I like the Eve Online model, myself. The game is free to buy and can be downloaded from their site. Monthly fees are about average for the market, and go down if you buy them in larger quantities at a time. You can cancel your subscription and they will hold your character and account for a -very- long time (they did it for me for 8mo) without you paying a nickel, and you can resume with all your cash, skills, items, etc. later, so cancelling a subscription for a 1mo vacation, or while you move if you know it will take a month or two to get the 'net hooked up again, or whatever, and it's all good. Also, the server goes down for 1hr. a day for maintenance, and patches / x-packs are released (free of charge) on a regular basis. That's not to mention that they regularly set records for most players simultaneously playing on a single server, or that they are ranked at the top on mmorpg.com for quite some time. It's an awesome model, and something I would love to see other companies strive to meet.
That will never fly. People have been using emoticons, and especially ASCII smilies etc., for a very, very long time. --- How long has that been in the character map? Surely somebody can find some instance of someone, somewhere, mapping that character to a single key?
This could be a really good thing for the RIAA, though. If functionality were added so that you could browse what songs others had available, and then download them while simultaneously leting the RIAA know you had acquired in a fashion similar to purchasing ring tones with your phone, They could cut out middlemen such as Napster or iTunes for probably 50% of song purchases. Person A downloads a song from Napster, goes to work, then tells all his friends at the office what a great song it is...pretty soon 1/4 of the people in the building have bought the song, and Napster only got a cut on the first sale.
This is the kind of thing that's really killing the RIAA; instead of embracing money-making potential in new technology, they panic and sue.
So a single, closed-source OS had fewer vulnerabilities publicised than a -class- of who-knows-how-many open-source OS's. Any given individual probably makes fewer mistakes than all the other people in the world combined, too. Like, *shock*!
And now that I think of it, you could also try using google image search for *.wmf, however that would probably be -incredibly- stupid, if reports that you only need to have the image displayed are accurate.
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/archive-12 2005.html#00000754 --- Several sites listed there. I also found a site last night while searching for, of all things, internet tetris clones. Luckily FF prompted for download, but yeah...if you google for "tetris", it was one of the first 3 or 4 to come up (YMMV, result order may have changed by now.)
Just think, the ability to overwrite a critical piece of system data with malicious or even simply garbled data merely by modifying downloaded but not yet installed updates, modifying them on the fly while they are downloaded, or just writing your own code to masquerade as an update, and not even needing to wait for a reboot before you can write and / or execute!
That's not what I meant at all. 'Fold', as I have heard it used usually, means either parts (attacking with a sword and gun at the same time might be called a 2-fold attack strategy), or exponential growth (like folding a piece of paper, each fold doubles the number of sections, or alternatively, unfolding a piece of paper doubles the size each time it is unfolded). So a 30-fold increase would seem to imply an increase by over 1 billion times.
People get bored and move on, at least most. A select few will stick to a single game like that and play for huge amounts of time each day every day for years, but for the most part people not only get totally bored and move on to a whole new game entirely after a while, but they get bored on a day-to-day basis and play other games just for variety.
It may be an 800lb gorilla right now, but it will grow old and die, or more likely, be unceremoniously butchered by the -next- 800lb gorilla to come along.
Aside from that, you also have to recognize that while MMORPGs are growing in popularity, the people that play them still are not such a huge target audience that a game company would go broke simply by failing to market to them altogether.
"She just jumped into the water and drifted down to the bottom, as if she was going to sleep."
That sounds extremely bizarre to me. How does a person just lose consciousness like that? Shock from cold water, maybe?
And you have to be surprisingly spineless to give in to it. I own a coputer service business, as well, and I don't care if you're a friend or just some guy on the street...if you come to me about business, I'm -all- business. "I do this, this and this. I do NOT do that, that, or that. If you want me to do something, these are my prices."
If someone isn't understanding about the fact that they are asking you to break the rules which you otherwise apply to everybody so you can put food on your table, they're what is called a 'leech', not a 'friend'.
"If their IT department can't use the software they create, they can't very well go out and tell other companies that it'll solve their problems now can they?"
Not that that's gonna stop them from trying anyways...:P
"We're 100 percent Windows, SQL Server"
Hold up a second, now. How the heck do they expect to know if their products are good or not, if they have nothing for comparison? You've got to be -very- familiar with both sides of an argument if you expect to win it.
It's uplifting to see that at least some places in the world are willing to aim for a more intelligent citizenry than simply legislating morality and restricting personal freedoms to for the sake of the idiot majority.
Qbasic to get the basic concepts down...and do it in a way that is useful to her. Many TI calculators use a BASIC-like language. Once that bores her to death, move to something like javascript and HTML (also useful and easy to see real results in a short time). If she's still interested at that point, Java or C#, or if she liked the calculator stuff, try VB, or something like that would be a logical step, or perhaps jump right into C++.
"and to include opt-out instructions and the sender's physical address"
Now it will be infinitely easier to counter attack email spammers with "paper spam".
From Kuhn's response:
In no violation case have we ever filed a law suit, and rarely even get the point to threaten one, because most companies feel that it is better for them and their customers to come into compliance.
