them.
This is just Yahoo trying to claw some money back. I wont be using this service - even if I was inclined to pay for results it wouldn't be Yahoo getting my money for oh so many reasons.
Hydrogen can be thought of as a clean energy transportation mechanism - because is does not, of itself, pollute.
As your question details - there are numerous options for the generation of pure H - and the truth is that a range of solutions will be used.
If I put a wind turbine on my land to power a small H plant in my shed, to power my H Fuel Cell when I need the power, rather than just when its windy, I have a clean source.
If I crack a hydrocarbon (be it fossil, biomass, alien eggs) to produce the H its not.
H is an enabler for cleaner alternatives as the H specific part of the infrastructure is independent of the means of production of the H. Start building the H transport and distribution channels using hydrocarbon originated H - then move on to biomass and solar / wind / space laser when we finally get our acts properly together.
Just imagine an iMac 3 without a power lead! Just pour some H into it every few weeks:-)
The reason the Olympics still matter to viewers (as opposed to TV channels) is simple - most people enjoy watching a bit of bob-sleigh and ski jumping every now and then. A couple of weeks of watching people in lycra run / jump / slide / skid / crash and burn on the snow is quite enjoyable to dip in and out of.
Indeed. Further than gibberish though. To refer to Apple talking about how 'cool' their products are is to miss the point.
Most people see numbers and scary buttons on a computer screen. Apple shows you pictures, music, movies. Most people see sinister grey boxes sitting on desks making your home look like an office. Apple shows you organic looking objects of desire.
Jobs does an incredible job of making his computers seem approachable to a vast chunk of the population that doesn't use them. He also makes them look sexy on your desk. And with OS X they're pretty appealing to that vast hoard of MS PC users who are keen to 'move on' to a more flexible OS without having to 'go linux'.
But most of all. Apple make nice things. The new iMac is nice. They could have made the iMac 2 a much cheaper affair, to get into the supermarkets at an impulse purchase price with a similar look to the original. They didn't - they made a nicer thing.
Microsoft make nice mice - and nice keyboards. I'm sure they could come up with a nice computer. But Jonathan Ive is a serious talent - unless they get a serious talent on board they'll remain a step behind.
Slashdot Mirror
I want a game that I can play through my browser, requiring a minimal download to get started, which is pretty immersive, doesn't cost so much to play that I get hung up about not 'getting my moneys worth' this month, doesn't penalise me to hard if I stop playing for a couple of months because I pull and have shagging to do instead, looks cool, has voice, allows me to dick about with it to show off how 1337 I am without pissing too many people off, lets me drive cars, fly planes, go on the subway, DOESN'T make me talk to elves or carry swords or have a really stupid name, DOES let me buy cool stuff with real money, DOESN'T require that I spend long periods doing dull repetitive stuff to earn stuff (I'll race a car all day to earn points though - if the tracks are good) DOES have lots of stuff going on that I can ignore, I should be able to swear and watch TV.
Oh - and it should work on my Palm, PC, XBox whatever on the same licence.
Late fees account for a decent percentage of Blockbusters profits currently, a search at Fortune.com may turn up the exact figure, I couldn't find it although I remember the article from late last year. Numbers are in the $Billions on return fees alone
However, the Shops themselves account for a much bigger slab of the operating costs. In surveys a majority of people who DONT hire movies cited the shops as OFF PUTTING because they felt intimidated by snotty staff sneering at their 'lame' movie choices. Ordering a disc through your TV opens up this VAST market to Blockbuster.
The only alternative would be to hire decent staff - which costs even more money. Blockbuster is about PROFITS not TURNOVER and would happily reduce its overall turnover to increase the profit margin.
Back of an envelope calculations would guess at each hire being anything from 20 to 200% more profitable from a business park unit than a shop - even if your sending them out within the hour on the back of a motorbike - these things are light - one courier could deliver a serious number of discs in a day.
Forward looking Blockbuster sees this - they can cope with losing the late fees. And the other posters suggestion of a 'green returnable deposit' is highly likely aswell.
Exactly. For those of us with the kit to copy this is great, but we are not the target.
;-)
Blockbuster want these more than life itself. They can finally forget about dealing with returns - and always have inventory as they don't have to play the averages game. Just order a stack of disks and send them out.
It IS wasteful, not only do we have 20 CDs falling out of every computer mag we buy - we'll have a DVD to bin every time we 'hire' a movie.
This has to be weighed against the real waste of returning to the shop with the watched tape, all the time and effort involved in dealing with the returns process etc... Its still a bigger waste, but probably not by much.
