Earth bombarded by interplanetary SLIME MONSTERS We are not alone' is the message of Invasion of the Hystrichospheres
Invaders from an unknown planet entered Earth's atmosphere on December 29 last year, riding in a fiery comet that burst 10km above Sri Lanka.
Compared with Phil's article...
UPDATE: No, Life Has Still Not Been Found in a Meteorite
Oh boy. Here we go again, again.
In January, I wrote about Chandra Wickramasinghe, who claimed he had found fossilized diatoms (microscopic plant life) in a meteorite. I showed pretty carefully why this claim is very wrong, but apparently it wasn't enough: A new paper from Wickramasinghe's team has been published furthering the claims, and it's getting picked up by mainstream media.
I read the paper, and really it's more of the same as from the first paper. In some ways, it's even shakier;
What's funny is this is what Facebook mastered, and everyone seems to hate them for it. They can make huge revenues with relatively few advertisements because they have amazingly great targeting.
It's simple, really. People pay more for ads that work. One way you do that is by having your ads shown only to the right people in the first place. That targeting only works through an engine that knows things about you... like Facebook.
It's also why Facebook hasn't and won't sell off their user data. Their exclusive access to that data is their big competitive advantage, the crown jewels, and it's something Google desperately wants.
1. Host them your self you lazy ass fucktards! There is nothing more frustrating for users than waiting some 3-5 seconds for some stupid adserver to respond with whatever crap they want to sell. Also, adnetworks are prime system for spreading malware, vet your friggin ads, host them and serve them proper.
Sites often use ad brokers to erase the difference between what the site operator and the ad buyer say is happening in the way of impressions and clicks. Without a neutral broker in the middle to serve the ads and handle redirected clicks associated with those ads, neither side can trust stats from the other.
Also, small sites can't bring in new advertising clients, because they're not Google or the New York Times. That's part of why ad networks exist in the first place.
I think it's an interesting question. Most of the sites people use are ad supported, and if total blocking is becoming more prevalent, everyone is going to need a replacement.
As a user, I use the nuclear option for ad blocking and whitelist sites I use every day. But that's me going out of my way to be fair about it. People aren't going to do that. It works out well for me because most of the good sites worth visiting frequently don't do the horrible auto-play videos or serve up malware, anyway (the AV still checks).
I don't pretend to have a better idea that would work for everyone, but I think it's a discussion we'll be revisiting more often in the future.
The context of the sentence was feeling bad for him. Any indication that the OP thought the willingness to drop data is prima facie evidence of diminished capacity exists only in your own mind.
You took it out of context, poorly, for an excuse to state your mind. You got called on it. Suck it up and move on.
He wasn't in the best frame of mind because he was having serious psychological issues related to gender identity disorder, sexuality in a "don't ask, don't tell" military, and a handful of other issues. He was looking at a possible discharge from service.
Yeah I really have no problem with this. Everyone gets broken into eventually. Actually noticing that it happened, what precautions you've taken, and how you handle it with your customers, is how I judge your company and service.
Evernote seems to have done what you should do in a situation like this.
I get a little aggravated with the, "games cost $100 million dollars to make and you pay too little" bullshit too.
We see good games made and sold that turn massive profit on small budgets, all the time. Yes, it's hard work. No, you can't do that every three months.
So they spend $90million of the budget on marketing... and then bitch that they're only getting $60 per title plus $50 annual subscriptions plus DLC revenues.
Make good shit. Make fewer games, with fewer people. If it's good you won't have to spend 90% of your budget on advertising. If you want to go the, "pump out another shitty madden title" route with 10 titles, all year long, then don't be surprised that you have to spend $90 million on advertising. And don't then bitch that you're not getting enough money. And don't try to remedy that with bullshit like always-on DRM and microtransactions.
Yeah, much to do about nothing. Most of the people in the Code.org video I saw were, in fact, programmers. Some of them were famous ones, some were not.
