Well, of course. If your dad is in the industry and has connections to lawyers, business planners, managers, developers and money for the idea he encouraged you to produce -- he needs to make sure he has connections to the media and some 2.0 "news" sites so he can have them put the story out there in the first place, right?
Nobody is saying they shouldn't use their connections and insights to their advantage. We're saying that it's not newsworthy. Presonally, I'm tired of media articles about some wiz-kid who founded his own company or invented some genius device and immediately got it into production and became wealthy before he had pubes when the kid already had the connections and avenues open for him to begin with.
Think of it this way. Which is a news story? Spoiled child of wealthy connected family attends Harvard where his parents are both Alumni and donors -- or underprivileged child from single parent home in the ghetto living on welfare lands a spot with tuition at Harvard?
See, one is impressive. The other is... well... inevitable and obvious.
Anyone who produces content for MySpace deserves to rot in hell with Hitler.
Second, she's 17 years old. She's not some twelve year old wiz-kid.
Third, I've been in the same boat as her with my eBay alternative (niche) site a decade ago -- only I didn't sell out by sticking advertising everywhere (no ads, no fees) and I didn't accept any offers to be bought out by commercial enterprises who wanted to suck some eyeballs into their retail and service offerings by having my site in their portfolio.
Seriously - throwing up a page with a bunch of myspace content and getting lots of traffic is about as impressive as the million 20 year old chicks that decide to get rich running their own webcam or porn site. *shrug*
Third, her story is very unique. They claim the internet is a meritocracy, but that's bullshit. It's a navel-gazing fraternity where everyone in the clique pimps each other's services and name up until they're bought out by a big fish and then they go on to start their next venture. Take a look at everything Kevin Rose does or that dude who created the retared "Mahalo" thing.
Yeah, there's nothing more relaxing than being stuck out in nature dealing with a lack of bathroom facilities, a bunch of bugs and mosquitoes and constantly wondering if things are fine at work or if someone needs your help or if your own company that you run on the side is in good hands and not having the technological resources strapped on you to deal with them should you be needed.
Thanks, but I think I'll stick with my laptop, cell phone and city landscape. Nature is ass and unplugging is highly overrated.
Exactly. It's like when people talk about the amazing startup that YouTube supposedly was and how it was "started by two kids in their garage". Well, not really. One of them was married to a woman whose father was in the industry and rich and had all the right connections and helped fund the startup.
It's true of almost all of these situations. If it weren't for the parents and their connections, kids like this wouldn't even be introduced to such possibilities, much less given the resources for them, the encouragement regarding them or the expertise that would cost a normal kid/adult a lot of money and the connections that money can't buy.
This would be like a story about Bill Gates' child starting up his own software company as a teenager or Harrison Ford having a son who goes into acting. I mean... duh. What else was he going to do? He had the example and the resources to do it by dint of relation.
Not to mention... we don't know who really did the meat of the work. Remember that girl who did the abstract paintings and made like a half million dollars before it turned out that her dad (an artist) was the one who actually did all of the paintings that she was famous for?
One good way to piss a cop off is to say that you don't have any identification or refuse to present your identification. We've unofficially fallen into the "show me your documents" police state. Worse, as this video demonstrates, police HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE ABOUT THE LAW.
Police are not lawyers or judges. They often infringe on your rights; often because they don't know any better. Police are nothing more than thoughtless henchmen. All you can do is follow whatever they command of you and hope that someone up the chain sets things right.
It's unfortunate that turn-based has to also mean "pointless". I mean, the battles and actions you take have little impact to anything and you have almost no input into your character development. That might be fun for some, but it bugs me. Turn-based on the PC was far more creative, if you can count games like Fallout in the mix.
Final Fantasy games are beautiful and have reasonable storylines, I suppose -- but I'd much rather just watch all the cut-scenes together than waste my time "playing" them.
I guess I would compare JRPGs (the ones I have been exposed to, anyway) to Top 40 pop charts. Shiny, pretty people singing peppy, well-produced, successful, popular music . . . but the music is still vapid, meaningless and cheesecake-like. While I might bop my head to a good Top 40 pop tune, I wouldn't sit down and pour through an entire album.
I understand that some people are JRPG fanatics. No slight against them, intended. I think there are a lot of people like myself who enjoy one aspect of them, but find that they just fall too flat to draw us in.
