I probably would have cut the cord a long time ago, but every time I start looking at cell phone plans, I just get mad. Especially with the various taxes that are always listed separately. Look, I don't care if you have to pay this tax, that fee, your company's hydro bill or for your CEO's lunches, just tell me what the bloody thing costs.
Besides, don't DSL companies still charge you the $10 or so for a landline?
Anyone care to suggest a cell phone provider in Toronto that won't get my blood pressure up (too much?:p)
Serious venture investors want to see startups that have already bootstrapped a significant amount of funding (at least six if not seven figures), have PhDs onboard, etc. That's exactly the point of YCombinator - to get your startup to the stage where serious investors will even look at you.
The biggest draw is not the money, it's the connections, the advice, the hype and recognition you get for being a YCombinator grad, and the investor meetings they set up for you.
Precisely because the barrier to entry is so low on the web, getting people to take your idea seriously can be very valuable. I believe one of Paul Graham's arguments in favour of YCombinator is - which would you rather do, keep the 2-10% of a company that has few chances of succeeding, or give away 2-10% of a company with higher chances of success?
Most of the YCombinator projects are run by people in their mid-20s - not exactly experienced at running a business, and this is the point in life where connections and advice can be more valuable than standard of living.
Is it worth it for everyone? If you already have capital, connections, and a rock-solid business plan, no way. If you have a great idea and lots of energy, but you're not actually sure how to make it work, then it might be.
And yes, my co-founder for "the next digg.com or whatever web-two-point-oh site is hot this week" (see my signature) flew down to San Francisco about a month ago to pitch our site to Paul Graham & co. for this year's summer YCombinator. And no, we didn't get it (we weren't expecting to:p). It was a valuable experience nonetheless, we're working on something a bit more original now:p
We're all copyright owners of some sort, so we all should have access Don't be silly. Only those who can afford expensive lawyers and multi-million dollar lawsuits are copyright owners. The rest of us are either consumers or pirates.
(and yeah, this worked most of the time, although today the technique is generally frown upon, as it is considered to be of questionable ethical judgement) Yeah, now it's limited to corporate takeovers:p
"How can I get people to read my blog... I know, I'll pick an extreme opinion that few people actually hold, combine it with a more popular but unrelated opinion, and write a long argument to shoot the whole thing down as self-contradictory."
Yeah, I was going for funny, not insightful... guess I should've put a smiley in or something.
If the competitors are smart, they obviously won't use any of the code... but they now have a handy reference guide to see how they can solve problems they're likely to run up against (while presumably writing an MMORPG). Definitely a bummer, but I still can't see the $1 billion figure - especially since, as someone already pointed out, so much of the effort in an MMORPG is spent on creating the content. I remember seeing a graph somewhere with the costs involved in a game - IIRC, programming was about 30%, art about 30%, and the remaining 40% was "overhead" like marketing, management, legal, accounting, distribution. The ratios are likely different for an MMORPG - but still, there's no way you can go from "code leaked" to "100% income loss".
From the article it sounds like they have bigger problems, anyway:
According to police and industry insiders, the game company has suffered from an internal management problem since a senior game developer was fired for poor leadership skills. But the sacking only led to greater problems for the company, since most of developer's 90-member team quit with their chief.
It's gotta suck only having one copy of the code. Now they gotta write it again from scratch, or hope the other company gives it back. They should've made backups.
3) The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.
It made me think of all the "evil" companies that see breaking the law (and the associated fines or sanctions) as just the cost of doing business. On the other hand, a "good" company that basically says, "we will do no evil... unless we're breaking the law by doing good".
I always thought E3 was for the press, not for the general public (yes, anyone can get in if they try hard enough, but that's not the point).
Showing your product to 4000 journalists (or bloggers or online comic authors I guess) is very different from showing your product to 4000 random gamers. My guess is companies go hoping their game will receive some of the buzz in the E3 coverage on gaming sites and magazines, and not for the E3 attendants themselves.
There are many things that make me sick about this story, and others like it (the fact that there are "others like it" is one of the things that make me sick).
Please, DO NOT add to it with talks of "worst" or not worst, of "top three", and of "body counts". This ISN'T a game. There is no high score. There's no achievement or rank involved.
This kind of talk always bothers me. I guess it's natural to try to categorize and make sense of it - but it even bothers me for natural events like earthquakes or floods. The difference is, natural events don't care one way or another.
I guess we'll never know the shooter's motivation. But is it that far-fetched to assume that the immense amount of attention previous shootings got played at least SOME role in his mind? That the temptation of immortal infamy made him choose THIS way to go, rather than another?
Anything where it's not trivial to break up the problem space into equal chunks, work on them separately, and put them back together at the end.
One example - which I run into at work all the time: parsing large HTML (or XML, same thing really) files. Web browsers are multithreaded in the sense that they use threads for connections to the server to get different files; it's still (as far as I know) single-threaded per file as far as parsing is concerned.
Another example - games. There's obvious potential for multithreading - one thread to maintain the gameworld state, another for AI, another for physics, another to push polygons to the GPU... But since these are different tasks, rather than one task that's being computed in parallel, it's very unlikely that the threads are going to be using the CPU cores (or multiple CPUs) equally - which sounds like the whole point of what Intel is doing.
