Now me, I'd rather have 30,000,000 casual fans, only half of whom actually cancel their subscription, and half of them sign back up when I bring out the expansion 2 years later.
According to both Amazon and Play that's actually less than the recommended retail price (RRP) for the DVD, which is £24.99 (nearly $50).
Needless to say, both are doing massive discounts resulting in £12.99 ($20).
The high street price in the UK is incredibly variable at the moment. I've seen some fresh titles up there at £17.99, whilst other just as fresh titles are £12.99 or less even.
All that said, I agree that the price is too high. I reckon I would consider paying rental prices (£3-3.50 for recent releases) for a download only version. Thing is, if I'm buying the DVD, how much more would I pay to be able to download it straight away before having to wait for it in the post? Probably no more than about 50p or £1 at a stretch.
The scary thing is, people are happy to pay about 75% of high street prices for music from iTunes, and you don't even get a copy of the CD in the post later with that!
Is advertising as revenue earning really going to continue to be such a viable model. Even one that seems to be increasing?
Surely they don't seriously think anybody is going to sign up for something that interrupts calls or insists on you listening to an ad before placing a call. That's just the obvious hyperbole line to take.
So, how does advertising and phone calls work? You can put banners and popups on the software tools, but people will manage to block them. Besides, they like to sell Skype phones, so that doesn't help. Ads on the Skype phone? Only way I can see that working is if you replace the buttons with a touchscreen that shows ads when you're not actually dialing. Though that again still fails when you consider the trend towards cradle free wireless phones.
Anyone care to conjecture, seriously, just how advertising can fund phone calls?
It seems this company (IIIR) thought of a "great" plan to make money uh?
This company had the feature (gmail) in their product before Google came along with their free web mail offering. As soon as Google came along they sorted out actual registration of it as a trademark. They appear to have been lax in registering something they were obviously using is all.
Now, in the bestest of all possible best worlds, they should have had 'gmail' trademarked from the first time they used it. However, that doesn't stop the fact that they were using it before Google, and that Google's use does confuse things for their (current and potential) customers.
who wanted an "exorbitant quantity of money" for the name
Now, to me, the figure quoted for IIIR to give up gmail to Google sounds far higher than can really be justified and certainly smacks of money grabbing. However, my reading of the BBC article suggests it would be fair for Google to come to some agreement as they are the second man in the game in this particular case. That is, they're in the right... they just got greedy.
I think we can safely say that for an off the shelf PC there isn't much to chose from between installing the latest linux or the latest Windows.
So, lets look at after that.
Desktop Windows - just the one Linux - do I go KDE or Gnome? (or even something else)
Apps Windows - none Linux - ooh, a bunch of free apps... that I don't even need
Available Apps Windows - yup, you guess it, Office Linux - erm, a bunch of best effort attempts to compete with MS Office
On every box I've had, Office type applications feel about twice as fast on Windows to their Linux equivalent.
Really, I love linux (well, unix in general actually), but there's too much to chose from and even the best doesn't feel as fast/good as the MS offering. With the single exception of web browsing and email (although linux certainly lags behind in compatibility with flash/real/etc.) everything I want to do as a user (i.e. not a sysadmin/developer) is better on Windows - word processing, spreadsheets, gaming.
A good MMOG would use the machines of the players to distribute the load of persistence.
Distributing the persistence load amongst client machines is all well and good. The trouble is that most of the people playing these games are really not going to want to leave their machines on all the time, so bang goes your persistence.
Building the world should be part of the game!
Again, open to debate. This can work, I've played muds. But with big commerical games most people don't want to world build, and a lot that do, can't. And how do you manage this? Better to have the core of developers who are actually skilled in world design, working together to maintain the game balance.
If you want user-written distributed persistence, look at Never Winter Nights. It gives you this, including some controls to maintain game balance between different people's creations.
With the scroll wheel you can scroll the page without moving your hand, just rolling your finger over the scroll wheel. This makes browsing, especially long pages like/. threads, incredibly easy and comfortable.
