Personally I'm under the impression that for a lot of companies, there is one damn good reason to lease their computing power: they lost control of their own IT department.
Let's face it, monopolies tend to not be great for their customers. (Their monopoly is one reason we're pissed off at MS.) And in a lot of corporations, their own IT department is, essentially, granted a monopoly for life on all things IT. You have to get your service from them, largely on their terms, and at their prices, or not use a computer at all.
Think about it. Some corporations have a bigger income than some countries' GDP. Granting someone a monopoly on IT isn't much different from granting someone a monopoly on a small country's IT.
The result is often:
- prices run out of control. It's not entirely unusual to have such prices per MB, for example, that it would be cheaper to burn a file on a CD and send it by taxi to the office in the next city, than use "their" network and servers.
- toxic personality types making it their duty to avoid doing any work. Or worse yet, to stroke their ego by being the ones who can prevent _you_ from doing any work. Just to show everyone else who's boss.
- bad service, including having to go through a baroque bureaucracy to get any service at all.
- incompetence, nepotism, corruption, etc.
- security theatre. Stuff that's largely insecure, but make you go through loops just to _seem_ secure.
Etc.
Sure, it's an upper management failure, but it happens. In a lot of places.
So when I see some companies where they have to deal with an incompetent, hostile _and_ overpriced bureaucracy just to get one mis-configured server, while they could get the same server and bandwidth and better service for 1% of the cost from a nearby ISP... I just have to wonder why don't they.
And again, the only difference I can see is that the ISP doesn't have a perpetual monopoly granted. They actually have to work to keep you as a customer, and can even be sued if they leave your data wide open to the world while just pretending to do something about it.
Well, nor does it have its hands tied by the whims and bad strategic decisions of upper management, but then that's also an argument to just go that route.
1. Buy cheaper disposable movie. 2. Rip it to harddrive. 3. Dispose of movie. 4. ??????? 5. PROFIT!
Well, how's that different from...
1. Rent movie. 2. Rip it to harddrive. 3. Return it. 4. ??????? 5. PROFIT!
Effectively, this is just a simpler way of renting movies. In fact, so simple that any regular store can get into that business. They don't need to keep track of who rented what, who's overdue, find and replace scratched movies, etc. It just lets them use their normal logistics, which they have in place and are already in place. And it makes it a lot simpler to "rent" them by mail over the internet too.
It also makes life simpler for people like me, who live half a city away from the nearest movie rental shop. It's more convenient to chuck it into the bin, than have to make a second trip to give it back. In fact, it would save me a lot more trips, since now I'd be able to just go there once and buy a small stack of disposables, and watch them whenever I have time. (The clock starts ticking when you opened it, not when you "rented" it.) No more "omg, I got the whole LOTR trilogy, so it's time to drop everything else and stay awake until 1AM to watch it all. Or just order a small stack of them by mail.
Of course, it has the same caveats as rentals. Including that if someone wants to rip it, they can. It's not a new problem, though. And I'll venture a wild guess that if it wasn't the end of the world or of the movie business before, the new version can't be that much more destructive;)
No shit. And they also use Remedy. (Same as half the companies out there.)
That said, if they claim to be also architects, IMHO they do a poor job too.
E.g., at one point, after much lurking, and after I already had a big list of veteran awards in SWG, I want to post a suggestion. I didn't have a forum handle yet (hadn't needed one before), it's ok, I'll just go to the account management and create one. Turns out I'm sandboxed in a newbie forum noone else needs for the next two weeks, 'cause apparently the forum can't read from the database whether I'm on a trial account or a regular one. But it can read whether I have an active account, or whether I just deactivated it. (Sony's games were in the habit of asking why you quit. Post-NGE SWG was the only one which basically told me "go away, we don't take input from people with inactive accounts" after I filled that form.) But it can't read whether I'm on a trial account or not.
Well, it sounds to me like those architects of the server room don't do a particularly great job, then. Whatever interface they use to that customer database (SOAP, XMLRPC, plain SQL, whatever) should be trivial to extend to fetch that one extra piece of information. If month after month noone can figure out how to do that, it doesn't come across as a particularly competent architecture.
That, or they have no qualms with lying to the customers.
Additionally, I kinda find this funny, and while pioneered by UO, it's become a typically _Sony_ excuse later: "While today most of the problems faced by Rizzo's team are technical or development related, back in the Ultima Online days, these were compounded by the unpredictable player base. In its day, no one had ever seen the psychological and sociological reactions of players in a massive online world before."
Erm, no. The vast majority of problems UO had, were already known (and some even solved) by MUDs before. There was no excuse to repeat the same mistakes verbatim, and try the same things which were known not to work.
E.g., player justice was known not to work, as there's nothing you can do to the disposable character of a griefer, that its owner would care about. Plus, mobilizing whole posses to hunt down a griefer is, basically, just feeding the troll: he got some attention out of tens of people. Tens or hundreds of MUDs have tried that before, as it was the holy grail of being able to run a MUD without the non-fun headache of policing it, and it just didn't work without being backed by a lot of admin support. UO's recipe was known to fail, every time.
What really happened with UO was Lord British having his head so far up his own arse, that he couldn't see there's a world outside. He didn't as much discover those issues, as thoroughly ignored everything that had been discovered by anyone else. And then repeated the same thing with Tabula Rasa.
And as for Sony, since a lot of people there seem very fond of the same excuse: you have even less right to use that excuse, guys. SWG was a _third_ generation MMO, EQ2 is even later. There wasn't really an excuse even for UO to ignore the lessons of MUDs before it. Ignoring a couple dozen MMOs before you, is even less excusable.
And finally: how were those social issues relevant, in any form or shape, for the IT guys running the servers? I mean, seriously, they were (A) poor game design issues, (B) created some work for the coders who had to keep implementing fixes (which created more problems and the need for the next fix), and (C) a neverending headache for the GM's who had to sort out the thousands of support requests resulting from that fuck-up. Daily. But for the guys monitoring the servers and doing backups? Exactly how does it affect them whether the MMO is a friendly place or a newbie-hostile gank-fest run amok?
TBH, this sounds more like a PR stunt for the MMO than anything relevant to the Sci-Fi channel.
I mean, think about it in the context of existing MMOs: sure, the quests are fun, but would you really want to see a TV show about most of them? Let's assume you're a SF fan, in fact a SW fan. (Role-play a bit, if you aren't;) Would you want to see SWG footage on TV?
Or maybe you're into medieval fantasy? Well, exactly which of WoW's (or EQ2's, or whatever) quests would be great fun to watch on TV?
This week we follow the adventures of grunt Horribly Polygonal and his trusty sidekick Tusked Girl, two simple hunter-gatherers, as they slaughter Durotar Tigers by the dozen, unaware (yet) that only 1 in 10 Tigers has a skin. And will they manage to pull voodoo trolls one at a time, while the rest of the tribe wanders obliviously 10 ft away from the fight? Or will Tusked Girl get impatient again and over-aggro? Watch them meet a new group member and enjoy the suspense of finding out: is he a n00b and gonna get them wiped? Is he going to leave the group immediately after he gets the last skin?
And next week we can follow them through the Barrens, as they slaughter about 100 Zebras to get 4 hooves each. (You'd think that being asked to bring 4 hooves, would mean one zebra, right? Shows how much you pampered city-folk know about hunting.)
Or watch Tamriel the wise druid preserve the balance and harmony of nature... by slaughtering bears wholesale and waiting for them to respawn. Then slaughtering them again. 'Cause he just got bored of alchemy and went leatherworking, so now he needs leather to grind it up. (Remember, kids: living in harmony with nature means taking all you want, but not more than that!)
Don't get me wrong. In the game it's fun. But 99% of the stuff I did in MMO's, even _I_ wouldn't want to see it on TV.
On the bright side, as a SF fan, I am looking forward to a new SF MMO. Nothing against medieval fantasy as such, but God knows there's no need for 99% of the market to be medieval fantasy. It's nice to have a choice. So I'll probably buy it anyway. But, still, just saying, I doubt that the whole Sci-Fi channel thing is more than a PR stunt.
