Absolutely subscription payers will be game buyers. But how many potential game buyers is Microsoft turning away by charging for live access? If I have a store where I charge people money to enter, I'm going to sell a lot less merchandise than if I opened up the store to all who want to browse.
Gets people to pick up the hardware. Also, if people can get on for free, it's a lot more likely that they'll stick around and maybe buy a few classic games.
Apparently a lot of the 'gibberish' spam not trying to sell you anything is just there to try to untrain the spam filters so the next one that does try to sell you something might slip through. Or it negates the spam filters' effectiveness so much that people have to start looking in their spam filters for actual messages.
Personally, I think there's a lot less of a greed factor right now than there is an 'us vs' them' factor. I really think it's just getting to be an elaborate game for these spammers now - all they're trying to do is thwart the filters, and they've forgotten all about trying to dupe people out their money.
Best answer I've seen yet. You've got experience, even if it's minimal. That's worth more than a lot of college degrees. Get into a company with a healthy IT department (at any position) and keep expressing your interest in the IT department, and developing your skills. Do relevant night school courses. Eventually you'll get to IT. And you can always keep learning throughout your life.
Absolutely agreed. I often watch commercials that are interesting or that have a relevant message to me.
Why don't they instaed focus on making the TV experience more like the Internet, where ads at least try to be relevant to you, the viewer. If my cable box knew how old I was and what gender I was, and what my buying habits and income level was, it could show me ads that were relevant to me. I know that sounds awful big-brother-ish, but there are ways of doing it anonymously so that no one has access to my personal info. And I would gladly give up that small bit of privacy not to have to watch tampon ads anymore.
perhaps they could get the message that if I'd wanted to install X, I would have. If I'm installing a player so you can make massive profits selling people the encoder, I shouldn't have to look at ads as well.
I've already started to give them the message by uninstalling Adobe reader and installing the FoxIt PDF Reader.
It's a small download, doesn't come bundled with anything, doesn't ask you to update EVERY time you open it, and has no splash screen. It just opens a PDF and displays it - really, really fast. I'm surprised no one else has linked to it in these comments yet.
So now, with Foxit, PDF Creator, and GIMP, I'm now pretty much Adobe free, so I don't have to worry about these stupid bundled apps and constant updates.
Any OS alternatives to Shockwave?
I think the big thing holding Ask back is the breadth of the search results, which Google is still king of.
Because I'm a narcissist, I tried a quick search for my play "Napoleon Vs. the Turk" on Ask.com, and got nothing related to it, even though it's mentioned on my blog, on digg, the Toronto Fringe webstie, and even has it its own homepage. Google returned all of those as top results.
I don't care about web page previews all that much, what I really care about is having as many search results as possible being considered, and ask looks like it's just not giving me that.
A collaborative workspace for M$ office was pretty well bagged as being generally pointless, so why would a web based one be any different. As for commercial use, threats to business secrets would pretty much put it out of the question. As for indivdual use, current portabel USB media solve that. A product with very limited application from a company struggling for new markets
I've been using Writely for the past little while to work on my play, and I've found it fantastic. I can jump onto any computer with a net connection and work on the most recent version. There's no way I'd trust having the one 'true' copy of the play on a USB key. First, it costs money, if not a lot. Second, the data is possibly corruptible due to wear and tear damage. Third, I'm so absentminded, I might lose it, or even more likely, forget to bring it out with me.
As for the collaborative nature... absolutely essential as well. I have my play notes which are up there as well, which the director can add to whenever he wants, and I'll see updates. Same goes for budget. We have a basic budget up on Writely, which we can tweak at any time, as expenses become more or less expensive as we though. And my director also knows that the most current version of the script will always be at one location - no e-mailing necessary.
I don't know if I had different unsyncrhonize term papers all over the place, but I can totally see his point that it's great to have an online document when working on term papers in university. When I was in school, I had no laptop, so I had one computer at home. If I wanted to work on it somewhere else, I'd have to email it to myself. Then I'd work on that and email it back to myself. Sure, I just always check the most recent email for the most recent copy, but this just makes so much more sense. And imagine groupwork, like a lab write-up or something. Everyone can just jump in and edit at the same time, or add stuff whenever they want to, and it's all centralized. Really, it's just huge.
Unfortunately.... still a browswer without a way of easily installing Adblock! Opera's great, but I'll never switch until I can easily implement Adblock.
I'll probably get mauled here for saying this, but I've found Microsoft Anti-Spyware to be more effective than either Ad-Aware or Search and Destroy - and the UI is about a hundred times better as well.
I think they used to allow usernames that differed in dots only as well. This happened to me, where I sent someone an email, but someone else got it, and their address differed only by a dot. Except that I know that I had the address correct (it was added when I invited him) so they must have allowed usernames differing by dots at one point. They only option I thought of is is my friend's account expired...
