The solar power part is a way to do this without condeming the tennants to a lifetime of mad energy bills.
Actually, according to the link provided in the article (I'll have to give up my Slashdot license for that one: reading TFA^2!), the energy used to turn the building is rather small:
... rotating an 80,000 tonne tower through 360 degrees over a seven day period... state of the art bearing systems at several points in the tower will allow a power plant to rotate the base of the tower at 5mm per second using only 21 electic kettles' worth of solar power.
I had to look twice, but sure enough, there are no links to Roland's ZDNet blog in this submission! No "But click here for more information", nothing but a single link to a source document. I don't think anyone can begrudge him the link in his name.
So perhaps Roland has reformed, or perhaps the Slashdot editors just got tired of our whining and broke out the scissors.
But I'm still going to tag the article as "pigpile", just because it's fun.
A quick whois at gandi.net shows that while yootle.com and yootle.net are taken, you can still get.org,.info, and several others.
That whois also reveals something else -- Yahoo! didn't get the.com and.net, as far as I can tell. You would think they'd have thought of that before announcing the name of their new online currency... checking Domain Tools' whois shows that the.com has been registered since 1999, and the.net since 2005. Neither is an active site.
I remember reading about this guy (probably on the Slashdots) years ago, and I hoped that this would be one of those rare cases of someone who is rejected by the "scientific community" and then goes on to success. There are so many scientists out there that end up on dead-end roads (I'm looking at you, Cold Fusion), that it's nice to have a reminder that there's still reason to explore.
For proof that success is the best revenge, just check out the company's product list. They're making a killing by creating replacements for aromatic allergens.
I guess one thing that made me think he was on to something was his reaction to the scientific community's snub -- one response I recall likened a quantum-mechanical sense of smell to "food being processed in the stomach by nuclear reactions". He did NOT go around telling the world that the scientist cabal was out to get him, or that the perfume cartel was conspiring to suppress his work. He simply went about building a successful business by *using* his hypothesis to create and license useful, concrete products.
You know, I think this is why we have patents in the first place. Not so megacorporations can trademark "business practices" -- if I hear another insurance company or bank describe their latest gimmick with a "patent pending" disclaimer I'm gonna puke. It's so some little guy on the right track can take a risk and come out on top.
Given the numerous problems Reuters has had with its own Middle East reporting, what controls are they going to put in place to ensure that these Citizen Journalists aren't feeding them fake pictures?
Pretty simple, I suspect. They'll use the model that US radio stations have used since the dawn of the Top 40 list.
1. Station compiles list of songs that they will play 2. Station tells fans to call in their requests 3. Station ignores all requests for songs not on the list 4. Station puts requests for listed songs on the air as though they were spontaneous 5. Lather, Rinse, Repeat 6. Profit!
This deal could simply be a refinement of the model. To a large extent, the news stories are already determined. Not by some evil cabal -- I'm comfortable leaving my tinfoil hat at home -- but by whatever criteria they already use to determine what will be interesting to readers/viewers. The "innovation" is that they can use civilian-submitted pix and vids to flesh out the story. The story was already there, but now it has more truthiness. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
To give both radio stations and Reuters some credit, though... the faux-request model does give a station an idea of what new songs are percolating in the market, so sometimes the requests *do* matter. Similarly, Reuters & co can get an idea of what people are interested in reading about by looking for trends in the photo/video submissions.
But mostly, it's just going to be window-dressing to look like they're in on the hot new thing.
Antistatic brush. These brushes, which you can still buy today (2002) are made for brushing static charge off of photographic negatives. The radiation from the polonium element (which must be replaced every year or so because the half life is only 138 days) ionizes the air around the brush, making it conductive and carrying away the static charge. [...] Later, while I was in Boston to receive the Ig Nobel Prize for the wooden periodic table, I purchased a brand new brush with a full charge of polonium. That's why this sample is classified as having about 20% actual polonium: It's an average figure assuming I buy a new one every few years (they are fairly cheap).