Well, the difference is that they don't use the mobile phone as a PC. It's an appliance. Same as a fridge, or a DVD player, or a TV, or their fixed landline phone. If it does its job, why would you care if your fridge has an x86 in it?
Most "normal" people I know don't really do much more than phone on their mobiles and sell the occasional SMS. Very few even realize that they could run any other program on those, much less actually download one, so compatibility doesn't play a role.
But I dare say that with a laptop, the expectations are a bit different. People start having these ideas like "can I open the.xls file my boss sent me?" or "can I edit photos on it?" Right before, "ugh, why can't I just use Excel, which I already know how to use?" or respectively, "whoever designed the interface of Gimp should be anal raped with a porcupine. Why can't I use my usual editor?" And that's when compatibility starts to matter. Not by itself, but by having access to the same software.
Player prices have dropped? Maybe your stronger Euro is misleading you, but there have been no price drops.
Alternately, all you're seeing is the effects of your Dollar's free fall.
Look, if it were just the Euro getting strong, it would be just the Euro getting strong. The fact is that the Canadian dollar is now worth a little more than 1 US Dollar, and has been for a while. Up from a little over 60 US cents, back in early 2000's. Even an Australian Dollar is slowly aproaching parity with the USD. Up from 47 US cents in 2001. Etc.
I don't think the strength of the Euro plays that much influence in those economies.
So basically I'm just saying that if the whole rest of the world seems to be going upwards fast, it isn't. It's you going downwards.
And with or without HD-DVD competition, you'd still have a dollar in freefall. It drives all import prices up over time.
Snopes basically said the exact same thing. The cavendish bananna will be extinct. Snopes is playing semantics by saying that all bananas won't be effected, but the only one eaten by americans is the cavendish, so yes, the bananna as we know it will be extinct. Just like the bananna your grandparents knew is already extinct.
Read more carefully. There's more than that in there.
The fungus discussed here grows in the earth, and spreads through earth. In fact, it is a problem _because_ it's in the ground, so you can't just spray the leaves with some fungicide.
So the only way this fungus could make the jump across the ocean to Latin America is either by
A) someone bringing an infected plant and planting it in the middle of a plantation, or
B) someone bringing a sack of infected earth and dumping it in a plantation. That's it, really.
And the cultivars _are_ aware of the threat, so they:
A) don't import any plants, but only clone plants which are known to be healthy. (They actually check, yes.) And
B) don't import soil from anywhere. And apparently the countries which depend on bananas for their economy, have special customs regulations to forbid exactly that.
Just about the only realistic scenario I can think of where that jump could happen, is, basically, an act of terror or sabotage. I.e., someone deliberately bringing some infected soil and spreading it around in Latin America. It could happen, I guess, but it's hardly something that the cultivars can do much about in advance.
At any rate, that's the failure point of the "OMG, it's spreading exponentially" scare. It can spread all it want somewhere else, as long as it can't cross the ocean by itself, it's even less of a threat to the Latin American plantation than Al Qaeda deciding to crash an airplane into a plantation.
Jailing "a few executives" probably isn't enough. Even getting rid of "Media Defender" won't do it. What's needed is for those who paid for it to be up on either racketering or terrorist charges.
Well, I'm all for wielding the RICO stick against those who paid them. After all, that's exactly what RICO and similar laws in other countries are for.
But "terrorism" sounds a bit extreme IMHO, and, well, two wrongs don't make a right. It's wrong and should be punished, yes, but setting one more precedent of abusing a law to punish someone you don't like... well, it's not something that I'd be looking forward to. The rule of the law means, among other things, that you can know exactly what you're allowed to do and what you aren't, and that the law is applied uniformly and equally, regardless of whether you're the King's best buddy or that creepy guy that all the neighbours dislike. Humanity fought hard to move from an arbitrary system to rule of the law, and it involved some pretty bloody revolts along the way too, so let's not actually ask that a step is made right back towards arbitrary power.
Though I'd compare a DOS more to a mugging than a pie in the face. That attack disrupted Revision 3 quite thoroughly for a while, and even knocked off their other servers.
But what I'm saying is: now imagine that, as a private person, John Doe goes to trial for something like that: John Doe was breaking into a house, the owner woke up and found him, and John promptly knocked him out. And it turns out that John Doe had bought a blackjack just for that: to whack anyone upside the head if they catch him red-handed. And carried it with him around daily. And made no secret as to why, and what it's for. He didn't just panic and punched the guy, but had planned all along what to do, and had the tool for it ready in advance.
I'm thinking you wouldn't find many judges sympathetic to John Doe in that case.
And at any rate, I'm saying it gives some insight into John's psychopathic little mind. He... doesn't exactly look like a likable guy there, to say the least.
You know, for a while I was kinda suspecting they'll play the "we're dumb, and it was an accident" card. You know, say that it was some poorly configured system that did the injecting, and it accidentally got stuck connecting in a loop instead of once a day. Present it as some bug they didn't even know about. Blame some techie. You know, anything _except_ say "yep, it was premeditated all along to break the law." Go for criminal negligence.
But that they have a big fat pipe dedicated to conducting DOS attacks? Jesus F. Christ, that's like saying that I have a car dedicated to running down pedestrians I don't like. If that's not a confession of premeditation, I don't know what is.
To put it in perspective, the western criminal system (as far as I understand it, and IANAL) tries, or theoretically should try, to establish the degree of intent (or "mens rea" = "guilty mind") in an act. So for example, if a shingle off my roof fell on the a passerby's head, although what happened is the same and the guy is just as dead, you can have very different punishments based on the nuance of being classified anywhere between "direct intention" (I actually intended to have shingles fall on him/someone) and "criminal negligence" (I had no flippin' clue that the roof is in that bad condition, though a reasonable person should have foreseen and inspected it regularly.) The worst you can do is not only go for "direct intention", but also basically say, "oh yeah, it wasn't a momentary act of rage, it was planned all along."
So these guys have basically been paying all along for a pipe _dedicated_ to breaking the law? They actually had a plan to break the law, and month after month paid the bill on the resources set aside for only that purpose? Geesh. I hope that a few executives land in state jail there.
These days? I was under the impression that all along he's been a self-centered attention-whore (i.e., what in a forum we'd call "troll"), who's been trying to milk every drop of attention and sympathy he could get. To pick on just a random example of what's been wrong with him, don't tell me that the whole changing his name to a symbol noone knows how to pronounce and the "the artist formerly known as Prince" bullshit has been anything else than trolling for attention.
Personally I doubt it, because coal wasn't even important in Britain (or almost anywhere else) before the 1600's-1700's or so.
Even in the iron age, the preferred fuel originally was charcoal. It's only when wood was more important for building whole ship armadas, that coal became the fuel of choice.
In the bronze age, you didn't even need coal at all, as tin and copper can be smelted with wood just as well. They have a lower melting point than iron. Copper: 1084.62 C, Tin: 231.93C, vs Iron: 1538 C. So with a good forge you just need wood to generate the temperatures needed for copper or bronze.
The first stage of Stonehenge dates from 3100 BC, although the stones you see now are from 2200 BC. In 3100 BC Britain wasn't just waay before Iron Age at that point, but was probably before Bronze Age too, if I remember the general timeline right. They were decidedly chalcolithic, i.e., a mixture of copper for weapons and some tools, and still a lot of stuff made of stone or bone.
I.e., the economic demand for coal was somewhere between "not at all" and "buggerall". Assuming that anyone went feverishly poking holes all over the place to find coal, is just... the wrong age for that.
Additionally, Stonehenge 1 from 3100 BC already had a big ditch dug in the middle. So they'd already know if there was any ore or (still worthless) coal underneath. Assuming that they still went and poked the same place with square holes around it for another 1000 years, is kinda silly. There was no further point in probing the same damned place as opposed to going looking somewhere else.
And even if they just buried some poor workers in such holes, noone would drag holes from 300km away from Wales to use as headstones for poor miner families. The poor guys would just get a wooden marker for their grave, not hundreds of people dragging and lifting stones for their grave. Their families wouldn't have been able to pay those.
