Ditto, I was going to mention plusnet. Although by the looks of things you got a better deal than I did!?
I was paying £30/mo for 2 meg -- but it was two years ago that I signed up (and a year ago I quit) so I guess their pricing has been forced down by competition.
Anyway, I paid as much as £30 because it said unlimited and it meant it. I used over 100GB/mo (just me!) and they never batted an eyelid.
Re:Some thoughts about myspace bashing on slashdot
on
The MySpace Ecosystem
·
· Score: 1
Hehehehehe... brilliant, that made me chuckle. Thanks!
Re:Some thoughts about myspace bashing on slashdot
on
The MySpace Ecosystem
·
· Score: 1
Warning... going OT.
"the kind of intelligent debate in the comments which brought me to slashdot in the first place."
You're funny. I like you.
Hehe, I know it seems hard to believe, but I do remember it being that way. I started reading slashdot in about '98 (yes, I know my UID suggests otherwise -- I didn't register at all for a year or two, then I registered but almost never posted and forgot my login, and so then I registered this login much later).
Whether or not it was better back then, or just the fact that I was 8 years younger and hadn't been to university yet, I don't know. But I do remember almost every story seemed to turn up an expert in the field. Low level programming? Hardware hacks? Nuclear physics? There always seemed to be someone who'd done it for a living for many years and had some great stuff to say.
Certainly, I have always come to slashdot to read the comments more than the articles themselves. I can find stuff on CNN/BBC/Ars/etc for myself, it's the breadth and (sometimes!) depth of opinions in the replies that are unique about this place. (And why I still stay here and haven't decamped to digg or technocrat or whatever)
Re:Some thoughts about myspace bashing on slashdot
on
The MySpace Ecosystem
·
· Score: 1
Hehe. Well, I did admit it's a technological piece of shit;)
But, I just hit refresh on our profile, and it works for me. Maybe if you try the verbose link instead of the alias? *shrug*
Some thoughts about myspace bashing on slashdot...
on
The MySpace Ecosystem
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Every time myspace is mentioned on slashdot, we same exactly the same thing. 98% of comments are just "UGH MYSPACE SUCKS", leaving absolutely no space for the kind of intelligent debate in the comments which brought me to slashdot in the first place.
So I thought I would try and buck the trend.
Let's see what the common complaints are about myspace:
First, some technical/webdesigner type ones.
Ugly... very, very ugly
Bad nested-table HTML
Poor functionality, built on a mess of coldfusion that never works properly for longer than five minutes
Covered in ads
Second, some more social/content focused ones.
Full of emo teenagers
Full of pointless "blogs" about how they hate their mom for making them tidy their bedroom
Full of people who validate their existence by having thousands of "friends" they don't actually know.
You know what? Pretty much all true. I can't argue with it. And for exactly these reasons, I used to preach anti-myspace rants in exactly the same vein as this comment. I might even have done so on slashdot itself -- I know for a fact I did on other forums, extensively.
But that's not quite the whole story.
Things are a bit different for music accounts.
Ya see, I'm in a band (unsigned/independent) and being a web developer for a day job, I'm left to look after that side of our operations. For the longest time I refused to get the band a myspace page for all the above reasons - but eventually the band forced me to drop my web designer snootiness about myspace and sort us out a page, and since then I've been forced to change my opinions a bit. For bands/musicians, it's genuinely quite useful.
When we started the page, I went on an adding spree, not adding strangers just to bump up our friend count, but just adding (1) people who are genuinely our friends (2) people who've previously bought our cds / come to our gigs / bigged us up, (3) a few famous bands/djs/people who are influences and inspirations to us. Aside from that I don't add request anyone -- I wait for them to add request us! And they do...! Usually something between 1 and half a dozen every day for the last month or so. Sometimes they're obviously people who have been to our gigs but sometimes they're obviously not (because they live in countries we've never played), they're just people who have been searching for music, come across us and liked the tunes...
And this is the crux of it. Sure, personally, as a "geeky" / "old school" web user, I'd much rather search google, find a website, and download an mp3 (or ogg, if you insist;) ), than search myspace, find a profile, and listen with a flash player. Like most of you guys.
