If I were Google I'd just do my best to ban all of the UK.
That's why you're not running Google.
Regardless of whether the UK government's position is right or wrong, if companies like Google threw a strop like that every time a government did something they didn't like, they'd soon end up serving Buttfuck, Illinois and Ascension Island.
While not another paper covering the same story, this does lend some weight to it.
Despite its former reputation as a newspaper of record, The Times is now- and has been for almost 30 years- a Murdoch-owned rag.
This is a man who, going by all available evidence, does not- and has never- believed in, stood for or supported *anything* that isn't in his own business interest.
Murdoch certainly isn't overly bothered about journalistic integrity, and he has been quite happy to repeatedly use one part of his business empire to promote or defend another; and The Times certainly hasn't been immune to this.
If The Times were to run an article attacking the BBC it would hardly be surprising- they've long been one of Murdoch's most consistent pet hates, mainly due to them standing in the way of his UK broadcasting ambition.
The summary makes a leap of logic. The company was never really worth 200 billion except in the eyes of the guy that bought his shares at $253.88 back in September of 2000.
So the loss of value isn't strictly due to mistakes the company made. The stock market crash accounts for most of that drop.
This is akin to people going "OMG! I lost 30% of my pension" or "I just lost £30,000 on my house's value" or whatever; yes, if you measure it from the ridiculous high of the market you "lost" that much, but really, what was it over the medium to long term? The only people who genuinely lose out are those who bought in at the peak of the market.
Apple is not going to waste money developing their own chips just for bragging rights.
That's right, they won't do it just for bragging rights. They'll do it for a compelling performance, power consumption, and/or cost advantage. Right now, they pay Intel, Nvidia, and AMD a hell of a lot of money for CPUs and GPUs, and I'm sure they'll do their homework before making the next build or buy decision.
The question is, would Apple seriously get into developing their own CPUs? I find that hard to believe, if only because- in terms of worldwide market share- the Mac is still probably quite small compared to Intel and even AMD based PCs.
Given how competitive the CPU market is and how hard AMD have to work to even compete with Intel, I find it hard to believe that Apple could afford to develop a chip that was competitive in terms of price *and* performance with either Intel or AMD solely for their own use. And would the incredible hassle of (effectively) getting in the CPU market outweigh the competitive and cost advantage? My gut reaction is that it wouldn't.
They could do a Commodore and buy AMD, but then they'd probably have to still sell CPUs to other people to justify it economically and (again) do Apple *really* want all that hassle? More likely that they'll concentrate on the other custom chips in their computers, iPods, etc.
What is clear is that later on Klingons played a much larger roll. ST:TNG was very Klingon, with Spock being replaced by Worf as the alien. I would argue that the social aspects of the Kligons were explored much more in TNG than vulcan in TOS.
Was I the only person who didn't find the obsession with the Klingons' background in TNG particularly interesting? I liked Worf enough as a character, and I didn't mind the Klingons as characters with a hint of background.
But I found all that stuff about Klingon society and the stories based around Worf's background quite boring. It just seemed like like a pointless and synthetic metaphor for various non-Western (primarily Middle Eastern and Central Asian) cultures seen through a left-leaning Hollywood script writer's eyes.
And while it was probably well-intentioned in a socially-aware 80s sort of way, it seemed to take itself a bit too seriously considering it was dealing with a totally a made-up, nonexistent culture with cod-Eastern guttural language and contrived religious ceremonies (with guttural names, etc.) that attempted to mimic the seriousness with which "real" non-Western people take such aspects of their culture.
But the problem was that the stories about the Klingon culture only worked if you took it Seriously. However, they *weren't* real enough to take seriously without feeling a bit silly; yet they weren't far enough from actual humans to work as abstract metaphors either.
What we are probably seeing is that the Klingons have been overexposed, and fully explored, so there is little interesting for a new writer to deal with, at least not without getting into trouble with the the Star Trek purists.
Yes, I hear that the writers of the rebooted Star Trek intend expanding the social background and politics of a different alien race- the tribbles.
If a problem with the internet connection actually freezes someone's computer, whoever had a hand in creating the operating system is a complete idiot.
Actually, when I used to access Internet BBSs via telnet on Windows 3.1, if the remote computer wouldn't respond, then telnet would sit there. Nothing new, but Windows 3.1 relied on co-operative multitasking. Due- I assume- to the way it was written, telnet wouldn't "let go" until the remote computer responded or the connection timed out... so the whole computer could lock up due to a problem with the Internet connection.