I actually don't have a problem with instant messaging. For example, my company uses our own IM product exclusively, because we are distributed all around the globe and many of us telecommute. Without IM, we'd be in a lot of pain. And for the world in general, IM is a different method of communication, rather than a version supplanting an already existing similar method. There's email, IM and telephone. But MySpace and similar "services" do nothing but erode these "big three".
It's sad that after decades of an evolving internet, the userbase is largely reverting to the sort of "singular resource" method of contact that we had to deal with on BBSes. That's ridiculous. If MySpace is down or slow (which it always is), you aren't able to communicate. Not to mention, you have little control over spam and you're giving all of your communications to the Fox News Corp databases.
There are so many people, however, who use ONLY social networks to communicate through and they rarely (if ever) check their email. It sucks to be essentially forced into creating an account somewhere and having to add it as one more point to check every day just in case those few people send you something. For these reasons, I hate social networks with a passion. They are seeking to consume eyeballs from users by taking over everything people typically use the internet for -- but constraining all of these services to one unreliable commercial network.
I really hate JRPGs. I find them too linear and lacking in the "RPG" part. When I play a JRPG, it feels like it's just a movie with some interactive (but meaningless in the scope of the game) elements. Like someone developed a story and said "okay, let's throw in a few random fights and some minor and meaningless generic character stats stuff to break things up and stuff them between the scenes".
I'll probably buy Eternal Sonata, because it does seem to have a unique story and I'm sure it will be beautiful on my 1080p. I'll just wait until I hear more on which platform I should buy it for and . . . until I can buy it used for half price.:)
AMD does own the low-end, but the low-end isn't enough to pay the bills (and the investors).
In addition to the seemingly over-priced and stagnant product line-up coming down the pipe-line, you also have AMD jumping into debt further every quarter.
I've been keeping an eye on AMD for some time now, because I wanted to build a long-term position in it, but I am not so sure anymore. Their financials are terrible, they are fighting an insane price-war with Intel that is hurting them significantly and they continue to make large questionable purchases (such as ATI) that may or may not pay off in the long run.
I don't see how they can hope to out-engineer Intel with new products and performance any time soon, when they are suffering such debt, lacking profits, lacking market-share and unable to gather the much needed R&D funding, because they're apparently losing their lunch to Intel because of the previously mentioned price-wars.
For nostalgia and competitiveness, I sincerely want to see AMD recover and come out on top again. I just don't know how (or when) that is going to happen. This year is the first time I have built an Intel based system since about 1996. I average two to four machines a year and they have always been top of the line AMD systems . . .
What's the point? From everything I keep hearing in the news, nobody uses email anymore. If Mozilla and "MailCo" really want to make a difference, they should start writing Facebook and MySpace email clients. Remember, the internet is not about open protocols and clients -- it's about one single website acting as the singular point of contact and communication for the entire globe! And of course, when people leave MySpace for facebook, all you have to do (instead of simply continuing to email them at their existing email address), is go to facebook, sign up for another account. Add the person. Have them add you. And then make sure that you add it to the growing pile of sites you check every day, so you can keep in touch with said idiot who refuses to use email.
Quite good, perhaps, but for less money you can certainly get better performance out of Intel. As much as I have loved AMD for the last decade, Intel is completely eating their lunch at the moment and Phenom and Barcelona are not going to save them. We can only hope that in the next couple of years, they have something in the pipeline that rescues them and their less than 15% market share, before someone gobbles them up.
I'll preface this by saying that I own stock in Sandisk (SNDK).
I am not selling SNDK at this point, because I find any insinuation that they are involved in price fixing questionable. The price per gigabyte for flash memory has been dropping significantly quarter after quarter, though they do note that prices have increased slightly the last two quarters. While I'm not an analyst by any means, I don't see this as a significant or indicative trend and unless they have incriminating emails passing around between CEOs, I'm sure these increases could be attributed to a number of things such as the school year and Christmas coming up (which increases demand) and the recent manufacturing shutdown at a major Samsung plant (which reduced production).
You also have Apple talking about new laptops down the pipeline that will potentially use a lot of flash and a flood of new hardware such as the new fat-wide ipod and the iphone which increase need for flash storage. So you have vastly increasing demand for the product with an industry that is still trying to ramp up production to keep up. I don't see how a slight price increase over two quarters would be a surprise?