Oh, it's perfectly rational all right, except don't think they actually understood what the aircraft was or what the pilots were. Almost invariably this was not some enterprising souls anchored in a skeptical view of the world, but actual _cults_. They _prayed_ to those aircraft. Even when they realized there's someone piloting it (e.g., as in the ghost steamer cult of Papua), they imagined ancestor spirits, or gods, or bird spirits, coming in them to deliver those goods.
(And if you want something even funnier, at least one Sioux tribe eventually came to believe that at the end of days, when the ancestors' spirits come back, they'll come by train.)
Now I'm still saying that it's perfectly rational, for someone whose whole life and explanation of the universe is firmly rooted in spirituality and belief in supernatural spirits. The Europeans would have probably done the same if an airplane showed up, as late as the middle ages.
But at the end of the day, yes, it is rational behaviour and _human_ behaviour. If you saw a guy making a lightsaber out of 5 leds, a lens, and 4 D bateries, you'd try to do the same even if just for curiosity sake. If you don't understand how, you experiment a bit. These guys essentially did the same. They tried to replicate something which obviously worked for the Americans and Japanese. So I'm not trying to paint them as dumb or anything. I'm sure they were perfectly intelligent humans, same as everyone else.
But at the same time I _am_ saying that their explanations _were_ indeed religious. They used the framework they already had for understanding the world, and that was one of religion, magic, supernatural forces, and mighty spirits. They fit those airplanes and airfields in that framework. Because they had no other framework available.
So I wouldn't be too surprised if these guys in the Amazon did the same. Again, I'm not painting them as dumb, nor looking down upon them. But I do expect them to do what so many other tribes did: see it as some supernatural event.
nice interpretation. did you rtfa? 'cuz it sure sounds like you're talking out your ass.
Actually, yes, I did. Once you get past the first 3 or 4 pages which actually had a product, you run even there into examples like TheGlobe.com who had _no_ business plan other than being a social site, and no way to monetize on the user base. Other than serving ads on their web pages, there was no other source of income. In Paternot's own words, and it's right in TFA, "way too little advertising revenues to support everyone". So there you have exactly what I was saying, right from TFA, and from the horse's mouth.
Later in the list: DrKoop.com. From TFA: "DrKoop.com's business plan rested on advertising, and in 1999 there weren't enough healthcare advertisers to support it and the many other healthcare dot-coms trolling for ad buyers."
Those are the only ones explicitly mentioning advertising as a factor, and they're both in the "we didn't get enough ad money" category I was describing. Neither of them says that they themselves didn't advertise enough.
But anyway, that's one list, and it just presents a debatable sample of it all. The "we'll get billions in ads" plan, although somewhat under-represented in that particular list, was actually the story of about 90% of the dot-coms back then. And as I was saying, I had the pleasure of actually working for one which had even less of a business plan.
Lack of their _own_ advertising? Heh. Where did you get that idea from TFA? The companies picked there are the ones which were maybe the best known back then, precisely because they advertised and built a lot of hype. The Pets.com sockpuppet from their ads is pretty much _the_ reason we all remember that one, out of the tens of thousands of dot-con flops.
So, heh, did _you_ read TFA? Doesn't sound like it.
Well, that would certainly explain why all those cults suddenly believed that their ancestors were white, like the guys they saw on the steamers and airplanes.
Duly noted, but none of the Civ games before or after were _that_ hideously unbalanced in that aspect. Yes, you could lose tanks to spearmen in Civ 1... if the spearmen were in the jungle, behind a river, etc, and even then it was rather a rare exception that they'd win. In Civ 3 the difference in numbers between top tech and stone-age axemen was ridiculously low, and due to units having only 2 hp, it only took two modestly lucky rolls out of 3 to win that fight. So spearmen often won against tanks in the plains, in the middle of a road, and when they're the ones attacking.
if this is the depth of your outlook on people you don't know than you're utterly disgusting.
Actually, it does work like that sometimes.
E.g., "cargo cults." In the whole island-hopping in the Pacific, ground troops in the jungle were sometimes resupplied by airplanes paradropping crates of food and equipment. Well, some airplanes dropped their cargo wrong (remember, it was before GPS), some ran into the enemy and had to eject their cargo to escape, etc. At any rate, some of that cargo fell near some local tribes.
And the funny thing is, some of those actually started worshipping the big birds who dropped all that good stuff. And prayed that they'd return and bring them more gifts. And when that failed to happen, they built wooden airplanes and sometimes (those who were close enough to an airstrip to notice that those winged gods landed there and unloaded stuff) built whole wooden mock-ups of airstrips including the barracks and buildings around them. Some went to such effort as to even build mock-ups of the other stuff they saw there, such as "radios" with "headphones" made out of coconuts. Some stood guard or conducted drills with sticks instead of weapons, because they assumed it was some ritual to make the big winged gods come land there.
It wasn't the first time. The first well documented cargo cult, and undisputedly a cargo cult, was from 1919 from Papua. Those guys believed in the coming of a great ghost steamer to bring them tinned goods, tools, and stuff like that. That was their "messiah", so to speak. Furthermore, that they can communicate with the ghostly ancestors by raising and lowering a flag, on the flagpole a mocked-up office. Essentially they had looked at the stuff the Europeans did in ports, and how they communicated with their ships, and built a whole cult and ceremony around it.
But we have documented instances of such stuff from the 19'th century too. E.g., the Tuka Movement in the Fiji islands. On the whole it was openly hostile to the Europeans, and preaching the extinction or enslavement of Europeans by the natives, and using such visual metaphors as fattening a white pig representing the Europeans to slaughter it when the ancients return. But funnily enough, it also incorporated a lot of stuff which was mocking what the Europeans did. E.g., military parades, blessing water for their religious ceremonies, etc.
So, well, I don't care whether you find that outlook disgusting or not, but we have plenty of documented cases where it worked literally like the GP post said. If historical perspective offends you, so be it.
You don't seem to understand. "Lack of advertising" in the context of dot-coms doesn't mean "we dot-coms should have advertised" but rather "damn, we thought people would pay millions to advertise on our site, and the bastards didn't." It's a different end of that shafting.
To recap, the dot-com bubble was started by greed over advertising money.
In the stone age of the Internet, sites had one ad banner on the front page. That was it. Not animated, not pop-up, no pop-under, and certainly not wall to wall. It also usually had something to do with the site's topic, e.g., a site about games, would likely had a banner to some games shop or publisher. It was easy to target those by hand since, well, you only had one and it stayed with you a long time.
And people actually tended to look at it, and occasionally even click on it. I mean, why not. We hadn't been flooded with ads yet and desensitized to the point where they're mentally filtered out.
And the ad rates were calculated for _that_ situation. A page view for your ad in those conditions was considered worth a lot. More importantly, the ratio between total ads shown and advertising budgets allowed quite a nice price per view. The pie was divided into a smaller number of slices, so to speak.
Unfortunately, that also gave some people the idea that, basically, they could make a site with 10 banners per page, and rake in tens to thousands of dollars (at those rates) per month for just being there. Heck, that there's even room for growth there. If you want twice as much money, just double the number of banners, and there you go, the ad provider surely will keep paying the same rate for them.
Whole sites were _designed_ to be little more than wall to wall ads, with a tiny frame in the middle for the actual content. Heck, I worked for one.
Others had no qualms to just lie to ad provider. (At first most sites hosted the banner themselves, so the ad provider had to just trust them that they actually had a trillion pages served last month.) Others used scripts to refresh the page in a loop, and/or to simulate a click on the ad if they were paid more for a click. Others urged their users to do that for them. Etc.
Basically a whole "industry" and a lot of financial analysts, built a model and started a bubble, based on little more than defrauding the ad providers. And on the bet that the ad providers were drooling retards, and wouldn't recalculate the rates. Most weren't even too secretive about their plans to abuse the system, and built whole projections for the next 20 years based on the underlying assumption that the rates would indeed stay the same, and the rest of the economy wouldn't react when that scam bleeds it dry.