The masses (and I dont mean that in a condescending manner) will love this.
"you mean I don't have to go back to the shop with the disk!! bingo!"
This technology is actually coming on line slower than I expected. Give the consumer what he wants. He wants movies to watch once, cheaply, when he wants it, with minimal hassle. This is a better option currently than movie on demand over a bit of wire.
Another benefit is that Blockbuser after Blockbuser will close as people get used to ordering films like pizzas. I can run to three video shops while holding my breath from my front door - bet thats down to 1 within a year of this hitting the street.
Maybe they'll fill those empty shops with coffee shops!
Correct. Your pretty much missing my point!
Some figures on the total software development spend of the BIG governments would be interesting - but on a 10 minute search I can't find ANY info.
I assume its huge. If all the work on systems NOT involving national security (for obvious reasons) were made open source and free these budgets would be creating a vast resource.
OKay.
I can't breath underwater or fly. That means fish and birds are the result of some supreme spark plug changer?
I can't trail long bits of poo out of my ass as I swim about in a bowl placed on a television - dear god why am I so neglected!
These things came about because they gave those creatures a competitive advantage in changing climates. So they survived, shagged, had some babies that were like them. etc...
We got smart, elephants got big, mice got small, toads can sleep for months, sea monkeys can survive in packets of salt for YEARS, rabbits do it all the time, tutles live for centuries, spiders have eight eyes.
I seriously can't see where you get the idea that you need there to be some Human Centric All Powerful Dude out there somewhere to explain all that. Seriously!
I also believe in creation to the extent that some higher being at one point installed the last "spark plug", if you will, in order to give humans that certain something extra that separates us from mere beasts.
For many of us 'creationist-bashers' its exactly this type of comment that gets us pissed off. 'Mere beasts'!!! 'Spark Plug'!!! WTF
I won't scream 'show me the evidence!' I won't scream 'when your dead your dead - deal with it!'
I'll simply say stop being so damn arrogant. We're just a lucky lump of carbon and water that happens to be able to use tools and stuff - big wow!
Plenty more where we came from I'll bet.
Cakes cannot be had and eaten. I sympathise, but if you sit down to write your 'big list' of important things - and the top three are "spend time with the kids", "spend time with the missus", "have a lot of sex", then make sure you do them!
If that means you have to ditch the career into a lower gear then cool - it WASN'T FIRST ON THE LIST!!!
Some peoples list will be "earn shitloads of cash", "shag dozens of women", "play better football" - They too should go for it and make sure they get what they want.
The fact that a wee computer exists doesn't make the slightest difference to this. I carry my laptop everywhere, I'll boot up and check my messages when visiting my parents, I love my job, my first three are different from yours, tech rocks.
I've left jobs because I realised they didn't fit with my top three. If yours doesn't then leave the job. That's not meant confrontationally - but quite seriously nontheless.
Lifes too short to dick about in the wrong job - they take too much time and effort at the best of times. Job inertia is a powerful thing.. fight it.
New wallpaper all round then!!
Off-topic - so shoot me!
/.ers - how about a poll - drug of choice.
Yep - legalisation is the only way to do it. As soon as you take away the need for drugs to be bought on the street you take away the drive to get new users hooked. You take that away the markt stops growing, it actually shrinks as in holland, and all these kids dont get into crime to feed their habit.
If it fucks up thier brains so what! so does alcohol and guns, and we let them have those!
I'd be interested in the level of drug taking among
never
occational spliff
daily hash head
coke monster
MDMA dance amfem dude
speed freak
fabulous furry freak brothers cocktail
I'll bet we're mostly pussies that dont do nothin!
Seriously guys - DONT refil your Trangia when its lit. You'll get away with it a lot of the time, but when it goes wrong you could lose a hand!
Always get SOMEONE ELSE to refil your Trangia when its lit - and sit OPPOSITE them!
This is what we want - carry a SIGG flask around to top up your laptop. Add a charger outlet to let you charge your MP3 player, digicam, etc... while on the move and you have the ultimate roaming system.
Couldn't agree more. Everyone has a habit of assuming they are correct, that their opinion is representative of 'the majority' until they are told otherwise, repeatedly, for about 20 years.
I know my opinions differ from most of my peers - most of my friends don't have computers - or if they do they only ever use them to buy books and stuff.
This wont hurt sony at all.
"I find it appalling that a "reputable" source like new scientist is actually giving this guy's poor research this kind of air time."
One of the things New Scientist does well is mix 'proper' science with the less rigorous, 'pop science' that this report represents.