That would mean that if you were born between 1961 to 1964, you are both a baby boomer and a gen x-er. Weird.
I always just assumed that generation baby boomers were born to WWII adults and gen X was born to boomer adults and gen Y was born to gen X. Otherwise it doesn't make much sense, since theoretically, the children of a baby boomer who are born a few years apart could all be a different "generation", even though they were born to a baby boomer.
I tried to review the business account services that Comcast offers, but from information I've found online and in forums, they seem to have the same strict and imprecise limitations as the residential accounts. The only difference seems to be that they give you more email addresses (I have never checked my comcast email in seven years) and you get some static IPs.
I tried to contact Comcast to verify this, becuase their business site is terrible and poor in description, but they just transferred me to a "local office" where I sat on hold for 90 minutes at a time each of four times I called. So I just gave up.
No, the press is against them right now, because instead of saying "sir, your usage of this service is impacting the experience of other paying subscribers on this node and we request that you reduce your usage to 250gb/mo", they are addressing the problem by saying "Sir, this is the Comcast Security Services department and we are calling to inform you that we are concerned with your monthly usage for last month, totalling XYZ gigabytes. This is negatively impacting people in your area and if you ever use too much again, we will terminate you for a year".
Notice that in the second situation -- which is the reality of what they do -- they don't offer any information on what "stop it" means. I actually had to deal with comcast on this a few months ago. I told the person on the phone that I definitely don't want to cause problems for anyone else on the service, so I would like to know how much I should reduce my usage by. How many gigabytes? What percentage of the previous month's usage? They wouldn't tell me. So I just got a vague "stop doing that". Gee, how fucking helpful.
And of course, they have no way to sell me additional services, either. If I use too much, I'd gladly buy a second account. If I'm willing to pay for two spots on the node, why not give them to me?! I thought they were a corporation that was all about the capitalist ideal and not the one-size-fits-all socialism style solution? What's appropriate for the elderly couple down the street may not be appropriate for my needs. That doesn't make me a bad person or a bad customer. It makes me someone looking for a service. And since my taxes and government help allow you to own a monopoly in this region -- this preventing competition for me to turn to so I can FIND those services that do fit me -- I feel there is some degree of obligation to expand those service options.
Where in the hell are you getting this random "650gb" limit? You are overboard by about a multiple of three.
Second, you have NEVER suffered slow standard service browsing slashdot or emailing grandma because some guy is sucking up bandwidth through bit torrent or porn downloads at the end of your block.
Third, if that was truly a valid concern, the answer is to use traffic shaping and throttling, rather than banning customers. What is the point in banning someone NEXT month for excessive use that *supposedly* impacted service for the entire node LAST month? So 100 or more customers suffer for an entire month or two before Comcast even addresses the problem? Wouldn't it make more sense to impose reasonable throttling techniques in real time, so that one can consume as much bandwidth as they are paying for (without overall monthly limit) as long as there is little network usage at the time -- and when periods are at their peak, throttling that person's connection back?
+ I doubt they are considering songs to be 6mb. I assume they're talking 128kbps (not that anyone even uses such a low bitrate anymore -- not even many decent radio streams).
+ Where in the hell do you live that you get comcast internet service for only $30/mo?! I pay $60/mo, before fees and taxes.
+ I don't care how cheap it is for the amount of bandwidth provided. If I can't get as much bandwidth as I *want*, then it's useless. If I want to drive to the next state, but you will only sell me one gallon of gas, the affordability of that one gallon of gas is meaningless. In other words, if I can get 200gb for $60/mo, then sell me $400gb for $120/mo. If I'm willing to pay for more, GIVE ME MORE. Don't just threaten to ban me for a year, simply because I use more than all the grandmas in this zip code who use it just to email their grandchildren once a year.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, of course. If your dad is in the industry and has connections to lawyers, business planners, managers, developers and money for the idea he encouraged you to produce -- he needs to make sure he has connections to the media and some 2.0 "news" sites so he can have them put the story out there in the first place, right?
You're missing the entire fucking point.