Sounds like all our Russian "friends" needed to do was to visit the local camera store's going-out-of-business sale.
Since it's the holiday, the usual rants against the article submitter, Roland Piquepaille, have been rather muted. To sum up:
* He gets a lot of articles posted to the front page, which makes the rest of us jealous.
* His articles tend toward pseudoscience, or at least towards the sort of flashy, headline-inspiring science that does little to advance human knowledge.
* He used to link to his personal blog, which really irritated people who'd love to have their own blogs get Slashdotted on a regular basis.
* He now links to his zdnet blog, which really irritates people who'd love to have their own blogs get picked up by a big corporate website.
* To top it all off, he's French, so all the right-wing nutters hate him automatically.
My irritation comes mostly from the second point -- and, I'll confess, the first as well. But as his defenders (and even the Slashdot editors) have noted, it's not like he's got some inside line to CmdrTaco's desk. He just finds himself at the right place at the right time.
Nonetheless, I recommend continuing to tag his articles with "pigpile", just so's we can keep up.
As a Dixie Chick fan, I'm not surprised you're happy to see Clear Channel retreating [if that is in fact what's happening here?].
You betcha. Not that it would help with the current album, which is stylistically all over the place (with the possible exception of Country). But "Travelin' Soldier" didn't deserve to get thrown off the charts in 2003 just because Bush and his buddies needed a straw man (woman?) to distract voters. (I may need to get one of your products after all...)
Oh, by the way, I would like to thank you and your fellow Canadians for supporting the Chicks' "Hey, we're still here!" tour! Their seven (count 'em!) kids won't go hungry after all.
It's because he's throwing a monkey wrench into her attempts to return Earth to the dolphins, by getting rid of the annoying parasite that calls itself "humanity". Kinda like your body warms up to make it easier to kill the bad bacteria, ya know?
(Note: above post contains sarcasm. Don't quote it when I run for office, m'kay?)
Here's a note I sent to the KHYI-Fans email list, a group of fans of independent alt-country station KHYI (and others) in Dallas:
As Winston Churchill said, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Clear Channel, the company that took advantage of greed and laziness in the radio biz and used it to buy over a thousand formerly independent radio stations, is in the process of being bought out itself.
Don't expect to hear good music on the radio again right away, but according to the AP wire, CC is already planning to sell of 448 of its 1,150 radio stations and all of its 48 TV stations. They're all in small markets, and together make up only 10% of CC's revenue. But putting those stations back in local hands -- even if they're still part of some corporate portfolio -- will give good music an opportunity to start eating at the edges. And "702 radio stations" had a decidedly less impressive ring than "Over 1,100 stations" -- meaning that CC won't have the same ability to push advertisers around.
On the down side, CC is likely to be bought out by a private investor group. That means that they won't be subject to the financial disclosure requirements that publicly traded companies must comply with, so the company will become even less transparent than before. But with dwindling influence both in market share and in Washington, it may not matter anyway.
It's the end of the beginning, but the end of corporate radio can't come soon enough.
Pff! What do they teach kids in school these days, eh? It's a frustum of a cone, aka a conical frustum, or just a frustum.
No idea what they teach these days... I'm 20 years out of high school, so any geometric omissions should be attributed not to lack of education, but to insufficient jellyware data storage.
(I wish I had known/remembered term, though, because it would have fit the joke perfectly! "... wax-lined cardboard inverted conical frustum of water, carbon dioxide...")
Something that might have been helpful to include in the story submission:
*Note for International media: CSIRO is the national research agency of the Australian Government. It undertakes scientific research for the purpose of assisting Australian industry, furthering the interests of the Australian community and contributing to the achievement of national objectives.
The 500, while still a cool box, wasn't a great technological leap forward. It was merely a mass-marketing-wrapped version of the 1000. (And Commodore poorly mass-marketed it!) As the easter egg hidden inside one of the later versions of Workbench said: "We made Amiga, they [Commodore] f*cked it up".
