If I don't completely understand the methodology in collecting the data and what they are doing to generate the final number, then I don't trust the article. This article had me knee deep in statistics that seemed overly complicated for what they were trying to say. This puts me in the high yellow on the BS meter.
Did you know that Virginia Tech keeps the email accounts of their students open until they stop using them? It's a very convenient feature that they don't advertise.
People don't put grace periods in their systems? I can understand being upset about not getting the info from Paypal, but the best solution would seem to be to suspend account terminations until after the Paypal issue is sorted out. This shouldn't cause their business to collapse.
Is it just me or is it the end of the world on the forum thread linked in the article. I know small businesses run on slim margins, but when the very first posts are "OMG, payments are over 12 hours behind! It's the end!", I have to think that maybe it's time to build in some robustness into your business model. More likely the people in that thread are being a little melodramatic, as people seem to be wont to do when Paypal is involved. Even this thread on Slashdot seems to just be a way to try to increase pressure on Paypal (which I can agree with to a point).
Power alone isn't good enough though, it needs to be unchecked to really be abused. That is why even though the US and Europe have plenty of abuses, a lot of them are caught and the effect on the economy is kept in check somewhat. This can break down in the US for example when the same party grabs all three branches of Congress, but the situation cannot last for long because the people eventually vote them in and the entire government is kept in check by the media.
This is why whenever you see a government shutting down independent media, you know that the government officials are gearing up to plunder their country dry.
Heh, my house is hardly trendy (being 20 years old), but when looking for stuff within a 20-30 minute drive of where I work (the area directly around my business is far too expensive), I noticed that there was not a single house listing that did not include a number in the HOA fees section. My realtor said that the county has a law that every home has to be part of some HOA, but I don't know if that is true or not.
Sure, it's easy to tell Slashdot to ignore him, but our congressmen and major news outlets don't read Slashdot and don't know (well, the major news outlets should have figured it out by now, not that it will stop them from giving him all the airtime he wants) that Jack Thompson is a nut. If you don't fight him you'll find your parents and non-tech friends suddenly talking about how games make people go crazy and kill and congress will make legislation (that will pass with an overwhelming majority) that kills video games. This wouldn't be the first time something like this happened. Look at what the Comics Code Authority did to the comic industry. It has taken years and years to undo the damage that caused, and it is still impossible to get most older people to take them seriously.
Yeah, you just have to go to a community without a HOA. Whoops! They don't exist unless you want to drive 2 hours to work every day. Worse, if your neighbor decides that he wants to start a tire burning service in his front yard, you have to go through the county (you won't be living in a city) and that's slow and iffy.
Not all HOAs are run by complete assholes, just most of them. You can help though. I live in a community where the HOA covers hundreds of houses, but at the annual meetings maybe 6 or 8 people show up. If you had a few neighbors willing to help you, it would be very easy to depose the entire board of your HOA and take it over.
While that is probably true for razors, I don't it is the case that battery technology is a lot better than what you can buy in the store. There are better kinds of batteries, but they are more expensive and also for sale (usually advertised as being for high drain devices). Most of the advances in alkaline battery technology seem fairly incremental to me. You could easily end up paying twice as much for a battery that lasts 15% longer.
But the Memory Stick had all sorts of advantages, like a useless DRM system and twice the price per bit of all of the competing flash solutions. It also capped out on capacity a lot quicker than its contemporaries. Who wouldn't want one?
It's turn based strategy! I thought for sure it was going to be a brawler like River City Ransom. It runs on Linux!! This is going to be the most awesome game ever.
That was only one of the reasons Iridium failed. Other reasons include:
Bulky phones that were well over twice the size and weight of even the 1990s phones they were competing with.
Lousy voice quality. The phones weren't 9600 baud modems like the above poster suggested, they are actually 2400 baud modems, and voice compressed down that far doesn't sound very good
They only worked outside. Buildings would kill the signal right quick. This is a serious dealbreaker for something you're trying to sell to businessmen
Most businessmen don't really have trouble with their coverage now that cell towers have popped up all over the place.
Expensive. Seriously, I'm sure the cost seemed "high but mostly reasonable" back in the 80s when they were planning it and all cell phone time was expensive, but by the time all of the birds were in the air cell minutes had dropped down into the pennies and they just could not compete.