Nobody is saying they shouldn't use their connections and insights to their advantage. We're saying that it's not newsworthy. Presonally, I'm tired of media articles about some wiz-kid who founded his own company or invented some genius device and immediately got it into production and became wealthy before he had pubes when the kid already had the connections and avenues open for him to begin with.
Think of it this way. Which is a news story? Spoiled child of wealthy connected family attends Harvard where his parents are both Alumni and donors -- or underprivileged child from single parent home in the ghetto living on welfare lands a spot with tuition at Harvard?
See, one is impressive. The other is... well... inevitable and obvious.
Anyone who produces content for MySpace deserves to rot in hell with Hitler.
Second, she's 17 years old. She's not some twelve year old wiz-kid.
Third, I've been in the same boat as her with my eBay alternative (niche) site a decade ago -- only I didn't sell out by sticking advertising everywhere (no ads, no fees) and I didn't accept any offers to be bought out by commercial enterprises who wanted to suck some eyeballs into their retail and service offerings by having my site in their portfolio.
Seriously - throwing up a page with a bunch of myspace content and getting lots of traffic is about as impressive as the million 20 year old chicks that decide to get rich running their own webcam or porn site. *shrug*
Third, her story is very unique. They claim the internet is a meritocracy, but that's bullshit. It's a navel-gazing fraternity where everyone in the clique pimps each other's services and name up until they're bought out by a big fish and then they go on to start their next venture. Take a look at everything Kevin Rose does or that dude who created the retared "Mahalo" thing.
First, what content does NBC have that's worth watching, other than Heroes?
Second, I'll stick to Bit Torrent. Thanks.
I can toss my wifi in the trash.
You're stuck paying alimoney the rest of your life.
As for Americans socializing less... Well, duh. Have you met the average American? Why in the FUCK would I want to socialize with them?!
Yeah, there's nothing more relaxing than being stuck out in nature dealing with a lack of bathroom facilities, a bunch of bugs and mosquitoes and constantly wondering if things are fine at work or if someone needs your help or if your own company that you run on the side is in good hands and not having the technological resources strapped on you to deal with them should you be needed.
Thanks, but I think I'll stick with my laptop, cell phone and city landscape. Nature is ass and unplugging is highly overrated.
Exactly. It's like when people talk about the amazing startup that YouTube supposedly was and how it was "started by two kids in their garage". Well, not really. One of them was married to a woman whose father was in the industry and rich and had all the right connections and helped fund the startup.
It's true of almost all of these situations. If it weren't for the parents and their connections, kids like this wouldn't even be introduced to such possibilities, much less given the resources for them, the encouragement regarding them or the expertise that would cost a normal kid/adult a lot of money and the connections that money can't buy.
This would be like a story about Bill Gates' child starting up his own software company as a teenager or Harrison Ford having a son who goes into acting. I mean... duh. What else was he going to do? He had the example and the resources to do it by dint of relation.
Not to mention... we don't know who really did the meat of the work. Remember that girl who did the abstract paintings and made like a half million dollars before it turned out that her dad (an artist) was the one who actually did all of the paintings that she was famous for?
I smell someone with a dad in the industry who gave him access to all the necessary advantages.
These wonder-kids never spring up out of trailer parks where mom and dad flip burgers and the most advanced high-tech device they own is a VCR.
Why is Konami having a conference for Trans-Genders?
One good way to piss a cop off is to say that you don't have any identification or refuse to present your identification. We've unofficially fallen into the "show me your documents" police state. Worse, as this video demonstrates, police HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE ABOUT THE LAW.
Police are not lawyers or judges. They often infringe on your rights; often because they don't know any better. Police are nothing more than thoughtless henchmen. All you can do is follow whatever they command of you and hope that someone up the chain sets things right.
It's unfortunate that turn-based has to also mean "pointless". I mean, the battles and actions you take have little impact to anything and you have almost no input into your character development. That might be fun for some, but it bugs me. Turn-based on the PC was far more creative, if you can count games like Fallout in the mix.
Final Fantasy games are beautiful and have reasonable storylines, I suppose -- but I'd much rather just watch all the cut-scenes together than waste my time "playing" them.
I guess I would compare JRPGs (the ones I have been exposed to, anyway) to Top 40 pop charts. Shiny, pretty people singing peppy, well-produced, successful, popular music . . . but the music is still vapid, meaningless and cheesecake-like. While I might bop my head to a good Top 40 pop tune, I wouldn't sit down and pour through an entire album.