Not to mention that anyone who's in the top 5% range of usage will drastically flee to cheaper operators
Not saying I disagree with everything you're saying, but the obvious response (devil's advocate or otherwise) to this is that such cheaper providers will then get a disproportionate number of heavy users. Either they'll be able to handle them or they won't. In the former case, good; in the latter case, they'll either have to introduce similar measures to the other ISPs or collapse. That, or things will balance out.
I have a geocities site which I've not updated since circa 2002, but I still use it for storing documents online which I can access from any place in the world.
That's nice, but I'm sure there are plenty of alternatives for that, and it wasn't really the point of Geocities. The fact that you haven't updated the actual site since 2002 reinforces my point.
And I said the "majority" of sites. With something as big as Geocities, it's inevitable that a small proportion of sites will still be being actively updated, but I'd guess that the vast majority have been abandoned.
And come to think of it, of the sites still in use, I wonder how many were started in the past five or six years?
Still, Geocities' storage and bandwidth requirements is probably so small by modern standards, that IMHO there's no reason for them *not* to keep existing sites online- even if they close the service to new users and (possibly) prevent updates to existing sites. They must be making money off the ads after all.
They had a similiar approach to what Columbia House did with music CD's. They sent out mailings that threatened to send you software that you didn't order if you didn't send back the mailer with a certain box checked.
Columbia House was one of those "record club" things, wasn't it? We had them in the UK (along with similar book clubs), but you only *had* to send the ticked monthly thing back if you'd already agreed to this arrangement by joining- and they were reasonably clear about it.
You also had to purchase something like six CDs, books or whatever at the regular (uncompetitive) rate in your first year. For me, this made the cut-price joining offers look much less attractive, but again- and IMHO- they never actually misled anyone.
Yes, GeoCities is the home of the stereotypical mid 90's "home page" with animated gifs and background MIDI music
No, that was the late-90s:-) The stereotypical *mid*-90s home page had a plain background (*), a few sparse horizontal inline images (with some server-side mapping if you were lucky), ten tons of text on a single long page and the owner's list of "useful" general-purpose websites (back when the web was small enough that this wasn't a laughable concept).
Geocities' rise probably marked the dividing line between the early-to-mid-90s era of the early web and the late-90s commercialisation, IMHO.
(*) Coloured possibly, but more likely the default white, or- as the default background was on some early browsers- grey. Why grey?!
I hate the guts out of myspace and facebook. Seriously. There is no content. [..] In that respect, Geocities actuallý was better, because at least you had a chance (even if it was small) of finding useful information there.
MySpace and Facebook are social networking sites, whereas Geocities was really "my first web hosting". The former aren't that good for detailed reference information because... well, that's not what they were intended for. They're not- and were never meant to be- general purpose successors to Geocities. The part they've taken over from is the static-background, sparkly/colour-clash "best BF in the WORLD!!!" type Geocities sites.
There are more appropriate places and tools on the web for creating- and finding- "harder" reference sites. Despite their popularity, MySpace and Facebook aren't the be all and end all!
I'd agree with the awful.gif's and styles, but they had a lot more going for them than myspace.
That's because MySpace is- for all its mindboggling popularity- focused on a particular niche which generally doesn't- and isn't intended to- include hosting reference information.
As you mention elsewhere, GeoCities was the "only" place for hobbyists to put information- but that just meant it was hosted with them.
Many times over the last decade I've ended up on a Geocities website when researching particular subjects (sorry - can't give any examples, but more than a couple dozen times when looking at some obscure stuff).
Yeah, but "the last decade" includes both 1999 and last week; but while a (relatively) large proportion of useful info was probably hosted on Geocities circa 1999, I rarely if ever find stuff I'm looking for there now.(*)
For a long while Geocities was the only place hobbyists could spew their knowledge.
I never used Geocities and I had webspace with my ISPs, so I don't remember, but was Geocities the only provider of free webspace and did they provide useful tools to help newbies build web pages?
In other words, was it the "only place", or just a well-known jumping-off point that technophobic 1990s newbies used because everyone else did?
Either way, Geocities was still basically just a web host (albeit one which was free and slapped annoying ads and branding over the sites). Yeah, it's a part of web history (**), but ironically most of the nostalgia suddenly being unleashed here is probably because it made itself tackily prominent- and hence associated with- other peoples' late-90s sites it hosted.
And long before this announced shutdown it was mostly a relic of the past; the majority of sites it hosted don't appear to have been touched since the millennium.
(*) Ironically, being so common, I guess it never stuck in my head when a website was hosted by GeoCities... so nowadays I couldn't tell you how much- if any- "useful" information I found was hosted there circa 1999. Probably a decent percentage. Conversely, nowadays I'd notice and remember if a useful site was hosted by them- if only because it seems as anachronistic and tied to a past era as cargo pants. Yet I very rarely come across GeoCities results for "proper" information searches.