Unfortunately, while the ad providers did react somewhat slower than expected (and it helped further "confirm" the belief that, yep, they're helpless and waiting to be fleeced), react they did. Among other things, because the actual companies advertising their products had a finite marketing budget. You couldn't tell them to pony up 100 times more money than last year, just because the number of ad banners on the web rose 100 times. Most didn't even have that kind of money.
And what happened was, well, basic economics. If there's the same X million dollars on the "demand" side for ad space, but the "supply" side has grown 100 times, then the price per banner dropped 100 times too. In fact, what happened eventually went even further than that, like often is the case in an overproduction situation. The old style plain banner views didn't just become 100 or 1000 times cheaper, they became outright worthless. The ad providers started wanting to buy better stuff instead, like better ads, or clicks instead of views, or unique users.
And that's when the dotcom's dreams of an endless stream of billions in advertising money, started going downhill. Almost none of them got as much advertising as they had built their business plan on.
Actually, I'd guess more like Civ 3. That was the one with the antitank spearmen. And mighty cavemen in sabertooth-skin loincloths, cleaving your tank in twain with their mighty stone axe.
I'm not entirely sure what your point is, and if it's supposed to be a good or a bad thing.
What would happen on a closed proprietary protocol? (E.g., let's imagine that MS had pursued their initial idea of makingt a MS net instead of the Internet, or that AOL/Compuserve/whatever had never gone TCP/IP and managed to win on their own, or that we all were on the French minitel. Or, heck, that each ISP had their own protocol and proprietary browser, and just converted to and from it. At least one did try to convert the graphics like that, and at least one is currently re-encoding movies, so it's not a huge stretch of imagination.)
Well, then you'd be pretty much in the hands of whoever owns the protocol, i.e., most likely the ISP. If you were on, say, a proprietary AOL network, which works only with proprietary AOL software, and uses AOL's own proprietary protocols, then you're completely at their mercy. If they want to reset your connections, or whatever else, what are you going to do about it?
Of course, you could reverse-engineer their protocols and patch their programs, which is a hell of a lot more expense and effort than with the open protocols. Except then they could:
1. Just change the protocol from one version to another, to break your changes. (AOL actually did this for a while to keep breaking MS's attempts of making their Windows Messenger interoperable with AIM.)
2. Sue you under DMCA for hacking into their network and bypassing their checks. (Seriously, much smaller attempts at reverse-engineering a protocol resulted in DMCA lawsuits.)
So basically at best you'd have to bet a _lot_ on, well, how sympathetic a judge would be to your view that you have a right to bypass the usage or access restrictions on privately owned servers, to download more than you've bought, and to hack their software to that end. I wouldn't take it as a given.
So basically open software at least gives you a fighting chance at all. Yes, they can keep modifying their implementation, but so can you. In the closed version, they own the software and the protocol, they can change it, but _you_ can't.
Open standards even put a limit on how far they can take technique #1 above, because at the end of the day, they still have to remain compatible with a metric buttload of software and hardware that they don't control. In the all proprietary version, if they want to change the protocol and software _completely_, and leave the old channel open just for downloading the new software, they can.
Also, IIRC, Java's arrays are immutable, which only makes them that much uglier. Although I don't know enough about JITs to even know if that's a Good Thing (SMP/multithreading win at the cost of GC?) or Bad Thing.
I'm not sure what you mean by immutable in this context.
You can't change the size of an array once it's allocated (which simplifies memory management, rather than the JIT), but you can change its contents. I.e., it's certainly not the same kind of immutable as that of, say, String.
Re-allocating a larger array and copying the contents is only two lines of code, if that's what you had in mind, although, admittedly, it does involve an expensive array copy. I.e., it's probably not something you'd want to do in the inner loop of that 4-dimensional time-space calculation.
You can also reallocate the rows in a two-dimensional array (or generally any inner arrays in a multi-dimensional array), which can produce some funny stuff. E.g., if you have a 3 by 3 matrix of double, you can do:
f[0] = new double[1]; f[1] = new double[2]; f[2] = new double[3];
As someone who started from Assembly, I find the argument kinda silly. I suspect it's the same for anyone who's trained to see it as a mathematical construct too.
As long as you have even one-dimensional arrays at all, you can simulate anything else by just calculating your own offsets. Write your own function if you have to have the offsets in any particular order.
Furthermore, if you're just doing algebra on a matrix, i.e., if you're doing physics and not system programming, you shouldn't be worrying about offsets at all. F(I, J) is simply the element at "coordinates" I and J, and that's that. Who cares if internally the offset is calculated as I*100+J or I+J*100?
If you're ending up writing stuff like F(Z, Y, X) just so your offsets will be the same as in C's f[x][y][z], you're doing something wrong. Just write F(X, Y, Z) if that's how you're used to writing them, and let the compiler worry about how to arrange them in memory. Even if you have to optimize for the CPU's read-ahead buffer and cache (which, again, is something you should only be doing in system programming, not in physics) just iterate by Z first and X last, and there you go.
Caring too much about such details will land you into trouble with a lot of other languages. E.g., a two-dimensional array in Java is a one-dimensional array of _pointers_ (ok, ok, "references") to one-dimensional arrays. And four-dimensional space/time will be an array of pointers to arrays of pointers to arrays of pointers to arrays of the actual values. The offsets are... well, all over the heap. There is no way to calculate the offsets by hand without writing some native library (and then wondering why it crashes your JVM) that can peek under Java's skirt to see the actual values of those pointers.
Heh. You know, you spelling nazis amuse me. You know why?
Well, I'm not a native English speaker. I'll take it I'm fluent enough in English, if that's the only word you could pick on. And I don't mean just in vocabulary, but also in grammar. Let's put it like this: if I used my native grammar in English, I'd sound like Yoda.
In fact, I'm fluent in three languages, only one of which is my mother tongue, and can understand another two decently.
While your claim to glory is... what? That you can spell a four letter word in your mother tongue? (It's a funny thing how spelling trolls only pick on 3'rd grade level words, but invariably miss longer typos.) I.e., that your grasp of language is enough for IQ 50 or so? _That_ is your great achievement and position from which you try to look down on people? That you could do well in a primary school spelling bee? Heh.
No, dearie, let me tell you who's the ill-educated loser: you and your ilk. If you actually had an actual achievement in your pathetic waste of a life, you'd brag about that, not about being up to 3'rd grade in spelling skills. Heh. You amuse me. Please continue.
Well, I guess Ghastly's Ghastly Comic is ok then, 'cause he says Chibi Sue is 36 and only looks like a little girl.
But seriously, how would one provide records to prove the the age of a drawn character?
And I'd worry more about judgments based on what it _looks_ like, in the context of a law where 17 years old is still considered paedophilia. Now I'm not saying one should look for naked 17 year old girls, just saying how it applies to a drawing. How do you prove that you had in mind a 18 year old girl, and not a 17 year old one, when you drew t.
I actually personally knew someone who looked like she was maybe 13 or 14 by the time she finished college and got married. No bloody kidding. Not only her face was that of a child, but she was really short too, so basically she was as close to a "chibi" drawing as it gets. She looked like she's probably not even in high school yet.
So what I'm saying is, basically this:
1. noone objected to her marrying and presumably having sex, unless a bright star appeared in the East again when she got pregnant;) Because she was well over 20, looks be damned.
2. she could probably even star in a porn movie, if she wanted to, because proof can be provided that she's well over 18
3. but if you drew some character based on her, you're essentially fucked because it looks like you drew a child. And you can't provide any proof that the character you had in mind isn't really a kid in disguise.
And actually, depending on the country (e.g., I _think_ in UK that's the case already) probably even #2 might be illegal, because it _looks_ like fucking someone underage.
Again, I'm not arguing for allowing actual paedophilia or child porn. But when the law gets into the murky domain of what it _looks_ like, it gets very funny indeed. Especially with an age like 18 as a cutoff point. Girls get their puberty and get breasts quite a few years earlier than that, and from there it's just a very slow and gradual transition to young adult, and there's considerable variation in how fast it happens. There are people well underage which look like they're 20 already (e.g., Traci Lords didn't raise any alarm bells when she claimed to be 18 and was actually 15), and there are people who look a lot younger than they are.