I understand that some people are JRPG fanatics. No slight against them, intended. I think there are a lot of people like myself who enjoy one aspect of them, but find that they just fall too flat to draw us in.
I actually don't have a problem with instant messaging. For example, my company uses our own IM product exclusively, because we are distributed all around the globe and many of us telecommute. Without IM, we'd be in a lot of pain. And for the world in general, IM is a different method of communication, rather than a version supplanting an already existing similar method. There's email, IM and telephone. But MySpace and similar "services" do nothing but erode these "big three".
It's sad that after decades of an evolving internet, the userbase is largely reverting to the sort of "singular resource" method of contact that we had to deal with on BBSes. That's ridiculous. If MySpace is down or slow (which it always is), you aren't able to communicate. Not to mention, you have little control over spam and you're giving all of your communications to the Fox News Corp databases.
There are so many people, however, who use ONLY social networks to communicate through and they rarely (if ever) check their email. It sucks to be essentially forced into creating an account somewhere and having to add it as one more point to check every day just in case those few people send you something. For these reasons, I hate social networks with a passion. They are seeking to consume eyeballs from users by taking over everything people typically use the internet for -- but constraining all of these services to one unreliable commercial network.
I just hope this trend does not continue.
I really hate JRPGs. I find them too linear and lacking in the "RPG" part. When I play a JRPG, it feels like it's just a movie with some interactive (but meaningless in the scope of the game) elements. Like someone developed a story and said "okay, let's throw in a few random fights and some minor and meaningless generic character stats stuff to break things up and stuff them between the scenes".
:)
I'll probably buy Eternal Sonata, because it does seem to have a unique story and I'm sure it will be beautiful on my 1080p. I'll just wait until I hear more on which platform I should buy it for and . . . until I can buy it used for half price.
AMD does own the low-end, but the low-end isn't enough to pay the bills (and the investors).
In addition to the seemingly over-priced and stagnant product line-up coming down the pipe-line, you also have AMD jumping into debt further every quarter.
I've been keeping an eye on AMD for some time now, because I wanted to build a long-term position in it, but I am not so sure anymore. Their financials are terrible, they are fighting an insane price-war with Intel that is hurting them significantly and they continue to make large questionable purchases (such as ATI) that may or may not pay off in the long run.
I don't see how they can hope to out-engineer Intel with new products and performance any time soon, when they are suffering such debt, lacking profits, lacking market-share and unable to gather the much needed R&D funding, because they're apparently losing their lunch to Intel because of the previously mentioned price-wars.
For nostalgia and competitiveness, I sincerely want to see AMD recover and come out on top again. I just don't know how (or when) that is going to happen. This year is the first time I have built an Intel based system since about 1996. I average two to four machines a year and they have always been top of the line AMD systems . . .
What's the point? From everything I keep hearing in the news, nobody uses email anymore. If Mozilla and "MailCo" really want to make a difference, they should start writing Facebook and MySpace email clients. Remember, the internet is not about open protocols and clients -- it's about one single website acting as the singular point of contact and communication for the entire globe! And of course, when people leave MySpace for facebook, all you have to do (instead of simply continuing to email them at their existing email address), is go to facebook, sign up for another account. Add the person. Have them add you. And then make sure that you add it to the growing pile of sites you check every day, so you can keep in touch with said idiot who refuses to use email.
Thank god.
Quite good, perhaps, but for less money you can certainly get better performance out of Intel. As much as I have loved AMD for the last decade, Intel is completely eating their lunch at the moment and Phenom and Barcelona are not going to save them. We can only hope that in the next couple of years, they have something in the pipeline that rescues them and their less than 15% market share, before someone gobbles them up.
I'll preface this by saying that I own stock in Sandisk (SNDK).
I am not selling SNDK at this point, because I find any insinuation that they are involved in price fixing questionable. The price per gigabyte for flash memory has been dropping significantly quarter after quarter, though they do note that prices have increased slightly the last two quarters. While I'm not an analyst by any means, I don't see this as a significant or indicative trend and unless they have incriminating emails passing around between CEOs, I'm sure these increases could be attributed to a number of things such as the school year and Christmas coming up (which increases demand) and the recent manufacturing shutdown at a major Samsung plant (which reduced production).