(**) And I'd like to say that:-
(i) I hope that Yahoo at least retain/store the websites as a historical artifact (while allowing their owners to remove them if so desired). Bear in mind that while it was big by the standards of the time, the number of Geocities sites is still probably dwarfed by the likes of MySpace. More importantly, since most of its sites are now quite old, I suspect that GeoCities' storage requirements are miniscule by modern MySpace/YouTube-era standards. If a site was 10MB in total- and I suspect that most were *way* smaller than that- you could store around 100,000 of them on a single 1TB drive alone.
(ii) Similar argument for the bandwidth required to keep GeoCities running. Couldn't Yahoo keep it online anyway, while closing the service to new accounts and encouraging still active sites to move elsewhere?
I would bet that Windows 7 includes something like this, and that the app limit doesn't apply to them. And as a result, I would bet developers start cramming more and more functionality into them, exactly as occurred under MacOS in the 80s.
Interesting point, but it's not going to happen because it won't be necessary. In the real world no-one's going to actually use the restrictive Starter Edition of W7 anyway; anyone who can't afford the proper version will just pirate it- particularly in the countries SE is aimed at.
This is in the UK. A "common carrier" in the UK is an omnibus.
Don't know why this was marked as a troll. He/she was making a reasonable point in a humorous manner- does the concept of a "common carrier" (regardless of the term used?) meaningfully exist in the UK?
It's disappointing that you were modded up, because it's clear that you barely read the article properly- if at all. You wrote a fairly detailed response to the expected "OMG, filesharing killed my record company" spiel... except that wasn't the point he was making at all! (Matter of fact, he explicitly *didn't* blame filesharing for the demise of his company).
In fact what he actually argued was that the nature of engines like TPB *consolidates* the market power and hype of the major players and well-known artists.
While that may be open to question, it would at least be helpful if you addressed what he actually said instead of your kneejerk assumption about the content.
Wow- I think you're reading too much into both his and the OP's messages.
My first thought when I read this was exactly the same as TheLink's. "'Sending humans to the stars?' Doesn't the nearest star system being over four light years away make telepresence extremly impractical?"
Then I realised that the people who said this worked at SETI, so if it was obvious to someone with an incredibly patchy knowledge of basic physics (me), then it was pretty implausible that they hadn't considered it- hence they likely meant some form of VR reconstruction. (I admit that the way the article itself was phrased may have implied otherwise, but that wasn't attributed to SETI themselves.)
I think this is what Abcd1234 meant.
I don't know who these Slashdotters are that too highly of themselves of which you speak.
He's talking about your typical Slashdotter- and if you ask me, he's right. To be blunt, your typical Slashdotter *isn't* as smart as they care to think outside the computer and related fields.
While there are perfectly intelligent discussions surrounding topics in the computer realm, when it comes to (e.g.) an even slightly esoteric aspect of physics- still a somewhat geeky topic- the conversation descends into a disappointing mass of bad jokes with very little informative or enlightening discussion. And when you do get it, it's often hard to tell when people really know what they're talking about, or whether they're spouting misleading and half-baked guesswork or misconceptions based on a decent High School Physics education and a few books.
Discussions on the law are worse because many Slashdotters think- or act like- they know what they're talking about when they don't. The fundamental problem is that while they might have internal consistency that can be exploited, court systems generally don't- contrary to what many here think- operate in the same manner as an up-its-own-arse Slashdot argument. And many aspects of the law you can't guess or reliably determine by "logical" deduction- you have to *know* or find out what you're talking about. Period. But do an Ask Slashdot for legal advice and you'll get a mass of conflicting and misleading advice from people who think they know it but don't.
Yes, there are a few people who know what they're talking about in these fields, but as a general rule, the level of knowledge outside Slashdot's "core competences" (eugh) falls away quite sharply.
BY dies out, I think you mean you out grew it 5 years ago.
No, I would still have been in my late twenties then, and I didn't use it that much myself. I do, however, remember seeing quite a lot of other people using it back then (often tongue-in-cheek), but I've hardly seen it at all recently.
Maybe it's because I'm surfing the same sites (like Slashdot!), and their demographic has grown up slightly. I don't tend to use newer sites that kids/teens use a lot- like MySpace, Facebook or (spit!) Twitter. So perhaps the other users of the sites I frequent grew up.
Even so, when I thought about it I realised that its apparent usage *had* died down over too short a period of time for that to be a good explanation.
The "tonne" spelling is specific to the metric ton, and thus useful if you want to make clear that the metric ton/tonne is being used without further qualification. However, you can still say "metric ton", or even just "ton", assuming it's already clear (or not that big a deal) which one is being used.
