Videos look interesting, I might check them out if I have time...
The processor in the xbox 360 was a wholly custom part. It has extra components to encrypt and hash memory to and from main memory (only the hypervisor is hashed, the rest of memory is encrypted) as well as e fuses for locking out downgrades. It is also a 3 core part, definitely uncommon.
I suppose this depends on what you mean by "custom". (I meant designed specifically for that machine from scratch, e.g. the Atari 800XL's ANTIC and GTIA processors, as opposed to its customISED, but based on the pre-existing standard design 6502C processor).
I wouldn't have expected MS to simply place a bulk order for an off-the-shelf PowerPC chip from IBM's catalogue. For a deal that size, I was sure they'd get a custom-modified version (e.g. cores, clock speed, pins, unneeded features stripped, etc. etc.) Granted, the level of customisation you describe there is significantly higher and more complex than I'd expected.
Even so, it can't be in the same ballpark in terms of development effort as the Cell, which (AFAIK) was basically an entire new architecture built from scratch. Strictly speaking that wasn't a custom chip since it's intended for other uses as well, but I'll still guess it was approaching (if not far more than) an order of magnitude more expensive than even the most generous budget for customising MS's PowerPC.
Not annualized profits, where years have been profitable. Division lifetime profit. like this [neowin.net]
Though personally I was already well aware that neither the PS3 or the XBox 360 have made back their overall costs yet, I'd like to know where the money went for the 360.
I can understand the PS3, since they spent eyewatering amounts of money developing the custom hardware- *especially* the Cell processor, which never seemed to pay off as the hype suggested- and high early subsidised manufacturing costs of that custom hardware (including the Blu-Ray drive which wasn't PS3-specific, but still expensive back then, since Sony still wanted to push the format).
However, while I'm not claiming that the 360 was merely a tweaked PC (as the original XBox was), it was still certainly- AFAIK- far closer to being off-the-shelf hardware. The CPU was just an IBM PowerPC, for example. So one would expect that that it wouldn't have had the PS3's horrendous development and early manufacturing costs to make back.
Every man and his dog seems to own one. If they're not in profit yet, where did the money go?! I know they lost a lot on the notoriously high failure rate of the early models, but was it really *that* bad?
Also, this assumes that one accepts that the London-centric, upper-middle-class-centric "BBC English" accent is somehow "officially" more neutral than other English accents. It may have been promoted as the standard accent by the aforementioned types whose accent (surprise, surprise) it most closely resembled, but that proves nothing other than their media dominance.
Besides which, it's probably changed over the years- I'm quite confident that even compared to a modern "neutral" accent, a BBC presenter from 50-70 years ago would sound very posh and cut-glass to modern British ears.
Yes, seriously... what *really* does this obsession with the "Internet of Things" actually offer us?
Right now, it comes across as something being pushed by for-the-sake-of-it technological fetishists meeting control freak tendencies, both playing into the hands of authoritarians everywhere.
It'll be even worse now with the fallout from a nuclear plant turning everyone into mutants. Oh wait, the article doesn't say anything about nuclear fallout. Damn click bait!
Yeah, I noticed that too- I would have said much the same thing if you hadn't already.
The only thing I'd say is that I think it was more a badly-thought out attempt to make a clever headline than an intentional effort to mislead. "Fallout" obviously has the nuclear meaning as well as a more general, metaphorical usage. In this case use of the term "fall-out" for the social after-effects of the closure ties in with the nuclear associations of the word and the fact it was a *nuclear* power plant.
Except that it doesn't work at all, because "fallout" doesn't apply to nuclear *power plants* unless there's been a serious accident. Still, I'd put it down to a not-as-clever-as-they-think bit of word association rather than intent to mislead.
or even better kill them, put it on tape and post it on liveleak - it has to be as violent as possible, but once you kill a couple of these trolls rest assured the rest of them will disappear quickly. Violence is the only answer.
I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
The humour, satire, writing in general is utterly tip top.
As with previous entries in the series (*), there are apparently a lot of subtle references that only people in Scotland (where the game was designed)- or at least Britain- will spot, without alienating everyone else or spoiling the atmosphere.
(*) GTA IV San Andreas apparently included the "Garver" and "Kincaid" bridges which were closely modelled on the Forth road and rail bridges respectively.