You also have Apple talking about new laptops down the pipeline that will potentially use a lot of flash and a flood of new hardware such as the new fat-wide ipod and the iphone which increase need for flash storage. So you have vastly increasing demand for the product with an industry that is still trying to ramp up production to keep up. I don't see how a slight price increase over two quarters would be a surprise?
That would mean that if you were born between 1961 to 1964, you are both a baby boomer and a gen x-er. Weird.
I always just assumed that generation baby boomers were born to WWII adults and gen X was born to boomer adults and gen Y was born to gen X. Otherwise it doesn't make much sense, since theoretically, the children of a baby boomer who are born a few years apart could all be a different "generation", even though they were born to a baby boomer.
I tried to review the business account services that Comcast offers, but from information I've found online and in forums, they seem to have the same strict and imprecise limitations as the residential accounts. The only difference seems to be that they give you more email addresses (I have never checked my comcast email in seven years) and you get some static IPs.
I tried to contact Comcast to verify this, becuase their business site is terrible and poor in description, but they just transferred me to a "local office" where I sat on hold for 90 minutes at a time each of four times I called. So I just gave up.
No, the press is against them right now, because instead of saying "sir, your usage of this service is impacting the experience of other paying subscribers on this node and we request that you reduce your usage to 250gb/mo", they are addressing the problem by saying "Sir, this is the Comcast Security Services department and we are calling to inform you that we are concerned with your monthly usage for last month, totalling XYZ gigabytes. This is negatively impacting people in your area and if you ever use too much again, we will terminate you for a year".
Notice that in the second situation -- which is the reality of what they do -- they don't offer any information on what "stop it" means. I actually had to deal with comcast on this a few months ago. I told the person on the phone that I definitely don't want to cause problems for anyone else on the service, so I would like to know how much I should reduce my usage by. How many gigabytes? What percentage of the previous month's usage? They wouldn't tell me. So I just got a vague "stop doing that". Gee, how fucking helpful.
And of course, they have no way to sell me additional services, either. If I use too much, I'd gladly buy a second account. If I'm willing to pay for two spots on the node, why not give them to me?! I thought they were a corporation that was all about the capitalist ideal and not the one-size-fits-all socialism style solution? What's appropriate for the elderly couple down the street may not be appropriate for my needs. That doesn't make me a bad person or a bad customer. It makes me someone looking for a service. And since my taxes and government help allow you to own a monopoly in this region -- this preventing competition for me to turn to so I can FIND those services that do fit me -- I feel there is some degree of obligation to expand those service options.
Where in the hell are you getting this random "650gb" limit? You are overboard by about a multiple of three.
Second, you have NEVER suffered slow standard service browsing slashdot or emailing grandma because some guy is sucking up bandwidth through bit torrent or porn downloads at the end of your block.
Third, if that was truly a valid concern, the answer is to use traffic shaping and throttling, rather than banning customers. What is the point in banning someone NEXT month for excessive use that *supposedly* impacted service for the entire node LAST month? So 100 or more customers suffer for an entire month or two before Comcast even addresses the problem? Wouldn't it make more sense to impose reasonable throttling techniques in real time, so that one can consume as much bandwidth as they are paying for (without overall monthly limit) as long as there is little network usage at the time -- and when periods are at their peak, throttling that person's connection back?
There are several problems with your comment.
+ I doubt they are considering songs to be 6mb. I assume they're talking 128kbps (not that anyone even uses such a low bitrate anymore -- not even many decent radio streams).
+ Where in the hell do you live that you get comcast internet service for only $30/mo?! I pay $60/mo, before fees and taxes.
+ I don't care how cheap it is for the amount of bandwidth provided. If I can't get as much bandwidth as I *want*, then it's useless. If I want to drive to the next state, but you will only sell me one gallon of gas, the affordability of that one gallon of gas is meaningless. In other words, if I can get 200gb for $60/mo, then sell me $400gb for $120/mo. If I'm willing to pay for more, GIVE ME MORE. Don't just threaten to ban me for a year, simply because I use more than all the grandmas in this zip code who use it just to email their grandchildren once a year.
Are they also in the habit of writing several zeros and a decimal point for a whole integer?