The purpose of leetspeak was to evade search and censorship efforts. A filter looking for "fuck" doesn't find "fu<k".
That as well- someone mentioned this the last time I commented on the disappearance of leetspeak, but generally speaking once the would-be-censors know these tricks- or rather, suddenly knowledgable parents realise what's going on- they lose their power.
Anyway, I agree that leetspeak probably started out for that reason, but I suspect it eventually became cool for its own sake. Until parents were suddenly hip to what the kids were doing, man:-)
BTW, what's the deal with websites that happily discuss adult sexual and social topics, yet censor the naughty swear words and force people to use euphemisms (or auto-replaces them)? It seems quite silly to me. Is this to avoid problems with being blocked or something?
It strikes me that it would be better to allow people to swear, filter-replace it by default and allow people with accounts to turn the filter off. Censorship software might pick up on this and blacklist the site anyway, but it strikes me that for a site with obviously adult discussions it's likely to get blacklisted anyway, regardless of the amount of naughty words they filter.
Does anyone use 1337 5p34k these days? It was quite common five years back, but it seems to have died out almost completely.
Having thought about it, I realised that it seemed to have disappeared shortly after all those articles appeared in newspapers explaining what all those strange characters your children were typing meant. Which probably isn't a coincidence; wasn't the whole point of 1337 its impenetrability?
This Fiesta is not the first Ford to carry that name. Back in the late seventies, early eighties, Ford also produced a car called the Fiesta.
The new model is part of that same line. Ford have sold the Fiesta (or at least successive models bearing the name) continuously in Europe since the 1970s.
As for the Escort- was that really meant to be a direct replacement in the US? WP says that the original US Escort (but not later models) was based on the then-current European Escort. But in Europe, the Escort was always a noticably larger model than the equivalent Fiesta and (to me) obviously aimed at a different market segment. Both were sold alongside each other until the Focus replaced the Euro Escort.
The Fiesta is a relabelled/reskinned Mazda2 -- that is successful in many other parts of the world. I doubt highly that it is a POS as you call it.
i think you got that backwards. the fiesta line of cars has been around a long time. i drove one built '90 and it was well established by then. mazda only started reskinning ford models when ford bought shares in mazda. (mazda3 is based on the ford focus for instance)
According to the WP article, the current Fiesta and the Mazda2 share the Mazda D platform, but it's unclear which spawned which or how similar they are. I suspect that neither was obviously spawned from the other; rather, that the D platform was always intended to be used for both.
In the UK at least, an earlier version of the Ford Fiesta was sold alongside a "Mazda 121" that was very obviously the same car with changed badges and a slightly different grille.
Discussing cars and their lineage on the basis of names is confusing anyway, because marketing and engineering are generally separate.
Sometimes cars which are essentially the same or very similar are sold under different names in different markets; sometimes even in the same market (see above). Sometimes the same name is used for unrelated cars in different countries (e.g. Ford Fusion). Sometimes the same name is used for similar or related cars in different countries, but then the lines diverge (e.g. Ford Escort, whose first American version was based on the then-current European Escort, but later diverged with a Mazda-derived model not related to the "Escorts" being sold in Europe by that time. Sometimes the names are harmonised so that (e.g.) the Vauxhall Nova line was replaced with the new Vauxhall Corsa, although the Novas were already known as Corsa elsewhere in Europe.
Lots of cars overlap in terms of parts and basic platform as well; e.g. the original Ford Ka was built around an older Fiesta platform, but it's obviously a model in its own right.
And of course, it all depends on how much you consider the different generations in the "Fiesta" range to be the same car- at least in evolutionary terms- or merely convenient marketing names. Some versions are obviously related, others less so; but the current Fiesta is obviously a completely different car to the original 1976 model.
And yet people still buy cars on the strength of a known name even if it's debatable if it's really the "same" car... that's marketing.
Well +1 to their marketing department for proper use of the web, but -1 for naming the car "Fiesta."
Well, according to WP (uncited, salt, blah blah) Henry Ford II had something to do with the choice of the name "Fiesta". Which is pretty impressive for a guy who's been dead for over 20 years- way to go, zombie Henry Ford II! (He wanted to call it the "Ford Braaaainnnzzz", but marketing nixed that on the basis it meant something vaguely rude in Catalan).
Hang on..... no. They've actually been using "Fiesta" for their smallish car range since 1976, 33 years ago.
Half the current marketing team were likely learning how to add, filling their nappies or waiting to be conceived at that time.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were Google I'd just do my best to ban all of the UK.
That's why you're not running Google.
Regardless of whether the UK government's position is right or wrong, if companies like Google threw a strop like that every time a government did something they didn't like, they'd soon end up serving Buttfuck, Illinois and Ascension Island.
