My mother lives in a "golf cart community" which means you can get to any place in the community with a golf cart. The only place she can't go is to Wal Mart, which is across the street and her golf cart isn't road legal, though there are some road legal golf carts.
One would be tempted to think that this car would be perfect for that situation. It would be completely safe because nobody drives about 30 - 45 mph along very scenic routes with relatively few cars. Only when she went to Wal Mart would she actually use it on the road, a 4 lane thing with a wide median, I think the speed limit is in the 45 - 50 range.
The only problem is... if she brought a friend along, where would they store the things they bought? There's barely enough room for groceries. In fact, it looks like her golf cart has more storage space than that thing, so she might as well stick with the golf cart, and get a regular car for gong to Wal Mart.
I looked all over for some indication of what might pass for a trunk, even at the brochure (link below, they pretend ask you for your email address before sending you to this link), and there spend lots of time on safety features, but no time on the interior.
So what do you do with it? You can't run errands with it, and it's probably uncomfortable for long trips. It looks sort of like a second car, or a car for people who never have to buy things in the store and bring them home, and without a back seat, there's no way you could use it if you have young children.
So I guess in some ways, this overlaps the Jeep Wrangler market - small, impractical, but fun, but even the Wrangler has a bench seat area in the back where you can put your groceries. Or maybe the bicycle market. You can carry about as much home (assuming you have a passenger) as you can on a bicycle, or - most likely - the road legal golf cart market. But those at least have 4 seats, and perhaps some extra storage space, and they don't use gas at all (I think), you charge it at home.
Also, Volkswagon has the TDI diesel engine that gets close to 50mpg highway, and something in the mid 40's in the city. So if I want fuel economy, I can get a VW, and be more comfortable to boot.
I'm not really disparaging this car, I like it - or want to like it - but don't see it as more than a "can get where I want to go and stay dry and warm in the process, unlike my bike" car. And with a $12k starting price, you'd really have to convince me why not to get a (insert budget car here) instead.
In all seriousness, if two of these fit into a standard parking spot, can you double up at a meter? Does the first person in to the meter spot pay, and the second one piggybacks and adds on as necessary?
Third Generation (I think that's what they're calling it) P2P programs like
ANtz and Mute rely
on a sort of plausible deniability and waste a lot of bandwidth. They're strictly
peer-to-peer and distributed. When you get a request for a file, you don't know
whether the originator is the person connecting to you, or someone behind them.
There is no request to make a direct connection. So while you could point the
finger at them, you may be wrong.
The problem with this - and I've pointed it out to the developer of Mute -
is that someone with enough resources (like the RIAA, or that British Porn group)
could log on thousands of times, and make enough reasonable guesses about who's
sharing what with who to pinpoint some of the major sharers, who would be smart
to figure out how to change their IP address and what parts of their collection
they make available on any given day frequently to avoid detection.
Also, as I said, this wastes a lot of bandwidth, because you're not making
a direct connection to the person you're sharing with, you could be acting as
a conduit as well, so people who pay for bandwidth will raise the familiar bittorrent
protests - I'm paying too much for what I'm downloading. Of course, P2P not
being bittorrent and being used for trading 99.99% illegal stuff (bittorrent
at least is used to distribute things like linux flavors), all those people
should shut up and be grateful they're not paying $20 (or their local currency
equivelant) for the CD/DVD etc. they're downloading.
Also, once this third generation stuff catches on, it's just a matter of time
before they start sueing the guys who make the software for aiding and abetting
file sharing, or whatever that thing congress wants to pass into law says is
illegal. You know, the thing that overturns the Betamax/Mr. Roges law. Then
again, the guy who makes Mute told me that he's in it for the fame, so being
sued could just make his day. Though sueing the developer seems like a free
speach issue to me.
I'm going to guess that most slashdot readers aren't Stern listeners. I don't listen to his show, I never did, but from what I've read about him and heard about him over the years, I have to say that I respect him.