As an attendum to that: Launching satellites and keeping them in the air is expensive. It's probably not feasible to compete with land based cell phones on cost anytime in the foreseeable future.
The data service sucked. It's 2400 baud, but you lose a good 30% of that due to the encoding/FEC/etc... Even then the connection is fickle, especially during satellite handover.
The latency is high too. It was bad enough to be noticable on voice communication and really hurt when you're trying to do anything interactive over the data.
Ultimately, the system isn't completely flawed, but the business plan was. Making Iridium a commercial system was a bad idea from the start. As a military system however it does have many of the features that you cannot find on regular cellphones, like working in the middle of the desert. Additionally the military is less cost conscious (especially when there is really no better option) than your average businessman. That's the reason the system was snapped up (for pennies on the dollar) by a government contractor type company.
Heck, according to the article he's not as munch debunking Darwin as proposing that some alternate understanding of evolution without doing any sort of real observation or experiments.
And after all, isn't that the basis of all crackpottery?
The thing is, you can't buy a new computer anymore that has XP installed. It's all Vista these days and you don't even get a choice. That's why it is inevitable that people will switch to Vista, they'll buy a new computer for whatever reason and not have the choice to stick with XP no matter how much they might want to.
The point is that it is impossible to make a mature game because there is no way to sell it short of running a web site out of your garage, hence the game industry is stuck in the same place the comic book industry is: seen as kiddy stuff and left to rot while the good talent goes looking for a less restrictive venue.
Frankly, I think retailers are to blame here. In their over eagerness to not offend anybody's sensibilities, they have shut themselves off from what would be a profitable and niche filling product. Of course nobody can tell them what they have to sell, but banning AO (and NC-17 for that matter) content out of hand doesn't do anybody any good.
Those artifacts really only show up when you have the compression turned up too high or you're trying to encode text or something like that. If you turn the compression up to the point where you don't see blocks, you'll still be using fewer bits than the PNG would have. The only general exception to this rule is a screenshot where you have plain 1 pixel thick-lines text. There you will see JPEG artifacting at all but the most insane bitrates.
Stop working for such crappy companies then. Mine has a policy where every 18 months they replace your laptop with a brand new one that while not top of the line, is no slouch (usually something like a Dell Latitude D620 I think with the C2D and 2GB of memory).
I have a webserver running locally on my box so they come back real quick with 404 pages.:) I'm not sure if that is really the best solution, but it seems to work for me.
Fired it up in IE to see what it's about. His site is slower than balls though, all I have so far is the "..as for me and my blog, we will serve the LORD", which might explain why I've never seen it.
Finally. That site took over 5 minutes to load. It looks less "abstract crazy" than I was expecting, but I don't think this is going to make my normal reading list. His sidebars are so busy I actually missed the ads the first time though. It's some sort of "blog ad swap" thing and some google ads. I really can't see what the fuss is about.
For the reasons mentioned in the op I have several notorious slow adservers in my/etc/hosts. I don't know if they're still a problem, but doubleclick used to be horrible about taking 10 or 15 seconds to get their ad bits back to you. I'm not even particularly zealous about killing ads, but if you're stalling out my webpage then it's in/etc/hosts for you.
I hit a lot of websites and I've never been redirected to this page. Does anybody actually use it, or is it something someone tossed up just to generate flames (AKA a troll)?
I thought Supercard became Metacard which renamed itself to Runtime Revolution? Actually, Metacard was pretty neat, they even had Linux/FreeBSD/Windows stacks, although it never had quite the same level of support from the OS that Hypercard had back in the System 7 days when I used it (I remember pulling up ResEdit and dropping sounds/pictures/etc... in my stacks, not to mention the compiled add ons). Metacard had compiled add ons as well, but they were something of a pain to get working.
I've had Netflix for years now and I've never had a reason to contact their customer service. Most of the stuff you would need to contact customer service for (missing disk, damaged disk, etc...) is handled conveniently on their website.
This sort of thing is the reason I have Netflix in the first place. I was tired of getting jerked around by traditional video rental companies.