While not another paper covering the same story, this does lend some weight to it.
Despite its former reputation as a newspaper of record, The Times is now- and has been for almost 30 years- a Murdoch-owned rag.
This is a man who, going by all available evidence, does not- and has never- believed in, stood for or supported *anything* that isn't in his own business interest.
Murdoch certainly isn't overly bothered about journalistic integrity, and he has been quite happy to repeatedly use one part of his business empire to promote or defend another; and The Times certainly hasn't been immune to this.
If The Times were to run an article attacking the BBC it would hardly be surprising- they've long been one of Murdoch's most consistent pet hates, mainly due to them standing in the way of his UK broadcasting ambition.
The summary makes a leap of logic. The company was never really worth 200 billion except in the eyes of the guy that bought his shares at $253.88 back in September of 2000. So the loss of value isn't strictly due to mistakes the company made. The stock market crash accounts for most of that drop.
This is akin to people going "OMG! I lost 30% of my pension" or "I just lost £30,000 on my house's value" or whatever; yes, if you measure it from the ridiculous high of the market you "lost" that much, but really, what was it over the medium to long term? The only people who genuinely lose out are those who bought in at the peak of the market.
Apple is not going to waste money developing their own chips just for bragging rights.
That's right, they won't do it just for bragging rights. They'll do it for a compelling performance, power consumption, and/or cost advantage. Right now, they pay Intel, Nvidia, and AMD a hell of a lot of money for CPUs and GPUs, and I'm sure they'll do their homework before making the next build or buy decision.
The question is, would Apple seriously get into developing their own CPUs? I find that hard to believe, if only because- in terms of worldwide market share- the Mac is still probably quite small compared to Intel and even AMD based PCs.
Given how competitive the CPU market is and how hard AMD have to work to even compete with Intel, I find it hard to believe that Apple could afford to develop a chip that was competitive in terms of price *and* performance with either Intel or AMD solely for their own use. And would the incredible hassle of (effectively) getting in the CPU market outweigh the competitive and cost advantage? My gut reaction is that it wouldn't.
They could do a Commodore and buy AMD, but then they'd probably have to still sell CPUs to other people to justify it economically and (again) do Apple *really* want all that hassle? More likely that they'll concentrate on the other custom chips in their computers, iPods, etc.
What is clear is that later on Klingons played a much larger roll. ST:TNG was very Klingon, with Spock being replaced by Worf as the alien. I would argue that the social aspects of the Kligons were explored much more in TNG than vulcan in TOS.
Was I the only person who didn't find the obsession with the Klingons' background in TNG particularly interesting? I liked Worf enough as a character, and I didn't mind the Klingons as characters with a hint of background.
But I found all that stuff about Klingon society and the stories based around Worf's background quite boring. It just seemed like like a pointless and synthetic metaphor for various non-Western (primarily Middle Eastern and Central Asian) cultures seen through a left-leaning Hollywood script writer's eyes.
And while it was probably well-intentioned in a socially-aware 80s sort of way, it seemed to take itself a bit too seriously considering it was dealing with a totally a made-up, nonexistent culture with cod-Eastern guttural language and contrived religious ceremonies (with guttural names, etc.) that attempted to mimic the seriousness with which "real" non-Western people take such aspects of their culture.
But the problem was that the stories about the Klingon culture only worked if you took it Seriously. However, they *weren't* real enough to take seriously without feeling a bit silly; yet they weren't far enough from actual humans to work as abstract metaphors either.
What we are probably seeing is that the Klingons have been overexposed, and fully explored, so there is little interesting for a new writer to deal with, at least not without getting into trouble with the the Star Trek purists.
Yes, I hear that the writers of the rebooted Star Trek intend expanding the social background and politics of a different alien race- the tribbles.
So? Good for them, right?
Quite possibly. Of more relevance is whether it's good for the rest of us.
If a problem with the internet connection actually freezes someone's computer, whoever had a hand in creating the operating system is a complete idiot.
Actually, when I used to access Internet BBSs via telnet on Windows 3.1, if the remote computer wouldn't respond, then telnet would sit there. Nothing new, but Windows 3.1 relied on co-operative multitasking. Due- I assume- to the way it was written, telnet wouldn't "let go" until the remote computer responded or the connection timed out... so the whole computer could lock up due to a problem with the Internet connection.
Not to mention that anyone who's in the top 5% range of usage will drastically flee to cheaper operators
Not saying I disagree with everything you're saying, but the obvious response (devil's advocate or otherwise) to this is that such cheaper providers will then get a disproportionate number of heavy users. Either they'll be able to handle them or they won't. In the former case, good; in the latter case, they'll either have to introduce similar measures to the other ISPs or collapse. That, or things will balance out.
