They're already *in* space though, so why not make use of them? Surely it would be more wasteful to burn all those resources putting GPS satelites up there, and then not use them because it was so polluting to launch the things.
It could if anyone who isn't a web professional knew they existed.
In practice, almost everyone will send a en-US header, because that's what the defaults are set to when their browser was installed.
Detecting location from an IP can sometimes work, but that can also cause problems - take for example the client we have at work who routes all their UK internet traffic through the head office in Paris.
The referer header is user provided data. And the first rule of web development is that you *never* trust user provided data. It's just too easy to fake things.
I was looking into this recently, and the last D20 license explicitly forbids creating computer games using the rule set... probably because Atari/Blizzard (not sure which) has the license for D&D based games.
I was thinking about that as I had a look at the release notes the other day - having just bought Hellgate: London, which takes place in a city vaguely ressembling London, I thought it would be cool to use actual map data so that it was accurate.
I'm not sure what the anti-terroism folks would think though... I have images of getting myself arrested for providing terroist training tools or some other nonsense like that.
Havn't you seen Deep Impact. It'll very nearly (but not quite) drown Washington DC, leaving the top of the capital building humourously sticking out of the water.
That sounds like a really cool feature to me - I've always thought Eve would be more fun if you could have automated fleets of ships (think X3 in an MMO setting).
I can however see that it might unbalance things a little;)
The ISP I work for does do this - on the basic package you can download 10Gb of data a month, and if you go over that you'll be given the choice of buying some more, upgrading your package, or just not using the Internet for the rest of the month. You can also check how much of your quota you've used up so far, so if you don't want to pay extra, you just stop downloading episodes of Dr. Who when you're coming up on the limit.
Personally I think that's a fair deal (although I do get my connection for free, so I may be biased!) - the low usage customers will never hit their limit, and the people who use services like iPlayer a lot have options on how they manage that, and how much it's going to cost them.
I have no sympathy for ISPs that sell "unlimited" services, and then start moaning about how their customers assume that means there isn't a limit on how much they can download.
Wow... thanks for letting me know that I'm working for free. There I was thinking that my paycheck was real.
You don't seem to understand how Open Source works. I work for a company that needs custom applications built, and have discovered that it's far, far cheaper to use OS software then it is to pay Microsoft for licenses. As I'm working on our applications, I'll occassionally find that there are some features that could be added to the software we use that would make that easier, so I add them, and then submit them back to the project (because then I don't have to maintain it for the rest of time).
Now, how about you get a grip... and maybe a more satisfying job.
It may look like those guys are having fun bathing in mediocrity and making video games look stupid but I think the problem is broader than that, video games are too action-packed and tightly defined to make good films.
I think you've just got to the root of things there. I've never seen a good movie adaptation of a computer game, and that's the reason.
How do you turn "run around, killing everything you see, waiting for a storyline element to turn up at some point" into something people want to sit and passively absorb for 2 hours?
There are very few games I can think of that would work as a film. That's ok though, because films generally don't work well as games either.
Maybe Half-Life could get away with it (I always thought it played like a B-movie), but they'd need to give Gordan some dialogue... and someone to tag along with him through Black Mesa.
I may just not have got far enough through, but it's not like Dungeon Siege had a deep and involving storyline as a game. I got bored of the formulaic medieval RPG plot about 2 hours into the game.
Seriously, how *do* you make a good film of something like that?
Their main business model is selling ad space on people's websites - find advertisers can be incredibly hard work, so a lot of sites outsource that to Double Click.
They then sell the advertising space, and provide web apps that allow the advertisers to see how effective the campaign is, and site owners to see who's buying their ad space, and how much they're paying.
That's also the reason there was so much scrutiny of this deal, since the largest banner advertising company has now been bought by the largest text advertising company.
At the moment their a single digit player, but they are no longer just for graphic artists.
At work, just about everyone here has at least one Apple machine at home - for most people they're the primary machine, and all the new workstations I've seen bought at work have been a variety of MacBooks. Admitadly this is a Unix shop, so there's likely to be more of a skew towards Apple hardware.
However, almost everyone I talk to about getting a new computer is seriously considering Apple hardware. That's not just geeks, this includes my land lady, my flat mate (who's a carpenter), and even a 60 year old receptionist in my last job. Apple are huge at the moment, and I can't see them going away any time soon unless they do something *really* stupid.
Some of it is branding, and making good looking hardware, but a lot of the influence they're gaining is quite simply through building software that people want to use. People get excited about applications like iPhoto - when's the last time you heard someone actually being interested in Office?
What I don't get is why they're not just advertising that you do in fact have a bandwidth limit - that way the customer knows what they're *actually* getting, and Comcast can make a few extra dollars selling top-ups to people who hit their bandwidth limit.
