Now, how do you measure profits made from advertising, because as I understand it, that is the issue under discussion here.
Determining the profit from a particular advertisement is actually quite easy in the online world. You can give each advertisement its own identifier and track the visitors from a particular advertisement and see how they relate to your sales. This is not perfect -- some people will have cookies turned off or will come back later, and perhaps some of these customers would have come even if they didn't see an advertisement, but in general this will be an accurate depiction of your profits from a particular advertisement.
The real issue is determining the potential of a (future) advertisement on a particular site, or determining the overall worth of a site based on the number and demographics of the site's visitors. This is a far more difficult question to answer. The best way to do this would be to gather the information from the existing advertisers themselves, but no advertiser in their right mind would want to freely share that information to other external entities.
Another thing I'd like to add -- if you are interviewing for a new position, assume that your employers are googling you and checking your online profiles. Do it yourself to see what they might be seeing -- if there is anything unflattering, try and take actions to get those items taken down. For example, let's say you keep a clean facebook profile but your roommate posts a picture of you half naked passed out clutching a bottle of scotch (note: this is a fictional situation and any resemblence to actual persons or events is entirely coincidental). If that happens, you should quickly untag yourself from that picture and possibly ask your roommate (nicely, with threat of force or loss of beer privileges, if necessary) to remove the picture entirely.
You should treat your online presence just like you do your credit report -- you should monitor it regularly and take action if anything innaccurate comes up. The problem is that people DO treat them the same -- they ignore both equally and it almost always comes back to bite you.
I can only imagine how difficult and lengthy the process is to get a fraudulent page removed from myspace unless it specifically violated several myspace rules.
While I have never personally needed to remove a fraudulent page from myspace, their reputation is very good for quickly removing anything. From what I've heard, they will usually take down a page first and then ask questions later. Whether or not this is a good policy is open for debate, but I can't fault them as a public company from going that route. You're more likely to run into legal/financial trouble keeping a bad profile up for an hour than you are for taking a good one down for a week. If anything that is an indictment on our legal system as opposed to myspace's policy.
Are you serious? You can't be. Who in their right mind would use My Space for job references?
Actually, a lot of companies are using myspace and facebook to screen applicants. While in my current position I have no responsibility for the hiring of new employees, if I did have that responsibility I would probably search for the person on google as well as myspace and facebook just to see if I can get any other details about a person. While I would definitely take everything I found with a grain of salt and it wouldn't weigh highly in my evaluation of the applicant, if I had several qualified applicants and one person has a facebook account with pictures and posts talking about how drunk they get every weekend compared to another with a "clean" profile, I would probably go for the one with the clean account. While the two of them might be partying with each other each weekend, at least the one has the sensibility to not publicly boast of his exploits.
If I found out that a potential employer was searching My Space for my details it would be the quickest interview ever. I wouldn't work for anyone who was that unprofessional.
I can understand your stance on the issue, and it definitely is a grey area. However, I have to ask a few questions. Do you object to the question on most applications asking if you have ever been convicted of a crime, or how many companies do background checks and drug tests? Is looking at a person's public myspace or facebook page considerably different? What if the background check that the company uses includes information gathered from the web?
The best rule of thumb is to not put anything in writing (including e-mails, text messages, web posts, etc.) that you wouldn't want anyone else from ever seeing. I have a myspace and facebook profile and I never put anything on there that I wouldn't mind my mother or my employer to see.
14 Second History
Spamhaus listed E360 as spammers
E360 sued Spamhaus in an Illinois court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus said Illinois court has no jurisdiction, take it to Federal courts.
E360 sued Spamhaus in a Federal court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus doesn't show up to Federal court, despite having accepted their jurisdiction.
E360 won a default judgement because Spamhaus didn't show up.
Spamhaus still said the court had no authority and ignored the judgement.
E360 filed for an injunction, asking the court to order either ICANN or the domain registrar to block the Spamhaus domain because Spamhaus ignored the judgement. ????
Profit!
So, if you can't beat us on the playgrounds, how are you going to beat us in the war?
Because the "playgrounds" provided a relatively equal playing field. Something tells me that if we had 20 people on the basketball court to our opponent's 5, the outcome may have been a little different.
Yet, I wanna see someone claim that by dissecting oranges he can help us fight heart diseases.
If you consider peeling a form of "dissecting" and then you eat the "dissected" orange, it could very well help you fight heart disease, especially if the orange is in place of something like potato chips or french fries.
You'd be thinking you'd landed on some pretty crazy planet!
Not having visited other planets, I can't really compare how ours compares in craziness to others, but I would venture a guess that this would be a pretty accurate depiction of our planet.