I have a geocities site which I've not updated since circa 2002, but I still use it for storing documents online which I can access from any place in the world.
That's nice, but I'm sure there are plenty of alternatives for that, and it wasn't really the point of Geocities. The fact that you haven't updated the actual site since 2002 reinforces my point.
And I said the "majority" of sites. With something as big as Geocities, it's inevitable that a small proportion of sites will still be being actively updated, but I'd guess that the vast majority have been abandoned.
And come to think of it, of the sites still in use, I wonder how many were started in the past five or six years?
Still, Geocities' storage and bandwidth requirements is probably so small by modern standards, that IMHO there's no reason for them *not* to keep existing sites online- even if they close the service to new users and (possibly) prevent updates to existing sites. They must be making money off the ads after all.
They had a similiar approach to what Columbia House did with music CD's. They sent out mailings that threatened to send you software that you didn't order if you didn't send back the mailer with a certain box checked.
Columbia House was one of those "record club" things, wasn't it? We had them in the UK (along with similar book clubs), but you only *had* to send the ticked monthly thing back if you'd already agreed to this arrangement by joining- and they were reasonably clear about it.
You also had to purchase something like six CDs, books or whatever at the regular (uncompetitive) rate in your first year. For me, this made the cut-price joining offers look much less attractive, but again- and IMHO- they never actually misled anyone.
Yes, GeoCities is the home of the stereotypical mid 90's "home page" with animated gifs and background MIDI music
No, that was the late-90s :-) The stereotypical *mid*-90s home page had a plain background (*), a few sparse horizontal inline images (with some server-side mapping if you were lucky), ten tons of text on a single long page and the owner's list of "useful" general-purpose websites (back when the web was small enough that this wasn't a laughable concept).
Geocities' rise probably marked the dividing line between the early-to-mid-90s era of the early web and the late-90s commercialisation, IMHO.
(*) Coloured possibly, but more likely the default white, or- as the default background was on some early browsers- grey. Why grey?!
I hate the guts out of myspace and facebook. Seriously. There is no content. [..] In that respect, Geocities actuallý was better, because at least you had a chance (even if it was small) of finding useful information there.
MySpace and Facebook are social networking sites, whereas Geocities was really "my first web hosting". The former aren't that good for detailed reference information because... well, that's not what they were intended for. They're not- and were never meant to be- general purpose successors to Geocities. The part they've taken over from is the static-background, sparkly/colour-clash "best BF in the WORLD!!!" type Geocities sites.
There are more appropriate places and tools on the web for creating- and finding- "harder" reference sites. Despite their popularity, MySpace and Facebook aren't the be all and end all!
I'd agree with the awful .gif's and styles, but they had a lot more going for them than myspace.
That's because MySpace is- for all its mindboggling popularity- focused on a particular niche which generally doesn't- and isn't intended to- include hosting reference information.
As you mention elsewhere, GeoCities was the "only" place for hobbyists to put information- but that just meant it was hosted with them.
Many times over the last decade I've ended up on a Geocities website when researching particular subjects (sorry - can't give any examples, but more than a couple dozen times when looking at some obscure stuff).
Yeah, but "the last decade" includes both 1999 and last week; but while a (relatively) large proportion of useful info was probably hosted on Geocities circa 1999, I rarely if ever find stuff I'm looking for there now.(*)
For a long while Geocities was the only place hobbyists could spew their knowledge.
I never used Geocities and I had webspace with my ISPs, so I don't remember, but was Geocities the only provider of free webspace and did they provide useful tools to help newbies build web pages?
In other words, was it the "only place", or just a well-known jumping-off point that technophobic 1990s newbies used because everyone else did?
Either way, Geocities was still basically just a web host (albeit one which was free and slapped annoying ads and branding over the sites). Yeah, it's a part of web history (**), but ironically most of the nostalgia suddenly being unleashed here is probably because it made itself tackily prominent- and hence associated with- other peoples' late-90s sites it hosted.
And long before this announced shutdown it was mostly a relic of the past; the majority of sites it hosted don't appear to have been touched since the millennium.
(*) Ironically, being so common, I guess it never stuck in my head when a website was hosted by GeoCities... so nowadays I couldn't tell you how much- if any- "useful" information I found was hosted there circa 1999. Probably a decent percentage. Conversely, nowadays I'd notice and remember if a useful site was hosted by them- if only because it seems as anachronistic and tied to a past era as cargo pants. Yet I very rarely come across GeoCities results for "proper" information searches.