But I - and you guys - are not typical. Obviously most people find the convenience of myspace and its auto-playing songs more appealing. Do you know how many emails I get saying "I randomly found your website from google and listened to your mp3s" -- pretty much none. Ever. Do you know how many messages from complete randoms on myspace saying "nice tunes" I get -- one every few weeks or so. As a band member/promoter you just can't ignore that!
It genuinely works for getting new fans and networking. Example: A couple of weeks ago we played at a festival near Amsterdam (we're based in London). When I asked the promoter how he discovered us and decided we were worth paying to bring over from the UK (remember, we're completely unsigned, we have no label or financial backing, we book all our own gigs ourselves, we record, produce, finance, and distribute our albums ourself, we have next to no media coverage...) he said "myspace".
So, if you want to bash it for being ugly and full of annoying emo kids, stolen pictures and unreadable profiles I can't really argue. It is. On the other hand... getting paid to go to Amsterdam for a long weekend isn't
Flash is basically either used as an application, or an animation format.
If I put up an application as an.EXE (or whatever Linux/Mac/etc use) or a Java applet, or if I put up an animation MPG/AVI/whatever, is this a website? No. It's just an application/animation which happens to be delivered over HTTP. Sure, hopefully it plays with a plugin in the browser, rather than needing to be saved to disk and run with a separate mouse-click / key-press, but that doesn't fundamentally change the facts.
Same with Flash. Just an application/animation which happens to be delivered over HTTP.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this. Sometimes little applications (like this) or animations (like this) are absolutely great, flash is a great technology to build/deliver them in, and the web is a great way to distribute that flash. I have no problem with that.
Doesn't make it a website though. A website (IMHO) is 'onion skinned', I can take the basic text and parse it how I want. There's no assumption it gets rendered in a browser as opposed to downloaded, parsed, searched, transformed, translated. I can take the content but ignore the styles. I can take the text but ignore the images. I can open a page in the current window, in a new window, in a new tab, save it to disk, pipe it to a script. Flash does none of that. So to me, I honestly see "flash website" as essentially a contradiction in terms.
Yeah. Dupes I can sorta forgive (not that there's any reason for them, the editors get paid, right, and searching your own site can't exactly be fucking difficult -- but I will let them slide under the "all part of the charm of slashdot" theory). But this is just an absolute fucking joke. Fix up, ScuttleMonkey.
The average age at which a child gets a mobile phone in Britain.
So the average can't go up all that far, by definition.
Gotta agree the figure seems suspect all the same, though. For that to be true, you'd need as many four year olds getting phones as 12 year olds, etc.
As for who they're calling - probably nobody, probably mainly texting!
And yes, I too feel old and "that just isn't right" ("get off my lawn") when I see things like that. I didn't get internet til I was about 16 and didn't get a mobile til I was 18 or 19, and much as I love the internet now and find the mobile invaluable, with hindsight, I'm glad.
You're right, however calling it the "London Times" when discussed in an international context, to distinguish it from the many other papers of the same name, is pretty common practice. I've seen it loads of times before, it's some sort of quasi-standard I think.
I'm a Brit, and I can get narked when people on slashdot or elsewhere make stupid/erroneous statements about British things, but this isn't one of them...
The trick is to just get the market's currency (money) to be a correct measure of cost. There are certain hidden costs in a libterarian free-market that are not correctly accounted for by the monetary costs in it. People get "free lunches" (ie, they make alot of money and destroy a river). Those need to be added to the model to make the system optimize to the correct 'costs'.
Exactamundo!
Most of the free-market advocacy here seems to naively equate "free market" with "total lack of regulation", completely missing the vital "make money, destroy a river" scenarios. I hope this (your) post gets modded high because it's a very concise statement of the free lunch aspect.
Just make sure it pays the Russian equivalent of the PRS, as they claim to, and that the Russian PRS duly pass on royalties to the UK PRS as appropriate.
This is so offensive to me. Don't ASK people to do things that are non-optimal. Don't ask people to make themselves and their business less cost effective. You don't set up a free market, and then ask people to work outside of the equilibrium points "because". Money is just the metric by which we choose to optimize the system.