Woida, if you've got a way to make mylar balloons capable of reflecting gamma rays onto a single focal point, there are some guys in the DoE and the DoD who would like to talk to you, and they pay way better than NASA.
That's what makes me wonder why anyone took this guy seriously in the first place. Fortunately, NASA is only giving him a token amount:
He received $9000 to study the idea from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) in Atlanta, Georgia, US. [...] In his concept study, Woida will work out the structural details of the balloons and study how much extra light from the reflectors reaches the Martian surface.
Nine thousand bucks would buy a lot of ramen, but in this case, it's probably worth it to get the guy to quick knocking on the door at NIAC saying "Hey, look at my space mirror thingie... on MARS!!!!11!!one!`1~~"
The body's energy systems are all closely associated with physical systems - each of the chakras corresponds with a gland: thymus, pituitary, etc.
Whatever. The important thing is that the cessation of phantom pain -- a sensation produced by the mind without input from the body -- is *real*. If gently rubbing thin air makes the mind decide the pain isn't there any more, great -- but that probably wouldn't work for me. But stick my arm in a box and give me a 3D simulation of it, and I bet you anything I'll be cured right away. Apparently, it's all about immersion in the experience.
For some reason, I'm put in mind of putting a knife under the bed, to cut the pain of childbirth. Seems like we're back to the best parts of 5,000-year-old medicine, right down to the leeches.
There aren't many references to it on the newfangled Internet (though three of the five results of this search are relevant), but back in the late '80s to early '90s, some of the biggest names in travel got together to create CONFIRM/RS. Hilton Hotels, Budget Rent-A-Car, and Marriott got together with a division of AMR to create it. AMR, with the biggest reservation system in the galaxy in SABRE, was clearly in the best position to develop the next generation reservations system.
Then again, maybe not.
I wasn't on the CONFIRM side -- I was doing tech support for Hilton and Budget's existing systems, which were being managed by AMR as part of the project. (Definitely one of the coolest jobs ever, BTW, even if it did mean waking up at 5am to talk to Bahrain and then staying until 6pm to troubleshoot problems in Brisbane.) But when it all came crashing down, I was close enough to hear the thud. From one of the links in the Google search above:
With a technical staff headcount of more than 200(DMN) programmers, systems analysts and engineers and an additional 200+(IW) support and administrative people on the Confirm project, one would think that sufficient resources had been gathered. In terms of skills and abilities, that was in fact the case. The main pieces of the project were clearly defined in 47,000 pages of documentation,(DMN) and a physical configuration was established utilizing two IBM 3090 processors: one running TPF(CW) for reservations processing and one running MVS-based DB2(CW) for decision support. By all accounts, everything should have proceeded along as planned. So what went wrong?
The many newspaper and trade journal articles written about the Confirm demise have all maintained a common pretext for the technological problems. Focusing on the multi-platform configuration, the problem being emphasized is the integration and communication between the two different operating system platforms, TPF and DB2. In addition, rumors about the use of IBM's C/370 language and the use of IBM's TPFDF feature having caused major problems on the project began to surface throughout the industry.
[...] According to a recent article in Hotel Business News magazine, insiders reported that AMR sent in a "SWAT team" of experts from their SABRE Computer Services division (SCS), to evaluate the Confirm situation. They uncovered serious flaws in the system's design. This was corroborated by a statement issued by AMR spokesman Al Becker, saying that AMR "believed that the project was on schedule and on track through the end of March." However, after problems came to light in April, "AMR launched a full-scale inquiry to investigate all areas of the system. A team of SABRE Computer Services experts was brought in to better evaluate the situation and assist in initiating corrective actions."