He's standing up to the FCC and is encouraging the media companies to do the same. I think it's great that he's "putting his paycheck where his mouth is" and not just moving to a medium that the FCC can't touch right now, but taking his ratings away from Clearchannel.
So Howard Stern, if you're out there, I salute you.
What's with the Recursive Link?
on
The Long Tail
·
· Score: 1
On page 3
Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see "Anatomy of the Long Tail").
AIM/ICQ, Yahoo and MSN have no need to adopt open standards, and never will. Yahoo does so much stuff that Jabber doesn't do - Imvironments, Audibles, etc., and more importantly, they want to be proprietary so they can decide whether or not to allow third party clients to connect to their service. Twice in the past year I've been locked out of Trillian because of Yahoo, and once they even caused Trillian to crash completely. I had to wait for an update to Trillian, which was available within 24 hours. Supporting open standards wouldn't let them do that. Remember, running a massive IM server and developing a client doesn't make you money, but showing ads does, and Yahoo brilliantly works these in as Imvironments.
Imvironments and Audibles, proprietary smilies, etc. are also strong arguments for using Yahoo's client rather than Gaim or Trillian. I don't get any of those things, and someone with Yahoo will inevitibly complain that I'm not in Yahoo, so I have to launch it. Very clever and "viral" of them.
Jabber will probably never reach the same market penetration as the other IM clients, but that's ok, it's not really competition for them. You use AOL if you want to talk to your friends no matter where they are. You ues Jabber because you want complete control over your chat network - who can connect, whether or not you log chats centrally on the server, and who can eavesdrop.
Jabber can work entirely behind a firewall, so your employees can talk to each other and not worry about revealing trade secrets to someone else sniffing their conversation, or talking to their friends and wasting company time. Or you use Jabber because you're conducting business you don't want someone else to find out about. For example, Google might want to use Jabber to communicate because MSN, Yahoo and AOL are their direct competitors and could listen in to their conversations.
You also use Jabber because you deal with clients and need an audit trail. By logging conversations centrally on a server, you can produce an audit trail superior to even email. Being centrally located, if you trust that nobody's tampered with it, you get chat logs that prove what was said when to who, and what the response was. This is similar to centralied web-based trouble ticket systems.
So, while Jabber may have many mechanical similarities to the other IM clients, the actual uses and needs it fulfils are somewhat different.
I've seen some digital movies. Star Wars Ep 1 was in digital theaters, I saw another handful of movies in digital theaters, and I have to say, they look fine to my eyes. They do look jagged, however, sometimes during the credits when there are lines that should be straight diagonal lines, but are suffer from the basic diagonal line on a computer problems.
The argument for digital theaters is that you don't have to transport film from point A to point B, so if Movie "X" is wildy popular, and Movie "Y" is a box office flop, you can quickly and easily repurpose a theater to show Movie "X" just by fiddling with the router (or whatever) and changing the Marquis outside.
That is, the theater can instantly respond to market demand.
The low-res TV commercial projector they use seems to be different from the high res projector, and in many theaters that do this, you can see a larger window in the back of the theater to accomodate the two projectors. I've seen both images on the screen at the same time while they're shutting one off and turning on the other.
In The USA, AMC shows first run movies, and was the only digital theater in NYC at the time Star Wars Ep 1 came out. Now I see them all over the place.
Everything I need to know about gaming I learned from Pac Man.
Actually, if you get into game making on some of the more primitive platforms out there, like SSI's Unlimited Adventures, or Inform, you'll see that the basic formula of just about all games, and most fiction is what I've distilled down to "Goal + Obstacle." You want something, but something prevents you from getting it.
Whether that something is all the pellets, and the obstacle is some floating ghosts, or that something is to destroy the ring of power and the obstacles are anything Sauron throws in your way, including orcs, Saruman, and The Mines of Moria, and even the weather, the basic idea is the same.