It's our left thumbs that do the precision controlling that is usually associated with the dominant hand, while the right hand does the button mashing more commonly associated with the subordinant hand.
While this is true in most games, in FPS the right control stick is almost always used for aiming, which I would argue is more important than the left joystick which is used for moving. However, in most every other game (especially sports games) the left stick is the most important.
It should also be noted that many games let you swap the two sticks, but if you're going to be using the buttons on the right side of the pad (as opposed to the triggers which most FPS are heavy on) it would be tough to also use the right control stick.
The goal of whoever plays the game is to have fun. Why else would you play games?
My comments were meant as a strike at the industry, because many of the games that have been released lately aren't fun.
Additionally, I think that many people who play games have other reasons (often higher in priority as well) than just having fun. In some cases, having fun is not the goal, although it may be a side effect of whatever the goal is. While we were talking about video games, I think my point relates well to playing poker as well. Some people play poker to have fun, some do it to make money, some do it for the social reasons, and some do it because they have an addiction to gambling. I think you could make many of the same arguments for video games, especially of the massively multiplayer variety. Taking WoW for example, there are many who play the game for profit (e.g. gold farmers), there are those who grind (and don't have fun doing so...for evidence of this read the WoW forums and see people gripe about how they have to grind and don't have fun doing so) for better items, etc. Yes, looking at the very big picture the end result of those actions may be fun (people use the money to do fun things, they use the new item to have fun defeating a new boss), but looking at a slightly shorter-term view these things often are not fun.
You don't have to make wild flailing movements to use the Wiimote. The promotional videos are exaggerated.
You don't need to make wild flailing movements to use the Wiimote, but that doesn't mean people won't. If you've ever played a racing game with someone who likes to steer with her whole body, you'll know what I mean. Those sorts of players are flailing enough already with a controller that doesn't respond to that sort of motion -- imagine what they'll be like with a controller that does!
Actually, now that I think about it, that's a good plus of the Wii. Now shoving your opponent while playing could actually affect something in the game! Sweet!
In college we liked to play full-contact DDR -- the rules were you could do whatever you wanted to your opponent to win, but most of the time the aggressor was the one that was missing more of the steps.
Re:Wii gets the highly vied after commune continge
on
Will the Wii Work?
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· Score: 1
"Metroid Prime: get inside Samus"
And next-gen's hot coffee scandal has begun. How long do you think it will take for someone to make a bootleg game that...ahem... "uses" the wiimote in such a way?
Goal of all games: Fun (or learning, which can be defined as fun)
Call my cynical but I'm pretty sure the goal of all games these days are to make a profit for the company that designs/produces/distributes them. I hope that many of the games that I have played recently didn't have "Fun" as their goal because I'd hate to think that there are people on this Earth that can fail so miserably at a single goal.
The Wii is the first console I've ever been excited about, simply because it's meant for my gaming style: multiplayer, social fun.
Everyone keeps talking about Wii's multiplayer possibilities, but none of the launch window games are going to be online-enabled. This means you're going to have to play multiplayer with people::gasp:: in close proximity to you!
Kidding aside, is anyone else worried that he won't have enough room in his living room to fit 2-4 people with arms flailing wildly as they try to use the Wiimote? I had enough trouble fitting two DDR pads (had to rearrange the furniture quite a bit), but leaving enough space for four people to use the wiimote may be difficult.
It's not just YouTube that is having issues with advertisers disguising as regular people. Facebook had a group a week or two ago along the lines of "if 100,000 people join my girlfriend will have a threesome with me." The group quickly had many hundreds of thousands of members, until it was realized that this was in fact a fraud and an advertisement for something. As soon as Facebook got wind that it was a fake they took down the group. I'm not sure about YouTube's Terms of Use Agreement, but I know that Facebook's specifically disallows using the site in any means for commercial reasons.
The people who report cheaters and get them banned are heros in gaming (And gaming companies should give them a month a free service for each cheater they sucesfully report).
Get gaming companies to give a free month of service for reporting a cheater.
Give me a break. When you get to the point where you are trying to care about what people think about you in a war you are losing. War is for one thing only--the destruction of your enemy.
And this is why we're losing -- or at least not winning -- the "war" in Iraq. Wars in the last millenia are not like the ones you get in Civilization games -- they rarely (if ever) result in the total annihilation of the enemy, nor is that usually the goal of a war either. Wars with that goal in mind (e.g. the Germans in WWII) are doomed to fail because there are always more "them" than "us."