The SCS assessment determined that the problems uncovered would require 18 months to correct, delaying the project well into 1993. "For management to suddenly learn -- years into the project -- that they're still 18 months off, can only mean one thing: They didn't know where they were in the project" in the first place! "Somewhere in there, you've got a management problem(DMN)" said Donald Tatzin, director of Arthur D. Little's travel consulting practice.
I still have some extremely unofficial documentation -- a satirical look at the unfolding and eventually unravelling project, written with the people and organizations represented by pseudonyms. For example, Mary Ott = Mariott. When Mariott pulled out of the project, character Mary Ott died in a tragic elevator accident, IIRC. They started out on an internal bulletin board that bore a surprising resemblance to what I'd later know as Usenet. They still exist in the form of printouts in my drawer... I'll have to transcribe them some day and put them online, now that all the players have moved on and the lawsuits have -- probably -- all been settled.
Instead of producing female characters who are actually interesting though, he manages to just take two-dimensional ones and give them some kind of special ability or extra attribute as a substitute for a personality. As such, his female characters really, really grate on the nerves of anyone who's ever had a conversation with a real human female.
I think you just pinpointed why I loved Heinlein as a teenager.
But now I have to wonder -- cause or effect? Did I like Heinlein because girls wouldn't talk to me, or would girls not talk to me because I subconciously expected them to all be naked hypersexual spacecraft navigators? (and what book was that, anyway?)
Back in the early '90s, I was working at American Airlines. Then as now, they were largely mainframe-oriented, though access was via PC emulation. A suggestion came across that we should look at this thing called SGML -- a way of digitizing our voluminous documentation so that it would be accessible from any platform. Mainframe, PC, Mac... anything.
I wasn't terribly impressed. Sure, it was cool to be able to add "hyper links" to other parts of the document, or to other documents, but the conversion process would be murder. And tables! What was all this TR TH TD mishmash, just to make a simple table?
My recommendation: Why doesn't everyone just use Microsoft Word format? It's available to everyone, and it's not like the internal format is going to change or anything!
Thank goodness I was working somewhere else by the time my first thoughts on SGML -- the precursor of HTML -- were proven to be utterly, completely Wrong.
Funny ha ha, but a lot of folks would accept that statement at face value. At this point, measured in Netcraft's metric of "number of web sites", it would be interesting to know what most of the Internet actually *is*. Blogs? Personal sites? Phishnets?
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on the hypothesis that the biggest category of "active web site" is the typosquatters.
Well, keeping in mind that the parent's YouTube link will get yanked for copyright infringement Right Soon Now, I suggest checking out the transcript of MAD TV's ad for the Spishak Mach 20:
You see the first blade cuts the facial hair... But before the hair can snap back the second blade cuts it again... The third blade cuts it once more The forth blade cuts it again The fifth blade goes deeper digging below the first layer of skin to remove the hair follicle The sixth blade cuts away that pesky second layer of skin where there might be some renegade hair follicles The seventh blade cuts away six more layers of skin ensuring that hair will never ever grow there The eighth blade sends an electronic pulse to the centre of the brain which destroys the part of the brain responsible for hair growth and four other non essential functions The ninth blade gently smoothes out the jaw bone to give your face a more even appearance. The tenth blade removes cavity-causing tartar And the eleventh blade starts the process all over again.
By the time the twentieth blade passes over your face, you're a first rate professional business man. That promotion is as good as yours!
I wish that mobile phone service providers would realize this. [...] No way am I going to pay $10 for a game I've not seen nor heard of before.
I'll second that emotion. I just got a phone from T-Mobile, and it has a demo version of something called Midnight Pool. You can play up until someone's cleared everything but the 8-ball. The full version costs $5.99, and I'm seriously considering it. But there's no way you'd have convinced me to spend six bucks on a mobile phone game that may or may not work. My wife has downloaded a bunch of games to her phone that absolutely suck on her screen (Pac-Man, in particular, is unplayable).