In an ideal world, you could do whatever you want with your connection, but this is the real world, where bandwidth is expensive, and ISPs would rather not be the ones paying to feed your free porn addiction;)
You should try working for an ISP, where we have a gigabit pipe into the office... now, if I could only persuade IT support to get me a network card capable of keeping up with it;)
Rainbow Six: Vegas had this feature to a limited extent - I used it for one mission, and then turned it off, after realising that it was quite a lot easier to use the controller, instead of hoping my team didn't utterly ignore me at a crucial moment.
Well, we usually don't have to install our own workstations--new employees usually get a machine that used to belong to someone who left.
I think people *would* do that around here, except one of your last day tasks is to cause as much damage to the OS as possible, so that the next person has to reinstall;)
You should see people's faces when they realise there's no shell installed on their desktop anymore, and ps is doing funny things.
The way we do it at the place I work (a mid-sized ISP), is that the first thing you do when you start is pick an operating system, and install it on your workstation. From that point forward maintaining your desktop is your job - IT support are there to manage the network, the internal file servers, and to look after the non-technical departments Windows machines.
This works remarkably well, but that's because our floor is about a 50/50 split of software developers and sysadmins, and we all know our way around a *nix install. If you do have any problems you can't fix, odds are there's somebody who can fix it around the place.
There's the begining of this sort of thing in development now - Google have Gears, which provides a Javascript interface to a locally stored SQLite database. Try using Google Reader in offline mode sometime, it's the same application, and will synchronise any changes you make when you take it back online.
Joyent have also developed Slingshot, built on top of Rails, which allows you to provide your web app as an offline desktop application. Again, this all synchs up with the servers once you get back into range of a network.
Contention does effect ADSL users, it's just a case of which end of the pipe they're effected at. As I understand it, this is how it works - no doubt I'll be corrected at some point.
For DOCSIS the number of users in the local area will effect your connection speed - the more people in your area using it at a time, the less bandwidth you get.
For ADSL lines the contention refers to the number of people connecting to the line on ISP's end, so if you're on a 50:1 contention, there's you, plus up to 49 other people connected to a single leased line in your ISP's data center.
Of course you then have the problem of ISPs over selling their service - I've heard that at the moment the UK cable operators are providing really slow connections, and this is because their backbones just can't handle the amount of bandwidth being used by their customers.
Slashdot Mirror
They're already *in* space though, so why not make use of them? Surely it would be more wasteful to burn all those resources putting GPS satelites up there, and then not use them because it was so polluting to launch the things.
Isn't it a bit painful whiping your arse with a DVD? And that hole in the middle is just asking for trouble.
It could if anyone who isn't a web professional knew they existed.
In practice, almost everyone will send a en-US header, because that's what the defaults are set to when their browser was installed.
Detecting location from an IP can sometimes work, but that can also cause problems - take for example the client we have at work who routes all their UK internet traffic through the head office in Paris.
The referer header is user provided data. And the first rule of web development is that you *never* trust user provided data. It's just too easy to fake things.
I was looking into this recently, and the last D20 license explicitly forbids creating computer games using the rule set... probably because Atari/Blizzard (not sure which) has the license for D&D based games.
I was thinking about that as I had a look at the release notes the other day - having just bought Hellgate: London, which takes place in a city vaguely ressembling London, I thought it would be cool to use actual map data so that it was accurate.
I'm not sure what the anti-terroism folks would think though... I have images of getting myself arrested for providing terroist training tools or some other nonsense like that.
Havn't you seen Deep Impact. It'll very nearly (but not quite) drown Washington DC, leaving the top of the capital building humourously sticking out of the water.
That sounds like a really cool feature to me - I've always thought Eve would be more fun if you could have automated fleets of ships (think X3 in an MMO setting).
;)
I can however see that it might unbalance things a little
The ISP I work for does do this - on the basic package you can download 10Gb of data a month, and if you go over that you'll be given the choice of buying some more, upgrading your package, or just not using the Internet for the rest of the month. You can also check how much of your quota you've used up so far, so if you don't want to pay extra, you just stop downloading episodes of Dr. Who when you're coming up on the limit.
Personally I think that's a fair deal (although I do get my connection for free, so I may be biased!) - the low usage customers will never hit their limit, and the people who use services like iPlayer a lot have options on how they manage that, and how much it's going to cost them.
I have no sympathy for ISPs that sell "unlimited" services, and then start moaning about how their customers assume that means there isn't a limit on how much they can download.
Wow... thanks for letting me know that I'm working for free. There I was thinking that my paycheck was real.
You don't seem to understand how Open Source works. I work for a company that needs custom applications built, and have discovered that it's far, far cheaper to use OS software then it is to pay Microsoft for licenses. As I'm working on our applications, I'll occassionally find that there are some features that could be added to the software we use that would make that easier, so I add them, and then submit them back to the project (because then I don't have to maintain it for the rest of time).
Now, how about you get a grip... and maybe a more satisfying job.
We're an ISP, but all the developers (except for 1 .Net developer), and most of the sysadmins are using Linux as their only desktop OS.