Contact me (tommertron at the mail service in question) if you want to collaborate on an answer. Maybe we could get a blog post resolving this up somewhere.
Hope this helps you in your quest for the featureless talk client.
Thanks for the info. Good to know the protocol is open enough to allow developers to make their own clients. And hey, don't get me wrong - I like features. File transfer would be great. Buddy icons, flashing graphics, etc, are all fine, as options - just let me see a clean screen that makes it easy to find what I'm looking for.
I hope that if they add more features, like buddy icons, etc, that they let me disable them all. One of the things I like about Google Talk vs. MSN is how clean and easy it is to navigate. It's so hard to make sense of the contacts on my MSN list, with their various different colours, icons, flashing dancing pigs, etc.
And I really hope they don't let people change their display name (or at least let me keep theirs static.) Cute sayings are what comments are for - your display name should tell me who the hell you are.
Why? Writers for some of my favourite newspapers and magazines get paid to submit their stories, and because the organizations will only pay good writers, we tend to get better stories.
Getting a personal benefit from posting on/. means that more people will want to submit - and the editors will have more stories to pick from. If the stories are good, who cares what the person's motivations are?
Even if you're not getting direct benefit in the form off traffic to a site, most people are getting some personal benefit from posting, aren't they? I've had a few stories accepted, and all I got was a bunch of spam from stupidly linking to my email address, but the benefit I got was knowing that thousands of people were reading something that I wrote. That's a personal benefit, too, isn't it? Same goes for Wikipedia - where I'm not even credited.
Personal benefit, whatever it is, increases the pool of submitted stories, and makes the final content better.
Remember how Google pays their bills? Right, adds. If you aren't looking at their adds (and possibly clicking them from time to time) they are losing money.
Full disclosure: I'm also a big Google fanboy. So... while I use adblock, I don't block Google ads. That's beacause I believe in the ads Google serves. They're non-intrusive, and at least strive to be relevant to what I'm looking at.
It's the same how now that I have a DVR, I skip through the commercials, BUT, if I happen to see one that looks interesting, or is something that I'm interested in, I actually play and watch the commercial.
Re:Lets hope they open source it
on
Google to Buy Opera?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Once you get used to it, you just can't go back.
I almost got used to Opera a few months ago, then I realized it didn't have extensions. Which means no adblock. Whoops. So it was back to Firefox for me.
WIth so many digital cable boxes out there, monitoring what exactly what people watch should be so much easier now. Neilsen has such a small sample that I'm sure it's very inaccurate. They're going more for an accurate demo-mix than raw numbers. If the cable company got into the tracking business, they'd make a lot of money, and I'm convinced it would help good shows thrive. People are watching Arrested Development, we just don't know about.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely subscription payers will be game buyers. But how many potential game buyers is Microsoft turning away by charging for live access? If I have a store where I charge people money to enter, I'm going to sell a lot less merchandise than if I opened up the store to all who want to browse.
Gets people to pick up the hardware. Also, if people can get on for free, it's a lot more likely that they'll stick around and maybe buy a few classic games.
Good theory. My reply theorized kind of the same thing. If I could use my mod points now, I'd mod you up!
Apparently a lot of the 'gibberish' spam not trying to sell you anything is just there to try to untrain the spam filters so the next one that does try to sell you something might slip through. Or it negates the spam filters' effectiveness so much that people have to start looking in their spam filters for actual messages.
Personally, I think there's a lot less of a greed factor right now than there is an 'us vs' them' factor. I really think it's just getting to be an elaborate game for these spammers now - all they're trying to do is thwart the filters, and they've forgotten all about trying to dupe people out their money.
Best answer I've seen yet. You've got experience, even if it's minimal. That's worth more than a lot of college degrees. Get into a company with a healthy IT department (at any position) and keep expressing your interest in the IT department, and developing your skills. Do relevant night school courses. Eventually you'll get to IT. And you can always keep learning throughout your life.
Why don't they instaed focus on making the TV experience more like the Internet, where ads at least try to be relevant to you, the viewer. If my cable box knew how old I was and what gender I was, and what my buying habits and income level was, it could show me ads that were relevant to me. I know that sounds awful big-brother-ish, but there are ways of doing it anonymously so that no one has access to my personal info. And I would gladly give up that small bit of privacy not to have to watch tampon ads anymore.
I've already started to give them the message by uninstalling Adobe reader and installing the FoxIt PDF Reader. It's a small download, doesn't come bundled with anything, doesn't ask you to update EVERY time you open it, and has no splash screen. It just opens a PDF and displays it - really, really fast. I'm surprised no one else has linked to it in these comments yet.