Also, the more you can obfuscate the simplistic nature of the formula, the better. Getting back to Tolkien, he did it by reversing the traditional goal - instead of getting something, you're destroying it. Even your most basic Three's Company plot had these basic elements, and the longer you can keep the goal away from the player/main character, the more satisfying it is once you finally get it.
I think any discussion of plot beyond this, unless it's an expansion of Goal + Obstacle, is overkill, or it shows that the author doesn't really understand what plotting is all about.
"First, I want to see everyone who walks in--with a good picture. And I want security checks of carry-ins there"--in other words, backpacks and purses.
This was the security model at my old job. Sure it prevented people from getting in with anything funny, but you could take whatever you want when you left and nobody bothered to check. People walked out with laptops, probably on a regular basis. Event he ones with the little wire security system were sawed through.
They could show ads, just like on the rest of their site - based on the searches and not the news items being shown.
For all I know this could be FUD from Microsoft, who is introducing a simlar service, but personalized.
For anyone who has a similar site that isn't being spidered by Google, the answer is simple. Use random URL's so that Google is forced to re-index any page every time it loads because the actual URL is different. domain.com/?1 domain.com/?2 are two different URL's and Google will spider each one on the spot.
The Google News Dilema
Slashdot - 1 hour ago ... about the status of news.google.com. It has been 3 years since its release and the major bugs have long since been ironed out, so why is it still in beta?...
I probably violate several patents just by existing. How do I respond to this? "So sue me."
The onus is on the patent owner to prove the violation, not anyone else. I doubt 1 legal entity owns all 283 patents, so you have +/- 283 companies suing someone... And who are they sueing anyway? Linus? Red Hat? It's open source, there's nobody out there to pay damages.
Then why is it trying to suck my soul out by making me never want to leave my computer?
My day 1 review is here: The Sims 2: The Sims Reloaded. I think I'll follow it up soon.
Oh, and you can play "Sim City Classic" on SimCity.com. Yes, online in your web browser. It's an active-x thingy, so... IE only.
In another 20 years Sims 2 will probably be given away trivially as "play online" ware too. Kinda scary.
Slashdot Mirror
My mother lives in a "golf cart community" which means you can get to any place in the community with a golf cart. The only place she can't go is to Wal Mart, which is across the street and her golf cart isn't road legal, though there are some road legal golf carts.
One would be tempted to think that this car would be perfect for that situation. It would be completely safe because nobody drives about 30 - 45 mph along very scenic routes with relatively few cars. Only when she went to Wal Mart would she actually use it on the road, a 4 lane thing with a wide median, I think the speed limit is in the 45 - 50 range.
The only problem is... if she brought a friend along, where would they store the things they bought? There's barely enough room for groceries. In fact, it looks like her golf cart has more storage space than that thing, so she might as well stick with the golf cart, and get a regular car for gong to Wal Mart.
I looked all over for some indication of what might pass for a trunk, even at the brochure (link below, they pretend ask you for your email address before sending you to this link), and there spend lots of time on safety features, but no time on the interior.
So what do you do with it? You can't run errands with it, and it's probably uncomfortable for long trips. It looks sort of like a second car, or a car for people who never have to buy things in the store and bring them home, and without a back seat, there's no way you could use it if you have young children.
So I guess in some ways, this overlaps the Jeep Wrangler market - small, impractical, but fun, but even the Wrangler has a bench seat area in the back where you can put your groceries. Or maybe the bicycle market. You can carry about as much home (assuming you have a passenger) as you can on a bicycle, or - most likely - the road legal golf cart market. But those at least have 4 seats, and perhaps some extra storage space, and they don't use gas at all (I think), you charge it at home.
Also, Volkswagon has the TDI diesel engine that gets close to 50mpg highway, and something in the mid 40's in the city. So if I want fuel economy, I can get a VW, and be more comfortable to boot.