When looking at a photo or movie of Traci Lords, or even interacting with her in person, pretty much noone could tell that she's 15 not 18. How do you tell if a drawing looks like 15 or 18 then? How about whether she's 17 or 18?
There are no major morphological changes that happen abruptly at 18. It's not like they sprout a tail or horns at 18, so you can look at the drawing and see if the character has them or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I'm under the impression that for a lot of companies, there is one damn good reason to lease their computing power: they lost control of their own IT department.
Let's face it, monopolies tend to not be great for their customers. (Their monopoly is one reason we're pissed off at MS.) And in a lot of corporations, their own IT department is, essentially, granted a monopoly for life on all things IT. You have to get your service from them, largely on their terms, and at their prices, or not use a computer at all.
Think about it. Some corporations have a bigger income than some countries' GDP. Granting someone a monopoly on IT isn't much different from granting someone a monopoly on a small country's IT.
The result is often:
- prices run out of control. It's not entirely unusual to have such prices per MB, for example, that it would be cheaper to burn a file on a CD and send it by taxi to the office in the next city, than use "their" network and servers.
- toxic personality types making it their duty to avoid doing any work. Or worse yet, to stroke their ego by being the ones who can prevent _you_ from doing any work. Just to show everyone else who's boss.
- bad service, including having to go through a baroque bureaucracy to get any service at all.
- incompetence, nepotism, corruption, etc.
- security theatre. Stuff that's largely insecure, but make you go through loops just to _seem_ secure.
Etc.
Sure, it's an upper management failure, but it happens. In a lot of places.
So when I see some companies where they have to deal with an incompetent, hostile _and_ overpriced bureaucracy just to get one mis-configured server, while they could get the same server and bandwidth and better service for 1% of the cost from a nearby ISP... I just have to wonder why don't they.
And again, the only difference I can see is that the ISP doesn't have a perpetual monopoly granted. They actually have to work to keep you as a customer, and can even be sued if they leave your data wide open to the world while just pretending to do something about it.
Well, nor does it have its hands tied by the whims and bad strategic decisions of upper management, but then that's also an argument to just go that route.
Well, how's that different from...
1. Rent movie.
2. Rip it to harddrive.
3. Return it.
4. ???????
5. PROFIT!
Effectively, this is just a simpler way of renting movies. In fact, so simple that any regular store can get into that business. They don't need to keep track of who rented what, who's overdue, find and replace scratched movies, etc. It just lets them use their normal logistics, which they have in place and are already in place. And it makes it a lot simpler to "rent" them by mail over the internet too.
It also makes life simpler for people like me, who live half a city away from the nearest movie rental shop. It's more convenient to chuck it into the bin, than have to make a second trip to give it back. In fact, it would save me a lot more trips, since now I'd be able to just go there once and buy a small stack of disposables, and watch them whenever I have time. (The clock starts ticking when you opened it, not when you "rented" it.) No more "omg, I got the whole LOTR trilogy, so it's time to drop everything else and stay awake until 1AM to watch it all. Or just order a small stack of them by mail.
Of course, it has the same caveats as rentals. Including that if someone wants to rip it, they can. It's not a new problem, though. And I'll venture a wild guess that if it wasn't the end of the world or of the movie business before, the new version can't be that much more destructive
No shit. And they also use Remedy. (Same as half the companies out there.)
That said, if they claim to be also architects, IMHO they do a poor job too.
E.g., at one point, after much lurking, and after I already had a big list of veteran awards in SWG, I want to post a suggestion. I didn't have a forum handle yet (hadn't needed one before), it's ok, I'll just go to the account management and create one. Turns out I'm sandboxed in a newbie forum noone else needs for the next two weeks, 'cause apparently the forum can't read from the database whether I'm on a trial account or a regular one. But it can read whether I have an active account, or whether I just deactivated it. (Sony's games were in the habit of asking why you quit. Post-NGE SWG was the only one which basically told me "go away, we don't take input from people with inactive accounts" after I filled that form.) But it can't read whether I'm on a trial account or not.
Well, it sounds to me like those architects of the server room don't do a particularly great job, then. Whatever interface they use to that customer database (SOAP, XMLRPC, plain SQL, whatever) should be trivial to extend to fetch that one extra piece of information. If month after month noone can figure out how to do that, it doesn't come across as a particularly competent architecture.
That, or they have no qualms with lying to the customers.
Additionally, I kinda find this funny, and while pioneered by UO, it's become a typically _Sony_ excuse later: "While today most of the problems faced by Rizzo's team are technical or development related, back in the Ultima Online days, these were compounded by the unpredictable player base. In its day, no one had ever seen the psychological and sociological reactions of players in a massive online world before."
Erm, no. The vast majority of problems UO had, were already known (and some even solved) by MUDs before. There was no excuse to repeat the same mistakes verbatim, and try the same things which were known not to work.
E.g., player justice was known not to work, as there's nothing you can do to the disposable character of a griefer, that its owner would care about. Plus, mobilizing whole posses to hunt down a griefer is, basically, just feeding the troll: he got some attention out of tens of people. Tens or hundreds of MUDs have tried that before, as it was the holy grail of being able to run a MUD without the non-fun headache of policing it, and it just didn't work without being backed by a lot of admin support. UO's recipe was known to fail, every time.
What really happened with UO was Lord British having his head so far up his own arse, that he couldn't see there's a world outside. He didn't as much discover those issues, as thoroughly ignored everything that had been discovered by anyone else. And then repeated the same thing with Tabula Rasa.
And as for Sony, since a lot of people there seem very fond of the same excuse: you have even less right to use that excuse, guys. SWG was a _third_ generation MMO, EQ2 is even later. There wasn't really an excuse even for UO to ignore the lessons of MUDs before it. Ignoring a couple dozen MMOs before you, is even less excusable.
And finally: how were those social issues relevant, in any form or shape, for the IT guys running the servers? I mean, seriously, they were (A) poor game design issues, (B) created some work for the coders who had to keep implementing fixes (which created more problems and the need for the next fix), and (C) a neverending headache for the GM's who had to sort out the thousands of support requests resulting from that fuck-up. Daily. But for the guys monitoring the servers and doing backups? Exactly how does it affect them whether the MMO is a friendly place or a newbie-hostile gank-fest run amok?
TBH, this sounds more like a PR stunt for the MMO than anything relevant to the Sci-Fi channel.
I mean, think about it in the context of existing MMOs: sure, the quests are fun, but would you really want to see a TV show about most of them? Let's assume you're a SF fan, in fact a SW fan. (Role-play a bit, if you aren't;) Would you want to see SWG footage on TV?
Or maybe you're into medieval fantasy? Well, exactly which of WoW's (or EQ2's, or whatever) quests would be great fun to watch on TV?
This week we follow the adventures of grunt Horribly Polygonal and his trusty sidekick Tusked Girl, two simple hunter-gatherers, as they slaughter Durotar Tigers by the dozen, unaware (yet) that only 1 in 10 Tigers has a skin. And will they manage to pull voodoo trolls one at a time, while the rest of the tribe wanders obliviously 10 ft away from the fight? Or will Tusked Girl get impatient again and over-aggro? Watch them meet a new group member and enjoy the suspense of finding out: is he a n00b and gonna get them wiped? Is he going to leave the group immediately after he gets the last skin?
And next week we can follow them through the Barrens, as they slaughter about 100 Zebras to get 4 hooves each. (You'd think that being asked to bring 4 hooves, would mean one zebra, right? Shows how much you pampered city-folk know about hunting.)
Or watch Tamriel the wise druid preserve the balance and harmony of nature... by slaughtering bears wholesale and waiting for them to respawn. Then slaughtering them again. 'Cause he just got bored of alchemy and went leatherworking, so now he needs leather to grind it up. (Remember, kids: living in harmony with nature means taking all you want, but not more than that!)
Don't get me wrong. In the game it's fun. But 99% of the stuff I did in MMO's, even _I_ wouldn't want to see it on TV.