That's coincidental, because I had almost the same experience. It was one of the few albums I had on LP, (*) and I didn't realise that was shorter until I got the CD over a decade later... and I thought *exactly* the same as you. Matter of fact, I ended up obtaining a good-quality rip of the LP version.
FWIW I didn't realise the tape version was edited- or was yours a homemade copy of someone's LP? Unlike vinyl, cassettes could easily match the length of CD.
Anyway, IMHO overextended playouts were a common flaw with Dire Straits; the album version of "Calling Elvis" is a case in point- well over half its 6 1/2 minute running time is playout descending into noodling. OTOH, not all their longer songs were bad- some were great (e.g. "Money for Nothing", and everything on "Love Over Gold" worked, despite consisting of five long songs! If anything, I'd rather "It Never Rains" had been a bit longer still...).
(*) I went pretty much from cassette to CD; my parents got a CD hifi less than a month after I got my cassette/record/radio one, and I decided to buy CDs for when I got my own player (copying onto tape in the meantime). "Brothers in Arms" was the only full-price LP I bought during that brief period, though I did much later buy some LPs secondhand and/or reduced, and a few 7" singles. Was never really attached to vinyl, to be honest.
Yeah but, if they were born in 86, and the technology existed but wasn't mainstream yet (like CDs), then it still became mainstream in the following years (as they were being parented).
True, but *they* were the ones that decided to party like it was 1986- I was merely pointing out that if one wanted to be faithful to the *spirit* rather than the wording of that plan- flawed or not- they probably shouldn't get the Motorola Yuppiephone.:-)
I got my first CD-player in 1984 (a Philips CD100 - http://www.audioscope.net/images/philipscd1005.jpg [audioscope.net]) - I was 18 at the time - and within a year my first shelf of CDs were filled. In 1986 I had around 150 CDs, including "Brothers In Arms" by the way. Today I have something like 5.500+ CDs, most of which has been ripped (FLAC) and I almost exclusively plays the rips only.
That's great- you clearly were (and are) seriously into music and were willing to pay serious money for a CD player even at that time. However, it doesn't change my original point that in 1986- and even more so in 1984- CD players were expensive, high-end items that most people didn't have, either because they couldn't afford them, or wouldn't have been willing to pay that much for even if they could.
Ok but lots of houses had electronic devices in 1986. Maybe electronic typewriters, maybe crappy computers maybe but we had devices you could play games on and write documents on.
Firstly, your comments seem more like criticism of the original concept and missed the point I was making.
I wasn't saying it was a good or a bad idea. Merely- and *specifically*- that since the underlying rationale was to replicate peoples' experience of 1986, it would go against the spirit of the original concept to pedantically allow technologies that were available at the time, but out of the reach of or impractical for the majority (e.g. CDs, Amigas, mobile phones). No more, no less.
Now, whether one thinks that 1986 devices and 2013 devices have made a qualitative or merely a quantitative difference to peoples' lives *is* a legitimate question, but still an entirely different issue.
Can they still use the USENET using an IBM PC Compatible?
Well, you've inadvertantly raised an issue I've already commented on elsewhere. (*) Just because a technology existed or was theoretically available to people in 1986, doesn't mean it was likely that ordinary people would have it. The article states:-
“We’re parenting our kids the same way we were parented for a year just to see what it’s like,” Blair said.
For example, the issue I commented on was in response to someone saying that CDs existed in 1986. While this is true, they were still relatively expensive at the time- yuppies and audiophiles probably had one to play their copy of "Brothers in Arms" on, but Joe Average and his friends probably didn't. It would be another couple of years before they would start to take off in truly mass-market terms.
Mobile phones existed in 1986, but they were bloody expensive to both buy and use, so even if you could get a Motorola brick to work with a modern network, it wouldn't have been an item that most people would have had at the time.
The Commodore Amiga computer mentioned later in the thread came out in 1985, but the original A1000 was expensive (RRP US $1300 on its release, plus another $300 for the monitor- double those to account for inflation) so I doubt most people would have had one. (The more affordable Amiga 500 that was massively popular in Europe at the end of the decade wasn't available until 1987).
The USENET reference you made? Better-off households may have had IBM PC compatibles (at least in the US) and some may have had access to dial-up proprietary walled-garden online services, but Internet access was *not* common then. Most people hadn't even heard of it back then, and probably couldn't have afforded it if they had.
Er... can you spot a pattern here?!:-)
The point I'm making is that if one simply wants to use technology that existed in 1986, then all these things and more qualify. But if one wants to represent the technological experience of an average person living at that time, then it's more questionable if they should be used.