I'm not really disparaging this car, I like it - or want to like it - but don't see it as more than a "can get where I want to go and stay dry and warm in the process, unlike my bike" car. And with a $12k starting price, you'd really have to convince me why not to get a (insert budget car here) instead.
http://www.thesmart.co.uk/act_smart/brochure/downl oad.asp
In all seriousness, if two of these fit into a standard parking spot, can you double up at a meter? Does the first person in to the meter spot pay, and the second one piggybacks and adds on as necessary?
Are you sure this isn't just a plug for the next Maxis game?
Third Generation (I think that's what they're calling it) P2P programs like ANtz and Mute rely on a sort of plausible deniability and waste a lot of bandwidth. They're strictly peer-to-peer and distributed. When you get a request for a file, you don't know whether the originator is the person connecting to you, or someone behind them. There is no request to make a direct connection. So while you could point the finger at them, you may be wrong.
The problem with this - and I've pointed it out to the developer of Mute - is that someone with enough resources (like the RIAA, or that British Porn group) could log on thousands of times, and make enough reasonable guesses about who's sharing what with who to pinpoint some of the major sharers, who would be smart to figure out how to change their IP address and what parts of their collection they make available on any given day frequently to avoid detection.
Also, as I said, this wastes a lot of bandwidth, because you're not making a direct connection to the person you're sharing with, you could be acting as a conduit as well, so people who pay for bandwidth will raise the familiar bittorrent protests - I'm paying too much for what I'm downloading. Of course, P2P not being bittorrent and being used for trading 99.99% illegal stuff (bittorrent at least is used to distribute things like linux flavors), all those people should shut up and be grateful they're not paying $20 (or their local currency equivelant) for the CD/DVD etc. they're downloading.
Also, once this third generation stuff catches on, it's just a matter of time before they start sueing the guys who make the software for aiding and abetting file sharing, or whatever that thing congress wants to pass into law says is illegal. You know, the thing that overturns the Betamax/Mr. Roges law. Then again, the guy who makes Mute told me that he's in it for the fame, so being sued could just make his day. Though sueing the developer seems like a free speach issue to me.
The ultimate irony is that most of these client are based on Waste, which was made by Justin Frankel (homepage, Rolling Stone article, Wikipedia entry), who was an employee of AOL Time Warner at the time he released it.
I'm going to guess that most slashdot readers aren't Stern listeners. I don't listen to his show, I never did, but from what I've read about him and heard about him over the years, I have to say that I respect him.
He's standing up to the FCC and is encouraging the media companies to do the same. I think it's great that he's "putting his paycheck where his mouth is" and not just moving to a medium that the FCC can't touch right now, but taking his ratings away from Clearchannel.
So Howard Stern, if you're out there, I salute you.
Perhaps. I suspect reverse engineering someone else's protocol is a difficult task, and that I'm never going to know the real cause of the crash.
All I know is news articles at the time said that Yahoo! told reporter they didn't do it intentionally.
AIM/ICQ, Yahoo and MSN have no need to adopt open standards, and never will. Yahoo does so much stuff that Jabber doesn't do - Imvironments, Audibles, etc., and more importantly, they want to be proprietary so they can decide whether or not to allow third party clients to connect to their service. Twice in the past year I've been locked out of Trillian because of Yahoo, and once they even caused Trillian to crash completely. I had to wait for an update to Trillian, which was available within 24 hours. Supporting open standards wouldn't let them do that. Remember, running a massive IM server and developing a client doesn't make you money, but showing ads does, and Yahoo brilliantly works these in as Imvironments.
Imvironments and Audibles, proprietary smilies, etc. are also strong arguments for using Yahoo's client rather than Gaim or Trillian. I don't get any of those things, and someone with Yahoo will inevitibly complain that I'm not in Yahoo, so I have to launch it. Very clever and "viral" of them.
Jabber will probably never reach the same market penetration as the other IM clients, but that's ok, it's not really competition for them. You use AOL if you want to talk to your friends no matter where they are. You ues Jabber because you want complete control over your chat network - who can connect, whether or not you log chats centrally on the server, and who can eavesdrop.