(**) And I'd like to say that:-
(i) I hope that Yahoo at least retain/store the websites as a historical artifact (while allowing their owners to remove them if so desired). Bear in mind that while it was big by the standards of the time, the number of Geocities sites is still probably dwarfed by the likes of MySpace.
More importantly, since most of its sites are now quite old, I suspect that GeoCities' storage requirements are miniscule by modern MySpace/YouTube-era standards. If a site was 10MB in total- and I suspect that most were *way* smaller than that- you could store around 100,000 of them on a single 1TB drive alone.
(ii) Similar argument for the bandwidth required to keep GeoCities running. Couldn't Yahoo keep it online anyway, while closing the service to new accounts and encouraging still active sites to move elsewhere?
I would bet that Windows 7 includes something like this, and that the app limit doesn't apply to them. And as a result, I would bet developers start cramming more and more functionality into them, exactly as occurred under MacOS in the 80s.
Interesting point, but it's not going to happen because it won't be necessary. In the real world no-one's going to actually use the restrictive Starter Edition of W7 anyway; anyone who can't afford the proper version will just pirate it- particularly in the countries SE is aimed at.
This is in the UK. A "common carrier" in the UK is an omnibus.
Don't know why this was marked as a troll. He/she was making a reasonable point in a humorous manner- does the concept of a "common carrier" (regardless of the term used?) meaningfully exist in the UK?
If not, the OP's question was meaningless.
It's disappointing that you were modded up, because it's clear that you barely read the article properly- if at all. You wrote a fairly detailed response to the expected "OMG, filesharing killed my record company" spiel... except that wasn't the point he was making at all! (Matter of fact, he explicitly *didn't* blame filesharing for the demise of his company).
In fact what he actually argued was that the nature of engines like TPB *consolidates* the market power and hype of the major players and well-known artists.
While that may be open to question, it would at least be helpful if you addressed what he actually said instead of your kneejerk assumption about the content.
My first thought when I read this was exactly the same as TheLink's. "'Sending humans to the stars?' Doesn't the nearest star system being over four light years away make telepresence extremly impractical?"
Then I realised that the people who said this worked at SETI, so if it was obvious to someone with an incredibly patchy knowledge of basic physics (me), then it was pretty implausible that they hadn't considered it- hence they likely meant some form of VR reconstruction. (I admit that the way the article itself was phrased may have implied otherwise, but that wasn't attributed to SETI themselves.)
I think this is what Abcd1234 meant.
I don't know who these Slashdotters are that too highly of themselves of which you speak.
He's talking about your typical Slashdotter- and if you ask me, he's right. To be blunt, your typical Slashdotter *isn't* as smart as they care to think outside the computer and related fields.
While there are perfectly intelligent discussions surrounding topics in the computer realm, when it comes to (e.g.) an even slightly esoteric aspect of physics- still a somewhat geeky topic- the conversation descends into a disappointing mass of bad jokes with very little informative or enlightening discussion. And when you do get it, it's often hard to tell when people really know what they're talking about, or whether they're spouting misleading and half-baked guesswork or misconceptions based on a decent High School Physics education and a few books.
Discussions on the law are worse because many Slashdotters think- or act like- they know what they're talking about when they don't. The fundamental problem is that while they might have internal consistency that can be exploited, court systems generally don't- contrary to what many here think- operate in the same manner as an up-its-own-arse Slashdot argument. And many aspects of the law you can't guess or reliably determine by "logical" deduction- you have to *know* or find out what you're talking about. Period. But do an Ask Slashdot for legal advice and you'll get a mass of conflicting and misleading advice from people who think they know it but don't.
Yes, there are a few people who know what they're talking about in these fields, but as a general rule, the level of knowledge outside Slashdot's "core competences" (eugh) falls away quite sharply.
BY dies out, I think you mean you out grew it 5 years ago.
No, I would still have been in my late twenties then, and I didn't use it that much myself. I do, however, remember seeing quite a lot of other people using it back then (often tongue-in-cheek), but I've hardly seen it at all recently.
Maybe it's because I'm surfing the same sites (like Slashdot!), and their demographic has grown up slightly. I don't tend to use newer sites that kids/teens use a lot- like MySpace, Facebook or (spit!) Twitter. So perhaps the other users of the sites I frequent grew up.
Even so, when I thought about it I realised that its apparent usage *had* died down over too short a period of time for that to be a good explanation.
That's metric crap tonne.
The "tonne" spelling is specific to the metric ton, and thus useful if you want to make clear that the metric ton/tonne is being used without further qualification. However, you can still say "metric ton", or even just "ton", assuming it's already clear (or not that big a deal) which one is being used.
The purpose of leetspeak was to evade search and censorship efforts. A filter looking for "fuck" doesn't find "fu<k".