I can see 12 Linux workstations from where I'm sitting, and we're in a corner of the office where you can't really see everyone else.
Sorry, you lost me when you mentioned X-Men as being a good film.
Maybe it's because I never read the comics, but that series always struck me as below average action, without much of a plot.
I think you've just got to the root of things there. I've never seen a good movie adaptation of a computer game, and that's the reason.
How do you turn "run around, killing everything you see, waiting for a storyline element to turn up at some point" into something people want to sit and passively absorb for 2 hours?
There are very few games I can think of that would work as a film. That's ok though, because films generally don't work well as games either.
Maybe Half-Life could get away with it (I always thought it played like a B-movie), but they'd need to give Gordan some dialogue... and someone to tag along with him through Black Mesa.
I may just not have got far enough through, but it's not like Dungeon Siege had a deep and involving storyline as a game. I got bored of the formulaic medieval RPG plot about 2 hours into the game.
Seriously, how *do* you make a good film of something like that?
Obligatory Penny Arcade link
Excellent, thanks for the tip :)
And just as an extra note - the banner ad that appeared when I posted that comment is hosted on ad.doubleclick.net.
Now... when is Adblock going to get updated for Firefox 3 Beta 3!
Their main business model is selling ad space on people's websites - find advertisers can be incredibly hard work, so a lot of sites outsource that to Double Click.
They then sell the advertising space, and provide web apps that allow the advertisers to see how effective the campaign is, and site owners to see who's buying their ad space, and how much they're paying.
That's also the reason there was so much scrutiny of this deal, since the largest banner advertising company has now been bought by the largest text advertising company.
At the moment their a single digit player, but they are no longer just for graphic artists.
At work, just about everyone here has at least one Apple machine at home - for most people they're the primary machine, and all the new workstations I've seen bought at work have been a variety of MacBooks. Admitadly this is a Unix shop, so there's likely to be more of a skew towards Apple hardware.
However, almost everyone I talk to about getting a new computer is seriously considering Apple hardware. That's not just geeks, this includes my land lady, my flat mate (who's a carpenter), and even a 60 year old receptionist in my last job. Apple are huge at the moment, and I can't see them going away any time soon unless they do something *really* stupid.
Some of it is branding, and making good looking hardware, but a lot of the influence they're gaining is quite simply through building software that people want to use. People get excited about applications like iPhoto - when's the last time you heard someone actually being interested in Office?
What I don't get is why they're not just advertising that you do in fact have a bandwidth limit - that way the customer knows what they're *actually* getting, and Comcast can make a few extra dollars selling top-ups to people who hit their bandwidth limit.
;)
In an ideal world, you could do whatever you want with your connection, but this is the real world, where bandwidth is expensive, and ISPs would rather not be the ones paying to feed your free porn addiction
Peesh... T1.
;)
You should try working for an ISP, where we have a gigabit pipe into the office... now, if I could only persuade IT support to get me a network card capable of keeping up with it
Rainbow Six: Vegas had this feature to a limited extent - I used it for one mission, and then turned it off, after realising that it was quite a lot easier to use the controller, instead of hoping my team didn't utterly ignore me at a crucial moment.
They should have all been shot for mutiny.
I think people *would* do that around here, except one of your last day tasks is to cause as much damage to the OS as possible, so that the next person has to reinstall
You should see people's faces when they realise there's no shell installed on their desktop anymore, and ps is doing funny things.
The way we do it at the place I work (a mid-sized ISP), is that the first thing you do when you start is pick an operating system, and install it on your workstation. From that point forward maintaining your desktop is your job - IT support are there to manage the network, the internal file servers, and to look after the non-technical departments Windows machines.
This works remarkably well, but that's because our floor is about a 50/50 split of software developers and sysadmins, and we all know our way around a *nix install. If you do have any problems you can't fix, odds are there's somebody who can fix it around the place.
There's the begining of this sort of thing in development now - Google have Gears, which provides a Javascript interface to a locally stored SQLite database. Try using Google Reader in offline mode sometime, it's the same application, and will synchronise any changes you make when you take it back online.
Joyent have also developed Slingshot, built on top of Rails, which allows you to provide your web app as an offline desktop application. Again, this all synchs up with the servers once you get back into range of a network.
Contention does effect ADSL users, it's just a case of which end of the pipe they're effected at. As I understand it, this is how it works - no doubt I'll be corrected at some point.
For DOCSIS the number of users in the local area will effect your connection speed - the more people in your area using it at a time, the less bandwidth you get.
For ADSL lines the contention refers to the number of people connecting to the line on ISP's end, so if you're on a 50:1 contention, there's you, plus up to 49 other people connected to a single leased line in your ISP's data center.
Of course you then have the problem of ISPs over selling their service - I've heard that at the moment the UK cable operators are providing really slow connections, and this is because their backbones just can't handle the amount of bandwidth being used by their customers.