Wars these days are as much ideological wars as they are wars over territory or economics. Especially in the war on terror, public relations is a huge issue (and perhaps the most important one). The problem we are currently having is that the insurgents are recruiting people faster than we can neutralize (either by killing or capturing) them. If we were to use unethical or excessive force in dealing with the insurgents, we will only succeed in driving more and more people to the insurgent's cause. Events such as the prison abuse scandal have hurt our efforts in Iraq and in neighboring regions. Some people will be driven to the insurgency regardless of what we do in the Middle East and across the globe, but we must take whatever steps possible (and reasonable) to limit the number of people who join the insurgency.
If winning a war was just about destroying the enemy without regard to any reprecussions, we would just drop a ton of nukes on Iraq and Afghanistan and call it a day. Obviously the world does not work like that, and hasn't since the middle ages.
Slashdot Mirror
Determining the profit from a particular advertisement is actually quite easy in the online world. You can give each advertisement its own identifier and track the visitors from a particular advertisement and see how they relate to your sales. This is not perfect -- some people will have cookies turned off or will come back later, and perhaps some of these customers would have come even if they didn't see an advertisement, but in general this will be an accurate depiction of your profits from a particular advertisement.
The real issue is determining the potential of a (future) advertisement on a particular site, or determining the overall worth of a site based on the number and demographics of the site's visitors. This is a far more difficult question to answer. The best way to do this would be to gather the information from the existing advertisers themselves, but no advertiser in their right mind would want to freely share that information to other external entities.
You should treat your online presence just like you do your credit report -- you should monitor it regularly and take action if anything innaccurate comes up. The problem is that people DO treat them the same -- they ignore both equally and it almost always comes back to bite you.
While I have never personally needed to remove a fraudulent page from myspace, their reputation is very good for quickly removing anything. From what I've heard, they will usually take down a page first and then ask questions later. Whether or not this is a good policy is open for debate, but I can't fault them as a public company from going that route. You're more likely to run into legal/financial trouble keeping a bad profile up for an hour than you are for taking a good one down for a week. If anything that is an indictment on our legal system as opposed to myspace's policy.
Actually, a lot of companies are using myspace and facebook to screen applicants. While in my current position I have no responsibility for the hiring of new employees, if I did have that responsibility I would probably search for the person on google as well as myspace and facebook just to see if I can get any other details about a person. While I would definitely take everything I found with a grain of salt and it wouldn't weigh highly in my evaluation of the applicant, if I had several qualified applicants and one person has a facebook account with pictures and posts talking about how drunk they get every weekend compared to another with a "clean" profile, I would probably go for the one with the clean account. While the two of them might be partying with each other each weekend, at least the one has the sensibility to not publicly boast of his exploits.
If I found out that a potential employer was searching My Space for my details it would be the quickest interview ever. I wouldn't work for anyone who was that unprofessional.
I can understand your stance on the issue, and it definitely is a grey area. However, I have to ask a few questions. Do you object to the question on most applications asking if you have ever been convicted of a crime, or how many companies do background checks and drug tests? Is looking at a person's public myspace or facebook page considerably different? What if the background check that the company uses includes information gathered from the web?
The best rule of thumb is to not put anything in writing (including e-mails, text messages, web posts, etc.) that you wouldn't want anyone else from ever seeing. I have a myspace and facebook profile and I never put anything on there that I wouldn't mind my mother or my employer to see.
14 Second History
Spamhaus listed E360 as spammers
E360 sued Spamhaus in an Illinois court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus said Illinois court has no jurisdiction, take it to Federal courts.
E360 sued Spamhaus in a Federal court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus doesn't show up to Federal court, despite having accepted their jurisdiction.
E360 won a default judgement because Spamhaus didn't show up.
Spamhaus still said the court had no authority and ignored the judgement.
E360 filed for an injunction, asking the court to order either ICANN or the domain registrar to block the Spamhaus domain because Spamhaus ignored the judgement.
????
Profit!
Completely off topic, but does anyone else say "Enhance" every time they double-click on a google map to zoom in?
This is Slashdot, so a more appropriate remark would be:
How long until we get lucky?
Because the "playgrounds" provided a relatively equal playing field. Something tells me that if we had 20 people on the basketball court to our opponent's 5, the outcome may have been a little different.
If you consider peeling a form of "dissecting" and then you eat the "dissected" orange, it could very well help you fight heart disease, especially if the orange is in place of something like potato chips or french fries.
Not having visited other planets, I can't really compare how ours compares in craziness to others, but I would venture a guess that this would be a pretty accurate depiction of our planet.