I just realized something, though. We're not the target demographic. She is. *sigh*
Just for reference, the parent posted the same thing in the previous discussion of neural-interface gaming. But I think he can be allowed the cut 'n paste in this case... give him more time to design the next generation of motorized wheelchair controllers so I can terrorize the kids in the yard in my old age.
Slashdot Mirror
... 'cause 14 billion years is about as old as news can get. Literally.
Thank you, I'll be here all week, enjoy the sushi!
Actually, according to the link provided in the article (I'll have to give up my Slashdot license for that one: reading TFA^2!), the energy used to turn the building is rather small:
Wow, a new unit of measurement! So new, apparently, that Google hasn't added it: no conversion factor for 21 electric kettles in watts or 21 electric kettles in joules. Cutting edge tech, I love it!
I had to look twice, but sure enough, there are no links to Roland's ZDNet blog in this submission! No "But click here for more information", nothing but a single link to a source document. I don't think anyone can begrudge him the link in his name.
So perhaps Roland has reformed, or perhaps the Slashdot editors just got tired of our whining and broke out the scissors.
But I'm still going to tag the article as "pigpile", just because it's fun.
A quick whois at gandi.net shows that while yootle.com and yootle.net are taken, you can still get .org, .info, and several others.
.com and .net, as far as I can tell. You would think they'd have thought of that before announcing the name of their new online currency... checking Domain Tools' whois shows that the .com has been registered since 1999, and the .net since 2005. Neither is an active site.
That whois also reveals something else -- Yahoo! didn't get the
I remember reading about this guy (probably on the Slashdots) years ago, and I hoped that this would be one of those rare cases of someone who is rejected by the "scientific community" and then goes on to success. There are so many scientists out there that end up on dead-end roads (I'm looking at you, Cold Fusion), that it's nice to have a reminder that there's still reason to explore.
For proof that success is the best revenge, just check out the company's product list. They're making a killing by creating replacements for aromatic allergens.
I guess one thing that made me think he was on to something was his reaction to the scientific community's snub -- one response I recall likened a quantum-mechanical sense of smell to "food being processed in the stomach by nuclear reactions". He did NOT go around telling the world that the scientist cabal was out to get him, or that the perfume cartel was conspiring to suppress his work. He simply went about building a successful business by *using* his hypothesis to create and license useful, concrete products.
You know, I think this is why we have patents in the first place. Not so megacorporations can trademark "business practices" -- if I hear another insurance company or bank describe their latest gimmick with a "patent pending" disclaimer I'm gonna puke. It's so some little guy on the right track can take a risk and come out on top.
Although true, I don't see how banning a game is going to prevent future violence. You can't apply that "logic" to other areas:
1) Pretty females can have a stimulating effect on sex offenders (known and unknown), so will you ban women from walking in public?
You might be on to something. I'll have to see what our friends in Afghanistan -- oh, sorry, I mean Somalia -- think about that idea.
Given the numerous problems Reuters has had with its own Middle East reporting, what controls are they going to put in place to ensure that these Citizen Journalists aren't feeding them fake pictures?
Pretty simple, I suspect. They'll use the model that US radio stations have used since the dawn of the Top 40 list.
1. Station compiles list of songs that they will play
2. Station tells fans to call in their requests
3. Station ignores all requests for songs not on the list
4. Station puts requests for listed songs on the air as though they were spontaneous
5. Lather, Rinse, Repeat
6. Profit!
This deal could simply be a refinement of the model. To a large extent, the news stories are already determined. Not by some evil cabal -- I'm comfortable leaving my tinfoil hat at home -- but by whatever criteria they already use to determine what will be interesting to readers/viewers. The "innovation" is that they can use civilian-submitted pix and vids to flesh out the story. The story was already there, but now it has more truthiness. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
To give both radio stations and Reuters some credit, though... the faux-request model does give a station an idea of what new songs are percolating in the market, so sometimes the requests *do* matter. Similarly, Reuters & co can get an idea of what people are interested in reading about by looking for trends in the photo/video submissions.