At this point I was about to launch into a rant about how if you abandoned your blinkered free-market love-in for just a moment you might realise that the life and death of the entire planet might be worth more than being "cost effective" and holding money as the primary determiner of everything. Who gives a shit what is economically non-optimal, since if we destroy the Earth's ability to support us that's even more economically non-optimal etc...
Fortunately, I saved myself looking an idiot by reading the rest of your post, and re-reading that paragraph too, to properly grasp the meaning of that last sentence I quoted... And also read your other post in this thread ("hidden costs")...
At this point I realised you are actually a free-market supporter who is aware of non-financial costs and intelligently advocating ways of turning them into financial costs, so that the system deals with the problem in the way the system is supposed to deal with things.
So really there was nothing much to this post except to say Congratulations. I get very tired of reading "libertarian" drivel on slashdot ("actually, I'm a libertarian" seems to be the slashdot magic wand for getting +5 insightful on a load of naive, high-school level political/economic theory that sounds great on paper with no relation to the real world -- exactly like communism, ironically). It's nice to see someone capable of supporting the free market ideology with a bit more sophistication.
I don't see why everyone is harping on China here.
I'm not sure why you're surprised, slashdot is the most racist forum/comment-enabled-website I frequent.
Admittedly we're not talking "kill niggers" or "funny slitty eyes" type of racism, but ignorant, unfair, patronising, offensive, unfounded generalisations abound.
Any time China ("thieves"), India ("job thieves"), Russia ("mafia"), anywhere in Europe ("socialists"), etc gets mentioned, the state of the comments on here makes me absolutely cringe.
Give me a reason why the nudity or language is 'essential' to the story (and couldn't be avoided artistically), then I have no real problem with the inclusion, although I may choose to avoid the story altogether. But when there is nudity that is gratuitous (as is frequently the case), then why should I have to put up with it? Personally, Titanic is the prime example of this: the nudity added very little to the story, and the sex added even less. It could have been reasonably omitted without any damage to the story.
Dude... what are you talking about? Seeing Kate Winslet's baps is the only thing that remotely rescued that catastrophic piece of shit.
I've read/. that way since the first day I came here. (Waaaaay before I registered with this account, FWIW).
In the last, ooh, 6, 7, 8 years (or whatever it is) of reading daily or near-daily, I can't have clicked through to more than a few dozen articles. Usually I only bother if it's pictures or something which inherently can't / won't be better summarised / {reposted without godawful javacsript/popups/10-pages-for-the-ad-views webdesign} in the comments.
Perhaps it's the history BA, but I find it's better to read the comments, with people saying "this article is absolutely right", "this article is absolutely wrong", and make my mind up from there, than it is to read the article and swallow whatever slant it has whole.
Not to definitively say that it wasn't (as I don't watch a great deal of TV anyway) but I'm in the UK and I've never even heard of it before, much less remember it being shown. It's quite possible it was a US/export-only production, I would guess.
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto, I was going to mention plusnet. Although by the looks of things you got a better deal than I did!?
I was paying £30/mo for 2 meg -- but it was two years ago that I signed up (and a year ago I quit) so I guess their pricing has been forced down by competition.
Anyway, I paid as much as £30 because it said unlimited and it meant it. I used over 100GB/mo (just me!) and they never batted an eyelid.
Hehehehehe... brilliant, that made me chuckle. Thanks!
Warning... going OT.
Hehe, I know it seems hard to believe, but I do remember it being that way. I started reading slashdot in about '98 (yes, I know my UID suggests otherwise -- I didn't register at all for a year or two, then I registered but almost never posted and forgot my login, and so then I registered this login much later).
Whether or not it was better back then, or just the fact that I was 8 years younger and hadn't been to university yet, I don't know. But I do remember almost every story seemed to turn up an expert in the field. Low level programming? Hardware hacks? Nuclear physics? There always seemed to be someone who'd done it for a living for many years and had some great stuff to say.
Certainly, I have always come to slashdot to read the comments more than the articles themselves. I can find stuff on CNN/BBC/Ars/etc for myself, it's the breadth and (sometimes!) depth of opinions in the replies that are unique about this place. (And why I still stay here and haven't decamped to digg or technocrat or whatever)
Hehe. Well, I did admit it's a technological piece of shit ;)
But, I just hit refresh on our profile, and it works for me. Maybe if you try the verbose link instead of the alias? *shrug*
Every time myspace is mentioned on slashdot, we same exactly the same thing. 98% of comments are just "UGH MYSPACE SUCKS", leaving absolutely no space for the kind of intelligent debate in the comments which brought me to slashdot in the first place.