While this is true in most games, in FPS the right control stick is almost always used for aiming, which I would argue is more important than the left joystick which is used for moving. However, in most every other game (especially sports games) the left stick is the most important.
It should also be noted that many games let you swap the two sticks, but if you're going to be using the buttons on the right side of the pad (as opposed to the triggers which most FPS are heavy on) it would be tough to also use the right control stick.
My comments were meant as a strike at the industry, because many of the games that have been released lately aren't fun.
Additionally, I think that many people who play games have other reasons (often higher in priority as well) than just having fun. In some cases, having fun is not the goal, although it may be a side effect of whatever the goal is. While we were talking about video games, I think my point relates well to playing poker as well. Some people play poker to have fun, some do it to make money, some do it for the social reasons, and some do it because they have an addiction to gambling. I think you could make many of the same arguments for video games, especially of the massively multiplayer variety. Taking WoW for example, there are many who play the game for profit (e.g. gold farmers), there are those who grind (and don't have fun doing so...for evidence of this read the WoW forums and see people gripe about how they have to grind and don't have fun doing so) for better items, etc. Yes, looking at the very big picture the end result of those actions may be fun (people use the money to do fun things, they use the new item to have fun defeating a new boss), but looking at a slightly shorter-term view these things often are not fun.
You don't need to make wild flailing movements to use the Wiimote, but that doesn't mean people won't. If you've ever played a racing game with someone who likes to steer with her whole body, you'll know what I mean. Those sorts of players are flailing enough already with a controller that doesn't respond to that sort of motion -- imagine what they'll be like with a controller that does!
In college we liked to play full-contact DDR -- the rules were you could do whatever you wanted to your opponent to win, but most of the time the aggressor was the one that was missing more of the steps.
And next-gen's hot coffee scandal has begun. How long do you think it will take for someone to make a bootleg game that ...ahem... "uses" the wiimote in such a way?
Call my cynical but I'm pretty sure the goal of all games these days are to make a profit for the company that designs/produces/distributes them. I hope that many of the games that I have played recently didn't have "Fun" as their goal because I'd hate to think that there are people on this Earth that can fail so miserably at a single goal.
Everyone keeps talking about Wii's multiplayer possibilities, but none of the launch window games are going to be online-enabled. This means you're going to have to play multiplayer with people ::gasp:: in close proximity to you!
Kidding aside, is anyone else worried that he won't have enough room in his living room to fit 2-4 people with arms flailing wildly as they try to use the Wiimote? I had enough trouble fitting two DDR pads (had to rearrange the furniture quite a bit), but leaving enough space for four people to use the wiimote may be difficult.
It's not just YouTube that is having issues with advertisers disguising as regular people. Facebook had a group a week or two ago along the lines of "if 100,000 people join my girlfriend will have a threesome with me." The group quickly had many hundreds of thousands of members, until it was realized that this was in fact a fraud and an advertisement for something. As soon as Facebook got wind that it was a fake they took down the group. I'm not sure about YouTube's Terms of Use Agreement, but I know that Facebook's specifically disallows using the site in any means for commercial reasons.
You, sir, have never played Scrabble against my friend's grandmother then.
Possible ways to cheat:
You're new here aren't you?
if it shows up at all....and talk about an indirect solution, you might as well just screencap your entire desktop then...
I vote that this should be the comment of the week.
Except that it's the Wii, so your wrists will be going numb. Well, probably not, because I'm sure they get a lot of exercise...
And this is why we're losing -- or at least not winning -- the "war" in Iraq. Wars in the last millenia are not like the ones you get in Civilization games -- they rarely (if ever) result in the total annihilation of the enemy, nor is that usually the goal of a war either. Wars with that goal in mind (e.g. the Germans in WWII) are doomed to fail because there are always more "them" than "us."
Wars these days are as much ideological wars as they are wars over territory or economics. Especially in the war on terror, public relations is a huge issue (and perhaps the most important one). The problem we are currently having is that the insurgents are recruiting people faster than we can neutralize (either by killing or capturing) them. If we were to use unethical or excessive force in dealing with the insurgents, we will only succeed in driving more and more people to the insurgent's cause. Events such as the prison abuse scandal have hurt our efforts in Iraq and in neighboring regions. Some people will be driven to the insurgency regardless of what we do in the Middle East and across the globe, but we must take whatever steps possible (and reasonable) to limit the number of people who join the insurgency.
If winning a war was just about destroying the enemy without regard to any reprecussions, we would just drop a ton of nukes on Iraq and Afghanistan and call it a day. Obviously the world does not work like that, and hasn't since the middle ages.