On the bright side, as a SF fan, I am looking forward to a new SF MMO. Nothing against medieval fantasy as such, but God knows there's no need for 99% of the market to be medieval fantasy. It's nice to have a choice. So I'll probably buy it anyway. But, still, just saying, I doubt that the whole Sci-Fi channel thing is more than a PR stunt.
Well, the difference is that they don't use the mobile phone as a PC. It's an appliance. Same as a fridge, or a DVD player, or a TV, or their fixed landline phone. If it does its job, why would you care if your fridge has an x86 in it? Most "normal" people I know don't really do much more than phone on their mobiles and sell the occasional SMS. Very few even realize that they could run any other program on those, much less actually download one, so compatibility doesn't play a role. But I dare say that with a laptop, the expectations are a bit different. People start having these ideas like "can I open the .xls file my boss sent me?" or "can I edit photos on it?" Right before, "ugh, why can't I just use Excel, which I already know how to use?" or respectively, "whoever designed the interface of Gimp should be anal raped with a porcupine. Why can't I use my usual editor?" And that's when compatibility starts to matter. Not by itself, but by having access to the same software.
Alternately, all you're seeing is the effects of your Dollar's free fall.
Look, if it were just the Euro getting strong, it would be just the Euro getting strong. The fact is that the Canadian dollar is now worth a little more than 1 US Dollar, and has been for a while. Up from a little over 60 US cents, back in early 2000's. Even an Australian Dollar is slowly aproaching parity with the USD. Up from 47 US cents in 2001. Etc.
I don't think the strength of the Euro plays that much influence in those economies.
So basically I'm just saying that if the whole rest of the world seems to be going upwards fast, it isn't. It's you going downwards.
And with or without HD-DVD competition, you'd still have a dollar in freefall. It drives all import prices up over time.
Read more carefully. There's more than that in there.
The fungus discussed here grows in the earth, and spreads through earth. In fact, it is a problem _because_ it's in the ground, so you can't just spray the leaves with some fungicide.
So the only way this fungus could make the jump across the ocean to Latin America is either by
A) someone bringing an infected plant and planting it in the middle of a plantation, or
B) someone bringing a sack of infected earth and dumping it in a plantation. That's it, really.
And the cultivars _are_ aware of the threat, so they:
A) don't import any plants, but only clone plants which are known to be healthy. (They actually check, yes.) And
B) don't import soil from anywhere. And apparently the countries which depend on bananas for their economy, have special customs regulations to forbid exactly that.
Just about the only realistic scenario I can think of where that jump could happen, is, basically, an act of terror or sabotage. I.e., someone deliberately bringing some infected soil and spreading it around in Latin America. It could happen, I guess, but it's hardly something that the cultivars can do much about in advance.
At any rate, that's the failure point of the "OMG, it's spreading exponentially" scare. It can spread all it want somewhere else, as long as it can't cross the ocean by itself, it's even less of a threat to the Latin American plantation than Al Qaeda deciding to crash an airplane into a plantation.
Well, I'm all for wielding the RICO stick against those who paid them. After all, that's exactly what RICO and similar laws in other countries are for.
But "terrorism" sounds a bit extreme IMHO, and, well, two wrongs don't make a right. It's wrong and should be punished, yes, but setting one more precedent of abusing a law to punish someone you don't like... well, it's not something that I'd be looking forward to. The rule of the law means, among other things, that you can know exactly what you're allowed to do and what you aren't, and that the law is applied uniformly and equally, regardless of whether you're the King's best buddy or that creepy guy that all the neighbours dislike. Humanity fought hard to move from an arbitrary system to rule of the law, and it involved some pretty bloody revolts along the way too, so let's not actually ask that a step is made right back towards arbitrary power.
Well, that goes without saying, of course.
Though I'd compare a DOS more to a mugging than a pie in the face. That attack disrupted Revision 3 quite thoroughly for a while, and even knocked off their other servers.
But what I'm saying is: now imagine that, as a private person, John Doe goes to trial for something like that: John Doe was breaking into a house, the owner woke up and found him, and John promptly knocked him out. And it turns out that John Doe had bought a blackjack just for that: to whack anyone upside the head if they catch him red-handed. And carried it with him around daily. And made no secret as to why, and what it's for. He didn't just panic and punched the guy, but had planned all along what to do, and had the tool for it ready in advance.
I'm thinking you wouldn't find many judges sympathetic to John Doe in that case.
And at any rate, I'm saying it gives some insight into John's psychopathic little mind. He... doesn't exactly look like a likable guy there, to say the least.
You know, for a while I was kinda suspecting they'll play the "we're dumb, and it was an accident" card. You know, say that it was some poorly configured system that did the injecting, and it accidentally got stuck connecting in a loop instead of once a day. Present it as some bug they didn't even know about. Blame some techie. You know, anything _except_ say "yep, it was premeditated all along to break the law." Go for criminal negligence.
But that they have a big fat pipe dedicated to conducting DOS attacks? Jesus F. Christ, that's like saying that I have a car dedicated to running down pedestrians I don't like. If that's not a confession of premeditation, I don't know what is.
To put it in perspective, the western criminal system (as far as I understand it, and IANAL) tries, or theoretically should try, to establish the degree of intent (or "mens rea" = "guilty mind") in an act. So for example, if a shingle off my roof fell on the a passerby's head, although what happened is the same and the guy is just as dead, you can have very different punishments based on the nuance of being classified anywhere between "direct intention" (I actually intended to have shingles fall on him/someone) and "criminal negligence" (I had no flippin' clue that the roof is in that bad condition, though a reasonable person should have foreseen and inspected it regularly.) The worst you can do is not only go for "direct intention", but also basically say, "oh yeah, it wasn't a momentary act of rage, it was planned all along."
So these guys have basically been paying all along for a pipe _dedicated_ to breaking the law? They actually had a plan to break the law, and month after month paid the bill on the resources set aside for only that purpose? Geesh. I hope that a few executives land in state jail there.
These days? I was under the impression that all along he's been a self-centered attention-whore (i.e., what in a forum we'd call "troll"), who's been trying to milk every drop of attention and sympathy he could get. To pick on just a random example of what's been wrong with him, don't tell me that the whole changing his name to a symbol noone knows how to pronounce and the "the artist formerly known as Prince" bullshit has been anything else than trolling for attention.
Personally I doubt it, because coal wasn't even important in Britain (or almost anywhere else) before the 1600's-1700's or so.
Even in the iron age, the preferred fuel originally was charcoal. It's only when wood was more important for building whole ship armadas, that coal became the fuel of choice.
In the bronze age, you didn't even need coal at all, as tin and copper can be smelted with wood just as well. They have a lower melting point than iron. Copper: 1084.62 C, Tin: 231.93C, vs Iron: 1538 C. So with a good forge you just need wood to generate the temperatures needed for copper or bronze.
The first stage of Stonehenge dates from 3100 BC, although the stones you see now are from 2200 BC. In 3100 BC Britain wasn't just waay before Iron Age at that point, but was probably before Bronze Age too, if I remember the general timeline right. They were decidedly chalcolithic, i.e., a mixture of copper for weapons and some tools, and still a lot of stuff made of stone or bone.
I.e., the economic demand for coal was somewhere between "not at all" and "buggerall". Assuming that anyone went feverishly poking holes all over the place to find coal, is just... the wrong age for that.
Additionally, Stonehenge 1 from 3100 BC already had a big ditch dug in the middle. So they'd already know if there was any ore or (still worthless) coal underneath. Assuming that they still went and poked the same place with square holes around it for another 1000 years, is kinda silly. There was no further point in probing the same damned place as opposed to going looking somewhere else.
And even if they just buried some poor workers in such holes, noone would drag holes from 300km away from Wales to use as headstones for poor miner families. The poor guys would just get a wooden marker for their grave, not hundreds of people dragging and lifting stones for their grave. Their families wouldn't have been able to pay those.