Slashdot Mirror
If I don't completely understand the methodology in collecting the data and what they are doing to generate the final number, then I don't trust the article. This article had me knee deep in statistics that seemed overly complicated for what they were trying to say. This puts me in the high yellow on the BS meter.
Did you know that Virginia Tech keeps the email accounts of their students open until they stop using them? It's a very convenient feature that they don't advertise.
People don't put grace periods in their systems? I can understand being upset about not getting the info from Paypal, but the best solution would seem to be to suspend account terminations until after the Paypal issue is sorted out. This shouldn't cause their business to collapse.
Is it just me or is it the end of the world on the forum thread linked in the article. I know small businesses run on slim margins, but when the very first posts are "OMG, payments are over 12 hours behind! It's the end!", I have to think that maybe it's time to build in some robustness into your business model. More likely the people in that thread are being a little melodramatic, as people seem to be wont to do when Paypal is involved. Even this thread on Slashdot seems to just be a way to try to increase pressure on Paypal (which I can agree with to a point).
Power alone isn't good enough though, it needs to be unchecked to really be abused. That is why even though the US and Europe have plenty of abuses, a lot of them are caught and the effect on the economy is kept in check somewhat. This can break down in the US for example when the same party grabs all three branches of Congress, but the situation cannot last for long because the people eventually vote them in and the entire government is kept in check by the media.
This is why whenever you see a government shutting down independent media, you know that the government officials are gearing up to plunder their country dry.
Heh, my house is hardly trendy (being 20 years old), but when looking for stuff within a 20-30 minute drive of where I work (the area directly around my business is far too expensive), I noticed that there was not a single house listing that did not include a number in the HOA fees section. My realtor said that the county has a law that every home has to be part of some HOA, but I don't know if that is true or not.
Sure, it's easy to tell Slashdot to ignore him, but our congressmen and major news outlets don't read Slashdot and don't know (well, the major news outlets should have figured it out by now, not that it will stop them from giving him all the airtime he wants) that Jack Thompson is a nut. If you don't fight him you'll find your parents and non-tech friends suddenly talking about how games make people go crazy and kill and congress will make legislation (that will pass with an overwhelming majority) that kills video games. This wouldn't be the first time something like this happened. Look at what the Comics Code Authority did to the comic industry. It has taken years and years to undo the damage that caused, and it is still impossible to get most older people to take them seriously.
Yeah, you just have to go to a community without a HOA. Whoops! They don't exist unless you want to drive 2 hours to work every day. Worse, if your neighbor decides that he wants to start a tire burning service in his front yard, you have to go through the county (you won't be living in a city) and that's slow and iffy.
Not all HOAs are run by complete assholes, just most of them. You can help though. I live in a community where the HOA covers hundreds of houses, but at the annual meetings maybe 6 or 8 people show up. If you had a few neighbors willing to help you, it would be very easy to depose the entire board of your HOA and take it over.
Go to Options->Date/Time and change the "Date/Time Source" field from Blackberry to Network.
While that is probably true for razors, I don't it is the case that battery technology is a lot better than what you can buy in the store. There are better kinds of batteries, but they are more expensive and also for sale (usually advertised as being for high drain devices). Most of the advances in alkaline battery technology seem fairly incremental to me. You could easily end up paying twice as much for a battery that lasts 15% longer.
But the Memory Stick had all sorts of advantages, like a useless DRM system and twice the price per bit of all of the competing flash solutions. It also capped out on capacity a lot quicker than its contemporaries. Who wouldn't want one?
It's turn based strategy! I thought for sure it was going to be a brawler like River City Ransom. It runs on Linux!! This is going to be the most awesome game ever.
- Bulky phones that were well over twice the size and weight of even the 1990s phones they were competing with.
- Lousy voice quality. The phones weren't 9600 baud modems like the above poster suggested, they are actually 2400 baud modems, and voice compressed down that far doesn't sound very good
- They only worked outside. Buildings would kill the signal right quick. This is a serious dealbreaker for something you're trying to sell to businessmen
- Most businessmen don't really have trouble with their coverage now that cell towers have popped up all over the place.