I've yet to find a browser where the click and drag scroll method isn't horrendously clunky. For a start you have to do something to stop it scrolling again. And its either too fast or too slow.
I've also seen the wheel scroll horizontally in some applications when there is just a horizontal bar and no vertical.
Isn't this a tad specific? Wouldn't a more suitable question be "What laptop should I go for?".
Whatever happened to working out what you were after and then seeing who provided it best (price, support, quality)?
Ooooh, look at that, it's got bells & whistles. I was thinking of getting one of them. Okay I don't really need the bells, and the whistles will only come in useful once in a blue moon, but man, it's groovy!
Should peer-to-peer file sharing be legal or not on the Internet? Should companies like Google and Yahoo be held legally responsible for the content that they index?
Surely these are two different issues...
File Sharing: No-one is trying to make file sharing illegal. Only saying that illegal file sharing should be stopped. Should it be legal to purchase a CD, make an MP3 from this and then give this away to anybody? Not without permission of the copyright holder. The copyright holder holds the rights to any copies. You have purchased your copy from them so thats okay. You cannot give/sell copies without permission though.
Yes, the genie is out now, and banning Napster will do no good, and Napster seems to increase sales. This still doesn't stop the trading of copyright MP3 being copyright theft.
Accountable Linking: Automated linking cannot be held accountable. Any categorisation or reviewing of indexed databases however should pick up on links to illegal material and remove that from the index. Similarily, links to mature content should be highlighted.
IANAL but this all seems fairly bloomin' crystal clear to me!
Yup, a context diff of the full html tree grows to over 8 meg. However, doing a diff of the text file found therein seems legible enough and is only a mere 300 odd K. If you want, find it here. (this is from 4.1.4 to 4.2.0).
a main dns server for every tld and the net would slow to a halt with all the traffick going on trying to resolve hostnames to ip adresses.
Every hostname already gets resolved to ip address surely. There's already tons of DNS packets (one day I'll work out what's making my NT box go for wizards.com every time I log in).
The annoying thing currently is how even the root domains are abused. What domain name do I want for my own personal site? I'm not a commercial company (.com /.co.uk), I'm not an oragnisation (.org), I'm not academic (.edu /.ac.uk) and I'm not network related (.net).
I know that here in the UK at least we now have the idea of a 'personal' phone number, and I 'spose that a mobile number is effectively going to be mine and unchanged for the duration, so what should I have for my own personal net presence (that's more memorable than a string of numbers). Maybe I should share with all those unrelated people who happen to have the same surname, or should I have to be part of some on-line community (and then what happens when that community goes bust?).
Well, I've never heard Imperial measurements referred to as English before. Very confusing, seeing as here in England (or more accurately the UK) we've thrown at least some of the old measurements out (officially).
Gallons are now litres (let's just not get into the different sizes of European vs American gallons). Given that, we still talk about miles per gallon.
Packaged foodstuffs are now labelled with (kilo)grams. Milk is still pints, as is beer (although that keeps getting threatened by Europe).
Maybe using kilometres rather than miles, and saying I'm 1.?? metres tall rather than just shy of 6 foot might make sense, but in the end it's what you're used to. Heck I measure my weight in stones, and I've no idea how that converts into kilos/pounds whatever! The UK is (un)fortunately becoming European, that doesn't mean we won't at least try and stick to our mix 'n match usage of units.
Farenheight is based on 100 being about the human body temp? If I ran a temp of 100 I'd be worried!
And given that... how did Linux perform? The out-of-box experience seems to have failed.
I think in this case Linux actually passed extremely well. This guy has done a complete install of Linux, obviously got the desktop working to the extent of browsing the filesystem and CD in the GUI.
It's CIV:CTP that's failed if anything. I bet if their install had been called setup instead there would have been no problem.
I've seen plenty of software that's difficult to install under Win, and most that's impossible to uninstall. Quite often with NT some stuff can't be installed without administrator perms because obviously all DLL's have to go in the system directory.