France should take it as such too!
Surrender in 5...4...3...2...
Dude, it's 2013, not 2003. France are the US's new best chums now, because they were going to help with the planned strikes in Syria. In fact, John Kerry referred to France as their "oldest ally" in a manner widely interpreted as a snub to the UK, whose parliament had voted against taking part (although the Prime Minister had been in favour).
Of course, we've been here before with the positions reversed- we all remember when the UK went along with the Iraq war and France were against, how pathetically childish Bush was towards France and how he publicly flattered the UK and Tony Blair as the US's closest ally and best chum. Of course, Blair being an egotistical ***** continued sucking up to the US in the belief that this would buy further influence over them long after it was obvious to anyone that the US only did what it would have done anyway (and admitted as much in private). I commented on this circa 2007 and also noted that- even though Bush was still in power then- France (and Germany's) defiance of the US earlier in the decade had not resulted in any long term damage to their relationship with them, just as the UK had not gained any substantial influence with its sucking up.
In short, even if one is an amoral realpolitician (realpolitikian?!), it shows that public sucking-up to- and being publicly flattered as a junior partner by- the US buys little substantial long-term influence, and isn't worth worrying about as much as paranoid-about-losing-global-power British leaders like to think.
In this specific case, if you are telling people to distrust Facebook, with a Facebook group, you'll get a lot of blog posts and Twitting if you shut down the Facebook group with no warning.
To be blunt, you have to wonder if people like this are more a part of the problem than the solution they purport to be.
The real- and obvious- fundamental problem is how Facebook operates their site. This company's product merely papers over the symptoms with a "solution" that doesn't address the real issue, and will only *ever* be short term, breakable at a whim by Facebook themselves. But by making Facebook more palatable over the short term, they hide this problem and encourage people to stay with the site.
It's a waste of effort that might annoy Facebook but ultimately plays into their hands. Fundamentally, if it doesn't encourage Facebook to change their behaviour and/or policies *or* work on moving people away to another service- or whatever- then it's still a part of the Facebook ecosystem and encouraging its use (and hence supporting its cynical behaviour and discouraging other, more responsible approaches to social networking).
Of course, it might suit *them* from a business point-of-view to be doing this anyway, but for everyone else it's not so great.
Sorry, Dice, I do not come here for multimedia. But I will come and bitch about it in the comments (wasting resources is my revenge).
Hmm. A couple of hundred bytes for your message and overhead, perhaps?
Post another ten *billion* messages like that and you'll have wasted an entire $110 (US) hard drive! If you can't manage that, remember at least that every message you type wastes a millionth of a cent's worth of storage. Please show *some* mercy and leave them a bit for coke and hookers, though.
It shouldn't be a special "gaming mode" to begin with; it should be an intrinsic feature of the display.
If- and I mean if- the extra features which cause the lag are a noticeable improvement for normal (i.e. non-interactive) viewing, then there's no reason why the minimalist gaming mode should be forced on users in such situations.
It made me wonder if we've been invaded by Digg Patriots or something.
Doubt it; Digg has been a has-been since its failed redesign alienated users a few years back. Any rats have long departed that now-sunk ship. No great loss, it *very* quickly devolved, becoming an illustration of how the smug Web 2.0 "wisdom of crowds" mantra in practice resulted in a partisan and manipulable mob mentality.
I am still using my 19.5" Sharp CRT from January 1996. It still works as of last night. I will replace it when it dies/starts having problems.
As I sit here typing this, my 14" Sony Trinitron from August 1993 (i.e. just turned 20) is on behind me. It's never *once* been fixed or maintained, yet still gives an almost good-as-new picture. Best £200 I ever spent (almost £350 in today's money and still worth it).
I tend to disagree on this one. I was there back in the day: the WWW was a lonely place filled with homepages that did not convey any useful information, Gopher was a commercial project (hence the reason why it failed), and the communities on Usenet were just as rude as most web fora nowadays.
I have some very, *very* major concerns about the modern Internet and our reliance on it colliding with its increasing potential to turn into a virtual panopticon. Yet, purely considering things in terms of content, I think it's too easy to over-idealise the old days.
I first used the Internet in late-1993, which is just about the point it was starting to cross over into mainstream consciousness, but when most of the old stuff was still in place (*). I remember how new and cool it seemed then, like "I can talk to people all over the world on this thing?!"