Jabber can work entirely behind a firewall, so your employees can talk to each other and not worry about revealing trade secrets to someone else sniffing their conversation, or talking to their friends and wasting company time. Or you use Jabber because you're conducting business you don't want someone else to find out about. For example, Google might want to use Jabber to communicate because MSN, Yahoo and AOL are their direct competitors and could listen in to their conversations.
You also use Jabber because you deal with clients and need an audit trail. By logging conversations centrally on a server, you can produce an audit trail superior to even email. Being centrally located, if you trust that nobody's tampered with it, you get chat logs that prove what was said when to who, and what the response was. This is similar to centralied web-based trouble ticket systems.
So, while Jabber may have many mechanical similarities to the other IM clients, the actual uses and needs it fulfils are somewhat different.
I've seen some digital movies. Star Wars Ep 1 was in digital theaters, I saw another handful of movies in digital theaters, and I have to say, they look fine to my eyes. They do look jagged, however, sometimes during the credits when there are lines that should be straight diagonal lines, but are suffer from the basic diagonal line on a computer problems.
The argument for digital theaters is that you don't have to transport film from point A to point B, so if Movie "X" is wildy popular, and Movie "Y" is a box office flop, you can quickly and easily repurpose a theater to show Movie "X" just by fiddling with the router (or whatever) and changing the Marquis outside.
That is, the theater can instantly respond to market demand.
The low-res TV commercial projector they use seems to be different from the high res projector, and in many theaters that do this, you can see a larger window in the back of the theater to accomodate the two projectors. I've seen both images on the screen at the same time while they're shutting one off and turning on the other.
In The USA, AMC shows first run movies, and was the only digital theater in NYC at the time Star Wars Ep 1 came out. Now I see them all over the place.
Everything I need to know about gaming I learned from Pac Man.
Actually, if you get into game making on some of the more primitive platforms out there, like SSI's Unlimited Adventures, or Inform, you'll see that the basic formula of just about all games, and most fiction is what I've distilled down to "Goal + Obstacle." You want something, but something prevents you from getting it.
Whether that something is all the pellets, and the obstacle is some floating ghosts, or that something is to destroy the ring of power and the obstacles are anything Sauron throws in your way, including orcs, Saruman, and The Mines of Moria, and even the weather, the basic idea is the same.
Also, the more you can obfuscate the simplistic nature of the formula, the better. Getting back to Tolkien, he did it by reversing the traditional goal - instead of getting something, you're destroying it. Even your most basic Three's Company plot had these basic elements, and the longer you can keep the goal away from the player/main character, the more satisfying it is once you finally get it.
I think any discussion of plot beyond this, unless it's an expansion of Goal + Obstacle, is overkill, or it shows that the author doesn't really understand what plotting is all about.
Do you think the episodes will be about whatever the third trilogy would've been about?
Star Wars Episode VII "Chasing Leia"
They could show ads, just like on the rest of their site - based on the searches and not the news items being shown.
For all I know this could be FUD from Microsoft, who is introducing a simlar service, but personalized.
For anyone who has a similar site that isn't being spidered by Google, the answer is simple. Use random URL's so that Google is forced to re-index any page every time it loads because the actual URL is different. domain.com/?1 domain.com/?2 are two different URL's and Google will spider each one on the spot.
I probably violate several patents just by existing. How do I respond to this? "So sue me."
The onus is on the patent owner to prove the violation, not anyone else. I doubt 1 legal entity owns all 283 patents, so you have +/- 283 companies suing someone... And who are they sueing anyway? Linus? Red Hat? It's open source, there's nobody out there to pay damages.
All I want to know is whether or not there's a white house at the top of the cave.
Then why is it trying to suck my soul out by making me never want to leave my computer? My day 1 review is here: The Sims 2: The Sims Reloaded. I think I'll follow it up soon. Oh, and you can play "Sim City Classic" on SimCity.com. Yes, online in your web browser. It's an active-x thingy, so... IE only. In another 20 years Sims 2 will probably be given away trivially as "play online" ware too. Kinda scary.