As a first briefing to the world about the economy of EQ to people who haven't heard of it this report did a good enough job. Its a bit hyped up and sensational, and wouldn't stand up to rigourous review as a serious piece of research.
BUT
There is a lot of snobbery about science. If I go out and count the number of blackbirds in my garden every day I am doing science. If I put out food for a week I get more birds. Therefore birds like food. WOW. Scientific deduction.
This is a similarly intuitive bit of research to do some quick, back of an envelope style, calculations to attempt to quantify the size of an economy. If there a real world economy? I think so, lets count it!
So while I agree that this is the lower end of the scientific spectrum - I am overjoyed that New Scientist continues to publish a range of articles. This is better founded than many of the articles they publish about extreme physics, and is certainly more approachable to the majority of the public.
Hopefully not too far off topic here.
What are peoples thoughts on the google text ads in the right hand of the results pages? Any experience as a buyer of these? Click through rates etc...?
Search Engines have to pay the rent somehow - if the google model works for advertisers it'll work for google. Personally I seldom click on them.
This is just Yahoo trying to claw some money back. I wont be using this service - even if I was inclined to pay for results it wouldn't be Yahoo getting my money for oh so many reasons.
Two things may be related, but changing one doesn't neccessarily change the other (cause & effect).
There is another, much stronger relationship here. That between 'little bastard kids' and shit 'couldn't give a rats ass' parents.
Since I know scripting languages, am I an elite hacker?
well... yes!
"sets up DHCP, DNS, FTP, Email, file sharing, firewall, NAT, internet access, dial-up, etc. almost automagically"
As we all know - that can be more annoying than not doing anything at all. Do what microsoft etc do - just miss out the almost.
It's not Plug and (mostly) Play is it?
They named the Americans because they give a shit about the Americans.
They didn't name the Somalis because they don't.
The titles guy didn't know the names of ANY of the dead until he did some research. He STOPPED researching when he knew the names of the Americans.
Either thats lazy, or racist.
Either way theres nothing honourable about it. If the research were done, I'm betting at least ONE NAME would have been knowable. NOT ONE NAME!
"these things are not within the scope of the movie"
Says who? They named the white guys that died at the end of the movie. They didn't name the black guys.
Nooooo. Nothing racist about that!
Hydrogen can be thought of as a clean energy transportation mechanism - because is does not, of itself, pollute.
:-)
As your question details - there are numerous options for the generation of pure H - and the truth is that a range of solutions will be used.
If I put a wind turbine on my land to power a small H plant in my shed, to power my H Fuel Cell when I need the power, rather than just when its windy, I have a clean source.
If I crack a hydrocarbon (be it fossil, biomass, alien eggs) to produce the H its not.
H is an enabler for cleaner alternatives as the H specific part of the infrastructure is independent of the means of production of the H. Start building the H transport and distribution channels using hydrocarbon originated H - then move on to biomass and solar / wind / space laser when we finally get our acts properly together.
Just imagine an iMac 3 without a power lead! Just pour some H into it every few weeks
The reason the Olympics still matter to viewers (as opposed to TV channels) is simple - most people enjoy watching a bit of bob-sleigh and ski jumping every now and then. A couple of weeks of watching people in lycra run / jump / slide / skid / crash and burn on the snow is quite enjoyable to dip in and out of.
Heres the address: http://www.saltlake2002.com/
Or string-can p2p! Attach your modem to a bit of wet string pulled taught between you and your friends PCs! Transfer rates are slow but free!
For additional bandwidth use rope!
Indeed. Further than gibberish though. To refer to Apple talking about how 'cool' their products are is to miss the point.
Most people see numbers and scary buttons on a computer screen. Apple shows you pictures, music, movies. Most people see sinister grey boxes sitting on desks making your home look like an office. Apple shows you organic looking objects of desire.
Jobs does an incredible job of making his computers seem approachable to a vast chunk of the population that doesn't use them. He also makes them look sexy on your desk. And with OS X they're pretty appealing to that vast hoard of MS PC users who are keen to 'move on' to a more flexible OS without having to 'go linux'.
But most of all. Apple make nice things. The new iMac is nice. They could have made the iMac 2 a much cheaper affair, to get into the supermarkets at an impulse purchase price with a similar look to the original. They didn't - they made a nicer thing.
Microsoft make nice mice - and nice keyboards. I'm sure they could come up with a nice computer. But Jonathan Ive is a serious talent - unless they get a serious talent on board they'll remain a step behind.