But to be honest, by modern standards there really wasn't a lot there. The fact that in the early days of the web people could maintain lists of "useful links" without this looking laughably inadequate illustrates this point.
Even just ten years ago (i.e. 2003) there was a lot less online. Sure, the net- and web- had grown a *lot* since its early 90s breakthrough and we'd already had the dotcom boom and bust. However, I was revising for my university finals at the time, and I clearly remember noting (with some surprise) that despite its apparent breadth of info, it was still hard to *find* and get *clear* "all-in-one-place" descriptions of the subjects I was looking up online. Information was still scattered, hard work to find- especially at the right level- and bitty. The books in the adjacent library were still far better resources in this respect.
Ironically, that's also the time I first came across what is now probably my most-used site, Wikipedia. Except that back then, it wasn't remotely as massive- nor hence as useful- as it is today. I don't remember that much about it (**), but ironically that probably says enough- if it had been even half as large as today's WP it would have stuck in my head immediately as the aforementioned "killer resource" that didn't exist back then.
(*) i.e. My first real use of it was Usenet, which back then was still a- or rather, *the*- forum for discussions, and I didn't use the web for the first time until several months later. The BBS I used was still text-based and accessed via telnet. Even the "guide to the net" I bought discussed gopher more than the web (though I never really used gopher much, and don't remember being too impressed with it).
(**) I vaguely remember thinking "Is that right? Can *anyone* edit this thing?!", but I wouldn't have had the time to do that, and I had other things to worry about. I didn't really notice it until about two years later, when it was starting to really grow and I had too much time to spend editing it.:-/
Slashdot Mirror
The processor in the xbox 360 was a wholly custom part. It has extra components to encrypt and hash memory to and from main memory (only the hypervisor is hashed, the rest of memory is encrypted) as well as e fuses for locking out downgrades. It is also a 3 core part, definitely uncommon.
I suppose this depends on what you mean by "custom". (I meant designed specifically for that machine from scratch, e.g. the Atari 800XL's ANTIC and GTIA processors, as opposed to its customISED, but based on the pre-existing standard design 6502C processor).
I wouldn't have expected MS to simply place a bulk order for an off-the-shelf PowerPC chip from IBM's catalogue. For a deal that size, I was sure they'd get a custom-modified version (e.g. cores, clock speed, pins, unneeded features stripped, etc. etc.) Granted, the level of customisation you describe there is significantly higher and more complex than I'd expected.
Even so, it can't be in the same ballpark in terms of development effort as the Cell, which (AFAIK) was basically an entire new architecture built from scratch. Strictly speaking that wasn't a custom chip since it's intended for other uses as well, but I'll still guess it was approaching (if not far more than) an order of magnitude more expensive than even the most generous budget for customising MS's PowerPC.
Not annualized profits, where years have been profitable. Division lifetime profit. like this [neowin.net]
Though personally I was already well aware that neither the PS3 or the XBox 360 have made back their overall costs yet, I'd like to know where the money went for the 360.
I can understand the PS3, since they spent eyewatering amounts of money developing the custom hardware- *especially* the Cell processor, which never seemed to pay off as the hype suggested- and high early subsidised manufacturing costs of that custom hardware (including the Blu-Ray drive which wasn't PS3-specific, but still expensive back then, since Sony still wanted to push the format).
However, while I'm not claiming that the 360 was merely a tweaked PC (as the original XBox was), it was still certainly- AFAIK- far closer to being off-the-shelf hardware. The CPU was just an IBM PowerPC, for example. So one would expect that that it wouldn't have had the PS3's horrendous development and early manufacturing costs to make back.
Every man and his dog seems to own one. If they're not in profit yet, where did the money go?! I know they lost a lot on the notoriously high failure rate of the early models, but was it really *that* bad?
royally screwed - and not in the good way
So Elizabeth, not Kate?
Prince Edward.
Queue the Brits w/ mod points ...
I'm queuing, but unfortunately I can't mod you up further as you're already at 5. :-)
Wales is a principality, Scotland isn't.
Also, this assumes that one accepts that the London-centric, upper-middle-class-centric "BBC English" accent is somehow "officially" more neutral than other English accents. It may have been promoted as the standard accent by the aforementioned types whose accent (surprise, surprise) it most closely resembled, but that proves nothing other than their media dominance.