That as well- someone mentioned this the last time I commented on the disappearance of leetspeak, but generally speaking once the would-be-censors know these tricks- or rather, suddenly knowledgable parents realise what's going on- they lose their power.
:-)
Anyway, I agree that leetspeak probably started out for that reason, but I suspect it eventually became cool for its own sake. Until parents were suddenly hip to what the kids were doing, man
BTW, what's the deal with websites that happily discuss adult sexual and social topics, yet censor the naughty swear words and force people to use euphemisms (or auto-replaces them)? It seems quite silly to me. Is this to avoid problems with being blocked or something?
It strikes me that it would be better to allow people to swear, filter-replace it by default and allow people with accounts to turn the filter off. Censorship software might pick up on this and blacklist the site anyway, but it strikes me that for a site with obviously adult discussions it's likely to get blacklisted anyway, regardless of the amount of naughty words they filter.
1 49R33 4|\|D 7|-|1|\|| 7|-|@ L337 5P34| 5|-|0ULD b3 7|-|3 r3PL4(3/\/\3|\|7.
Does anyone use 1337 5p34k these days? It was quite common five years back, but it seems to have died out almost completely.
Having thought about it, I realised that it seemed to have disappeared shortly after all those articles appeared in newspapers explaining what all those strange characters your children were typing meant. Which probably isn't a coincidence; wasn't the whole point of 1337 its impenetrability?
That's assuming he means the American Ford Fusion, and not the different car of the same name sold in Europe.
Which would be ironic, given that he was talking about foreign cars and "European-like handling"!
This Fiesta is not the first Ford to carry that name. Back in the late seventies, early eighties, Ford also produced a car called the Fiesta.
The new model is part of that same line. Ford have sold the Fiesta (or at least successive models bearing the name) continuously in Europe since the 1970s.
As for the Escort- was that really meant to be a direct replacement in the US? WP says that the original US Escort (but not later models) was based on the then-current European Escort. But in Europe, the Escort was always a noticably larger model than the equivalent Fiesta and (to me) obviously aimed at a different market segment. Both were sold alongside each other until the Focus replaced the Euro Escort.
The Fiesta is a relabelled/reskinned Mazda2 -- that is successful in many other parts of the world. I doubt highly that it is a POS as you call it.
i think you got that backwards. the fiesta line of cars has been around a long time. i drove one built '90 and it was well established by then. mazda only started reskinning ford models when ford bought shares in mazda. (mazda3 is based on the ford focus for instance)
According to the WP article, the current Fiesta and the Mazda2 share the Mazda D platform, but it's unclear which spawned which or how similar they are. I suspect that neither was obviously spawned from the other; rather, that the D platform was always intended to be used for both.
In the UK at least, an earlier version of the Ford Fiesta was sold alongside a "Mazda 121" that was very obviously the same car with changed badges and a slightly different grille.
Discussing cars and their lineage on the basis of names is confusing anyway, because marketing and engineering are generally separate.
Sometimes cars which are essentially the same or very similar are sold under different names in different markets; sometimes even in the same market (see above).
Sometimes the same name is used for unrelated cars in different countries (e.g. Ford Fusion).
Sometimes the same name is used for similar or related cars in different countries, but then the lines diverge (e.g. Ford Escort, whose first American version was based on the then-current European Escort, but later diverged with a Mazda-derived model not related to the "Escorts" being sold in Europe by that time.
Sometimes the names are harmonised so that (e.g.) the Vauxhall Nova line was replaced with the new Vauxhall Corsa, although the Novas were already known as Corsa elsewhere in Europe.
Lots of cars overlap in terms of parts and basic platform as well; e.g. the original Ford Ka was built around an older Fiesta platform, but it's obviously a model in its own right.
And of course, it all depends on how much you consider the different generations in the "Fiesta" range to be the same car- at least in evolutionary terms- or merely convenient marketing names. Some versions are obviously related, others less so; but the current Fiesta is obviously a completely different car to the original 1976 model.
And yet people still buy cars on the strength of a known name even if it's debatable if it's really the "same" car... that's marketing.
Well +1 to their marketing department for proper use of the web, but -1 for naming the car "Fiesta."
Well, according to WP (uncited, salt, blah blah) Henry Ford II had something to do with the choice of the name "Fiesta". Which is pretty impressive for a guy who's been dead for over 20 years- way to go, zombie Henry Ford II! (He wanted to call it the "Ford Braaaainnnzzz", but marketing nixed that on the basis it meant something vaguely rude in Catalan).
Hang on..... no. They've actually been using "Fiesta" for their smallish car range since 1976, 33 years ago.
Half the current marketing team were likely learning how to add, filling their nappies or waiting to be conceived at that time.