Of course, I am not an expert in any of these fields, so (factual) corrections are welcome:p
It seems like a tacit admission from Intel that multi-threaded apps haven't caught up with the availability of multi-core CPUs.
Or maybe Intel, unlike the story submitter, knows that many apps simply do not lend themselves to multithreading and parallelism. It's not about "catching up".
Multi-core for multithreaded apps? Check. Trying to get each core as fast as possible for when it's only used by one single-threaded app? Check.
Schools should absolutely block Wikipedia and sites like Wikipedia.
In fact, schools should do one better. They should start by blocking ALL WEB SITES. Next, they should whitelist and allow only sites on which ALL the information has been verified as 100% accurate by the school staff.
This information checking should be done independently by every school throughout the nation. To avoid bias by the teachers for their favourite subjects, the fact checking should only be done by IT staff.
Further, the results of fact checking shall be collected in a centralized, proprietary database, contracted to the highest bidder. Sites shall only be added to the whitelist once they have been unanimously approved by ALL the schools.
To avoid changes to the verified content, a parallel "intranet" system shall be created with static copies of the verified pages, and only these shall be accessible by students.
So will we see another try from Microsoft to beat Apple's iPod or it will be another vain attempt from the Redmond guys.
Just because you don't put a question mark at the end of your badly phrased attempt to stir up the flames doesn't mean it's any less of an annoying and pointless question.
PLEASE stop with the inane, pointless, content-free rhetorical questions at the end of submissions. They're annoying, biased, and make Slashdot look like amateur hour. The conversations would flow just as well, if not better, without the obvious "here's what you should think about this story" cues. Too bad the editors keep falling for them.
Slashdot Mirror
I probably would have cut the cord a long time ago, but every time I start looking at cell phone plans, I just get mad. Especially with the various taxes that are always listed separately. Look, I don't care if you have to pay this tax, that fee, your company's hydro bill or for your CEO's lunches, just tell me what the bloody thing costs.
:p)
Besides, don't DSL companies still charge you the $10 or so for a landline?
Anyone care to suggest a cell phone provider in Toronto that won't get my blood pressure up (too much?
The biggest draw is not the money, it's the connections, the advice, the hype and recognition you get for being a YCombinator grad, and the investor meetings they set up for you.
Precisely because the barrier to entry is so low on the web, getting people to take your idea seriously can be very valuable. I believe one of Paul Graham's arguments in favour of YCombinator is - which would you rather do, keep the 2-10% of a company that has few chances of succeeding, or give away 2-10% of a company with higher chances of success?
Most of the YCombinator projects are run by people in their mid-20s - not exactly experienced at running a business, and this is the point in life where connections and advice can be more valuable than standard of living.
Is it worth it for everyone? If you already have capital, connections, and a rock-solid business plan, no way. If you have a great idea and lots of energy, but you're not actually sure how to make it work, then it might be.
And yes, my co-founder for "the next digg.com or whatever web-two-point-oh site is hot this week" (see my signature) flew down to San Francisco about a month ago to pitch our site to Paul Graham & co. for this year's summer YCombinator. And no, we didn't get it (we weren't expecting to
You're wrong. Non-living objects HATE IT when they're anthropomorphized.
Hey, it worked for Digg!
Yes, but would you then put such a device in a coin with a BRIGHT RED MARK in the middle before trying to pass it off as a harmless coin?
You could further disguise it by adding some LEDs and wires...
"How can I get people to read my blog... I know, I'll pick an extreme opinion that few people actually hold, combine it with a more popular but unrelated opinion, and write a long argument to shoot the whole thing down as self-contradictory."
Yes, mod me down -1 cynical.
He's an unemployed aerospace engineer
:p)
Is there any other kind?
*ducks*
(I get to say that, a good friend of mine is an unemployed aerospace engineer
I've been watching this happening on digg today (first time I've even really read digg in a long time, coincidentally :p)
7 .png ... and the digg story got deleted while I was typing this post. Fun fun.
;)
I saw one story with the key go from 200 to over 800 "diggs" in something like 20 minutes, then it got deleted.
In about the same time, this story, which links to this blog got up to 2-300 "diggs", then was removed from the front page.
My favourite submission so far was this, which linked to this image: http://img91.imageshack.us/img91/3967/gitshddvdkb
I think I'll stick with Slashdot
Yeah, I was going for funny, not insightful... guess I should've put a smiley in or something.
If the competitors are smart, they obviously won't use any of the code... but they now have a handy reference guide to see how they can solve problems they're likely to run up against (while presumably writing an MMORPG). Definitely a bummer, but I still can't see the $1 billion figure - especially since, as someone already pointed out, so much of the effort in an MMORPG is spent on creating the content. I remember seeing a graph somewhere with the costs involved in a game - IIRC, programming was about 30%, art about 30%, and the remaining 40% was "overhead" like marketing, management, legal, accounting, distribution. The ratios are likely different for an MMORPG - but still, there's no way you can go from "code leaked" to "100% income loss".