Compare that to the RIAA filing lawsuits against those who violated the copyrights without even giving them a warning. It's not the ends that are being debated here, it's the means.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the Eve Online model, myself. The game is free to buy and can be downloaded from their site. Monthly fees are about average for the market, and go down if you buy them in larger quantities at a time. You can cancel your subscription and they will hold your character and account for a -very- long time (they did it for me for 8mo) without you paying a nickel, and you can resume with all your cash, skills, items, etc. later, so cancelling a subscription for a 1mo vacation, or while you move if you know it will take a month or two to get the 'net hooked up again, or whatever, and it's all good. Also, the server goes down for 1hr. a day for maintenance, and patches / x-packs are released (free of charge) on a regular basis. That's not to mention that they regularly set records for most players simultaneously playing on a single server, or that they are ranked at the top on mmorpg.com for quite some time. It's an awesome model, and something I would love to see other companies strive to meet.
Stupid crap cut out my character...anywho, type alt + 257 or 258 into a text box or whatever. Smily face characters. How long have those been around?
That will never fly. People have been using emoticons, and especially ASCII smilies etc., for a very, very long time. --- How long has that been in the character map? Surely somebody can find some instance of someone, somewhere, mapping that character to a single key?
the sample was destroyed when the scientists decided to celebrate with drinks on the rocks.
This could be a really good thing for the RIAA, though. If functionality were added so that you could browse what songs others had available, and then download them while simultaneously leting the RIAA know you had acquired in a fashion similar to purchasing ring tones with your phone, They could cut out middlemen such as Napster or iTunes for probably 50% of song purchases. Person A downloads a song from Napster, goes to work, then tells all his friends at the office what a great song it is...pretty soon 1/4 of the people in the building have bought the song, and Napster only got a cut on the first sale. This is the kind of thing that's really killing the RIAA; instead of embracing money-making potential in new technology, they panic and sue.
As I said two days ago...
So a single, closed-source OS had fewer vulnerabilities publicised than a -class- of who-knows-how-many open-source OS's. Any given individual probably makes fewer mistakes than all the other people in the world combined, too. Like, *shock*!
You're doing it wrong. Type *.wmf
And now that I think of it, you could also try using google image search for *.wmf, however that would probably be -incredibly- stupid, if reports that you only need to have the image displayed are accurate.
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/archive-12 2005.html#00000754 --- Several sites listed there. I also found a site last night while searching for, of all things, internet tetris clones. Luckily FF prompted for download, but yeah...if you google for "tetris", it was one of the first 3 or 4 to come up (YMMV, result order may have changed by now.)
Just think, the ability to overwrite a critical piece of system data with malicious or even simply garbled data merely by modifying downloaded but not yet installed updates, modifying them on the fly while they are downloaded, or just writing your own code to masquerade as an update, and not even needing to wait for a reboot before you can write and / or execute!
That's not what I meant at all. 'Fold', as I have heard it used usually, means either parts (attacking with a sword and gun at the same time might be called a 2-fold attack strategy), or exponential growth (like folding a piece of paper, each fold doubles the number of sections, or alternatively, unfolding a piece of paper doubles the size each time it is unfolded). So a 30-fold increase would seem to imply an increase by over 1 billion times.
30 -fold-? No way.
...stack against the likes of distributed.net and other similar projects for processing power?
Wow, men on the moon in a mere 13 years. I'm almost impressed!
People get bored and move on, at least most. A select few will stick to a single game like that and play for huge amounts of time each day every day for years, but for the most part people not only get totally bored and move on to a whole new game entirely after a while, but they get bored on a day-to-day basis and play other games just for variety. It may be an 800lb gorilla right now, but it will grow old and die, or more likely, be unceremoniously butchered by the -next- 800lb gorilla to come along. Aside from that, you also have to recognize that while MMORPGs are growing in popularity, the people that play them still are not such a huge target audience that a game company would go broke simply by failing to market to them altogether.
"She just jumped into the water and drifted down to the bottom, as if she was going to sleep." That sounds extremely bizarre to me. How does a person just lose consciousness like that? Shock from cold water, maybe?
...sliced bread.
And you have to be surprisingly spineless to give in to it. I own a coputer service business, as well, and I don't care if you're a friend or just some guy on the street...if you come to me about business, I'm -all- business. "I do this, this and this. I do NOT do that, that, or that. If you want me to do something, these are my prices." If someone isn't understanding about the fact that they are asking you to break the rules which you otherwise apply to everybody so you can put food on your table, they're what is called a 'leech', not a 'friend'.
"If their IT department can't use the software they create, they can't very well go out and tell other companies that it'll solve their problems now can they?" Not that that's gonna stop them from trying anyways... :P
"We're 100 percent Windows, SQL Server" Hold up a second, now. How the heck do they expect to know if their products are good or not, if they have nothing for comparison? You've got to be -very- familiar with both sides of an argument if you expect to win it.
It's uplifting to see that at least some places in the world are willing to aim for a more intelligent citizenry than simply legislating morality and restricting personal freedoms to for the sake of the idiot majority.
Qbasic to get the basic concepts down...and do it in a way that is useful to her. Many TI calculators use a BASIC-like language. Once that bores her to death, move to something like javascript and HTML (also useful and easy to see real results in a short time). If she's still interested at that point, Java or C#, or if she liked the calculator stuff, try VB, or something like that would be a logical step, or perhaps jump right into C++.
"and to include opt-out instructions and the sender's physical address" Now it will be infinitely easier to counter attack email spammers with "paper spam".
From Kuhn's response: In no violation case have we ever filed a law suit, and rarely even get the point to threaten one, because most companies feel that it is better for them and their customers to come into compliance. Compare that to the RIAA filing lawsuits against those who violated the copyrights without even giving them a warning. It's not the ends that are being debated here, it's the means.