But mostly, it's just going to be window-dressing to look like they're in on the hot new thing.
Sounds like all our Russian "friends" needed to do was to visit the local camera store's going-out-of-business sale.
Since it's the holiday, the usual rants against the article submitter, Roland Piquepaille, have been rather muted. To sum up:
* He gets a lot of articles posted to the front page, which makes the rest of us jealous.
* His articles tend toward pseudoscience, or at least towards the sort of flashy, headline-inspiring science that does little to advance human knowledge.
* He used to link to his personal blog, which really irritated people who'd love to have their own blogs get Slashdotted on a regular basis.
* He now links to his zdnet blog, which really irritates people who'd love to have their own blogs get picked up by a big corporate website.
* To top it all off, he's French, so all the right-wing nutters hate him automatically.
My irritation comes mostly from the second point -- and, I'll confess, the first as well. But as his defenders (and even the Slashdot editors) have noted, it's not like he's got some inside line to CmdrTaco's desk. He just finds himself at the right place at the right time.
Nonetheless, I recommend continuing to tag his articles with "pigpile", just so's we can keep up.
As a Dixie Chick fan, I'm not surprised you're happy to see Clear Channel retreating [if that is in fact what's happening here?].
You betcha. Not that it would help with the current album, which is stylistically all over the place (with the possible exception of Country). But "Travelin' Soldier" didn't deserve to get thrown off the charts in 2003 just because Bush and his buddies needed a straw man (woman?) to distract voters. (I may need to get one of your products after all...)
Oh, by the way, I would like to thank you and your fellow Canadians for supporting the Chicks' "Hey, we're still here!" tour! Their seven (count 'em!) kids won't go hungry after all.
Gaia hates him for some reason.
It's because he's throwing a monkey wrench into her attempts to return Earth to the dolphins, by getting rid of the annoying parasite that calls itself "humanity". Kinda like your body warms up to make it easier to kill the bad bacteria, ya know?
(Note: above post contains sarcasm. Don't quote it when I run for office, m'kay?)
Pff! What do they teach kids in school these days, eh? It's a frustum of a cone, aka a conical frustum, or just a frustum.
No idea what they teach these days... I'm 20 years out of high school, so any geometric omissions should be attributed not to lack of education, but to insufficient jellyware data storage.
(I wish I had known/remembered term, though, because it would have fit the joke perfectly! "... wax-lined cardboard inverted conical frustum of water, carbon dioxide...")
(Source: a previous press release about the case)
Foo: a greasy warm dead bird in a cardboard bucket
Bar: Yeah, I'll also need a side of mashed potatos, slaw and 4 biscuits please.
And an oversized wax-lined cardboard conic section of water, carbon dioxide, artificial flavor, and high-fructose corn syrup, please.
To go.
You'll learn how millions of dollars worth of Amigas were scrapped because of a cheeky message placed in the ROM by a disgruntled employee.
Some Googling brought me back to Slashdot, and a previous story involving the Amiga:
Woida, if you've got a way to make mylar balloons capable of reflecting gamma rays onto a single focal point, there are some guys in the DoE and the DoD who would like to talk to you, and they pay way better than NASA.
That's what makes me wonder why anyone took this guy seriously in the first place. Fortunately, NASA is only giving him a token amount:
He received $9000 to study the idea from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) in Atlanta, Georgia, US. [...] In his concept study, Woida will work out the structural details of the balloons and study how much extra light from the reflectors reaches the Martian surface.
Nine thousand bucks would buy a lot of ramen, but in this case, it's probably worth it to get the guy to quick knocking on the door at NIAC saying "Hey, look at my space mirror thingie... on MARS!!!!11!!one!`1~~"
The body's energy systems are all closely associated with physical systems - each of the chakras corresponds with a gland: thymus, pituitary, etc.