So yeah when you see Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberk, Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Tony Hsieh (Zappos), Gabe Newell, etc you might think they haven't written a lot of production code recently, but they're faces you'd know, and they threw in plenty of people that are probably sitting at their machines writing code as we speak.
And either way, it didn't hurt anyone to have any of them. Many of the "learn to program" sites didn't have much in the way of marketing, so this is something. We're going to bitch about it?
The article says that it was constructed with the help of a taxidermist. I doubt there was much in the way of rot going on, but it would probably smell funny (like plastic and glue).
That version of the analogy doesn't really work either since a stolen widget is a stolen widget, where content piracy doesn't directly deprive anyone of anything material, or correlate predictably with lost sales.
But anyway, my point wasn't that content piracy is the new model. It's that piracy will force them to evolve. There will be money involved, just as there is with music now. Piracy is just a big ass lever that can help move industries.
If I had to guess, it would be that we'll head towards the Netflix model. Not specifically their core content now (older stuff), but what they're trying to do with programming like House of Cards. The Hulu model is a dead-end, in my opinion. It's some tiny fraction of TV content, with many of the downsides we hate in the traditional system, only made worse.
On the details I can only guess, though. On the fact that the existing model is totally untenable in the face of what's coming, I'm dead certain.
The only thing that the industry should have learned from Napster was that customers really want convenience and speed.
Right, and perhaps just as important, that people didn't want a $16 CD of shitty filler to get the one song they heard on the radio. But the industry didn't learn those things. Instead they were dragged, kicked and screaming, into the iTunes model. Meanwhile file-sharing never died... it got better, and legitimate music purchasing has had to get better to compete with it. Everything has gotten easier, cheaper, more organized, with better quality and consistency. In every way, people won.
Now it's TV's turn. That industry refuses to look five years in the future, so they'll be forced, just as it was with music. People don't want all the garbage that comes with the one thing they like, and they won't tolerate the obscene bill and mandatory advertising.
Today you can spend $35 on a computer, add a free software plugin, and immediately call up any television show you want in HD, no commercials, on demand, for free. It's only going to get better and that industry is going to have to compete or die.
Buggy whip manufacturers have to evolve and it's seldom voluntary.
I guess the nice part of that is that you give them a few grand, they buy the app, and you make back most of the money they spent on your app.
With these book campaigns you've preordered 3,000 books made of actual plant matter, that costs serious money, and you don't make the majority of that back in a sales check. You have to count on making it back with the, "New York Times Bestseller" moniker, over the rest of your professional life.
Amen. And we really do need Google to do this, if even on behalf of (and with written permission of), the actual rights holders. Every system needs checks, and just dumping countless notices on a service provider and letting them be the arbiter, with no repercussions for bogus requests, is absolutely insane. There needs to be counterweight.
At least the Democrats *say* they want to return to a slightly more reasonable tax regime in order to try and balance the books.
Republican *say* they want to return to a slightly more reasonable tax regime, too. The problem is that neither actually do. One is "kill tax loopholes and reduce spending", both of which are legitimate ideas depending on where they're implemented, the other is "spend more to promote economic growth and increase taxes", which, depending on how it's implemented, also makes sense.
If it weren't all bullshit political posturing, where two enemies were trying to preserve their voting records for reference in future elections, we'd get some arrangement that involves all of the above and be in pretty good shape in short order.
But they bicker, we bicker, and nobody comes to a legitimate solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop it. We are not going to invade Iran.
I don't disagree, though I imagine language has always been this way.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I guess the appropriated form of "begs the question" does make a kind of literal sense, don't you think?
That's pretty funny.
I guess it's one of those situations where the new use is far more common than the old one, so we might as well acknowledge it.
I can't help but laugh at the differences.
Slashdot-linked Register article...
Earth bombarded by interplanetary SLIME MONSTERS
We are not alone' is the message of Invasion of the Hystrichospheres
Invaders from an unknown planet entered Earth's atmosphere on December 29 last year, riding in a fiery comet that burst 10km above Sri Lanka.