Besides which, it's probably changed over the years- I'm quite confident that even compared to a modern "neutral" accent, a BBC presenter from 50-70 years ago would sound very posh and cut-glass to modern British ears.
Ey up... here are some images of t' alleged Yorkshire aliens' purported spacecraft.
Don't connect your lightbulb to the internet.
Yes, seriously... what *really* does this obsession with the "Internet of Things" actually offer us?
Right now, it comes across as something being pushed by for-the-sake-of-it technological fetishists meeting control freak tendencies, both playing into the hands of authoritarians everywhere.
It'll be even worse now with the fallout from a nuclear plant turning everyone into mutants. Oh wait, the article doesn't say anything about nuclear fallout. Damn click bait!
Yeah, I noticed that too- I would have said much the same thing if you hadn't already.
The only thing I'd say is that I think it was more a badly-thought out attempt to make a clever headline than an intentional effort to mislead. "Fallout" obviously has the nuclear meaning as well as a more general, metaphorical usage. In this case use of the term "fall-out" for the social after-effects of the closure ties in with the nuclear associations of the word and the fact it was a *nuclear* power plant.
Except that it doesn't work at all, because "fallout" doesn't apply to nuclear *power plants* unless there's been a serious accident. Still, I'd put it down to a not-as-clever-as-they-think bit of word association rather than intent to mislead.
or even better kill them, put it on tape and post it on liveleak - it has to be as violent as possible, but once you kill a couple of these trolls rest assured the rest of them will disappear quickly. Violence is the only answer.
I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
The humour, satire, writing in general is utterly tip top.
As with previous entries in the series (*), there are apparently a lot of subtle references that only people in Scotland (where the game was designed)- or at least Britain- will spot, without alienating everyone else or spoiling the atmosphere.
Such as the fact that the small Scottish borders town of Hawick has had its name "borrowed" for a fictional town with a "drug addict hipster vibe". They aren't too happy about it, apparently...
(*) GTA IV San Andreas apparently included the "Garver" and "Kincaid" bridges which were closely modelled on the Forth road and rail bridges respectively.
That's coincidental, because I had almost the same experience. It was one of the few albums I had on LP, (*) and I didn't realise that was shorter until I got the CD over a decade later... and I thought *exactly* the same as you. Matter of fact, I ended up obtaining a good-quality rip of the LP version.
FWIW I didn't realise the tape version was edited- or was yours a homemade copy of someone's LP? Unlike vinyl, cassettes could easily match the length of CD.
Anyway, IMHO overextended playouts were a common flaw with Dire Straits; the album version of "Calling Elvis" is a case in point- well over half its 6 1/2 minute running time is playout descending into noodling. OTOH, not all their longer songs were bad- some were great (e.g. "Money for Nothing", and everything on "Love Over Gold" worked, despite consisting of five long songs! If anything, I'd rather "It Never Rains" had been a bit longer still...).
(*) I went pretty much from cassette to CD; my parents got a CD hifi less than a month after I got my cassette/record/radio one, and I decided to buy CDs for when I got my own player (copying onto tape in the meantime). "Brothers in Arms" was the only full-price LP I bought during that brief period, though I did much later buy some LPs secondhand and/or reduced, and a few 7" singles. Was never really attached to vinyl, to be honest.
Yeah but, if they were born in 86, and the technology existed but wasn't mainstream yet (like CDs), then it still became mainstream in the following years (as they were being parented).
True, but *they* were the ones that decided to party like it was 1986- I was merely pointing out that if one wanted to be faithful to the *spirit* rather than the wording of that plan- flawed or not- they probably shouldn't get the Motorola Yuppiephone. :-)
I got my first CD-player in 1984 (a Philips CD100 - http://www.audioscope.net/images/philipscd1005.jpg [audioscope.net]) - I was 18 at the time - and within a year my first shelf of CDs were filled. In 1986 I had around 150 CDs, including "Brothers In Arms" by the way. Today I have something like 5.500+ CDs, most of which has been ripped (FLAC) and I almost exclusively plays the rips only.
That's great- you clearly were (and are) seriously into music and were willing to pay serious money for a CD player even at that time. However, it doesn't change my original point that in 1986- and even more so in 1984- CD players were expensive, high-end items that most people didn't have, either because they couldn't afford them, or wouldn't have been willing to pay that much for even if they could.
Ok but lots of houses had electronic devices in 1986. Maybe electronic typewriters, maybe crappy computers maybe but we had devices you could play games on and write documents on.