Whatever. The important thing is that the cessation of phantom pain -- a sensation produced by the mind without input from the body -- is *real*. If gently rubbing thin air makes the mind decide the pain isn't there any more, great -- but that probably wouldn't work for me. But stick my arm in a box and give me a 3D simulation of it, and I bet you anything I'll be cured right away. Apparently, it's all about immersion in the experience.
For some reason, I'm put in mind of putting a knife under the bed, to cut the pain of childbirth. Seems like we're back to the best parts of 5,000-year-old medicine, right down to the leeches.
Then again, maybe not.
I wasn't on the CONFIRM side -- I was doing tech support for Hilton and Budget's existing systems, which were being managed by AMR as part of the project. (Definitely one of the coolest jobs ever, BTW, even if it did mean waking up at 5am to talk to Bahrain and then staying until 6pm to troubleshoot problems in Brisbane.) But when it all came crashing down, I was close enough to hear the thud. From one of the links in the Google search above:
I still have some extremely unofficial documentation -- a satirical look at the unfolding and eventually unravelling project, written with the people and organizations represented by pseudonyms. For example, Mary Ott = Mariott. When Mariott pulled out of the project, character Mary Ott died in a tragic elevator accident, IIRC. They started out on an internal bulletin board that bore a surprising resemblance to what I'd later know as Usenet. They still exist in the form of printouts in my drawer... I'll have to transcribe them some day and put them online, now that all the players have moved on and the lawsuits have -- probably -- all been settled.
Instead of producing female characters who are actually interesting though, he manages to just take two-dimensional ones and give them some kind of special ability or extra attribute as a substitute for a personality. As such, his female characters really, really grate on the nerves of anyone who's ever had a conversation with a real human female.
I think you just pinpointed why I loved Heinlein as a teenager.
But now I have to wonder -- cause or effect? Did I like Heinlein because girls wouldn't talk to me, or would girls not talk to me because I subconciously expected them to all be naked hypersexual spacecraft navigators? (and what book was that, anyway?)
Back in the early '90s, I was working at American Airlines. Then as now, they were largely mainframe-oriented, though access was via PC emulation. A suggestion came across that we should look at this thing called SGML -- a way of digitizing our voluminous documentation so that it would be accessible from any platform. Mainframe, PC, Mac... anything.
I wasn't terribly impressed. Sure, it was cool to be able to add "hyper links" to other parts of the document, or to other documents, but the conversion process would be murder. And tables! What was all this TR TH TD mishmash, just to make a simple table?
My recommendation: Why doesn't everyone just use Microsoft Word format? It's available to everyone, and it's not like the internal format is going to change or anything!
Thank goodness I was working somewhere else by the time my first thoughts on SGML -- the precursor of HTML -- were proven to be utterly, completely Wrong.
from the and-most-of-it-is-porn dept.
Funny ha ha, but a lot of folks would accept that statement at face value. At this point, measured in Netcraft's metric of "number of web sites", it would be interesting to know what most of the Internet actually *is*. Blogs? Personal sites? Phishnets?
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on the hypothesis that the biggest category of "active web site" is the typosquatters.
I wish that mobile phone service providers would realize this. [...] No way am I going to pay $10 for a game I've not seen nor heard of before.
I'll second that emotion. I just got a phone from T-Mobile, and it has a demo version of something called Midnight Pool. You can play up until someone's cleared everything but the 8-ball. The full version costs $5.99, and I'm seriously considering it. But there's no way you'd have convinced me to spend six bucks on a mobile phone game that may or may not work. My wife has downloaded a bunch of games to her phone that absolutely suck on her screen (Pac-Man, in particular, is unplayable).
I just realized something, though. We're not the target demographic. She is. *sigh*
Just for reference, the parent posted the same thing in the previous discussion of neural-interface gaming. But I think he can be allowed the cut 'n paste in this case... give him more time to design the next generation of motorized wheelchair controllers so I can terrorize the kids in the yard in my old age.