So I thought I would try and buck the trend.
Let's see what the common complaints are about myspace:
First, some technical/webdesigner type ones.
Second, some more social/content focused ones.
You know what? Pretty much all true. I can't argue with it. And for exactly these reasons, I used to preach anti-myspace rants in exactly the same vein as this comment. I might even have done so on slashdot itself -- I know for a fact I did on other forums, extensively.
But that's not quite the whole story.
Things are a bit different for music accounts.
Ya see, I'm in a band (unsigned/independent) and being a web developer for a day job, I'm left to look after that side of our operations. For the longest time I refused to get the band a myspace page for all the above reasons - but eventually the band forced me to drop my web designer snootiness about myspace and sort us out a page, and since then I've been forced to change my opinions a bit. For bands/musicians, it's genuinely quite useful.
When we started the page, I went on an adding spree, not adding strangers just to bump up our friend count, but just adding (1) people who are genuinely our friends (2) people who've previously bought our cds / come to our gigs / bigged us up, (3) a few famous bands/djs/people who are influences and inspirations to us. Aside from that I don't add request anyone -- I wait for them to add request us! And they do...! Usually something between 1 and half a dozen every day for the last month or so. Sometimes they're obviously people who have been to our gigs but sometimes they're obviously not (because they live in countries we've never played), they're just people who have been searching for music, come across us and liked the tunes...
And this is the crux of it. Sure, personally, as a "geeky" / "old school" web user, I'd much rather search google, find a website, and download an mp3 (or ogg, if you insist ;) ), than search myspace, find a profile, and listen with a flash player. Like most of you guys.
But I - and you guys - are not typical. Obviously most people find the convenience of myspace and its auto-playing songs more appealing. Do you know how many emails I get saying "I randomly found your website from google and listened to your mp3s" -- pretty much none. Ever. Do you know how many messages from complete randoms on myspace saying "nice tunes" I get -- one every few weeks or so. As a band member/promoter you just can't ignore that!
It genuinely works for getting new fans and networking. Example: A couple of weeks ago we played at a festival near Amsterdam (we're based in London). When I asked the promoter how he discovered us and decided we were worth paying to bring over from the UK (remember, we're completely unsigned, we have no label or financial backing, we book all our own gigs ourselves, we record, produce, finance, and distribute our albums ourself, we have next to no media coverage...) he said "myspace".
So, if you want to bash it for being ugly and full of annoying emo kids, stolen pictures and unreadable profiles I can't really argue. It is. On the other hand... getting paid to go to Amsterdam for a long weekend isn't
I have mod points; if it were possible for me to push you higher than +5, I would do so.
To download the files quickly and easily just copy & paste the filenames into a file
Easier than that, assuming there is a webpage out there which links to them all: Firefox + DownThemAlleh? Do you think $100 million was a BAD deal for a freeware mp3 player?
Yes, I said it: "Flash websites" aren't websites.
Flash is basically either used as an application, or an animation format.
If I put up an application as an .EXE (or whatever Linux/Mac/etc use) or a Java applet, or if I put up an animation MPG/AVI/whatever, is this a website? No. It's just an application/animation which happens to be delivered over HTTP. Sure, hopefully it plays with a plugin in the browser, rather than needing to be saved to disk and run with a separate mouse-click / key-press, but that doesn't fundamentally change the facts.
Same with Flash. Just an application/animation which happens to be delivered over HTTP.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this. Sometimes little applications (like this) or animations (like this) are absolutely great, flash is a great technology to build/deliver them in, and the web is a great way to distribute that flash. I have no problem with that.
Doesn't make it a website though. A website (IMHO) is 'onion skinned', I can take the basic text and parse it how I want. There's no assumption it gets rendered in a browser as opposed to downloaded, parsed, searched, transformed, translated. I can take the content but ignore the styles. I can take the text but ignore the images. I can open a page in the current window, in a new window, in a new tab, save it to disk, pipe it to a script. Flash does none of that. So to me, I honestly see "flash website" as essentially a contradiction in terms.