From the article it sounds like they have bigger problems, anyway:
According to police and industry insiders, the game company has suffered from an internal management problem since a senior game developer was fired for poor leadership skills.
But the sacking only led to greater problems for the company, since most of developer's 90-member team quit with their chief.
They lost over $1 billion because of the theft?
It's gotta suck only having one copy of the code. Now they gotta write it again from scratch, or hope the other company gives it back. They should've made backups.
Wait, what?
Summary of the article:
"I have devised a marvellous way to stop Digg-cheating, which this article summary is too short to contain."
(aka: if it's so simple, why does it take 19361 more bytes to explain it?)
...because good is dumb.
This line made me think:
3) The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.
It made me think of all the "evil" companies that see breaking the law (and the associated fines or sanctions) as just the cost of doing business. On the other hand, a "good" company that basically says, "we will do no evil... unless we're breaking the law by doing good".
However, the company leasing you the T1 line (usually the phone company) guarantees that the line will be available to something crazy like 7 nines.
Do they though? I know my company had a tough time getting providers to sign any kind of SLA for ANY number of 9s.
I'm honestly asking, because I'm not involved in any of this stuff. What kind of guarantees does a T1 usually come with?
I dunno... it can get scarier.
:p
& svnum=10&um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozil la:en-US:official&hs=Wc4&start=0&sa=N
Err... I was gonna link to a few images, but forget it. Too many to choose from
http://images.google.ca/images?q=stallman&ndsp=20
I always thought E3 was for the press, not for the general public (yes, anyone can get in if they try hard enough, but that's not the point).
Showing your product to 4000 journalists (or bloggers or online comic authors I guess) is very different from showing your product to 4000 random gamers. My guess is companies go hoping their game will receive some of the buzz in the E3 coverage on gaming sites and magazines, and not for the E3 attendants themselves.
12. I am feeling lucky!
:p
I KNEW GoogleOS was coming!
There are many things that make me sick about this story, and others like it (the fact that there are "others like it" is one of the things that make me sick).
Please, DO NOT add to it with talks of "worst" or not worst, of "top three", and of "body counts". This ISN'T a game. There is no high score. There's no achievement or rank involved.
This kind of talk always bothers me. I guess it's natural to try to categorize and make sense of it - but it even bothers me for natural events like earthquakes or floods. The difference is, natural events don't care one way or another.
I guess we'll never know the shooter's motivation. But is it that far-fetched to assume that the immense amount of attention previous shootings got played at least SOME role in his mind? That the temptation of immortal infamy made him choose THIS way to go, rather than another?
And now we put him in a "top 3"?
Anything where it's not trivial to break up the problem space into equal chunks, work on them separately, and put them back together at the end.
:p
One example - which I run into at work all the time: parsing large HTML (or XML, same thing really) files. Web browsers are multithreaded in the sense that they use threads for connections to the server to get different files; it's still (as far as I know) single-threaded per file as far as parsing is concerned.
Another example - games. There's obvious potential for multithreading - one thread to maintain the gameworld state, another for AI, another for physics, another to push polygons to the GPU... But since these are different tasks, rather than one task that's being computed in parallel, it's very unlikely that the threads are going to be using the CPU cores (or multiple CPUs) equally - which sounds like the whole point of what Intel is doing.
Of course, I am not an expert in any of these fields, so (factual) corrections are welcome
It seems like a tacit admission from Intel that multi-threaded apps haven't caught up with the availability of multi-core CPUs.
Or maybe Intel, unlike the story submitter, knows that many apps simply do not lend themselves to multithreading and parallelism. It's not about "catching up".
Multi-core for multithreaded apps? Check.
Trying to get each core as fast as possible for when it's only used by one single-threaded app? Check.
Makes sense to me.
Glad someone picked up on the logical follow-up ;)
Schools should absolutely block Wikipedia and sites like Wikipedia.
In fact, schools should do one better. They should start by blocking ALL WEB SITES. Next, they should whitelist and allow only sites on which ALL the information has been verified as 100% accurate by the school staff.
This information checking should be done independently by every school throughout the nation. To avoid bias by the teachers for their favourite subjects, the fact checking should only be done by IT staff.
Further, the results of fact checking shall be collected in a centralized, proprietary database, contracted to the highest bidder. Sites shall only be added to the whitelist once they have been unanimously approved by ALL the schools.
To avoid changes to the verified content, a parallel "intranet" system shall be created with static copies of the verified pages, and only these shall be accessible by students.
Damn, I should be a school board policymaker!
So will we see another try from Microsoft to beat Apple's iPod or it will be another vain attempt from the Redmond guys.
Just because you don't put a question mark at the end of your badly phrased attempt to stir up the flames doesn't mean it's any less of an annoying and pointless question.
PLEASE stop with the inane, pointless, content-free rhetorical questions at the end of submissions. They're annoying, biased, and make Slashdot look like amateur hour. The conversations would flow just as well, if not better, without the obvious "here's what you should think about this story" cues. Too bad the editors keep falling for them.
Yep. Nothing like running a full-fledged 3D app on the side to chat while I work.