Compared with Phil's article...
UPDATE: No, Life Has Still Not Been Found in a Meteorite
Oh boy. Here we go again, again.
In January, I wrote about Chandra Wickramasinghe, who claimed he had found fossilized diatoms (microscopic plant life) in a meteorite. I showed pretty carefully why this claim is very wrong, but apparently it wasn't enough: A new paper from Wickramasinghe's team has been published furthering the claims, and it's getting picked up by mainstream media.
I read the paper, and really it's more of the same as from the first paper. In some ways, it's even shakier;
This is all anyone needed to say about this story.
I don't know why people think it's so impossible. It's only about as strange as liberal gun owners... of which there are millions.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that people have opinions on more than one thing, at the very same time.
Make ads rare. And make them meaningful
What's funny is this is what Facebook mastered, and everyone seems to hate them for it. They can make huge revenues with relatively few advertisements because they have amazingly great targeting.
It's simple, really. People pay more for ads that work. One way you do that is by having your ads shown only to the right people in the first place. That targeting only works through an engine that knows things about you... like Facebook.
It's also why Facebook hasn't and won't sell off their user data. Their exclusive access to that data is their big competitive advantage, the crown jewels, and it's something Google desperately wants.
1. Host them your self you lazy ass fucktards! There is nothing more frustrating for users than waiting some 3-5 seconds for some stupid adserver to respond with whatever crap they want to sell. Also, adnetworks are prime system for spreading malware, vet your friggin ads, host them and serve them proper.
Sites often use ad brokers to erase the difference between what the site operator and the ad buyer say is happening in the way of impressions and clicks. Without a neutral broker in the middle to serve the ads and handle redirected clicks associated with those ads, neither side can trust stats from the other.
Also, small sites can't bring in new advertising clients, because they're not Google or the New York Times. That's part of why ad networks exist in the first place.
I think it's an interesting question. Most of the sites people use are ad supported, and if total blocking is becoming more prevalent, everyone is going to need a replacement.
As a user, I use the nuclear option for ad blocking and whitelist sites I use every day. But that's me going out of my way to be fair about it. People aren't going to do that. It works out well for me because most of the good sites worth visiting frequently don't do the horrible auto-play videos or serve up malware, anyway (the AV still checks).
I don't pretend to have a better idea that would work for everyone, but I think it's a discussion we'll be revisiting more often in the future.
Well played.
We should get around to using that by the time the Enterprise D is first leaving dry dock, yeah?
The context of the sentence was feeling bad for him. Any indication that the OP thought the willingness to drop data is prima facie evidence of diminished capacity exists only in your own mind.
You took it out of context, poorly, for an excuse to state your mind. You got called on it. Suck it up and move on.
He wasn't in the best frame of mind because he was having serious psychological issues related to gender identity disorder, sexuality in a "don't ask, don't tell" military, and a handful of other issues. He was looking at a possible discharge from service.
Lay off the rhetoric, it's making you jumpy.
Yeah I really have no problem with this. Everyone gets broken into eventually. Actually noticing that it happened, what precautions you've taken, and how you handle it with your customers, is how I judge your company and service.
Evernote seems to have done what you should do in a situation like this.
I get a little aggravated with the, "games cost $100 million dollars to make and you pay too little" bullshit too.
We see good games made and sold that turn massive profit on small budgets, all the time. Yes, it's hard work. No, you can't do that every three months.
So they spend $90million of the budget on marketing... and then bitch that they're only getting $60 per title plus $50 annual subscriptions plus DLC revenues.
Make good shit. Make fewer games, with fewer people. If it's good you won't have to spend 90% of your budget on advertising. If you want to go the, "pump out another shitty madden title" route with 10 titles, all year long, then don't be surprised that you have to spend $90 million on advertising. And don't then bitch that you're not getting enough money. And don't try to remedy that with bullshit like always-on DRM and microtransactions.