Firstly, your comments seem more like criticism of the original concept and missed the point I was making.
I wasn't saying it was a good or a bad idea. Merely- and *specifically*- that since the underlying rationale was to replicate peoples' experience of 1986, it would go against the spirit of the original concept to pedantically allow technologies that were available at the time, but out of the reach of or impractical for the majority (e.g. CDs, Amigas, mobile phones). No more, no less.
Now, whether one thinks that 1986 devices and 2013 devices have made a qualitative or merely a quantitative difference to peoples' lives *is* a legitimate question, but still an entirely different issue.
Can they still use the USENET using an IBM PC Compatible?
Well, you've inadvertantly raised an issue I've already commented on elsewhere. (*) Just because a technology existed or was theoretically available to people in 1986, doesn't mean it was likely that ordinary people would have it. The article states:-
“We’re parenting our kids the same way we were parented for a year just to see what it’s like,” Blair said.
For example, the issue I commented on was in response to someone saying that CDs existed in 1986. While this is true, they were still relatively expensive at the time- yuppies and audiophiles probably had one to play their copy of "Brothers in Arms" on, but Joe Average and his friends probably didn't. It would be another couple of years before they would start to take off in truly mass-market terms.
:-)
Mobile phones existed in 1986, but they were bloody expensive to both buy and use, so even if you could get a Motorola brick to work with a modern network, it wouldn't have been an item that most people would have had at the time.
The Commodore Amiga computer mentioned later in the thread came out in 1985, but the original A1000 was expensive (RRP US $1300 on its release, plus another $300 for the monitor- double those to account for inflation) so I doubt most people would have had one. (The more affordable Amiga 500 that was massively popular in Europe at the end of the decade wasn't available until 1987).
The USENET reference you made? Better-off households may have had IBM PC compatibles (at least in the US) and some may have had access to dial-up proprietary walled-garden online services, but Internet access was *not* common then. Most people hadn't even heard of it back then, and probably couldn't have afforded it if they had.
Er... can you spot a pattern here?!
The point I'm making is that if one simply wants to use technology that existed in 1986, then all these things and more qualify. But if one wants to represent the technological experience of an average person living at that time, then it's more questionable if they should be used.
(*) Nope, it's not a new story- sorry, folks!
I was looking at the Slashdot RSS bookmark menu from a distance and briefly read a headline as referring to the new "iPhone SS".
France should take it as such too! Surrender in 5...4...3...2...
Dude, it's 2013, not 2003. France are the US's new best chums now, because they were going to help with the planned strikes in Syria. In fact, John Kerry referred to France as their "oldest ally" in a manner widely interpreted as a snub to the UK, whose parliament had voted against taking part (although the Prime Minister had been in favour).
Of course, we've been here before with the positions reversed- we all remember when the UK went along with the Iraq war and France were against, how pathetically childish Bush was towards France and how he publicly flattered the UK and Tony Blair as the US's closest ally and best chum. Of course, Blair being an egotistical ***** continued sucking up to the US in the belief that this would buy further influence over them long after it was obvious to anyone that the US only did what it would have done anyway (and admitted as much in private). I commented on this circa 2007 and also noted that- even though Bush was still in power then- France (and Germany's) defiance of the US earlier in the decade had not resulted in any long term damage to their relationship with them, just as the UK had not gained any substantial influence with its sucking up.
In short, even if one is an amoral realpolitician (realpolitikian?!), it shows that public sucking-up to- and being publicly flattered as a junior partner by- the US buys little substantial long-term influence, and isn't worth worrying about as much as paranoid-about-losing-global-power British leaders like to think.
Dude! He's getting Dell.
I guess the answer to "I Cahn Has Dell?" was no, then.
In this specific case, if you are telling people to distrust Facebook, with a Facebook group, you'll get a lot of blog posts and Twitting if you shut down the Facebook group with no warning.
To be blunt, you have to wonder if people like this are more a part of the problem than the solution they purport to be.
The real- and obvious- fundamental problem is how Facebook operates their site. This company's product merely papers over the symptoms with a "solution" that doesn't address the real issue, and will only *ever* be short term, breakable at a whim by Facebook themselves. But by making Facebook more palatable over the short term, they hide this problem and encourage people to stay with the site.