Slashdot Mirror
The name is Farscape and yes, Frell is from there.
Also I think it is Goram, not Gorrum, from Firefly.
Now me, I'd rather have 30,000,000 casual fans, only half of whom actually cancel their subscription, and half of them sign back up when I bring out the expansion 2 years later.
According to both Amazon and Play that's actually less than the recommended retail price (RRP) for the DVD, which is £24.99 (nearly $50).
Needless to say, both are doing massive discounts resulting in £12.99 ($20).
The high street price in the UK is incredibly variable at the moment. I've seen some fresh titles up there at £17.99, whilst other just as fresh titles are £12.99 or less even.
All that said, I agree that the price is too high. I reckon I would consider paying rental prices (£3-3.50 for recent releases) for a download only version. Thing is, if I'm buying the DVD, how much more would I pay to be able to download it straight away before having to wait for it in the post? Probably no more than about 50p or £1 at a stretch.
The scary thing is, people are happy to pay about 75% of high street prices for music from iTunes, and you don't even get a copy of the CD in the post later with that!
In Soviet Russia, 911 calls you!
Is advertising as revenue earning really going to continue to be such a viable model. Even one that seems to be increasing?
Surely they don't seriously think anybody is going to sign up for something that interrupts calls or insists on you listening to an ad before placing a call. That's just the obvious hyperbole line to take.
So, how does advertising and phone calls work? You can put banners and popups on the software tools, but people will manage to block them. Besides, they like to sell Skype phones, so that doesn't help. Ads on the Skype phone? Only way I can see that working is if you replace the buttons with a touchscreen that shows ads when you're not actually dialing. Though that again still fails when you consider the trend towards cradle free wireless phones.
Anyone care to conjecture, seriously, just how advertising can fund phone calls?
It seems this company (IIIR) thought of a "great" plan to make money uh?
... they just got greedy.
This company had the feature (gmail) in their product before Google came along with their free web mail offering. As soon as Google came along they sorted out actual registration of it as a trademark. They appear to have been lax in registering something they were obviously using is all.
Now, in the bestest of all possible best worlds, they should have had 'gmail' trademarked from the first time they used it. However, that doesn't stop the fact that they were using it before Google, and that Google's use does confuse things for their (current and potential) customers.
who wanted an "exorbitant quantity of money" for the name
Now, to me, the figure quoted for IIIR to give up gmail to Google sounds far higher than can really be justified and certainly smacks of money grabbing. However, my reading of the BBC article suggests it would be fair for Google to come to some agreement as they are the second man in the game in this particular case. That is, they're in the right
Crivvens, you aren't suggesting that their orbit is decaying are you?
I think we can safely say that for an off the shelf PC there isn't much to chose from between installing the latest linux or the latest Windows.
... that I don't even need
So, lets look at after that.
Desktop
Windows - just the one
Linux - do I go KDE or Gnome? (or even something else)
Apps
Windows - none
Linux - ooh, a bunch of free apps
Available Apps
Windows - yup, you guess it, Office
Linux - erm, a bunch of best effort attempts to compete with MS Office
On every box I've had, Office type applications feel about twice as fast on Windows to their Linux equivalent.
Really, I love linux (well, unix in general actually), but there's too much to chose from and even the best doesn't feel as fast/good as the MS offering. With the single exception of web browsing and email (although linux certainly lags behind in compatibility with flash/real/etc.) everything I want to do as a user (i.e. not a sysadmin/developer) is better on Windows - word processing, spreadsheets, gaming.
At least if you're using Google you'll be able to continue by using their cache.
KANEDAAAAAA!
A good MMOG would use the machines of the players to distribute the load of persistence.
Distributing the persistence load amongst client machines is all well and good. The trouble is that most of the people playing these games are really not going to want to leave their machines on all the time, so bang goes your persistence.
Building the world should be part of the game!
Again, open to debate. This can work, I've played muds. But with big commerical games most people don't want to world build, and a lot that do, can't. And how do you manage this? Better to have the core of developers who are actually skilled in world design, working together to maintain the game balance.