So now, with Foxit, PDF Creator, and GIMP, I'm now pretty much Adobe free, so I don't have to worry about these stupid bundled apps and constant updates. Any OS alternatives to Shockwave?
... and word processors. Oh, and web accelerators.
Because I'm a narcissist, I tried a quick search for my play "Napoleon Vs. the Turk" on Ask.com, and got nothing related to it, even though it's mentioned on my blog, on digg, the Toronto Fringe webstie, and even has it its own homepage. Google returned all of those as top results.
I don't care about web page previews all that much, what I really care about is having as many search results as possible being considered, and ask looks like it's just not giving me that.
What nipple? Give us a link!
Google calendar uses your gmail contact list to auto suggest email addresses when inviting other users to an event. It doesn't do this for me!
I've been using Writely for the past little while to work on my play, and I've found it fantastic. I can jump onto any computer with a net connection and work on the most recent version. There's no way I'd trust having the one 'true' copy of the play on a USB key. First, it costs money, if not a lot. Second, the data is possibly corruptible due to wear and tear damage. Third, I'm so absentminded, I might lose it, or even more likely, forget to bring it out with me.
As for the collaborative nature... absolutely essential as well. I have my play notes which are up there as well, which the director can add to whenever he wants, and I'll see updates. Same goes for budget. We have a basic budget up on Writely, which we can tweak at any time, as expenses become more or less expensive as we though. And my director also knows that the most current version of the script will always be at one location - no e-mailing necessary.
I don't know if I had different unsyncrhonize term papers all over the place, but I can totally see his point that it's great to have an online document when working on term papers in university. When I was in school, I had no laptop, so I had one computer at home. If I wanted to work on it somewhere else, I'd have to email it to myself. Then I'd work on that and email it back to myself. Sure, I just always check the most recent email for the most recent copy, but this just makes so much more sense. And imagine groupwork, like a lab write-up or something. Everyone can just jump in and edit at the same time, or add stuff whenever they want to, and it's all centralized. Really, it's just huge.
Unfortunately.... still a browswer without a way of easily installing Adblock! Opera's great, but I'll never switch until I can easily implement Adblock.
I'll probably get mauled here for saying this, but I've found Microsoft Anti-Spyware to be more effective than either Ad-Aware or Search and Destroy - and the UI is about a hundred times better as well.
Contact me (tommertron at the mail service in question) if you want to collaborate on an answer. Maybe we could get a blog post resolving this up somewhere.
Thanks for the info. Good to know the protocol is open enough to allow developers to make their own clients. And hey, don't get me wrong - I like features. File transfer would be great. Buddy icons, flashing graphics, etc, are all fine, as options - just let me see a clean screen that makes it easy to find what I'm looking for.
And I really hope they don't let people change their display name (or at least let me keep theirs static.) Cute sayings are what comments are for - your display name should tell me who the hell you are.
Why? Writers for some of my favourite newspapers and magazines get paid to submit their stories, and because the organizations will only pay good writers, we tend to get better stories.
Getting a personal benefit from posting on /. means that more people will want to submit - and the editors will have more stories to pick from. If the stories are good, who cares what the person's motivations are?
Even if you're not getting direct benefit in the form off traffic to a site, most people are getting some personal benefit from posting, aren't they? I've had a few stories accepted, and all I got was a bunch of spam from stupidly linking to my email address, but the benefit I got was knowing that thousands of people were reading something that I wrote. That's a personal benefit, too, isn't it? Same goes for Wikipedia - where I'm not even credited.
Personal benefit, whatever it is, increases the pool of submitted stories, and makes the final content better.
Hi! I don't know what this subject is about, but it's the new year! happy fuckin' new year! woooo! I'm durnk....
If it means a short learning curve for better and more accurate typing in a smaller space, you'd better believe I'd be willing to re-learn.
Full disclosure: I'm also a big Google fanboy. So... while I use adblock, I don't block Google ads. That's beacause I believe in the ads Google serves. They're non-intrusive, and at least strive to be relevant to what I'm looking at.
It's the same how now that I have a DVR, I skip through the commercials, BUT, if I happen to see one that looks interesting, or is something that I'm interested in, I actually play and watch the commercial.
I almost got used to Opera a few months ago, then I realized it didn't have extensions. Which means no adblock. Whoops. So it was back to Firefox for me.
Umm... really? What about this?
Google blocks sites at the request of the Chinese goverment, but they still haven't turned people in like Yahoo has.
WIth so many digital cable boxes out there, monitoring what exactly what people watch should be so much easier now. Neilsen has such a small sample that I'm sure it's very inaccurate. They're going more for an accurate demo-mix than raw numbers. If the cable company got into the tracking business, they'd make a lot of money, and I'm convinced it would help good shows thrive. People are watching Arrested Development, we just don't know about.
And... end of rant.