Oh, it's perfectly rational all right, except don't think they actually understood what the aircraft was or what the pilots were. Almost invariably this was not some enterprising souls anchored in a skeptical view of the world, but actual _cults_. They _prayed_ to those aircraft. Even when they realized there's someone piloting it (e.g., as in the ghost steamer cult of Papua), they imagined ancestor spirits, or gods, or bird spirits, coming in them to deliver those goods.
(And if you want something even funnier, at least one Sioux tribe eventually came to believe that at the end of days, when the ancestors' spirits come back, they'll come by train.)
Now I'm still saying that it's perfectly rational, for someone whose whole life and explanation of the universe is firmly rooted in spirituality and belief in supernatural spirits. The Europeans would have probably done the same if an airplane showed up, as late as the middle ages.
But at the end of the day, yes, it is rational behaviour and _human_ behaviour. If you saw a guy making a lightsaber out of 5 leds, a lens, and 4 D bateries, you'd try to do the same even if just for curiosity sake. If you don't understand how, you experiment a bit. These guys essentially did the same. They tried to replicate something which obviously worked for the Americans and Japanese. So I'm not trying to paint them as dumb or anything. I'm sure they were perfectly intelligent humans, same as everyone else.
But at the same time I _am_ saying that their explanations _were_ indeed religious. They used the framework they already had for understanding the world, and that was one of religion, magic, supernatural forces, and mighty spirits. They fit those airplanes and airfields in that framework. Because they had no other framework available.
So I wouldn't be too surprised if these guys in the Amazon did the same. Again, I'm not painting them as dumb, nor looking down upon them. But I do expect them to do what so many other tribes did: see it as some supernatural event.
That's really all.
Actually, yes, I did. Once you get past the first 3 or 4 pages which actually had a product, you run even there into examples like TheGlobe.com who had _no_ business plan other than being a social site, and no way to monetize on the user base. Other than serving ads on their web pages, there was no other source of income. In Paternot's own words, and it's right in TFA, " way too little advertising revenues to support everyone ". So there you have exactly what I was saying, right from TFA, and from the horse's mouth.
Later in the list: DrKoop.com. From TFA: " DrKoop.com's business plan rested on advertising, and in 1999 there weren't enough healthcare advertisers to support it and the many other healthcare dot-coms trolling for ad buyers. "
Those are the only ones explicitly mentioning advertising as a factor, and they're both in the "we didn't get enough ad money" category I was describing. Neither of them says that they themselves didn't advertise enough.
But anyway, that's one list, and it just presents a debatable sample of it all. The "we'll get billions in ads" plan, although somewhat under-represented in that particular list, was actually the story of about 90% of the dot-coms back then. And as I was saying, I had the pleasure of actually working for one which had even less of a business plan.
Lack of their _own_ advertising? Heh. Where did you get that idea from TFA? The companies picked there are the ones which were maybe the best known back then, precisely because they advertised and built a lot of hype. The Pets.com sockpuppet from their ads is pretty much _the_ reason we all remember that one, out of the tens of thousands of dot-con flops.
So, heh, did _you_ read TFA? Doesn't sound like it.
Well, that would certainly explain why all those cults suddenly believed that their ancestors were white, like the guys they saw on the steamers and airplanes.
Duly noted, but none of the Civ games before or after were _that_ hideously unbalanced in that aspect. Yes, you could lose tanks to spearmen in Civ 1... if the spearmen were in the jungle, behind a river, etc, and even then it was rather a rare exception that they'd win. In Civ 3 the difference in numbers between top tech and stone-age axemen was ridiculously low, and due to units having only 2 hp, it only took two modestly lucky rolls out of 3 to win that fight. So spearmen often won against tanks in the plains, in the middle of a road, and when they're the ones attacking.
Actually, it does work like that sometimes.
E.g., "cargo cults." In the whole island-hopping in the Pacific, ground troops in the jungle were sometimes resupplied by airplanes paradropping crates of food and equipment. Well, some airplanes dropped their cargo wrong (remember, it was before GPS), some ran into the enemy and had to eject their cargo to escape, etc. At any rate, some of that cargo fell near some local tribes.
And the funny thing is, some of those actually started worshipping the big birds who dropped all that good stuff. And prayed that they'd return and bring them more gifts. And when that failed to happen, they built wooden airplanes and sometimes (those who were close enough to an airstrip to notice that those winged gods landed there and unloaded stuff) built whole wooden mock-ups of airstrips including the barracks and buildings around them. Some went to such effort as to even build mock-ups of the other stuff they saw there, such as "radios" with "headphones" made out of coconuts. Some stood guard or conducted drills with sticks instead of weapons, because they assumed it was some ritual to make the big winged gods come land there.
It wasn't the first time. The first well documented cargo cult, and undisputedly a cargo cult, was from 1919 from Papua. Those guys believed in the coming of a great ghost steamer to bring them tinned goods, tools, and stuff like that. That was their "messiah", so to speak. Furthermore, that they can communicate with the ghostly ancestors by raising and lowering a flag, on the flagpole a mocked-up office. Essentially they had looked at the stuff the Europeans did in ports, and how they communicated with their ships, and built a whole cult and ceremony around it.
But we have documented instances of such stuff from the 19'th century too. E.g., the Tuka Movement in the Fiji islands. On the whole it was openly hostile to the Europeans, and preaching the extinction or enslavement of Europeans by the natives, and using such visual metaphors as fattening a white pig representing the Europeans to slaughter it when the ancients return. But funnily enough, it also incorporated a lot of stuff which was mocking what the Europeans did. E.g., military parades, blessing water for their religious ceremonies, etc.
So, well, I don't care whether you find that outlook disgusting or not, but we have plenty of documented cases where it worked literally like the GP post said. If historical perspective offends you, so be it.
You don't seem to understand. "Lack of advertising" in the context of dot-coms doesn't mean "we dot-coms should have advertised" but rather "damn, we thought people would pay millions to advertise on our site, and the bastards didn't." It's a different end of that shafting.
To recap, the dot-com bubble was started by greed over advertising money.
In the stone age of the Internet, sites had one ad banner on the front page. That was it. Not animated, not pop-up, no pop-under, and certainly not wall to wall. It also usually had something to do with the site's topic, e.g., a site about games, would likely had a banner to some games shop or publisher. It was easy to target those by hand since, well, you only had one and it stayed with you a long time.
And people actually tended to look at it, and occasionally even click on it. I mean, why not. We hadn't been flooded with ads yet and desensitized to the point where they're mentally filtered out.
And the ad rates were calculated for _that_ situation. A page view for your ad in those conditions was considered worth a lot. More importantly, the ratio between total ads shown and advertising budgets allowed quite a nice price per view. The pie was divided into a smaller number of slices, so to speak.
Unfortunately, that also gave some people the idea that, basically, they could make a site with 10 banners per page, and rake in tens to thousands of dollars (at those rates) per month for just being there. Heck, that there's even room for growth there. If you want twice as much money, just double the number of banners, and there you go, the ad provider surely will keep paying the same rate for them.
Whole sites were _designed_ to be little more than wall to wall ads, with a tiny frame in the middle for the actual content. Heck, I worked for one.
Others had no qualms to just lie to ad provider. (At first most sites hosted the banner themselves, so the ad provider had to just trust them that they actually had a trillion pages served last month.) Others used scripts to refresh the page in a loop, and/or to simulate a click on the ad if they were paid more for a click. Others urged their users to do that for them. Etc.
Basically a whole "industry" and a lot of financial analysts, built a model and started a bubble, based on little more than defrauding the ad providers. And on the bet that the ad providers were drooling retards, and wouldn't recalculate the rates. Most weren't even too secretive about their plans to abuse the system, and built whole projections for the next 20 years based on the underlying assumption that the rates would indeed stay the same, and the rest of the economy wouldn't react when that scam bleeds it dry.
Unfortunately, while the ad providers did react somewhat slower than expected (and it helped further "confirm" the belief that, yep, they're helpless and waiting to be fleeced), react they did. Among other things, because the actual companies advertising their products had a finite marketing budget. You couldn't tell them to pony up 100 times more money than last year, just because the number of ad banners on the web rose 100 times. Most didn't even have that kind of money.