- Expensive. Seriously, I'm sure the cost seemed "high but mostly reasonable" back in the 80s when they were planning it and all cell phone time was expensive, but by the time all of the birds were in the air cell minutes had dropped down into the pennies and they just could not compete.
- As an attendum to that: Launching satellites and keeping them in the air is expensive. It's probably not feasible to compete with land based cell phones on cost anytime in the foreseeable future.
- The data service sucked. It's 2400 baud, but you lose a good 30% of that due to the encoding/FEC/etc... Even then the connection is fickle, especially during satellite handover.
- The latency is high too. It was bad enough to be noticable on voice communication and really hurt when you're trying to do anything interactive over the data.
Ultimately, the system isn't completely flawed, but the business plan was. Making Iridium a commercial system was a bad idea from the start. As a military system however it does have many of the features that you cannot find on regular cellphones, like working in the middle of the desert. Additionally the military is less cost conscious (especially when there is really no better option) than your average businessman. That's the reason the system was snapped up (for pennies on the dollar) by a government contractor type company.Yes, because Iridium was such a massive success...
I've actually had to use Iridium modems in the recent past and I can tell you that the service is worse than you remember it but just as expensive.
The thing is, you can't buy a new computer anymore that has XP installed. It's all Vista these days and you don't even get a choice. That's why it is inevitable that people will switch to Vista, they'll buy a new computer for whatever reason and not have the choice to stick with XP no matter how much they might want to.
The point is that it is impossible to make a mature game because there is no way to sell it short of running a web site out of your garage, hence the game industry is stuck in the same place the comic book industry is: seen as kiddy stuff and left to rot while the good talent goes looking for a less restrictive venue.
Frankly, I think retailers are to blame here. In their over eagerness to not offend anybody's sensibilities, they have shut themselves off from what would be a profitable and niche filling product. Of course nobody can tell them what they have to sell, but banning AO (and NC-17 for that matter) content out of hand doesn't do anybody any good.
Those artifacts really only show up when you have the compression turned up too high or you're trying to encode text or something like that. If you turn the compression up to the point where you don't see blocks, you'll still be using fewer bits than the PNG would have. The only general exception to this rule is a screenshot where you have plain 1 pixel thick-lines text. There you will see JPEG artifacting at all but the most insane bitrates.
Stop working for such crappy companies then. Mine has a policy where every 18 months they replace your laptop with a brand new one that while not top of the line, is no slouch (usually something like a Dell Latitude D620 I think with the C2D and 2GB of memory).
I have a webserver running locally on my box so they come back real quick with 404 pages. :) I'm not sure if that is really the best solution, but it seems to work for me.
Fired it up in IE to see what it's about. His site is slower than balls though, all I have so far is the "..as for me and my blog, we will serve the LORD", which might explain why I've never seen it.
Finally. That site took over 5 minutes to load. It looks less "abstract crazy" than I was expecting, but I don't think this is going to make my normal reading list. His sidebars are so busy I actually missed the ads the first time though. It's some sort of "blog ad swap" thing and some google ads. I really can't see what the fuss is about.
For the reasons mentioned in the op I have several notorious slow adservers in my /etc/hosts. I don't know if they're still a problem, but doubleclick used to be horrible about taking 10 or 15 seconds to get their ad bits back to you. I'm not even particularly zealous about killing ads, but if you're stalling out my webpage then it's in /etc/hosts for you.
I hit a lot of websites and I've never been redirected to this page. Does anybody actually use it, or is it something someone tossed up just to generate flames (AKA a troll)?
I thought Supercard became Metacard which renamed itself to Runtime Revolution? Actually, Metacard was pretty neat, they even had Linux/FreeBSD/Windows stacks, although it never had quite the same level of support from the OS that Hypercard had back in the System 7 days when I used it (I remember pulling up ResEdit and dropping sounds/pictures/etc... in my stacks, not to mention the compiled add ons). Metacard had compiled add ons as well, but they were something of a pain to get working.
I've had Netflix for years now and I've never had a reason to contact their customer service. Most of the stuff you would need to contact customer service for (missing disk, damaged disk, etc...) is handled conveniently on their website.
This sort of thing is the reason I have Netflix in the first place. I was tired of getting jerked around by traditional video rental companies.