If you want user-written distributed persistence, look at Never Winter Nights. It gives you this, including some controls to maintain game balance between different people's creations.
With the scroll wheel you can scroll the page without moving your hand, just rolling your finger over the scroll wheel. This makes browsing, especially long pages like /. threads, incredibly easy and comfortable.
I've yet to find a browser where the click and drag scroll method isn't horrendously clunky. For a start you have to do something to stop it scrolling again. And its either too fast or too slow.
I've also seen the wheel scroll horizontally in some applications when there is just a horizontal bar and no vertical.
Isn't this a tad specific? Wouldn't a more suitable question be "What laptop should I go for?".
Whatever happened to working out what you were after and then seeing who provided it best (price, support, quality)?
Ooooh, look at that, it's got bells & whistles. I was thinking of getting one of them. Okay I don't really need the bells, and the whistles will only come in useful once in a blue moon, but man, it's groovy!
Sigh.
Surely these are two different issues...
File Sharing:
No-one is trying to make file sharing illegal. Only saying that illegal file sharing should be stopped. Should it be legal to purchase a CD, make an MP3 from this and then give this away to anybody? Not without permission of the copyright holder. The copyright holder holds the rights to any copies. You have purchased your copy from them so thats okay. You cannot give/sell copies without permission though.
Yes, the genie is out now, and banning Napster will do no good, and Napster seems to increase sales. This still doesn't stop the trading of copyright MP3 being copyright theft.
Accountable Linking:
Automated linking cannot be held accountable. Any categorisation or reviewing of indexed databases however should pick up on links to illegal material and remove that from the index. Similarily, links to mature content should be highlighted.
IANAL but this all seems fairly bloomin' crystal clear to me!
Yup, a context diff of the full html tree grows to over 8 meg. However, doing a diff of the text file found therein seems legible enough and is only a mere 300 odd K. If you want, find it here. (this is from 4.1.4 to 4.2.0).
Every hostname already gets resolved to ip address surely. There's already tons of DNS packets (one day I'll work out what's making my NT box go for wizards.com every time I log in).
The annoying thing currently is how even the root domains are abused. What domain name do I want for my own personal site? I'm not a commercial company (.com / .co.uk), I'm not an oragnisation (.org), I'm not academic (.edu / .ac.uk) and I'm not network related (.net).
I know that here in the UK at least we now have the idea of a 'personal' phone number, and I 'spose that a mobile number is effectively going to be mine and unchanged for the duration, so what should I have for my own personal net presence (that's more memorable than a string of numbers). Maybe I should share with all those unrelated people who happen to have the same surname, or should I have to be part of some on-line community (and then what happens when that community goes bust?).
Erm, well that's got me thinking at least.
Gallons are now litres (let's just not get into the different sizes of European vs American gallons). Given that, we still talk about miles per gallon.
Packaged foodstuffs are now labelled with (kilo)grams. Milk is still pints, as is beer (although that keeps getting threatened by Europe).
Maybe using kilometres rather than miles, and saying I'm 1.?? metres tall rather than just shy of 6 foot might make sense, but in the end it's what you're used to. Heck I measure my weight in stones, and I've no idea how that converts into kilos/pounds whatever! The UK is (un)fortunately becoming European, that doesn't mean we won't at least try and stick to our mix 'n match usage of units.
Farenheight is based on 100 being about the human body temp? If I ran a temp of 100 I'd be worried!
Anyway, how big _is_ a loaf of bread?
I think in this case Linux actually passed extremely well. This guy has done a complete install of Linux, obviously got the desktop working to the extent of browsing the filesystem and CD in the GUI.
It's CIV:CTP that's failed if anything. I bet if their install had been called setup instead there would have been no problem.
I've seen plenty of software that's difficult to install under Win, and most that's impossible to uninstall. Quite often with NT some stuff can't be installed without administrator perms because obviously all DLL's have to go in the system directory.