And what happened was, well, basic economics. If there's the same X million dollars on the "demand" side for ad space, but the "supply" side has grown 100 times, then the price per banner dropped 100 times too. In fact, what happened eventually went even further than that, like often is the case in an overproduction situation. The old style plain banner views didn't just become 100 or 1000 times cheaper, they became outright worthless. The ad providers started wanting to buy better stuff instead, like better ads, or clicks instead of views, or unique users.
And that's when the dotcom's dreams of an endless stream of billions in advertising money, started going downhill. Almost none of them got as much advertising as they had built their business plan on.
Actually, I'd guess more like Civ 3. That was the one with the antitank spearmen. And mighty cavemen in sabertooth-skin loincloths, cleaving your tank in twain with their mighty stone axe.
I'm not entirely sure what your point is, and if it's supposed to be a good or a bad thing.
What would happen on a closed proprietary protocol? (E.g., let's imagine that MS had pursued their initial idea of makingt a MS net instead of the Internet, or that AOL/Compuserve/whatever had never gone TCP/IP and managed to win on their own, or that we all were on the French minitel. Or, heck, that each ISP had their own protocol and proprietary browser, and just converted to and from it. At least one did try to convert the graphics like that, and at least one is currently re-encoding movies, so it's not a huge stretch of imagination.)
Well, then you'd be pretty much in the hands of whoever owns the protocol, i.e., most likely the ISP. If you were on, say, a proprietary AOL network, which works only with proprietary AOL software, and uses AOL's own proprietary protocols, then you're completely at their mercy. If they want to reset your connections, or whatever else, what are you going to do about it?
Of course, you could reverse-engineer their protocols and patch their programs, which is a hell of a lot more expense and effort than with the open protocols. Except then they could:
1. Just change the protocol from one version to another, to break your changes. (AOL actually did this for a while to keep breaking MS's attempts of making their Windows Messenger interoperable with AIM.)
2. Sue you under DMCA for hacking into their network and bypassing their checks. (Seriously, much smaller attempts at reverse-engineering a protocol resulted in DMCA lawsuits.)
So basically at best you'd have to bet a _lot_ on, well, how sympathetic a judge would be to your view that you have a right to bypass the usage or access restrictions on privately owned servers, to download more than you've bought, and to hack their software to that end. I wouldn't take it as a given.
So basically open software at least gives you a fighting chance at all. Yes, they can keep modifying their implementation, but so can you. In the closed version, they own the software and the protocol, they can change it, but _you_ can't.
Open standards even put a limit on how far they can take technique #1 above, because at the end of the day, they still have to remain compatible with a metric buttload of software and hardware that they don't control. In the all proprietary version, if they want to change the protocol and software _completely_, and leave the old channel open just for downloading the new software, they can.
I'm not sure what you mean by immutable in this context.
You can't change the size of an array once it's allocated (which simplifies memory management, rather than the JIT), but you can change its contents. I.e., it's certainly not the same kind of immutable as that of, say, String.
Re-allocating a larger array and copying the contents is only two lines of code, if that's what you had in mind, although, admittedly, it does involve an expensive array copy. I.e., it's probably not something you'd want to do in the inner loop of that 4-dimensional time-space calculation.
You can also reallocate the rows in a two-dimensional array (or generally any inner arrays in a multi-dimensional array), which can produce some funny stuff. E.g., if you have a 3 by 3 matrix of double, you can do: Producing a triangular array.
Or what did you mean?
Not to mention "any Steamwork game". What's that? Steampunk? :P
As someone who started from Assembly, I find the argument kinda silly. I suspect it's the same for anyone who's trained to see it as a mathematical construct too.
As long as you have even one-dimensional arrays at all, you can simulate anything else by just calculating your own offsets. Write your own function if you have to have the offsets in any particular order.
Furthermore, if you're just doing algebra on a matrix, i.e., if you're doing physics and not system programming, you shouldn't be worrying about offsets at all. F(I, J) is simply the element at "coordinates" I and J, and that's that. Who cares if internally the offset is calculated as I*100+J or I+J*100?
If you're ending up writing stuff like F(Z, Y, X) just so your offsets will be the same as in C's f[x][y][z], you're doing something wrong. Just write F(X, Y, Z) if that's how you're used to writing them, and let the compiler worry about how to arrange them in memory. Even if you have to optimize for the CPU's read-ahead buffer and cache (which, again, is something you should only be doing in system programming, not in physics) just iterate by Z first and X last, and there you go.
Caring too much about such details will land you into trouble with a lot of other languages. E.g., a two-dimensional array in Java is a one-dimensional array of _pointers_ (ok, ok, "references") to one-dimensional arrays. And four-dimensional space/time will be an array of pointers to arrays of pointers to arrays of pointers to arrays of the actual values. The offsets are... well, all over the heap. There is no way to calculate the offsets by hand without writing some native library (and then wondering why it crashes your JVM) that can peek under Java's skirt to see the actual values of those pointers.
Heh. You know, you spelling nazis amuse me. You know why?
Well, I'm not a native English speaker. I'll take it I'm fluent enough in English, if that's the only word you could pick on. And I don't mean just in vocabulary, but also in grammar. Let's put it like this: if I used my native grammar in English, I'd sound like Yoda.
In fact, I'm fluent in three languages, only one of which is my mother tongue, and can understand another two decently.
While your claim to glory is... what? That you can spell a four letter word in your mother tongue? (It's a funny thing how spelling trolls only pick on 3'rd grade level words, but invariably miss longer typos.) I.e., that your grasp of language is enough for IQ 50 or so? _That_ is your great achievement and position from which you try to look down on people? That you could do well in a primary school spelling bee? Heh.
No, dearie, let me tell you who's the ill-educated loser: you and your ilk. If you actually had an actual achievement in your pathetic waste of a life, you'd brag about that, not about being up to 3'rd grade in spelling skills. Heh. You amuse me. Please continue.
Well, I guess Ghastly's Ghastly Comic is ok then, 'cause he says Chibi Sue is 36 and only looks like a little girl.
;) Because she was well over 20, looks be damned.
But seriously, how would one provide records to prove the the age of a drawn character?
And I'd worry more about judgments based on what it _looks_ like, in the context of a law where 17 years old is still considered paedophilia. Now I'm not saying one should look for naked 17 year old girls, just saying how it applies to a drawing. How do you prove that you had in mind a 18 year old girl, and not a 17 year old one, when you drew t.
I actually personally knew someone who looked like she was maybe 13 or 14 by the time she finished college and got married. No bloody kidding. Not only her face was that of a child, but she was really short too, so basically she was as close to a "chibi" drawing as it gets. She looked like she's probably not even in high school yet.
So what I'm saying is, basically this:
1. noone objected to her marrying and presumably having sex, unless a bright star appeared in the East again when she got pregnant
2. she could probably even star in a porn movie, if she wanted to, because proof can be provided that she's well over 18
3. but if you drew some character based on her, you're essentially fucked because it looks like you drew a child. And you can't provide any proof that the character you had in mind isn't really a kid in disguise.
And actually, depending on the country (e.g., I _think_ in UK that's the case already) probably even #2 might be illegal, because it _looks_ like fucking someone underage.
Again, I'm not arguing for allowing actual paedophilia or child porn. But when the law gets into the murky domain of what it _looks_ like, it gets very funny indeed. Especially with an age like 18 as a cutoff point. Girls get their puberty and get breasts quite a few years earlier than that, and from there it's just a very slow and gradual transition to young adult, and there's considerable variation in how fast it happens. There are people well underage which look like they're 20 already (e.g., Traci Lords didn't raise any alarm bells when she claimed to be 18 and was actually 15), and there are people who look a lot younger than they are.
When looking at a photo or movie of Traci Lords, or even interacting with her in person, pretty much noone could tell that she's 15 not 18. How do you tell if a drawing looks like 15 or 18 then? How about whether she's 17 or 18?
There are no major morphological changes that happen abruptly at 18. It's not like they sprout a tail or horns at 18, so you can look at the drawing and see if the character has them or not.