It's a waste of effort that might annoy Facebook but ultimately plays into their hands. Fundamentally, if it doesn't encourage Facebook to change their behaviour and/or policies *or* work on moving people away to another service- or whatever- then it's still a part of the Facebook ecosystem and encouraging its use (and hence supporting its cynical behaviour and discouraging other, more responsible approaches to social networking).
Of course, it might suit *them* from a business point-of-view to be doing this anyway, but for everyone else it's not so great.
But does your Corolla show the world how big your dick is?
Yes, it does. It shows that his dick is pretty big and he doesn't have to rely on a flashy car to impress the girls.
Well, either that or he's skint and can't afford a Ferrari. Not sure which.
Sorry, Dice, I do not come here for multimedia. But I will come and bitch about it in the comments (wasting resources is my revenge).
Hmm. A couple of hundred bytes for your message and overhead, perhaps?
Post another ten *billion* messages like that and you'll have wasted an entire $110 (US) hard drive! If you can't manage that, remember at least that every message you type wastes a millionth of a cent's worth of storage. Please show *some* mercy and leave them a bit for coke and hookers, though.
It shouldn't be a special "gaming mode" to begin with; it should be an intrinsic feature of the display.
If- and I mean if- the extra features which cause the lag are a noticeable improvement for normal (i.e. non-interactive) viewing, then there's no reason why the minimalist gaming mode should be forced on users in such situations.
It made me wonder if we've been invaded by Digg Patriots or something.
Doubt it; Digg has been a has-been since its failed redesign alienated users a few years back. Any rats have long departed that now-sunk ship. No great loss, it *very* quickly devolved, becoming an illustration of how the smug Web 2.0 "wisdom of crowds" mantra in practice resulted in a partisan and manipulable mob mentality.
I am still using my 19.5" Sharp CRT from January 1996. It still works as of last night. I will replace it when it dies/starts having problems.
As I sit here typing this, my 14" Sony Trinitron from August 1993 (i.e. just turned 20) is on behind me. It's never *once* been fixed or maintained, yet still gives an almost good-as-new picture. Best £200 I ever spent (almost £350 in today's money and still worth it).
call me selfish, but I'm way more concerned about attempt by its competitor, to enforce digital only games.
Bastards, I want my analogue games!!!
I tend to disagree on this one. I was there back in the day: the WWW was a lonely place filled with homepages that did not convey any useful information, Gopher was a commercial project (hence the reason why it failed), and the communities on Usenet were just as rude as most web fora nowadays.
I have some very, *very* major concerns about the modern Internet and our reliance on it colliding with its increasing potential to turn into a virtual panopticon. Yet, purely considering things in terms of content, I think it's too easy to over-idealise the old days.
:-/
I first used the Internet in late-1993, which is just about the point it was starting to cross over into mainstream consciousness, but when most of the old stuff was still in place (*). I remember how new and cool it seemed then, like "I can talk to people all over the world on this thing?!"
But to be honest, by modern standards there really wasn't a lot there. The fact that in the early days of the web people could maintain lists of "useful links" without this looking laughably inadequate illustrates this point.
Even just ten years ago (i.e. 2003) there was a lot less online. Sure, the net- and web- had grown a *lot* since its early 90s breakthrough and we'd already had the dotcom boom and bust. However, I was revising for my university finals at the time, and I clearly remember noting (with some surprise) that despite its apparent breadth of info, it was still hard to *find* and get *clear* "all-in-one-place" descriptions of the subjects I was looking up online. Information was still scattered, hard work to find- especially at the right level- and bitty. The books in the adjacent library were still far better resources in this respect.
Ironically, that's also the time I first came across what is now probably my most-used site, Wikipedia. Except that back then, it wasn't remotely as massive- nor hence as useful- as it is today. I don't remember that much about it (**), but ironically that probably says enough- if it had been even half as large as today's WP it would have stuck in my head immediately as the aforementioned "killer resource" that didn't exist back then.
(*) i.e. My first real use of it was Usenet, which back then was still a- or rather, *the*- forum for discussions, and I didn't use the web for the first time until several months later. The BBS I used was still text-based and accessed via telnet. Even the "guide to the net" I bought discussed gopher more than the web (though I never really used gopher much, and don't remember being too impressed with it).
(**) I vaguely remember thinking "Is that right? Can *anyone* edit this thing?!", but I wouldn't have had the time to do that, and I had other things to worry about. I didn't really notice it until about two years later, when it was starting to really grow and I had too much time to spend editing it.