Yeah, much to do about nothing. Most of the people in the Code.org video I saw were, in fact, programmers. Some of them were famous ones, some were not.
So yeah when you see Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberk, Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Tony Hsieh (Zappos), Gabe Newell, etc you might think they haven't written a lot of production code recently, but they're faces you'd know, and they threw in plenty of people that are probably sitting at their machines writing code as we speak.
And either way, it didn't hurt anyone to have any of them. Many of the "learn to program" sites didn't have much in the way of marketing, so this is something. We're going to bitch about it?
If there's a middle step here, I guess it's "wires". But there's really no need for question marks in that old-as-time equation. ;)
Oh damn, now we need a legislative working group for a bill to shield people from copyright suits.
Maybe call 'em... the Justice League?
The article says that it was constructed with the help of a taxidermist. I doubt there was much in the way of rot going on, but it would probably smell funny (like plastic and glue).
That version of the analogy doesn't really work either since a stolen widget is a stolen widget, where content piracy doesn't directly deprive anyone of anything material, or correlate predictably with lost sales.
But anyway, my point wasn't that content piracy is the new model. It's that piracy will force them to evolve. There will be money involved, just as there is with music now. Piracy is just a big ass lever that can help move industries.
If I had to guess, it would be that we'll head towards the Netflix model. Not specifically their core content now (older stuff), but what they're trying to do with programming like House of Cards. The Hulu model is a dead-end, in my opinion. It's some tiny fraction of TV content, with many of the downsides we hate in the traditional system, only made worse.
On the details I can only guess, though. On the fact that the existing model is totally untenable in the face of what's coming, I'm dead certain.
The only thing that the industry should have learned from Napster was that customers really want convenience and speed.
Right, and perhaps just as important, that people didn't want a $16 CD of shitty filler to get the one song they heard on the radio. But the industry didn't learn those things. Instead they were dragged, kicked and screaming, into the iTunes model. Meanwhile file-sharing never died... it got better, and legitimate music purchasing has had to get better to compete with it. Everything has gotten easier, cheaper, more organized, with better quality and consistency. In every way, people won.
Now it's TV's turn. That industry refuses to look five years in the future, so they'll be forced, just as it was with music. People don't want all the garbage that comes with the one thing they like, and they won't tolerate the obscene bill and mandatory advertising.
Today you can spend $35 on a computer, add a free software plugin, and immediately call up any television show you want in HD, no commercials, on demand, for free. It's only going to get better and that industry is going to have to compete or die.
Buggy whip manufacturers have to evolve and it's seldom voluntary.
I guess the nice part of that is that you give them a few grand, they buy the app, and you make back most of the money they spent on your app.
With these book campaigns you've preordered 3,000 books made of actual plant matter, that costs serious money, and you don't make the majority of that back in a sales check. You have to count on making it back with the, "New York Times Bestseller" moniker, over the rest of your professional life.
Amen. And we really do need Google to do this, if even on behalf of (and with written permission of), the actual rights holders. Every system needs checks, and just dumping countless notices on a service provider and letting them be the arbiter, with no repercussions for bogus requests, is absolutely insane. There needs to be counterweight.
At least the Democrats *say* they want to return to a slightly more reasonable tax regime in order to try and balance the books.
Republican *say* they want to return to a slightly more reasonable tax regime, too. The problem is that neither actually do. One is "kill tax loopholes and reduce spending", both of which are legitimate ideas depending on where they're implemented, the other is "spend more to promote economic growth and increase taxes", which, depending on how it's implemented, also makes sense.
If it weren't all bullshit political posturing, where two enemies were trying to preserve their voting records for reference in future elections, we'd get some arrangement that involves all of the above and be in pretty good shape in short order.
But they bicker, we bicker, and nobody comes to a legitimate solution.
You could have just said CM is the best software patch for any android device that isn't a platform reference.
Do any of them actually support their devices? I know Samsung doesn't, either.
Yes... feeeel the hate. Let it flow through you, consume you, make you stronger. Know the power of the slashdot.