Course they could be faked but I doubt it (coming from the person in question)...
Yeah. Dupes I can sorta forgive (not that there's any reason for them, the editors get paid, right, and searching your own site can't exactly be fucking difficult -- but I will let them slide under the "all part of the charm of slashdot" theory). But this is just an absolute fucking joke. Fix up, ScuttleMonkey.
Um. Calm down. The editors put it in the "funny" category.
javascript:void(document.oncontextmenu=null)
Gotta agree the figure seems suspect all the same, though. For that to be true, you'd need as many four year olds getting phones as 12 year olds, etc.
As for who they're calling - probably nobody, probably mainly texting!
And yes, I too feel old and "that just isn't right" ("get off my lawn") when I see things like that. I didn't get internet til I was about 16 and didn't get a mobile til I was 18 or 19, and much as I love the internet now and find the mobile invaluable, with hindsight, I'm glad.
You're right, however calling it the "London Times" when discussed in an international context, to distinguish it from the many other papers of the same name, is pretty common practice. I've seen it loads of times before, it's some sort of quasi-standard I think.
I'm a Brit, and I can get narked when people on slashdot or elsewhere make stupid/erroneous statements about British things, but this isn't one of them...
Exactamundo!
Most of the free-market advocacy here seems to naively equate "free market" with "total lack of regulation", completely missing the vital "make money, destroy a river" scenarios. I hope this (your) post gets modded high because it's a very concise statement of the free lunch aspect.
Duh.
At this point I was about to launch into a rant about how if you abandoned your blinkered free-market love-in for just a moment you might realise that the life and death of the entire planet might be worth more than being "cost effective" and holding money as the primary determiner of everything. Who gives a shit what is economically non-optimal, since if we destroy the Earth's ability to support us that's even more economically non-optimal etc...
Fortunately, I saved myself looking an idiot by reading the rest of your post, and re-reading that paragraph too, to properly grasp the meaning of that last sentence I quoted... And also read your other post in this thread ("hidden costs")...
At this point I realised you are actually a free-market supporter who is aware of non-financial costs and intelligently advocating ways of turning them into financial costs, so that the system deals with the problem in the way the system is supposed to deal with things.
So really there was nothing much to this post except to say Congratulations. I get very tired of reading "libertarian" drivel on slashdot ("actually, I'm a libertarian" seems to be the slashdot magic wand for getting +5 insightful on a load of naive, high-school level political/economic theory that sounds great on paper with no relation to the real world -- exactly like communism, ironically). It's nice to see someone capable of supporting the free market ideology with a bit more sophistication.
I'm not sure why you're surprised, slashdot is the most racist forum/comment-enabled-website I frequent.
Admittedly we're not talking "kill niggers" or "funny slitty eyes" type of racism, but ignorant, unfair, patronising, offensive, unfounded generalisations abound.
Any time China ("thieves"), India ("job thieves"), Russia ("mafia"), anywhere in Europe ("socialists"), etc gets mentioned, the state of the comments on here makes me absolutely cringe.
If you put a time frame on that you might have a point.
Since you don't, it's hilariously wrong.... You can hardly begin to imagine how many things came out of China.
I've read /. that way since the first day I came here. (Waaaaay before I registered with this account, FWIW).
In the last, ooh, 6, 7, 8 years (or whatever it is) of reading daily or near-daily, I can't have clicked through to more than a few dozen articles. Usually I only bother if it's pictures or something which inherently can't / won't be better summarised / {reposted without godawful javacsript/popups/10-pages-for-the-ad-views webdesign} in the comments.
Perhaps it's the history BA, but I find it's better to read the comments, with people saying "this article is absolutely right", "this article is absolutely wrong", and make my mind up from there, than it is to read the article and swallow whatever slant it has whole.
Your second sentence is irrelevant/misplaced in this context, just random Windows bashing for the sake of it.
Not to definitively say that it wasn't (as I don't watch a great deal of TV anyway) but I'm in the UK and I've never even heard of it before, much less remember it being shown. It's quite possible it was a US/export-only production, I would guess.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail ?